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It’s no mystery that ChatGPT is already making inroads into HR tech. So, who’s ready for “ChatGPT for interviews”? Metaview thinks you are. That’s why Siadhal Magos, Metaview co-founder and CEO, faces the Firing Squad. A former Sr. product manager at Uber, Magos, created Metaview to automatically write interview notes for recruiters in order to “save time and focus on high-quality interactions with candidates.” Maybe he’ll use Metaview to summarize his interview on Chad & Cheese, but it will be no defense against a smackdown if his pitch is a dud. Locked and loaded, let’s do this. 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 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. It's Firing Squad everybody. And this is your favorite guilty pleasure a.k.a the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host Joel Cheeseman joined as always the woody to my buzz Chad Sowash is in the house and we welcome Siadhal Magos, co-founder and CEO of Metaview to the program. Siadhal Welcome. Siadhal Magos: Thank you very much for having me. Joel: Glad to have you here. So most of our listeners don't know who the hell you are. Give us a little bit about you in a Twitter bio. Siadhal Magos: Nice, thanks. So I'm Siadhal. As you've mentioned, I'm one of the co-founders at Metaview. Been building Metaview for about four years. Before that was on the product team at Uber when they were one of the fastest growing companies on the planet which is really where I started to get pretty nerdy and frustrated about hiring processes and how we might be able to use technology to improve them. Metaview's pretty full on, but outside of work, I've got a very young family. So I have a two-year-old and a six-week-old. So if I fall asleep... Joel: Wow. Siadhal Magos: During the show, then please forgive me. It's nothing to do with how entertaining the show is. It's only to do with the lack of sleep. [laughter] So pretty full on that side of things doesn't leave much space for other things. My wife's on a mission to visit 100 countries in her lifetime, so by default, I do a bunch of traveling too. We're currently on 60 which is we're getting there. But the pesky kids have sort of got in the way of late. [laughter] I grew up in London, currently live here too, but in between, I have spent a bit of time living on the west coast of US and a couple of years living in Amsterdam as well. So that's a bit about me. Joel: Benny Hill or Monty Python, which is funnier? [laughter] Siadhal Magos: I would say Monty Python, but that is both a little bit before my time. But Monty Python I think has stood the test of time a little more. [laughter] Joel: He's off to a great start calling us old. [laughter] He's off to a great start. Chad: Joel just loves Benny Hill because of all the boobs that came along with Benny Hill. Joel: You say it like it's a bad thing. Chad: I didn't. I was just putting out a fact. So how many countries in Europe have you actually visited? All? Siadhal Magos: No. Chad: Most? S?: Europe has a bunch of countries in it. [laughter] Siadhal Magos: There's a lot of the small ones that we haven't been to and... But my wife's very strategic about it. She's like, "Listen, we can do those European ones easily anytime." So what we had to do before we started having a family was go to the sort of hard to travel to places. And then she's got a bunch that are easier to travel to now, so we're more likely to do a bunch of those European countries. And then I guess we get back to challenging ourselves in some distant future. Joel: Talk about how great Portugal is when you visit. That's how you get on Chad's good side. Chad: Everybody loves Portugal. Shut up. Siadhal Magos: Yeah, absolutely. [laughter] Joel: And over this Euro trash, tell him what he's won. Chad: Yeah. So this is how Firing Squad is going to play out. At the sound of the bell, you're gonna have two minutes to pitch Metaview. At the end of two minutes, we're gonna hit you with about 20 minutes of Q&A. Be sure to be concise or you're gonna get the crickets. Just means to tighten up your shit and move along. At the end of Q&A, you will receive one of either from the two of us. Big applause, pop the champagne, this one is a winner. Golf clap, put away the champagne, it's looking good, but you still have a lot of work to do or the Firing Squad. Joel: Ouch. Chad: ChatGPT just drank all the champagne. You better pull out the whiteboard because this one is headed to the dumpster kids. That's Firing Squad. Joel: ChatGPT more like ChatGPT with the guns. Are you ready? Siadhal Magos: I'm ready, I'm ready. Joel: The pitch begins now. Siadhal Magos: Interviews are the most crucial touchpoints in any hiring process. They're aware the decision gets made by the team and by the candidate, but every recruiter and every interviewer hates frantically taking notes during interviews rather than actually engaging with candidates, then spending a bunch of time submitting subpar notes that don't really feel like a full reflection of the conversation. Metaview makes it so that you never have to take interview notes manually again. No more sort of cracking your knuckles before and taking a big deep breath before the interview begins. Metaview does that exhausting work for you. We've built the first of its kind AI that seamlessly records your interviews, then generates your interview notes for you, so recruiters and interviewers can instead focus on high quality interactions with candidates, save time writing up notes after every interview, and really just give the judgment, the decision, and why they're making that decision rather than sort of the morass of content you captured during the interview. Siadhal Magos: Now what's more, the notes are far higher quality than you'll be able to write yourself 'cause of course robots are doing it for you. A few things that make experience of using Metaview the best assistant for your interviews, one, our notes are purpose built for recruiting. So they take into account all of the context and specificities of the interview context. Secondly, where typical transcription might let you down maybe with technical terms or specialist language within your industry or company names, Metaview does not because we've trained it particularly for this use case. And thirdly, we know that every person's note-taking needs are different. So after every interview, based on what you do with your notes, our AI tailors and improves itself to get closer to your specific needs for note-taking. So that means if you prefer paragraphs to bullet points, your notes will be in paragraphs instead of bullet points. Siadhal Magos: If you prefer bullet points, they'll be in bullet points. If you prefer really succinct notes versus really detailed, we'll take that form. So it learns based on how you take notes. Our AI generated notes are being used by recruiters and interviewers at companies like Brex, Robinhood, AngelList, Pure Storage, and the proof is really in the pudding. 80% of recruiters say they would be very disappointed to have to go back to the old way of doing things. They say it saves them anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes after an interview and obviously has an immeasurable impact on candidate experience. 50% more scorecards are being completed within 12 hours. Head to... That's a... Obviously I had to run. Head to metaview.ai to find out more. Thank you. Joel: Alright, alright, alright. Well, we'll let you squeak in that last bit there. Metaview the name, talk about that. Your metaview.ai, metaview.com is not in use right now. Did you try to buy it? And more interestingly, has Zuckerberg called you to file a lawsuit? Siadhal Magos: Okay. So Metaview is a mashup of metadata and interview. So that's where the name comes from. Metadata is data about data. We found that a lot of people were focusing on the outcomes of the hiring process like time to close or time to offer acceptance rates without having any data about what led to those data points. So that's where the name comes from. We would love to have the.com. Watch this space on that one and Zuck has not been in touch. We were Metaview before Meta was I guess part of everyone's daily penance. Joel: Part of the daily lexicon of business with meta. Okay, I can buy that, I can buy that. So there seems to have been a fair amount of pivot with ChatGPT and what the business... The core business to what it is now. I think December or February maybe something major happened. Talk about the pivot, why you did it, and the difference in the business now versus what it was before. Siadhal Magos: Yeah. I probably wouldn't call it a pivot. The product still retains a lot of the features it had before that point. Really what changed with... We've been working with OpenAI for a couple of years on a few elements of our product. It's sort of how we ended up enriching a lot of data off the back of interviews. But what sort of... The changes around... You said December is when all these changes started to rapidly occur. We then launched this new product, this AI notetaker in February. What we saw was just... So it was a different pinpoint for a different bunch of people. So previously we would sell sort of to help organizations understand, take control of their interview process. It was a strategic sale, still very much part of our business. What we're finding now with AI generated notes is it's just flying off the shelves for individual recruiters who want to make their life easier and want to give it a go. And we are wrapping sort of a different go-to market around that. We're enabling people to sign up and start to use it and have a very quick onboarding because the product really speaks for itself and the time to value is so instantaneous and the value is so clear to them that it's just crazy not to. Chad: So the problem you're trying to solve is note-taking. Is that the scope? Siadhal Magos: That's the problem as the sort of the end user feels it for sure, like the sort of the franticness and exhaustion of taking notes. If you are running sort of five to 10 interviews a day, yes. Obviously the downstream impacts of that impacts the candidate experience, it impacts the speed of your... When you run better interviews 'cause you're actually present during the conversation, you make better decisions which means you have fewer weaker candidates sort of polluting the rest of your pipeline. But yeah, I think it's really fair to say the big sort of the painkiller that we're providing to folks is stop doing that really manual rope work 'cause machines are better at it now. Chad: Okay. It's pretty much a micro point solution at this point, right? Joel: Feature versus product. Chad: Yeah. When you take a look at it, are you looking to perspectively grow this into a platform or really just focus micro and get this right for really a small segment of the universe? Or are you looking to expand that? Siadhal Magos: So right now, laser-focused on this AI note generation. There's so much more you can do to make it even more delightful. The way that we think about I guess the market is that summarization is gonna be one of the key capabilities that is gonna impact many parts of business. So people will be summarizing all of their meetings and they'll be relying on AI to do that. And there'll be various platforms that will do that job. Maybe Teams already has this capability for general meetings. Zoom I'm sure will at some point too. But recruiters and people who are involved in interviewing have a very specific workflow and very specific expectations around who can access their notes, who in the conversation is the person who'll be most interested in getting notes about that? Siadhal Magos: There are all these very specific things that means we have this steady. Having a dedicated summarization solution for interviews makes a ton of sense and there's loads more we can do there before you move into that platform world. When you think about that platform world, we actually have a bunch of these capabilities already because we built this previously. What we focus a lot on is one, how do you help interviewers level up? So as well as sort of taking away the need to write notes which means you can be more present and you're just a release valve in terms of improving your basis for interviews. We also play back data. How much did you speak compared to the candidate? How many questions did you ask during the interview? And how does that compare to other people in your company who are responsible for this same interview type? So we can give you really contextual data to help you understand, "Looks like I ran that interview a little differently to what I usually do." Chad: Okay. Siadhal Magos: Secondly, we help organizations create training programs that are fully automated too. So a lot of top tech companies especially, and I'm sure it's true in other parts of the industry, will train up interviewers by having them shadow. So, "Hey, listen in on Joel next time. He's doing an interview. We think he's really good at interviewing. You can learn how he does it." That has a couple of downsides. One, Joel might be good at interviewing, but this next interview might be terrible and it might be with a candidate who is really not up to the task and therefore you never really get to see what a rigorous interview looks like. And now you are calibrated based on this weak interview. The great thing about having this corpus of recorded interviews which is part of Metaview's platform is you can actually identify your canonical examples of amazing interviews run by your best interviewers and say every single person who's gonna interview at this company going forward is gonna listen to those very best interviews before they start doing it themselves. So training is a big part of it too. Essentially there's a whole number of applications that unwrap themselves when you're capturing these conversations. But AI notes generation is the painkiller that makes people say "Hey, I want this today." Chad: Okay. So who are your main competitors in your mind today? Siadhal Magos: From an AI notes perspective, we are really first to market with this and years ahead of any competition because anyone else, if you look at say the Otters of the world or these companies that do generalized meeting summarization, they're not specific for the use case which means really there's no competition. In terms of the broader interview intelligence market, there are other companies like BrightHire, Pillars who sort of also record interviews as well. Chad: Yeah. Now you've got ChatGPT in the market plus you're gonna have to face some bigger competition with organizations who have been in the Chat realm for a very long time and they're already gathering this data. Now they can plug into ChatGPT and just bulletize what happened. So when you take a look at the landscape today especially with organizations who can plug into chatGPT and take all of this text like you're saying, it's not created the way that I want it. Well, I can get it there pretty quick. All I have to do is tap into an API and boom, I'm done. What is your next step because this isn't gonna get you where you need to go? Siadhal Magos: Just to clarify your question, when you're saying these other players that have chats, what are the sort of thing you're referring to? Chad: I'm talking about conversational AI talking about all of these other... Siadhal Magos: Got it. Chad: Even hone it who does the transcription, I take the entire transcription. All I have to do is plug it into ChatGPT and I can get it bulletized in a heartbeat. It takes no time. Siadhal Magos: Yeah, yeah. So where you start to gain advantage over time is one, integrating into workflows as I mentioned. So I mentioned a few. The fact that we know... Given we have integrations with the ATS, we know that the recruiter for this role is this person. So when the candidate was interviewed by the hiring manager, we can default into knowing the recruiter has access to that set of notes which means they don't have to spend time chasing up the hiring manager to say, "Hey, give me your summary," only to get a one line summary. All of that is sort of ingested into the workflow of this summarization. Chad: Well, all that should go into the ATS in the first place and you're just integrating it into the ATS. So I mean, this is all systems and process. This has nothing to do with your system. Siadhal Magos: Yeah. No, no, it does because the generation of the content that goes into the ATS which is... Chad: Where's my recordkeeping system? Are you my record keeping system? Siadhal Magos: No. Chad: You are not. So therefore it has to go to my applicant tracking system. That's where I'm going to do business. So from a process methodology standpoint and from a recordkeeping and storage standpoint, it better be in my damned ATS. So that's nothing that you have control over. Correct? Siadhal Magos: It's correct that we don't have control over. So the pushing of the content and helping people fill in the ATS which is a... Chad: Do you have control over where the recordkeeping actually takes place? Siadhal Magos: No. Chad: It's gonna happen... Storage wise is in the ATS. So therefore access is available to anybody who has an access point there. So either you're talking about SMBs who are gonna use your platform as a point solution and they're gonna use it as the full solution. But when you're talking about enterprise, you're talking about an entirely different animal. Let me go ahead and really quick pivot into experience. You and your co-founder, how much experience do you have in this industry before actually starting Metaview? Siadhal Magos: As hiring managers in interviews, we were hiring managers in interviews for four or five years. Chad: That's not in this industry. That's not talent acquisition. Being a hiring manager, I was that before too, has no bearing on understanding the processes, these issues, and the problems in this industry. Before you started Metaview, how long have you or your co-founder actually been in this industry? Siadhal Magos: Given the definition that you described there, we were not in this industry before starting the company. Chad: Okay. Joel. Joel: Let's talk about fundraising. You guys have raised 7.6 million. 6 million of that was in late '21. So it's been a while. What have you done with the money you've raised? Is there gonna be another round here soon? Talk about investment. Siadhal Magos: Yeah. Bulk of the cash is, as I guess with any company our size, was used on building the team, getting much more experimental on the marketing side of things too now as well which is yeah, a good thing. So in terms of raising again, we'll look at things later this year, is where our sort of timeline brings us in. Joel: So you mentioned building a team. Richard Cho is a fan of the show and we're a fan of his and Chad sort of grilled you on experience in the industry. I will help you out a little bit and say that you are at least bringing some people onto the team that have a pretty deep knowledge... Siadhal Magos: Oh a 100%. Yeah, yeah. Joel: Of the industry. So talk about getting Richard on the team. He's an advisor at Gem still. I don't know exactly what his relationship is there, but he's on your team. Talk about that. Siadhal Magos: Yeah. So Rich Cho was... We got an introduction to him probably about three years ago now from Village Global who are one of our early backers. And we sort of initially just jumped on the products really as at the time, it was more of a prototype. Robinhood was going through absolutely crazy growth at the time and he had a bunch of thoughts around the directions we should take the product which were all pretty prescient, but not things we could do at that point. We were sort of three people. So we obviously had to pick which arrows we put our wood behind. And we just stayed in touch since. He became a customer at Robinhood over time and we stayed in touch as he moved on to Gem. And increasingly, I've been sort of picking his brains for sort of some of the sort of both positioning questions, but also very much product questions too around what direction to take the product. And yeah, we made it official start of last month that he's a strategic advisor to the company. Joel: So you mentioned some of your logos customers which from my standpoint are pretty small in nature. And Chad sort of alluded to what your customer look like. Who is your customer, who you're targeting? Talk about global footprint if any at all at the moment. Siadhal Magos: Typical customer is venture-backed tech company. So usually series B to series D and then a couple of marking customers further along the net. Recently, especially with the launch of AI notes, we're finding a lot more inbound from other parts of the market, whether that's recruitment agencies or much smaller organizations, maybe just even with one recruiter who's water wall, doing interviews every day that we can help. But typical sweet spot is that sort of series B to series D, maybe up to series E I'd say. In terms of sort of international footprint you asked as well, well, about 50% of our customers are in the US and then the rest are dotted around different parts of Europe. So we have sort of... Yeah, it's about 50-50 at the moment. Chad: So why this industry? It's slow to adopt, it doesn't garner the types of budgets that marketing and sales does. So I mean, why get into this tar pit? Siadhal Magos: Yeah. [laughter] You folks have probably heard this from a bunch of founders before, but really when you're starting a company, the best advice is to scratch your own itch. And at the end of the day, much as you pointed out, we don't have frontline recruiting experience as founders, we were at companies where we were running a lot of interviews as hiring managers and sort of interviewers on other people's loops. Uber, as I said, I was there 2016, 2017, growing incredibly fast. Co-founder was at Palantir, which interviews a lot of people to make one hire, let's put it that way. So you end up just doing a lot of interviewing and that's where we really got exposed to the problem. So yeah, it was very much scratch your own itch thing. It wasn't sort of a super opportunistic thing necessarily. It was something we felt that we were understood really well from, again, a hiring manager and interviewer perspective. I think the thing that we've learned a lot as with folks like Rich Cho have really helped us with this is the way that recruitment... The work that recruitment have to do around interviewing, but also the way they view it, which I think when you scratch beneath the service is this is just a big dependency for them. Siadhal Magos: They need to hit... They're supposed to hit their number, they really value the quality of their relationship with their hiring manager, and they just have this big dependency in their ability to achieve, which is the interviews. And none of those people in that interview process report to them or work with them. And so that's sort of the other side of the coin that we realize over the last... Well, as we started the company. But yeah, anyway, background is it was our own itch. We wanted to scratch it. We didn't probably know all of those characteristics of the market that you just described, Chad. Those weren't top of mind for us. We just wanted to... We just thought this product made a lot of sense. Chad: So go to market. Talk to me about your sales, go to market strategy. Siadhal Magos: I'll go to market. As of six weeks ago now, we launched a free trial. So folks can get onboarded for as few as many seats as they want and run a free trial which runs for 10 interviews. So you get your first 10 Metaview written AI notes for free. And then we have a conversation about converting and you can buy one seat or you can buy 100 seats. It's up to you. And then if you decide you wanna roll it up past your recruitment team, then it's more of an enterprise discussion because obviously a lot of interviews don't interview every time and per seat doesn't quite make sense. So sorry, per seat for recruiters and then enterprise for if you wanna roll up beyond the recruiting team. Chad: Okay. Are you going direct? Is the main focus direct to brands or are you actually doing partnerships with other platforms? Siadhal Magos: Vast majority direct. As in direct is our... Our focus is on getting direct as efficient and optimized and predictable as possible. Chad: Okay. So what about integrations? What integrations do you currently support? I see that it says you sync with the applicant tracking system. What does that mean? What applicant tracking system? Tell me more. Siadhal Magos: Sure. So, yeah, we are sort of partners with Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, Teamtailor, recruiting a few others. So again, these mid-market ATSs are the ones we partner with most closely. And then our system also works seamlessly from a... So that's one really sort of important integration point. You don't need to integrate with your ATS to use Metaview. You can still get really high quality. You just have your notes written for you even if you don't integrate to the ATS. It just helps with some of the workflow that we were talking about earlier. And as you said, that's where the notes need to end up. And then on the video conferencing side, Teams, Zoom and Google, we capture interviews on those platforms. Chad: Talk to me about your exit plan. What are you looking to do? Are you looking to actually have a bigger player gobble you up to be a part of a a larger ecosystem? Are you looking to prospectively turn this into a platform that serves more than just note-taking? Siadhal Magos: Definitely the latter. So if you buy the idea that interviews have always been this black hole in your hiring process, which we completely do, then the ability to turn those conversations into data is gonna help our customers make much better hiring decisions in the future. And if you have access to what's actually happening in the interviews, given that is where the decisions get made, if you have the platform that has those interviews... Is making those interviews available to our customers, then actually suddenly you become a really interesting place for those hiring managers to make their decision. So if you think about the system of action for a hiring manager, where does a hiring manager go and a recruit, anyone involved in hiring decisions go to make their decisions? Currently, of course the final decision is logged in the ATS, but the actual act of the hiring decision is usually debrief conversations or Slack messages back and forth or corridor conversations and it's not super data-driven, but actually if you have the data, then you can become that system of action for hiring. And that's our bigger play. And we think a lot of power... I guess strategically a lot of power rushes to the platform that has the most compelling data about your hiring. And actually we think the most compelling data is in these conversations. Joel: Walk me through how this is recording conversations. Is this a Chrome browser extension that you turn on and it records phone calls? Is it a mobile app that's recording both ends of the phone call? Talk to me about that 'cause I'm a little confused about how it can pick up video conferencing as well as your phone calls and record all that talk. Talk me through that. Siadhal Magos: From our system's perspective, those are two applications. We have our video conferencing bot that will essentially pass... Whether it's a Teams link, a Zoom link or a Google Meet link will understand that this is where the interview is happening and they will join that as a participant and record at that point. From a phone conversation, it's your classic switchboard application where someone will dial our number first and then they'll later patch through to the candidate. And that's how we capture those. So those are two different channels for capturing the conversation. Chad: Do you also capture the video? Siadhal Magos: It's configurable. So most customers prefer to capture the video too, some opt for just audio. Joel: Which makes it odd that you wouldn't say like a HireVue or a Vervoe wasn't a competitor. No? Siadhal Magos: Most of the time on the... Definitely for our market, most of the perception, most people see HireVue more as the sort of top of funnel filtering tool that's sort of like the asynchronous video interviewing, the on-demand video interviewing. What we focus on is completely the live video, the live interviewing where you have a human being talking to another human being and they're sort of potentially meandering conversation, potentially going off on tangents. Those are all of the problems that we witnessed, less so they're sort of the top of funnel filtering. How do I not leave three thousands, thousand CVs and maybe rule some people out based on a on-demand interview. Joel: Clarify this for me. Chad asked you about integrations. You started talking about partnerships with Greenhouse and some others. Are those different in your mind? Have you built on those platforms? If you haven't built on it, what is partnership in your definition? Siadhal Magos: Partnership really, it means that we have an agreement in place with these organizations that we are logged on their partner app store, we have access to certain of their APIs, which means we can build either right data to their ATS or pull data from the ATS depending on our customer's discretion. So it's a relatively... It can be light touch. It's again, really up to the customer. Joel: Okay. Siadhal Magos: But that's what partnership means in that context. It's not like a go-to-market or a marketing partnership necessarily. That's really we source our customers. It just tends to be a lot of them are Greenhouse or Lever or Workable users. Joel: You guys are on all those marketplaces. If I use your service, I can use it integrated into the system. Okay. Alright. I think last one for me is the world is moving toward more automation. ChatGPT is gonna be everywhere. Chad sort of alluded to being a commodity at some point where hell, I can just plug it in and I'm a competitor of yours or it's easy to do that. Convince me that this product won't be irrelevant in five years. Siadhal Magos: So five years from now is obviously... That's a very long time. Joel: Pick whatever timeframe you'd like. Three? Siadhal Magos: The context for your question was more about note-taking. So the reason note-taking will always be specific for interviewing is because of the workflows that sit around recruiting. I talked about some of the characteristics. I think, Chad, you alluded to the idea, well, I could get the transcript, I could give ChatGPT some prompts and they could format it for me. The fact is we have a bunch of people who are working tirelessly and every day to make sure that this is the perfect notetaker for this particular context and I won't sort of bore you by talking through some of those contexts again. But that's the primary reason why there will be specific applications, specific note-taking applications for very common structured conversation types such as interviewing. Siadhal Magos: Just as there'll be one for sales conversations and one for customer research conversations, for example, there'll be one for interviewing. In the longer term, again, the richest data that you've never had in your hiring process is what happens between interviewers, hiring managers and candidates in those conversations. If you are the organization that knows what topics are being covered in those... If you're the platform that knows what topics are being covered in those conversations, how long different people are speaking for, when this person is really vocal during the debrief, we tend to make bad hires, if you start to get these sort of alerts and these bells ringing in your company, suddenly you're in this world where you have a much better hold on how you can actually design a high quality interview process and a hiring process as opposed to what most companies do, which is leave it to luck. Like, "Hey, I think this person seems pretty smart. Let's put them in the interview room." And I've got no log of whether they've made good decisions in the past. I don't really remember what they said for this, but it's just a complete... Hiring has not had that moneyball moment yet, and that's what's gonna change. Joel: In 30 seconds or less, run us through your pricing. Siadhal Magos: Pricing is start free trial. If you wanna use it beyond that, it's $25 per seat, per recruiter seat. And then if you want to expand it beyond recruiters, ie, into the whole organization, then it's a much lower unit price per seat because of course these people don't interview, but it's essentially based on the volume of interviewing. Joel: And that's per month? Siadhal Magos: You can go per month. Most people go per year. Joel: When you say 25, it's per month. Siadhal Magos: 25 per month, billed annually. $32 per month if you wanna go month to month. Joel: Alright. You know the bell. It's the end of the Q&A. It is time to face the Firing Squad. Siadhal, are you ready? Siadhal Magos: Yeah, bring it on. Joel: Get him, Chad. Chad: I gotta say, I love, love, love the idea of taking big tasks off of recruiters and then also hiring managers because yeah, that was one of the things that really sucked about being a hiring manager, was doing interviews 'cause they suck, they're horrible, they're uncomfortable, and you don't get a chance to really focus because you're taking notes and because you're thinking about what's my next question, and etcetera, etcetera. So it is a pain in the ass. Interview data needs to be gathered so that training can actually happen. So I agree with that 100% and I love that Cho is on board. He's a great guy. And he's been in the space for a minute, so it's good. So next time somebody asked you about experience, just pull out a picture of Richard Cho, okay? Chad: Cho hooked you up on that one. But for me, the biggest issue I think I have right now is that it timing. Take a look at the current landscape, take a look at ChatGPT. The solution, it's a little bit too micro for me. Once you start to expand and perspectively be able to start pushing out training modules and start to create a training business, I think there's something there. The experience that you and your founder have, like I had said earlier, you have to lean very heavily on individuals who have been in this industry who understand not just the tech stack, but the process methodology and also the thought process behind talent acquisition. Chad: It is much different than most other business leaders, I promise you. Go to market execution. I would go to white labeling as soon as humanly possible because there are so many damned threats that are out there that you might not even see right now. So at the end of the day, I love where you're going. This is very early, I think, in the journey for me. So I'm gonna have to give you the Firing Squad. Joel: Ouch, ouch. Alright, Siadhal. You still got to face me. This one's really hard for me. We're in the early, early days of ChatGPT, and I can remember a day when there might have been a few players that were doing like search engine optimization for jobs and people would say like, oh, if you just fix the URL, if you just fix the title tags, then everyone has SEO, right? The truth is Jobs2Web was really the only solution that paid... That got paid big money for what they did. You could say the same about mobile or particularly job postings, right? Like, "Oh, if I just plug in an API, I've got every single job that Indeed has, I've every single job that Monster has." Like if you're a job board, then you're irrelevant, right? Because this thing is a commodity. To me, ChatGPT is in the same place. Like, I think it's a little bit disingenuous to just say, well, anyone can plug this technology in and you're all the same and that you're on a level playing field and it's a commodity. Joel: I do think that while the technology will be available, I don't think it's as clear as saying everyone's gonna be the same because they can plug in this technology. I think that right now you're more... You're much more of a feature than a product. I think you need to work hard to become more of a product and become like the place where people go for all things interviewing. I don't know what that looks like. You guys live this every day, so hopefully you'll figure that out. But I do think unless you become more of a product, they're gonna be a lot of companies with this feature and you're gonna get squeezed out as an also ran. And I don't think that you want that. You don't have experience in this industry. However, you're clearly a smart guy. Spent some time at Uber and in some other places. I think Richard Cho speaks volumes in terms of my impression of your stock if there was stock at the moment. Richard Cho Facebook, I mean Jim, I mean his resume speaks for itself, but he would not be on board this company in any form or fashion unless he saw something there that was worth getting behind. Joel: Pricing I think is right on. I don't think it's a hurdle. I like that you're transparent with your pricing. A lot of people are not in this space. So for me, it's just really hard to like endorse it and get on board, but it's also, I think, impossible for me to just shoot it down to the Firing Squad. So for me, this is gonna be a golf clap. I think there's opportunity. We're unclear what ChatGPT is gonna look like and you're bringing on team members that know the market. So I think you got your work cut out for you, but you can make it thus the golf clap. So that is one Firing Squad and one golf clap for Metaview. How do you feel? Chad: It's early, it's early. Come on, man. Joel: Yeah, yeah. I really appreciate the feedback. I think there's some great feedback there. So I appreciate it and thanks for that. Yeah, we know we're... We've got some really happy customers out there, so that's what... That's I guess the most important thing. Joel: And Chad's just a double American anyway. For those who wanna know more about Metaview, where would you send them? Siadhal Magos: Head over to metaview.ai, sign up for a free trial. Would love to get you on board. And, yeah, you can decide I guess whether it makes a difference for you. Joel: Chad is limping out with some blood flowing, but he's still alive. [laughter] Joel: Maybe he'll be back in a few years to tell us to stick it with how successful his company has been. And with that, another Firing Squad is in the books. 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.

This episode is a masterclass in understanding Talent Acquisition and Talent Management business strategy through the eyes of Manjuri Sinha, Global Director of Talent Acquisition at OLX and Quincy "Queen of Chatbots" Valencia, VP and Research Director over HCM Tech at Ventana Research. In this episode; - 2021's Unethical Scaling and the impact - No track of productivity metrics for Expensive Staff - Always buying and not upskilling - Attrition verus Upskilling and more! Get ready to take notes... 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. [music] Chad Sowash: Oh yeah. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese HR's most dangerous podcast. I'm your co-host, Chad Sowash. And the substitute teacher today for Joel Cheesman is Queen of chatbots herself. That's right, kids. Give it up for Quincy Valencia. [applause] Quincy Valencia: I'm back. Chad Sowash: Welcome back to the show, Quincy. Quincy Valencia: Thanks. It's been too long. It's good to be here. Chad Sowash: Well, it has been too long. So for all of those listeners who don't know who Quincy is, give 'em a little Twitter bio. Quincy Valencia: So I've been in this game, like you, for about 25 years, although as we already established, you're older than me. So you probably have done it a little bit longer. Chad Sowash: Shut it. Quincy Valencia: It's true though. Yeah. But I've been a practitioner, I've been a provider, a vendor, a product creator, and now most recently, I'm taking a seat in the analyst chair as head of the HR Tech Analyst Practice at Ventana Research. And apparently, I'm now a podcast co-host. Chad Sowash: Exactly. So this is the first time you've been in the co-host seat, right? Quincy Valencia: First, but not the last. Joel, better watch out, man. [laughter] Chad Sowash: So it's feeling comfy, is what I'm hearing? Quincy Valencia: I like it so far. We'll see. Chad Sowash: So let me tell you that this interview today is at least a year in the making. We've been working hard to get this interviewee on. She's important. She's one of those types of people. She's important. Today, I would like to introduce... Are we ready? Are you ready? Manjuri Sinha. It's right. Global Director of Talent Acquisition over at OLX. Welcome to the show. Finally. How you doing? How you feeling? Manjuri Sinha: Great, great. Finally, super, super happy to be here, Chad. So one year in the making, so yes, finally, we landed it. Chad Sowash: It feels like longer than the year. It could have been the pandemic fog making it seem longer. I don't know. Manjuri Sinha: Possibly, possibly. [laughter] Chad Sowash: You said it's actually taken longer than getting some of your execs hired. [laughter] Manjuri Sinha: Of course. Yeah. We call it the birth year of the vacancy. So if you have a year's birthday, I think that's a good time to take a call, would they keep that role open or not? [laughter] Quincy Valencia: That's funny. I'm excited to be here co-hosting today with you because I talk to vendors all day, every day, and what I really enjoy is talking to the people who are actually solving problems in the workplace. This is gonna be a fun conversation for me. Chad Sowash: Amen. So most Americans don't know who OLX is. It's a huge brand in Europe. So if you would, give us a little Twitter bio about you, and then tell us a little bit about OLX. Manjuri Sinha: Sure. Absolutely. About me. So I'll start with being a panda lover. Anything to do with pandas, I am a crazy fan of. So if you see me ever presenting a talk in some conference, you'll definitely find a spy panda stalking somewhere there. 20-plus years of experience in HR and TA, different roles, different industries, different countries. My passion is talent acquisition, have been working across India, lived in countries like Sweden, Czech Republic and now called Berlin and Germany home for the past nine years. I'm myself amazed that it's been nine years here. And yeah, currently, I had talent acquisition, including employer branding, all cool stuff, as well as onboarding for OLX, and I'm based in Berlin. What is OLX? So OLX is basically a classified platform, and somewhere where you can go for buying and selling secondhand cell phone, car, house, anything. A couple of the brands, front-ending brands. Probably listeners from the US would relate to our brand, which is called Webuyanycar. If you're in Portugal, then you would know OLSISH, because that's how it is pronounced in Portuguese. If you are in Poland or Romania, you definitely know the OLX brand because it is the classified platform, app that you use. Kids use for the first mobile or the first refrigerator when students shift into their first accommodation, etcetera. Manjuri Sinha: So we are mostly in the emerging markets of the world. Eastern Europe, Latin America, India, Indonesia, these are our footprints. 30 markets all across, 10,000 plus people as an organization. Chad Sowash: So what's your favorite kind of panda? That's the first question I wanna get into. Manjuri Sinha: It's the mid-sized, fluffy pandas that you can probably lift and take with you. So that's an agenda in my life. I've been hunting for a job vacancy called a panda nanny. Quincy Valencia: I was just gonna ask if you've applied for one of those, because I've seen them, and they look fabulous to me. I can do that. Manjuri Sinha: That's my life goal. I really wanna do that one day. [laughter] Quincy Valencia: My life goal is to be an elephant keeper. Chad Sowash: Oh, elephant keeper. Manjuri Sinha: Oh, you should watched The Elephant Whisperers, by the way. Quincy Valencia: I have watched it. I love it. If I don't get my hands on an elephant and come to have my own elephant sometime before I die my life will not be complete. And it's interesting because that's what the whole topic of today's conversation is, right? Elephants. Different type of elephants, but it's still an elephant. I feel right at home. Chad Sowash: Elephants in the room. So in our long set of trying to actually get this pulled together, we had several different topics that we wanted to try to tackle. And Manjuri said, "Well, there are many elephants in the room, so why don't we just start calling them out?" That's what we do. So let's do it. Let's start with the first elephants, which you wanna call irresponsible hiring. So tell us a little bit about that. Manjuri Sinha: Yeah, thanks, Chad. And I think good, Quincy, that you spoke about the elephants and brought us here. It's interesting that all of us are hearing a lot of advice being given to talent acquisition leaders and TA functions right now on how to shape up, how to plan your teams, how to plan ahead, etcetera, what could have been done better, etcetera, in the past months. We've also seen TA teams have been disproportionately impacted with all the layoffs which have happened in the past couple of months. However, if you take a step back, it is so interesting to see that there's been a lot of what I call as unethical scaling across 2021, all across. Right after the pandemic, we had three months when people were going slow. A lot of the tech organizations did think that there'll be an impact, so they kind of held strong. And the moment they saw that the consumers were running to online, behaviors had changed, there was more traffic online, there were more purchases being done online, people who were flocking to Netflix, Zoom was in demand because of organizations going for remote, etcetera, that's when we saw the curve coming back on like crazy. I think that phase in 2021 and 2022, as most of us know, that we've seen 2x, 3x hiring in those phases. Manjuri Sinha: I was looking at some data today. Between 2019 to 2022, companies like Amazon, Amazon grew by 106% in their headcount. Meta grew by 103% in their headcount, Salesforce by 67% in their headcount. And this is up till 2022. We know that hiring went on crazy pretty much till the August or July of 2022 as well, so it's more than these numbers. And today when we open the Layoffs.fyi tracker, we see that just from Jan today, there have been about 149,000 layoffs across these organizations. So for the lack of a better word, it's a bloodbath out there, and this has to do a lot with this whole hiring ahead of the curve, really going crazy, not thinking about, "Do we really need those 10 packs of engineers? And has there been any kind of due diligence that we've done?" When we look at the org designs, we hear today a lot of leaders talking about, "We have too many managers and too less people to do their actual things. Why do we have such a layer of managers and managers and managers?" Well, at that particular time, nobody was looking at the org design, how many managers do you need, what is your rule of a pack, what is the productivity of the team, how do you track that productivity, how is the finance team looking at, "Yes, we are getting these headcount plans coming in. What kind of productivity will they give in? What will be the cost that we're looking at?" Manjuri Sinha: And this unethical scaling actually went ahead on other things because we have to fight the war for talent. We were looking for the same people. [laughter] All the Amazons, Metas, us, all of us were looking for the same people, we're dipping in the same pool, and we were fighting the negotiation battle on, "Let's give you 20% more, 30% more, 40% more." And what did we do? We increased the salary cost there for the organization. This was a whole tech bubble. It's not just one company standing alone and doing it, it's everybody was within this pool. And now we're seeing the domino effect. So rather than just saying, "What should the TA teams do?" I think it's also calling out these elephants and not saying, "Okay, the blame is on whom," but really looking at, "What can we do better?" Because the tables will turn again. Quincy Valencia: So like you, I've worked in corporate TA as well. And I talked about this, and Chad, of course, I've heard it on your show. But HR and TA leaders have had that proverbial seat at the business table more than ever over the last couple of years. Everything sort of went to hell and everyone looked at HR and TA and went, "What do we do? I don't know what to do," because they'd never had it before. So we know that, but this is not a TA issue. As far as I'm concerned, this is a business issue, because TA's reacting in many cases to what business is telling them to do. "I don't care. I'll get the budget approval. Just go do it. Just go do it." Organizations are not using the technology that they do have to scale appropriately. They're using the technology to mimic and just replicate poor decision-making and poor processes that have been in place forever, and then you have the perfect storm of that with the businesses who are making promises, "We're gonna grow by so much," and they never meet it, and they're going to their TA teams and saying, "Just do it. Just hire." And TA teams are working at the behest of the business, and it's this terrible cycle, and that's where we end up. Now, there's been no planning and then not using the resources that they already have, and I'm sure you've seen that as well, or I'm assuming you've seen that as well. Chad Sowash: So real quick, I don't agree that TA is not at fault, because first and foremost, TA needs to understand the business. And we just did a great interview with Jeff Lackey, who was at CVS, and one of the things that he did was he focused heavily on talking to the business units to be able to take a look at the "vital positions" that were opening to really see if they were impacting the bottom line, and if there was strategy for long-term growth there, or if this was just something that was felt to be a need versus not. So I think in talent acquisition, if we are more in tune with the business and we can understand it, then we can actually guide it. The problem is we have never really been at the table, a seat at the table. We finally were, so we were so excited. Then the next thing you know, we were reactionary with the rest of the business, as opposed to being the adult in the room, which we need to be. So I do agree, there were a lot pushed on us, but we need to stiffen our spine and be more business minded. Quincy Valencia: Oh, completely. There's no question about that. What we need to do and what our colleagues and so forth need to do, I'm not saying there's a complete lack of responsibility, but I'm saying that the bottom line is the business makes those decisions and owns those decisions at the end of the day. So no matter how smart... Even Jeff, as you were saying, I'm certain that there were times where he had very strong opinions based in facts and data and he was overruled. Ultimately, it's a business decision and a business responsibility. Manjuri Sinha: Exactly, Quincy. And thanks for laying it out, because that's exactly what I wanna say in follow-up, this elephant in the room, that when you have the TA leader at that table, listen to the TA leader. And this is exactly what a lot of CEOs and CFOs have not done in that period. I happened to be at TA leaders dinner two weeks ago and this resonated, because another very senior TA leader in Berlin shared his experience, that he tracked and saw that there were senior executive positions, almost 365, that had already been hired. Humongous cost. Chad Sowash: Senior? Manjuri Sinha: They have another 100 senior execs, so you can say Director, Senior Directors and above in the organization, and they have another 100 vacancies still open. So he went back to the CFO talking about the cost of hiring, plus the cost of the average salaries and actually said, "Are you sure? I think you should pause. I literally recommend you to pause." What did the CFO said? "Yeah, thanks for the information, but I think we'll go ahead." And that company has actually gone through a round of layoffs right now. So this is where we need to also put it, "Yes, TA leader should do this, they have to be chief repeating officers, they have to really, what John Vlastelica says, have those teaching moments with the leaders, but the leaders have to listen to the TA leaders as well." That's what is a key takeaway from this. Chad Sowash: But there are no ramifications for CEOs who lay off tens of thousands of employees. That's the biggest issue. Quincy Valencia: Yeah. They're still getting their salary and their bonuses. Chad Sowash: Oh, they've got a golden parachute, for God's sakes. But there's still no ramification for hiring tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of individuals and then chopping because of irresponsible growth. So do we really think... Other than us being able to have a seat at the table, start speaking more to business, do we really think that this is going to change unless we start seeing heads roll at the top? Manjuri Sinha: It will change, Chad, if we get adult leaders who have the... Okay, maybe I won't use that word, but... Chad Sowash: I like adult leaders. No, we need this. [laughter] Manjuri Sinha: Probably. Okay, let me quote unquote. Who have probably the balls to say that, not really think about, "Am I on the chopping block next?" But say that in that round table that, "There are trade-offs you're doing. If you're planning a growth curve which looks like this on the... Looks like a platform like this, it'll cost still this much and ramifications. You remember that time. Will you sign the trade-off today for me as well?" So I think these are the adult conversations that don't happen. And Quincy said, we were so happy that, "Yes, we got the seat at the table. Let me show you we can deliver." Of course, we can deliver. At what cost? I think that's the trade-off, remembrance that we have to keep on giving to the senior leaders as well. Quincy Valencia: The other cost that no one has mentioned too is when you hire at that pace, which of course, is unsustainable for every reason imaginable, every DE&I initiative that companies claim to have, that they have on their wall and their marketing goes straight out the window because they don't actually care of the makeup of their organization, they care that they have butts and seats. And then you start laying everybody off and then it's that group that, once again, is disproportionately let go, and then that continues the cycle as well. And to your point, when you say, "Will it change, unless it changes from the top," well, no, I don't think that it will. And I think you have to start looking at the accountability, Manjuri, who has the balls to stand up and make the stand and actually make it happen, but look at who the CEO's number two is. If you're in an organization where their right hand is the CFO, you're always gonna have a problem, because at the end of the day, no matter how forward-thinking your CFO is, if they see humans as an expense line, you're never gonna overcome it. If your right-hand person is the CHRO, then they're looking at your people as part of your go-forward strategy, and you're gonna have much more of a chance of making some of these changes that need to happen in the business. Chad Sowash: I would say, in most cases, CFO or CRO are generally the right hand, much more than the CHRO, which is the things that we should be focusing on, right? Quick question, it's a little bit of a diversion. How much talent hoarding do you think was actually happening by some of those big organizations, keeping amazing talent away from competitors and really out of the market, doing nimble things within their organization until they were cut here recently? Manjuri Sinha: A lot of it, a lot of it, Chad. I think we've seen the quotes from Meta ex-employees very recently. They've shared their stories of this lady who was practically doing nothing for the past eight to nine months and had a humongous salary sitting in New York. And not just on local employees, these companies have actually hired experts on H-1B visas who are today just left with 60 days to look for a job and switch. Otherwise, go back to their home countries. So they had to hoard it. And this has been a norm. We've also seen an experience in India where we were competing with companies like Meta, Amazon, Walmart, etcetera, where for each offer that we would make to the individual, literally within two days, we would have a counteroffer that comes from one of these companies. And we would... Of course, we would ask them, 'cause in India, you can ask for a candidate to literally show you that offer. So they would show that offer, and you can see that it would increase percentage by percentage, so the numbers that they were hiring at, and the kind of pace as well that they are hiring at. It was definite that they were hoarding the talent. Chad Sowash: Wow. Quincy Valencia: But in some cases, don't you think that's the right, smart thing to do? Manjuri Sinha: In some cases, yes, Quincy, but not at the kind of bulk that they would do. And did they think of what if? Do you... I understand a lot of organizations have a talent pool, like the services companies have a bench, they carry a bench. They bench as a method, and they know that, "Okay, after a particular month or two, we can actually move them to another project." Here, that projection was not there. It was pegged n the growth that was supposed to come, which never came. Quincy Valencia: Right. Right, right. Chad Sowash: Well, let's go ahead and transition to elephant number two. That's actual justification for all of this damn hiring. So let's talk a little bit about that, Manjuri. Manjuri Sinha: Yeah. So I think we were talking about this whole high cost of attrition. And this is now the interesting fact, that we talk about a lot of the news, a lot of the articles, Bloomberg articles, etcetera, talk about the new headcount that companies have added, but there was this one interesting article which Amazon never put a comment on. That was about the estimated cost of attrition that they said would have been around $8 billion annually. It's interesting to see how much of this hiring that happened in 2021 and 2022 was backfills. And most of the cases, they were actually higher number of backfills because yes, people were hired. Like Quincy said, when you hire fast, the things that you compromise on are diversity, equality and also that new hire engagement, and that's what was happening. Yes, people were joining, people were dropping. People were joining, people were dropping. Whether they are dropping for a 30% increase in another organization, that's a different thing to look at, but that's what was happening at that time. And this cost was humongous on organizations. When we are looking at those balance sheets today and seeing that, "Yes, we need to push up our bottom line, and that's why we need to look at our staff cost," no organization is looking at that cost of attrition. Manjuri Sinha: I don't think any organization can literally even calculate that. Any finance department can show me today, "This is the cost of attrition for 2021." I don't think so. Quincy Valencia: So I will tell you that in 2009, I was getting my master's degree, and one of the things that I was putting together was about the high cost of attrition. It was actually about creating a high productive workforce, but attrition was in there. And I worked with... I don't know if you're familiar with Dr. John Sullivan. He's all over the place. But he actually... And he probably doesn't remember it, but he worked with me directly to come up with a cost, a literal cost of that turnover and what it means for the business, because Finance, I said it before, they only see a cost to the business if you are in a revenue-producing role directly. Otherwise, they don't see it. And we actually worked on it and calculated the map and came out and put it in, and nobody cared then, and nobody still cares today, and it's so completely short-sighted. It boggles the mind. Because to those of us who work in this and who do this work, it's so obvious, [chuckle] and I just don't understand what is so difficult, what part of the story is not coming across. It makes me crazy. Chad Sowash: Yeah, no, I agree 100%. And one of the things that we don't know who owns in many organizations is talent management. Who actually owns the up-skilling, the ability for internal mobility, those types of things. Is that with Talent Acquisition? Is that with HR? Who actually owns that? And how do you actually look for justifications? Well, first off, you have to understand the cost of the business. And as you'd Quincy, a lot of organizations, especially CFOs, only see you if you're a revenue driver. Well, let's go ahead and make this very simple for everybody to understand. If you don't have people, you can't ideate product. And if you don't have people, you can't develop product. If you don't have people, you can't produce. You go along. If that salesperson and that customer service person who sells it and expands wallet share doesn't have all of those individuals, then they can't actually make revenue. Quincy Valencia: You're gonna bring me to tears here. [laughter] I've never also seen or heard or connected in my life. Chad Sowash: It why we have you. It's why we have you. So at the end of the day, I've heard CHROs call themselves a cost center for years, and I look at them square in the face and say, "You are the living, breathing heart of every organization. There's no revenue-driving, there's no product. There's nothing without you." So at this point, once we start to breathe that in and understand it, how do we get to the point where we understand that, "Okay, there's a cost to loss," and we see this with Amazon. Who takes control of that talent management piece? Who focuses on up-skilling, internal mobility? How do we actually transform... We talk about transformation all the time. Nobody's really fucking doing it. How do we get there? Manjuri Sinha: Yeah, Chad, we also saw that there was hardly any interest in up-skilling during this period. There was more buying of talent. Everybody went external. And that lack of up-skilling also harmed folks and not... Because if you look at the hiring demand coming in at that period, and because of all the competition, I was talking to a lot of TA leaders in my peer group, be it in the US, India, Europe. Everybody had the same deal, 70% to 75% of all open vacancies were in the senior bucket, join and run, join and run. So that's another... That's another. This, again, Quincy, also was completely contradictory to diversity because you know in... For example, in technology, a role like reliability engineering, if you are looking for our seniors, there are very few women in that bucket. So if you don't grow these women and hire them at a junior level, then how will you enable that talent? So that's a big, big loss. And that's amiss. I think a lot of... Even talent leaders need to take that accountability. I can share my example. The bit on internal mobility, I think that was initially amiss because we were running on the external bit. Last year, this was something that we prioritized, and we said, "Okay, let's not figure out who owns this. We will own this, we will launch the platform, we'll get this going, and then figure it out amongst us," kind of a thing. Manjuri Sinha: So I think we need to pick those pieces up as well and take ownership. TA as such has evolved with a push as well in the last three years beyond the whole push of remote hiring, the whole push of, "Let's look at hypergrowth. Let's scale. Let's stop." So all these things have been very, very interesting. I think we need to look beyond just the gamut of employer branding and hiring and new hires, but go beyond, also internally, look at how we can... Look at location strategies, etcetera, and be more valuable on that aspect and take more ownership. Quincy Valencia: So I will say that I have seen a little bit of a light at the end of the tunnel. So one of the things we do as analysts is we prognosticate about things that we assert will happen, not unlike your predictions that you do on this show every year, Chad. [laughter] I've seen the blending now of talent management and talent acquisition, which I actually think is super smart, because to me, it's a talent function. I don't really care where you get the person. I think you need to invest properly in your internal talent that you've already invested so much in and give people the opportunity to see paths down the road, potentially, whether it's the same path to run or a different one, and give them the tools to develop skills, they need to close those gaps. I think that you need to look externally, you need to make sure that you have a proper blend of mix of where your people are coming from, internal and external. And the technology vendors have really stepped up. I think they're actually ahead of the adoption rate, and I think they'll drive this, where I've seen more and more opportunity marketplaces coming, particularly from the platform players, but others that are just quite impressive in bringing in data from the external marketplace, from the internal marketplace, from the ATS, what jobs are open, what gigs might be open, projects, so you can redeploy, Manjuri, some of those people you were talking about and keep them, and then identify paths... Quincy Valencia: One thing... I actually have something I'm publishing that's coming out here pretty soon, an analyst perspective, which is really just a, "This is what's on my mind lately," thing. But for years, there's been... Everyone has touted themselves with saying, "Here at this organization, you own your own career path," and that's bullshit. [laughter] You can't own a career path to do something when you don't even know what might be available. Unless you happen to get lucky... Especially if you're early career. Unless you happen to get lucky and somebody takes you under their wing, you have no idea what you might be able to do. And so when you have these technologies that are bringing together, "Here's what might be available," how do you get from A to point D if that's what you wanna do if we value you as an employee? And that point D is still something within our organization that we're gonna need, more valuable to us. It behooves me as the organization to provide you the employee that we value every opportunity to get where you wanna go. And the technology vendors are coming up with ways to get this done. Now it's a matter of getting organizations to adopt it on the back end, which is harder. Manjuri Sinha: Yeah, I think we need to stop acting as airport operations department of handing over the flyers from the operations to the plane and have a sink. And talent management and talent acquisition actually should sit under one wing, because you have the moments that matter along the lead and the candidate and the employee and the alumni. You can't impact it if you do this whole Ops handling, okay, take over, hand over, take over, hand over. You lose a lot in that. And this is where platforms like Gloat, Degreed, I think they will be a game changer, and such as well that bring this insight on skill insight. We are listening about a lot about skill-based hiring, skill-based growth, etcetera, as well. This is the excellent tie-in there. It also talks about those... Many jobs. So we were talking about people hired or hoarded talent. This in a way is your bench talent. So if I am good, 60%, this is what I do, maybe 40%, I'm great with DE&I initiatives. So on that 40%, can I hone my skills to take over a role in that probably in the next one year? I'm actually building a bench strength with that skill. Not just the person or the headcount, but it's also the skills that we can count. Those are good to hoard. Quincy Valencia: You're gonna make me cry tears of joy too. This is just [laughter] the sobbing, emotional, Hallmark Channel movie episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad Sowash: Exactly what we always wanted, Quincy. So let me ask you a question with regard to being able to create your own. And this is internal mobility, but it's also being able to fill those entry-level roles with individuals who have at least a subset of skills that you need. Manjuri, why aren't companies actually building talent pipelines, internally, but also externally with schools, with community colleges and those types of things and working on the curriculum to ensure that we don't have these "skills gaps?" Because that's... The gap has grown over the years, the actual skills gap. And there's a lot to be said about that. But isn't it our job as organizations to go out and start to cultivate that new crop and then get them ready to hopefully be with our company for years? Manjuri Sinha: Yeah, absolutely, Chad. And I think I see this as a legacy of abundance. And yeah, we know we've never had a abundance of talent, this is because of the talent war, but the abundance of resources. And a lot of startups and the gig economy companies have never ever built that muscle of growing talent from really junior levels. The enablement of give back to the community and then you can take as well from the community, I think that piece has always been missing. So it's a vicious circle. When you have your VCs plugging in that money into you, they want to see the growth right away, and you want to have products and products released and shipped right away. There are some challenges. There are a lot of startups are hiring, they've also probably not hired the most grown-up tech leaders who would really like to train people also from the bottom. So availability of this, we see cash resources, which is now completely bootstrapped and there's a constraint on that, that was something that people had legacy of and they wouldn't look at this. Manjuri Sinha: Companies that are steady today or companies that are not facing as big as a problem today, we see those examples, they have those programs. They have management development programs with colleges, they have... Even certain... Other companies, set good examples, initially, we saw Google working very closely with Udacity and having nano-degrees for data scientists and certain other players. We don't see that as much in the gig economy. It only caught up end of last year when we realized that we will not have the unlimited cash to really buy senior tech talent and we need to grow that tech talent as well. So that's where I see the... If I may say, the legacy of The Triangles of Sadness. [laughter] It's a movie that I saw recently and it really hit hard, but that's the legacy of abundance, I guess. Chad Sowash: And this, I think, all revolves around the elephant number five, which is no strategy. It feels like we're just throwing spaghetti at the wall every time a new requisition is open. There's no strategy on how to even look internally to see if we might have a great up-and-coming star who'd be for this role. We're just automatically getting into, "Throw spaghetti at the wall and let's just hope that we've got a great candidate." Manjuri Sinha: Absolutely, Chad. And we're talking about this whole sit at the table discussion. In 90%, to probably 95% of organizations today still, there would be a discussion between whoever is deciding, probably a CTO or a CEO or whatever level in the organization does, and the CFO. You would have the headcount plan. That headcount plan comes up and gets shipped. I'm not even calling it a workforce plan because hardly will you ever talk about skill sets, just the headcount plan, it's resourcing. So you talk about that, and that comes as an email to the TA leader saying, "Go hire." Literally, this is practically that, "Okay, go hire." And then you'd probably have a nice chat with the TA leader where you make the leader feel that their advise is being taken to account, which is absolutely not happening. This is where examples of lack of strategy. You probably have given 50 super difficult roles to be hired in a country, but you don't even have those 50 super difficult people to look for. Quincy Valencia: You must have 15 years of chatGPT experience. Manjuri Sinha: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. [laughter] Chad Sowash: I knew we were gonna fit chatGPT in here somewhere. Quincy Valencia: We certainly weren't gonna talk about it. Chad Sowash: I knew you would do it. [laughter] Manjuri Sinha: Exactly. And then you would have a discussion with this leader. Then this leader will go helter-skelter, figure out how to do it, probably will tie up with an agency at an RPO, which will cost really high or need local recruiters and then take a lot of time to bring those people and relocate them, blah, blah, blah. Why not start from a location strategy, ask for that input, think about, "Okay, I need this many. Let's look at what our location strategy can be." We are sitting in a world of hybrid and remote. Why not learn from what we've learned in the last three years, drive that strategy, you look at talent, you look at cost, and also look at what Quincy was talking about, in which pockets do you have a diversity aspect as well? Can you have more neurodiverse candidates? Can you have people with disabilities in that bucket? Can you have more women in that talent, in that bucket, etcetera? But we don't see that kind of a strategy ever happening mostly. Quincy Valencia: So you said... So some of the things we've seen over the last three years and one of the things that we've seen across the board is the amount of accountability and responsibility that's been pushed to a middle layer of management that has never had it before. And so now we're giving them the responsibility saying, "You have to accomplish these 50 things you've never had to do before," but not giving them the tools to do it, and I think some of that is what's perpetuating... I'm not gonna say what's leading to, 'cause it's always been that way, but it's perpetuating the inability of someone at that level to see potential in other people internally or in people with adjacent skills because they simply don't know how. And that's not a knock on anybody, it's just, that's not their job. You and I have been trained in how to identify talent, how to interview talent, how to look at people and look and see what they might be able to contribute. Those managers haven't. They know that they have certain goals that they have to get to by the end of the year, and as far as they know, they have to get somebody who already knows how to do all the stuff, and that's not necessarily the case. So now we've just put more on that table and they have no idea how to do it, and they are woefully ill-prepared and ill-equipped to make these decisions, so now we're making the problem [chuckle] even worse. It's difficult. Manjuri Sinha: And that's where maybe AI can help, right? Quincy Valencia: Absolutely. Yeah. [laughter] It is a matter of fact now that you mentioned it. [laughter] Chad Sowash: And that's another show, kids. I was actually gonna call this The Elephant Killer Series, but I don't wanna Quincy start to cry, so we're not gonna do that. [laughter] We'd like to say thank you so much, Manjuri Sinha, for coming on the show. Global Director of Talent Acquisition at OLX. So we've got a lot to talk about. We should find a stage, maybe, I don't know, come back on the podcast after another year or so and talk more about this. [laughter] But Manjuri, if somebody wants to find out more about you or they wanna connect with you, where would you send them? Manjuri Sinha: Just go to LinkedIn. You'll find a lot of my podcast, you'll find a lot of the recorded talks from different conferences. That's where you can find me. And Chad, I'm at Unleash this year. If you're there, we're definitely catching up there. Chad Sowash: Excellent. Excellent, excellent. Quincy, thanks for subbing in. You're a much better time than Joel Cheesman. That's all I gotta say. Quincy Valencia: I was just gonna say, I'm no Joel, but I didn't clarify what that actually meant. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Well, another one in the can. We out. Quincy Valencia: Out of here. 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 and 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.

We are unleashed this week as, um, UNLEASH America makes its third trip to the states. The boys wax poetic about their time in Vegas, which includes a Chad & Cheese party, a pot party and selfie consultants … don’t worry, it’ll all make sense. News-wise, CV Wallet raised money, Jobcase cuts heads and CEOs are still losing their minds over remote work. Pass the Tylenol, bet it all on black and enjoy this live episode from a Vegas dive bar. 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. [music] Joel: Oooh, yeah. We are live from a dive bar in Las Vegas, licking our wounds from a week at UNLEASH America. Hey kids, you are listening to The Chad & Cheese Podcast. This is your co-host, Joel "What I Did Here Stays Here" Cheesman. Chad: And this is Chad "Did You Pick This Place Because It Has A Shit Ton of Big Booty Latinas In It" Sowash. Joel: I don't know what you're talking about. On this week's episode, which is Abbreviated CEO's Gone Wild, Sir Richard Unchains the Blockchain. Chad: Oh my God. Joel: And UNLEASH is unleashed. Let's do this. How are you feeling, Chad? Your battery a little low? [chuckle] Chad: I'm one of those guys who at first I am energized off of all the engagement. Joel: Sure. Chad: And then it just fucking smothers me. Joel: And it's been a while since we've had this much engagement. We're a little out of shape. Chad: Yeah. Joel: We need to get in conference shape again, but it's been a hell of a lot of fun. Chad: It's been amazing. It has been amazing. Let's go ahead. Let's. Let's jump... We'll talk more about unleash. Joel: Let's suck it up. Be professionals. Chad: Whole block of unleashed... Joel: And do some shout outs. Chad: Do some shout outs. I'm gonna do a block of LinkedIn shout outs. You ready for this. Joel: LinkedIn love. Chad: James Cleaver on LinkedIn. Here's a quote. It's what he posted. Joel: Yep. Chad: "I have to mute unleash and chad and cheese. The FOMO is killing me." Next, we have Stephen McGrath on LinkedIn. Quote, "I square to the good Lord, if someone doesn't get me one of those t-shirts ASAP, you're both gonna be in trouble when I see you next." SFX: Welcome to all things Scottish. Our slogan is, If it's not Scottish, it's crap. Chad: And then Joe Stubblebine. Joel: Stubbs. Chad: I'm gonna save this one for last. Joe posted on LinkedIn, quote, "You've got to hand it to Chad and Cheese. They're... The Chad and Cheese podcast is a master class in staying relevant." This is where I tear up a little bit 'cause Joe was one of the original listeners. I mean he was almost like an advisor at one point where he would call in and say, "Hey, look... Joel: When we sat down and said maybe 50 people will listen to this and he was one of them. Chad: He was one of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so he was incredibly helpful early on. He's been listening and watching in the background and every now and again he comes up for air and he gives us little gems like this so. Joel: And helpful in many ways because he was critical. Chad: Oh God, yeah. Joel: And sometimes your critics are your best friends. If you listen to them and take their advice early on, I remember him saying you guys should, you know, snap it up a little bit. Don't worry about the F-Bombs and then taking people to task. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And we listened. So. Joe, thank you. Chad: Yeah, we had the usual HR kind of like line coming into us saying, oh wait a minute, you guys need to back it down. Joel: Oh, you can't do that. Chad: You're challenging people, you're using the F-Bomb, you're doing these... You just can't do that. And Joe was one of the only guys there was a handful that said, "You know what? Fuck them. Dial it up. Dial it up, because that's what the people want. That's what they're thinking. That's what they want." And when we went to our first SHRM talent, where all the old SHRM HR ladies go. Joel: The suits. Chad: Yes, they came up to us and they said the exact same thing. You're saying what we've been thinking for 30 plus years. For God's sakes, keep it up. Joel: Yeah. Chad: And thanks to people like Joe for the support. Joel: Thanks for all the love. We'll get to the actual on site love that we've been getting. But thanks for the virtual love. Chad: Yes. Joel: From everywhere. From Scotland to where the hell is Joey Stubbs now? On a boat off of the Italian coast. Chad: He could be in Budapest. He could be in Italy somewhere. Greece? Who the fuck knows? But that guy's... He gets around. Joel: Well, Chad, my shout out goes to a special person in my life. Chad: Oh, yeah? Joel: When I say Jerry Springer, what comes to mind? Chad: Cincinnati, Ohio. And who the baby daddy? Joel: Jerry. Jerry. Yes. Former mayor of Cincinnati. Chad: Yes. Joel: I believe he was caught with a prostitute, which is why he was no longer the Cincinnati mayor. Chad: Big surprise. Joel: And obviously most famous for The Jerry Springer Show. Chad: Yes. Joel: Which in college, while you were battling the communists, I was in a fraternity house with a bunch of guys in our underwear watching Jerry Springer. And years later, I met Jerry in Cleveland, got a picture taken with him. It's out there somewhere. I'll find it. And I said, "Jerry, you got me through college." And he said, "Well, don't send me the bill." And that was my Jerry Springer moment. But Jerry, sadly, has passed away this week at the ripe young age of 79 years old. Chad: Wow. Joel: Rest in peace, Jerry. I like to think that Jerry had a little influence on this show. We're not throwing chairs. We're not revealing who the baby daddy is, but we do talk a lot of shit. So, Jerry, this is for you. Shout out. Chad: For your side of the show. We'll say that's Jerry Springer. Okay, Let's go ahead. Let's jump into events again. We'll talk about Unleash here in a minute, but we have more events coming kids, this is exciting. It's pretty amazing. Our next one is gonna be an iCIMS Inspire Coronado Beach early part of May go to Chadcheese.com/events if you're an iCIMS customer I don't know prospect or maybe a vendor who just wants to come to enjoy check it out Chadcheese.com. Joel: Vegas to So-Cal Life doesn't suck. Chad: Does not suck. Joel: And then you go to Portugal. Chad: Yeah. [laughter] Joel: So I did all the birthdays. Chad: Oh really. Joel: Last week for the rest of the month. Chad: Good. Okay. Joel: But Plum was here at the show. Chad: Yes. Oh, my God. Joel: And they were very supportive. Chad: Yes. Joel: I just wanna give a quick shout out for them. Chad: They fed you, that's crazy. Joel: For sponsoring. Chad: Yeah. Joel: The birthday segment of the show. [music] Joel: In case you missed it, everybody. Chad: Oh, what? Joel: We were in Las Vegas for the Unleashed America Conference this week. Joel: You did not miss it. James Cleaver had to mute us. Chad: We're talking PowerPoints. Plug-in software and pour me another one. Chad, I need a nap. What are your thoughts and takeaways from our time in Vegas? Joel: I got to say the new venue, as I'd said prior, I'm really excited to see how it plays, right. Because MGM actually has a pretty good setup, but the Seizures Forum is much more business. It's much more focused. The high roller is there for events. They had the night summit. It was pretty awesome. And this is just the first year, they're actually gonna expand next year. I thought the setup, just the venue itself was pretty amazing. What'd you think? Joel: Yeah. The venue for sure. I love that it was... So typically in Vegas, it's at a hotel. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And you end up staying in the hotel. Chad: Everybody. Joel: Because it's just a pain in the ass. This one is located where you're basically right at an alley of bars, in and out burger... Chad: Hotels. Joel: Gordon Ramsay Fish & Chips. So you can walk down this alley. Chad: Flamingos right there. Joel: Yeah. And then at the end of the alley, you've got the Vegas Strip, is at your fingertips. Chad: Yep. Joel: So I love that the location was great. The Ferris Wheel is a cool visual. Chad: It is. Joel: The hotels that we stayed in were right where they needed to be. So location-wise it was fantastic. I think you and I talked about how much, how far this conference has come in three years. Chad: Yes. Joel: And they've been a juggernaut in Europe. Chad: Not even consecutive years, that's the thing. Joel: Correct. Chad: Yeah. Joel: There was a pandemic in there. [chuckle] But I remember us talking when they said, "We're gonna come to America." sort of scoffing and there's so much competition and HR Tech and for Mark and his team in three years to bring this saying to as big of a apex predator as it is, is really, really impressive. And I think the other conferences need to look out, keep an eye at the back of their head because Unleash is coming. [laughter] I'm equally excited about Rec Fest. Chad: Oh fuck. Joel: Taking their first step into the United States. These two European... Chad: Americans got to step their shit up. Joel: America's gotta step it up. Chad: Here's the interesting thing. HR Tech was bought by a European company, a UK company. So we might see a little twist this year. Maybe not this year, maybe next year. But it is interesting. Joel: So you are saying like HR Tech Euro? Chad: I don't know. Joel: Europe. Chad: Yeah. Who knows? But there might be a red light district somewhere. Who knows. [laughter] So we got here, we had a chance to be in the Work human booth four hours yesterday. Kissing hands, shaking babies, giving away t-shirts. I appreciate everybody who stop by. We're gonna have some great interviews that are gonna be popping out. Joel: And before that, we're on stage with Tex Colonel. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Talking vibe build or partner. That was a great segment, which I think we got on record and we'll push that out as a podcast or no? Chad: Yes. Joel: Okay. So be on the lookout for that. We got to talk about the Tatio party. Chad: Yes. Joel: They're your homeboys and girls. Talk about it. Chad: Yeah. So, Tatio, little startup out of Israel, two female founders, they are incredibly electric. I don't know how other to say it. Right. I mean they are just incredibly ele... Joel: Ball of energy. Chad: I don't know if it's the Israeli culture, and they're all born bred military for the most part, but they are on it. And this is the second party that they've had with us. And this one doubled the last one and we blew out the last one. So it was a great time. We had over I think 125 people who registered, we had over 80 show up. Joel: Wow. Chad: That kind of ratio of engagement to actual attendance is pretty fucking awesome. Joel: And it wasn't easy to get to where we were. Chad: I'm humbled it was not in the same place. Joel: No. Chad: People had to walk 15 minutes. Joel: So I'm incredibly humbled by the experience. Yes. Love the Tatio girls. Chad: They're amazing. Joel: They wear Yellow Jackets, [laughter] which makes me think I'm in Cantons Football Hall of Fame every time that I go, or the old Monday Night football with Howard Cosell and the Yellow Jackets. So it's a nice fashion touch and makes me miss football season quite a bit. But I was saying that this little podcast is on the verge of becoming bigger than... Like a life of its own. And it's incredibly humbling, but it's obviously a thirst that needed to be quenched in our industry. And we are happy to tap the keg and pour the beers people. Chad: Yes. So then also let's talk about the Evan White experience, shall we? Joel: Sure. Chad: We went with hiring... Joel: Is that talent tok's new name or is this a whole. [laughter] Chad: So hiring branch had us on day zero after the vendor summit up in the high roller. Yes. That's a Ferris Wheel that... I think the Apex is like over 500 feet in the air. Takes a half an hour for a full turn. We had a bar in there, we had about 25 to 30 people. It was a blast. Joel: It was a who's who of HR influencers. Chad: It was a blast. Joel: For sure. And I love. [laughter] Last call takes on a whole new meaning. Chad: Oh God. [laughter] Joel: When you're on the clock and you can see it towards the end. Slowly coming. The rush to the bar was like a college frat party. It was very entertaining. Chad: It was great. Joel: But yeah, thanks to hiring Branch. That was fantastic. And then after our party, we did the toque a little bit. I didn't know what to expect. It wasn't a really official, official venue type thing. Chad: No. Yes. Very informal. Joel: It was a little bit like. Chad: Let's smoke weed. Joel: We were selling fake Rolexes [laughter] and on the carpet on the street, and then when the cops come, you roll it up. Chad: Okay. Yeah. Joel: And then you run out. Chad: I gotta tell a story though. So we're all sitting there because Evan had to go get the weed and then we see him rolling up now Evan has a Chad and Cheese t-shirt on, has this very light jacket. Right. And he looks like he's coming straight from Miami. Straight from Miami. Joel: Don Johnson is missing jacket. Chad: Miami Vice. He's walking up, he has this leather Satchel, [laughter] like he was a bank robber in the 1930s. [laughter] He gets up to the point where we are, he drops the satchel, opens it, pulls out a blunt, lights it, takes a puff. Says who's next? [laughter] That was fucking baller. [laughter] Joel: Bootlegging and balling is what that was. Chad: That was baller. Joel: Wow. Chad: Yes. Joel: Evan. Love you man. Love you man. [laughter] Joel: So we're in the middle of everything at the Bellagio, watching the water, people enjoying it at certain levels. A lot of curiosity seekers. And then we went to the Museum of Selfies, which is a thing that your wife apparently loved. Chad: Yes. She did. And they had selfie experts on hand because... Joel: Selfie experts. Chad: Yes. Because they have all these different areas where you can take pictures. And there are different modes on your phone that are better for certain selfies. Joel: Yep. Chad: So depending on what area you're in, like the exhibit area, they would actually show you which one, like Slow-mo, or Boomerang or whatever the hell, and they would show you how to do it. And it was really interesting. So you didn't just go and get some really cool selfies, you had somebody actually teach you how to use your fucking phone. [laughter] Joel: Yeah. Unfortunately my flip phone was incompatible with many of the selfie. Chad: Yes, no. The Nokia. [laughter] Joel: Yeah. Chad: No, the Nokia. [laughter] Joel: The Blackberry wasn't working for me on that one. And then we had, I don't know, the courage... The liquid courage to then go have more drinks at O'Sheas... Or was there something in between... Oh, In-N-Out. Chad: Yes. Joel: We went to In-N-Out, didn't we? Yes. Chad: My first time. Joel: No shit. Chad: My first time. Joel: You are living now my friend. [laughter] Joel: And please tell me you didn't get the veggie, like the lettuce burger. Chad: I did the... I did a double animal style. Joel: Nice. Chad: Yep. I had to go. I'm gonna go. Joel: Is the hype... Is it up to the hype or do you think it was... It's... Chad: I think it was really... I love a smash burger no matter what, the Steak 'n Shakes. Yeah. It was good. Joel: You'll be back. Chad: It was really good. Joel: You'll be back. Chad: Yeah, 'cause there's a possibility. Joel: Cool. Late night at In-N-Out. Chad: [laughter] There's a possibility. Joel: And then, we went to the PandoLogic Museum of Selfies. And then we went and got more drinks. Chad: Yes. Joel: And I think that was the end of our night for the... Chad: That was it. Yeah. Joel: Most part. Chad: Yeah, yeah. Then up again in the SAP booth, the UNLEASH SAP booth. Joel: Four interviews today. Chad: Four today. Joel: And the weekly. Chad: I am interviewed the fuck out dude. Joel: Yeah. After this I think we're done. Chad: Yeah. Joel: For a while. Chad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Joel: Yeah. Chad: No, it's good. It's good. But I also have to give somewhat of a pseudo-shoutout to Pando and my lovely wife, the Disability Solutions. So they actually launched a new product called PandoDIVERSITY. Pretty close to this one. Here's a quote, "PandoDIVERSITY provides access to a robust network of publishers specializing in diverse and underrepresented candidates such as women, minorities, individuals with disabilities, and veterans. Additionally, the use of AI-based programmatic recruitment technology helps to automate and optimize hiring campaigns, remove bias in the recruitment funnel and enhance data transparency." Again, I'm biased on this kids, but I know what the fuck I'm talking about. Chad: Most organizations come up with this, and they have literally nothing that is outcomes-oriented. Julie's team literally every single day does nothing but get individuals with disabilities hired into major organizations. And just Pepsi in itself, I think have 3000 plus with higher retention rates than the normal cohort of non-disabled individuals. 20% of those are disabled veterans. So to be able to see something that actually fucking works, has outcomes retention, all those things, and then to twist new programmatic technology into it, I'm pretty excited about it. Joel: Terry Baker, CEO at PandoLogic told me it took three years to develop this product. So your endorsement is great and his time commitment to this issue is... Chad: Yes. It means something. Joel: Is worthy of another... Chad: Yeah, it means something. Joel: Not just a pseudo-shoutout, Chad, a real live, legit shoutout is what that deserve. All right. The news keeps rolling on kids. We'll take a quick break, get a refill and be right back. Chad: Beer, beer here. Joel: Sir Richard and Beverly are back, Chad. CV Wallet, a skills-based hiring platform that utilizes Web3 and AI Technologies has raised $1.1 million in an angel round. The startup plans to use the funding to further develop its job seeker tools and employer products and assessment provider partnership program. CV Wallet's mission is to create a fair, more efficient and trusted hiring ecosystem by bringing together job seekers, employers, and assessors, that might be the key word, to enable skills-based sourcing at scale. Chad, we love us some Richard and Beverly, but give us your objective take on this news. Chad: I don't have an objective take, first and foremost. Joel: It's impossible? You can't do it? Chad: I love Richard and Beverly. These guys, they know where the gap is. Right? And they are not taking the easy road in trying to fill this gap. This is also another one of my predictions that came true, thank you very much, for 2023, I might've seen this coming, I don't know. [laughter] Joel: You might've had a few pints... Chad: I might've... Joel: Yeah, and then got to this decision. Yeah. Chad: I might've seen this coming. But here's the thing, the resume sucks, we've all known that. But then everybody says, "Yeah, but what else are we gonna use?" which is a great question. What else are we going to use? Well, something that is yours that you own as an individual, that is portable, so you don't have to go through, Indeed or Monster or any other website to be able to apply or go get your stuff to apply. You've got this, it's yours. Right? You dictate how long somebody can actually utilize this information, how long they can't. Not to mention all the credentialing, the assessments, everything is within this actual wallet. It's not spread all over the fucking web like it is today. So if you go get an assessment here, an assessment there, a background check over here, everything's all over the place. Joel: Yep. Chad: And you gotta try to pull that into the applicant tracking system. No. Pull that shit into the fucking blockchain in the CV Wallet and away you go. The hard part about this, I don't think is adoption because it'll happen white label wise, behind the scenes. I think the hard part is, the hard work is getting all the assessment, background check, everybody to say, "Look, the old way of you making money, which you still do fairly well is going to go away, now it's time to adopt something new." Joel: Yep. So, here's what we found out early about Sir Richard. He sold his business to indeed. Chad: It was Richard and Beverly Get it together. They're a duo. Joel: Early on we didn't know Beverly. Chad: That's because she's the smart one behind the scenes. Joel: My point here is early on what we knew. Chad: She's the smart one behind the scenes. Joel: We knew that he had probably made a little bit of cash. We knew that he drove a Maserati. That's just about all we knew about him in our first conversation. Chad: Aston Martin. Joel: So let's assume that he has a little bit of money. [laughter] Chad: And what I like about this... Joel: An Aston Martin, a little bit of money. Joel: Is how low the round was. What it tells me is that they understand this is a long game. Chad: Oh, Yeah. Joel: Everyone who hears Web3 blockchain, whatever is like, "what! It's gonna take some time for this to unfold." Chad: Yes. Joel: So the low round tells me that he understands this is a long game. We talked about LinkedIn partnering with Clear to make profiles legitimate. There's gonna be a lot of competition around this space to make some leverage to be successful. So I don't know how this is gonna turn out. I'm gonna watch this and you are as well, but there's gonna be a lot of competition to make profiles legitimate. We're seeing the blue check at Twitter. We're seeing LinkedIn partnering with Clear to do this. Is CV Wallet gonna be the thing? Are they gonna be bought to have someone bigger than them have that as the thing? I'd have enough faith in them that this is going to go somewhere. But it's also a long game. Don't expect a final chapter to be written for years to come. Chad: So the whole LinkedIn-Clear partnership is nothing but validation for what these guys are doing. Number one. Number two, it's a Band-aid because they're not not going to the extent of creating the infrastructure that's needed for this industry. Clear was built for something entirely different. So I love the signal from the market in LinkedIn saying we need something, but that's not it. So, good for these guys and I don't know, at least I have not heard of anybody taking cash, that's looking to do the same thing CV Wallet is. Joel: Yeah. I want to see Indeed do something. I'd like to see even a ZipRecruiter or somebody to do something. But yeah. If you're bullish on blockchain, this is something you need to keep your eye on. Chad: Here's the problem though. If ZIP does something or Indeed does something. Nobody else is going to use their shit. They won't allow an Indeed blockchain resume to actually come into their system like an applicant track system. So remember iSIMS, how much they fucking hate Indeed. Right. So it's one of those things where it's gotta be a third party. It's gotta be somebody who's not attached. Then what happens is they get all those connections, they get the infrastructure built, and then you see somebody big come buy them. Joel: Yeah. There's people that are still putting money in Chase Bank and Wells Fargo. Chad: I'm not saying it's bad. What I'm saying is the trust will not be there if it's a big name. Like in Indeed. Joel: And, I think crypto, blockchain has a trust issue as well. Chad: Yeah. Crypto, I'm gonna separate crypto from blockchain. Joel: I think a lot of people don't. I think a lot of people put it in a bucket of new stuff that scares me. Chad: I don't think that they're gonna sell this as blockchain. I just think that they're gonna sell... Joel: Web3. Chad: Yes. They're just gonna sell it as Web3 and here are the capabilities of the product. Joel: So perhaps the biggest hurdle is gonna be perception and they have very little to do with that. Chad: Yes. Just not saying blockchain. [laughter] Joel: We may still say blockchain just like we still say chatbot. Sorry. [laughter] Joel: Sorry again, All right. Let's get to Jobcase, word is podcast sponsor. Jobcase is struggling after we reported about layoffs in February. Word is the ax has fallen again costing some 50 people their job at the self-proclaimed LinkedIn for everybody that's not on LinkedIn. Chad, Jobcase has raised almost $150,000,000. What's your take on the news? Chad: My take is that the first cut wasn't deep enough. They did layoffs. Joel: Fred's too nice. Chad: It is hard as a guy as empathetic as Fred is. Joel: So sweetheart. Chad: Not to mention he understands optics. Right? Joel: Yeah. Yeah. Chad: So if you can try to get away with their first cut, then fuck Yeah. Let's do it. Right. But in this case, I mean they actually dropped some pretty big talent, one of them being Ben Koons. Right. I mean the guys will, should and would find a job in five minutes. Right. But I think a couple of things, we just did a podcast earlier or earlier this week called Tech Debt, right? Joel: Yep. Chad: Jobcase has been around for a very long time. They just bought recruitology. There's a lot of tech that could maybe not or will be integrated. Joel: Yep. Chad: There's a lot of work to be done and in this market we see Indeed floundering with new models. Right. And them having to backtrack. From CPA, CPSA, I hope it's one of... It's my hope that, they get a chance to really focus heavily on their good to market and then just start to squeeze it. Because I personally, I think Jobcase is one of the players who could alleviate a lot of the pressure on most of these companies from using Indeed. And if we get more of that along with programmatic players and whatnot, if we get that, then Indeed loses power. And these companies are not forced into bullshit moves. Like calling CPC something entirely different and charging 10 times more for it. Right? Yeah. So we need the Jobcases of this fucking world to be fucking strong and go out there and alleviate pressure on the market. Joel: We talk a lot on the show about how companies generally don't fail because they took too little money. Chad: Yeah. Joel: They fail because they took too much money. And that along with timing, has really put the screws to Jobcase to make money quickly, to be that Indeed... Or LinkedIn. For a lot of people that don't use LinkedIn very quickly, it's a tough business. The job board business is really, really hard. From ZipRecruiters, Share price to dice, to even indeed having challenges, as we've talked about on the show, this is a hard business and they've taken a lot of money, they're investors that want to see growth quickly, and it clearly hasn't happened. So headcount, restructuring is the first step. To your question, where does the business itself go? They have 100 million profiles of people on the site that are looking for work. You should be able to monetize that in some form or fashion. I agree on Fred, total sweetheart, great guy, smart people that are there, but this is a case of a lot of money, bad timing. Let's see if they can turn the Titanic around and if not, well you know what happened to the Titanic. [laughter] Chad: Yes. No, we do know what happened to the Titanic. Yes. Joel: And just like this beer sank, I'm gonna need another beer. Chad: Thank you. Joel: And we'll be right back. And we're back. Chad: We're back? Joel: And unbeknownst to us. Chad: What? Joel: We have a special guest who neither of us know, but she wanted to know what we were doing and let us know that it's her birthday. Chad: What are these microphones for? Yes. And she's also in the industry. So what's your name miss? Joel: So give us your name, where you're from and a little Twitter bio. SFX: I don't know if I need to disclose that right now. Just kidding. [laughter] My name is Ivana Zirojevic. I'm the CEO and founder of Ren Head. Joel: CEO. Chad: Hello. Joel: Nice. Chad: I love it. [laughter] SFX: And I'm a local, by the way. Chad: Happy birthday, by the way. I understand, it's your birthday, it's your 30th. You are looking smashing for 30. SFX: I love you. [laughter] Chad: The youngest billionaire out there. Okay, well... Joel: Well thank you for stopping by. SFX: Thank you. Joel: We appreciate it. CEOs continue to lose their minds over the work-from-home issue. Chad: Go fucking figure. Joel: This week, real estate billionaire, Sam Zell, said, "Work from home is a bunch of bullshit." And added. [laughter] Joel: "One of the biggest lies in the world is that people working from home are more productive than people working in the office." Chad: What an asshole. Joel: An oped and business insider entitled, the real reason bosses are freaked out by remote work proclaimed, "CEOs might as well just say it. They think working from home is for sissies." The beatings will continue until morale improves. Chad, what's your take on this never-ending CEO assault on remote work? Chad: These little wimpy assholes calling anybody a fucking sissy in the first place, that just, to me makes me laugh. To be able to play that bully sissy card... Joel: Jeff Bezos will fight you. Chad: That is... Joel: Jeff Bezos. Chad: Well that's fine. That's fine. He's probably all hopped up on Mountain Dew and shit anyway. What a piece of shit. What a piece of shit. One CEO said, he actually remarked, also mentioned an unnamed employee who had decided to sell his family dog in order to comply with the back-to-office order, and that was something that he got behind. And he felt like that was the kind of a commitment that an employee should make. I'm a dog guy. Joel: You are a dog guy. Chad: I would beat the shit out of my CEO if he told me to get rid of my fucking dog. Luckily right now I don't have a CEO. [laughter] Joel: Yeah. So, you know how I always say the answer to all your questions is money? Chad: Yes. Joel: How did Sam Zell make his billions? Chad: How? Joel: I'll take commercial real estate for 400. So shocking that someone who made billions of dollars in... Chad: In real estate. Joel: In commercial real estate would want everyone to go back to the office. Sam Zell, I get it. What troubles me is that six months ago I was like, "We're never going back to work the way it was. Layoffs happened. CEOs are getting really chirpy and chesty about how work from home is bullshit." The pendulum is swinging to get back in the office and it'll be a lot of fun to talk about and watch on this podcast. Does it go back? Do the workers unite and send it back to the work-from-home movement? Is hybrid where we settle? Does the fraud continue to boil? We will be watching. Chad: I think we underestimated the power of old white dudes, 'cause they continue to play fucking oppression and bully games. It's bullshit autonomy, not micromanage is the king of the day. And we learned that through remote and hybrid working. So I think, and this is during one of our conversations earlier with a chief expert at SAP. He said that the companies who demand this are gonna look like the iron fist types of rulers and people are just not gonna wanna work for them. They're gonna lose the best talent. And it's already happening. Joel: Well, there's work from home, and there's me who can't wait to get home to lay in my bed and take a nap. And with that from Las Vegas, 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.

Do you like your snark served up with a heaping helping of despair? Then this episode is for you. Permanent layoffs, stock crashes, and a commercial real estate meltdown are just the beginning of what A.I. has in store for us. And let’s throw in robot baby daddies to boot and child labor run amok at McDonald’s. The good news may be ridding ourselves of high-priced CEOs forever. Oh yeah, and a couple of startups - Hackajob and Simpplr - got funding, but we’re kinda mixed on those too. We’ll even throw in fake obituaries and a Gen X rant. The end is nigh, humans. 🤖 PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides full-scale inclusion initiatives for people with disabilities. Intro: Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where 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, happy Cinco de Mayo! 47% of all drinks ordered in the US today are margaritas. Hola ninos. You're listening to the Chad & Cheese Podcast. This is your co-host Joel Cerveza Cheesman. Chad: And this is Chad I'll-have-a-Corona Sowash. Joel: And on this week's episode, Hackajob comes to America, not-so-happy meals at McDonald's, and the end is nigh humans. S?: Shall we play a game? Joel: Let's do this. Chad: Damn, back from Vegas just in time to rest up and get ready. Well, you had a mini-marathon. [laughter] Now we get rest up, then we have Cinco de Mayo, then we find ourself back on the left coast again next week. Joel: Yeah, there's a pool with my name on it. I'm a little concerned, though Chad, these hotels are getting really nice that these companies are having these events. I'm not sure they're gonna let a guy like me in, I'm gonna have to hit up a Motel 6 off of Highway 66 or something. Chad: Econo Lodge. Joel: Yeah, Econo Lodge, Holiday Inn Express, I don't know, I'm getting a little worried. A little high class. Chad: The Cheesman brand has to be, it has to be solid. The Econo Lodge Cheesman brand. Joel: That's my people. Give me an all-you-can-eat waffle bar and I am a happy, happy man everybody, happy. Chad: Shout out. Joel: I got a shout out, Chad. And I got a beef. Chad: Oh God, here we go. Joel: I got a beef with Gen-X. Chad: Already? Oh with us? Joel: I got a beef with Gen-X. A Gen-X beef, yeah. Chad: Okay, fuck. Joel: So you and I came of age when the baby boomers were going from their like hippie, Woodstock period to their Wall Street greed-is-good period, and we all swore like, "That's not gonna happen to us, we're... " Chad: Their cool-to-asshole period, is what I call it, yeah. Joel: Yeah, our pop-icons are gonna be solid. And I point anyone younger to go search an interview with Kurt Cobain back in the early '90s, where they told Kurt that Madonna's tickets, concert tickets were 50 plus dollars, and Kurt gob-smacked, couldn't believe it. I think Nirvana tickets at the time were probably $12 to $15. So anyway, my wife is a huge Pearl Jam fan, it's her favorite band, they're touring this year, and they're coming to Indianapolis for the first time in over a decade, they're only doing nine cities. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So she's super excited and people will also remember the '90s that Pearl Jam was this band that fought Ticketmaster, fought the man, was anti-capitalism, pro Green, they were sort of the poster childs for this. Well, you gotta register to even buy tickets, so you put your name in a little lottery, and then you get an email whether you can buy tickets. Well, my wife was selected, went to go buy tickets and wanted to get the best tickets possible. Well, to her surprise, the best tickets possible now to a Pearl Jam concert are in the $800 to the $1000 range. Chad: Oh God. Joel: Let me say it again, 800 to $1000 range. S?: Boo. Chad: Fighting the man to become the man. Joel: How much pro-capitalist is the other guy, but if your brand is based on fighting the man, doing it for the fans, keeping it real, Dave Matthew style, Fish style, etcetera, you can't drop 800 to $1000 tickets at a concert, so I had to get that out, little Gen-X disappointment there, little beef with Pearl Jam, Ten and Vs. Are still fantastic albums, but I'm a little less bullish on Pearl Jam at the moment. And did they need money? Did Eddie? Was Eddie broke? Was Andy hurting? I mean, come on now. Chad: Never meet your heroes. Never meet your heroes. My first shout out goes to Rahkeem Morris, the CEO of HourWork, he actually sat with our dumb asses for about an hour and a half, actually more than that, to create the New voices five-part series. We dropped it yesterday, Wednesday, a five-part binge-able series. So go check it out, you can go to the chadcheese.com, go to Voices, you can check it out there. Also, I created a Spotify playlist. That's right, all you have to do is search Voices and Rahkeem Morris. But five episodes. This dude's journey, I'm talking about way back when he was like a kid, like a pre-teen, his journey to all the way through today is just an amazing, an amazing story, and I'm glad we got a chance to do this series. Joel: I feel like we've either jumped the shark with this five-part series, or we're gonna start giving Netflix a run for its money. I'm not sure. S?: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Joel: Alright, so you mentioned my mini-marathon after my liver destruction tour date in Vegas. Chad: Yes, yes. Joel: So I'm sitting down, I go to Louisville, and Louisville will come up later in the show by the way, I'm sitting down with my nieces, my family, and my nieces are in their 20s, I like to get like what's trending, what's happening? What kind of app should I be paying attention to? They're on BeReal, they're obviously on TikTok and everything. And one of my nieces says, the latest trend is fake obituaries and people are faking deaths, faking like literal death certificates and statements to employers, and apparently it's easier than ever with work-from-home and remote, you can just pick these things online. Chad: Come on. Joel: There are templates. Chad: Come on. Joel: I'm telling you. So I just... I want all the HR people out there to listen, to know, to be on alert that fake obituaries are a thing. So I'm gonna play you the sound bite from the TikTok and just to give you a flavor. Here we go. S?: My dad has died at every single job I've ever been at, sometimes I forget when he really died because I've said he died, I lied and said that he died so many times. My cousin Reed told me, she said, "If he don't do nothing else for you, at least he can get you a couple of days off work, and then when you come back, you get so much attention, everyone feels bad for you, and you might even get some motherfucking flowers." So ever since then like, "My dad died, I'm sorry I got a, you know, bereavement." That bereavement's a bitch too. Once you got that bereavement, set. He ain't do nothing else for you, might as well get you off a couple of days. Joel: Hope it's still funny in hell, Gen-Z. I hope it's still funny in hell, shout out to fake obituaries. Chad: It says something about our society when it's that hard to get a fucking day off, you gotta fake your dad's death. It says something about the character of that person, but it also says something about our society. One good thing about our society, I'm gonna give a big shout out to Mark Coleman and the UNLEASH team for an amazing event, number one, but I have a special shot out that's a little bit more personal. Are you ready for this one? Joel: Oh, do you want? Chad: It's not sexy, okay? It's not sexy at all. Joel: Oh, no. Chad: So you and some listeners might already know that my step-daughter Kennedy lives and works in Budapest. Less than a year ago, she started working with Mark and the UNLEASH team in the midst of preparing for a huge UNLEASH America event. Kennedy living in Budapest had a medical emergency, so Julie jumped on a flight and Mark and the team dropped everything and provided amazing support to Kennedy. Long story short, she had minor surgery, was on a flight to Vegas with Mama Julie less than a week after the surgery. So this was something that could have been major, but because of the quick reactions, the care and the support from Mark, Gina, Orci, and the team at UNLEASH, a crisis was averted. So shout out to an amazing UNLEASH team. Chad: It's one of those things where you have friends in the industry, you have people that you have acquaintances in the industry, obviously, we are continuing to find the people that are more than friends, but family, and we're starting to, I think, have even deeper connections than we ever have, and I am thankful. So thanks guys. Joel: It feels very European to me, I feel like if it had happened in America, it would have been like, "Good luck. See you at the bar." Chad: Rugged individualism. You'll be fine. Joel: Good luck. See you later, see you later. All right, Chad, well, we mention it on every show. Chad: Yes. Joel: We got free shit and I took a bunch of T-shirts items to Vegas. I got rid of all of them. These things are hot, hot, hot items. Chad: They are. Joel: The Canadians can't get enough. I think they're re-selling them at a top dollar in Calgary and Winnipeg, I think they're hot items. So anyway, if you wanna get one in your mailbox, you gotta go to Chadcheese.com/free or click the free link. We're talking beer from our friends at Aspen Tech Labs, whiskey from Textkernel, free t-shirts from JobGet. And if it's your birthday, Chad, you could win rum with plum, that's right, we'll send you a nice bottle of rum from our friends at Plum, but you gotta play if you wanna win. Chadcheese.com, click the free link to win. S?: You know what that means. 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. Joel: All right, that brings us to birthday shout-outs for the week, these people are spending another trip around the sun, shout out to Annie Jarvis, Glen Hill, Garvit Sharma, Jerry Frank, Peter Shapira, Shauna Berdholdt, Keegan Ocepek, Stefan James, Sarah Starkweather, Sarah Addison, Bennet Song, who we interviewed, so be on the look out for that. JT O'Donnel, the mouth of Portsmith, she's celebrating another year around the sun. Robert Rainer, Alfonso Zamora, Herb Drew, Lou Adler, Matt Kaiser, and our favorite Chicagoan, Joe Shaker. S?: Happy birthday. Joel: All another year older. Happy Birthday everybody. Chad: Happy Birthday. Joel: God, and our list of fans is getting big, at what point do we like we can't... It's too many people, it's too many people. Chad: We're just going to have to announce the winners, I think is where we're probably gonna have to go with this. Joel: I'm gonna need a supply of oxygen. Chad: That being said, we need to get to events also brought to you by Shaker Recruitment Marketing. That's right, kids. Whenever the Chad and Cheese travel, we travel in style with Shaker swag. Events coming up, we talked about UNLEASH, it was amazing. Now we're getting ready to go to California, baby. Coronado Beach for iCIMS INSPIRE where Chad and Cheese are closing out day one with Lauree Porter, who's the Director of HR systems at Penn Entertainment, who recently, Joel, acquired Barstool Sports and Christy Spilka, VP and Global Head of TA for iCIMS, we're gonna be doing a round-up of what we heard from the stage that day, and who knows. You're prepped and ready for Cali? Joel: Again, similar to the high-end hotels that they're putting us in, I feel like the guests are getting way too solid for us, like I'm used to the degenerates in the vendor side of the house, we're talking to like the elitist in the employment and hiring process, so I might shave a little bit. I'm getting a little ratty, so I might shave a little bit, comb my hair and put on some cologne for this audience, for once. Chad: I know Christy and the team over at iCIMS, they are avid listeners, so they're gonna be there and listening in, then we're gonna find ourselves... It's gonna be in July, so we're gonna take a little time off, which is nice, but July 6th, in Knebworth Park, just north of London, Chad and Cheese are gonna be hosting the Disrupt stage where it will be all things tech all damn day. And if you have not been to a RecFest, kids listen up, listen up listener, go to chadcheese.com, click on the events in the upper right hand corner, check out our events, register, but you've got to, if you're even close to the UK, you gotta go to RecFest. Jesus, this place is a fucking carnival, it is amazing. Joel: By the way, there could be a Cole Cheeseman siting in Knebworth, which I know you see in European vacation National Lampoon's... Chad: Rusty. Joel: In the scene where Rusty makes out with the German girl. I'm having a little bit of fear that some British girl might have it her way with my 16-year-old son, so I'm gonna be... Chad: A little fear... Yes, I'm sure. Joel: I'm gonna have the leash on Cole Cheesman in Knebworth, for sure. Chad: Topics. Joel: Oh my God. Layoffs baby, we haven't talked about layoffs in a while, but we got some big ones here in our industry to talk about. Number one, Greenhouse who I predicted would go public this year, which does not seem very, very good for me at the moment... Chad: I don't know. Joel: But we'll see, it's only Q1 at this point. So they laid off according to layoffs.FYI, 12% of the workforce or 100 or some people. Gloat another big winner in the investment sweepstakes, laid off 12% of their workforce. And Culture Amp, another surprise there laid off 9% or 90 people according to layoffs.FYI. So talking layoffs. Chad: So Greenhouse, being able to talk about IPOs still feeding into your prediction, this is generally part of the recipe to go to IPO, you're thinning out the ranks, you're focusing on obviously spend, revenue, all that stuff, so you could still... That prediction could still come true. Doubtful, but it could come true. Joel: Well, you know what they say about my predictions Chad... S?: 60% of the time it works, every time. Joel: Alright, let's talk about London-based Hackajob, founded in 2014. They've raised $25 million in a series B, bringing their grand total to $33 million. The company will use the funds to accelerate expansion into the United States. Hackajob's product suite includes a two-sided marketplace for direct talent sourcing, online assessments, remote interviews, and the like. The company says it has a community of over half a million techies. Chad, your take on the Hackajob news. Chad: So I think platforms like Hackajob are what all legacy job sites and applicant tracking systems, core talent platforms should be modeling after. I'm a huge fan of two-sided marketplaces, but I really like the feel of Hackajob as they position the platform as an employees come to you or employers rather come to you type of system, and that's a great way to entice top talent to join up. Then there's the up-skilling and testing modules in the platform, which I believe every single fucking marketplace should have. The companies receive 85% response rates, and they reduce their volume of candidates, which means they're getting more quality than they are quantity, I.e. Indeed still sucks. Also 25% of active candidates now based in the US, which means they have tremendous room for growth with this cash. Now HackerRank and GitHub are major competitors, but I believe if Hackajob creates the right partnerships, key to growth here in the US, kids, partnerships, they can compete in the market. We're seeing amazing types of marketplaces like Harri with an I, on the hospitality side, where they're building an entire ecosystem and also Applicant Tracking System onboarding, those types of things. This is the new age, right? This is the new age. So I love what Hackajob is doing, I think it's a model and a standard, and again, we're seeing the same thing in hospitality with Harri. Joel: So I have a little show that covers the European market, and we like to comment regularly that companies from Europe that come to the US typically face a pretty negative outcome. So Hackajob has its work cut out for it, to say the least. I think there are a few headwinds, I like the business overall, but there are some things outside of their purview that are gonna impact. The number one is the tech employment universe is freaking out right now. Elon's laying off everybody, but can do what they've done with less people. Meta, Apple, Amazon, laying off people. I'm hearing from tech folks that you can turn an entry-level or modest experienced recruiter into like a super 10X type recruiter. Can you do more with less? Can you do more with not senior people or the levels that you have had before? I think we're gonna find out. I think Twitter is sort of at the edge of that, and a lot of companies are gonna watch to see what happens there, what happens to all the... We'll talk about some companies here in a little bit that are also laying people off thinking that AI can do the job of developers. So there's a major headwind in terms of just the techy developer ecosystem that's gonna hit everybody, not just Hackajob but everybody, so that's number one. Joel: Number two is timing again, timing's a little rough, high inflation, war in Europe, it's just not the best time to do a lot of stuff. A lot of companies are staying pat, so growing right now, you're getting ahead of the curve and hoping that things will get better. I hope they do, certainly, but we'll see what happens there. And the other one I think is the biggest is competition, looking at America, we got Turing and Della, HackerRank, Stack Overflow, you mentioned GitHub, I'll throw Dice in there dammit. I will throw in Dice and all the others out out there, the top tall, etcetera. It's gonna be a hard road to hoe for Hackajob. I'm bearish on them. You're bullish, but I think both of us look at it as things outside of their purview that are gonna impact them more than just the business itself and what they do. Chad: We saw and I'll show my t-shirt here, it says "Fuck interviews" from HiringBranch them, the Tadeos of the world, and I feel like all of these marketplaces, the HackerRanks, the GitHubs, the Hackajobs, they are all focused on a couple of things, upskilling and or not just assessments, but tests, so most of these platforms at that point can get rid of the interview entirely, unless you're really looking for "culture fit", you don't need it, especially if you've got tech people who are working remote for the most part. So I see this is a great opportunity, and again, most of these marketplaces, they've gotta move toward upskilling and assessments either through partnerships or through building it themselves. Chad: Now, from a timing standpoint, I agree from the standpoint of, I think this is perfect timing because if it was booming at this point, they wouldn't have enough time to actually focus on areas of the business that they could or should. I think they're going to have more time because they don't have as much demand on them, they've got the money, so now they can re-tool and when everything hits and it will because it's always the cycle. Chad: They'll be ready for it. So again, I think that the Hackajobs, HackerRanks, GitHubs, all of these organizations that are focused on marketplaces that upskill and also test are getting well, well, in front of the old style career sites like the Indeeds, the ZipRecruiters, and even applicant tracking systems. These guys are going to leapfrog over them, if these companies, these old legacy organizations don't get their shit together. Joel: It sounds like you're saying if they're gonna make it into America, they gotta go deep. Oh shit. [automated voice] Chad: Here we go. Not again. Joel: Now we got what we're calling, the Doomsday segment in two parts, call it The White Album for Chad and Cheese, a double album, we'll have an advertising break in between, but some things are happening with AI that scary as shit should... Should be on everyone's radar. So let's go through some of these and we'll have a comment on each one, so number one, the week started with Geoffrey Hinton, known as the Godfather of AI... I bet that picks up chicks at the bar, don't you? He's quit Google. He regrets the work he's done and fear AI could lead to the proliferation of fake images, videos and text. No shit, he also warned AI could power killer robots and cause harmful disruption to the labor market. No shit. Chad your take on The Godfather bowing out? Chad: Yeah, I mean, Skynet... Skynet, on its way, it's interesting, they asked AI experts what the likelihood was of AI actually taking over and being deadly, and they said, "Ah 10%." Okay, 10% is pretty fucking big, that's a little bit much kids. What do we need to do to regulate this shit, so as we hear about just literally this unregulated no guardrail AI that's happening out there, I can see why the guy wants to eject, he probably has plenty of money and chics again, being the Godfather of AI, so... Yeah, no, I see that now, being able to progress into what's the next step and are we gonna lose jobs in this market is the next question I think. S?: That escalated quickly. Joel: Did you see the killer drone that hit Moscow this week? Chad: Yeah, it was funny because I think on the news today, they were talking about how somebody went out and got a couple of drones from a Radio Shack or something like that, it was all just like, Okay, this is really nothing much to do about anything, it's kind of like the drones that you might see around your neighborhood. Joel: I'm calling a fake flag on that one, there's no way that was a legitimate hit on Putin's life, that was literally like a kite with a bomb, a firecracker on it. Chad: Not from Ukraine for God's sake says, no. Joel: And they're blaming us for it. Look, say what you want about America. If we wanna take a guy out, we're probably gonna take the guy out no matter which they are. So that leads us into more doomsday scenarios, let's talk about the IBM CEO who said quote, "He expects to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7800 jobs could be replaced by AI in the coming years. 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations within five years." Chad, your take on the IBM CEO comments. Chad: So first and foremost, we've all recognized that most of the corporate ranks have become bloated, we're seeing... We're seeing these layoffs because of the huge bloat that's happened, so cuts shouldn't surprise us, even though the C-suite's job is to plan and manage the business, so CEOs and the C-suites almost across the board have underperformed in these tasks and doing their damn jobs, for most of what we're hearing though, over and over and over is the phrase cutting mundane tasks, which does not equal jobs. So we continue to have that discussion about tasks, which does make sense, but it's augmenting the human, not replacing the human. So let's be serious, we're not talking about less humans performing different positions, we're talking about being able to give them a better experience, and then also prospectively customer's better experience as well, but here's the big question, so during this whole discussion, you've gotta ask yourself, why is IBM CEO saying this out loud, this isn't great for optics when it comes to holding onto top talent, so why is he saying this out loud. Joel: Are you gonna tell us? Chad: I have a conspiracy theory, but think about it, you can be replaced, so I feel like this is almost like a power play of just saying, "Hey look, we could replace thousands, thousands of positions, you could be replaced, so get your ass back into the office." It's the exact same bullshit move that Johnny C. Taylor made at SHRM when an employee made a case that their job could be done remotely, so Johnny's dumbass just fired them and outsourced the job to India for 40% less. So these are the power plays that reign in the peasants, it's nothing more than control at this point, that's a level that I see because there's no reason for the CEO to come out and say this stupid shit other than trying to rein in the peasants. Joel: I like a good conspiracy theory, Chad when Johnny's mentioned, yes. So I posted this on LinkedIn, I was surprised to see how many people are like, "It sounds like he's trying to set the table to justify layoffs, he said like, he's creating the expectation like, people are gonna lose jobs, and it's not my fault, it's technology's fault, so you're not the only conspiracy theorist out there, Chad. There are a lot of people thinking that. He said that to serve a purpose of laying off people. Now, he did say that they wouldn't lay off people, they would just say they wouldn't be replacing people once those folks left for another job, but you're right, and that those people probably don't feel real secure in their job right now, and they're probably looking to get out and you save yourself from the bad PR when people just leave and you don't have to lay people off, and you get a little bit of extra severance to keep in the coffer, so conspiracy theories abound on this one at IBM, which leads us through Chad, your Xanadu, your paradise, your Nirvana. Joel: Can I interest you in a robotic CEO, AI CEO... Chad: Oh, wait a minute, what? Joel: That's an article from Futurism argues rather than replacing employees with AI-powered robots, CEO should consider replacing themselves with artificial intelligence, a CEO's primary function is often to measure business growth, a task that can be outsourced to AI pretty easily, but Chad, I wanna know your thoughts. My favorite CEO hater. Chad: So I don't hate CEOs, I hate that they have become overrated. Let's just say that. So CEO-pay has skyrocketed nearly 1500, 1500% since 1978. While the people who are actually doing the fucking work, their wage increase is guess what? Not even 20%, 18%, so the average CEO today is earning 400 times more than the employee who's doing the work. Another quote from Futurism Amazon CEO, Andrew Jassy, 2021 salary is capped at a staggering $213 million, a number amounting to the collective earnings of 6474 average Amazon employees, that's salary, not total comp, CEOs get paid ungodly amounts of cash. If we could just ratchet that down to where it was before, it just makes sense, but, but listen to this, even the CEO of Warner Brother's discovery, David Zaslav, who raked in $200, almost $250 million back in 2021, was named on the worst CEO list of 2022. They're still getting paid even though they're doing shitty fucking jobs, they're bloating, they're not managing the company, right, so we're seeing all these huge lay-offs, they're not doing their job, so one or two things need to happen, they need to take a huge pay cut and or they need to get the fuck fired. [automated voice] Joel: CEOs aren't going anywhere, Chad. Chad: They aren't. I know. Joel: Unless the Red Army shows up in San Francisco. The system will prevail over the working class every day of the week. Chad: The peasants. Yes. Joel: Which we should mention a couple other startups that came out recently, so Harvey as a company, they just raised $21 million, they're looking to augment or replace a lot of the tasks of a lawyer, and you and I both have some familiarity with lawyers... Chad: Unfortunately. Joel: And believe you me a lot of the shit they do can be automated or at least augmented. The other one, a company called an NinjaTech AI, horrible name, but some really smart folks at some really big companies just raised $5 million in alpha, you gotta sign up on their waiting list to get access to that, they're gonna replace assistants, executive and otherwise with real-looking people like facial, this is some next generation shit head out to Ninjatech AI at ninjatech.ai I think if you wanna look at more, but I will reiterate, the CEOs and the shareholders will be the last one standing in the castle when the peasants come with the pitch forks to take over. Now CEOs will augment their job and probably have more time on the golf course, more time on the beach, hanging out with you in Portugal... Chad: Still get paid. Joel: Using AI, but they'll be damned if they're gonna be replaced by AI. Chad: And they're not gonna be replaced, like you said, they're gonna be augmented and they're just gonna continue to make this crazy amount of cash, and that's the thing, is that we need to focus on the narrative that we've been told our entire life. If you take a look at just basic economics, whenever "inflation" happens, we don't look at price gouging or profiteering, we look at wages and wage growth, and we focus on middle class, and it's like, "Oh wait, these wages are growing too fast." Motherfucker please. 1500% compared to 18%. You fuck off, Steve Rattner. Joel: And that is part one of our Doomsday segment, we'll take a quick break and come back with another start-up, raising some money. Alright, Chad, I like things that are simpler. How about a company called SIMPPLR? That spelled S-I-M-P-P-L-R. There's two p's on it, SIMPPLR or not, but anyway, the California-based internal social network platform has raised $70 million in a funding round. This brings total funding to $131.1 million. SIMPPLR aims to enhance employee engagement. SIMPPLR platform also uses sentiment and emotion analysis to track and monitor employee attitudes and language patterns. Scary. The funds raised will be used to expand the company's workforce and product R&D. Chad, your thoughts on SIMPPLR. Chad: Horrible name, the whole misspelling generation won't even get this one right. Joel: Only those using Flickr will get this one right. Chad: So has Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and others ruin the social network forever allowing these types of platforms to pop up? Does a company really want and or need their very own social network? I mean, who polices it, will employees really even use it and then from TechCrunch, what you'd actually said, SIMPPLR also uses AI for sentiment and emotional analysis. What employee is gonna wanna put any of their information and or data or anything into that? Moreover SIMPPLR's CEO declined to answer questions about the company's privacy policy, including how long, sorry, SIMPPLR stores user data and whether users can easily delete the data, this is a big fuck you, man. I don't know how they got $70 million. Isn't Slack, Teams and that Facebook work thing enough for business already? [automated voice] Joel: Facebook for your company. What could be more fun than that, Chad, create a profile, connect, share pictures, do polls, play music to each... I don't know what's going on, but it certainly sounds good, and I'm sure a lot of employees will think it's a lot of fun to get on the social network internally and engage with their co-workers. Chad: And get monitored. Joel: However Chad I must caution you. How did Facebook make all their money? Data, they know everything about you. Chad: You're the product. Joel: While you're having fun, sharing pictures at the company picnic, the company is learning more and more about you, including when you wanna leave, maybe you're lobbying other co-workers to leave with you, maybe you wanna start a company that's a competitor. Oh boy, Chad, SIMPPLR sounds like a fantastic way for your company to monitor you and keep you in line. Chad: It's like your own Cambridge Analytica. Joel: Say no to the SIMPPLR... Simpler life. This has disaster written all over it. If they start importing data, exporting your data to other companies, and that company can create a score on you of like what kind of employee you are, are you... Is it gonna be mutiny on the bounty when you show up like, this is a really bad idea. And the only way that they could get that kind of money is because they spun this story to investors about, we're gonna be able to track people all across their entire professional life, and it's gonna make us a ton of money. Chad: Yeah, no. [automated voice] Joel: Alright, Doomsday part two, baby, here we go, let's go to a little more corporate angle on this and. Alright, so number one, shares of Chegg, Chad we're too young to know what Chegg is, or benefit from it, 'cause we were in school when CliffsNotes were considered cheating. Anyway, so shares of Chegg, coming to help students with homework, exam prep and writing support fell by 50 freaking percent after they reported a fall in revenue due to, "Significant spike in student interest in ChatGPT." Chad, your take on the Chegg news. Chad: Chegg is the Blockbuster in the scenario, while Khan Academy is the Netflix, and they are actually piloting ChatGPT in the hopes that the tech can turbo-charge it system with generative AI tutors that leverage the content already provided in Khan Academy. So we're going to see this throughout every single industry, kids, period. We're gonna have the Cheggs of the world, the Encyclopedia Britannica of the world, they're just gonna die because they didn't innovate, because they didn't go that next step, and then you're gonna have the Khan Academies where they automatically I mean they're feverishly going into this saying, "Wow, this could really super charge what we do, and it could help us really force multiply how we tutor students in our platform," so there is a great opportunity to turbo-charge platforms and companies versus what Chegg is looking at the blockbuster is having one store in Alaska, I don't even think that one exists anymore. Joel: So Chad if you wanna know what's coming, watch the kids, remember Napster, that was a revolution driven by the kids and the kids are gonna go around over and under the fences and walls that we as adults create, and I think Chegg is just the tip of the iceberg for what the kids and eventually the adults are going to be doing to public companies and regular old companies all around every industry whatsoever. You and I talked about a little company called Textio in our space a couple of weeks ago. Imagine if Textio was a public company, there would be headlines like this coming out of Textio and fear of companies just go into ChatGPT and writing their own unbiased job postings and their stock with tank more than 50, I promise you that if that news came out, so this... Watch what the kids do, 'cause this is coming to a company near you and it might be coming to the company that you currently work for, and you should be aware of that. Joel: But yes tip of the iceberg. This is gonna be a common thing. If the company you're using or working for can be disrupted, this shit and these kind of headlines are gonna be hitting you, and I guarantee you they're hitting a lot of the companies in our space, a lot of the unicorns that we talked about, 2020 through 2022, they're going through the same shit, they're just not public companies that have to put out headlines on this stuff, but I promise you, they are feeling the pain, just like the people who own commercial real estate everywhere, but certainly places like San Francisco and New York City that have a high density of people in downtown. So this week, we learned that nearly 30% of San Francisco's office space is now vacant, most notably, a building in Downtown San Francisco that is worth or was sold for $300 million four years ago, is likely to sell for 80% less on the market now. Joel: 80% less. And in New York City, a report from Columbia University says New York City office buildings could tumble $48.75 billion in value in the coming years. These are just New York and San Francisco, but I guarantee you every city in the world, thanks to remote work, is feeling the pain. What's your take Chad? Chad: We need to re-imagine cities, much like our relationship has changed to work, our relationship to cities need to be different, in some cases, we need to turn into destination, more of a destination location, even for people who are "locals." We have to innovate as opposed to have this fear-mongering that's going on. Yes, prices are coming down, okay, and they're dropping, they're plummeting, okay, that's an opportunity for organizations to actually get in there, and also for the city of New York to start looking at innovating how they're pulling people in, everything is changing so fluidly with technology today, even brick and mortar. So we have to evolve to be able to say that, well, we need to force people into the cities because of rent. No. This is what we call evolution. The pandemic did this, it demonstrated how fluid we could be as human beings, it also helped us re-prioritize our lives in some cases and work, and that long ass commute is not a part of it anymore, so we've gotta re-imagine these things, we've gotta be smarter, we've got to evolve. Joel: Yeah. And there's gonna be a lot of pain in that evolution. Chad: Yeah, of course. Joel: You and I talked about Sam Zell last week... Chad: Fuck that guy. Joel: Who's pounding the table to get back to work, get back in the office, morale will improve once the beating start anyway. How many rich people do you think own commercial real estate around the world? Chad: All of them. Joel: A lot. Chad: All of them. Joel: So it's no shocker that all these people are like, get back in the office, work from home is bullshit, remote sucks, etcetera. So the first of the cycle is them bitching about this, trying to get people back to work, which isn't gonna work for the most part, the second is, you're gonna see defaults, bankruptcies, runs on bank. A lot of the loans that came for these local markets, commercial real estate are regional banks, local banks, they're gonna feel a lot of pain, and you're starting to see it now in the news with smaller regional banks under pressure from shareholders and fear of what's gonna go on there, so that's gonna be really painful too. The banking system is gonna take a lot of pain from this, and then the next thing is, there are a lot of laws right now, zoning laws that say you can't build residential shit here, you can't build whatever. This is a commercial real estate section of town, those laws have to change and change very fast. We gotta put on the expediting of those in a big way, but... Yeah, you're right. Joel: Look, they're not gonna tear these buildings down and grow farms, they're not gonna put a Six Flags in the middle of Manhattan, so these changes are gonna happen just like in 2008 when everything went to shit. It took five, 10 years for things to come back, and I was in Phoenix at that time, Phoenix is back like it was... Florida's back like it was before 2008 and 2009. These cities will be back, but there will be a lot of pain that happens before that, and speaking of pain, Chad, let's talk about reproduction. Chad: Oh good God. That was never painful for me, at least... Joel: Yeah. Chad: On my side. Joel: But this story might be painful, so robots apparently are taking our women. This was in the news this week. Two babies have been born after a robot guided by a PlayStation 5 controller. Yeah, I said Playstation 5 controller fertilized human eggs. This is in Barcelona, your neighbor there in Portugal, Chad. The procedure created by Overture Life is intended to make it easier for women to become pregnant in a cheaper and more accessible way and... Yes, without men. Chad, talk me off the ledge of all these catastrophe news. What are your thoughts on robot daddies? Chad: Yeah, I got nothing there, man. I can't put myself in the shoes of a lot of the sex-less 20-year-old dudes that are out there today, and why this could, in some cases, be necessary now, there are lesbian couples who want to have kids, and this might be a great mechanism to be able to do that, but personally, this is well outside of my wheelhouse. Joel: Well, yeah, it's nice that all those dudes in their basements are playing video games because that might be the only way that they get to impregnate a woman, with that PlayStation. Look, if women are gonna resort to pregnancy by PlayStation controllers, it'll be our fault, men and the sex robots that we're making right now and perfecting apparently, not that I would know anything about this, but I read the news and it'll probably start in Utah, Chad, because Utah has just blocked PornHub from the entire state, and with that Chad, only Bill Burr, one of our favorite comedians, can sum up the future of sex and how men are gonna be responsible for fucking it all up. Take a listen. Bill Burr: They're gonna make Victoria's Secret super models, just like Paris runway, looking super models, and you can be able to come home to one of these things and it's gonna laugh at all your jokes. [vocalization] Bill Burr: It's gonna sit down and watch the game with you. Like it doesn't get any better than this. Yes, it does. [vocalization] Bill Burr: And it's gonna get up and make you a fucking bundt cake or a meat pie, whatever the fuck you people. Right? 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? Go fuck yourself." And after you've been with one of these robots like sex dolls, you're not gonna be able to go back to a real woman, right, with all their hopes and dreams and their needs. 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've been thinking is how do I shut this fucking thing off. What is it on nagging mode? Why isn't it blowing me right now? Joel: We'll be right back. Joel: Alright Chad, McDonald's is in the news. Call it the not so happy meal, a McDonald's franchise in Louisville, Kentucky has been found to have violated federal labor laws by employing two 10-year-old children. That's right, I said 10 years old who were not paid and worked late hours, including operating a deep fryer, which is prohibited for workers even under 16, let alone 10 years old. The franchise has been fined nearly... You're ready for this Chad, $40,000 by the department of labor. Two other McDonald's franchises were also investigated and found to have employed 305 children to work more hours than legally permitted and perform prohibited tasks. Chad, what you got on this story out of the golden arches? Chad: Welcome to America, kids. So this from the Economic Policy Institute, in the past two years, at least 10 states have introduced or passed laws rolling back child labor protections, here in the United States. Already in 2023, eight bills to weaken labor protections have been introduced in six Midwestern states, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and South Dakota, and in Arkansas where a bill replacing restrictions on work for 14 and 15-year-olds has now been signed into law. In Iowa, probably the most extreme... In Iowa, they've proposed lifting restrictions on hazardous work, lowers age for alcohol servers, extends work hours, grants employers immunity from civil liability for workplace injuries, illness, and death. That's right, your kids could go to work and die, that 10-year-old in Iowa because this is the state of America, kids. Joel: So this is nothing new, apparently, this is news to me. The rise in illegal child labor has been observed by the department of labor since 2018, and the agency has issued millions in fines in just 2022 alone. Chad: Wow. Joel: $40,000, employing two 10-year-olds. Nothing's gonna change, and you and I talk about this all the time, nothing's gonna change with these little fines. That local McDonald's probably makes 40 grand in one day in terms of sales of chicken McNuggets and McShakes. So until we start seeing real fines or perp walks or the McDonald's headquarters, putting on some orange jumpsuits, this is gonna continue to be a problem. Joel: I just can't believe no one noticed a couple of 10-year-olds at the store. And by the way, this is Louisville, I know it's Kentucky, but we're not talking like Dukes of Hazzard, Boss Hogg, Hazzard County, Kentucky. We're talking like a city in Kentucky, so how nobody noticed this or said something just blows my mind, and frankly, if there's an argument for automation in restaurants, I think there's not a better one than keeping little Johnny and Janey away from the fryer, which I can tell you as a fast food worker is not fun to be around, and it's even worse to clean. I'm loving it, McDonald's, not so much. And Chad, that's why I'm boycotting the quarter-pounder for at least a week. 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 a 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 will be back like an awful train wreck, you can click away and like Chad's favorite Western, you can quit them either. We out.

Build, buy, or partner? Fewer questions have dogged mankind as much as this one, especially when it comes to HR tech. That’s why Chad & Cheese added Textkernel’s VP of sales in North America, Chris Conrad, to get to the bottom of this pickle, live from the big stage at UNLEASH America in Las Vegas. Along the way, they break down the issue, visit the historical implications and shine a light for current and future generations to answer this puzzling question, once and for all. 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 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] Intro: In this episode of the Chad and Cheese we take to the main stage of UNLEASH America in Las Vegas with our friend Chris Conrad from Textkernel. Talking about should companies build, buy or partner? Check it out. Jess: Chris Conrad, VP of sales for North America from Textkernel. He's a global... Textkernel is a global leader in AI-powered semantic technology for understanding, connecting and analyzing people and jobs better. We've talked about that on the consultant panel a little bit ago. Over 15 years of experience in recruitment, and recruitment technology. Chris brings a ton of knowledge and experience to this panel and to this conversation. He's gonna sit alongside Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman, of course the co-founders and co-hosts of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I learned a whole bunch of things when I read this intro earlier. I didn't know all of these things about Chad, so I'm gonna share them with you. Former infantry, army infantry drill sergeant. He cut his teeth in online recruitment back in '98 with an outfit called Online Career Center, before the next year it became Monster. Thank you. Jess: And then of course he went on to build direct employers from the ground up. He steered recruit military toward revenue as their Chief Experience officer, and built Randstad's first military veteran recruitment program. I didn't even know all of this about Chad. That's an amazing bio. [applause] Jess: Joel Cheeseman has over 20 years of experience in online recruitment as well. Worked with both international and local job boards in the late '90s and early 2000s. In 2005, Joel founded HR SEO, a search engine marketing company for HR and launched an award-winning industry blog called Cheesehead. Let's bring them to stage. [applause] [music] Chad: My turn? Jess: Amazing. Yes, absolutely. Chad: Hello, hello, hello. Is this thing on? Is this thing on? Jess: Good to see you. Chad: Hello. Jess: Have fun. Yes. Chad: Wake up, Vegas. Joel: I know that dude in the back. They said can you and Chad get on the couch together? I don't know what they're expecting at Unleash to happen with that. [laughter] Joel: And those lights are bright. [laughter] Joel: It's very interesting vibe right now. Chris Conrad: So what are we we're talking big back better. Is that, is that... Chad: Build Back better? Joel: Build back Better, big back Better, love it. That was at my house. [laughter] Joel: Immediately moving over. Build... Chad: Yes. Joel: Buy or partner. Chad: Yes, exactly. Joel: I think that's the topic, right? The hot topic, yeah. Chad: Which is... Yeah. Which is what the other group tried to stay away from the entire time, and everybody kept asking. So we might as well go ahead and and knock it out. Joel: So, I feel like we should really simplify it, what those terms mean. So, build, do you have your tech team build this thing from the ground up? Chad: Yep. Joel: Do you buy? Do you acquire somebody that's already doing it and plug it into your system? Chad: Really questions for the ages, to be quite frank. Joel: Or partner. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Yes, partner. Someone does it really well. You know that you are not... I don't know. You're not named Google or AWS or something and you just go buy that and partner with them to do it. So, I think, historically if we take it back there, there's been some mistakes that companies in our space have made. One that comes to my mind is Jobbing Video. I don't know if you remember Jobbing Video. Chad: Who was around long enough to remember Jobbing Video? Joel: Who remembers Jobbing? Oh, you're able. We got one. Chad: Jesus Christ. Joel: Well, Jobbing was a job board, headquartered out in the southwest. And in the mid 2000s, YouTube was a thing, google Video came out. And Jobbing created Jobbing Video where they thought, "We can do a video player as good as YouTube. Chris Conrad: Yeah. Joel: Turned out they couldn't. Chad: For about five minutes. About five minutes. Joel: They couldn't. It cost too much. Hosting it was too much. They couldn't do HD, they couldn't do the the things that that YouTube did. So they went back to YouTube. So that's one example of, they should have just partnered with someone like YouTube to start with. Chad: But sometimes you're afraid to do those things because there might be an API, I don't know. Twitter might come out with an API and you use the API and you start to build revenue off of the API. And then they pull the plug on the API. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. You were a career builder. What did Monster have on Facebook back in the day? You remember that? Remember, Be Known. Chris Conrad: Oh, my God. Joel: Be Known, anybody remember Be Known? Chris Conrad: I try to forget about that... Joel: I know. Yeah. I heard you, so... Chad: Everybody was doing social media, Facebook. Joel: Be Known, and they had Branch Out. Branch Out was a startup that was on Facebook and they claimed to have a billion users. Which is... Chris Conrad: How do you remember all of this stuff? Joel: This is what I do. Chad: It's our job. Joel: I have no life. So, we have a billion users. And then Facebook said, "You know what? We're gonna switch this up." And they're dead. And so is Monster's Be Known. Chris Conrad: I'm pretty sure that they'll be known in my office somewhere. Joel: So, there are significant threats. A guy named Elon just bought Twitter. Now you have to pay for that API. So all these companies that were using Twitter's API are now proper, you know what, in using that. Chad: Bot. Joel: So, in our space we have to ask the question "Build, buy or partner?" My man here at Textkernel, a lot of you know Sovereign, they acquired Sovereign a couple years ago. You have tons of partners leveraging your program. And I assume you see this question with your partners. How do you convince them not to be scared that you're not gonna go away, that they shouldn't build it themselves? What's that conversation like with companies? Chris Conrad: Surprisingly easy sometimes. [laughter] Chris Conrad: Especially when you start talking about R and D right? Yeah. I think you know a lot of the audience here are actually customers of our Sovereign product line. Within HR Tech we have a high level usage. I think probably maybe over a thousand different partners in North America alone. Joel: Yeah. And if they're not using you directly, they're probably using someone that's using you guys and saying that they built it themselves. Right? Chris Conrad: That is a phenomenon. Joel: That happens. Yeah. Chris Conrad: We've ran into that before. But, yeah, so the thing is, for maybe a lot of you guys, what we do is fundamentally resume parsing. So, I think something like two and a half billion resumes get parsed through Sovereign and Textkernel. Chad: Two a half bi-bi-billion? Chris Conrad: Yeah. Chad: Is that a year? Chris Conrad: Yeah, per year. Chad: Holy shit. Chris Conrad: It's insane. Yeah. All unique people, obviously. All unique. Yeah. Chad: Yeah. [laughter] Chris Conrad: No, but it's crazy stats, right. And so, yeah, we do a lot of this and we've built up a lot of energy and expertise, but the challenge is who's building a new parser? Is it anyone's core business model to build that? Even if you're a job board, do you even want to have that proprietary tech? Joel: And we're talking how many years between Sovereign and you guys, have you guys been doing this? Chris Conrad: They both started 20 years ago. Joel: Yeah. Chris Conrad: And that's crazy. I'm not aware of another parser that's been came up in the last five, really. But, really, I think any more it's less about just the parsing, it's more about the enrichment of skills, professions, it's about all the other stuff. And what's kinda crazy... And this, I feel like I'm getting in a parsing tangent, this is weird. It's like all the creativity that people have on resumes, the advice that your mom would give you. Chad: Yep. Chris Conrad: Like on your first game job. Like, "Go stand out." Chad: Yeah. Yeah. Chris Conrad: And so then people started making these really creative resumes. Chad: And you guys strip the creativeness out. Chris Conrad: And it's horrible for... [laughter] Chris Conrad: So you have to do a lot of work, be like, alright well... Because people are putting addresses all over the place or they have headers where their footers should be, and it's all over the... Joel: And doesn't LinkedIn change things up pretty regularly to keep you guys on your toes. Just keeping up with LinkedIn is a total pain in the ass, right? Chris Conrad: Yeah. Yeah. They changed style, like what? I feel quarterly now. Joel: Yeah. That's a whack-a-mole that no one wants to play. Chris Conrad: Yeah. No, but... And so that's a thing, right? So when we're talking about all the different technologies that are coming out, It's hard to keep up with the Joneses. So I think when we're all talking about different vendors in this segment, it's what can we differentiate? What can we special in? What can we bring a unique solution to the market? But really almost all of us have to interact with either job data or candidate data. And so you start having the question, "What needs to be proprietary technology for your business to be unique in the marketplace?" And surprisingly, and especially I feel like the conversation's changing daily now, it's limiting. Like, what makes you unique is sometimes a very small set of skills, very small set of capabilities that your tool might have or problems that you're solving with your solution. Joel: So, let's... We don't have a lot of time on stage. Do we open up the chatGPT Pandora's box yet, or no? Chad: Open up the can of worms. Because we... Joel: Okay. Chris Conrad: We haven't talked about that, right? [laughter] Joel: No one has talked about this yet. This is brand new for everybody, I know. ChatGPT, in case you don't know it, go ahead and Google it. Is this a conversation? 'Cause I fear a little bit like we're moving really fast to adopt this, to integrate it, without sort of thinking about it. And some of you may know... Chad: You feel that way? Joel: So, Samsung. Chris Conrad: Yeah. [chuckle] Joel: Not job specific, but... Chad: Well you've seen how many products pop out that are GPT in the last 2 weeks for God's sakes. Joel: Oh, yeah. Chad: It is ridiculous. Joel: Wait till you go to the expo hall. Chad: It is ridiculous. Joel: Yeah, it's the new AI in big data over there. But at Samsung, some developers said, "Let's throw all our code into chat GPT and see what happens." Chris Conrad: Why not, right? Why not. Joel: Well, to their dismay now open AI has that code, and it was sort of an oopsie moment. But we have not just code and IP, but we're talking about candidates, human beings. Chris Conrad: Yeah. Joel: Databases of profiles. Should we be afraid about unleashing the chatGPT, the OpenAI animal on all this data? Should vendors be asking, should we, instead of why not? Chris Conrad: We talking about people, right? What's the risk? Chad: Yeah. I guess, yeah, the big question is cannibalizing your own current business and future business. So do we actually utilize the secret source that... We're talking about Samsung, right? Chris Conrad: Yeah. Chad: The secret source that nobody else has. It's our code, it's our data, what have you. Do we go ahead and allow a company like OpenAI or Google, or maybe soon, Amazon, to actually gobble in this? Joel: Elon's got one too, x.ai. Everyone's gonna be flooding that with data. Chris Conrad: Yeah. Jess: So, pros and cons behind that. Because you guys, you've powered pretty much the entire industry between Sovereign and Textkernel, powered the entire industry and you know what white labeling and partnering looks like, but now this is changing the game entirely. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. Chad: So tell us about that. Chris Conrad: Yeah. A lot of our company is PhDs, so. I'm a sales guy, but we're a small sales, and we don't need to be. We have huge R&D efforts comparatively for our company size. And so I'm talking to our head of R&D, and getting our position on large language models, which I feel right now should be a drinking game. Like every single time you say generative AI, you take drink. Joel: Why Not? Chad: Somebody get the Makers... Chris Conrad: I got a bottle of Makers. Chad: Yeah. Get a Maker's Mark out of my bag. Chris Conrad: Let's get after it. No on will... [chuckle] Joel: Backstage is crazy, everybody. Chris Conrad: Soo, one of the anomalies, I guess, the smart people are talking about is the concept of hallucinations. Where the generative AI, which is naturally creative, will just make up stuff, which is great when you're asking it to write up some marketing content, maybe draft a prospecting email or make a job description. But when you're talking about something like, let's just say a resume, we're testing it out and we're like, "This is sometimes just coming up with just fake history." Chad: So you're saying a hallucination for AI is pretty much them, the AI itself, not having enough data to fill a gap so they come up with their own, and it could just be total bullshit. Chris Conrad: Could be. And I think how it's been explained to me by the Smarty pants is that it's like when you're having a conversation with someone, but you anticipate what someone is gonna say next, how often do you get that wrong a little bit? I know I kind of screw it up a bit. Well, it's like generative AI, it's kind of doing that. So it's making that assumption, it's drawing that conclusion, which sometimes... Most of the time it's right, sometimes it's not. And so when you're talking about doing this hundreds of times, thousands of times, billions of times, that level of inconsistency is horribly dangerous. And so you're talking about, like that's a challenge. So, what do you do with this? So there's things that it's really good at. And I personally believe we're at this moment where because of how accessible this technology is, I think it's gonna change a lot of things. But for the short term, we need to be able to augment what it's able to do, it's creativity with hard coded data sets, things that are industry specific. Chris Conrad: So for example, we have extensive taxonomy and ontology around skills and professions, great. Use that to guide the AI, because that's similar to curation, right? So you're pointing in direction saying, "Hey, you build out this job description, but here are the skill that it should have. Don't guess, don't jump to some conclusions." Like, here's what we want on here. Chad: So you're talking about, really... And we've talked to a couple of AI companies that focused on large language models and then having a link to domain specific. And that's smaller, right? But it is really organization's secret sauce. Chris Conrad: Yeah. Chad: And again, your secret sauce being 2 billion resumes that have been parsed, the ontologies, the taxonomies, all those things. That large language model does not currently have that information. How long do you think it's gonna take for them to actually pull that data in? Or do you think that it's gonna take a company to point them in that direction to be able to start gleaning that data? Chris Conrad: That's a good question. I suspect not long. So we're already looking really heavily into how we incorporate, we're incorporating it in certain areas. And our main focus is around compliance, obviously, privacy, and what not. So there's a lot of concern, like what kind of data are you pumping into? Is this gonna be compliant with European legislation? Definitely not. But we know American legislation's gonna change. New York City has that weird law in the books that no one can seem to figure out what to do with it. But you know what, California's not far. Colorado's pretty close. This is all gonna change. Again, I kind of... We were talking about this over lunch, I see this as like the Model T, where traffic lights didn't exist before. The cars were around before. Chad: Yeah. Chris Conrad: But it's just the prevalent... The amount of 'em that started hitting the roadways. You had to put rules in place. You had to have, which side of the road are you gonna be on, what are stop signs? How are they gonna interact with horses? I think this is how we're gonna have in the future to be like, "Hey, How do we use this? How do we regulate it? How does it manage our environment?" But, that's beyond my scope too. Joel: For a long time we talked about automation, AI replacing recruiters. And I feel like that has come full circle to it's gonna augment what a recruiter does. Chris Conrad: Yeah. Joel: Does Chat GPT have the ability to write job descriptions, to write rejection letters and cover letters, and does this replace the recruiter or does it augment them to do their jobs better, or focus on more important things? Chris Conrad: Ooh, that's a dangerous question. Joel: It' what I do. Chris Conrad: We've talking about this for years. In terms of, obviously not with generative... Of this type of technology, but with different workflow automations, conversational AI, right? I don't think we're at that point, anywhere close to it, because at the end of the day, it's human connection. People wanna talk to people, you can read the room if you're gonna give someone some bad news. You need to have that conversation. But also it's kind of like if you... So my wife's a recruiter and she was singing an offer to someone, so she had the phone call with that individual, of course they wanted more money. So, how do you have that conversation with someone? I think where you're gonna use like a AI generated, voice of Bruce Willis, to communicate, like this stuff, is that where we're going? Chad: They can definitely do that. Yeah. Chris Conrad: There's also the rights. Why not? Joel: There's also the flip side, which is less controllable, which is the job seeker. Chris Conrad: Yeah. Joel: And we're starting to see stories about smart developers that are applying to jobs that aren't them, and they're passing pre-screening questions, and they're passing conversational AI discussions, and they're getting job interviews. Chris Conrad: Yeah. Joel: So we're building a beast on both sides. Chris Conrad: Yeah. Joel: I always joke about eventually robots are just gonna interview robots until that first day of work, no one's gonna see anybody. But I think the job seeker side of it is worth... Chris Conrad: Yeah. Wasn't, bill Gates given an interview where he's talking about where his test for whether open AI was ready was whether it could pass AP Bio exam. Joel: Yeah. Chris Conrad: And he thought it would take like two years from the do. And I guess they call him back in a couple months being like... Chad: Done. Chris Conrad: We're ready to do this now. Chad: Yes. Chris Conrad: Yeah. I think that we're there, there. But, again, it's I think the human interaction, we always, I think, discredit that a little bit. There's things you can do, obviously, in terms of matching, understanding different data points, different pieces of the puzzle. But at the end of the day, still being able to understand whether someone's the right fit for your company culture, are we going to rely on that to generative AI? Chad: I think that's the answer. For the most part is because how long have we given job seekers a shitty experience anyway, right? Chris Conrad: I mean. Chad: They've gone into a black hole. And they just want some type of touch, some type of love, some type of, communication. They don't care where it comes from, just as long as they know whether they got the job, they're going through to the next... To the interview or what have you. I think when we're talking about recruiters, they're gonna be able to provide... When they utilize this tech in companies who smartly build this tech or partner to build this tech, they will provide recruiters with the opportunity to have more time that they don't have today 'cause they're doing so much administrative shit that takes up all their time and they don't get a chance to actually be human and talk to humans. So AI could, in this sense, help recruiters be more human because it gives more time back to them to be able to have that conversation about pre-interview, post-interview, offer, et cetera, et cetera. Chris Conrad: Yeah. And kind of switch gears a little bit, think about like... Also if you're starting up a new tech company. Right now we have all the different building blocks, we're starting to get to that point for a company to really build unique solutions, right? So they could... You're leveraging the public cloud to store all your data. You got processing power from, let's just say using Generative AI, you're buying that processing power. You can leverage companies like us to process the initial data, building out your indexes, build out your data set. So you have all the different components. So you can actually deliver solutions, I think, in the future, a lot faster to market... And with less headcounts, but you have to still have that unique solution, that unique idea, that differentiation. You can't just churn out like a copy of a copy. Chad: Is it just the idea? Joel: Is that a good thing though? Chad: I mean, no. Well, first is it just the idea that now you can take pieces and parts and APIs and large language models and start to build your own, not even with your own tech. I mean, you don't even have to have a layer of your own tech in there other than bleeding all those together and having UI, right? Chris Conrad: Yeah. Yeah. Chad: So how close are we to that today? Chris Conrad: I think we're close. So I got a good buddy of mine and he runs a sales org, or a small startup, that does a little bit of conversational AI, a niche player. And so I was talking to him, I was like, "All right, so tell me more about the tech." And none of it's proprietary, none of it. So, which is... This is interesting, and they're doing great. So what's proprietary obviously is their marketing campaign, their ability to sell and position within like the niche segmentation that they do. And they're really good at the staffing industry. So they have the local knowledge of how to apply the technology to that, into solving those problems. So they're doing great, but none of it truly is their unique IP. Chad: So therefore, from an acquisition standpoint, that's more than likely not gonna happen. But they've got a great lifestyle company. Chris Conrad: Yeah. Well, they're making money. Joel: Let's explore this for a second. So when we got started in this, we'd go to Sherm, there'd be like 10 huge booths and a few 20 by 20s. And now we have like the startup alley where people have kiosks and these startups. And there're fewer big booths. Are we going to a place where just it's one big kiosk mall and every company is like 10 people or less, and 80 companies do the same thing? And what's gonna differentiate companies and if no one's getting a $100 million, everyone's getting 2 million in funding, and that they can make a business. I just see this going into a real confusing, convoluted space. Am I wrong there? Chad: More than what it is now? Joel: Yes. [laughter] Chris Conrad: Who wants to be in that conference room? Joel: Way worse. Can you imagine walking into HR tech and it's all kiosks. Like think of the worst mall ever. Chad: I can't think anything worse than walking into HR tech expo. Chris Conrad: It'll be the eightfold booth, 200 by 200, and then a bunch of kiosks. That's what HR Tech will be like... Joel: Oh, and just like a whole bunch of singular sales reps with hungry eyes, asking you to come on by. Chris Conrad: I don't think that's good for the industry. Is it? Joel: I don't think so at all, right? Chris Conrad: Is that where it's going? Joel: I'm not against startups, obviously. But I think you still need to differentiate yourself. And the scenario you're talking about is like cookie cutter. Where you're not differentiating yourself. I don't think that's where the market's going. I think we're just talking about the ability to bring new products to market faster, and differentiate. Chad: Well, in today's environment, there are still companies that utilise, as you'd said, tech not theirs, building companies for... I mean, it's happening today. The question is how much faster can this happen when you have these types of capabilities with organisations like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Elon's dumbass... Joel: The ability to differentiate technologically, to me is going to a place that's almost impossible. The only differentiator is brand and maybe I have money to spend on trade shows and commercials. But if everyone's using open AI or Barred or whatever, and if those all become commodities, it's really hard to see a world where you really have something unique. Chris Conrad: Yeah. I think you're describing... Joel: Unless you have 20 years of experience and data. Chris Conrad: Well, obviously something to be said about having industry experience or niche industry experience, but I think you can't discredit human creativity. Whether we're talking about any of this stuff large language models are disrupting. This has all happened before. Human ingenuity. We're gonna always solve problems and this is gonna create a problem that we're probably gonna solve in another way. So I think we're just... The tool set is changing rapidly, but not the application or the creativity. Chad: So in the future. Build, buy, partner? Is this even... Joel: Are we doing buy? Buy or sell? Chad: Yeah. I mean, is this even going to be... Joel: Yes. I think build is a big sell. Chad: Yeah. I mean, is build even gonna be a part of it when it comes to technology? Joel: Unless you wanna be a two person company. Chris Conrad: Yeah. Joel: I guess. Chris Conrad: I think build is... I think it's important if it's gonna be unique and it's gonna be a differentiator. But so much if it's not, if it's not part of your core business model, if it's not something that will set you apart in the marketplace, you've gotta partner every single time. Because you can be faster, more efficient, more economical, and then focus on what you can deliver, what you're in the business to do. Are we selling, buy? Chad: Buy, definitely. Chris Conrad: If buy becomes there's a dozen big companies with a lot of money and then a bunch of kiosks, at some point, all those kiosks get bought up by the big companies. So I think in that perspective, there will be a lot of consolidation from this. But ultimately, partnering, if you can be that trusted source of data or technology, and you're not gonna go anywhere, that seems like that is the best answer today. Joel: I mean, that's the bet we're making. Chad: At least from this stage. And unfortunately, the big screen says time is up. Joel: Yep. Chris Conrad: Take a question? Joel: Does anyone have a question? Jess: Ooh, he's got a question. Louder. Outro: All the big providers have massive marketplaces, and different partners, obviously. And they seem to be growing and growing every single day. Don't you feel a lot of the startups that are in those marketplaces are getting washed out, so it's hard for the actual customers of those companies... Joel: So the question is around marketplaces. So most of you know, your ATS or big platform, you can build on top of that. And then their customers can access those products and services. So the question is, do those just get washed out? Chris Conrad: You know, someone asked me this question. Joel: There's no platform on text Kernel? Chris Conrad: No, no, no. Joel: Okay. Chris Conrad: I think, the platforms are always gonna be slow to innovate, in my opinion. And so I think that there's always gonna be a healthy marketplace for innovation, for startups, because they're always gonna be more agile, right? Chad: Do we really see a workday, like coming out, cutting edge? [chuckle] Chris Conrad: I mean, that's probably a burn there, but that's the reality, right? Chad: No, it's the truth. Chris Conrad: It's not their business model. Chad: They're old lumbering dinosaurs for the most part, right? And so they're going to need those marketplaces and they're gonna need to nimble startups that are actually there. Chris Conrad: I think they probably need 'em more than ever, to stay relevant. Because also those platforms have a ton of technical debt, like massive, and this is only accelerating. So you think these platforms are gonna be able to like overhaul, right? Chris Conrad: No. Chad: Like Dynamics or... Joel: I can tell you now. I know we advise companies and talk to a lot of startups and whatnot on the show, and we always advise startups, get on the easiest... Most are free now, fortunately. Get on as many platforms as possible, integrate as much as possible, because that's gonna be a funnel to customers. I think the threat becomes, does the company just build it themselves, and you become like way down on the depth chart or do they kick you out totally, or do they buy you? Chad: Yes. Chris Conrad: They usually buy. They usually buy. Joel: That's probably where you were going, is like, if you look at TextRecruit and iCIMS, TextRecruit was on the iCIMS platform, and they saw... I mean, the secret of having platform is you get to see what the coolest, new, sexy stuff is that people are using, and then you go buy it. Chris Conrad: It's also the data. So they also see the analytics, what the usage rates are. They have a lot more data points, some of these these companies. And we're starting to see them now that they're funding some startups too. They'll have little investment arms. It's amazing. Really. Chad: Thank you, Omar. We appreciate it. Thanks for everybody. Chris Conrad: Have we answered your question? I feel like we just kind of went round of it. Joel: Thank you everybody. Chris Conrad: Thank you. [music] Jess: Thank you. Thank you. That was amazing. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favourite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two 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 favourite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Did you know quitting a company is contagious? Yeah, us either. Luckily, there are really smart people looking at data and making such conclusions. That’s why we invited Andrea Derler, Ph.D., principal, research and value at Visier, a human-resources analytics company, to the show. Visier found that when employees were laid off or terminated, the likelihood that their direct colleagues would quit was 7.7 percent higher thn if those employees had remained. Ooooh, that’s juicy. Sounds like a podcast topic … so let’s do this. 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 & Chees Podcast. Joel: Oh, yeah. What's up everybody? It's your favorite guilty pleasure, AKA, The Chad & Chees Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman. Joined as always, the Garth to my Wayne, Chad Sowash. And we are happy to welcome Andrea Derler, PhD. [applause] Joel: She's the Principal Research and Value Principal at Visier. Andrea, welcome to the Chad & Chees Podcast. Andrea Derler: Hello. I'm so happy to be here. Joel: Your mic is better than ours. I'm a little upset about that. Chad: Yeah. Joel: A little... Chad: No, that's a good looking mic. Yeah, you can't see the mic, but it's pretty sexy. That's a sexy looking mic right there. Andrea Derler: Thank you. Joel: So, Andrea, a lot of our listeners don't know who you are. Give us a little Twitter bio and then we'll dig into the company and what you guys do and the data that we're gonna dig into today. Andrea Derler: I started the humans behind the data. The accent that you all discover is because I'm from Austria, living in the US. I'm from the same city... Chad: No, that's not a Raleigh accent. That sound like Raleigh, North Carolina to me. [laughter] Andrea Derler: I can't even do that. Joel: It's Southern Austrian. Andrea Derler: Southern Austrian. Joel: It's Kentucky Fried Austrian, is what that is. Chad: Yeah? Andrea Derler: That's right. I'm from a beautiful city of Graz, which is the same city as Arnold Schwarzenegger. Don't share his popularity quite yet, but I'm hoping to very soon with the type of research that we do. [laughter] Chad: Andrea, the Terminator. Joel: Yeah. Andrea Derler: Data Terminator. Yes. Chad: Oh, there it is. Andrea Derler: Yeah. Joel: Ooh, we found a new LinkedIn title for you, data terminator. Chad: So a little bit more about you. How did you find your way to the US? Andrea Derler: I won the Green Card Lottery, and that's no joke because not many Austrians actually wanna move to the US, so it's very easy to win the Green Card Lottery. [laughter] It is really true. And so, yeah, that happened about 16 years ago and that's how we got here. And this country has treated us really well, my husband and I, and my two kids. Chad: Nice. Andrea Derler: So we've been happy ever since. Chad: Very nice. Yeah. Why leave Austria? Well, there's a good reason. Joel: Well, there's pretty good skiing in North Carolina from what I understand, so. Andrea Derler: That's probably up for debates. Skiing in Austria is awesome. That's why we go back there quite often. Joel: We have a lot of sarcasm on this show, Andrea. Andrea Derler: Oh, I see. Joel: I don't know. Andrea Derler: I'm sorry. I didn't catch, yeah. Joel: Yeah. Didn't catch on. Andrea has a PhD, so she's like, what am I doing here? Chad: Well, she's Austria and that's not... Sarcasm isn't really baked into it, so yeah. Andrea Derler: No, we are very dry and boring people. Usually, that's my one of... Joel: I will ask the questions. All right, Andrea, we know more about you. Some don't know Visier and what you guys do. So talk a little bit about that and we'll get into some specific topic that you recently wrote about on LinkedIn. Andrea Derler: This is the leader in people analytics, according to George Person, for sure. So we are a people analytics company. That means we have about 25,000 customers around the world who load their data from their human resource information systems into Visier to do people analytics. Meaning to understand some of the relationships between, for example, retention and diversity, productivity and business outcomes. Chad: How many people does that represent? Because obviously under those companies you have many... How many people are you getting data points from? Andrea Derler: Yeah. It's growing every week, but it's currently at about 17 million employee records. That means people working... Chad: God. Andrea Derler: In companies around the world, 17 million. Joel: That is a lot. Chad: That is huge. Now, I have this amazing business insider, layoffs can cause contagion, that pushes workers who are left behind to quit. This is something that... We talk about attrition on the show, right? We talked about Amazon and their attrition, and it's actually cost them billions and billions of dollars. Why is our industry... Why are companies not paying more attention to this? I mean, layoffs are one thing, but what about the actual attrition that comes along with that? Because it sounds like it's inherent. Andrea Derler: I think many just don't know. We've discovered this phenomenon in our data, because we actively looked for it. We wanted to understand is a resignation or a layoff of a person, an isolated event or does it actually affect the people around them? And because we are studying the humans behind the data, we found like, let's see if team members are affected by one person's either resignation or layoff event. And we did find that there is an effect on others. And if you think about this, naturally there would be. If you're losing your colleague, through whatever reason, it affects you in many ways. Either you have to do their job now, or your work is being completely changed, every process is being turned upside down, or you simply miss them and you need them to be successful yourself. So you're suddenly considering, well, if they're not here anymore, what am I doing here? And I think, that's the component we just haven't really paid enough attention to. It's as simple as that. We didn't know and we had no way to prove it. Chad: Right. Right. So turnover is contagious in this case. And did you guys coin the term turnover contagion, or did that exist already? Andrea Derler: The term has existed before. So what I like to do is I like to... I'm a little bit of a nerd, so I do read academic articles, and when we started turnover in general... Chad: Oh, you're the person that does that. Okay. Andrea Derler: Yeah. I do that sometimes, because you find really interesting nuggets such as turnover contagion as a term, where we then said, okay, can we prove that this is happening? That it's an actual phenomenon in our vast database. So the term has existed before. It has different words. Sometimes they call it collective turnover. It's always affects on... Social effects basically on teamed members around a person who's leaving. Turnover Research is about a 100 years old, so there is lots more nuggets we can probably test. But that particular one interested us, because we started the resignation wave that started in 2020, and that's when we came to the turnover contagion as a phenomenon. Joel: So when you say contagion, I obviously think COVID, they're not connected whatsoever. But we're in a remote world, and when I hear what's going on and you see people in jobs, maybe yours now, that you didn't have before, how has working remotely impacted this? I could see where, hey, the New York office had a big layoff, and because I actually know these people and we go out for drinks, there's more of a contagion there. But if my New York coworkers get laid off and in I'm in Boise, Idaho, is it less contagious because I'm geographically in a different place? Chad: Because you're not really connected to those people? Is that what you're saying? Joel: Correct. How has remote work impacted the contagion? Andrea Derler: The assumption, based on what we found, we tested this in a timeframe between February, 2019, so before the pandemic until October, 2020, to have that time to calculate everything. We don't know if there's an actual effect of the pandemic on this or hybrid work. However, the way we know that people are connected, even regardless of where they live, is are they're working for the same manager, for example, belonging to a certain team is how we defined team. So that's why if a random person leaves that's living someplace else, or even not even works within that same team, that effect does not exist. That's how we tested it. The only reason we know that turnover is contagious is because we could see who's been working on the same team. So when their team member left, that's when their team, their peers were affected. That's exactly how we proved that regardless of where you are, if you're a member of the same team... I've worked remotely for the last 10 years. I have very close relationships with my peers who are on the other side of the country, sometimes in the other side of the world. But if one of them leaves and I depend on their work to be successful myself, doesn't matter where they are. So my hypothesis would be that the effects of remote are probably, weaker. It's more important who you are connected with and how strong the relationship is. Joel: Is the opposite true? If people being laid off leads to people quitting? Does greater retention lead to more people staying? Andrea Derler: It's actually not a mirror image of each other from what I've learned here. So we haven't looked at that. The draw certainly was away from the company, which is different from why am I staying? So that's not... So the reasons why I'm staying at a certain place are not the same as why I'm leaving a place. So that's what we've learned too and academics have written quite a bit about that. I don't know, to be honest, we can't really say if these are the same reasons. I think, it's more about, and that's what fascinates me about this topic, is the social impact, the relationships, that bonding experience, again, beyond the office can be pretty strong. So if somebody's being let go, that the effect is a bit weaker than if somebody actively leaves, which is that resignation. That's why we found different effect sizes. Joel: When you do that study and publish it, let us know. Maybe we'll have you back talking about that. Andrea Derler: Okay. I promise. Joel: When it comes to the company, in the report, you'd said that, if you do a layoff, expect another at least 7% to leave. In this case, do you think they were, those individuals that were leaving, this contagion piece was, they were just ready to in the first place? Or I might as well leave before they cut me. Do we know any reasons or we just know the data is that if there's a layoff, at least 7% are gonna go? Andrea Derler: The way I think about that is, again, based on academic research, because we don't know why the people in our own sample left. That's... Would be something we have to study later. But there is something like a shock effect, a trigger. Something happens, somebody around me is being let go in the case of layoffs and that's a shock event. Was I ready to leave before? Maybe, but maybe that's not even important because that shock event, that's really what shakes me. That's what makes me wanna leave. That's where survey data meets our data sometimes, that we have seen lots of surveys, who said 40% of people are going to leave next year? You remember that? We saw that in industry publications. That was based on surveys, but survey... And our intention to leave, me wanting to, planning to, maybe not always happy, sometimes frustrated is not by any means the same as me actually handing in my resignation tomorrow. So we don't really know always the reasons of why people now are suddenly triggered to leave. Layoffs is certainly a shock event, but if one of your best colleagues... Chad, if Joel were to leave tomorrow, you'd be really shocked. Right? And so you'd figure it out, what am I still doing here? Chad: Oh, yes. I would be very shocked. [music] SFX: Hey, it's Corona time right now. Chad: I have to get some Corona. Yeah. Joel: He'd be all right. I think. Chad: Is there any correlation between, and I don't know if you've actually run these numbers or not, but if there are positions that have been open long on that team, obviously you're starting to spread those people that stayed too thin. Right? Have you started to take a look at the actual data around the open positions? The longer they're open, the more people that actually go out the back door because again, they're just being worked too hard? Andrea Derler: Yeah. This would be all subject to more research, to be honest. I think the first step, and I keep saying we have to do more. I just wanted to point out how unique it is that we even could find an effect. There are hundreds of studies, based on survey and academic research that showed that turnover contagion is a possibility. But we did an experiment to even see that there is an effect that we saw people leaving because of the_ was a really big importance next step. There are many other questions that open up, that we need to explore further. I think what's probably important and interesting is, what does this mean for the manager? What can they do? What's also interesting is when does it actually happen? When is the effect the strongest? Because it's not forever. Your team members don't leave in the next two years after that first resignation. We saw very specifically, this happens immediately after, on day one, of a person's resignation, once this becomes known. Joel: What advice would you give a company? I know you're not a marketer, but what would the spin be if you were on the end of the company, in terms of trying to put out any kind of contagion quickly? Is there something companies should say to sort of turn the temperature down on people sort of freaking out and taking off? Andrea Derler: Oh, that's top of our mind. So our research doesn't exist in the bubble. That's particularly important in terms of what can an organization or managers do. The first one is, immediately look at the risk of exit profiles for the remaining team members on that team. That should be something that hiring managers do all the time. And you're looking, basically you're asking yourself, who is my top talent? That sounds a bit mean, but I think that's how we all think. Who are the most important people on my team? Who do I certainly not wanna see leaving as well? You look at their risk of exit profile, you see, when was the last promotion, what's their compensation? When was their last pay raise? How long have they been in the job? What's their tenure? Where do they live? But also I think most interestingly, is now in the hybrid world, you mentioned that what managers can do now with technology is to see how engaged are people. What do I know about their, let's say, collaboration with others? What do I know about their potential burnout? What do I know about their work patterns, their daily work patterns? Have they changed? Can I detect any changes in how my people are working every day? Andrea Derler: And so that's something that should always be top of mind. But I think in a resignation event, if I have somebody who is leaving, I have to think immediately about what impact this potentially could have on others. So I do wanna have that open conversation. First, I check the data, but then I should actually, address it heads on. Joel: I was expecting sort of a rah-rah locker room speech from the CEO. And what I got from you was sort of a really personalized employee by employee strategy of how is each one going to hopefully stick around. That was an answer I wasn't expecting. So I appreciate that. Now, if I flip it on the other side, and Chad and I do in this show, we know that companies tend to be evil sometimes. Chad: Twitter, Elon Musk. Joel: So my question is, are companies putting contagion in their calculus when they do layoffs? In other words, if I know that 5% are gonna leave, if I lay off 20%. If I want 25% to leave, do I just lay off 20 and then I know the other 5% are gonna leave and I don't have to pay them severance and all the other stuff. Are companies thinking about contagion when they do layoffs, hoping that more will leave so they come down a little bit and wait for the others to leave after? Andrea Derler: I think we should ask that question to a CHRO because that's a question that I can't answer. I don't think they have done it so far. Joel: What do you think though? Andrea Derler: I don't think so. I don't think that the awareness was there before. Maybe they thought maybe it's possible, they were hoping secretly that this will happen in some cases. But then again, how do you control who's gonna leave? You want your top talent to stay, you don't want your top people to be part of that. Right. That's why it's a little dangerous and risky if you were to do that, because you don't know who's gonna leave. Chad: Right. Makes sense. So, I guess when we're talking about those people, obviously leaving, not knowing whether they're gonna be your top talent or not top talent, and they're sure at this point aren't correlations yet, but this starts the conversation. I think this data starts the conversation for TA leaders and thinking, okay, well if some of my top talent leaves, not only is it going to be bad for others wanting to leave, but they might have had more of the load, the workload, than others, so therefore they're going to spread people too thin. I mean, it's one of those things where we have to look at resources, and I just don't think that many CHROs obviously are even thinking about the contagion effect and how deep it goes. Do you think they are, or is this something incredibly new for them right now because of all these resignations that we've seen over the past few years? Andrea Derler: I love that you're bringing up the talent acquisition function there, because that was something on my mind that I've [0:15:45.7] ____ on. If you know, for example, a team in another company, who have been chasing talent. That's certainly one way to track who's leaving at that company and to see if there are other people that I'd like to kind of have a conversation with about potentially interviewing or are considering other roles. Again, that's the power of people analytics that we are starting to learn about those dynamics right now. We are starting to learn about those phenomena and what they mean for other functions. For example, we know that there's a significant amount of rehires of boomerang employees, that has a lot of implications for talent acquisition, right? Because I may hire people, but then how do I keep them on as long as they actually get embedded in the organization? Or are they leaving within the next three months again and going back to the previous employer? So the retention starts with the hiring, of course, right? So who do I need to keep? How long do I need to keep them on, and what's the risk of them boomeranging back to their previous employer. Andrea Derler: So we have talent management, we have talent acquisition, employee experience, HR function needing to work together because this is becoming a more and more complex problem now. So I think the way you're thinking about this is also how we've been thinking about that. What does this mean for talent acquisition? Not just about hiring and recruitment, but also, what do I need to know and how can I attract teams and team members in my target organizations? Chad: Right. One thing you didn't mention was internal mobility, which is incredibly big. But again, something that just here, recently, we've started to put more emphasis on. So being able to demonstrate to the actual employee that, Hey, look, we value you. We want you to stay. Here's what your career path looks like. Here's some opportunities for education. Right? Those types of things. And being able to demonstrate that, okay, this isn't all on you. This is a team effort. If you're talking to someone in TA about this, or even just on the talent management side of the house, what is the biggest key for them, the biggest indicator for them to be looking at, for the possibility of somebody leaving the team? Is there anything in the data that actually says this is an event, that shock event? Is it pretty much just you're seeing layoffs or is there another shock event? Andrea Derler: I think from what we learned from other analysis we did, is internal mobility is still lagging behind vastly when we compare external versus internal. So that's clear. I think the biggest indicator, we interviewed a couple of boomerang employees and wanted to know why did you leave in the first place? Which is coming to the retention question, I think that you're asking, which is really, people get bored. The top talent that's sometimes resigning. And that's exactly, again, the problem. They get bored at their jobs, they wanna learn something new, they wanna do a little bit of a different role. So theoretically, internal mobility would be the key to... One, key to talent retention, including compensation. So mobility, learning... So the typical ones that we always have discussed, but what makes it so hard? A couple things. Of course, talent hoarding by managers has always been an issue. Who's gonna wanting to let go talent that they really need and want, and probably even really like, and get on with really well. So that's becomes a systemic problem you take in, asking an individual manager to let go of somebody who they actually really need on their team. Andrea Derler: So that's an issue. I don't know how much organizations know these days about the skills that those employees actually have. How much do we know, which roles my employee can actually take in my company? The way CV is sometimes processed, or I mean, curriculum vitaes or even experiences and skills summaries are not very comprehensive sometimes. So I don't know what other skills you have, what do you know about what other skills I have? I've been in sales for a very long time before I became a researcher. Nobody usually knows that. So knowing about what my people can do, versus what they actually currently do, is one of the key problems I think that organizations have. They're working on that right now. As you know, skills technologies are becoming more prevalent now, but it's a complex problem that needs a lot of brains working together. Chad: Well, it's what they want to do as well, right? I mean, they... You know what they can do, but they might wanna pivot into... If you were in sales, you might wanna pivot into marketing, right? Or something of that nature. From an internal mobility standpoint, are we thinking too much about ourself and what we need as the company, as opposed to what the employee needs? Because again, they're gonna get bored and then they're gonna leave, and if they leave, there's high likelihood that another 7% or plus would leave with them... Andrea Derler: But that's really comes down to, again, the manager understanding their team members, right? So you're right. We should always consider what the person wants. That's always been an ever occurring problem because they just don't know. I think what I learned from interviews of people who I interviewed for the boomerang research last year, was the primary reason of why they left was, I just wanna do a little bit more. It's not sometimes a radical change that people want to do, but just learn a little more. Make that next best step. People are incredibly positive usually about the way they work. I mean, I'm not... I'm overgeneralizing here, but my position's always been that, in general, people want to work, want to do a good job, want to perform, most of them. And so, give them that opportunity to maybe contribute to a project outside of their realm. It doesn't have to be complicated, doesn't have to be complex. Andrea Derler: But we are going into psychological safety. Now, again, am I going to my manager and talk to them about that I'm bored at work. Do I feel I can do that? Do I feel that or should I go to HR? Who do I speak to about this? I think that systems and processes need to be in place, that support managers, to have those conversations transparently. But I agree with you. I think that's a complete close circle. How do we keep people? What do we know about them? What don't we know about them? And so far, certainly we have not known about the social collective impact of anyone being a little frustrated and actually leaving their jobs. Chad: You mentioned shock to the system. Is there any data... What would your thesis be around multiple rounds of layoffs? In other words, one round of layoff, you see a certain level of contagion. If there's another round of layoffs, does contagion go up more because there's more layoffs and more fear in the workforce? Andrea Derler: I think that would be another really good question. I mean, I can only hypothesize around that. Of course, when we think about psychological impact of turnover, caused by layoffs in particular, what it causes in people is an incredible big sense of uncertainty, right? Fear, uncertainty. This goes way beyond, can I keep my job? But it's what's... When is it gonna happen to me next? So we would assume that the probability of more people resigning after layoffs would go up only because of that sense of uncertainty, but it will depend on the industry as well. Of course, we see industry differences, and how easy is it going to be for me to find a job someplace else, or I'm just gonna wait it out? So I think we'll see probably variations in industries, probably in education levels, probably in skills as well. What can I do someplace else versus why do I have to stick around? But in general, we would expect that this goes up because people are, of course, particularly in the US where there's not a really strong social safety net, where you don't get a lot of unemployment benefit, it's becoming a life and death situation for some people. Can I survive with my family? Chad: So the recommendation would be, if you're gonna do a round of layoffs, get it done in one sort of action instead of drawing it out into multiple rounds of layoffs. Yes or no? Andrea Derler: Can we do another podcast in a couple of months because we are studying layoffs next? Actually we're looking... Chad: Oh, of course. Andrea Derler: Into this right now. We'll have a lot more data around when are layoffs happening, which industry is the most affected, which kind of demographics are most affected? And I'm actually trying to interview managers about what made the decision happen in the first place? What played into the decision making process? So the layoff conversation is a whole different other beast that we are tackling because it's happening quite prevalently right now. Joel: We'll put a pin in that one. Andrea Derler: Yep. Joel: The media plays into this, I think, you mentioned the great resignation and if you go to Google Trends, the term the great resignation spiked in 2021. It has since collapsed in terms of media mentions of it. You're seeing the great regret start to go up, right? Everyone's regretting resigning. How much does media play into people's decisions to stay or go at a company? Andrea Derler: I love that question. I think what media outlets underestimate is that impact that they have on how people feel, the sentiment about work. I'm always really concerned about that, because it may just really, sometimes, make a problem worse. The great resignation did happen. It's now gone down in numbers. We are tracking resignation rates monthly based on our data, on our database as well. So yes, resignations are down. In terms of the great regrets, interestingly, we've found that people really regretting and going back to their previous employer has been steady over the last four years. So that has not changed much. We see that about a quarter of hires, new hires, are actually rehires. That was higher than we expected. Whether that's regret or not, it's hard to say. It varies by industry as well, but it's been quite steady over the last four years. What's probably more interesting currently is to see how long is that whole recession talk and layoff talk gonna last, because I think compensation's gonna be the next big topic. Andrea Derler: If we are trying to keep people, particularly in some regions of the world, we need to think about compensation. How much do organizations really need to ramp up their compensation and pay for new hires and existing hires until the breaking point? And at which point does that affect actually fade away? How much do I need to pay Andrea so that she stays, but at some point, she's gonna leave anyway. Chad: Yeah. Andrea Derler: So I think that makes sense. That's the next big topic that we want to see after layoffs even to understand what role does pay really play in retention? Chad: I'll let you out on this. You mentioned in your article that smaller teams are at greater risk of contagion. Why is that? Andrea Derler: We've consulted a psychologist on this and the common opinion is that the smaller teams have just more coherence. They know each other better. They're in a closer relationship. That sounds pretty obvious to all of us. That's probably at the core. I think, their work process are also probably more intertwined. So if my colleague leaves and I really depend on them in my smaller team, because we do work together almost every day, that's why the effect is probably stronger for smaller teams than for larger teams beyond 20 or 30 people where the effect is much smaller because people don't necessarily... You won't have 30 people working on one project for a very long time together that closely. Even though the effect is still there, there're still an effect for larger teams, but it's that bonding experience and that necessity of us doing something together to be successful kind of sentiment that makes that effect stronger for smaller teams is our hypothesis. [applause] Chad: Well, Andrea, we appreciate you coming along, talking to us about turnover, contagion, all these wonderful things. I've gotta go get a shot now. If somebody wants to find out more about you or they wanna link up with you or they wanna find out more about this data and the statistics, where would you send them? Andrea Derler: We have a report that can be downloaded on our Visier website. I also have published this a lot on LinkedIn, so you can follow us on LinkedIn. You can follow Visier on LinkedIn or me personally, Andrea Derler, and there's lots of media attention around this. You'll just type in Visier turnover contagion, and you'll find lots of interesting articles and links. Joel: Quitting contagion. Don't stand so close to me, Chad. Another one is in the books. Andrea, thanks for joining us today. We out. Chad: We out. Outro: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? A podcast, the Chad, the Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology. But most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know. And yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese, not one cheddar, blue, nacho, pepperjack, 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.chadchees.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. It's so weird. We out.

The LIVE onstage energy is back with this performance, complete with two amazing guests, Lauree Porter, Director of HR Systems at PENN Entertainment, and Christy Spilka, Global Head of TA at iCIMS who help the boys cover a wide range of topics that preceded them during a full day of rich content. The Chad and Cheese take the stage, Joel nearly breaks a hip, hurl some t-shirts, drink some beer, and close out the first day at iCIMS Inspire, which took place Tuesday, May 9th at the Loew's Coronado Resort. 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. Speaker 1: Please welcome back, Shannon [0:00:01.0] ____. Shannon: All right, I have to get you some fresh air and getting you guys to come back in from that wonderful weather, I'm glad you're here 'cause we're gonna lighten things up with what some call HR's most dangerous podcast and hopefully... Yeah, I see they have beers on hand here, so this won't be your buttoned up HR conversation. Oh no, watch out HR pros, because there's gonna be some honest truth told on this stage today, so without further ado, please join me and welcome the Chad & Cheese podcast. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls it's time for the Chad & Cheese Podcast. [music] Joel Cheesman: Come on! [applause] Chad Sowash: Give it up. There you go, watch yourself. Watch yourself. Joel Cheesman: Where's Will? Chad Sowash: He just threw his shoulder out, Will, thanks. Joel Cheesman: I think I pulled something. Chad Sowash: Now I've gotta look for workman's comp, this is crap. Joel Cheesman: What's up? Chad Sowash: Good call. Joel Cheesman: Oh yeah, what's up everybody? If you don't know, ask your parole officer, this is the Chad & Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman. Chad Sowash: I'm Chad Sowash. Joel Cheesman: Joined as always. Chad Sowash: That's right Chad Sowash. Joel Cheesman: The Lennon to my McCartney, Chad Sowash is here. And we are excited to welcome to this stage Lauree Porter and Christy Spilka. Give it up everybody. [applause] Chad Sowash: Who wants one? Don't take... Joel Cheesman: There we go. Chad Sowash: Don't take mine. Don't take mine. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, Chad had a special, special one. Chad Sowash: You guys don't have any? What's going on? This is... Joel Cheesman: Yeah, ISM said everyone would have one. Sorry about that. Chad Sowash: I think that was supposed to be at 6:00. I'm not sure. Joel Cheesman: Can we turn the spotlight down on Chad's head? I don't want him to blind anybody. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: By the way is Torin still here? Oh yeah Torin there's a golden girl with missing some glasses, you might wanna return those later. Later in the day. How is it going, ladies? Lauree Porter: Good. Christy Spilka: Cheers. Joel Cheesman: Cheers. Everyone's mad at us 'cause we... Chad Sowash: Oh that sucks. Christy Spilka: So is that good? Chad Sowash: That's delicious. Joel Cheesman: It's good. That's good beer. That's Nevada finest right there. UNLV grad, by the way, in case anyone wants to know, former cheerleader at UNLV. Christy Spilka: Go Rebels. Joel Cheesman: So for those that don't know us this is Chad, I'm Cheese... We're the Chad & Cheese Podcast. If you wanna learn more, go to chadcheese.com. If you haven't gotten a t-shirt at the registration desk, we have every size possible, get your free t-shirt. If you put it on the socials, we'll give you a shout out on the weekly show, how does that sound? Woo... Chad Sowash: We'll see. Joel Cheesman: And we'll mention your company maybe get you some free advertising now. For those that don't know, these lovely ladies, let's do a quick Twitter bio before we get into the Q&A, Lauree you can go first. Lauree Porter: Lauree Porter with Penn Entertainment. I'm the director of HR systems. Christy Spilka: Hi everyone, I'm Christy Spilka. I am the VP and global head of talent acquisition at iCIMS. Chad Sowash: Excellent. Joel Cheesman: So give it up for them. All right, make them feel good. Chad Sowash: We don't have a lot of time. Let's dig into this. Okay, so we've talked about a lot today, and a lot of it... Well, a good amount of revolving around tech, but there's a lot of noise in the space today dealing with the tech side, dealing with just process automation side, all of it. So Lauree I'll start with you, how do you get through the noise? I mean, you have a lot to deal with, you have a lot of shit to deal with during the day, how do you stay in tune with what's happening or do you? Or can you not? You just have to focus on what you have in front of you. Lauree Porter: I think it's a combination of both. On a daily basis, yes, I do have to focus on what's in front of me and keeping all the systems running, keeping all our properties happy. As things pop up and initiatives come up with... Whether it's TA or something else, then you have to go out into the market and find what's out there, what's relevant, it's nice that there's so much out there, but it also makes it difficult because there's so many different variables and it's always changing. So what I've seen last year that may have worked well for one circumstance isn't gonna work again this year. Joel Cheesman: More importantly, how many sales calls do you get a day from vendors? Lauree Porter: Not many. Joel Cheesman: Not many? Lauree Porter: No. Joel Cheesman: There's a opportunity sales guys and gals out there, their phone ready for your calls. Lauree Porter: That's one of the beauties of going remote is my office phone no longer exists, so I just have my cell phone and not very many... Joel Cheesman: So do you rely on friends, colleagues, do you go to... Chad Sowash: Podcast. Joel Cheesman: Do you go to podcasts? Do you go to websites where reviews or all the above? Lauree Porter: Yes. A lot of networking, getting to know people in the industry like today, so later on down the line, if I need something and they're in an industry similar to ours, I know I can reach out to someone and get some information. Chad Sowash: Christy, same question, I know you have a tech stack, I get it, but not all the... It's not... The whole points they're not all covered always, right. I mean, come on now. So... Joel Cheesman: I was like where are you going with this? Chad Sowash: What do you do? Christy Spilka: A lot actually, I listen to your podcast number one. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: Brownie points. Joel Cheesman: Such a suck up. Please. Chad Sowash: I love it. Christy Spilka: And of course, I get a lot of information being an iCIMS, especially with Rhea and our Data Insights reports that you guys heard earlier. That's always fabulous. And then outside of that, I'm the board president at ATAP, the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals, and we do a lot of work there as well to connect the community and really have conversations about what's happening in TA so that we can all support each other as we advance talent acquisition. Joel Cheesman: So we're the final entertainment for the day. You've been through all of the sessions. What stood out? What blew your mind? What was like... What are your takeaways from the conference so far? Lauree. Lauree Porter: I would definitely say a lot of what Rhea talked about really rang true. And also surprised me when she talked about how the younger generation is really looking for stability, that really surprised me. I think we were all under the assumption that they weren't, that they're carryover millennials. And so it's really taking a look at who we're hiring and how we need to hire them, so that was great information for me. Joel Cheesman: Let me piggy back on that before we get to Christy. So you hire everything from a baker to an Android developer. That's a broad spectrum of folks. How do you navigate that? How do you message that? How do you target those different audience? [overlapping conversation] Joel Cheesman: Make sense of it for us. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Lauree Porter: Well, I think the thing to remember is that there's gotta be a general process that everyone can somehow customize that works for them. So where a property may have one process when they have a lot of front-line openings, the team that's hiring for vice presidents has a different process, but the basic steps along the way are still within a standard process. Joel Cheesman: Christy your take aways from the show. Christy Spilka: So many. It was a great day. Right everybody, amazing speakers. Joel Cheesman: Awesome give it up for iCIMS. [applause] Christy Spilka: So many takeaways, I love hearing about CXM coming from Al. I'm really excited about that. I think the ability to pipeline our talent and engage our talent and build those healthy and diverse talent pipelines is more critical than ever, it's always been important, and it's ever more so. So I'm really excited about that. The interesting facts we heard from Rhea today on the data insights report, that was interesting. And what we also found is over the last three years, the difference in compensation between the expectation of early grads and what HR professionals are looking to pay actually was smaller a few years ago, increased rapidly and then has compressed again. So I found that to be pretty interesting and Torin always gives a great, a great talk. Chad Sowash: Takes us to church, all the time. Christy Spilka: Amazing. Always. So inspiration also overall, just a fabulous day today. Chad Sowash: So you have the inevitable position where you get to use all this tech that iCIMS has at your disposal, and I assume even start testing some things and getting feedback or giving feedback on stuff that's going on. Not everyone has all those tools. So if you could break down everything from texting to video, to custom messaging, what are a few things that employers should definitely look at doing, what are the tools are invaluable to you getting the right people in those seats? Christy Spilka: Oh my gosh, I think we're gonna need a couple of hours to hit that topic, but... [overlapping conversation] Chad Sowash: We're gonna extend, we're extending. We need more beer. Lauree Porter: We'd be cutting into happy hour. [overlapping conversation] Christy Spilka: To break it down to a few things, I think your applicant tracking system is really important, and looking at the way that you're creating efficiency, looking at the way that you're creating engaging experiences with candidates that are coming through the process. Monitoring that candidate experience, we heard earlier in the session today that we're worried about what's gonna happen in candidate experience with some of the layoffs that we've seen. So really looking at how you can ensure that you've got quality there is gonna be really important. Video is always amazing. I know we've talked about video recently, we use video a lot in our internal TA team, we have it on our career site, we just did a whole career set refreshed by the way, so check us out icims.com. But we have it in all of our nurture campaigns too, so going into your CRM and creating email campaigns with a video, that's really going to set you apart. We heard one of our customers earlier talking about the importance of that and creating those experiences to really highlight their culture, I think that's gonna be critical as well. Joel Cheesman: So talk about... It sounds like iCIMS has almost like an internal Skunk Works that's happening, right? And you would be perfect and your team are perfect to lead that, I'm sure Lauree is very envious. Talk a little bit about that because you're building products, obviously for yourselves, but something that you can actually productize for the entire market. Talk a little bit about that and how you guys impact the build to actual technology and future technologies and processes. Christy Spilka: Yeah, it's definitely a part of my job that I love. I've been a customer for more than nine years, so it was a big iCIMS fan, even before I came to work for iCIMS, I've implemented three times over numerous companies. And so I've got a good amount of experience in leveraging our products and our team gets to all be a part of customer zero at iCIMS where we get to give feedback to the product team. I have the chance to sit down with Al and talk about, "Oh, what's coming up this year, and what are we working on? And let's talk about some of the feedback from our internal talent acquisition team." All of our team members have the opportunity to participate in that, and it's been great to be a customer zero and help to have those conversations. Joel Cheesman: Lauree, you were just talking about the ability... Really to be able to somewhat customize the process, because obviously high volume is different than executive, etcetera, etcetera, but you're also looking at a very fluid market, the landscape is changing all the time. We're talking about how the economy... We have no clue that's doing one week, next week, first part of the week, second part of the week, so how do you plan for that next change? How can you be nimble? Is it really hard with today's tech? Or is it much easier than it has been in the last few years? Lauree Porter: I will say with iCIMS, it does make it a lot easier because I do have the capability to make a lot of changes on the fly when I want to, when I get feedback from different properties or different recruiters that just say, "This isn't working, or how can we fix this, or I wanna do this," I can go in and do it myself. I can play with it, I can test it. They can test it out and say, "Okay, it does work, it's working better. Can we change this? Can we change that?" So it's really just working with the users out there, getting their feedback and testing things out, seeing, does this work? How can we make it better? Joel Cheesman: Fortunately, in the gaming industry, they're used to taking risks and doing things that aren't normal for most people. Chad Sowash: Very heavily regulated. Joel Cheesman: Yes. Chad Sowash: Yeah. DE&I was a focal point of today's content. What are each of you doing in terms of targeting diverse communities, bringing more people into the fold? I'll let Christy start because I know that we talked about it earlier. Christy Spilka: Yeah, we do a lot of work in this area. Like I said earlier, we put a really big focus with our career site refresh on making sure that we had videos that we're representing our culture and who we are as an organization, and our focus on DE&I. We actually created a whole new page on our website as well, in the career site, to talk about the focus that we have in that area. We do a lot of work, we leverage a third party as well to help us ensure that we have inclusive job postings. So every single one of our job postings before it goes up on our career site, it gets a score, and anything below a 95% score is not getting on our career site, so we take that really seriously. We have... Joel Cheesman: Is that an internal tool that's built into iCIMS. Christy Spilka: Third party. Joel Cheesman: Third party, okay. Christy Spilka: And we do a lot of work with, we leverage performance-based hiring, we have what we call alignment meetings rather than intake meetings, where we're really aligning on the opportunity. What are the critical things this person is going to do to be successful in this role? And then we really help partner with our hiring managers on what are those things that the candidate should bring to the table, and what are those areas where maybe we can train someone. So it's a really... It's a very inclusive process, and we're very thoughtful on the approach all the way through the entire hiring process. Joel Cheesman: She says third party tool, I say future acquisition, am I right, Al? Christy Spilka: They're testing it, they're testing it. Chad Sowash: Where's my M&A people? Yeah. Lauree Porter: So very similar to what Christy and iCIMS is doing, it's a non-stop ongoing evolution of things that you need to look at, and I think someone brought up today that it doesn't stop when someone's hired, and I think that's something you have to remember. It's not just at the hiring process, yes, you have things in place to look at who you're hiring and how you're hiring them, and metrics to report on that, but it's also important to think long-term as far as what does everyone have to contribute to the organization whether it be leadership programs or further development programs, making sure all of those are inclusive as well. Chad Sowash: Let's jump into the hard conversation, so generative AI, everybody loves it. They're playing with ChatGPT blah, blah, blah, right. The thing is, it can be very helpful from the efficiency standpoint, but as a Al Smith would say, there's a lot of poo out there, that's a quote from Al. Joel Cheesman: His mom is so proud of him for using that language. Chad Sowash: But also taking the behavior that us humans have, which is incredibly biased, and one thing that AI can do is scale much better than any human can do. So as you're looking at future scope, there's a lot of risk, but there's also a lot of reward. How do you guys approach that? I'll go to you first, Lauree. Lauree Porter: So I know you mentioned the gaming industry likes to take risks... Joel Cheesman: Some I heard not that I would know first hand... Lauree Porter: In the casino? Yes. When it comes to systems and processes like that with the risks, that's probably something we'd be in the background for and wait and see what happens, there's a lot of risk, like you said, for inaccurate messages that we wouldn't want to get out there. Especially when it comes to gaming because we are so heavily regulated, so for me, it's really early, and we'll think about it later. Joel Cheesman: You're a fast follower. Is that right? Fast follower. Lauree Porter: I wouldn't say fast. Really, we wanna see what happens with others that are in similar industries before we jump all in. Joel Cheesman: Christy. Christy Spilka: From an AI perspective, I go back to Al's conversation earlier. He talked about being human lead and some of the principles that we focus on at iCIMS as it relates to AI, and I think a big part of that too is to use the words that he shared as well, having that co-pilot, having that human loop is going to be really important as we embark on this. Joel Cheesman: Background checks were mentioned in Johnny Taylor's presentation, which I didn't really come in thinking that would be a topic, but then when I think about how detailed your background checks need to be... And I look at social media and what's going on there, we gotta say at least Tiktok wants in our presentation of what's going on. How do you guys look at background checks specifically, not just the state and county records, but beyond that with what people are doing online, and whatnot? Lauree Porter: I think it depends on the position. A background checks are definitely a necessity, a lot of our locations actually require licensing. So if you can't pass the background check, you can't get licensed, you can't work for us. So it's not something that we can be too flexible on when it comes to those situations, but depending on the position that someone's in, it depends on the level of background check that we'll go through. Joel Cheesman: So the baker is not as detailed as... Lauree Porter: Head of finance. Joel Cheesman: Head of finance, sure. Thanks for saving me on that one, Christy. Christy Spilka: We follow the requirements in that area of the world, and our own internal guidelines and conduct background checks according to that. Joel Cheesman: Do you look at social media content and what people are putting out there? Christy Spilka: Me? No. Joel Cheesman: No, that's interesting. Chad Sowash: On the record no. Joel Cheesman: They're always listening. Christy Spilka: I've seen what you guys are doing on social media, that's about it. Chad Sowash: Not like you would ever hirer us, I mean come on. Joel Cheesman: We don't need mean background checks. Christy Spilka: Or you wouldn't be here. Joel Cheesman: We have our parole officers and our ankle bracelets. Chad Sowash: So process efficiency. We were talking about application. The application process, heard stats earlier. Needs to be less than five minutes. That's awesome. But also over half of the applications are coming via mobile, so are we just trying to take the mobile process make it shorter or the desktop process make it shorter, put it on mobile? Are we really going to engage with chat bots and look at asynchronous apply as well? Lauree I'll go with you. Lauree Porter: So a few years back, we actually did look at our application process and we saw that 50% were coming from mobile and that a large number of them were dropping off at certain points. So we sat down, we said, "What do we need to know? Now, what's the initial things... " And we cut out at least 50% of the job of the application questions. Cut out any forms. Cut out anything that I could ask you later. What do I need to make a decision there? Chad Sowash: How hard was that? Were you the determining factor of that, or did you have to go... Lauree Porter: I was not, I had recommendations, but I worked with our TA team because ultimately they're the ones using the system, I knew what I thought, but I did work with them. The hardest part, I think, was coming to a consensus and getting everyone to agree on what are those critical questions. Chad Sowash: How long did that process take? Lauree Porter: Well, it got delayed by a little thing that happened in 2020... Chad Sowash: Oh, okay. That'll do it. Lauree Porter: But overall, it's something that I also did at my previous company, so I knew the process, and actually there's someone in here, maybe Jamal, if he's in here, he helped me with my previous company when went through that, and so he really helped me set the ground work for this next time that I did it. So it could have been done very quickly, but it was pandemic consensus, it's always not the top priority until it is the top priority, and it became the top priority when then we had to bring people back after the pandemic, and we need to get them in fast. How can we do that? And I'm like, "Guess what... " Chad Sowash: So Christy, you're part of the Skunk Works... Joel Cheesman: Can I jump in here reall quick before we get... So I think this is an important point you mentioned... [overlapping conversation] Chad Sowash: Of course you think it's an important point. Joel Cheesman: Well, obviously a lot of people agree with me, so the pre-screening questions where you lost people in the process of mobile when you looked at it. Because certain ATSs not this one that we're at currently have a bad reputation of a bad mobile experience on their ATS. So I just wanna get to a point where the pre-screening questions were, where you got the point of people left and how you fix that to keep them going through the final destination. Lauree Porter: For us a lot of it was that we had an i-form as the application, and so if you're on a mobile device, it's not as mobile-friendly. So we took out the questions that we needed to ask and just built it into the profile and got rid of the form. Joel Cheesman: Got it. Lauree Porter: So if you were on a desktop or a mobile device, you're still answering the same questions and you actually got a better experience on the mobile device. Joel Cheesman: Cool. Chad Sowash: Gotcha. So on the skunk works side of the house. Christy Spilka: Customer zero. Chad Sowash: Huh? Christy Spilka: Customer zero. Chad Sowash: Yeah, yeah customer zero, I like skunk works better. Sounds great. So are you using... Are you thinking about using async chat to be able to go through application process, because somebody could be applying on the bus and then they have to get off on their stop, then they wait till they get home, and then they finish the application? What are you guys doing? What are you guys doing internally? Customer zero. Christy Spilka: Yeah, I know we heard in Al's conversation earlier talking about this with our chatbot and some of the work that we're doing there, so absolutely, we plan to adopt that and leverage that to have a fast apply process, and like you said, iCIMS... We're great with the mobile application experience already, and internally, we make sure that we have a really fast process for people to apply as well. And we can track that, which is great, and the ATS, I can see exactly what my drop-off rate is at any given time, how long it's taking to apply and having that data at your fingertips is really critical. Chad Sowash: So what about other things like onboarding and being able to take that chat process to onboarding and async or maybe even synchronous. Yeah. Christy Spilka: No, I think that's great. I think that's very interesting, and we also leverage video studio, video, and all different things to keep people engaged through a process as well, to ensure that we have a very low drop-off rate during the onboarding process. Joel Cheesman: Up-skilling is a hot topic now. People would rather grow talent in-house as opposed to the recruiting because that's more and more challenging, talk about opinions on up-skilling from your company's perspective, what you guys are doing on up-skilling strategy and maybe what you're looking to do in the future. Lauree. Lauree Porter: So we've always had a pretty strong internal transfer process, and I think that's a form of up-skilling where you can look to grow in other areas of the business, and so that's always out worked well. We've also increased the talent and development offerings for those who want to grow, whether it's in or outside, whether it's the mentoring program, so we've really tried work on a diverse number of options as far as people who wanna grow. Joel Cheesman: Is it in-house, is it third party? Christy Spilka: It's in-house. Joel Cheesman: In-house. Chad Sowash: To talk about the internal mobility, 'cause most companies... It's now a new buzzword, internal mobility. Yeah, let's take care of our people. Let's move people through. Talk about that. Talk about... Joel Cheesman: Horrible. Chad Sowash: Yeah, I know, I mean, we're losing people. How is that happening? I don't know. They... Talk about that, did you see attrition happening, you're like," We know this is an issue," or was this just a part of the culture from day one? Lauree Porter: It's always been a part of the culture. We always look internally, especially when it comes to our upper level positions, we're always gonna look internally at who's been with us, who's been working for us and performing for us. We know exactly who they are and what they can do. Let's go to them first before we go to externally, even if it is moving them across country. Joel Cheesman: Let's talk about work from home, remote work real quickly, you have a lot of employees that can't work from home, I assume probably aside from tech, and you can tell me where the remote is and where they're not. You on the other hand, probably can go almost totally remote if you want to, so you first, talk about the challenges of remote work, where does Penn stand on hybrid versus back to the office versus remote, and then the advantages that you have in a work-from-home environment that others don't. Speaker 1: So I think Penn not I think, I know pen is very flexible. So it comes down to what does the business need. So if in our interactive division, they are all remote or there's a small number that needs to be in the office, there is no black and white as far as who needs to be remote and who doesn't. It's really about what the business needs, what the leader needs, what they're comfortable with. Joel Cheesman: So does the manager decide what the team... At what level is it decided where you could be remote or not, or hybrid or what days you come in? Who decides that? Lauree Porter: I'd say leader of that area. Joel Cheesman: Okay, manager. Lauree Porter: But not like... Like the GM can't say that at my property we can all be remote... Joel Cheesman: There's been no CEO mandate of saying "We're all hybrid or we're all... " It's at the ground level of what the team needs to do... Lauree Porter: Yeah, the message has always been that he trusts his leaders, and so they've decided for themselves what they thought worked best. Joel Cheesman: And was that decided from the top down, or did you ask your employees what would you prefer to do and they told you and then you adapted that? Lauree Porter: It was both. Joel Cheesman: It was both. Lauree Porter: We did have conversations, town halls, where we talked about it. He heard feedback from everyone, including his leaders. Joel Cheesman: That's great. Lauree Porter: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: Christy. Christy Spilka: So I think even in some of the data we saw today, flexibility is really important for people having the opportunity to have hybrid in many cases, because a lot of folks like remote and a lot of folks like on-site and many enjoy hybrid work as well. And so I think there's no really one-size-fits-all approach. One of the things that we did a while back on our career site and internally is we added that as a column when you're searching for a job so that you understand exactly the work type of that position, which has been really helpful as well. 'Cause I think transparency is also really important when people are looking for jobs, they wanna know what that's going to look like for them. Joel Cheesman: And does the new hrjobs.icims.com site have remote or not remote in the job posting? Christy Spilka: That's a really good question. We're gonna have to check that out. We'll give some feedback of customer zero... Joel Cheesman: By the way talking about this site I'm thinking what a great sales tool. Think about all the HR people that they can sell iCIMS from the site. Sorry, I'm cynical, I'm cynical. Chad Sowash: Sales jobs.icims.com. [overlapping conversation] Joel Cheesman: HR jobsite. Chad Sowash: I think I've seen this before, I think I've seen this before. So $85 trillion in lost revenue because positions aren't getting filled, why are we not taking this to the C-Suite and giving more budget so that we can get better tech stack, so they can get better resources? Are we finally getting the data that we need to start making the business case? 'Cause we've been talking about cost per hire forever, and CEOs don't even know what the hell that is, and they don't care, because that's not something they can sell to their board. But they can sell this number, it's huge, so do you feel like all these data points are finally coming together for us as an industry so that we can sell it and we can start to be at the big table and talk about the big discussions? Christy Spilka: 100% and how often have you gone to a conference or listened to something online and hear people talk about putting together a business case for investment or whatever, like... We don't talk about it enough, I don't think. I think it's a really important topic. It'll actually be in plug check out my career site session tomorrow, where I will be going through putting together a business case to get investment in your career site, but I do think the data that was shared today is amazing. Jot that down, bring that back to the business, because ultimately, that is how we can continue to get investment, I've done that in my own various organizations over the years in TA to say, "Here's what I'm looking to do, here's why it's important. And here's the value that we'll get back as an organization," Lauree Porter: And I think we're getting there because the leaders are seeing the effects, you don't necessarily have to show them the actual dollar amount, they're actually seeing the effects in not being able to do things. And this hasn't really affected us, but how many businesses do you see that can't open on Monday because they can't hire people. Well, if you had maybe more resources to hire people, maybe you could get people in there. So people are now seeing the actual effects of it, not only the dollar amounts. Joel Cheesman: Seat at the table, Chad, we're out of time. Let's hear it for Christy and Lauree. We are the Chad & Cheese podcast, get your t-shirts before they run out and check us out at chadcheese.com. Chad. It's in the can. It's done. Chad and Joel: We out. [applause] Outro: Thank you for listening to what's it's called a podcast with Chad, with Cheese, brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most all, they talk about nothing, just a lot of shout-outs of people who you don't even know, and yet you're listening. It's incredible, and not one word about cheese, but one, cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss so many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Anywho, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode and while you're at it visit www.chadcheese.com, just don't expect to find in recipes for grilled cheese. It's so weird. We out.

A recruitment marketing podcast with a surprise news alert? Yes, please. Recruitics made a move that all three hosts like a lot. But listen and make up your own mind. Regularly scheduled news, however, includes everything from tip bullying to Miller Lite following Bud Light, bending conservatives out of shape to Goodwill doing, well, good. All the feels in this episode. 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. S?: 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 Cheesman: Oh yeah. News out of Tesla says Elon must personally approve every new hire. That'll certainly speed up the hiring process. Hi kids, you're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast Does Recruitment Marketing. I'm your cohost Joel "Model Y" Cheesman. Chad Sowash: And I'm Chad "Elon is The King of Dick Moves" Sowash. Julie Calli: I'm Julie "Real Human Intelligence" Calli. Joel Cheesman: On this episode, Miller Lite stirs up Conservatives, Goodwill gets a new life and working nine-to-five is no way to make a living anymore. Thanks, Dolly Parton. Well, let's do this. Chad Sowash: So, I was told this week that I'm not a real European unless I'm watching Eurovision. I didn't know this is a thing. Joel Cheesman: What the fuck is Eurovision? Julie Calli: Is it like Hulu? [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Is it like Hulu? Chad Sowash: That was the thing that actually created ABBA. Did you not know that? It's kinda like the America's Got Talent before America's Got Talent, but it brings all the European countries together. It's what ABBA won to become ABBA. So, yeah. So again, this is something that the Europeans keep away from us Americans so that they can have it all to themselves. Joel Cheesman: So, it's like American Idol for Americans. And there's also a really bad Will Ferrell movie, I think, called Eurovision. Chad Sowash: It was. Oh, it wasn't bad. It was amazing. Joel Cheesman: It was awful. Chad Sowash: That was hilarious, dude, I love it. Joel Cheesman: It was awful. Chad Sowash: Watch your mouth. Joel Cheesman: Will Ferrell's either like gold or trash. Chad Sowash: He's always gold. Julie Calli: I'm a fan. Joel Cheesman: I know. He's always got a good quote in every movie, but some of his movies, man, I just... I can't do it. Chad Sowash: Was it the Blades of Glory? I mean, that was horrible at first and I've watched it like a dozen times since. Julie Calli: You're right. It's like a fine wine. If it sits a couple years, it gets funnier, [laughter] maybe. Chad Sowash: Fine wine. Joel Cheesman: Napoleon Dynamite. What happened to that dude? That was supposed to be his like big leap into the stratosphere of celebrity stardom, but I think he's just like living in Utah, skiing now. Chad Sowash: Him and Pedro. I mean, what happened to Pedro? I mean, seriously. Joel Cheesman: Pedro's on the corporate speaking circuit talking about how to win elections. Julie Calli: Vote Pedro. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Vote for Pedro, baby. Vote for Pedro. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: That is a great movie, by the way. Chad Sowash: Shoutout, eat your food, Tina. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Do these chickens have talons? What did you say? Alright, I got a shoutout, everybody. Chad Sowash: Okay. Joel Cheesman: Tip bullying apparently is a thing now. Chad Sowash: Oh, good God. Joel Cheesman: I don't know if you've heard about this. So, the Wall Street Journal had a story this week about how self-checkout machines at various establishments now prompt customers to leave a default 20% tip even if there is minimal or zero interaction... Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: With an employee. Some experts argue that companies are shifting the responsibility of paying employees onto customers instead of increasing salaries themselves. So, this phenomenon known as tip creep aims to encourage higher tips in transactional situations. The article claims customers perceive self-tipping as a form of emotional blackmail. I like that. How do you guys feel? SFX: Emotional damage. Chad Sowash: Dude, I think it's fricking horrible. I don't know. Julie, how many times have you actually gone and gotten a coffee, and then this thing prompts you and you have to go to custom? There's no no tip. You gotta go to custom and then hit no tip. Have you gone through this? Julie Calli: You know, I do a lot of takeout and I feel like I still have to tip when I do takeout. But... Chad Sowash: Really? Julie Calli: I can't even bring... I can't bring myself to spend money on buying coffee. It's just... Why pay $5 for a cup of coffee you could have made at home? I have a really hard time with that. Joel Cheesman: Problem is it's not just coffee, it's everything now. Julie Calli: Yeah. Chad Sowash: No, it's everything. Yeah. Joel Cheesman: If you pay digitally with a credit card... And by the way, Chad, if you push customize, it's a pain in the ass. It's like an exact amount... Chad Sowash: No, it is. Yep. Joel Cheesman: Percentage... And it's worse if you got people behind you like self-checkout, you feel like an ass if you don't tip even though you know you don't want to and the person behind you feels guilty if you tip... Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: And then they don't tip. I know what you're gonna say. It all comes down to like, let's pay a fair wage. Let's be like Europe and just tap and go and be done with it. Chad Sowash: Yeah, yeah. Well, and that's the biggest problem I see is we're not paying real wages as it is in the first place, living wages in that case. So, we automatically go figure... The company's like, "Well, if they had good service, then they'll go ahead and tip." Well, that's total bullshit anyway. We need to start taking a look at wages and when we're all... The thing... This just drives me crazy. First off, whenever we start talking about inflation, the only thing that we can talk about is wages and how wages have come up. And we don't look at the CEO wages that have exploded, since 1978, 1500%. We look at the bottom line that has only gone up less than 20%. And we're like, all those people, they're the problem. We don't look at profiteering, we don't look at any of this stuff. But yet, we have to focus on, "Oh, let's go ahead and see if we can shame people into tips instead of... " Just the entire system in the United States from a payment and a wage and compensation standpoint is totally fucked up. Julie Calli: Yeah. Is that tipping or is that charity? Are are we trying to fill in the compensation because the company can't afford to pay that wage? Chad Sowash: That's a good point. Yeah. Julie Calli: And then it's unpredictable for the employee. Like, "How many people are gonna tip me today? Will I be able to pay my rent?" It's not predictable income. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: And there's a lot of ambiguity. Like if you tip... If you give a waitress five bucks, you know that five bucks is going in the pocket of that waitress. If you digitally donate 20%, who the hell knows where that goes, to be honest? It's not like at the end of the night, everyone gets paid a percentage of what came in digitally. Chad Sowash: Well, then you take a look at the experience. And this is going off-track a little bit, but when we take a look at actually having dinner in Europe, they're not trying to turn and burn tables because they don't need that next tip. "How many tables did you turn so I can get more tips out of those tables?" And they're always coming back, "What's next?" They're politely pushing you out the door here in Europe. I mean, if you don't have a three-hour dinner, you didn't have dinner, for god's sakes. And it's amazing, 'cause again, you go and you tap and you go, nobody asks for a tip. Nobody thinks about asking for a tip because they make a great livable wage for where they're at. And it's crazy. Again, America's fucked up when it comes to salaries, wages and focusing on the bottom line as opposed to the assholes up top who are getting 1500% boosts. Julie Calli: Right. And tips originally were almost a way a bit of an incentive, like good service, you get tipped at the end for providing quality service. But if you're paying for your coffee upfront, you don't even have your coffee yet, you still need to wait 15 minutes to get it, for somebody to write your name on it and move it at the end of the line. Chad Sowash: And they didn't even spell your name right, for god's sakes. Come on. Julie Calli: So, you're tipping upfront, but yet you have no idea... Chad Sowash: Yeah. Julie Calli: The service is incomplete. [laughter] So you're like, "Here is a tip. I hope to get my coffee within the next five minutes." Joel Cheesman: For our listeners who haven't been to Europe, it's so nice to go into a bar, get a drink, round of drinks, whatever, pull out the thing, tap and you're done. In America, it's like, "Do you wanna start a tab? Yes or no?" "Here's my card, let me go run it," get the thing, sign it, get a tip... It's such a nice way to do business when you just tap and go in the bar. It's bad for my liver... Chad Sowash: It's amazing. Joel Cheesman: But it is good for efficiency. By the way, Chad, I know you're a Galloway listener. Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: In his market podcast, they talked about the writers strike in Hollywood and all the money that CEOs in entertainment are making right now and his co-host said, "Why don't the CEOs just reduce their pay so that they can pay the writers?" [chuckle] And of course, Galloway is like, "That's really cute that you would think the CEOs would reduce their pay to pay the writers." Chad Sowash: Yeah. Well, I mean, Galloway's onboard with making as much money as he fucking possibly can. Joel Cheesman: Oh, he's a capitalist. Chad Sowash: He's a capitalist who lives in fucking London. Fuck that dude. Julie Calli: Yeah, I mean, I feel for the writers. I know whenever people need to go on strike, it's to make a point, it's to make a stand, but of all the times to make a stand, writers are at the top of the list of their careers being threatened by AI and they're like, "Hey, now's the time. Now that I'm replaceable by artificial intelligence, now I think I'm gonna demand more pay." [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Like most things in life, it's all the millennials' fault. All the password-sharing, none of y'all were paying, none of y'all were paying for Netflix and now the writers get to pay for it. Thanks, millennials. Thanks, millennials. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Oh, shit. My shoutout goes to events. I can't say enough. And again, we're a little ways out of COVID, but I can't say how much it... How good it feels just to see people again, to be on stage. [music] Chad Sowash: Oh yeah. It is amazing to be in ferris wheels, to do VIP events. I mean, this is how life was meant to live kids, and we're just having a great time. All the events that we're going to, one event, get ready kids, we're gonna be at RecFest in London just north and in Knebworth Park. And the very first RecFest in the US is happening in Nashville, happening in September, so you got plenty of time. You go to chadcheese.com, click on Events. If you click on the discount code in our events section, hell, it's in the header, for god's sakes, it's a hero image, click on Sign up or Register Here, or whatever the hell it says and you'll get a 50% off from Chad and Cheese. Bring your entire team because that's what RecFest is about, it's about community, it's about bringing the whole team together. And an all-hands day in Nashville is exactly what your team needs. So, go to chadcheese.com, click on Events, click Sign up and boom baby, we'll see you there. Joel Cheesman: Groupons from Chad and Cheese, that's what I'm talking about. And we get to see Julie Calli in Vegas. That was the first show of the year. Chad Sowash: Oh yeah. Joel Cheesman: And Julie Calli is in the house. Julie Calli: Yeah, that was great. Chad Sowash: We were up in a ferris wheel. Julie Calli: Oh, the high roller was awesome. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: I'm on a boat and a ferris wheel. Julie Calli: Yeah. Thank you to HiringBranch for that trip in the high roller. I just thought it was like a ferris wheel, and then the doors opened and there was a bar inside of it. I was like, "What am" Joel Cheesman: A bartender. Julie Calli: "I climbing aboard?" And then I was just so overjoyed. Chad Sowash: Is this a penis rocket? [laughter] Julie Calli: With all the people that were... It was a great move too, to seal us all in a little pod together. [laughter] But then you put a whole bunch of talkers in a pod together and I was enjoying all the conversation, I realized, "Oh yeah, let me look at the view." [chuckle] I almost didn't even look out the window. I was so excited to talk to everyone. Joel Cheesman: I have a request, Chad. Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: I know Jamie listens to the show at RecFest. Chad Sowash: Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Joel Cheesman: Come to America, the ferris wheel is a cutesy thing in England, I get that. You got the Eye in London. You're coming to Nashville, I want a mechanical bull. I want a mechanical bull at RecFest and I will ride it. Julie Calli: You will? Joel Cheesman: On record. Chad Sowash: I can see... Joel Cheesman: Yes. Chad Sowash: I can see a Chad and Cheese VIP event with a mechanical bull. Oh, wait a minute. Alright. Joel Cheesman: I'm talking chaps, pants, optional, baby. That's what I'm talking about. And an electrical bull. Do it Jamie. Chad Sowash: I do not want Cheesman ass-less chaps, okay? Joel Cheesman: Come on, Jamie. Chad Sowash: That's not... No, no, I don't want that. Joel Cheesman: Give me a bull, Jamie. Julie Calli: Should I control it? [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Get me a bull. Chad Sowash: Sure. Joel Cheesman: There you go. Chad Sowash: He can't even control it. Are you kidding me? Joel Cheesman: Control the bull, baby. Here we go. [music] Joel Cheesman: And topics. Alright. Well, listeners will remember discussing Bud Light's ad featuring a trans influencer which led to an outcry by Conservatives. Well, Miller Lite is in the news this week for what conservatives are calling a woke ad. The surprise is the ad came out in March, nearly a month before the Bud Light ad. Listeners, if you haven't seen it or heard it, let's sample it and we'll talk about it on the other side. [video playback] Miller Lite Commercial: Here's a little known fact. Women were among the very first to brew beer ever. From Mesopotamia to the Middle Ages to Colonial America, women were the ones doing the brewing. Centuries later, how did the industry pay homage to the founding mothers of beer? They put us in bikinis. Wow. Look at this shit. Wild. It's time beer made it up to women. So today, Miller Lite is on a mission to clean up not just their shit, but the whole beer industry's shit. Miller Lite has been scouring the internet for all this shit and buying it back so that we can turn it into good shit for women brewers. Literally, good shit. How, you ask? Ladies, take it away. Miller Lite Commercial: First, we turn the bad shit into compost, then we feed compost to worms, beautiful fertilizer. Miller Lite Commercial: That good shit helps farmers grow quality hops. Miller Lite Commercial: Which is then donated to women brewers to make their own really good shit. Miller Lite Commercial: But there's definitely more shit out there, in your attic, in the garage, in your parents' basement. Send any shit you got to Miller Lite and they'll turn that into good shit, too. Oh, so here's to women, because without us, there would be no beer. [music] Joel Cheesman: Alright, Julie Calli, you are a woman, what are your thoughts on the Miller Lite campaign? Julie Calli: Oh, it feels a little like it's pandering a bit, but I'm glad to see that at least it's calling out the truth of, yes, women have been used to sell beer, but at least this is giving some credit to, women also took a big part in making beer throughout the centuries. But I read a lot of the comments on social media and I'm like, why are people getting all rallied up about? It's a commercial. It's a commercial and it's trying to change the narrative a little bit and be more respectful in the way that it's doing this commercial. I'll take that. I'll take that recognition that women may have been used in beer commercials in ways that are maybe not the same that we want going forward. And it's making a change. And it's not just calling out their own ads. It's calling out everybody's ads. I'm for it. I'd say go for it. Keep changing the narrative to things that are more inclusive today. Joel Cheesman: Julie, you came of age in the '80s, '90s and these beer ads. How did you feel as a young woman watching these ads? Did you take offense? Did it impact you in any way? Julie Calli: It painted a lot of pictures of what I thought I was supposed to look like. Certainly had a lot of influence on that. And I would say at a young age, I truthfully feel that a lot of the impression that was put on me is it mattered more what your beauty was than your brains. And when you're young, you have youth on your side, [laughter] and then as you get older, you realize that's not what matters. So, I would say that I didn't really start to feel even as if there was more to myself to offer beyond beauty until I started to get into my young 20s. And then I started to realize how powerful my own brain was, but that was never something that was real... I wasn't growing up seeing female doctors on TV. I wasn't seeing female CEOs in my youth. Julie Calli: So, I was inspired by other working women who were going to school and getting an education and fighting for a place in the workforce of equal opportunity. So I got to witness that. I wanted to be part of that and I stood my ground as I entered into this space. But I realized that that was not what it was like before. So yeah, I think that those commercials had a huge influence. And while the beer commercials might change going forward in the future, young women are still very vulnerable due to social media today, which is something I didn't have in my youth. Chad Sowash: Well, and remember there was a time when bulimia was... I mean, it was literally... It was like an outbreak. Joel Cheesman: Sure, eating disorders. Chad Sowash: And a lot of that, you could definitely tie to those commercials, those ads, and just the whole idea of what a "woman" should look like. Julie Calli: Yep. Chad Sowash: Right? So, I think, going back to the people that are saying this is woke, what we're seeing is what they call selective rage campaigns and people are creating rage where it doesn't really exist. Okay? This is truth, much like critical race theory. They have problems with that. They have problems with history. I mean, it's fucking history. It's history you weren't taught. It doesn't mean it's not true. Right? So, now we're doing the same thing with females saying, "Hey look, women created beer. Guess what guys, you like it, that's great, but we created beer." So, these are things that we as human beings we need to be aware of, that many of these things we're that calling things "woke", it's just a selective rage campaign to be able to try to pull the narrative away from things that actually fucking matter. Chad Sowash: I mean, things that matter versus things that really don't matter. I mean, this doesn't matter other than being able to just tell history. It matters from that standpoint and we should be doing this. But it's pulling and it's diverting away from conversations we should be happening because this is... Or we should be having. But this is something that's important. Joel Cheesman: Julie, are you more likely to buy a Miller Lite product or a product by the Molson Coors Company because of this ad? Julie Calli: Well, I already drink Miller Lite, [laughter] so now I'm just gonna raise my beer a little prouder, I think. Chad Sowash: There you go. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Okay. Julie Calli: But today, Miller Lite and who's next? Right? I just feel that every brand when they make an attempt now to stand for something, there's gonna be somebody out there starting a campaign against them about why it's wrong that you gotta stand for something right. Chad Sowash: Well, talk about Bud Light though, 'cause they folded like a two-card table after we were giving them huge kudos. Julie Calli: Yeah, disappointed in them. Chad Sowash: What is a brand to do, especially in the United States when all we do is we focus from quarter to quarter? We're not looking long-term, right? We're not looking long-term. We're looking from quarter-to-quarter and we're answering to shareholders, it seems like, every five fucking minutes as opposed to being able to plan long-term, which is what we were really focusing on and saying, "Hey, these guys have been around for 170-plus years, right?" Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: They wanna be around for another 170-plus years. They've gotta think long-term. But they got shot. Well, they really didn't get shot down. They shot themselves down. Julie Calli: Yeah, they did. Now, instead of standing with one side, they folded on both, right? So now, who do you stand for? Nothing and nobody. And that's not it. We talk about being a cult brand, people gravitate towards something that's authentic and real that they wanna be part of. So stand for something and people will stand with you. But Budweiser really messed that up. They really did. Joel Cheesman: I think it's an important message for the kids that if you can't... What really changes the world is voting and money. And I was in a conversation with my two nieces who are in their 20s and I was asking about the Bud Light ad, what they thought about it. And of course, they were upset and didn't understand and they responded as you thought that they would. And I said, "Okay. Did you guys go out and buy some Bud Light in response to this ad?" and both of them said no. They had other things to spend money on, whatever. And I said, "You can feel as strong as you want, but until you spend money or you can vote, things are gonna change much more slowly than they would otherwise." And if you look at... Obviously, Budweiser stock is down about 8% from last month. Miller Lite's parent company's stock is down around 3% on this story. Now, if all the women in the world or in America said, "Let's all go buy Miller Lite," and their earnings report went through the roof, we'd see more ads promoting women in a fair and balanced way. Joel Cheesman: So just for the kids, until money is spent, companies aren't gonna go near transgender issues for a really long time. It's gonna have to be a start-up that is willing to take chances. But a big established company like this is gonna be really gun-shy because of the Bud Light issue. And what's interesting to me as well is the whole Disney Florida thing is also another touchstone for Conservatives and going on talk radio and Fox News. The Little Mermaid comes out this month, and Chad and I were lucky enough at iCIMS to meet an influencer on TikTok whose daughter's seen the Little Mermaid ad and it's an African-American Black mermaid. Joel Cheesman: Everyone who wants fairness, inclusivity, go see the Little Mermaid because if Disney can crush it at the box office, you're gonna see more movies like this and more inclusion in that. If this movie flops for whatever reason, it's gonna be another punch in the gut to sort of this entertainment and advertising and marketing being more inclusive. Julie Calli: Yeah. So, sign me up. I wanna be right there in the front row to see that movie. It almost brought tears to my eyes to see some of the videos. I'm getting choked up just saying this. Seeing the videos of moms recording their daughters and them seeing themselves in the Little Mermaid like, "She looks like me." Right? Joel Cheesman: Mm-hmm. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Julie Calli: To see the look on those kids' faces, it made me realize just how much they're starving to see themselves in the types of movies and entertainment that we create. And it was incredibly touching to see that. And I was fist-bumping immediately after seeing that, the response of the children's faces and they're seeing inclusion. That was really touching for me. Chad Sowash: That to me... I mean, you're right. I teared up watching those kids saying, "It's me." Julie Calli: Yeah, they were in such shock. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: So go see the Little Mermaid everybody and have a pint of Miller Lite after the show. We'll be right back. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Let's talk a little bit about Goodwill, shall we? So Goodwill, the place Chad likes to donate his used jockstraps, has launched... Chad Sowash: I haven't worn one of those since I've been like 18. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Do they still sell jockstraps? Chad Sowash: I don't know. Joel Cheesman: Anyway, anyway. Okay, alright, so they launched a new ad campaign called New Lives to highlight the impact of donations on changing lives and supporting individuals facing employment challenges. The campaign showcases the stories of Goodwill job seekers and emphasizes how public donations play a vital role in empowering these individuals. The campaign is based on consumer surveys that revealed increased support for Goodwill's mission among donors, shoppers and job seekers. Julie, just like Chad and I, you probably buy from Goodwill from time to time. What are your thoughts on their new ad campaign called New Lives? Julie Calli: Yeah, I love Goodwill. I shop there a lot, actually. I find more interesting things there than I do at the mall. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: And if you got kids, it's invaluable. Julie Calli: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: They outgrow this shit in a week, pay a dollar for it, yeah. Chad Sowash: Oh God, yeah. Julie Calli: I'm glad that Goodwill is raising awareness for what they do because a lot of people think, "Oh yeah, you drop off your clothes and stuff, and then they sell it there, and then maybe that money goes to charity and that's great." Right? But it does a lot more than that. So, I love that they're raising awareness for that, that they are creating a lot of career pathing opportunity for people that are in need of those services. So, I think that that's fantastic that they're raising that awareness to that. But I think it's sad that they have to because Goodwill actually has a lot of competition now. You've got the Salvation Army, you've got Savers, you've got... Joel Cheesman: The internet. Julie Calli: Yeah, the internet, right? So, there's a lot of ways that people can donate their goods now. I think that it's great for them to allow people to understand that by donating there, by shopping there, that you're really making an impact on helping people be enabled to get back to work in many cases. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Well, and they also have individuals with disabilities that have been working throughout Goodwill for decades, right? So yeah, being able to impact different communities to be able to... Literally, Goodwills are in communities far and wide throughout the United States. That to me is... It's more than impactful for the individual. It is impactful for the entire community. And that's the thing that we've lost in the United States a lot. Again, we've aligned behind rugged individualism and do things for yourself, and we forgot about community. And then what happens are that these individuals who are less fortunate in many cases, physically, monetarily, it doesn't matter, they get lost, they get lost and they have been getting lost for decades. And you have to have an organization like Goodwill to be able to demonstrate, "Hey, look, a community exists." People are getting lost. Chad Sowash: Now, what we need to do as Americans, what we need to do as humans is we need to focus on these types of initiatives. And we need to remember that we are a part of a community. This isn't just about me, me, me, right? All these other individuals only get one life as well. Take a look at how they're living and would you ever wanna live like that if the roles were reversed? Kinda like 48 hours kinda thing. No, trading places. That was it. But at the end of the day, Goodwill is amazing. Do I think that their CEOs... 'Cause every single one of these locations or these regions have a CEO that gets paid about half a million dollars apiece. Julie Calli: What? Oh no. Chad Sowash: Oh yes. I don't know if that's quite what I would be looking for. Julie Calli: That doesn't sound like Goodwill. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Yeah. Julie Calli: Their CEO is not working on his good will. Chad Sowash: Yeah, yeah. So, there are some takeaways that we can kind of have and talk about and try to peel back the layers there. But again, there's a lot of good being done. Could there be more? Of course. But yeah, this is a big kudos. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, Chad, you mentioned disabilities, Second Chance is another one. A lot of people that have had... Chad Sowash: Yes, yes. Joel Cheesman: Mistakes in their life and done time get second opportunities at places like Goodwill. And Julie, you mentioned in America, there's a Goodwill in almost every community. And I think people take for granted that you just give your stuff to them, you get the tax credit or whatever, and then you move on. And there are certain charities that specialize in other things. People don't really realize that Goodwill's sweet spot really is employment opportunity and education. And here are some numbers which surprised me, I had no idea. Nearly two million people receive services to build skills and connect with jobs in their communities. Roughly, 300 people every day find a job because of Goodwill's help in training and education. Nearly 125,000 people found employment through services provided by their local Goodwills last year. Joel Cheesman: So, we talk about government needs to do more, people need to do more. There's things going on behind the scenes at places like Goodwill and charities that are doing amazing work to help people get jobs and find employment if they're not employing them themselves, helping them find jobs elsewhere and vouching for them with credentials. So, big applause from all of us, I assume, here on this one that Goodwill is doing some great work. And for everyone out there, if you need to donate some stuff, Goodwill is a pretty good choice to do so. Chad Sowash: I've got an audible for the next one. There's news breaking. Joel Cheesman: Okay. Chad Sowash: Are you ready? Joel Cheesman: Alright. Chad Sowash: Acquisition alert, kids. And this is perfect for recruitment marketing. Recruitics acquires video recruiting platform, Jamyr. Recruitics, the leading in data programmatic advertising, engagement and analytics for recruitment has acquired Jamyr, J-A-M-Y-R, that's how you spell Jamyr, an innovative video recruitment platform. Jamyr delivers employee-generated videos, content at scale, enabling organizations of all sizes to strategically and easily engage job seekers with exceptional and relevant content. Julie Calli, I'm sure you knew this was coming. What do you think about this? A video, programmatic video. Are we looking at programmatic video ads being distributed? What's going on here? This sounds like pretty crazy stuff. Julie Calli: Recruitics came into the market with... Really created the job programmatic industry, being the first to market with that technology. But it's built on top of analytics. So, data is the foundation of everything. And everything can expand from there. So, it's a really smart move, of course, to bring video into its platform, into its suite of technology that it has. It's always build, buy or partner, right? So, a way to accelerate and get video into the platform, it's a great move. It's a great move because, as you know, with TikTok and all of the things, the new generation is all about video. It is all about video. Chad Sowash: Who can receive video ads at this time? Are we looking at kinda fashion-forward stuff when we're looking down the road and whatnot? Because at this point, people are just getting used to performance-driven job postings, right? Julie Calli: Right. Chad Sowash: So, how fashion-forward is this? Is this really something that we could see prospectively by the end of the year where we're delivering videos? What's the idea around this? Julie Calli: Well, so I can't speak for a lot of things very specific to this... Chad Sowash: Sure. Julie Calli: 'Cause I'm not on the leadership team there. But what I would say generally is we have been attached to the job, like the J-O-B job, the actual job, the metadata, the thing, the URL destination, the terrible ugly texting. [laughter] We've been attached to that since job boards first were created in 1999 and we've been stuck on that. That's the only way, right? Now, I know that there's some legal needs to be able to be compliant and you have to post jobs. Okay, fine, check that box. But that does not mean that's the only way that you can create awareness about your opportunity. And nobody wants to read that boring text on that flat page. The internet is more interactive now. You have Siri in your kitchen talking to you, you have video, and short form video at that. People have an attention span of 15-30 seconds. You can't even read a job description in 15-30 seconds. Chad Sowash: No. Julie Calli: People wanna feel more human connection. So video is absolutely where the consumer industry is. That's how they wanna see it, they wanna see real people, they wanna feel more connected to it. So, it's an excellent move. But we're gonna see a lot of other things like people getting away from it just being on the job. We're gonna find a lot more creative ways to be able to talk about job opportunities using multimedia rather than just a static job posting. Joel Cheesman: If we can blame the millennials for the writers strike, we can blame Gen Z for the fanaticism around video. And Chad, we talked about last week, the HireVue Modern Hire acquisition in terms of video. People progressively don't read, they don't search, type stuff. They want voice, video, audio. That's the wave of the future. And as our industry is ahead of the curve and like people wanna hire young folks, that's the developers, that's the creative types, you need to talk to them in their language. It's really as simple as that. And if their language is social media, short-form video or audio, then that's how you have to reach them. And Recruitics started as a way to reach job seekers. It was pay-per-click for the most part, how do we leverage search? Well, people aren't searching like they used to. They're doing it differently. Chad Sowash: No. Joel Cheesman: So obviously, Recruitics is getting ahead of the curve there. Applause to them that they are seeing the future and the future is visual, audio, et cetera, voice, and they're getting ahead of that. And they won't be the last. You're gonna see a lot of consolidation, a lot of gobbling up. Because building video is pretty hard, by the way. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: YouTube has sort of been doing it for everybody forever. Well, no one wants to just embed video from YouTube because you gotta deal with ads that are on Google and you gotta deal with their shit like they wanna own it. And if it's buy, build or partner, buying is certainly a good option because not a lot of people have built good video platforms in the past 10 years. So, you're gonna see a lot more consolidation and acquisitions around this space. Chad Sowash: So, I'm a big believer in video. As a matter of fact, I don't know if you know out there or not listener, but the Chad and Cheese now have video podcast. Go to youtube.com/@ChadCheese or just type in the Chad and Cheese Podcast on YouTube. Yeah, we're seeing this huge, I don't wanna say rush, but there's this hockey stick that's happening with video. And if we can get into more snackable video, I think that's even better. I'm an advisor for JobPixel, so I wanna put that out there for you guys. I really believe that this is... That there's validation, not just because of Jamyr getting acquired, but we saw iCIMS buy Altru, right? Julie Calli: Mm-hmm. Chad Sowash: And I think we're going to start seeing more of this consolidation, but also these moves because you have to outflank your competition quickly. What is hot, right? What can you use? What can you actually integrate into your platform and/or system? I think video is one of the more sexy, and again, I'm biased, but one of the more sexy ways to actually get in front of those potential buyers. Joel Cheesman: Unless it's you on the video, then the sexiness goes up. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Then it goes up about 100 times. Joel Cheesman: Portugal Chad is way sexier than Indiana Chad. [laughter] Chad Sowash: It's the tan. Yes, it's the tan. Joel Cheesman: And Chad... This is our first episode recording where Chad's in Portugal and unfortunately, we don't do video for these. But Chad is tanned, he's got like... He's got the leisure suit on. He's got sun in the background. Yeah, sunglasses on. Julie Calli: Oh, there it is with the sunglasses. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Yeah, it's the poor man's Rock, everybody, coming at you from Portugal. Great scoop, great episode, everybody. We'll save freelancing for maybe next time. But until then, another one is in the can. We out. Chad Sowash: We out. Julie Calli: 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 last week's show was lactose free, this week is an extra cheese edition of Chad & Cheese, because Chad is away in merry ol' England and Cheese is running the show. Anyway, this week is Thanksgiving in America, which means we highlight the year's biggest jive turkeys. Industry veteran Jonathan Duarte of GoHire helps break down some turkeys too. We'll leave it up to you as to which "turkey" gobbles the loudest. Even Chad weighs in from London. Turkeys in London? Oh yeah, turkeys are everywhere. Enjoy and don't hog all the stuffing, damn it! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Joel (1s): Time to introduce a little anarchy for the non-regular listener. I'm Joel Cheesman of the Chad and Cheese podcast. It's Thanksgiving Day Week in America, and my cohost Chad is away in London for a conference. Here's a little secret about Chad. He's a fucking control freak. He edits all of our shows. He enjoys it, by the way, but he likes to control the show. He's taking a break from the show, so I'm in charge. And that means zero editing. This show is gonna be raw. It's gonna be like a Grateful Dead bootleg cassette from 1973. The production may be bad, my dog might bark. Joel (43s): The ads are even gonna be off the cuff. We're likely to get canceled, especially since I've invited industry veteran Jonathan Duarte to the show this week. We'll get to him in a second. Anyway, regardless of how this show turns out, thanks in advance for coming along for the ride and sticking it through. I don't think you'll be disappointed in the Jive Turkeys we'll be highlighting on this episode, but anything can happen when chaos rains and there's a turkey in the oven. Here we go. sfx (1m 17s): Hey, look, sit down. Alright. It ain't cool being no Jive Turkey. So close to Thanksgiving. INTRO (1m 25s): 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 (1m 46s): Oh yeah. Happy Thanksgiving everybody. Who needs Taylor Swift tickets when you've got hrs most dangerous podcast? Hi, boys and girls. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your cohost, Joel, you need to calm down Cheesman. Jonathan (2m 2s): And this is Jonathan Duarte "I need more Aderall". Joel (2m 7s): And on this week's show, it's all about the jive turkeys as we celebrate Thanksgiving in America. Let's do this. Jonathan, are you familiar with JobAdX? Jonathan (2m 22s): I am. Joel (2m 23s): You are. Okay. That sounds really positive. Well, they're a longtime advertiser with our show, and I'm thankful for our longtime advertisers, especially ones that are from Canada. sfx (2m 35s): Take Off. We we're doing our movie! Don't wreck our show you Hoser. Joel (2m 39s): That's right. They're Canadians, so, you know, they're nice. They hail from Thunder Bay and Toronto. By the way, Jonathan, do you know how many Canadian provinces there are? Jonathan (2m 49s): I think there's 13. Joel (2m 51s): That's close. But that is incorrect. I'm sorry. I had to go back to the judges. So when I first started dating my wife, this is a side note to this advertisement. When I was dating my wife, she is Canadian, she asked me how many provinces there were. I did my best sort of atlas estimate and I said five, which also, oh, that was really wrong. So there are 10 provinces in Canada in case you're ever on Jeopardy. Anyway, let's get back to JobAdX. They're an all in one advertising for jobs platform. They're one tool to analyze and manage the entire job advertising process. Jonathan, you know, everyone is looking to leverage programmatic these days, but you need to make sure. Jonathan (3m 34s): Yes I do. Joel (3m 35s): You need to make sure JobAdX is on your shopping list if you're looking to get into programmatic yourself, you're an agency or your company. You know, look, maybe AppCast isn't quite what it used to be since being acquired by StepStone a couple years ago. Maybe that ROI is a bit too pricey these days with your programmatic job solution. If that's the case, go check out JobAdX. That's www.jobadx.com. Jonathan, welcome to the show. Jonathan (4m 13s): Hey, thanks for having me. It's been a long time and so great to be on with you, Joel. Joel (4m 19s): It has been a while. When did we last see each other? Definitely pre Covid, right? Wwere you at HR Tech? Jonathan (4m 25s): Yeah, I think you were drunk and forgot. Joel (4m 28s): Well, that's very likely the case or we were both drunk and both forgot the meeting altogether. Jonathan (4m 34s): That was probably true, yes. Joel (4m 37s): But yeah, man, you, you and I have known each other for what, 17 years? Jonathan (4m 44s): Probably. Joel (4m 45s): '05. Jonathan (4m 45s): Yeah. I'm not even gonna try to get back to those days. But that was, remember old SEO for jobs and before Success Factors bought, who were the guys back in the day? Nah, I can't remember Joel (5m 6s): Something my job? Jonathan (5m 7s): Yeah, somehting my job. Joel (5m 10s): That's Take the interview. Jonathan (5m 12s): I know, exactly. That's, that's how long ago it was, right? Can't even remember. Joel (5m 15s): It's been a while. Yeah. I remember many SEO laden conversations with you back in the day when you were rocking GoJobs. Jonathan (5m 25s): Yeah. Joel (5m 25s): Google hadn't put the smack down on everybody yet, but. Jonathan (5m 28s): Exactly. Joel (5m 28s): You're into a lot of other stuff, which we will get to after our shoutouts and our celebrations of fantasy football and birthdays. So you came armed with some shoutouts, so you have more than me. I'm gonna let you go first and we'll just alternate. So who's your first shout out? Jonathan (5m 47s): So my first shout out is to Will Staney who you may have met and I'm sure, yeah, many might know him. And the reason why is having been a CEO and founder multiple times, myself and you as well, layoffs are the hardest thing to do. When the economy turns down, you know, you gotta go through it, but Will had to go through this recently. One of the best, I think guys that have ever handled it. I don't mean guys and girls, but he went on and tried to help everyone that he had to let go doing recruiting, I think everyone knows a lot of the team, but just a really stand up guy and took it the best way. Jonathan (6m 45s): They're not easy for a CEO. A lot of people don't understand how that impacts a leader too. But Will did it in a phenomenal way. Joel (6m 54s): And is there anywhere that people can go if they are looking to hire some of those folks, like find Will on LinkedIn or did he have a blog post? Jonathan (7m 6s): Yeah, find Will Staney, Proactive Talent on LinkedIn. Probably pretty easy to find him. I think he's got a post out there that's probably pretty easy to find. Joel (7m 18s): Yeah, I'm guessing sales people, some marketing folks, those kinds of, Jonathan (7m 21s): A lot of recruiting. So they were doing a lot of recruitment tech and we'll get into another one cuz I got other ones on that same vein, if you will. Being thankful for folks there. Joel (7m 32s): Well, if you're looking to hire some recruiters and maybe some other kinds of folks go find Will on LinkedIn. So my, my overall shout outs this week are on the tradition of Thanksgiving. And, I really have to give some thanks to our fans, particularly this week they really stood out. My first one goes to Joe, Joe Stubbe. Joey Stubbs, you know him, you love him. He was, he was really complimentary to us on, on a, a LinkedIn share. He said quote, there's one podcast on careers in HR tech that I can't get enough of, Chad and Cheese. It's also known as HR's most dangerous podcast. And that's why I love it. Joel (8m 13s): We love you Joe, and you've been a listener since the early, early days. Gave us some great feedback that we did implement and we're thankful for Joe, wherever he is in Europe, probably not celebrating Thanksgiving. So he may actually be listening to this week's show as opposed to passed out on the couch from too much turkey. So, so Joe, shout out to you buddy. We appreciate the comment and we thanks for your listenership. Jonathan (8m 41s): Yeah. Way to go. Way to go, Joe. All right. Joel (8m 44s): Excited for Joe, man! Jonathan (8m 46s): No. Well, I mean, the last time I saw Joey Stubs doing his little walk, you know, he's got his walk. He just another late night at one of the TA tech conferences. But I saw him at HR Tech and you know what was so funny was, I think he married a Ukrainian recently. Joel (9m 10s): Did he? Okay. Jonathan (9m 12s): Yes. And just, you know, Joe's been in the space for so long, a guy who just really knows his stuff and just a great person. Which is, you know, it's not like it's a rare find in our space cuz we got a lot of really great people, but somebody who's just real and a good guy to be around too. Joel (9m 32s): Gee, Joe Stubb marrying an a Ukrainian woman. How am I not shocked by that? You know? Jonathan (9m 38s): Exactly. Joel (9m 38s): Probably took her on the boat and it was over from there. Anyway, we're happy for Joe and and thankful for him. All right. Who's your next shout out? Jonathan (9m 48s): Okay, so this is multiple. So with, you know, the slow down economy, recruiters unfortunately are again, usually the first to be let go. There is just a team of people out there trying to help each other. Katie Zucker, Hallie O'Neill recruiters at Amazon. Sarah White is an analyst we all know. sfx (10m 20s): Applause. Jonathan (10m 20s): So many people out there on LinkedIn trying to help other recruiters. This is not an easy time, but I just wanted to appreciate everyone who's spending their time to, you know, create opportunities, list them out, share on Twitter opportunities with others. That's what we need to do. Because this is, as anyone who knows listening, this is a very small community of people and it is community. We help each other a lot. Joel (10m 52s): Yeah. Jonathan (10m 52s): So. Congrats and well not, I mean, thanks for everyone who's, you know, doing their best to help each other out, because chances are at some point, I mean, the recruiting industry, it comes and goes, but that's we're here to do is just help each other out. We've been doing it for years and thanks for everyone who's helping out. Joel (11m 11s): Yeah. Like you and I learned in Pledgeship, little known fact. Jonathan and I are both Sigma Chis, albeit from different schools. Rising tide helps all boats. My next shout out goes to Tyler Weeks of Marriott. Tyler's a long term fan of the show. Anyway, Tyler went above and beyond. I was at iCIMS Inspire last week or the week before that and I saw that Tyler was speaking and I just said, Hey, dude, would, would you, what would I need to do to get you to wear our t-shirt on stage? And he was like, no problem, man, just make sure I get it. So I brought the T-shirt. Joel (11m 52s): I expected him to be in like some side room where he was talking about, you know, AI or whatever PhDs talk about at recruiting conferences. Well, turns out in the keynote part, the opening keynote with the CEO of iCIMS, the now outgoing CEO of iCIMS, he actually brings Tyler on stage with them. So Tyler comes out in a Chad and Cheese t-shirt talking to the CEO of iCIMS. Apparently they livestream this thing out to like 5,000 people. You know, the messages and stuff started coming in like, nice shirt, or I can't believe he wore your shirt, da da da. Joel (12m 35s): So, Tyler Weeks man, is a huge shout out! sfx (12m 38s): Applause. Jonathan (12m 39s): Nice. Joel (12m 39s): Nice is something else. So anyway, I know he is listening somewhere. I know he is enjoying Thanksgiving with his family, but Tyler, man, you are an Allstar dude. Thanks for wearing the shirt at iCIMS and especially wearing it at a time that you knew was on stage with the CEO. That was awesome. Jonathan (12m 59s): All right. And I got one last one and it's a kind of odd one. Some of you may know Rob Kelly, the founder of Ongig. I think he's a quiet guy, very smart guy. No one really talks about him. But Rob has done so much work in this space to help people understand ATSs. And he's got a monthly newsletter where people ask me all the time when I'm on sales calls and they're asked about, you know, which ATS should I buy? I'm like, who knows? I mean, there's like at least 30 variables that you have to consider before you even ask that question. Jonathan (13m 48s): That's a whole nother story. But Rob has done phenomenal work as far as talking about, in his newsletters, what ATSs are out there and, you know, just done a lot of data work. And so he's one of the unsung heroes in our space that I just don't think that many people talk about, cuz he's just heads down doing his work. Joel (14m 10s): Yep. Jonathan (14m 10s): But a founder and been in the space for a long time. Joel (14m 16s): Well, he is no longer anonymous cuz he's on HR's most dangerous podcast. Speaking of thankful, you gotta sign up for free shit, Jonathan. We're giving away all kinds of shit that you can be thankful for this holiday. We're talking about whiskey from our friends at Textkernel. We're talking about beer from our friends at Aspen Tech Labs. We got t-shirts like the one that Tyler wore at the iCIMS event. Those are sponsored by our friends at JobGet. And if you're celebrating a birthday this month, our friends at Plum are giving away some rum. That's good marketing Jonathan. Rum with Plum every month if it's your birthday. Jonathan (14m 54s): Nice. Joel (14m 54s): But you can't win if you don't sign up. You gotta go to Chadcheese.com, click the free link and sign up. And also, if you're thankful for the podcast, leave us a review. Go to your favorite podcasting platform, give us a review. Positive or negative, doesn't matter. We just like to get some of the feedback. And that is it for our shoutouts. Let's get to some birthdays. And as some of you that listened last week, know that Chad skipped on the birthdays. So there are quite a few this week. And let's get to those. So again, if it's your birthday, you get a chance to win rum from Plum. Joel (15m 36s): Celebrating a birthday from the last couple weeks we got Jeff Herndon, Michelle Meahan, Kyla Fraser, Mason Wong, who actually won this month's Plum giveaway. Nichole Adamson, Quincy Valencia, the wonderful Jen Levine Reilly, Chris King, Neil Dunwoody by the way, we're trying to get a trip to Ireland scheduled to go see Neil, he just opened up a distillery. We'll see how that pans out. We got Deborah Szajngarten, hopefully I'm saying that correctly. Tracy Harmon, Frederic Pattyn, Victoria Conly, Katrina “Roman” Polanski. I put in the Roman, not her. Joel (16m 19s): Jennifer Sheridan. Jonathan (16m 21s): I was gonna say! Joel (16m 24s): Thomas Twomey, Anthony Scarpino, Kevin Wheeler, Noel Cocca, Michael Goldberg, De Ann Russell, Susan Burns, Jason Buss, Alex Murphy and Matt Charney. Everybody that's celebrating a birthday, that is a who's who's list of recruiting royalty. Jonathan (16m 37s): Yeah, that's, some real stars in there. Joel (16m 40s): Yeah, yeah, send 'em a note. Send him a note. Send him a happy birthday note. Send him some whiskey. I don't know. Travel is over for the year for us. Jonathan, wherever Chad is, is his last trip. Wanted to give a quick thank cuz we're thankful on Thanksgiving to Shaker Recruitment Marketing for supporting our travels and our bar tabs. Quite frankly, at many airports across the world, without them we could not do it. So big thanks to to Shaker. Next we have our foreign language shows. Have you heard one of our foreign language shows, Jonathan? Jonathan (17m 14s): I have not. English is about as far as I get. Joel (17m 17s): Well, our foreign language shows, you can listen to us now in German, which apparently is a lot angrier than the English version, which some people might prefer. We've got Spanish, French, and Portuguese because Chad is the new prince of Portugal. We gotta have a Portuguese version for that. Anyway. Jonathan (17m 37s): That's nice. Joel (17m 37s): Powered by our friends at Veritone who acquired our friends at Pando. So they're doing some fantastic things over there. Lastly, before we get to the good stuff, let's talk about Fantasy Football. All right, week 11 is in the books sponsored by our friends at FactoryFix. Here's your leaderboard from number one to the basement. Number one. 1. Chris “Rock” Mannion 2. Matt Hilltopper 3. Serge “Fading into the “Boudreau 4. Joel “Stinky” Cheesman - that's me! 5. Chad Sowash-ed up 6. Dennis “The Menace” Tupper 7. Smokin’ Joe Wilkie 8. Christy Kelling It 9. James Gilliam & The Skipper 10. Joel (18m 19s): Iron Mike Schaefer 11. Jason “And the Argonauts” Putnam, who by the way was last year's champion. 12. Dan Wee-Willie Shoemaker rounds out the fantasy football lineup. All right, let's get to the good stuff. Chat with you Jonathan. Let's talk a little bit. You've got your finger to the pulse of recruiting. For those that don't know you, they know a little bit about you now give us a a Twitter bio. You got some kids, you're an entrepreneur. Like give us a little bit about you. Jonathan (18m 54s): Yeah, so I think the easiest way to understand me is I started one of the first 10 job boards in '96 when we were on dial up modem. I built a lot of job distribution stuff in the late nineties, then built a background screening company and now I'm in building text messaging and recruiting automation. And just for years, just been trying to solve one problem that is just encompassed my entire brain, which is 'how do we make it easier for candidates, qualified candidates to talk to recruiters?' And that's just spurred me for years. Jonathan (19m 34s): And married, got two kids, a daughter just went off to college and a son who's 16 and out driving a car. Joel (19m 44s): There you go. And that is Jonathan DuArt, everybody. So my favorite story about you goes back to 2008 and you had lived through the 2001, you know, dot com crash. So you had seen like kind of what our industry does, it does less so now. Jonathan (20m 0s): Yeah. Joel (20m 0s): Because we're more diversified and more like sort of tech focused as opposed to job posting focused. But in 2008 when the world ended, mortgage crisis, Bear Stearns, et cetera. You said, fuck it, you you laid everyone off at your company, which wasn't like a ton of people. Jonathan (20m 17s): Yeah. Joel (20m 17s): You, I guess you put in like Indeed backfill and the job board and just let that run with SEO and then you move the family to Thailand or Vietnam or some shit and just said, I'm gonna put my head down, wait for the storm to pass and then I'm gonna come back. I think that's the coolest shit, that I've heard in a long time. And I always think about you when I hear your name or see you. So I don't know if 2022 is starting to look like 2008? From the sounds of it, not so much. But if you do decide to do that again, please say goodbye and turn out the lights as you leave in California. Jonathan (20m 57s): Yeah, it was a weird time. And there's a whole backstory and I actually love, I think at HR Tech you introduced me to someone that time and in that same vein, certainly after several cocktails. But it, the truth of the matter was, is in 2008 I owned seven houses. I literally could not go bankrupt because of a bunch of legal reasons. And at the same time I owned a ton of SEO traffic. So I was able, my wife and I just decided like, this just sucks. Jonathan (21m 43s): So we literally, I couldn't go bankrupt. I couldn't even, I was just stuck and we had to foreclose all our houses except for one. We packed everything that we owned into a 10 by 10 storage unit, sold everything else, rented our house to our friends, for two years. And our intent was to take our three and five year old and travel the world for two years because I could live off the SEO from Indeed. Joel (22m 15s): Yeah. Jonathan (22m 15s): And, you know, it worked okay, but the economy just kept crashing. But it was like, I read the four hour work week and many people have, cuz it's almost been like a dream for people. I'm the only one I've ever mentioned that I've ever heard of that actually implemented it. But I don't think we're even close to that now. Like the economy right now, yes, there's tightening, there's a lot of weird things going on. People are getting laid off, especially in the Valley. We'll talk about that. Jonathan (22m 55s): But Macroeconomically, we're okay. There's just other things that are happening that are beyond our control as individuals. So yeah, I don't think we're going into a tailspin. I think we've had some bad numbers and I think they're gonna continue for a while. But I, the sky's not falling and I think in recruiting. I was even just looking up to, cuz we'll talk about it from turkeys. I mean, people are still hiring and they're still hiring recruiters. It's just a different market. Joel (23m 27s): Yeah, yeah. We're much more diversified and global than we were. Jonathan (23m 31s): Yeah. Joel (23m 31s): Back in 2008. So I know that the GoJobs just sort of zombies, zombies along. You're focused much more on the go hire the go be the chat conversational ai. Like what's the state of chat right now in terms of where that is? We saw a lot of companies, the AllyOs, the Myas, you know, get gobbled up in the last couple years. Like what do you see as the landscape for conversational ai/chatbots? Jonathan (24m 1s): I still think, we're super early and you know, it's weird, we've been doing, I think we're now, what, eight years into chatbots? I don't even remember. Joel (24m 15s): Yeah. Like Mya was 14, right? Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Jonathan (24m 22s): So we're really early on, I think. So I started in this space 2016, released the first messaging chat bot for job search this week in 2016. Two days before Thanksgiving, I sent out a post on Facebook, 'Hey, here's this.' It went viral to 130 countries in 30 days. Joel (24m 49s): There you go. Jonathan (24m 50s): And so the thing is the tool works, you know, but it's the strategy around using the tool that's often the problem with implementing HR Tech. It's the engagement and how you make it work. So we're just getting there. You know, texting in the US is a phenomenal tool. People said, oh yeah, everyone's bot texting. I still don't think more than 10% of recruiters text. Joel (25m 20s): Really? Jonathan (25m 20s): And certainly don't do it in a automated way. So it's a huge opportunity. Still. The difference between what we're doing at Go Hire. Joel (25m 28s): That's a wild number. I'm gonna stop you there. 10%. Even though we've seen TextRecruit, Canvas, you what, you know, what you're doing. I mean these are integrated solutions into popular ATSs and you're saying it's still only about 10%. Jonathan (25m 49s): Yeah, and that's because even like, I think Paycom, Paycor, some of them have one on one texting ability, but the tool isn't smart. So it's a checkbox in the RFP rather than a tool that can really automate and help, especially in the hourly workforce cuz they don't read email and no one picks up the phone anymore. I always ask people this, I think the thing that, all I do on sales calls is ask. All I do is ask this. I ask clients, I go, when was the last time you answered the phone from a number you don't know? Jonathan (26m 38s): And I make it tangible. Because everyone has a blocker or everyone doesn't pick up the phone and because candidates do the same thing. And when you're trying to pitch a new technology to your boss to buy. When you can tangibly say no one's picking up the phone when I try to call, that's like, you know, when they say, you know, somebody moved our cheese or you know, my, whatever that book was, that's what's happening is the old tools just don't work anymore in the hourly space. Email and phone just is, they're not as effective as they used to be. Joel (27m 15s): Or in mail. Jonathan (27m 15s): It's just starting off. We're just still early. Joel (27m 19s): Yeah. So this is your one commercial for the show. For those that want to know more, would you send 'em to gohire.com? Jonathan (27m 31s): Yeah, gohire.com and it's all about just utilizing texting in what we call is recruiting automation for recruiters. Joel (27m 39s): Okay. Curious, you're in the Valley, which from Indiana at least looks like a shit show. Elon's doing his thing, hiring freezes, metaverse. Like what's the state of San Francisco in the Valley right now from someone who's there? Jonathan (27m 59s): Just like you guys see it? I mean, I think last time you were here, like, we drove by like a Tesla charging stations, like all over the place. It is a weird place. I mean, I love it cuz that's what I get off on, is like, you know, trying to find the next thing. Joel (28m 25s): Sure. Jonathan (28m 26s): But it is a shit show in the sense of what's going on with Twitter and Meta and like, I know, you're a big VR guy, which I think has a lot of practical purposes, but the whole Meta thing, like I just don't get it. Joel (28m 43s): Yeah. And crypto. Jonathan (28m 44s): Maybe I'm old, but like whatever otherwise. Yeah, go ahead. Joel (28m 48s): Well, cause for a while it was like all the best tech talent is going to blockchain. Do you see that? Are those people gonna exit and then find no jobs at Meta and other big companies? Jonathan (29m 5s): Yeah. Well here's, I was talking to somebody, the other day, an exec at LinkedIn, and I think there's two things to realize about the Valley, is that it's constantly, and it's not a valley if anyone doesn't really know that. It's an area like it's constantly regenerating itself. So, all the, you know, thousands of people that are getting laid off by Twitter and Facebook, they're going to take that knowledge and there are incredibly talented people at these companies. They're going to take that knowledge base that they learned, they're going to spread that into all these other companies that don't have that knowledge base. Joel (29m 48s): Yeah. Jonathan (29m 49s): So it's gonna keep growing that next level. And that's happened generation after generation in the Valley is you get really smart people. Like you look at PayPal, Elon Musk was there and that team spread out and then they grew the next wave and then they grew the next wave. Joel (30m 9s): Yeah. Jonathan (30m 10s): And they grew. So it's just another regeneration. It's not a death spiral and not all of the employees that got let go. I mean, Twitter had a lot of people here and same with Meta, but they're gonna get picked up and moved around. Maybe they're not gonna get a quarter million dollar paycheck for do as an admin, but yeah, they're gonna be, it's gonna solve itself. Joel (30m 32s): And I some of the great next startups will come from this group of people. Right? Jonathan (30m 41s): Absolutely. There's just a lot of talented people who are willing to, I think the difference in the Valley is that people come here or, you know, when they come in as college students or you know, post-college, when they come in, it's all about, we're not looking for security jobs, we're not looking for, I'm gonna retire here. They're looking for option packages, they're looking for, you know, it's the next runway. But I think there's a collective knowledge that it's never gonna last where you are. So it, you're always looking for an off ramp. Joel (31m 24s): Yeah. So there, I heard a few predictions in there. Gimme one more before we move on to our Jive Turkeys for 2023. Jonathan (31m 33s): Well, I think for predictions wise, I think, you know, this next year's gonna still be tough because we're still gonna be doing economic stuff, but I think it's all gonna come through. I think we're gonna see it all, you know, change. I, I don't think we're gonna see much of a true recession, where people are getting laid off as much as you would normally see a recession. Especially in the Valley. There are people gonna lose their jobs, but at the same time, people are gonna take some time off and they're gonna hang out with their family on holidays and then they're gonna get right back to work again. Joel (32m 5s): Got it, got it. All right, man. Let's get into the Jive Turkeys, shall we? Well, Chad can't totally disengage from the show. He sent in his own Turkey of the year, if you will. So I'm gonna play that little sound bite and we can comment or not and move on to the next Jive Turkey. Chad (32m 28s): All right guys, it's time for Turkeys from London. Yes. They have turkeys in London apparently. And my Turkey goes to Indeed. Yeah, I know it's a surprise. Indeed pitching pay per apply starts, as something new when it's nothing more than just 2008 PPC campaigns. Pre 2-pane obviously. Give it a new name, a higher price and watch the suckers come running. Now let me clarify. Indeed really isn't the Turkey here? Okay. The turkeys are all the TA and recruiting professionals, including the recruitment marketing agencies, that are once again turning a blind eye. Chad (33m 12s): Fooled once, shame on Indeed. Fool twice, shame on you. Fooled again and again and again. Well, you're a fucking turkey. Joel (33m 20s): Figures the first F-bomb would come from London in a prerecorded message from Chad. Indeed had a lot of turkey moments this year. Anything stood out from you? I have one as well later in the show, but what's your take on Indeed in it's current state? Jonathan (33m 39s): I think that people need to stop drinking from the fire hose and think about, just look, like do the deep, like you got a couple weeks now where there's not a lot of hiring going on. Just look at your process because there's other opportunities. Listen to the show. Go back and hear about, you know, PandoLogic and some of these companies that can do things a little differently. Joel (34m 8s): Yeah. Jonathan (34m 11s): But take part of your budget and experiment. Cause programmatic, to me it's crazy that companies aren't going to programmatic and I don't think anyone on this show, hasn't looked at programmatic. And if you haven't take this time over the next two weeks to figure it out, because you're gonna save money, you're gonna get better candidates and that's the end of the game. I mean, I know there's a whole bunch of things you have to do in HR and tech in recruiting, but it doesn't make any sense. It just keeps sipping, sucking on the Indeed tit and expecting something different to happen. Joel (34m 55s): That is good, good advice. All right. My first turkey goes to ZipRecruiter. Okay. This is from August. ZipRecruiter announced that the company had joined President Biden's call to action to address the nationwide teacher and school staff shortage. I don't know if you remember this, they were on stage or at a table with Indeed in Handshake as well. However, Zip went the extra mile. They actually launched a new online job portal schooljobsnearme.org, which was powered by ZipRecruiter. Sounds really great. Right? Sounds like something that a headline is just made for, unfortunately ZipRecruiter didn't really put a whole hell of a lot of effort into school jobs near me. Joel (35m 46s): There's no link from ZipRecruiter for teacher jobs or school jobs or link to schooljobsnearme.org. The only link on ziprecruiter.com that I found was their cookie policy page. There's no link in the footer, there's nothing in site map links, there's no ads on Google when you search school jobs near me or education jobs. So, they're spending no money there. There's nothing on YouTube that would highlight school jobs near me. This looks just like a real fucking circle jerk of let's get some great PR, let's get some headlines, let's get some pictures with the president and not do anything that we say that we're gonna do. Joel (36m 29s): To me, this was a massive Turkey from ZipRecruiter from last year. Comments. Jonathan (36m 37s): Yeah. I get that, you know. Yes. You're taking pictures with the president and so you gotta have some sort of PR angle, but I think I'm with you. Is ZipRecruiter's better than that. Joel (36m 50s): Yeah. Jonathan (36m 50s): And I just don't know why they didn't execute. I mean, they have a great team. They could have done something better. Joel (36m 58s): And maybe my comments will be inspiration to do more. All right. You gotta, turkey. What's up? Jonathan (37m 8s): Yeah, so mine just goes, I mean, what we've already been talking about is Elon Musk and Twitter. The whole HR shit show that's going on over there. And the weird thing about, it's not about the Valley or anything else, it's just the way you handle people. And in our space, and the interesting thing is they're hiring again. Joel (37m 35s): Hiring back some of the people they laid off too. Jonathan (37m 38s): Yeah, maybe. But I mean, you know, so if you're a recruiter, I mean a contractor recruiter, you could probably make a ton of money at the moment cuz they're gonna need anyone and everyone and from tech side and everything else. But just the way you treat people, I think that Chad's gonna be rolling over in his grave that he's not on this one. I think Elon's become the new Jeff Bezos as far as, you know, how you treat people and your community. And I mean I think he's gonna get the biggest turkey award for the next decade cuz I was talking late last night about it, which is I think he just hit his own Tesla moment, where Tesla sold, you know, gave his shares back to Westinghouse and died poor. Jonathan (38m 35s): And I think Elon just hit his inflection point of, he doesn't know what the shoot he's dealing with and he just screwed himself. Joel (38m 48s): Yeah. I don't think I've ever seen a personal brand decline outside of maybe racist or, you know, just outlandish statements, than Elon doing what he's done. And I think that to your point, there's a lot of worship, you know, technocratic worship going on that that Elon knows what he's doing. We're too stupid. He's gonna turn this thing around. I'm not sure he has a clue. I think he's bitten off. He's the dog. You've heard this, he's the dog that caught the car. And what that does from here, I have no idea. Yeah, he's a massive turkey on multiple shows. I like that. He took a spin at recruitment on that one and the talent exodus is gonna be interesting. Joel (39m 31s): Now what I find intriguing is, will all the other, you know, boards and shareholders look at this, if he turns around and say, oh, well if Elon did that with, you know, half of the staff or less? We need to lay off half of our staff as well because he's smarter than all of us. I hope that it doesn't become a contagion and that everyone follows suit by laying off 50 to 75% of their developers. Jonathan (40m 1s): Yeah, I don't think anyone, you know, if you talk to most CFOs they're not thinking that way at all. It just, yeah, I have a great quote. I can't remember it specifically at the moment, but you're just coming from the entrepreneurial side. But your company is only as valuable as the systems that you create. And it's, everyone's got dreams, but your dreams don't create a system. It's the value of the company is in the system. So you don't just destroy the system. Joel (40m 41s): Yeah. Jonathan (40m 42s): As a way, and in many cases the system is still people. In most all cases. So I don't think other companies gonna follow suit that way. Joel (40m 49s): How Silicon Valley of you to make the statement that you just made. All right, dude, let's take a quick break and we'll get to some more jive turkeys. All right. Right. Jonathan, I know that, you know, Sovren, the staple from many companies, but if you know Sobren, and I know most of our listeners do, actually all of our listeners do, cuz they're a they're a longtime sponsor show. You need, you need to get to know Textkernel who acquired Sovren a year or so ago. Since 2001, Textkernel has been delivering AI power technology to companies looking to better connect people at job ads. Joel (41m 31s): So whether you're talent sourcing, looking for a matching engine, or frankly the best resume parser in the world Textkernel with Sovren technology that they've acquired is the 800 pound gorilla in the industry. If you're a vendor, staffing firm, corporation consultancy, whoever, if you haven't checked out Textkernel, you'd need to do that asap, like as of yesterday. You love Sovren, you know, Sovren, I promise you'll love Textkernel as well. And by the way, if you haven't listened to our recent interview from Unleash in Paris with Textkernel CEO Gerard Mulder, check out our archives in Chadcheese.com today. Joel (42m 13s): Some great insight from Gerard, as well as some insights into the future where the product's going, where the industry's going. Check that out at chadcheese.com today. But no matter what you do after this show, go out to Textkernel.com. That's www.textkernel.com. Jonathan (42m 41s): I also wanna put a little note on that is Joel (42m 43s): Sure. Footnote Baby Jonathan (42m 44s): Show. Yeah, the show with Gerard, a lot of great learnings in there, especially from a CEO merging two companies, understanding the market. There's a lot of things that can go wrong in M and A, and I think that this is one of those partnerships I think you talked about it, that is gonna work for a very long time and positively affect our industry. Joel (43m 8s): Yeah, yeah. And if you know Sovren, you know, Robert Ruff, a bit of a wildcat, a bit of, you know, not doing business as usual, Textkernel's, building a kick ass team here in the States and building an infrastructure to really take the company to another level. So yeah, appreciate the comments. If you haven't listed that interview, go out to chadcheese.com and and check that out today. Back to the turkeys. I'm gonna give an Indeed Jive Turkey as well. They, they've had a lot to be basted for this year, but to me, going back in time with you, and because you have a historical relevance to this, when Indeed and SimplyHired and Jobster were indexing jobs back in the day, this is '05, '06, '07. Joel (43m 59s): I remember the day when Jason Goldberg from Jobster told me that, Craigslist had given them a cease and desist as well as Indeed and everyone else not to scrape or index their job postings. To me it turns out that was a pretty good idea. Jonathan (44m 17s): Yeah. Joel (44m 18s): Craigslist is this little company, I think they're the most profitable per person company in the world. Like that decision was something that they made. And when Google for Jobs launched in 2017 and Indeed was like, we're not gonna play. To me it harken back to that moment when Craigslist said, you're not gonna index our stuff. And I thought that it was a good solution at the time. This year, however, after five years, Indeed has decided that they're going to do the walk of shame. They're gonna bend over, they're gonna give it to Google to finally win the day. Joel (44m 58s): And Indeed Jobs are now listed on Google for Jobs, which to me is a major Jive Turkey moment. Now it probably is paying off. Our friend, Chris Russell recently noticed from a quarterly report, I believe, that traffic had spiked to the tune of 50 million globally last quarter or per month. Which to me is probably no small way due to Indeed jobs suddenly showing up on Google for Jobs. And now we're getting word that Indeed pricing for certain customers is going up a hundred plus percent. Joel (45m 38s): So all that free Google traffic is translating into real costs for employers. Congratulations back to Jive Turkey. Indeed. Comments? Jonathan (45m 47s): Yeah. Yeah. Back to sucking on the Indeed tit. Is, I don't know this and I think most of us don't in the spaces, like what's the actual cost per candidate? That comes out of, I know some of our, some of the co friends on the show will be able to tell you right away, but if you can't benchmark your cost, as a TA leader, if you can't benchmark your cost of candidate acquisition from your recruiting spend and you're not going to programmatic company to look at alternatives or other ways to change your, what we call like the pipeline or your process, your conversion, it's not always just buying more ads. Jonathan (46m 47s): It's about optimizing the funnel, the recruiting funnel. And, I think everyone listening at TA, there are ways probably to reduce your spend and convert better and get better candidates. You just gotta talk to the right people and just don't write the check. Joel (47m 8s): Amen. You got another Turkey. Who you got? Jonathan (47m 12s): So mine, this isn't on an individual or company, but, I think you guys, I know you and Chad would greatly appreciate this. The endless funding of shit companies in HR tech, from people that have no idea what's going on in the space and think that they're gonna create something new that's been failed five times over. So that's to, you know, the venture capitalists that love good business ideas, but have no reality in what we do because this is a very, very complicated space in the sense of, like when I talk to clients, I literally have to say, okay, let me understand your config. Jonathan (48m 2s): Like how do you run your process? There is no two processes even within the same company for the same employ, for different rounds of employees. I've worked at VC backed companies in HR tech and they're thinking that staffing and HR are the same things. Joel (48m 27s): Yeah. Jonathan (48m 27s): So it's the knowledge base of understanding that this is a very, very different area and anyone who's pumping money in, and then I just, the reason I bring it up as a turkey is HR teams just have to deal with people calling them who have, it's just nonsense that they're trying to sell stuff. Joel (48m 45s): Yeah. Jonathan (48m 45s): That is just never gonna work. Cuz they just don't, they just can't tie it out. So that just pisses me off, not only as the founder in the space, but somebody who has to talk to clients who spent money on something and it's a risk adverse space. And when you've got, you know, a great salesperson who sells you something that's just, you know, a pig with lipstick on it. It's really tough to be able to invest again. Joel (49m 29s): Yeah. So question in that vein, we saw a lot of companies in the last few years become unicorns based on the work from home, work from anywhere, pandemic inspired, sort of new workplace. We saw Remote, we saw Deel, we saw Oyster, we saw Velocity Global, we saw HiBob, Personio, like the list goes on and on of companies that got billion dollar valuations. Since then, we've seen companies that we know, Snapchat, Facebook, et cetera, like super declines in terms of valuations, stock prices. Jonathan (50m 6s): Yeah. 75 percent and then some. Joel (50m 9s): What's gonna happen? What's gonna happen to all these companies? Jonathan (50m 13s): Atom bomb? I mean, you're gonna see it's gonna be worse than Hiroshima for some of that stuff. Joel (50m 22s): Wow. Jonathan (50m 22s): Because, and they're payroll companies, right? And so here's the thing is, how could a company that doesn't have an international presence, doesn't have the systems, doesn't have the relationships? Be worth more than ADP? Joel (50m 39s): Yeah. Jonathan (50m 39s): The numbers just don't, you know. So the other thing is in VC world, so, the thing is like, they have a powder keg, they call it the powder keg, how much money they can deploy. And they're sitting on tons of cash right now the VCs are, because they had a lot of really big as exits over the last couple years. So they're throwing money at things that are less risky. And you also have private equity companies coming in really into the startups space. So there's a lot of money coming in. Jonathan (51m 20s): It's really tightened up a lot lately. But. Joel (51m 22s): Yeah. Jonathan (51m 22s): You know, when you can write a $50 million check, it's easier to do that than the right five, $10 million checks. Joel (51m 32s): Yeah. Jonathan (51m 33s): But your risk is still really high. So they're still doing that with these big companies, but I just don't think the math works. Joel (51m 45s): Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, my biggest turkey of the year goes to our friends at Wells Fargo Bank. This is from June, the New York Times. For many open positions at Wells Fargo, employees would interview in quotes, "diverse candidate", the bank's term for a woman or person of color and keeping with the bank's years long informal policy. But someone there noticed that often the so-called diverse candidate would be interviewed for a job that had already been promised to someone else. Oh shit, the whistleblower was fired. Apparently they retaliated against him for telling his superiors that the fake interviews were inappropriate morally wrong and ethically wrong. Joel (52m 31s): Well, no shit, but wait, there's more, Jonathan. Seven current and former Wells Fargo employees said that they were instructed by their direct bosses or human resources managers in the bank's wealth management unit to interview diverse candidates as well. Even though the decision had already been made to give the job to another candidate. Five others said they were aware of the practice or helped to arrange it. Wells Fargo, you take the stuffing this year for my biggest turkey, and you'll probably end up on my naughty list for December as well. Joel (53m 15s): Big Shame on Big Turkey, Wells Fargo. Jonathan (53m 15s): I don't, like, I know you didn't know this and a lot of people probably don't, but I built some of the artificial intelligence chatbots for Wells Fargo and it's a mess. I mean, it's really, it's truly a mess. It's just they can't get over the, you know, the stuff that happened in the past. They just won't own up to it. And, because they won't own up to, to it. And obviously it's still happening. It's a leadership problem and the company is just never going to get around it until they start chopping heads at the top. But welcome to big banks, you know, they're too big to fail, they're too hard to, you know, toss out. Joel (54m 2s): Yeah. Jonathan (54m 2s): It's a but it's a truly a cultural issue at Wells Fargo. Joel (54m 9s): Yep. Yep. Alright, quick break and then we'll get to our final turkey of the episode. So another longtime sponsor, Jonathan, PandoLogic. I assume you know Terry and the guys over there. Jonathan (54m 24s): Absolutely. Yep. Great Solutions. Joel (54m 26s): Yeah, I mentioned, I mentioned that they were powering our foreign language podcasts through the technology Veritone, which acquired PandoLogic last year. You already probably know Pando is a fully autonomous recruiting platform. AI empowered recruiting is powerful recruiting, which is why top employers trust PandoLogic. But I wanna highlight what Pando is going to do with the power of Veritone. The shit that Veritone is doing, and I've gotten sort of a sneak peek is pretty mind blowing. And if they start taking, you know, foreign language on the fly, video with different languages, interacting with candidates and customers, it's really mind blowing. Joel (55m 8s): So if you've looked at Pando in the past, if you've passed on it, do yourself a favor and connect with them again. Get a refresher on their products. If they can give you a sneak peek into what's going on. Take a look at Veritone and what they're doing and kind of use your imagination to say, if they took Veritone stuff and put it in recruiting, what would it look like? And that'll hopefully give you somewhat of a picture of what Pando's doing, but I guarantee it'll blow your mind. Go to pandologic.com today. You can also go to Veritone to find out more. Joel (55m 49s): Again, that's www.pandologic.com. Go there today. Jonathan (55m 50s): Awesome. Joel (55m 51s): All right. Jonathan (55m 52s): That's gonna be cool to see how Terry and the team pull that stuff off. That's gonna be a fun thing to watch. Joel (56m 2s): Yeah. And it sort of dovetails into what you're doing with conversational stuff and chat stuff. So if that becomes a video of a person in multiple languages, like it gets really, really interesting. So yeah, it's not just hyperbole that I'm saying go check out what Pando's doing and keep your eye on on them. Keeping your eye on one thing is another thing that you should do when you're in an office when someone's got a pee pee problem, Jonathan. And this brings us to our final turkey. Hopefully all that Thanksgiving dinner has digested by the time you listen to the show, because this next turkey might make you lose your mash potatoes. Joel (56m 51s): This, out of Houston, Texas. Charges have been filed against 50 year old, Lucio Catarino Diaz, a janitor who told investigators quote "that his sickness led him to commit reprehensible and unspeakable acts against employees at a doctor's office leaving multiple employees with herpes." Oh shit. You don't get rid of that overnight, Jonathan. How you asked did they get herpes? The janitor was infected with Simplex one and allegedly past the disease onto his coworkers after repeatedly urinating in water bottles. Joel (57m 34s): The jig was up when one victim removed the cap on her water and noticed that there was a yellowish liquid inside. Oh. The woman smelled it and realized that it was urine. Security cameras caught the would be peepee perpetrator. And he's now facing multiple charges and sure to see some jail time unless that insanity plea takes hold. Jonathan, this may be the best argument I've heard for working from home that I've ever heard. What are your thoughts? Jonathan (58m 14s): How do the guys at JP Morgan Chase feel about that? Joel (58m 18s): Well, you're working with them. You can ask them. Listen dude, thanks for joining us. Jonathan (58m 23s): Jay-Z Joel (58m 24s): Oh no, it's not Jay-Z. It's shit. Anyway. Anyway, dude. Jonathan (58m 27s): Oh yeah, yeah. Joel (58m 28s): Happy Thanksgiving to you. Thanks for coming on the show. We went really long. Hopefully people found some value out of it. But other than that, enjoy your holiday and yeah. Jonathan (58m 39s): Thank you. Joel (58m 39s): Yeah, it's all good man. Jonathan (58m 39s): Thank you so much. SFX (58m 38s): Sit down. Alright. It ain't cool being no Jive Turkey so close to Thanksgiving. Joel (58m 39s): Give me a We out. Jonathan (58m 38s): We out. Joel (58m 39s): We out. Happy Thanksgiving.

There’s all kinds debt. Like our bar tab. Don’t even get us started. Or technical debt, the kind that makes life difficult of developers everywhere, but especially the tech behind a lot of HR tech. That’s why we’ve invited Sean Luitjens, vice president of product management for Korn Ferry Intelligence Cloud to the podcast. After a walk down Memory Lane, highlighting Sean’s days at Monster in the ‘90s, we come back to the 21st Century and talk about issues creating headaches for tech teams today. Additionally, we discuss smart questions customers (that’s probably you) can ask vendors to make sure landmines aren’t stepped on in the future. We also explore if the technical debt can be a good thing, and what the hell is wrong with LinkedIn and its crazy high debt. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides full-scale inclusion initiatives for people with disabilities. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where 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 favorite degenerates, AKA the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman, joined as always, the Bart to my Homer, Chad is in the house, and we welcome today... [applause] Joel: Sean Luitjens, Vice President of Product Management for Korn Ferry Intelligence Cloud to the show. Sean, welcome. Sean Luitjens: Hello. Chad: This dude's a dinosaur, man. You can see. He's actually in Jurassic Park right now. Sean Luitjens: Yeah, yeah. Joel: Yeah, there's a Brontosaurus behind him right now. Jesus. [laughter] Chad: Where the hell are you at, Sean? Before we get into the Twitter stuff, where the hell are you at? Sean Luitjens: Yeah, I'm in the Azores, hanging out in Portugal. I'm working my way across the ocean. Next year, I'll hit the Algarve, but this island made it partway this time. Chad: Okay. No, that's a good stepping stone. Maybe Madeira, and then you're welcome in the Algarve any time. It's freaking gorgeous. Joel: It's shown in the first interview we've had that he's outdoors, that he's literally parked his bike on the side of the road to talk to us. Chad: I think so, at least with the ones that we've had video, that's what we know. Sean, give the audience a little bit about you. You're VP, as Joel said, of product management over at Korn Ferry, but give us a little Twitter bio about you, triathlete, that kind of stuff. Sean Luitjens: Wow. Yeah, so I'm glad you didn't ask about work experience 'cause I'm so freaking old. It'll take a long time. But mostly... Joel: Yeah, your eight-page resume. Let's go over that. Sean Luitjens: No, no. So yeah, that piece is basically miscellaneous product stuff, talent acquisition and pay type of things, basically everywhere around the software space. Nothing as an HR practitioner 'cause that job, honestly, looks like it sucks 'cause you have to deal with all the employees while still trying to solve the problems. Other than that, yeah, I'm at Korn Ferry now, and married most of the kids off the payroll. So I'm working... Got one left out of three, which will be a big momentous day for me. And then I have... You're making fun of me working outside here. I have done a couple of podcasts from the trail or two. So I'm a big fan and a work remoter. Chad: Nomad, baby. That's right, the nomad life. I love it. So Sean and I both come from around the same place, so does Joel, but Sean and I have an interesting relationship because I was with Online Career Center back in '99. Sean actually, you joined the Monster Board in '98, didn't you? Sean Luitjens: Yeah, I was there ahead of you. I was there in the good days. Chad: Yes. Well, yeah, when we were printing fucking money. S?: Alright, alright, alright. Chad: But we've had so many listeners that we talk about technical debt all the time and we just know it because it's ingrained in our upbringing in tech, especially when it comes to recruitment tech. And most of our HR practitioners, there are many of our listeners that are out there that really don't understand technical debt. So I wanna bring in a product guy who's been around the block who knows this shit, not too much in-house stories. So that's why we are here today. So your first gig in this industry was what? Tell us a little bit about. Sean Luitjens: Yeah, so I'd come over from Fidelity actually to show how old... I'll just claim myself and not you guys. I helped kind of put together some of the 401K system at Fidelity and met Jeff Tailor along the way. We had put some online ads from some newspapers Fidelity had bought and came over to the Monster Board. So I was a product/tech person. And not long after that, you kinda had TMP Worldwide had kind of stealthily acquired the Monster Board and Online Career Center, which was kind of interesting back in the day when there were like six job boards, they decided to consolidate two right away. Chad: Two, yeah. Sean Luitjens: And so you really already had, to be honest, technology was changing even back then pretty quick. So you already had our tech stack, which was completely different than Online Career Center's tech stack coming together, and how do you deal with and take the best of those and throw them together? And for those of us that can remember that long ago, we merged and then bought a Super Bowl ad. And so nothing makes friends with the people on the other side when you're trying to consolidate things and a real hard deadline. Joel: Can I give you an outsider's perspective on how that went and not knowing any of the inner workings of it? Sean Luitjens: Yeah. Joel: It looked like you basically took OCC and slapped Monster's logo on the website. Chad: We'll get into that. We'll get into that. Sean Luitjens: Yeah. Joel: You guys are insiders. I was on the outside looking in. That's my perspective of how this thing happened. Chad: So I'll dig into that here in a second, then we'll get Sean's side, too. But first and foremost, let's dig into what is technical debt? So originally coined by computer scientist, Ward Cunningham in 1992, technical debt is the idea that building short-term solutions to technical systems incurs a set of trade-offs, resulting in future obligations that must be repaid in the form of engineering work. So it's kind of like using bubble gum to close up a hole in the dam instead of actually taking the time and resources to shore up your actual structure. Anything you wanna add to that, Sean? Sean Luitjens: Well, the concerning part is that term is not that much older than me being in the industry. It's probably not good when words come out. [laughter] Joel: It came in with you. Maybe you're responsible for it. Sean Luitjens: Yeah, I'm the creator of technical debt. Yeah, I think that's right. I think what's interesting is most decisions companies make, and I say most 'cause we can come up with stories of things where shit just went completely wrong out of the gate, but most of those decisions, if you put them in isolation, tend to be not bad decisions, right? Something's not going to break, and so you decide to go after the revenue instead of fixing your technical debt. And like credit card debt, it just sits there and piles on and then you have another year of interest, another year of interest. But most of those decisions aren't bad. I'll show my age. Windows 3.1 was one of the most solid platforms you could drop anything on. And so there was a period of time when I was at Mercer, it was so hard to go get investment to write a new system because people would ask, "What's your up time?" It's a 100%, but I'm gonna have to go to the old folks' home to get someone to write APL for DOS on Windows 3.1 pretty soon. And so when do you tackle that? But I'd argue most of those decisions taken on their own aren't bad. It's just that they sum up over time. Chad: Let me give you my first experience with technical debt. So I was in sales over on the Online Career Center site, so on the OCC site, and we had our sister, the Monster Board, and we would use other job boards to find leads. It just makes sense. You'd use the newspaper job boards. But if somebody was already using a job board, you knew they already bought in, right? And at that point, we were educating people on what the Internet was, let alone what [chuckle] doing online ads were. Chad: So anyway, I noticed that Monster Board was timing out every day around 2:00 PM, right? So that's when I started calling on the leads that I got from Monster on 2:00 PM every day. So I'd start calling them and I just would ask them, "Hey, where are you doing your ads?" and they would say, "On the Monster Board." I was like, "Is that still alive? I don't think it works anymore." But that was all because of technical debt. The infrastructure that the Monster Board built was very short term and it wasn't built like Online Career Center. So to kind of like answer Joel's question, yes, what happened on the flip-over in January of '99 was they took all the monsters and the colors and they put it on OCC and they redirected, pretty much redirected everything to OCC. Now, I knew this from a backend standpoint because I was a sales guy and I had to do demos every single day. Right? I had everybody calling me from Maynard, Massachusetts, all the salespeople, 'cause they didn't know what this new platform was. [laughter] So Monster Board, pretty much talk about the technical debt that you guys had to deal with on a daily basis. Sean Luitjens: Yeah, I mean when I got there, I mean that was the thing, they really... They were working in trailers, getting it out. And still today actually, the job board business is a marketing business. Basically, how do I get consumers to show up in B2C space? It's, how cool does it look? Right? And so it looked cool, and it was. One of the reasons we went to Online Career Center's tech stack was there wasn't a Home Depot in Maynard, Mass., and so I couldn't buy enough duct tape to keep things jammed up. And that's right. I think that was the case. And to be honest, in the back office, you really look at it and you say, "Here's the tech stack we're on. Here's the tech stack you guys are on. We've got four months to get this right." And it was just on a better tech stack. It was a little more recent and it was actually the difference between an Oracle or Microsoft stack and you looked at it and they had just done a better job of planning for the future side. And so we took the best of both worlds. Chad: In January of '99, when you flipped the switch, tell that story, number one, and then number two, the load that it took on Super Bowl day. Sean Luitjens: Oh man, I don't even remember the stats, the load, but I'll tell you, you talk about everyone else was enjoying Super Bowl ads and how stoked they were that our ad was on there and there had to be a couple of the guys at Indy and myself, we were like ill, just sitting there with fire extinguishers ready next to the server farm 'cause that's when you hosted your own, you're like, "Oh please, oh please, oh please, oh please, oh please." I mean, the traffic spiked back in those days 'cause obviously you go from a not big number, now the numbers are so huge, to hundreds of thousands to millions of users. It was insane to watch and you're like... And then by halftime, we were like, "Oh, I'm still employed and we've got huge numbers and we're off and running." Joel: It didn't crash, did it? Sean Luitjens: No, no. Joel: I mean, I remember everyone at our company was like, "Monster's gonna die. They're just gonna die." And they didn't. So congrats to you. That was a thing in the '90s that happened, right? [overlapping conversation] Chad: OCC backbone, baby. Sean Luitjens: Yeah. [laughter] Joel: OCC was the best. Sean Luitjens: But the hard part of that tech debt stuff is, like Chad mentioned, is how it all starts is getting people to convert. So you do have Monster people who made good decisions at the time, got it going, it obviously had a huge brand, right? And you've gotta get them to agree to make a change. And that change management piece is huge to this because you gotta get somebody to admit, especially if you've got long-term employees, that what you did just isn't good anymore. Chad: The biggest name on that is Jeff Taylor. I mean Jeff is the one who actually... He instigated this because I think he saw that they were coming to a bridge that wasn't built yet. And he wanted something bigger. He knew that they had the brand, but to be able to technically get to where he needed to, they were gonna have to rebuild the entire fucking system. So why not just merge the two? Intro: But that's what good leaders sometimes know. They're good at what they're good at and they punt on crap they're not, right? And JT was like, "I'm not a tech guy, so a couple of us from Monster go away with the OCC people and you come back and tell me what's not gonna implode in January and you have to sign your name to it." Look, even if I was on the Monster side, think something like a Super Bowl, you're like, "I kinda wanna keep it 'cause it was ours, but I also wanna be employed in February. So I'm gonna pick the best available player to win." Joel: Can we come into the 21st century now, guys? Is that... Sean Luitjens: We can. [laughter] Joel: Okay. The consumer side '90s was great. So the perspective from the consumer business, the B2B stuff and with the ATS's and things happening, my perspective is that the debt that has been incurred is largely a part of salespeople and the buyers wanting customization, wanting sales to be made and those customizations happening because they want sales to happen. And ultimately down the road, when you get to 20, 25, 30 customers, the customization piece really breaks the machine. Am I right on that? And how did it get solved? At what point did we say, "Okay, stop it, we need to create standards in our tech and not customize everything"? Sean Luitjens: Well, real quick, I wanna come up to today, but if we remember Recruit Soft, Recruit Soft was one of the very first applicant tracking systems that had a standardized rollout for every single one of their customers. So you couldn't come in and customize anything. I mean it was just... And again, we're talking early, early days. Now, they did that for a few reasons. First and foremost, from an onboarding standpoint, it made it much easier. From a sales standpoint, it made it much easier. Right? So from an ops standpoint, it was much easier. But from a technical debt standpoint, you could last a hell of a lot longer if you could standardize. Then a lot of money came and customization became a part of what they did. They changed their name to Taleo and we are where we are today. S?: Go ahead, Sean. Sean Luitjens: Well the opposite of that though is brass ring at the time, if you wanted a configured system, you could get anything you wanted, like anything, you can pay for it. But they got to somewhere around, I don't know exactly, 25, 30 clients, as you mentioned Chad, and then if they wanted to change a button from blue to red, they had to roll it out 25 times 'cause they had 25 different strings of code running out there. Chad: It's buggy as shit. Sean Luitjens: And I think we're in a better state now. If you jump up, 'cause I know Joel wants to get into the current decade, the Agile methodology, if people are on that, you can roll things out much better and it's just a prioritization issue. But to your... You still have the same fundamental problem of, "It's working. Do I kick it down another quarter, two quarters before I deal with technical debt because I've got this giant client who wants something?" Now, when you roll it out nowadays, you obviously roll it out for when you roll it out for all. Who pays for it? We can put that on the other side. So that technical debt from that, having multiple strings of code, that just doesn't generally happen. At least if you're decent in the product and dev side, that just shouldn't happen now. The tools are better. But you still create technical debt, though. Chad: That's a hell of a caveat, by the way. [laughter] Sean Luitjens: Yeah, yeah. There's still people hanging on to that stuff. Well, and you still have people that are on tools that are even 10 years old, right? So let's not even go that old. You and I chatted once before. You mentioned your LinkedIn just turned 20, which, God, did I feel old when somebody said that. They're gonna have tech debt. There's gonna be companies with tech debt out there that you wouldn't think have tech debt. And when do you solve those things under the covers? Joel: And I guess rolling into that as well is, should customers care? I mean, it's not really my problem if your shit doesn't work. Should customers be asking questions to make sure that shit doesn't break down the road, to make sure that they're buying a tech that is standardized or is built for flexibility and growing? Sean Luitjens: Yeah, I mean, I think customers should 'cause obviously if you talk to, with Chad on, it's always fun to make fun of sales guys. Sales guys can be either your best friend as a product person... Joel: Easy target. Sean Luitjens: Or they can be your worst enemy, right? They come back and tell you what they just sold type of thing. Getting the product team in and just asking some simple questions around, "Do you have a roadmap?" you'd be surprised how many people are like, "Well, we don't have a roadmap." Well, if they don't have a roadmap, they're probably not thinking far enough ahead to deal with the tech debt. And you can ask them basic questions around, "Well, what percentage of your dev is for tech debt?" Chad: Well, can we see the roadmap? I've heard so many people talk about said roadmap and it's just total... It's much vaporware is what they're selling in the first place. Now, I do have an angle from the sales standpoint. If the C-suite themselves understood what really drove business and they stop putting so much emphasis on sales and giving them so much power, this shit wouldn't happen as much. Sean Luitjens: Yeah, but there's... Well, now it's a quarterly thing, right? So you look at it every quarter and you can look at your annual plan and put it together, and you basically are saying... They want new revenue, right? So the assumption from management and CEOs, especially public companies is everything that you had this year is gonna happen again next year. Well, you know this Chad, right? I mean, they don't wanna talk about renewal. Renewal should be 100%. And so you got clients on a platform. And that's going to work. And so now they wanna know, "How do I get the next dollars? What's the next new cool thing to help me? What are clients asking for? This client needs this to sign, et cetera." And if you don't clear that old, your churn goes up and then instead of having to get 10% new, you gotta go get 15% or 20% new just to get to the same line. And that's the tech debt discussion that's really, really hard 'cause companies are based on how much additional profit and revenue you had. That's just the way it is. Chad: Well, talking about LinkedIn, we're talking about a company that's 20 years old, and we're always making fun of them because they're coming up with shit like Instagram features and things of that nature that, to me, it might drive engagement, but for the most part, it's not gonna drive sales. So they have old infrastructure. They are dealing with tech debt on a daily basis. What does a company like LinkedIn do? Joel: And I'd love to know your thoughts on Microsoft owning them and how that plays into LinkedIn's problems. Chad: Or does it? Joel: Or not. Sean Luitjens: I mean, look at it as there's an opportunity there to get a quality product in place, right? It's hard to fix tech debt, let's just be honest. It's like anyone's bill, your mortgage, hard to pay off in one chunk. So you've gotta get somebody with some rigor to step in and say, "What's the plan to get rid of the debt?" Just like you prioritize new features, how do you get rid of the old? Start to line that stuff up in the roadmap and have some dedicated resources. This is where HR practitioners can ask, "What percentage of your dev goes to tech debt?" If they say, "No, no, no, our shit's so cool and so great that we don't need to have it," then you gotta start asking yourself, "Well, how hard is it to switch?" Because that, to your point Joel, that becomes the question they need to ask, "Why is it my problem?" If it's an easy switching cost, who cares? It takes you a month to switch, it doesn't matter. If it's your ATS or your human capital management system or something like that, that thing goes bad, well, the best you can do is go find another job, make it someone else's problem. It's not good. And so that's why you gotta start asking those questions. How are you gonna deal with those? Joel: How did the pandemic impact this issue? I know security, infrastructure, processes, all these things sort of came to the forefront. Was the pandemic a good thing to sort of get companies focused on scale and getting rid of debt? Joel: I think it just depends on the company, in my honest opinion. If you were a company that had enough revenue coming in, so all of a sudden I'm selling toilet paper online, I probably have enough infrastructure dollars coming in to deal with tech debt. Companies that had to get lean to get through like, "I've gonna ride this out, I've gotta go completely lean," maybe if they don't have much stuff coming in, I think that's a tough question. And you have the philosophical issue, right? Does a company use COVID and that whole period to say, "I'm not gonna push out the same profit because of COVID and deal with tech debt"? That's the leadership, the CTO's suite to deal with that issue during that time. Chad: When we're talking about applicant tracking systems, because these are I think the systems that are most wrought with tech debt, can you somewhat explain to HR practitioners that the more complex their process methodologies are that they try to feed into these systems, the more tech debt they're actually building into systems? Sean Luitjens: I think it's that and I think the number of things you try to plug in. So you start adding the number of tools you wanna have in your toolbox to be cool. "I've gotta have this tool, that tool, every tool." So now you're... Chad: So like the tech stack itself. Sean Luitjens: The tech stack, right? So every one of those could exponentially go bad. So if it's a workflow and it's pretty linear and you're using different tools along that workflow, you start looking at a couple of those going bad. They don't integrate. They're on an old methodology, tech stack methodology. They're not gonna integrate with some point in time. 'Cause those big companies, the progressive companies, they'll say at some point, "You can't do this anymore. We're gonna sunset this methodology." And if the other companies got so much tech debt that they can't deal with that change, you're now stuck in the middle of cutting and pasting from one process to the other, whatever it is. So I think there's just a lot of complexity there. And yeah, ATS is, I think, as you start to add all these other things in there, "Oh, I'm gonna be the first one today, how cool." So even if you integrate something like ChatGPT or Bard in there, I get to be the first one to say that today, how is that gonna affect the other tools that are down through the system? They all talk to each other. Chad: And that being said, today's dinosaurs who have tech debt, what kind of chance do they have against the ChatGPTs of the world, this more fluid technology that's actually making itself into our space? And we've had some of these in our space before, more domain-specific. So how do these dinosaurs have a chance against the more nimble platforms that are out there? Sean Luitjens: So I look at ChatGPT a little bit different. So I think you have to stick to your business principles. "What am I trying to do for the customer?" That doesn't change. ChatGPT now might be the way to get rid of some tech debt if you haven't been able to do these things. "So here's the 10 things, whatever the number is, that's in my vision of what I take care of for clients with my tool." That's it. How do I get to those 10 things? And some of that was obviously slinging code to make these things happen and now ChatGPT comes along and it might be your chance to kind of drop some debt because it's just there. The weird thing from a product standpoint talking to people is, this is obviously a big leap in theory, is this sometimes perpetuates the problem, right? So some leaders are gonna be like, "Well, why should we fix the old? I'll just wait for the next ChatGPT thing to come along. I'll just make this last as long as I can." Sean Luitjens: And if you don't get one of those in time, you've got a problem. But I think for some places, if they can use the tools to solve the problem they're trying to solve, I think there's gonna be some people trying to just use ChatGPT because, "I wanna say I use ChatGPT," and now they're gonna spend dev cycles on that. It doesn't change the value proposition to their end client. They might even try to charge more for the same shit that has all the same problem. And by the way, all those dev resources aren't tackling any of their actual internal problems. Joel: Facebook popularized go fast and break things around 10 years ago. Are those days over, or are they still popular? Sean Luitjens: Go fast and break things. I guess I'm a fan of aim, fire, aim, fire. So build an infrastructure that I can make a guesstimate based on client, theoretically a smart guesstimate on what I'm doing, get it out the door. I'm not a believer in zero bugs. I also don't want a million bugs. And then basically look at the client feedback and make those changes. And that's where I think those discussions at HR practitioners need to have with product teams, say, how nimble are you guys, and do a little bit of research. Are you an Agile methodology? You don't have to get down into the weeds about the tools and all that crap. But if they say they're Agile and they do a release once or twice a year, that's not okay. If they're doing a release every two or four weeks, you can look at that and put that together. But I think just a little bit of research to do that and are people gonna lie to you or do whatever, but at least you did your diligence. Joel: So an article in Info World said, "A growing school of thought among progressive engineering organizations says that technical debt should be a core part of the job of all software developers and that proactively managing technical debt, those teams may not only avoid sinking, but can actually outpace the competition." So the question is, is the attitude around technical debt changing and can it actually be a good thing? Sean Luitjens: Well, can tech debt be a good thing? I think... So we look at it and we try to tackle it in a percentage of time, dev time goes to tech debt. And so I think if you start to tackle that, you're just always looking at what's older and what's longer and actually take a really pragmatic look at that. Is it a technology that's gonna be around for another 10 years and it's working? Fine, I can kick the can down the road, 'cause obviously can't do it all. Do I have stuff that isn't gonna run anymore in the next little bit? It's not going to... I'm not gonna be able to get dev going? Then those are the issues I need to tackle. But I think most companies are now having some percentage of their time looking at tech debt. And hey, it's a great quarter if you've got no tech debt and you can do some new dev, but it should be at least part of the fundamental product process to look at it and say, "Are we creating tech debt?" And if you have engineers that are looking to dev folks that have to deal with tech debt on a regular basis, like any of us, they're like, "I don't wanna make that mess 'cause I'm gonna have to go clean it up because I can't just bury it in the closet, or the other guy is gonna give me crap if I write code or build something that's gonna result in tech debt another two years." And so it becomes part of the practice to try to eliminate as much as you can. Chad: Yeah, I think that magazine was more about realizing that you do have tech debt, everybody does, and managing it and who manages it best. 'Cause it's gonna happen. It's all around the strategy of managing that debt. And again, much like financial debt, being able to manage the debt to be able to get yourself out of the hole, but you're not gonna be able to from the standpoint of just putting Band-Aids on it, there's gotta be a change in infrastructure. And again, that goes back to kind of like what we talk about with LinkedIn. It has more of my information and I think any other platform that's out there that's kind of like a job board-like platform or a social media platform, and yet they return the worst results, their tech still is slow and sloppy, and I attribute that mainly to, they haven't changed in 20 years. What are your thoughts? Sean Luitjens: The good news is with tech debt, I mean, think about it, the good news is to have tech debt, you've been in business a while, so take the W that you've got that going, right? [laughter] Chad: It's a good way to look at it, yeah. Sean Luitjens: If you... A lot of businesses go out in a hurry. I mean, I'd be curious, I don't know the number, how many go out of business because they just can't keep up at some point, the new tools and new tech. So they've got 50 clients on, and to keep those 50 clients, they can't actually produce anything new. But I think with LinkedIn, the Microsoft piece, can they get them on some type of fundamental product path to prioritize those things to get out in front of clients? Obviously, you might have an opinion, Chad, have you list those out. Is it the functionality? Is it speed? Is it search results? What is that issue? And then as you look at those client issues, you go back and say, "Well, what's the root cause of the speed? And now... Is it the way I'm structured? Okay, I gotta tackle that. I gotta tackle that 'cause I was not gonna get better... " The speed thing will never get better with time. Retro is not cool with everything. So... Joel: Only my wardrobe. [laughter] Sean Luitjens: Yeah. Joel: Curious about marketplaces. And marketplaces seem to be a great way to standardize things. Like if you're gonna build on the platform, this is how it is and this is our documentation around that. Curious, Fountain, we talked about them in last week's show, they just built a conversational AI chat bot, it looks like a homemade solution, whereas my thought was, why not build a marketplace, spend that time and energy to let other people build on top of that? Just curious, your thoughts on marketplace versus building it yourselves. Isn't Fountain just begging for more technical debt when they build it themselves? Sean Luitjens: Yeah, without... I mean, not to pick on or talk about them specifically, but I think you start to look at it and say, "What are things that are core to my business that can give me a differentiator in the market? What makes me different?" And if there's other stuff that doesn't make me different, then I'm gonna go try to grab that marketplace, or I guess I'd use the term, unified API platform, that there's tools out there now where you basically... Their whole job is to be the, almost like the old job distribution engines actually, but basically it'll be a platform by which you can integrate with them and they integrate with everything else and you basically say, "That's an... Everybody has it. No one's gonna buy my crap because I have this versus something else." Where I would argue with Fountain is if they think they've got something that's so much better than everyone else. It's a differentiator. It's why you buy. That's what you build. You build the stuff that banks you money. The other stuff you're like, "What's the most efficient way, cost-effective way for me to get that either content or tech?" Chad: A difference between a market differentiator in a me too, right? Sean Luitjens: Yeah. Chad: So last last for me, if you're talking to two groups, HR practitioners and vendors, what advice would you give them surrounding due diligence? Because I don't think that we do a good enough job in prepping on the vendor side and also even understanding. People are asking for, "Hey, can I have your latest RFP?" They have no fricking clue what to ask. What should vendors do and what should the HR practitioner do? Sean Luitjens: Vendors, I think is just, you mentioned, is managing tech debt. I don't know how to answer that question so much from the standpoint of what they should do to deal with those. It's a, how do you deal with tech debt? Like you said, I think everyone's gonna have it at some level. But do I have a small mortgage or a big mortgage? Am I about to file Chapter 11 on my tech stack? The goal for me would be never having to shut down. I think we joked and we chatted once, Chad, about the FAA. Everyone says we need to update the system, but I'm like, "Look, I don't wanna be the dude flying the first week they put the new system out. I don't know about you, guys. That's not for me. Are they gonna shut down for a month to beta test it? That's probably not happening either." So that's so much tech debt that they've reached a point at which, what are they gonna do? Chad: How many years has that tech been out there, I can't remember, that software? Sean Luitjens: Like '60s, '70s. It's actually pretty... Chad: Yeah, yeah. Sean Luitjens: You think about the amount of crap they're managing on seven... I can't imagine... Think of an HR company from the late '90s or mid-'90s that you would wanna use their stuff, and then think how smart those guys probably were putting together the FAA stuff because it's still jamming along. On the company side, I'd probably say leverage one of your vendors' product teams. I literally would just make a network of... Obviously, if it's someone you might be purchasing or whatever, they're gonna be maybe biased. But I would go out to one of your current vendors that you really like the way they're doing business and say, "Hey, can I have 15, 30 minutes with your product team?" So what would you ask? What would someone ask me that I would say, "Here's how I'm going to show you, 'cause I think we're in a good place where we are right now"? Sean Luitjens: Obviously, I'm slightly biased. We are moving some legacy tech debt. One of the reasons I came here was there is some legacy tech debt around a couple of the products, but we're tackling that. So there's a plan in place and that was kind of coming over versus get here and how much duct tape can you bring over when you come to Korn Ferry? That's not the plan. But if someone was to sit down and say, "Can you spend 15 or 30 minutes with me?" virtually walk through the five or 10 questions you'd ask and what you'd expect for reasonable answers, I think that gives you a really good starting point to see... And if they won't put the product person on the phone or someone on that side, that's not okay. [applause] Joel: That's Sean Luitjens, everybody, VP of Product Management for Korn Ferry. Sean, for our listeners who want to connect with you or learn more, where would you send them? Sean Luitjens: I'd send them to LinkedIn. The good news about being Luitjens is three is three of us online. So I wanted to take my wife's maiden name when we got married 'cause I got... It sucks spelling Luitjens, but there are some times it works out. Joel: I feel the same being a Cheesman. Chad, that's 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 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 quit them either. We out.

From a name change to another pivot, HourWork caught a wave that resulted in nearly 10,000 clients signing up. Additionally, more investments poured in, and our friend Rahkeem Morris shares his experience of being a black man raising funds for his startup. All these events led to the birth of HourWork, the company as we know it today, with a vision that's making them one of the hottest names in the industry. This finale, part of The Chad & Cheese Podcast's Voices series, may not be as thrilling as Breaking Bad or The Sopranos, but it's truly remarkable, even though I may be a bit biased. Until next time, I'm co-host Joel Cheesman, and this is more of our interview with Rahkeem Morris, the CEO and founder of HourWork. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps support and educate your workforce through disability awareness and inclusion training. Intro: Voices. We hear them every day. Some voices, like mine, are smooth and comforting. While, on the other hand, the Chad and Cheese Podcast is like listening to a Nickelback album, you'd rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway, you're now listening to Voices, a podcast series from Chad and Cheese that features the most important and influential voices within the recruitment industry. Try not to fuck it up, boys. Joel: A name change, another pivot, and catching a wave that would lead to signing up nearly 10,000 clients. On top of that, more investment came in and our friend, Rahkeem Morris, discusses his experience about being a Black man raising money for his startup. It would all lead to our work being the company that it is today. It's not quite Breaking Bad or The Sopranos, but this finale, part of the Chad and Cheese podcast's Voices series, is quite remarkable, even if I may be a tad biased. Till next time, I'm co-host Joel Cheeseman, and this is more of our interview with Rahkeem Morris, CEO and founder at HourWork. Joel: So you're talking about a pivot, which, when Chad and I talk about the numerous startups that we talk about all the time, pivots are a, they're just built in, right? It's just baked into what you do. You didn't start out as HourWork. You started out as Syrg. Talk about that name. You've talked about the pandemic pivot. What other pivots did you face in the early days of the company? Rahkeem: Yeah, it's, yeah, this is going to be a trip down memory lane for me. It's been quite a bit. In terms of main major pivots, there's been one with the company. In terms of these smaller mini pivots, there's countless of them. The first thing that we were doing as a company is we were getting involved a lot with scheduling. We were backfilling shifts for people, and we thought that we needed to get, well, just very integrated into the scheduling system at these employers. And given the integration challenges that we were experiencing, we decided to build out a scheduling platform at that time. It was something that was too big for us. Time, like programming time is actually really, really difficult. And then getting it right is even more difficult, especially when you're dealing with employers who want to make sure that their operations are running as efficiently and smoothly as possible. It was something that wasn't going to benefit us long term. And so we dropped the scheduling component of that, and we kept this backfilling of the shift component, and that became Syrg. Rahkeem: So before Syrg, actually, there was something that we had called Aday, A-D-A-Y. There happens to be, by the way, a woman's clothing company [laughter] in New York City that we occasionally got confused with. Chad: It's where Joel gets his shorts, yes. [laughter] Rahkeem: Oh, I could tell. Shift to the camera that's on right now. [laughter] All right, that's our first product. Once we removed the scheduling component of this, that's when we changed our name to Syrg. We were only dealing with shifts that became open because, let's say, someone was sick or their car breaks down or something like that. That's when we made our first big pivot to just and then after shifts, that's when we not focus on Syrg, which was this individual shift product that we had, and then pivot to what we're doing today as a company as a result of the pandemic. Chad: So a round of that, you talk about concepts, right? And then there's execution, because you can ideate all day. There are plenty of people that do it. Talk about the execution point to this pivot, because it's not as easy as it might sound. You can't just put it on the whiteboard and it happens. So talk about that, that actual transition pivot, who was involved. I would assume that there was a good amount of company interaction then also founder interaction. Rahkeem: Yeah, 100%. For me, when I'm thinking about this business and just businesses in general, most startups at least, you know that there are going to be certain pieces to the puzzle of your grand vision that you will need to assemble at some point in time. So let's say, as an analogy, let's say you are building a car. You know that you need to have your axles, your drivetrain, your wheels, your doors. You know that you have a certain list of components that you'll need to build a car that functions and that's legal and that runs. Same thing with the business. You know eventually you'll need to have, let's say from an operational standpoint, like marketing, you need to have sales. But from a vision standpoint, which I have very clear in mind, there were certain components of the vision that needed to be true that we know that we need to build at some point in time. It's strictly a matter of sequencing that's the question at hand. And for us, around the time of the pandemic, we had proven at that point that former employees are willing to return back to their former employers for on-demand shifts. Rahkeem: What we haven't proven just yet is that former employees are willing to come back to their employers for full time and part-time jobs. When the pandemic happened, we weren't doing that one component of the larger vision that we know that we need to do. But there was another part, component of that larger vision that we saw an opportunity to launch a new product to the market that would accomplish the component of this longer-term vision, which was getting former employees to return back to their former employers. Joel: You're talking about consumers driving the pivot or what you're doing going forward and I think that's a little surprising to people that are doing a lot of competitive analysis and what's the market opportunity. It sounds like that wasn't a big part of your decision to do or to change course with the company. Was it a part or does it even need to be a part? Is it consumer demand that should drive it? Rahkeem: The broader market context was the only reason that we decided to pivot this company and then following that and wanting to catch the wave. We did two things around the time of the pandemic and that's just me, us, looking forward to the future thinking, well, half a million people are being laid off of work every single week. What's going to be the next phase of this? Well, the next phase is a massive rehiring effort of employers and we have documents here on the team that are labeled and titled in the beginning, call in something else. Rahkeem: Catch the wave. Catch the wave. Do all businesses wanna catch the wave? All of the internal documents that we have? We created a program at the company that was focused exclusively on catching the wave of the massive rehiring effort of employers. And we built that product right before things got really serious in terms of the rehiring efforts. And we caught that wave all the way up into nearly 10,000 restaurants that we now have on our platform. Chad: Which, predictable, right? That was predictable. You could see that this was going to happen. So yes, you weren't actually addressing something that was happening in the market. You were addressing something that you knew that was incredibly predictable that was gonna happen in the market. Joel: Go where the puck is going. Rahkeem: Yeah. Exactly. Chad: Yeah. Rahkeem: Yep. Go where the puck is going. Right around that time too. I wish I would've known that Tupperware stock would've gone through the roof. It went from $1.76 cents on March 27th, 2020 to $33 on December 31st. So that's another one I wish I would've caught the wave on. [laughter] Joel: Right next to the eggs. Chad: Maybe next time. Maybe next time. So, in talking about the actual product, now, first and foremost, why did you feel like you needed a rebrand? Why didn't you just pivot under the same name? Rahkeem: I really enjoy this question. I always wanted to have a name for the company that, and I was proud of our last name. I wanted to be proud of, and I wanted to represent exactly what our mission and vision were for the company. The company, it's called HourWork, and it is a play on words. Maybe a play on spelling is a better way to say that. The hour is spelled with H, I'm sure you get the connection. And this is really, this is this gets back to the reason why I founded the company which was to benefit people that worked these jobs. Especially recognizing and acknowledging the skills that they've learned from these employers and then using that knowledge to get additional income. Chad: So, personalizing it, it's our work. Rahkeem: Yes, exactly. Our work. Hourly workers. Hourly employers, our platform that is that's the reason why it's HourWork. Joel: So you've raised a total of just over $16 million. What was the decision to go raise more money? Was it always something that was in your mind like, okay, we got a seed, now I gotta go get a series A. Are you looking to get more money? Also interested in raising money as a Black man and your take on the difficulty of that and challenges that maybe others don't have? Chad: I think you're closer to 18 now, aren't you? Rahkeem: Yep, $18.1 million. There's one fundraise. It's not recorded because it is a convertible debt note. [laughter] So you won't find that in the public documents. I suppose. And so why did we raise money and when we raised it. The first couple of rounds were, it was clear that we needed to raise money because I needed to hire a team, get engineers who are very expensive to work here at HourWork at the company. And so it was clear then and I've actually been pretty good with this which is to set out very, very explicit objectives that I wanted to accomplish with a certain set of funds. And then going out for each one of those raise with those objectives being first and foremost in my pitch. And so I was always raising based on some initiative that I wanted to achieve and accomplish here at the company. And each of my raises have, well just done exactly that. I'm actually, my forecasts for everything I've told investors so far has come true, including my top line revenue number, which I'm really proud and happy about. Chad: What might that be? Joel: Name names. Rahkeem: It will be public knowledge now, and so we're right above $5 million, just a little bit over two years in the market which I'm also really, really, really proud of my team. And of course, me being involved in that getting us to that point. Joel: Well, raising money as a Black man, your impression of that, more challenging, different than a White guy? Chad: Much like the Harvard experience, I would assume. Rahkeem: Definitely, yeah. It's exactly that. There's, it certainly is more difficult to raise money as a Black founder, and it's not because people are sitting, let's say in the decision making room thinking about, oh, this Black guy just pitched to me. Let's say no because he's Black. No one is having that conversation anywhere. What happens is that I'm sitting across a table from an investor who grew up in a suburb of some really big city that we all know of, and they went to a boarding school, they went to the same schools that I went to, Ivy League schools, and they've just had a very different type of life than I did. And we're sitting across the table and we don't have anything in common. Rahkeem: And so now there's no small talk, there's just very, very strictly business is what we're talking about. And very small differences and micro behaviors that culturally come up, those are not relatable. And so for that reason, it is there's just less favorable outcomes for a Black man in this league. There's unconscious biases certainly of investors. And there is also, I think we also think that we're in complete control of our mind. 99% of the day we're doing things on autopilot, and if you're not intentional about the evaluation process for the founders that come into your room, you're going to have unpredictable results. Rahkeem: One of the things that we do here at this company is that when people are interviewing for a role here on the team, we make sure that we're asking that person, each person that comes in for that one role, the same questions, and we wanna make sure that we can compare apples to apples. That does not exist in the VC world. No one's asking you the same questions. No one's caring about creating a fair and equal process. And I say that because it's not an intentional process of making sure that they're picking the winners. It's all based on gut feelings about the pattern recognition that they have. And I'm saying all that to say that it hasn't fazed me in a bit. I go into a room, I go into a pitch expecting to win, expecting getting that investment and walking away with a yes from the investors that I meet every single time. Chad: I have to say, intentional isn't a word that just automatically points to you, for goodness sakes. You've been intentional through the whole walk, it sounds like, of this journey. When it comes down to the actual platform itself, everybody, and Joel and I talk about this all the time, talks about, they talk about how they slap DEI on their platform and they put their thumbs up or AI on their platform, and they put their thumbs up. You guys haven't done that. You've kind of stayed away from that. Why is that? When that is the popular thing to do and also moving toward with that wave, what do you think, how do you think your platform can just help find people who are qualified? Rahkeem: Yeah. Yeah. I really appreciate this question, especially thinking about the types of people that work these jobs, these wage earning jobs. So you're thinking about, when we're thinking about jobs that pay less than 30, $40,000 a year, those jobs are going to be worked predominantly by Blacks and Latinos in the United States. The majority of people that work these jobs are gonna be US minorities, again, Black and Latinos primarily. And, well, these employers, at least at this level don't struggle with DEI in the same way that let's say, a desk job would. Joel: I want to a little shoutout to you, your team is very diverse. And Chad mentions the companies with DEI on their pitches and their websites, and then you look at their leadership team and it's not so diverse. So you guys walk the walk, which I think is, which is commendable. And was that on purpose? Is that based on your interviewing process, which you just said is everyone gets the same question and also one of your corporate mantras is be like the Army. Explain that. Rahkeem: Yeah. Two things here. We have on our job postings that we focus on DEI at the company, and it is a program that we have here internally. I will also say that we always hire the best person for the job. When you have an interview process in which you're comparing apples to apples, what happens is that you get a more diverse group. So no one gets a job because they're a woman and because they're Black, because you're, whatever it is, no one gets a job for that reason. We're able to get a diverse team at this company because we run our interviews well, and that's the reason why we have a diverse team here at this company. That's one. Rahkeem: And in terms of the Army, I think you may be referring to sometimes how I pitch what we want to do longer term with this company, which is that we want, let's say a McDonald's manager to think about their workforce very much like the Army does. They have your active duty people and you have your reserves. And we want a place like McDonald's to think about their headcount as every single person that they have ever trained. Rahkeem: It's also the case that 1-8 people have worked at McDonald's. And so you can imagine now that you have your active duty staff working at McDonald's, a shift becomes open or someone quits their job. You're able to go into your previously trained people just like the Army does with the reserves. Get that person in here in short order, and make sure that you're meeting every single operational metric goal initiative that you have at your restaurant. And it's something that, would employers embrace it, they will have a operational revolution that they've never experienced. Chad: It's pretty amazing though, too, as you talk about that when we were at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were many times when we had more infantry units that were National Guard and Reserve on the ground overseas than we did active duty. So being able to actually structure a workforce like this gives you more assets and more availability to actually get the job done, especially when we have issues with jobs just going totally unfilled, positions going unfilled and companies that are missing top line revenue because of those unfilled positions. Rahkeem: Exactly. Yeah. There are more than enough people in the United States for every single hour of every single job. The reason that we don't do it today is a collaboration failure among employers that they don't recognize these skills as universal skills to be shared among employers so that people can work at multiple employers. If that were something to be true with wage earning jobs, and then people were actually able to get legally, which is a whole other thing. Then every single job and every single hour would be filled. Over time, all the stuff, all the things that owner, operators, operators, managers, franchisees worry about, this would all be solved for the platform as I'm describing it. Chad: So requirements, go down real quick. When you're hiring from a requirement standpoint, one of the big issues that I see with companies today, the requirement is a need, right? We need you to have this skill, this skill, this skill. A want is, I would like you, it would be nice if, you had these. We're clumping them all together these days in the same group. And when people are applying, you're getting a variety of mishmash of people who meet the wants and or needs in vary, in a variety of ways. Rahkeem: There's a case that, well, actually every single employer outside of QSRs, fast food places, they don't know which positions their employees are trained on. They just don't know. And I know it because we've sat down with managers at places and gone through the entire roster on a table with all of the positions on the Y-axis and the people on X-axis, and then fill out every single one of the boxes. Can this person be a sweeper here? Can this person be an expediter here? And have done that exercise dozens and dozens of times. And so what happens when you have a short-term staffing need? You don't, you literally don't know who to call because you haven't recorded these positions or skills either at that employer or you're recognizing some external skills that you need at that job. And so there is, that not knowing what someone can do that is in there, that prevents us from having an efficient labor market, both local to just that one employer, that one location and just the broader labor market. We just don't know what people can do. Joel: You mentioned McDonald's and at risk of getting even hungrier than I already am with all these fast food names being dropped. A popular story that we read a few years ago was a McDonald's franchisee paying $50 for people just to come in and interview. I assume that's the kind of problem that you're looking to solve at HourWork. And what sort of your... What would you do with that franchisee and what is just your overall opinion and perspective on the state of hourly work in America? Rahkeem: Two big questions. The first one is what would I do to let's say advice or some suggestion that I would make to that owner who is paying people $50 for their interviews. Is that right? Joel: Yes. And they weren't even coming in for $50. Rahkeem: Yeah. I think a better way, a long term, that's a very short-term solution to a problem that they have. I'd say that they, well, what I would suggest to them is that they take the 50 bucks or the amount of money they're paying to people. 50 bucks times, let's say, 10% success rate and they need to fill 50 roles. Now they have 500 interviews and they're paying, I don't know, $25,000, $2500 for this. Maybe that math is right. [chuckle] But they're paying a lot of money for people to take interviews, people that are not guaranteed to eventually work at that employer. A longer term sustainable solution would be to take that amount of money they're paying for interviews and pay that to their existing staff for doing a good job at that employer to engage in some profit sharing with their hourly workers and their frontline workers. Rahkeem: In the same way that desk workers, I look forward to my bonus at the end of the year and how that incentivizes people to stay longer at that employer to cash out on their bonus by the end of the year. That same thing could do wonders for employers, especially, employers that have hourly workers. Having that bonus structure of profit sharing could incentivize people to stay longer at that employer and take more pride in their work. One thing I'm confident about is that there is for many people a stigma for working in these types of jobs. And it's a stigma for many different reasons. One of the main reasons is that, it's a job that is very much plug and play for certain people. You're not walking into a McDonald's with a certificate or a license to say, "I'm a proficient." Rahkeem: It's not a professionalized job just yet. But when you do things like profit sharing, you get people on the frontline thinking about how they can improve the profit margins of their employers because you're doing profit sharing, the more profits that the store has, the more that you get your take home pay as an hourly worker that is engaging in a profit sharing program. And so I would take the money that they would spend on interviews and really create a robust benefit package that would include profit sharing at that employer. And that will do so much, [chuckle] again, for their operations. And absenteeism, people showing up on time. It would do a lot. Joel: Absolutely. Rahkeem Morris, everybody. Thanks for giving us so much of your time. For those listeners out there that want to know more about you or HourWork, where would you send them? Rahkeem: Yeah. You can go to rahkeem.com. It's my Twitter, follow me. And then you can also go to hourwork.com. Make sure you spell Hour with the h to get to the right place. And you'll find out more about me, the company, what we're working toward, and more about our vision and where we see the market going for HourWork. Joel: Awesome. Such a pleasure, man. We appreciate the time. Chad, I'm gonna go eat some Taco Bell, man. I don't know about you. Chad: Maybe you should. Joel: We out. Rahkeem: Yes. Chad: We out. Rahkeem: Yes. Grilled cheese. Do it. [chuckle] See ya. Outro: You can find more episodes of Voices, the Chad and Cheese Podcast series devoted to stories and opinions of industry leaders by subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts or just visit chadcheese.com.

We often hear about the inception of companies secondhand, but in this episode, you have the opportunity to hear it straight from the mouth of a co-founder. Rahkeem Morris, the CEO and founder of HourWork, shares his experience of participating in a startup competition that led them to secure their seed round. He also talks about the challenges they faced during the pandemic and the changes they had to make to their strategy. Brace yourself for a rollercoaster of emotions; you may laugh or even shed a tear, but one thing is for sure - you won't want to miss the final episode. Enjoy the show! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps support and educate your workforce through disability awareness and inclusion training. Intro: Voices, we hear them every day. Some voices like mine are smooth and comforting. While on the other hand, the Chad and Cheese podcast is like listening to a Nickelback album, you'd rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway, you are now listening to Voices, a podcast series from Chad and Cheese that features the most important and influential voices within the recruitment industry. Try not to fuck it up, boys. Joel: We hear so much about the birth of company secondhand, but this is your chance to get it straight from the co-founder's mouth. In this episode, Rahkeem Morris, CEO and founder at HourWork, talks about the startup competition that landed them their seed round, along with a pandemic pivot that forced them to rethink their entire strategy. You'll laugh, you might even cry, but you'll definitely want to hear the final episode after listening to this one. Enjoy. So you're so thoughtful in calculating in your moves. Rahkeem: Yeah. Joel: You're looking at top 10 lists and things like that. Was it just serendipitous that Rob was in the same place at the same time and you guys both wanted to start this business? Did you have to sort of twist his arm, how the idea and how that came about talk about that. Rahkeem: Yeah. I am a calculated person and I think that has a stigma sometimes, but I certainly plan. I am a calculating person, I'm proud of it, and I do like to create my own luck in life. And I was hanging around the Harvard Innovation Lab, because I knew that it was a good place to find founders, because often someone in incubation, their startup doesn't work and they still have that entrepreneurial vibe and spirit. Rahkeem: And so I very intentionally hung around the Harvard Innovation Lab to find early employees and co-founders for my business. And I'll also say, with great success, because the first... My first team, which almost all of them are still here of three or four people, they worked for free for the company for a year. And then maybe, I can't say that, 'cause the IRS now, [laughter] but they quit their jobs and decided to do this full-time with me. Now I think about it, their stock actually more than enough makes up for it Now. [laughter] Joel: Good say. Rahkeem: And so I can't say that. [laughter] they did an entire year, quit their jobs and worked on this company without any compensation, cash compensation that first year. Chad: So was this company an idea in your head that had been long standing, or did it just pop in Harvard? When did it happen? And then how did you start to carry this through to fruition? To me it sounds you had an idea when you were seven, for God's sake. [laughter] Joel: He went out and bought the barons and saw the most, profitable businesses to start. How'd that come about? [laughter] Chad: So it was when you were 14 when mom had this issue, it's like you had this idea pop, and then you started creating the schematic to success. Hey, when did it happen? When did it hit you in the face? Rahkeem: I'd say that it was, when I was thinking about starting a business, there was two things I had in mind. First, how terrible that experience was working at that temp agency. [laughter] Rahkeem: That day, the first day I went to this warehouse, [laughter], I didn't have a way to get there, so they told me to get in this car of someone who was... [laughter] And later found out has several felonies, and so I'm just going back and forth with this complete stranger into this place. And then I'm sweating at the end of the day, and they gave me 20 bucks at the end of the day. Rahkeem: And so I had this experience working this temp agency. And then I also had the knowledge that for most of my wage-earning jobs that I had, again, I had 13 in total, over half of them, I had returned back to them at some point later after I initially left them. I was a boomerang employee, so Taco Bell, I just kept going, that was a revolving door for me. Yue Huang, the same thing. Pizza and Uno's the same thing. Joel: You're making me hungry, man. Chad: So did you keep your flare so that when you went back to Yue Huang, you said, "Hey, I've got all the flare, we're good to go" Rahkeem: Wait. I wanna make sure you said that, I definitely kept my uniform. [laughter] It's almost anticipating that I would... And now I think about it, this happened. I totally forgot about the story. I had all those uniform tops, when I graduated Cornell, [chuckle] that was the first time I actually let them go. [chuckle] And I donated them. So I would keep my uniform, and so I was always able to walk back in. And I thought, "Alright, well, I worked all these jobs, I can always go back. I had this terrible experience with this temp agency. I had this prior training, why wouldn't I be able to do this at a place like a Taco Bell, returned back there, because I got this training from them that I still remember?" Rahkeem: These jobs are all rote memorization. If you need to get that Taco at 2.9 ounces 50 times a day, and you do it for a whole year, you're not gonna forget what that weight is. That's like you're doing flashcards all the time at work. And so you don't forget those things. And so I have all this training, I knew I could just do that job again, if I were to walk back in. Why not create a platform and system that would enable exactly that? Chad: When did you actually whiteboard this idea, 'cause I think that's when it comes to fruition. When you start to ideate and you get the ink out to whether it's on a pad or it's on a whiteboard. When did you do that the first time? Rahkeem: Great question. So the first time I did that I was applying to these startup competitions. For a whole year, the only thing that I did was, yeah, like without building anything, was apply to startup competitions. And that is one of the most useful things, surprisingly. It was an... Well, the outcome of it was completely I couldn't have anticipated it. Since I was in school, I wasn't able to actually work on it as many hours as I wanted to. [chuckle] And so all I was able to do was apply to competitions. [chuckle] And so I would get all this feedback, from all the judges, and I would just iterate on it until I had something that was beginning to sell to the people. And that's exactly what happened. Joel: Were you like Y Combinator, you must know every single incubator in the country? Rahkeem: I literally, and this is without exaggeration, I'd applied to over 50 accelerators. And then I'd say over half of those have gotten to a certain step in the competition, where I'm getting very valuable feedback from people who are often founders themselves and entrepreneurs in their past lives. Joel: And what was Rob's role in this? Did you guys sort of develop a relationship where your strengths were his weaknesses and vice versa? Talk about the evolution of your relationship. Rahkeem: Yeah. Rob is a really great writer. He's a really great writer. Initially, I was writing all these applications myself and to have a partner like him to come in, rewrite what I had written and then reapply to some of these competitions, with a better written let's say... Joel: Better pitches, better written pitches yeah. Rahkeem: It certainly helped in the beginning. And then getting into the finals of these competitions. And getting to the final of these competitions was also the reason why I was able to raise that pre-seed round, our very first round. We went to a competition at Rice University at their business school called the Rice Business Plan Competition. Joel: That's creative. Rahkeem: Yeah, right? It almost, it's like an acronym. [laughter] Chad: Say what it's, I like it. Rahkeem: Exactly what it's. Chad: Yes. Rahkeem: So we enter this competition and one of the fascinating things about this competition is that they don't give you the prize. It's not a no-strings attached $50,000 winning for winning the competition. When you win the competition, they give you a convertible note. It's a fascinating way to run a competition. Initially, in the beginning, I felt gypped that it was a convertible note, but then when you realize it... Or when I finally when it happened, I realized that, we won second place in this competition was that when we got a term sheet for winning second in the competition that set off the fundraising process. And one of the best ways to kick off a fundraising process is with a term sheet. And that's exactly what happened out of this competition. And it set us up so well to raise a little bit over a million dollars for our very first round. Joel: So a lot of our listeners didn't go to Harvard Business School, describe a convertible note for those that don't know. Rahkeem: Yes. So a convertible note, the longer form name for a convertible note, it's a convertible debt note. And if you're thinking about the balance sheet, you know what you said to one who didn't go to Harvard, I'm gonna do it to one who doesn't have even, let's say a knowledge about business. Pretty much an investor gives you a loan, and then by the time that your business looks as if it's going to be something, that's converted into stock for that company, that's pretty much what a convertible debt note is. Joel: So you have a little money in the bank. What's your next move? Rahkeem: And this is around the time after our first round. Chad: What's next? Joel: Yeah. Rahkeem: Oh, yeah. So what's next? So we're going back to August, 2018. Well, we began to begin building out toward the vision, that I had set for the company. Chad: What's the vision? Rahkeem: Yes, the vision is a liquid universal workforce. Chad: A liquid. Liquid... Rahkeem: Yes. Chad: Universal. I like that. I like fluid better, but liquid is fluid, so that's good. Carry on. Rahkeem: Yeah. And so, why is it liquid? Why is it universal? Liquid refers to the ability for a worker to take a skill that they have and convert it into income in a very quick way. So you think about all the assets that you have. Let's say as a company, you have assets that are liquid and assets that aren't liquid. It's the speed at which you're able to convert that into cash. And so the liquid part refers to someone's skills to be able to convert that skill quickly into cash. And that's what the liquid part of this means. And so that looks like, and we have many different proof points of this working already with our platform today, is that someone that has been previously trained at a job, let's say you've been trained as a crew member at a McDonald's. With that skill that you've been trained on, you're able to return to the McDonald's that hired you instantly through our platform. And so now you've got this skill that you've earned, you're able to make it liquid by converting that into income in the form of a paycheck by returning instantly to your employer without any questions. Chad: If the employers get into this because the employers, they're obviously the door that you have to have opened, and these are franchises. So if they all agree that, let's say, for instance from a Taco Bell standpoint, "The exact weight of a Mexican pizza, then come on in," right? And if you have proof to do that, also what about manufacturing, being a CNC operator and being credentialed in one organization, how fluid is this? Is this just for fast food, or is this for a more broad scope? How were you thinking of this first? Was it incredibly pointed when you first executed, or was it just broad-based, come on, come all? Rahkeem: It was broad-based, come on and come all. It's actually exactly the way that my mind works. I'm very much, especially given where I've come from and just understanding what I needed to do to get to where I wanted to go, I'm just a visionary-type person. I have the dream bigger beyond my current resources and circumstances. And in the beginning, thinking about this company and what I wanted it to do. I thought very big, very broadly. And that refers and that relates to the universal aspect of this platform so liquid universal. Universal refers to those skills. So not only do we want to have all skills on this platform, we also want someone that is in possession of one of these skills to be able to use it, that skill, at any workplace where it's currently practiced. Chad: That's herding cats though, right? You've got all these skills, now you've gotta silo the skills, and then you've gotta get the employers to agree that said skills are exact, the exact skills so that they can open the door for all of this fluid, fluidity to happen, right? That might have been the concept, but that's not really where you started at first, right? You started with the janitorial side of that. Rahkeem: That's right, yes. Okay. Yes. So janitorial, we started with janitorial for the reason that is a general skill that someone has. As long as you can follow directions and do some job shadowing of someone for a very limited amount of time, you'll be able to become fully proficient and competent in that role. It's a easier... There's no previous training that you need to have that job. And so we got started off with what's our first product that we had. By the way, our product was nearly killed, this product was killed by the pandemic. Although we have one legacy... Two legacy customers on it. The first product that we had, we allow for managers to request their former employees on demand. And that was with companies that cleaned commercial buildings. Chad: Okay. Rahkeem: Around the time of the pandemic, we had about 12 to 15 of these companies on our platform. Chad: Okay. How did it work? Did it work well before the pandemic? Rahkeem: It did. And so what we did is we created a pool of workers, who were completely unscheduled. These were people who were employed by that employer still. And at the beginning of the week, what they did is pick up each and every single one of their shifts. The benefits of the employer was that with nearly 2000 people, but to this one employer is a case study here, 2000 people that this employer has cleaning about 300 buildings in all of Los Angeles, they incurred no overtime in a year after we were installed. Chad: Whoa. And now these were all employees that were already on the payroll, or were they 1099? Were they W2? What kind of employees were they? Rahkeem: All W2 employees, 92% of these employees had first jobs, which is one of the things that was important to us on this platform, that they were using this for supplemental income, so 92% of them have first jobs. What we did is we took the former employee list, that we got from this company, call up everyone that they gave us, created this list of people who are willing to do work in this way. We got a really great response from their former employees. Then we got them rehired at that employer, and then we kicked this off. [music] Chad: You can find more episodes of Voices, The Chad and Cheese Podcast series devoted to stories and opinions of industry leaders by subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts or just visit chadcheese.com.

Have you ever imagined being in charge of managing more than $1 billion in corporate expenses, especially in your mid-twenties, and for a renowned Silicon Valley giant? Well, in this episode, we catch up with Rahkeem Morris, the CEO and founder of HourWork, as he shares his experience of doing just that. We also delve into the early days of his entrepreneurial journey, which paved the way for even greater accomplishments. Brace yourself for yet another inspiring episode that will leave you eagerly anticipating the next one. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps support and educate your workforce through disability awareness and inclusion training. Intro: Voices; we hear them every day. Some voices, like mine, are smooth and comforting. While on the other hand, The Chad and Cheese podcast is like listening to a Nickelback album; you'd rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway, you're now listening to Voices, a podcast series from Chad and Cheese that features the most important and influential voices within the recruitment industry. Try not to fuck it up, boys. Joel: How would you like to oversee $1 billion in corporate expenses? How about doing it in your mid 20s for a giant Silicon Valley company? This episode finds our friend Rahkeem Morris, CEO and founder, at HourWork, doing just that. Additionally, we explore the early days of his journey as an entrepreneur. It's an exploration that would lead him to even bigger things. Another inspiring episode that'll have you craving for the next one. Chad: So how did that set you up for your time at Google? What was the transition? Joel: Did they recruit you? Rahkeem: Yeah, you know what? I was recruited. That's the crazy thing. I got either an email or LinkedIn... No it was an email and I showed my friend like, "That's @google.com email address." I didn't know they actually had google.com email addresses. That surprised me because I'm thinking... I don't know, it just surprised me that... Chad: Did you think it would be Gmail? What did you think it'd be? [chuckle] Rahkeem: That's what I was thinking. [laughter] Yes, actually, that's exactly it. I thought I'd get an email from a Gmail address. I'm like "This is official. This is from google.com." And I did the interview. I did something I never do in an interview, which is that I totally get... Eventually who will be my skill level report... Manager rather... I told him I wanted to draw on the whiteboard the solution to it and he loved it. Chad: What was the problem? You're talking about drawing a solution, what was the problem? Rahkeem: [chuckle] That's another good question. Okay, so the question was... All right, "Let's say Google AdWords is making different gross margins in the United States and Canada. Tell me what are the top two or three drivers for that?" And so the crazy thing is that I didn't know what AdWords was. [laughter] Joel: Wow! Rahkeem: I'm sitting literally 30 minutes before the interview, and then something... I was going online, I was like searching... I forget what it was, but I got some recommendation to open up an AdWords account. So I opened up an AdWords account immediately before my interview. I set it up, I went through a couple of different options. And yeah, lo and behold, I go on to the interview and the question is about AdWords. And I explained it to him at such a level of depth that probably shocked him, probably more than he knows... Not because he's not a smart person. It's because I literally had just read the manual on it. [laughter] And so going into depth about these terms on the whiteboard, I was really into it, and it worked out obviously. I got the job. Joel: I'm surprised they didn't ask you "How do we save Google+?" because it was in 2012. [laughter] Joel: If only they had asked you that, it might still be around today. [laughter] Rahkeem: I think so. It's funny. Actually, for some reason, me and my friends at Google, we're all Googlers at this point. We try to prop up Google+ and we actually used it as our main social media tool for like a year. Joel: You and Chad. I think Chad was heavy on the Google+. Rahkeem: It would be on chat, right? [chuckle] Chad: Horrible. Yeah, it was horrible. [laughter] Joel: So were you AdWord... Were you working on AdWords? What'd you do at Google? What did you started doing and what did you end up doing? Rahkeem: Oh yeah. So my first job I had at Google, I had a Job that was listed as FP&A job, but it was completely different from any job I ever did at GE. This is a job where I had to go to directors, VPs and even the CIO, to ask them, "All right, what do you plan to spend your money on? What are the projects and initiatives you're having for your team?" And then I would have to report these metrics and operational data to them. It was... We're kinda... And then also, I approved, literally, every single expense. So all of the area I looked over was $1.2 billion of expenses. About half of that was... Yeah, it's ridiculous. I was like, 25-26 years old. Chad: $1.2 billion of expense [laughter] Rahkeem: Yes. [chuckle] Like literally, I'm going in and approving each one of these requests for... Like, I'm the gatekeeper for all this money. And I would do it on the bus down from Mountain View... Or rather from San Francisco, to review. Chad: Didn't take the BART? Rahkeem: I didn't take the BART, it was on the Google buses. And I improved all that spend and then I would have to tell people... Again, I'm very young, telling directors and VPs, asking them to stop spending money. And they're just looking at me, like "Who are you?" [chuckle] Looking back at that job, I shouldn't have had that job. Like, knowing what I know now, especially running this company for as long as I have and seeing the growth, I should have never had that job. It was, it was... No, I shouldn't have had it, but anyways, that was my first job or that's my primary job, I had at Google. Joel: Was that when they showed you the money printing machine at Google? That just... Chad: I'm staying. Yeah, I'm staying. Rahkeem: That was one of the biggest differences between GE and Google. Joel: I bet. Rahkeem: At GE, every single penny is accounted by the company and they're so good with their financial controls, it's exceptional. And you go to Google, and people are spending $5,000 on a Frodo statue they wanna give to one of their engineers. Shouldn't have thought about that. [laughter] Joel: That sounds like a true story. You wouldn't have just pulled that out. Rahkeem: [laughter] Just like, "I'm not sure if I can approve this." [laughter] Chad: A fucking Frodo statue. Rahkeem: And so that was the biggest difference. And so they were just so willy-nilly with their money, relatively so of course. [chuckle] But we have profit margins of what? 90 whatever percent it is. It's very easy to be that... I was gonna say careless, but... Chad: Yes. Joel: Frivolous. Rahkeem: Less stringent... Yes, frivolous with your money, kinda, yes. Joel: Frivolous, there you go. Chad: So how in the hell did you find yourself to this industry? I mean, you had $1.2 billion of expenses that you actually had control over. That's really what it was. Joel: He's segueing you to Harvard, I think, this is what Chad's doing. How did you get into that? Rahkeem: Yeah... And so by the way, it was all with IT. And that's the last thing I wanna mention before I go into what I'm doing today. So it was IT, and the way that IT is... By the way, with that $1.2 billion, I wanna be very clear, over half of that was salaries. I can't really do anything with that. So that's just like, you gotta just approve that. And so with the IT, which was where I was doing all this work in finance and operations at Google, there's a IT team for each of the teams that are at Google. So let's say there is an Android team or a finance team, or a real estate team, there's a corresponding IT team for those teams at Google. And so not only was it 1.2 billion in IT expenses, it was across the entire company. Rahkeem: And I had to interact with each of those managers to understand how they're spending their money, what are the main operational metrics of each of their teams, their initiatives for the year, what they're doing to excite their teams. It was... I just got a lot of insight across the business, surprisingly [chuckle] from this position, which is another outcome that I couldn't have anticipated in the beginning. And so I knew I wanted to get my MBA. I also knew very early on, that I wanted to start a company. And it's mostly based on my personality type, that I knew I needed to start a company. I was pretty certain about it over the summer of 2015, that's the summer before I got my MBA. And right before that, I took an Amtrak trip from California to the East Coast in New York. Joel: Good God. Amtrak across the country. Rahkeem: It was actually... I loved it. I did. It was my first solo trip too. And I just needed to get away from work for a bit. And so there's this deal where if you pay them 500 bucks, they give you these 10 passes where you can get on and off the train at anywhere that you want. And so I had mapped my entire journey across the United States. I went through Arizona, down to Texas. I saw a ton of historical landmarks, some that, I guess, I thought I would see later in my life, but I happened to see it then. The Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr was shot. I went to the Central High School in Little Rock, with the... And a story there that we all... Well, we know about. I visited the World War II Museum in Louisiana, which is an incredible museum, I love it. Yeah, I never thought I would be so into a museum, and that was really great. And I also went to a plantation for the first time and saw that. And so I saw all these sites across the United States right before I went to school, and it made my decision to become an entrepreneur even more certain, that trip really solidified it for me. Joel: What was your first nibble on entrepreneurialism? Is there a story as a kid that you were hustling? What's the seed that planted that? Rahkeem: Yeah, this is another great question. A lot of these answers, yeah, I haven't thought about these in so long. I wrote about this in my Cornell essay. So I'm from Upstate New York, Albany, New York, again. I've been shoveling people's porches since as long as I can remember. And so I would just go around my neighborhood, walk door to door, knock on their front door, say, "Hey, you know, I'll shovel your porch for a dollar." I always started with a dollar. And then I eventually I would go through the whole thing, finish, and then they would feel so guilty that I did the whole thing by myself. I was like, I was 7, 8, 9, 10, 11-year-old that they would give me much more than a dollar. And so I would do that every single time that it snowed. And it was the one reason why I looked forward to when it's snowed in Upstate New York. So that's my first taste. Chad: Money, money. So you felt like you needed a Harvard MBA to do this? [laughter] Rahkeem: Yeah. Well, so I, at that time... So this is actually the truth of it. I looked up who gets funded for companies, and it's people who got their MBAs from Harvard. Joel: Harvard... Does his homework. [laughter] Rahkeem: And so I literally applied to Harvard for my MBA program. And then fortunately, obviously, I got accepted and graduated. Joel: That's a really quick breeze of Harvard MBA. What was your experience there? Was it what you thought it would be? Was... Like talk about that for a little bit. Rahkeem: Yeah. Oh yeah. So my Harvard MBA experience, I had a great experience going to that school. It did bring to light a lot of different, let's say, inequalities about the world and just different ways of living. My mom made about $20,000 a year supporting three siblings. And you can imagine just the things that... It's just not a lot of money. It's not at the poverty level, but it's fairly close to it. I'm in a class now of 90 people, there's like several people in the class where it's just public knowledge that their parents are billionaires. And it's just... And they're like actually pretty awesome people, I love these people. It was just really... It was just funny that that's just like the case, where not one, but multiple of them. And also the sons and daughters of CEOs of companies, household names that you know of. And then also there's this thing where people go on foreign trips on the weekend and... So every weekend you're like going to Iceland, or Chile, or to Columbia, or somewhere halfway around the world. And this is the first time where I'm like, "Okay, well, maybe... " Rahkeem: There is a hangover effect of growing up so poor. I just can't go to a new country every single weekend. And so I did miss out on a couple of different, let's say, excursions with my classmates because it was getting really expensive to go to the school in addition to the opportunity cost of going getting your MBA, not working for two years, and now spending all this money, all these travel and trips. At a certain point in time, it definitely felt as if I'm the poor kid getting my MBA at Harvard. Joel: Did you feel like their level of commitment was the same as yours? Or did you feel like they're just here because daddy says they have to go to Harvard? Rahkeem: It's a good question too. It's maybe a bit controversial, but if people took the MBA degree seriously, they can get so much out of it. People didn't take it seriously enough when I went. And it's so funny 'cause nowadays, I'm going back in my cases, whether it's a module note or an actual case itself, I'm reading it, understanding it, and thinking, "Shit, this would've been really helpful to unpack these concepts when I was in school and talk to my peers and learn from them." And at the same time, maybe I guess I didn't find my group of people who were like that, who took it more seriously, at least the concepts and the actual academic exercise of studying and understanding businesses. That's... I don't think that they went to school because of daddy's money or mommy's money for that matter, or because they wanted another shiny thing on their resume, they went there because, well they had money. The school would accept them because maybe, well, I don't know, how would I say all that [laughter] Joel: They had money. Go ahead, say it. [laughter] Rahkeem: This is a public... [laughter] I would've went to school and excuse some class sessions and [laughter] be invited back. But I'm kidding about that. But I don't think I do anything for that reason. It's actually is a really fine education that you get in the school. Joel: Now, you did meet someone, I'm assuming, someone named Robert Snyder at Harvard. Talk about that. Rahkeem: Yeah. So, Rob Snyder is my co-founder in the business. We worked together by the way, our four years in this. He's an advisor with us now, but we're working quite closely. Rob Snyder... When I was working on this, I had written a paper and I was on the look for a co-founder for the company. And I am an early bird. I wake up, since time immemorial, at least for me, I wake up very early in the morning, 4:30-5 o'clock in the morning, just a relic cup of the past. And so that's what I do. So I'm always up in the morning. At the Harvard Innovation Lab, it is their incubation center for startups at Harvard, and it opens up at 7 o'clock in the morning. And so I was always up, maybe I have worked out and done on my whole routine at 7 o'clock in the morning and there's only one other person there at 7 o'clock in the morning. It was Rob Snyder. And we began to, well, just have conversations pretty much every day of the week. And, yeah, we were the only two people at the Harvard Innovation Lab that early until we struck up a friendship. Joel: And he's from Upstate, New York as well, right? Rahkeem: I think he was born there. He was born in Buffalo. Joel: Big Bills fan. Intro: He is a big Bills fan, yeah, like a diehard Bills fan. Even a fan of them when they're not winning. But they've had a lot of really great seasons recently. And so he's from Upstate New York. Eventually I think that him and his family moved to Ohio, not too far away. Yeah, we had that connection as well. [music] Outro: You can find more episodes of Voices, The Chad and Cheese podcast series devoted to stories and opinions of industry leaders, by subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts or just visit chadcheese.com.

Prepare to gain a fresh perspective on Taco Bell. In this episode, we continue our conversation with HourWork's CEO and founder, Rahkeem Morris, as he shares his experiences of working demanding hourly jobs while attending an Ivy League school. This journey proved to be rewarding, eventually leading him to secure a position at one of Silicon Valley's most esteemed companies. Tune in and enjoy. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps support and educate your workforce through disability awareness and inclusion training. Intro: Voices. We hear them every day. Some voices like mine are smooth and comforting. While on the other hand, The Chad & Cheese Podcast is like listening to a Nickelback album, you'd rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway, you are now listening to Voices, a podcast series from Chad & Cheese that features the most important and influential voices within the recruitment industry. Try not to fuck it up, boys. Intro: Get ready to have a whole new appreciation for Taco Bell. On this episode, our journey with our work, CEO and founder Ricky Morris continues taking us into his stint at an Ivy League school while working through the gauntlet of demanding hourly jobs. It was a journey that would pay off. However, landing him an opportunity at one of the most prestigious companies in Silicon Valley. Enjoy. It's a must listen. Ricky Morris: So I eventually went to community college for a year, and then at the same time I applied to Cornell, like literally what I did was I pulled up a spreadsheet of the top ranked business schools. I assorted it from one to whatever, and then it was, I think it was three or four. It was in New York. I was like, this is close enough. This is the highest freaking school I could think about, possibly going to and I applied and I got a letter back that said that I wasn't accepted right away. And then I had to go to another school for a year to get either, I can't remember, it's either three eight or three five at another school. And I was going to be automatically accepted. And so I went to SUNY Albany and then also community college courses. And then I got, it's like a three nine something. And I was able to transfer automatically to Cornell. Well, I finished up my education there. Joel: Did you work through college? Obviously Ivy League schools aren't cheap. Did you get scholarships? How did that work out? Ricky Morris: Yeah. That's, I had to work all the way throughout college and I've paid for every single penny of my education. Joel: Wow. Ricky Morris: And this is before... Joel: Good for you. Ricky Morris: Thank you very much. This is before these schools, these Ivy League schools had this whole thing where if your family earns less than $60,000, obvious, they give it to you for free. That happened as soon as I graduated from undergrad after I'm working. Joel: Go figure it. Ricky Morris: Listen. Tight right. The timing... It's maybe some retroactive program that's [chuckle] someone can hear and then pay me that back. I'm kidding. But it was the case that when I dropped outta high school 14, nearly 15 years old, I began working hourly jobs right away. Over the course of the nine years after I dropped outta high school, I had about 13 hourly jobs. Chad: Well, Was there a range? Were they all like the same kind? Tell me about those jobs. Ricky Morris: These are mostly wage earning, actually. They were all jobs that you're earning money by the hour wage jobs. And they were primarily in restaurants and food. So I've worked, it must be four or five different industries. So my very very first job was at Taco Bell. Ricky Morris: Taco Bell, I remember having such great time. There we go. They came up in the beginning and I actually, I really enjoyed my time there. I still remember the waits for some of the products there. Joel: Are you as glad that the Mexican pizza is back as I am? Ricky Morris: Actually, I am... You know what? Joel: Yes. Ricky Morris: Fun fact for me at least, is that the Mexican pizza was the very first thing I had at Taco Bell. And it's because I was in the break room. I had worked there for about four or five months. We mess up in the Mexican pizza. Do you want it? I'm like, oh, I've never ate Taco Bell before. Chad: You were there four or five months and you had never had Taco Bell. Oh my God. There's no way in hell Cheesman could have waited four to five minutes. He would've... [laughter] Joel: That would've been a requirement for me to take the job. Ricky Morris: Well, it's funny, [laughter] back in the day, Taco Bell for me was like exotic food, I've never... Joel: It still is. What are you talking about? [laughter] Ricky Morris: I was like, I've never had Mexican food before. I was almost concerned. I have it when I was 15 years [laughter] old working at Taco Bell. But by the way, I think our Mexican pizza is 10.8 ounces. I'm pretty sure that's right. So I'll well fact check that. But I have all these weights of foods that I still remember to this day. So a hard taco's 2.9 ounces. Soft taco is 3.6 ounces. Quesadilla I'm pretty sure is 10.9 or 11.9. Chad: Did you get credentialing for that? Because you should have. Ricky Morris: Actually, you know what, I did become a trainer at Taco Bell during my time there. And so that's probably one of the other reasons why I remember these things so well. And so that's my very first job. And then I probably worked about three or so waiting jobs, just waiting tables, which is such a fascinating, you learned so much about people doing that. Ricky Morris: I was a dialysis technician. I worked at FedEx, I worked at Kinko's, was a temp worker for a company called Labor Ready. It's called People Ready Now. That was a fascinating week that I had there, moving appliances across the warehouse. It was... Okay, [laughter] it was a week. And I remember why I quit that job. And it's because you're paid daily as a temp worker. You show up at this place, this like... It looks like a rundown, shopping out plaza. You go to this place, you wait outside in the morning, it's 06:00 o'clock. They tell you what your job is the day of, you work it and they give you a check at the end of the day. And there's these check cashing things inside of the place. And then I was getting maybe 20 or 30 bucks for really hard manual labor. And I realized at that time it was just something I couldn't do sustainably, but that job. And every time I think about it, there's another job that pops up. I'm like, "Oh yeah, I did that one too. So it was probably more than 13. I just can't remember them all. Chad: So how did that actually shape where you were going to go in the future? Because you're going to school, you're paying for school. And I would assume you're like, "I don't want to do this." Ricky Morris: I can't say that it had a strong influence on the type of job I chose afterward. I just knew that I wanted to not have to work on my feet anymore. And well, when you're on the line for about 10, they're working at double 15, 16 hours. Even at 17, 18, when you're young, your joints are healthy. That hurts. Your ankles... Chad: Yes. Ricky Morris: Are in pain. It is just like, "I can't walk another 10 feet." And so I suppose the way that influenced my decision was that I gotta got a job that I will be sitting down, maybe some part of the day, and that's the strongest influence it had. Joel: Did you go from Cornell to Google, or was there a bridge between that? Ricky Morris: Yeah. There was a bridge there. Yeah, I worked at General Electric. Joel: Oh yeah. Ricky Morris: That was my very first job, I did the financial management program which trained me very well. Surprisingly for the job that I have today. It's a genuine shock how helpful it is that I went through that program. Because you worked that job and they also have the training part of it, and it's like a class, it's three or four credits. Joel: Was that still the Jack Welch culture or were you, did you kind of miss out on that? Ricky Morris: I think I missed out mostly on it. I think he may have been the CEO when I was an intern, but when I was full-time, he wasn't. Joel: His shadow was still there after he left, wouldn't you say? Ricky Morris: Exactly. Yeah. It was. Yeah. Culture is a something that's very hard to change in the company. Joel: And did they pull you out of Cornell? Did you wanna work for them? How did that connection happen? Ricky Morris: You know what? I have a very, actually, really fascinating story about that, that I'm almost concerned about legal issues to say this. [laughter] I'll try to be like... Joel: Lawyers, don't listen to our show. It's okay. Ricky Morris: Okay. Very good. Then I'll say everything now. I got, so I worked my internship at GE. I remember the head of HR told me if I didn't graduate in that current semester in the fall semester, they weren't going to give me the full-time job. They were looked at my resume. The reason why they said that is because they looked at my resume. I had 150 credits on my transcript, rather, 150 credits is a lot of credits to have as an undergrad. What they didn't take into account was that I dropped outta high school. And so when I went to community college, it was all remedial classes. So I have all these credits, but 30, I don't know how many credit, it was a lot of credits that were all remedial. They saw the transcript. They thought, all right, we want our classes to start in January for this new this F&P program. Let's put some pressure on this guy to graduate school this semester instead of taking the entire year. The thing is, I had 24 credits that I needed to take to graduate with the requirements that I needed, but I also really wanted and needed that job. And so what I did in my last semester of school is I worked two jobs and I took 23 credits at Cornell. Chad: Oh cool. Ricky Morris: And by the way, it was my best performing semester. I got a three, nine, one doing that. And also in that semester my car didn't start with the key. You had to jump my car every single time to start it. So I probably jumped my car at least a hundred times. Working two hourly jobs and taking 23 credits at Cornell of all places. Joel: Powered by Taco Bell, by the way, kids. Chad: An hour and a half sleep every night. Ricky Morris: Literally in my last semester in school, and this is not an exaggeration, I stayed up every single Sunday night, all night of every single Sunday night. Chad: You didn't have a choice at that point, did you? Ricky Morris: I was just working. And by the way, this is... Before I even knew what things like Adderall were, like that would've made things much easier. I was just on caffeine and five hour energies. Joel: Who needs Adderall when you have Chalupas. Chad: But Chalupa puts you to sleep. Are you kidding me? Ricky Morris: And by the way, Chalupa is just a fried gordita. Just so you both know that. Chad: Oh, Joel knows. Oh, Joel knows. Joel: It's a slice of heaven, bite your tongue. Ricky Morris: It's very good. [music] Outro: You can find more episodes of Voices, The Chad & Cheese Podcast series devoted to stories and opinions of industry leaders by subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts or just visit chadcheese.com.

Do you believe your childhood was difficult? Well, think again. In this episode, we have a virtual chat with Rahkeem Morris, the CEO and founder of HourWork, who joins us from downtown Boston. Rahkeem shares with us his childhood experiences, which challenged and tested him, ultimately shaping him into the successful man and leader he is today. This journey is both humbling and inspiring, and definitely worth listening to. No spoilers though! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps support and educate your workforce through disability awareness and inclusion training. Intro: Voices. We hear them every day. Some voices like mine are smooth and comforting, while on the other hand, the Chad and Cheese podcast is like listening to a Nickelback album, you'd rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway, y'all now listening to Voices, a podcast series from Chad and Cheese that features the most important and influential voices within the recruitment industry. Try not to fuck it up, boys. Joel: Think your childhood had some hurdles? Not even close. On this episode, we meet HourWork CEO and founder Rahkeem Morris, chatting virtually with us from downtown Boston. Rahkeem takes us on a journey of his childhood. No spoilers, but it was these early years that challenged him, tested him, and essentially made him into the man and leader he is today. Equal parts humbling and inspiring. It's a must listen. Joel: So Rahkeem where does this podcast find you? Rahkeem: This podcast finds me in Boston, and in fact, I'm sitting in Old City Hall in Boston right now. Joel: How's the WiFi at Old City Hall? [laughter] Chad: It's good... Rahkeem: You tell me. How good is it? Is it good enough for you? Joel: Is there like a Sam Adams router somewhere? Rahkeem: Well, Sam Adams is literally buried perhaps less than 200 feet away from me right now. Chad: They planted the WiFi in Sam Adams. Joel: What's the best and worst part about living in Boston? Rahkeem: Really the people, you can find [laughter] anyone that you want to ever want to meet here. Whether it's different cultures, different ages, different everything it's a place to find someone of interest for you. Joel: And oddly enough, the worst part is the people of Boston. [laughter] I'm kidding. What's the worst part? Rahkeem: [laughter] That's funny. Joel: The winters. Rahkeem: The weather. You know what? I've gotten used to the weather because I found out what winter coats are. Well, and I say that in a way that I grew up in Upstate New York, and so I didn't have a good winter coat [laughter] when I was there. And it makes it much bearable. I suppose one thing that... One of the cons is that a lot of the streets here are narrow and just generally the... It feels like a older city, but not in a way that's cool, in a way that like, alright, I can't get gigabit to my house for my internet. That kind of old [laughter] The houses are old, and so there's a lot of not modernization in terms of how we're able to live here because of some infrastructure challenges. Joel: Well, thank God the country's most elite technology school isn't in a place like Boston. That'd be horrible. [laughter] Rahkeem: Hey, I had no stick in that game. Chad: Would be. Talk a little bit about growing up in Upstate New York. Your entire life did... Born, bred, Albany. Where were you at? Rahkeem: Actually the first time I was outside of Albany, I was about 19. So yeah, born and raised in Albany, New York. And I think your question was how was it growing in Upstate New York, in Albany? So in Albany. Albany is the capital of New York, but as you both know, it's not the biggest city in New York. You definitely get some smaller town vibes, but it's very much a city. I had a pleasant enough [chuckle] childhood growing up in Albany, New York. And it gave me enough of a grounding in just, where we are and who we are as people to be successful enough in the world. And so that's Albany for me. Joel: So your upbringing is unique, single parent household. Talk about that and how it shaped you. Rahkeem: Yeah, I think in terms of just having a single parent it's something that happens frequently here in the States and for many, many, many different reasons. But you can imagine that you just have one half less of a person as the head of your household. It's one less income, that's one less stream of support, that's one less of everything. And that's just math. And so when you have a mom, in my case, a single parent porting three kids, there's just a lot of resources being divided across many people. So, that's just the reality of it. Chad: Remember Joel, when latchkey Kids became a phrase. A moniker? Joel: I was one of them. Chad: I think that was a Gen X thing, right? Where latchkey kids where you would obviously get up in the morning, your parent probably wasn't there because they went to work and then you came back home and the parents still wasn't home yet because they were still at work. But you had the key that was either under the mat or on your necklace or where... Where was your key? Rahkeem: That's a good question. You know what, back in the day, and I... Now that you asked it, I haven't thought about this in years. I used to keep my keys in a carabiner. Joel: I'm sorry, what? The carrotbiner. What is... Chad: Carabiner. That's more of a military like piece of equipment. Joel's... Yeah. He's used to more like snacks, like carrots and well, maybe not carrots and... [laughter] Joel: Now Rahkeem you dropped out of high school, correct? Rahkeem: Yes. That's correct. Chad: Oh, when? Rahkeem: So I was 14 years old when I dropped out of high school. Chad: 14? Rahkeem: I went through I guess my evolution as a person later in life [laughter] if I could... Yeah, I was 14 years old, about two months away from becoming 15. That's just the way this school year works. And the reason why I dropped out of high school was because I had a new thing to do at home and that was to bring my little brother to school every single day. Joel: Are we talking elementary? We talking... Rahkeem: He's... Yeah. Great question. He is 10 years younger than I am. Joel: Oh, wow. Rahkeem: Yeah. Joel: Okay. So you're 14 taking care of a four year old? Rahkeem: Exactly that. Joel: Wow. Rahkeem: And so it wasn't even school in the beginning it was daycare I was bringing him to and then eventually it became school. Explaining why I got into this situation in the first place. So I mentioned before, single mom, but also my mom, her employer gave her an ultimatum and they told her that she needed to move her afternoon nursing shifts to mornings or find a new job. When that happened, she asked me to begin bringing him to school, well, initially, again, daycare, and then eventually to school every single day. But, well, sometimes in the morning they aren't always cooperative, especially when you're 3, 4, 5. And so you can imagine that this would add a lot of time to my schedule every single day. Most of the time I got him to daycare about 2 miles by public transit across town. It just added 90 minutes to 2 hours to my mornings every day. I began missing my first period of school. And that dominoed to me missing entire days of school. And the last thing I'll mention there is that I didn't quite understand this when I was telling people, initially this story that I only began this year recently, that I'm telling you now. I didn't realize that people thought I just dropped out because I wasn't focused or something like that. I was in honors classes. I was actually a year ahead in school. And... Chad: Oh, wait, time out, time out, time out. You didn't... So did anybody reach out to you during this? Seeing a kid with such great promise just eject, did you have anybody actually from the school reach out to you and say how they could prospectively help? Rahkeem: Yeah, that's a really great question, because this is what happened. So, no one from the school, I'm sure they called me. I don't remember getting those calls, and I don't remember my mum letting me know that she got those calls. So, about around the time I was going to my high school, Albany High School, in upstate New York. Only 43%, 44% of people that entered their freshman year graduated from that high school. It's one of those schools that, well, Johns Hopkins has done some research of all these high schools in the states. And that's just one of the dropout factories, they call it in the States. And so I think I got some calls, perhaps they were automated. There were just so many people who were dropping out of my high school. It's the only high school, public one in Albany. They put you on a program when you don't go to school. So, eventually, the outcome of this was that I was in this program called TIPS. I forget what the acronym stands for, but they more or less have you visit a probation officer every week or every other week. Chad: Like truancy. Right? Rahkeem: Exactly. Yep. Absolutely. Joel: And what was the impact on your mom? Obviously a solid work ethic as a nurse. Where was her head knowing that her son was in honors classes and dropping out of high school? That must have been crushing. Rahkeem: Definitely, it was. I also have to say that because I was also working, we had opposite schedules. So, I wasn't having these types of conversations with her. I was literally working in the evening while she was working in the day, and then it often switched. Joel: Wow. Rahkeem: At a certain point in time, she was able to get enough stability with her work that this wasn't an issue. Later when I returned back to high school, though for some time it was definitely well a lot extra to do that others wouldn't have to worry about at that time. Joel: So what was the catalyst to get you back into school? What sort of events played out? Rahkeem: I have a couple of different people to thank for that. I made friends with an incredible group of people that age in my life that we're around the same age. We all had our own thing that we were dealing with in life, and they really encouraged me to go back to school around 17, 18 years old. And so that was Juan. I had an amazing mom of a friend who also encouraged me too, and of course my mom who actually went through the process of getting it all done and making sure that I was returning back to school. So, I have a really good group of people, both friends and family that encouraged me to go back to school when I was 17. Just about 18 years old. Chad: So your mom, she was obviously having schedule, not really scheduling issues, she was having employer issues, right? Rahkeem: Yeah. Chad: So what do you know about that experience other than it rocked your life and obviously her life as well? What can you tell us more about that experience for her? What could you actually see? What was your experience through her? Rahkeem: Yeah, that's a really a great question. When I think about it, I... She was already out of the house in the morning when I was awake. So she needed to be at work at 6 o'clock in the morning. And the way that the public transportation... Well, it just takes an hour to get there. [chuckle] If you were to do it by public transportation, we didn't have a car. And so for her to be on a bus for nearly an hour, she had to walk to the bus stop, get in the bus. It just took 90 minutes for her to get on the bus in the morning. So she left around 4:30. So, in the morning, it was just... It was completely up to me and whatever I wanted to do. And what she instructed me to do too, at that time, which was to bring my little brother to school. Rahkeem: It was just, it was all up to me. And there was no one looking over my shoulder to make sure I got to school. What I'm getting to is that given the time... So if you're working an 8-hour shift and you get your standard 1 hour, which is typically unpaid, especially with wage work, you're at work now for 9 hours, then you have an hour to and from work. 'Cause it's several miles away, she doesn't have a car. So, now you're spending for earning 8 hours, now you're spending close to 11 to 12 hours just to do that one job because you don't have the resource to buy a car and you're taking the public transportation. I guess that it's also to say too, it's hard for me to tell you exactly all the things that she was working through and the feelings and emotions, and thoughts that she was dealing with to see her son go through this, go like drop outta high school and it's because she was working. She wasn't in the house. And then, eventually I was going to work myself in the evening and including going to night school for my high school diploma in the end. Joel: So this does have a happy ending. And most people would say you're a very unlikely candidate to attend an Ivy League school. Rahkeem: Yeah. Joel: Let alone even maybe even have that on your radar. Talk about the process of considering an Ivy League school applying, getting in, what that was like. That seems like the best hallmark story ever. From your perspective, how did that play out? Rahkeem: Yeah. Yeah, it worked out. It played out very well. So I went back to high school when I was 17, two months away from becoming 18. I went to a night school program that allowed you to get the full credit for that course, if you're passing the final exam. And so even though I had only gone to high school for a year, I was able to finish the last 3 years of school in a single year. [laughter] [applause] Rahkeem: 'Cause I would clear these 65 final exams [laughter], and in fact, I actually got a, on some of the state exams, I had scored the highest in the school in both the night and day programs. And so I still had that working well for me. But I had this experience not going to school for so long. It became, I'd say clear to me that even at 18, that education was going to be the only way for me to get out of my current circumstance, my situation, and I really poured myself completely into it when I was younger. [music] Outro: You can find more episodes of Voices, the Chad and Cheese Podcast series devoted to stories and opinions of industry leaders by subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts or just visit chadcheese.com.

It’s helpful to check the pulse of the recruitment industry from time-to-time. It’s especially useful when the company rep who comes on the show has a newsletter called The Pulse. That’s why we brought industry veteran Michael Woodrow, CEO at Aspen Tech Labs, on the podcast. With over 120K source sites and 9M jobs in their kitty, Michael is able to speak from a position of deep understanding about the labor markets. We discuss job openings, popular trends (ChatGPT alert!), just how bullish Michael is on ZipRecruiter and whether or not a hard or soft landing is on the offing. Tune in and get smarter. Mike's last interview - Woody's Google for Jobs LOVE/HATE 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, 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, ask your parole officer. What's up, kids? You're listening to the Chad & Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman, joined us always, the Dr. Dre to my Snoop Dogg, Chad Sowash is in the house. And we welcome Michael Woodrow, President at Aspen Tech Labs. Michael, welcome back to the show. It's been a minute. Mike Woodrow: Hi guys. How's it's going? Joel: Doing well. Doing well. Those listeners who don't know you or are new in the last four years, tell them about Michael Woodrow. Mike Woodrow: So, yeah, it's Micheal Woodrow, President of Aspen Tech Labs. What Aspen Tech Labs does is we kind of power the back of the Internet job postings, the backbone. We move a lot of jobs from company sites directly to our about 300 customers, job boards, advertising platforms, etcetera. So we collect job postings daily, or more often, kind of clean them up and move them into platforms like ZipRecruiter and Dice and The Muse. Chad: Talk about you, Mike. Talk about you. You're in Cally right now. You're usually on the slopes in Aspen. Joel: Company headquartered in Aspen. Yeah, Mike has as a tough life. Mike Woodrow: I'm an executive recruiter by training. So I had an executive recruiting firm. I come from that background, so I kind of know what it takes to fill positions. I've filled hundreds of recruiting positions, senior positions. Still have involvement in a recruitment firm, but that's how I got into the space. And then in the early 2000s, I launched a little job board and used some older technology, and then in about 2005, re-launched it and met my former partner, who's Ukrainian guy. So there's a little Ukrainian story to Aspen Tech Labs, or actually a pretty big Ukrainian story to Aspen Tech Labs now. But that was, we launched Aspen Tech Labs back in 2007 as a job board platform, which we still have called JobMount. So we launched niche job boards for our customers, and then we got into the scraping business, the data collection business, probably in about 2010. Chad: Is that because you guys needed it or you had prospective clients? Mike Woodrow: Our customers were asking for it. Chad: Makes sense. Intro: They were like, "Yeah, all right, you launched this job board for me, I need jobs." And some job boards, or we like to say a lot of job boards, don't want those paid feeds. They want real jobs or they want specific jobs. So that's how we got into scraping, and then now we have about 25 people that we call spider-men and spider-women who do are scraping for us and keep track of all the data that comes in. We scrape about 130,000 companies every day, right now, in a 120 countries. Chad: Damn, that's a lot. Mike Woodrow: So that business started with a couple of customers saying, "Hey, can you scrape some jobs for us?" And we were like, "Okay, we'll figure that out," and now we collect that jobs data, and any kind of data, if you can collect it and normalize it, it's valuable today in 2023. And so we operate mostly in the job space, but we dabble a little bit in auto and in property. A little bit more than dabble in auto, but auto and property are two of our other verticals, actually, and healthcare. So we collect a lot of healthcare data too. So we're really good at collecting data, going back tomorrow, looking to see if anything's changed and then collect what's changed or aggregate it and normalize it. Joel: How many job board clients are on your software platform? How many job boards are you powering right now? Mike Woodrow: We have about 100 job board clients. Joel: Okay. Refresh my memory. The origin of that was like for SEO, I remember. Like have all your jobs search friendly and indexable. Am I right about that? It's been a while. Mike Woodrow: Yeah, that was, I used this older technology when I launched my first job board and I launched it, and nobody could find the jobs. They weren't out there. Joel: You weren't alone. Mike Woodrow: So that was a big piece of me moving over to this platform that now is JobMount, that the jobs are all very well organized and set up for Google to easily find them. Chad: Let's rehash a little bit of our last conversation, and kids, we'll have a link in the show notes on this one so you can listen to that one. But back in January of 2019, the three of us got together and we talked about some things that are still being talked about today. One of those being Google For Jobs. So there's been a huge change and shift, and will it be there, and will it go away? And then here as of late, we start to see that they're beta testing paid jobs. So your thought back then was that Google is going to be a force. Google For Jobs is going to be a force. The question is, today, do you think it's gonna be a force for good for the rest of the ecosystem? Joel: Or evil? Mike Woodrow: The ChatGPT thing is really interesting to see where that's going. Joel: Oh you jumped right into that, didn't you? Oh my God. Mike Woodrow: But it's certainly a big competitor that we didn't even think about back in 2019 about Google. But a friend of mine is a senior person at Google, and he tells me that Google cares about making it easy for people to find whatever they want on Google. They obviously make a lot of money doing that, but they wake up every morning thinking about, is it a good visitor experience for someone to come and find whatever they want; a restaurant, a job, a car, whatever? And so they're still very focused on that. So jobs fits into that. And one thing that we're seeing with them recently, I'm a big... I don't know about advocate. I'm bullish on Google For Jobs. I think it works really well. It's clean. If I were a company, and I say this all the time, make sure your jobs are getting on Google For Jobs. It's free clicks. Why pay Indeed if they're putting your jobs on Google For Jobs and your jobs aren't optimized? That's something, just it's easy to do. So I think it's super important. Mike Woodrow: I do think it's gonna be a good thing for the industry. People are putting... One thing that they're focused on these days is addresses. Most job posting surprisingly don't have street addresses, but Google wants to, between their mapping and between everything, they want the job postings to be very specific because people search on things like jobs near me or X jobs near me or something. So addresses is something that is super important and becoming more important. They're telling their most important partners, unfortunately, we're not one of them apparently, but they're telling some of our partners that you need to put street addresses on job postings. Joel: Is mapping coming, you think? Mike Woodrow: Yeah, so, man, if you think about it, you think someone would wanna say, "Hey, this is where I drive my kid to school," or, "This is where I do whatever. What jobs are gonna be near there?" Or, "What jobs are gonna be around?" And that technology should exist. So I think it's super interesting. The paid thing, I don't really think it's a big threat to the industry or anything, so I'm actually a little surprised that they're monetizing it, but they're trying to monetize it. There's no question that they're more serious about it. They've been doing updates to their algorithm. We follow really closely. They've been doing updates to their jobs algorithm about 3-4 times a year for the last two years. So they're on this. Joel: Why are you surprised they're monetizing it? Chad and I have been predicting it for about eight years now, like before the show started. Why are you surprised by that? They are a for-profit business, right? Mike Woodrow: Yeah, I don't know that it'll be super easy for them to monetize it, I guess, but maybe it will. I don't know. Joel: It's like Indeed in the early days. All I need is about a dozen clients to pay me a ton of money to get their jobs indexed or higher in the search rankings. They don't need a million clients. They need a few job boards. They already have LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter. They'll pay them a few million dollars a month, I would assume to have their jobs... Mike Woodrow: Yeah, I just don't know if that's gonna move... It's gotta be a big chunk of money to move the needle for Google, and so you're talking about, is there a $5 billion opportunity for them? I don't know, maybe. Chad: Well, which is why they got out of the APIs, what, the search APIs and Google Hire. They saw that the trajectory for Google Cloud in other aspects of business were just bigger, much bigger opportunity. So are you surprised they shut down those other two platforms and they kept this one going? Why do that? Why not just go ahead and keep search the way it is? But they can't make that kind of money if they're ejected out of this. Joel: You don't think the math nerds at Google believe that they can't make that kind of money? There are enough agencies, enterprise businesses and job boards. Chad: Did you think they thought about that when they built an applicant tracking system? Joel: Yeah, that was spaghetti at the wall. Clearly, Google For Jobs is a real business, they think, which is why they've launched a pay-per-click component to it. I think it's beyond the testing-and-see-what-happens phase. Mike Woodrow: Yeah, and I think also, if they can be successful, then maybe there's something they can do in autos or there's something they can do in some other verticals. I really thought that the Google For Jobs thing was really a keep using Google, come to Google for everything, jobs too. That's where I thought they were going with it. Chad: That makes sense. Yeah. Mike Woodrow: And that did make a lot of sense, but maybe they're trying to see if there's a big enough revenue opportunity, and then if there is, some of these other verticals, like I'm talking about autos, that'd be huge too. Chad: Does it just turn into more arbitrage though? As we're starting to cycle jobs through job board A to ZipRecruiter to Google For Jobs, has it just become a huge arbitrage game at this point? Mike Woodrow: You know, I've always been really negative on the arb game because the candidate experience is just so bad. Chad: It sucks. Oh, yeah. Mike Woodrow: And so we have a good thing in our industry, why screw it up? And so I've always been against the arb piece. It's not that easy to arb, I don't think the Google side. I think it's just the ads are expensive and so it's tougher. I think they're smart about taking a big piece of whatever they do, and so the way the arb works in our industry is there's 20 ¢, 25 ¢ here, 30 ¢ here, and there's people who can kind of scrape a little bit off the top and it works. I think with Google, it's harder to do that. Chad: Any more Google jokes? I'm gonna step to StepStone next. Joel: Go to StepStone. Chad: Okay, so last show we also talked about Europe and about StepStone. Were you surprised that StepStone bought Appcast? And if so, are you surprised what they've done with Appcast thus far? Mike Woodrow: Yeah, StepStone was very open that they were looking for a US opportunity, and they were looking all around, kicking a bunch of tires and everything, looking for a US opportunity. And I don't know the numbers or anything, but I would imagine that Appcast has been a big win for them. Again, like I said, I don't know, the numbers but Appcast numbers have to be down because Amazon was advertising just crazy for a year, a couple of years, and most of that was on the Appcast platform, and they've pulled back really significantly on that. But I think it's a great business. I think the StepStone guys were smart. A whole bunch of their businesses are our clients all over the world, our customers all over the world, Sun Group, Totaljobs, PNet in South Africa, all these are StepStone businesses, so they've got businesses kind of all over. Joel: Did they leave money on the table though? A lot of people think they sold for a little too cheaply. Mike Woodrow: Appcast? Joel: Yeah. $72 million, I think was the number. Mike Woodrow: I think had Appcast knew what was gonna happen with COVID and advertising and everything like that, sure, but... Joel: Hindsight? Mike Woodrow: $72 million for a relatively small business is a good number. Joel: It'll buy a lot of beer. Mike Woodrow: Yeah. Yeah. Chad: Well, it's interesting... Mike Woodrow: Yeah, so I think those guys did okay. We don't have to worry about them. Chad: I think it's interesting StepStone has retracted out of France. We started to see some chinks in the armor. Totaljobs, they're going through some changes. I think they're preparing for IPO. So there's some big changes, I think, happening at StepStone. Do you think we will see Appcast start to finally gain some traction from a usage standpoint in Europe? Because the US is one thing. Europe is an entirely different ball game. Mike Woodrow: I don't think I have a good perspective on that. You're right, it is. It's completely different. The UK, is kind of a solid, really established market, and then the rest of Europe is just a little bit piecemeal. But yeah, Appcast has not taken hold in Europe as strongly, but I know they're working on it. I know they're working on it. They're definitely focused on it. And I think their business model makes sense. Chad: It's kind of hard for them though, because their business model on how they actually, they won, let's just say, programmatic early, was to be the rails for agencies, for programmatic and performance-driven advertising. So they powered all of the agencies and then they were bought by StepStone. So at this point, it's kind of like, will they or won't they? You've got the RecruitX who was, obviously they bought KRT. You've got Pando that's out there. You have now all these competitors who could perspectively take advantage of some of the StepStone IPO focus, more focused on that than the actual market itself. Mike Woodrow: Yeah, Appcast is super focused on direct customers. They started with the agencies, but then moving over, and like you said before, getting the top customers, starting there first and taking that agency piece out of the equation, I think they're gonna be successful. Chad: So that didn't work for Monster and it didn't work for Careerboat. It hamstrung them. What makes you think it's gonna work for Appcast, to be able to go direct to client instead of through the agencies? Mike Woodrow: Well, yeah, I guess I don't have the full answer. I'm a big fan of Appcast. I think these guys are smart. I think that they're trying to make sure that the visitor experience is high quality. They're trying to work on things that some of the other guys don't care so much about it, and I think that over time, they're gonna build share. Chad: Last year we also talked about ZipRecruiter, and you were very bullish on them. And you said that pretty much their brut force ability is driving their success, but that brut force seems to have gone limp over the last couple of years. What the hell's happening at ZipRecruiter? Mike Woodrow: They are super focused and have been super focused on SMB, so the middle piece of the market. So they had their layoffs, Indeed had their layoffs. Once you're a public company, the game changes. And so I'm thankful, I would assume you guys are thankful you don't have to report quarterly, I'm thankful that I don't have to report quarterly, and I'll always be up over last year. Joel: My wife wants weekly reports, by the way, which can be more brutal than public markets, but that's a different show. Mike Woodrow: Yeah, so I think once you go public and you have quarterly reporting responsibilities, the game changes and you just really have to dial it down. But we work super closely with those guys. I'm still bullish on ZipRecruiter. They're smart guys. I think their advertising is pretty cool. Joel: Do you own shares? Do you own the stock? Mike Woodrow: I don't. Joel: Okay. So not that bullish. Mike Woodrow: I just feel like I'm long enough into some of our customers that I don't really need to own their shares. I've got a bigger stake than some shareholders do. Yeah, so I think to have a direct pipe into Google and some places like this, they're working on some really cool things, and I think they care about the visitor experience. I know they care about the visitor experience. I know for sure they do because we've got a product called Jobs Control, that we follow clicks through to see where they land and they're a customer on that product, so they care. They wanna know. They distribute their jobs. They wanna know what the situation is for the visitors, and that's rare. Chad: So talking about scraping, talking about labor market information and getting the pulse on what the hell is happening right now, you guys scrape... You've been scraping data forever. How long have you been warehousing that? How long have you been being able to analyze that? What's the whole back story and how much data warehousing do you have? Mike Woodrow: So we started collecting data for our customers and configuring it for them. So if we scraped for Dice, they want the data delivered this way, if we scraped for ZipRecruiter, they want it delivered it this way. So we weren't very smart about it in the beginning. We just collected it, configured it and send it on. And then we realized we've got this huge pool of data because not only are we scraping Amazon and Walmart, but customers kind of come and go. Like this month, for instance, we added... I just looked at the report. We get a daily report, we added about 430 new scrapes and about 330 scripts were cancelled, so just customer flow. That's pretty normal. And so there's very few months that are down, so we're a few down months recently, which I think is not a big surprise with the industry. So there's always scrapes being added and scrapes being subtracted. And so what we decided to do was take all these scrapes that were being cancelled and continue scraping them and collecting the data. Now we've got this data, but we had eight fields for Dice and 10 fields we were collecting for ZipRecruiter and everything, and we looked at the data and we were like, "God, this is a mess." Mike Woodrow: So it took about two years to really figure out how we could aggregate it. Because you think of all these job postings are the same, but they're really not. They're looking at things differently. There's a couple extra fields. Somebody's adding an industry classification, someone's adding this, whatever. And so it took us a couple of years. We launched this big jobs data quality project, both for our customers and to aggregate and normalize the data. So that took a couple of years, and last year, in about the middle of 2022, we felt like we were at the point where, okay, we've got this data normalized and we can make some sense of it. And so that's where it all started. And we have some historical data going back further than that, but not too much further than the middle of last year. So now we're starting to build it and we have a big... Everything we do is AWS, Amazon Web Services. I'm a big advocate of those guys, and Amazon's a customer too. They have a job board called AWS Educate, so we work closely with those guys. Joel: Such a name dropper. Mike Woodrow: Right, you gotta throw out a couple of them. Chad: Smart man. Mike Woodrow: Google, Amazon. We have some good customers. Joel: Amazon, ZipRecruiter, I know all the famous people. Let's bring us back into 2023. The Pulse, you talked about it, a lot of data, a lot of things you guys are finding out. Give us a 30,000-foot view of the current state of employment and workforce issues. Chad: Date of the Union of Jobs. Mike Woodrow: Yeah. So we have Job Market Pulse. We're putting out quarterly reports and some other things like that. One thing that that we look at that's really interesting is we have all of the S&P 500 companies in our database. So it's easy to see, "Hey, what's going on with S&P 500 companies? Is that representative of the US or not?" Kind of think it is because it includes the Walmarts of the world and some of the big hiring companies, and then it includes Exxon and some of the Microsoft and companies like that. So back in November, they had about a million job postings out there available. And remember, all of our data comes directly from the company sites, not from job boards where maybe they're duplicating things or they're doing whatever. This is directly from the company site. Joel: Is that global or US? Just so I know. Mike Woodrow: So that's US. Joel: US? Okay. Mike Woodrow: The number I'm giving you is US, about a million jobs US in November, and now that total is dropped below 800,000 jobs. So that's a pretty big reduction in job counts. More than 20% since November, and now we're sitting here at the end of March. Joel: So what the Fed hopes to happen is happening ultimately. They want fewer... Mike Woodrow: Yeah. And so, I've been in this game for a long time, since the '90s, so my perspective really is that when employment was really ridiculously low, kitchens and everybody was short staff, okay? So everyone knows that, restaurants open four days a week, all that kind of stuff. Over the last six months, that has started to fill in, and I think that's why we're seeing very low numbers on new claims for unemployment, even though we're hearing about all these kind of layoffs. So all those positions started to kind of fill in and we're getting to the point where I think they're full. You hear about hiring is still challenging, but people have filled position. And now we've got all these IT and these kind of more senior level positions that were announced and that just takes six months or so to work their way through. Mike Woodrow: People get a couple months of pay, the big companies have to give 60 days I think, and then they pay a couple months after that. So we're still in that cycle that a lot of those people are still kind of in between, kind of working or not working whatever, and I think it's gonna be a soft landing. I really do. I think it's gonna be a soft landing and we'll end up somewhere around 4%, 4.5% unemployment, which is I think good for the country and it's certainly good for our industry. Joel: And something that's good for my life is that Taco Bell is the number one employer in the polls. So that means a lot of people are still going to Taco Bell, which is good for me. I wanted to point that out. How much of it is... All right. You mentioned ChatGPT, all these tech people are being unemployed, but we're seeing hundreds of new apps being built around ChatGPT, companies hiring AI folks. Obviously, it's gonna be a huge thing with all the big guys; Google, Facebook, Amazon. They're all gonna get in this game. How much impact are you seeing job postings for ChatGPT, job postings for AI, what are you seeing in the polls in terms of AI? Mike Woodrow: AI is you, guys have been at conferences, people have been talking about AI in our space for the last, I don't know, five or 10 years. Joel: Yes. Mike Woodrow: You don't see that much kind of coming into play. But I'll tell you what's some things that are really happening. Now, one is ChatGPT, the date is old, right? Joel: Yeah, '21. Mike Woodrow: September, 2021, and that'll come quicker and quicker and quicker. Will it get to real time, what we call realtime, one or two days old? I'm not sure how long it's gonna take to get there. That's a lot of data and processing that. So I think, for our industry, I'm not sure that it's gonna be a huge, huge deal. Here's something that's super cool though. So you ready for me to drop a few names here? Chad: Oh, let's do it. Here we go. Here we go. Mike Woodrow: So my daughter's an AI PhD student at Stanford. Chad: Oh, hello. Mike Woodrow: So serious stuff, right? She's here with me this week and she was coding and she has an extension on her computer that Stanford has access to from ChatGPT. She starts coding and it tries to finish her line of code for her, because it knows what she's doing. Seriously, I watched it. And after she does it, she'll run it through and it'll say, "Hey, here's a better way to do this." And I use this example with her, I'm like, "Is it like Google translate that if you don't really know what you're saying, you're not really sure what's coming back?" And she's like, "Exactly." But if you know what you're doing, it's telling you a better way to do something. So she's actually making a presentation to our team tomorrow about how they can use ChatGPT to be quicker with their coding and more efficient with their coding. So that's some cool stuff. SFX: Shall we play a game. Mike Woodrow: That's being used now. That's not like next year, next month Elon Musk says. Joel: So bring that into our space. Don't you think... Chad: Well, that's on demand QA/QC. That's what's happening right now, right? Joel: Yeah. Mike Woodrow: Yeah. Chad: But that could literally be taken over after it's been trained enough. Mike Woodrow: Yeah, her argument is, at this point, you still need someone who's smart enough to see what's happening. Is it doing what you want, what you really wanted it to do, or just what it thinks you wanted it to do? So that's cool. And so it's already being used and this is just literally a Chrome extension. Joel: Yeah. So bring this into our space, Mike. I mean, job postings, why couldn't... Same thing. I'm starting to write a job posting and it starts writing it for me. I mean, what vendors, what businesses in our space are gonna be disrupted by what your daughter's seeing on the ground? Mike Woodrow: It'll certainly make it easier to write a job posting and things that are important like, "Hey, could you check job posting for diversity and inclusion?" Joel: Rejection letter. Mike Woodrow: They'll say, "Hey, here's a better way to say this", or, "Here's this." The thing that I think is super interesting is it's easy to generate content. So Google is, the search engines and everyone are the really big on original content. So what is original content gonna be like starting a month ago? Joel: Well, there'll be new tools and there already are that make it sound more organic. They'll take the AI wrote this and they'll rewrite it and AI can't... It'll be like this game of Whack-a-Mole. Mike Woodrow: There's already tools that can say, "Did AI write this?" Joel: Yeah, and there are tools that will rewrite the AI, so that AI can't say that AI wrote it. [laughter] Mike Woodrow: Yeah, exactly. Chad: So, a question, are companies like Textio in mortal danger? Joel: Yes. Chad: I mean, why do I need to spend the kind of money that Textio wants me to spend when I can just hook up a Chrome extension and and have a nice day? I mean, is it pretty much their day in the sun is over or they just need to sell as soon as humanly possible? Mike Woodrow: They're gonna be under pressure, but good companies adapt to new technology. So if they can help people use AI to do a better job writing and not instead of having a 1000 customers have 10,000 and charge them half as much, I don't know. I mean that's what I would be thinking about if I were them. Joel: Michael's so diplomatic. Chad: He is. He's bright and shiny too. It's like, I'm happy just talking to him. I don't get this just having a regular conversation with Joel, Mike. Thanks, man. [laughter] Mike Woodrow: I mean, what about you guys? ChatGPT is gonna create podcast. Joel: This is our show, Mike. This is our show. [laughter] Mike Woodrow: What if they created a podcast that were actually funny? No, I'm just kidding. [laughter] Joel: Oh, damn. Chad: That's a very good question. We already have our voices cloned by Veritone, so being able to actually generate the content, and then, yeah. Joel: You literally could do our show without us at this point in multi-languages, which is crazy. Chad: Five different languages at this point. So at the end of the day, when we're talking about the actual job polls, what's the biggest insight that you saw out of this information over the past, let's say, three months? Mike Woodrow: The biggest insights that we see and the thing that we're getting the most customer attention from is from the wage benchmarking. And we say wage benchmark, it's who's hiring and what are they offering? Because the recruiters don't really have control over the pricing, the wages, but they do have input into, "Hey, we're not filling these positions." And one of the reasons is because Taco Bell is paying $2 more in our market than than we are at Walmart or wherever. So yeah, I think that's the most interesting and that's something that's still evolving, or 20% States are starting to put the regulations in, and you guys, at least I say I know this, candidates wanna see it. They wanna see what what it is. Chad: Yes, of course. Mike Woodrow: And I think recruiters really want candidates who really want the job to apply. So, even though companies don't necessarily wanna post it, the Chambers of Commerce and everyone are kind of fighting that in each State, but it's coming. And I think that's the most interesting data I think that's out there. Joel: Mike, I wanna get your take on remote. The world has changed since we last spoke and remote jobs have obviously been a big topic on our show. Talk about, are the big metros dying? Are job postings moving elsewhere around the country? Are multiple postings for the same job being posted in different areas and is that skewing the actual number of open jobs? How many jobs do you see out there that actually are remote and really promote the fact that they are remote? Talk about that. Mike Woodrow: Yeah, so we track the remote job postings and very few jobs actually put remote in the job title, less than 5%. And part of that's because you need to have a location for a job. It's just the way that the old school systems are set up. You have to put a city in or something. So that's part of that, that's why they pop the remote up in the job title. But Apple and the financial services, companies want people back in the office. So my son works for a company called Dataminr and they collect breaking news from social media. It's a big company in New York. It's like a thousand people or whatever. But they have a whole bunch of people who are fully remote forever. So I really think it's gonna be company by company. But I think Google's got people in the office, what, three days a week. They're having a little more trouble in the US than they're having in other locations. Like in France, they're in the office three days a week. That's just, everybody's in the office. Mike Woodrow: And so I think people are gonna come back into the office. I do, I think they are. I don't think it's gonna be five days a week, but I do think people will want to come back into the office, and companies, we haven't talked about the Ukraine thing at all, but when people aren't in the same place, it's a little harder to collaborate and we're constantly building new products and everything and good companies are doing that. Being together makes it easier. And just kind of you hear about these companies who are saying, "Oh yeah, we're gonna meet once a quarter in wherever and we're gonna bring everybody in from all over and do that," I don't know. That's pretty expensive and that seems like it's not really practical to do that over the long run. I think people are gonna come back in the office on some kind of a three day week basis and that's gonna become the new normal over time. That's just my perspective. Chad: So, real quick, talk about Ukraine, because you did have and probably still currently have workers that are in Ukraine. I mean, how did that disrupt business? It had to have because it disrupted their lives. How did that disrupt and and how did you at that point start to work toward a solution for them? Mike Woodrow: We have an amazing team and we kind of call it family. So there's 60 people in our company. Right before the war started, we moved a handful of people out to Portugal and Poland because I was worried about power and internet. That's what I was worried about, and that's what most of us were worried about. And then obviously this happened. So we have 45 people still in Ukraine and the people are amazing. Chad: Wow. Mike Woodrow: We have not lost a single customer over the war. So nobody was disrupted. People needed something to do other than worry about the war. So our people decided to work. And so that was awesome for our customers and for the company. The people are fatigued now. The people who are still there are really tired, really tired of this, and I could imagine it. Joel: Yeah, of course. Mike Woodrow: One of my guys is having his first baby, his wife's having her first baby in a few days, lives by an anti-missile battery. So that thing's firing at night. Joel: Geez. Mike Woodrow: Just something you just don't think about. So the people are amazing, customers have not been disrupted because of, there we go, with AWS, oh, here's another plug I'll put, Starlink is fricking awesome. Absolutely awesome. I'm not a huge Elon Musk guy. Joel: And I've got Elon on speed dial right now. Mike Woodrow: That stuff... Joel: Elon's coming out to Aspen next week. Mike Woodrow: That stuff works. And we've got a handful of those things that we put in place after the war started. So we got equipment, some of it was delivered to Ukraine, some was Portugal, we moved over to Ukraine and that stuff works great. So, resilient people and I think we did a pretty good job as soon. As a war started, we told everyone, "Move wherever you want. Take with you whoever you need and we'll pay for it until further notice." So thanks to our customers for supporting all that. But that took the pressure off I think. People felt like, if I'm staying, I'm here 'cause I wanna be, not because I have to stay and I can't figure out what to do. So yeah, so it's been tough, but the people are great and we built a good company and I think, hopefully we reward the people so that they feel like it's a quid pro quo. [applause] Joel: That's Michael Woodrow, everybody. President at Aspen Tech Labs. Michael, for our listeners that wanna connect with you or learn more, where would you send them? Mike Woodrow: Just mike@aspentechlabs.com or as Chad knows even better, at lana@aspentechlabs.com. [laughter] Chad: Lana! Mike Woodrow: Yeah, big shout out to Lana. Joel: And with that, I'm headed to Taco Bell. Chad, another one is in the can. Thank God I didn't throw my dockers away from the '90s 'cause I'm going back to the office. We out. Chad: We out. Outro: Thank you for listening to, what's it called, a podcast, the Chad, the Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know, and yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one cheddar; blue, nacho, Pepper Jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Anywho, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. It's so weird. We out.

Al Smith, CTO at iCIMS, is back on the podcast recording from his front-row seat to the AI race, he talks ChatGPT, chatbots deciding to compete with applicant tracking systems like his, what we can expect from the upcoming INSPIRE conference (icims.com) (new CEO on stage alert!) and why, exactly, he dislikes the term “ATS” so much. Al is always smart, candid, and transparent - almost like he has no filter at all - so this is a must-listen if you want an honest breakdown of the current state of tech at his company and the industry at large. 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 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. Joe Cheeseman: Oh yeah, if you don't know, ask your senator. What's up, everybody? It's your favorite guilty pleasure, AKA, The Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host Joel Cheeseman, joined as always, the Little John Demi Robin Hood, Chad Sowash. Chad Sowash: What's up? Joe Cheeseman: And today we welcome Al Smith, CTO at iCIMS to the podcast. Al, welcome. Al Smith: Thanks so much, guys. Nice to see you again as always. Chad Sowash: Welcome back. Joe Cheeseman: Welcome back. So for our listeners that don't know you, all three or four of them, give us your Twitter bio, and we'll get to the hard-hitting Q&A after that. Al Smith: Yeah, real easy. So Al Smith, CTO at iCIMS. Been with iCIMS over eight years. And I've got responsibility for our product management, engineering, cloud-hosting teams, and a great lover of technology that helps people find jobs. Chad Sowash: Eight years. He just said eight years. Listen. Joe Cheeseman: I was drinking out of my iCIMS YETI. The ice was smashing against the lips. Sorry. Chad Sowash: So within the eight years that you've been there, what's changed. What's been the biggest change in our industry, not iCIMS? I'll get to that one in a second. Al Smith: It's funny, some things have not changed at all. And I knew nothing about this industry before I joined. To be candid with you, when the recruiter called me about joining iCIMS, I said, "Hiring software? Isn't this death, taxes sucks?" Like what could possibly be new." Obviously, I was poorly educated on this industry. I think I joined in 2015, and our industry hadn't yet pivoted to really understand mobile sufficiently. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Al Smith: And I think as I think of today, everything is de facto mobile, mobile, properly mobile, I think. And we've moved away from apps largely. Just mobile adaptive is being just bread and butter. I think the impact of... Everybody wanted to use the term big data. I did too. It's real. We benchmarked ourselves a lot, and I think a lot of our customers are hungry for that data to try to help understand the dynamic of their own business and what it could be, and it's a hard job. Al Smith: Now what hasn't changed, it's kinda crazy when you look at it, is I think it's still a crazy fragmented industry with hundreds of vendors playing different roles. I think when we look at our customers that are hiring... Buying and hiring software, we see customers a year buying best-of-breed or they're buying from their ATM vendor, and I don't think that's changed a heck of a lot. The numbers switch back and forth depending on which analyst you talk to. But I think at the other today, we do these surveys, and I know a lot of people do, how many tools does a talent acquisition team use? And I don't think numbers move the needle a lot. They use 20 to 25 to 30 tools depending on how big their scope is. I think what's changed for me and for us is we offer now more and more of those tools from one vendor, which hopefully in the big picture is really helpful for our customers. It's kind of the mission we've been on to say how do we make it easier, better, more of? But it's a hard job, folks, doing this. Joe Cheeseman: Can we clarify the death of apps comment? Are we talking about just our space? Are you digging the grave for the entire app ecosystem? Al Smith: It's interesting. I think a couple of technology changes that early on everybody was writing phone-specific, platform-specific apps. If you go 2013, there were six operating systems for mobile people were trying to write apps. Then we were writing for Android and Apple, and that's still happening. But I think there's a lot of movement. I know we've moved and other people have moved to like a React Native kind of implementation. We use React as part of our UI technology, you can generate a Native app for iOS and Android off of that, and therefore is less about going to the app store also, that kind of thing. And then mobile adaptive web experiences when you don't need the extra data help that an app can give you. I'd see a pretty strong trend that more people are focusing on web adaptive... Mobile adaptive experiences on a web interface 'cause it's easier. Joe Cheeseman: Yeah. So you mentioned 2013, I think you said there, and I'm gonna go back in the past just a little bit. You guys had... Chad Sowash: Here we go. Joe Cheeseman: The INSPIRE Conference last year, which was just November, and you've decided to just flip it and have another one like six months later. Al Smith: It was so good. Joe Cheeseman: Yeah. It was so good. Al Smith: Yeah. Joe Cheeseman: But a little... A few things have changed in the world since November. But I wanna go back to something you said in your presentation. I don't know if you said you hate the term ATS or something along those lines. Tell us why so hateful on the term ATS, and what should we be using instead? Al Smith: I don't think that I hate ATS. I think you put those words in my mouth, and I accept them. I was complaining that a lot of our... A lot of the analyst community particularly, but also even some of the market at large have a hard time seeing us as more than an ATS, and I was talking about iCIMS specifically. When I joined, they had three products. It was an amazing company that had been on a wonderful run. But we're now a portfolio of 20 plus products, and I think we do a disservice... And look, some of this is marketing brand and other things, but we do a disservice just lumping it all to say, "Hey, iCIMS is an ATS company." We're really focused on trying to address all the parts of the hiring process, the top of funnel, the attract and engagement experiences. Al Smith: Yes, we continue to remain really strong, I think, on the higher part, where ATS is still important. I still love my child called ATS. And then we've expanded our lane a bit. Last year, we introduced an opportunity marketplace around internal mobility and advancement. And for me, I think of all these things as a complete life cycle is what we're trying to bring to our customers and solutions on the candidate and employee experience. So I was whining. You called me out on the whine. That's fair, that's fair. And I was whining that says, "Please think of us... I need your help. Think of us as more than just an ATS." Joe Cheeseman: Cheese knows a whine when it sees it, you know what I'm saying there? Chad Sowash: It's really amorphous. It's kind of like this nebulous relic of... I mean, applicant tracking system back in the ResumeX days. I mean, this is back in what shit? What? '98. That was an applicant tracking system. The ResumeX of yesterday is not the iCIMS of today. Not to mention, if you even try to bump up different, "applicant tracking systems or what's siloed as an applicant tracking system", the capabilities, the performance, everything is different from brand to brand to brand. Al Smith: Yeah. Chad Sowash: I've wanted to get rid of this term ATS 'cause it is a relic. It is a very small portion of what you guys actually do. Although the hard part is, HR is slow to adopt, talent acquisition is slow to adopt. And trying to teach them a new term to be able to fit yourself into is just a marketing nightmare. Al Smith: Yeah. Like I'd give kudos to Colin Day who founded the company, and he'll tell you, I'm sure if we called Colin now, he'd say, look, it may not be sexy, but everybody needs an ATS and guess what? It's still the foundation of the hiring process. You know it is. And we invest a lot in... Chad Sowash: Recordkeeping. Al Smith: Yeah. Well, look, we invest a lot in it to constantly make it hopefully have more and more utility, I think is the right outcome as opposed to just being recordkeeping. So I don't hate it. Joel, I don't hate the term. I just wanna be known as more than that. That's all. Joe Cheeseman: And unfortunately, Colin is retired in Fiji, so the time zones really wouldn't work up if we did call him. Chad Sowash: I think he's in Bora Bora this month. Joe Cheeseman: Yeah. If we called him right now, he's probably asleep, he's probably asleep. Al Smith: He's gonna be listening to your podcast every day, come on. Joe Cheeseman: On the beach, yes, in a Speedo, obviously because that's the best way to listen to us. Al Smith: He did not do that. Joe Cheeseman: So going back to November again, a little thing called ChatGPT launched in November. A few things have changed since then. A lot of companies have embraced it. I just wanna get your overall take on ChatGPT and its impact on our industry. Al Smith: Yeah. So as I mentioned, I renamed my dog GPT. All kidding aside, I don't have a dog right now. My daughter does. The hype is crazy. Although, look, we're certainly doing research and experimenting with it. I'll come back and kind of lay out how I see it. I do think it's gonna make a huge impact in our business in a lot of different ways. And that's important to not ignore it or put your head in the sand and say, "Hey, I don't have to participate." It's gonna be a serious impact in a couple ways. Some I hope for the real good positive. We've spent a lot of time building a responsible AI program, working really hard at a code of conduct, human-led, explainable, reversible, transparent, all these things that we think matter. Al Smith: GPT today doesn't represent a lot of those aspects. And I think some of the people who are worried about it may be appropriately so is the explainability, is like, mmm, that kinda thing. That said, look even with all the careful work we've done, the number of companies at scale, I think that's the key word, not the early adopters, but companies at scale have been really slow to make decisions to use AI knowingly using AI as part of a decision process. I will tell you the approaches that we've taken on AI in general. I'll come back to ChatGPT, is I think AI can do a hell of a lot of good for our industry, solving problems that are beyond human scale. And I think we're just too ready to ignore these things that are beyond human scale. Al Smith: So DE&I problems, there's a lot of stuff that goes into the news around, "Hey, new AI model has bias and somebody's not getting a job that you get a job." Well, that's good that that's getting the news. That's a bad outcome. But if we look at the situation where you flip it on its head and you say, well, look in a normal hiring process, first of all, if you have a diversity plan, how diverse is your company to start? Do you know that? If you don't, can we set goals? By the way, when you start hiring, how diverse is the top of the funnel? Are you diverse to begin with? And do you lose diversity as the funnel proceeds? And if so, do you also keep track trending? Are you making improvements on your goals? And are you looking in the right places for diverse people? Al Smith: Are you using technologies that help you hire on potential, not on experience only? That is a lot of our AI program, and it compliments a lot for companies that are trying to solve the problem of scale and complexity and all these things that the human can't track. The other one, I think, is it's kinda crazy. We have employers that have... You have 1000 open jobs for a certain position and you're fortunate and our technology helps us, I get it. You got 25,000 candidates in an hour or in a day. In a day, you picked up 25,000 applicants. First of all, how does your team who's trying to hire 1000 people, how do they find the right 2000 people to talk to to make a decision on, number one? And most of the companies that have this dynamic, they're B2C companies. And so those people applying to your company are also your customers. How do you ensure you give them a good experience and telling them you're not giving them the job so that they don't think poorly of your brand and hurt those things? I think too often we're ignoring this stuff. This is where AI shines. Chad Sowash: We have for years. Even before the scalability issue that we're seeing now, we just... The black hole has existed. You have clients today that they don't address the black hole issue. This perspectively could help do that. Al Smith: Totally. And look, I will tell you categorically, when we talk about generative AI which we've been piloting and working with for a while, there's a lot of places in the different workflows that the hiring process represents, where this has a lot of great potential and we're certainly gonna use it. To me overall, it's got the highest potential on being a productivity aid, right? And we know everywhere we help productivity, there's a big plus for our employers and even for the candidates and employees who are going through this journey. I think from my perspective, we've been playing around with it for a number of months right now on, hey, don't take this the wrong way, but 90% of all job descriptions are a pile of poo. Can we have better job descriptions that actually better support... Joe Cheeseman: You can say shit on this podcast, Al, just so you know. Al Smith: I know, but my mother might come smack me, so I... And candidly, so are most resumes. They're pretty, pretty poor. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Al Smith: So helping people communicate better, the employer and the person looking for the job, can the technology give you a better starting point? Make you more effective at doing it and communicate better? Yes. Think about all the things that are in our talent cloud. I'm doing a marketing automation campaign to recruit candidates. Can I write better letters and emails and texts and things that better communicate the likelihood that you're gonna do it and give it to you in a way that I give you a starting point, you finish it? Because again, human-led, no black box, bing, here's the answer. We do... When we send you a job offer, can we give a better offer letter? When you're onboarding, can we give you better explanations of the tasks you're being given? There's just so many places where we have content that relies on kind of either lowest common denominator of template libraries or the talent of the individuals and their experience to write good content. I'm hoping this can improve that significantly. Joe Cheeseman: Are you talking about current products, future projects? It sounds like you're talking about some native things that iCIMS is gonna be building or has built. Talk about that. Al Smith: Yeah. One of the things I've decided to do, particularly with this technology, is introduce a bit of a playground where we can open up the lab for our customers to come in and play with the technology before we productize. We haven't released the ChatGPT specifically or generative AI in our products yet. We have a really robust AI platform that does a wonderful job at the notion of match and all the permutations of match, whether it's job to person, person to job, person to person, et cetera. And we've been using that AI also as part of helping us solve problems of human scale like, "Hey, we've got a half a billion profiles. When we go through there and look at people's job experiences, how do we actually identify a good skills cloud or skills taxonomy to help people make better decisions about career pathing and what skills you need and where are your gaps?" Same thing, when how do we normalize, look at how people name jobs. If I just look at our own company, how many different titles I have for the same job across departments, it's crazy. Al Smith: Those are problems of human scale our industry just sucks at. And so I'm using AI in solving a lot of those problems that, again, category is beyond human scale. Here's a great... We took... I know in one of our runs, we took about 250,000 different job titles and distilled them down to a common 20,000 jobs. And that's a jobs taxonomy that we can now do skills matching against and then help people with career pathing decisions. So that's in current product. What you'll see me do is open up a bit of a playground where you can play with the GPT products and other generative AI things that we're looking at. And I'd like to actually feedback and here's what I'm more interested in before I just say, "Hey, it's in our products". I don't know about the other vendors out there, and I know a lot of 'em have rushed to market with a new product named with that. Chad Sowash: Oh, you don't say. Al Smith: I do say, but... And I'm sure the early adopters will jump on that, but the regulatory challenges that I see our customers struggling with around data privacy, around data residency, around AI fairness. Look, we just spent a lot of effort and a lot of time. I knew we would do well, but just New York City's new fairness and AI rule, now they just delayed enforcement again until I think July. But we were ready in January. We went through the audit. Yes, we came through well 'cause we knew the program we had built. But even with that, I can't tell you how many of my customers have just second guesses about saying, "Yes, I'm willing to turn it on." That's AI that is very explainable. There's clear audit trail on all of this that we provide. GPT is a bit different. So let's see. Chad Sowash: Here's one thing and I think we get it in our own way sometimes because we talk about it being explainable, but those companies don't give two shits about explaining it. They wanna defend it. Right? So it's about defendability and it's about going in and transparency, number one. I think one of the lessons that we have learned from ChatGPT is that transparency is the way forward. Not just because of GDPR, not just because of New York and California and all these states and metros that come up with new regulation, but because it's better for business. Look at ChatGPT explodes because I would say my opinion is because of the transparency and allowing users to taste it, touch it, feel it, and really play around with it knowing that it's not perfect. It almost feels like it has to be perfect before we allow anyone in to our gates. And then when we do that, we only allow salespeople to demo that. Is that gonna change? Al Smith: Yeah. Look, that's a really great point you're making. I don't think any of these technologies will get to the point that they're perfect before you can adopt, I think. I think what you've got to ask yourself is, again, around that notion of a productivity aid, does this give me a better 80%, 90% starting point and take a lot of the undifferentiated work I'm required to do off my plate? If the answer to that is yes, I think you've hit the tipping point of adoption for a lot of people and a lot of users. And that's how I'm looking at it, at least. I will say one word of caution from at least Al Smith being the maybe overly cautious, I'll take that criticism. What's unclear to me, and particularly on OpenAI's public website, is when you put your information into it, who owns the IP that was generated? Do they own it or do you own it? Chad Sowash: Yes, they currently do unless you're using, I think, the API. There's a different set of terms and conditions. Al Smith: Right. And I just wanna put that word of warning. For my own organization, look, we're licensing, we have long-term relationships with all the cloud vendors, and Microsoft clearly has made the big investment. And so I can license with clear ownership of IP through there. I will say, by the way, just a nod to Microsoft, as much as I'm shocked that they let go of their fairness in AI leader, and they've gone all in on this, I do think the notion though that they've introduced of Copilot, Chad, is exactly the right way to think about it. It's your Copilot, right? So it's helping you get rid of the undifferentiated work you're required to do to complete a task. And if it makes you faster, better, more consistent at that work, can you bring other skills to what you do? And I think I like that concept. I think they got that right. I saw somebody else already has turned their stuff Copilot as well. I think SeekOut or somebody. I can't remember, but... Joe Cheeseman: Chad is my co-pilot. [laughter] Al Smith: He takes care of the undifferentiated work for you and... Chad Sowash: Let's just talk about all the work. Let's just talk about that. Joe Cheeseman: I don't know what any of that means, Al. Alright. Look, you have a front row seat with your marketplace to what you've mentioned vendors and what they're doing. Are you seeing a rush to add features on ChatGPT? Are you guys putting up any guardrails on that? What are you seeing on the marketplace? Al Smith: Well, look in the marketplace, we're not reselling our partners' products. We're making them available, saying that they've been validated, working properly on our products using our APIs, and that we have mutual customers. So if you're trying to make a decision, it is truly a marketplace. These are vendors you should look at and make a decision for what the fit for you is. Yeah, look, there's a lot of noise. I haven't seen new, I haven't seen new products in our marketplace yet per se. Some of the people who we have coopetition with who do have a presence in our marketplace, I've seen some of their introductions. I think it is gonna be a rush. I think it's gonna be the hype cycles probably more extreme for the reasons you brought out, Chad. People can touch it with their own hands, if you will, and see the benefit and that helps. And look, as a tech guy, am I excited by that? Yes, I'm excited that we climb over our next level barrier hopefully to get people to want to consider what good things it can do for you. Al Smith: I think we just need a little bit of air to come out of the balloon so that we also know what bad things it could do for you. Let's face it, these large language models are trained on all the poo that sits in the internet. They try to clean it, but they're... Where I have really high hopes is in a private implementation that we would do or people like us, we're curating the data, we're cleansing the data, we're removing data that might actually might create bias in its behaviors. And then if we train it on a model, do I think it'll work really well? I do. I have really high hopes and expectations that it can be impactful. Chad Sowash: So we've talked to Ryan Steelberg, who is the CEO of Veritone, the guys who cloned our voices and we actually do the foreign podcasts through. Talk about scary shit. Or sexy, depending on who you are. We talked to Ryan Steelberg about this and he's talking about linked data models where you have the large language data models and then you have the domain specific so that when you are in the Chat environment or what have you, the system knows whether it's gonna be hitting off of large language or if it's gonna be hitting off of domain specific, but those are separated so that you don't have to worry about kind of like the clash of terms, what you were talking about earlier. Talk about that. Have you seen that? Is that something that you guys are looking to do? Al Smith: Yeah, we are. I mean, look, I think everybody's gonna end up here for a couple of reasons. You don't want these weird... At least in... Look, we're producing a class of products in a B2B model that you want predictability and expected behavior in everything we produce, right? That's really the definition for me of enterprise software, known state and expected behavior, right? But I don't run the risk that this thing starts, just going off the deep end and asking to marry me, right? That would be a bad outcome. So I think as they... As we get smarter about what are the guardrails you can implore, that's gonna be one of the techniques. Certainly curating the data that you train those domain-specific models with is one of the techniques. For me, it's not about having a specific model per customer, which I think is a mistake the AI industry made even in our space over the last bunch of years because it's unsustainable. If every customer has a separate model, I also need data scientists to be tech support, I need data scientists to be implementers. I can barely find enough data scientists to build and train models, let alone do the full life cycle of software products. Al Smith: So I've not done that. Sometimes again to... I understand the criticism and it's appropriate for things we can't do, but we'd rather build domain-specific models, I use your term, that are specifically... We know the state of the data it's being trained on. And just to be clear, if you're running a responsible AI program, you're also training your models with uncleansed data, uncurated data, and you're comparing the results and you're measuring the bias and you're tracking and trending that and you're also looking for model drift. We do all that stuff. I'm not sure everybody's doing all that stuff, but we are. Joe Cheeseman: You mentioned everybody else and you've also talked about user experience and scale and a lot of things that sound eerily like a chatbot. And I won't name names, but a certain chatbot is getting into the ATS game. What's your read on that? Are you threatened? Is it like, yeah, mosquito on my ass. No big deal? What are your thoughts? Al Smith: Oh, you give me such like opposite end choices. Look, if I was them, I think this is bold and brilliant on their part. Knowing and looking at their business, they've done one thing pretty well. Like most specialists, I would imagine they're running out of white space in the market they're looking for. At least that's how it appears to me. They do one thing incredibly well and God bless. But now how do you keep growing for your investors at a rate that when you start using up white space? So their positioning is three things that I think are kind of interesting. A vertical industry alignment around high volume hiring is kind of a very needed, but also pretty narrow kind of space, that's one, although I know that's the strength of what chatbots do 'cause it's a simpler class of hiring. I think the fact that they're using conversational AI, not generative AI is an important nuance. And again, I think pretty cool on their part. So curious to see how well they do. And then the statement on, and now you no longer need an ATS, well, that's kind of interesting back to how our conversation started. I guess that works for regional companies doing a single class of hiring where you don't have extensive EEO and responsibility and other things, but I don't see our complex employers being able to get away with that in the challenges of running your business just at scale and let alone be global businesses. Al Smith: So look, I think am I ignoring them? No, I'm gonna watch and see how they do. Do I think that was bold on their part to reposition the company in this way using both technology and a narrow vertical industry focus? I do, but I think I understand why they're doing it. So let's see how it works out for them. Chad Sowash: So don't you think that probably one of the best ways to get inputs of data is through chat, through messaging, through... It's more async than it is sync, right? So even no matter whether you're high volume hiring or you're hiring mid-level managers, to be able to give them more of an experience that's on their time as opposed to having them fill out a form on the web, don't you think that that is a transition and evolution? And are you guys looking at actually going down that road? Al Smith: Yeah. Look, and let's hope that that is the trend because it's what's needed. Look, we've done some pretty good stuff with our digital assistant, not trying to say it's the world's most amazing, but I think we scheduled something like 45,000, 50,000 job interviews last year through the digital assistant and that's pretty meaningful. And so to your point, Chad, anywhere we take noise out of the process to let people get to the decision-making is good. And so if we can get people feeling comfortable with adoption like that, I like that idea a lot. And yes, we have a lot of different levels of stuff in the lab that we're always looking at. When's the right time to go into product? Can we do it at scale? Can I do it across all the geographies with regulatory data privacy, data residency rules? Sometimes I have to go slower because it takes me longer to get all that to line up on everywhere you're gonna go. It's so much easier in the US. Honestly, there's a lot less regulation and it's more uniform. Even though we have these CCPA in California and the New York Fairness and AI and other things popping up, it is less complex than that. Al Smith: And I'm hoping that what you described is we're all gonna just go there. But that said, and I'm not throwing any shade on any of my customers who have very strong legal teams, but we've got technology that really streamlines. Like I don't need your resume if that's not the class of hire, I don't need much information from you. It's 10 clicks. And then they hit the 12-page legal document that they have to read through on their phone and click through. It's like, gang, you're not getting it. If that's really a requirement of hiring somebody, bring that to them later, not when they're thinking about, "Gee, I wonder if I wanna work at this company." So there's so much unevenness when I look across the implementations out there. Joe Cheeseman: So the next time we all see each other, we won't be in our home offices. We'll be in paradise AKA San Diego for the... Chad Sowash: Yes. By the pool, right? Joe Cheeseman: Inspire Conference. So Al, give us a preview of what we can expect particularly a new CEO? What should we expect from him? Al Smith: Umbrella drinks, umbrella drinks from Brian. So Brian Provost will certainly have the keynote and I'll be joining him. Real excited. Brian, I think people are gonna find is a what you see is what you get kind of person, which is great. He comes from a really strong software background and his ability to jump into our company... And this is saying something, I think, jump into our company, plug in the culture and pick up the use cases very quickly that our customers care about, I think he's doing a great job. So hopefully you'll hear him having a comfort level from just being introduced in November as coming on board to somebody who's in the saddle and still learning, but doing a lot of things now from a totally different lens, that's one. Al Smith: You guys will uphold me... Hold me accountable for any announcements I made in November, I'm sure. I'll tell you some of the favorite parts of the conference that we've started to really build repeatably. I kind of like those fireside chat sessions where you get either a panel of people talking to each other or somebody driving the panel throwing questions. We have some really great ones. I know you guys are fans of, and I am too, of Andreea Wade, who is our strategist on AI and founded the company that we've built on and she's gonna have some great sessions. I think that every time I hear Andreea talk, I learn something new and it's just the kind of thing I wanna be doing. And then hopefully, you all are gonna be there, right? I mean, so we're gonna have... Chad Sowash: Yeah. And that's not for us. That's for Andreea Wade because deathmatch winner, number one, number two, acquired by iCIMS, and number three, she's going to be on stage in early May at iCIMS Inspire on the beach, or at least close to the beach. Al Smith: The other one, and I'm sure you guys will jump on this, is we've got a bunch of customers that are gonna tell their journey. That's always the best. Maybe that's why we moved it so close 'cause we wanted to do more of that. I don't know. Chad Sowash: Two or three a year, that'd be awesome. [applause] Joe Cheeseman: Al Smith, everybody, CTO at iCIMS. Al, for those listeners that wanna know more about you or the Inspire Conference, where would you send them? Al Smith: Icims.com, right on the banner. It's there. Joe Cheeseman: Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy. Another one in the can, Chad. We out. Chad Sowash: 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 whisky, 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.

Companies rise and fall - usually because of of ego and hubris - and our industry is no different. Take CareerBuilder and Indeed for example; each to varying degrees are facing headwinds thanks to the unbridled belief that the good times will always roll and the competition is unworthy. Based on news this week, it’s looking more and more like Indeed is on the road to be the next CareerBuilder, and the boys dig in. Additionally, consolidation continues, as Fama has acquired Social Intelligence, making them a juicy acquisition target for the likes of Checkr and Sterling. What’s more, the CEO of MillerKnoll put her foot in her mouth and is paying the price on social media, while Amazon’s AWS is taking aim at Google and Microsoft’s OpenAi as another player in the artificial intelligence arms race. By the way, if you’re in Vegas for UNLEASH America next week, stop by the WorkHuman booth on Wed. and say Hi (you might even get a T-shirt). 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, it's National Surprise Drug Test Day. Thank God it's the week before Talent Toke happens next week in Vegas. Hey kids, you're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. This is your cohost, Joel... SFX: "All right, all right, all right." Joel: Cheesman. Chad: This is Chad "Is alive or Memorax" Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, Indeed backs up, CareerBuilder shrinks up, and Fama levels up. Let's do this. Vegas baby. Chad: Holy shit. My god. Dude. Just the preparation for getting ready for this. Yeah, it's a bit much. Joel: It is, it is. I'm gonna spend the weekend drinking Gatorade and sleeping, I think, to help prepare for this. Chad: Yeah. Pedialyte, I would go with Pedialyte. Get some Pedialyte, cut it with something like cranberry juice or something like that. That is the fucking breakfast of champions. Joel: Pedialyte. I'm gonna go one step further, my friend. Chad: Yeah. Joel: On camera here, I'm showing you ZBiotics. Chad: What the fuck is that? Joel: It's a hangover remedy that I'm gonna be trying in Vegas, so... Chad: Oh, I like that. Joel: Pray for me, America. Pray for me. Chad: Well, that being said... Joel: Oh my god. Chad: Let's get to shout-outs, baby. First and foremost, shout-out to Textkernel, that's right, for being crazy enough to bring us on stage with them during the Vendor Summit with our buddy Chris Conrad... Joel: Conrad. Chad: Talking about whether vendors should be building partnering or buying in a new AI, ChatGPT automation world. Textkernel is legit, they bought Sovren who's the legit OG, right? Joel: Yep. Chad: But they're the legit OG of this, doing the hard stuff, the heavy lifting, the white labeling so that vendors can focus on their core products. So, check us out at the Vendor Summit. Joel: And they are piling on the talent in the US. Chad: Yes. Joel: Every day I see a new LinkedIn update like, "Congratulations, new job at Textkernel," is what I saw. The troops are on the beachhead, if you will, of America, and it's nice that we're taking the stage with them before they become too cool for us in the States. Chad: Knock on wood, that's not gonna happen. Joel: I hope not, I hope not, I hope not. But yeah, that's just the beginning of a jam-packed schedule. Chad: Yes. I'm glad that's early, by the way. Joel: That is early. Chad: Yes. Joel: Yeah, that's like, "Dude, you gotta get there early, so we can do... " "Okay, cool." So, then we got a ferris wheel which is probably not the right thing to say. It's like a glass container, a glass egg on a tire going around Vegas. Anyway, it's the high roller event. Chad: Yes. Joel: Apparently, it's sold out. This is our friends, HiringBranch, that's having us come in. It's 30 minutes of all you can drink. By the way, shout-out to Evan White. Chad: Yes, who comes up with the coolest shit. Joel: Dude is PR extraordinaire. Chad: Yes. Joel: We'll get to more of his events here in a second. But this guy, if you're looking for a PR, look him up on LinkedIn. Anyway, he actually created a little card for everyone that's attending this thing. Chad: Yeah. Joel: That they're gonna share on LinkedIn. He's also got Talent Toke which we'll talk about in a minute. Anyway, to Evan, shout-out to you, man. You are above and beyond. And by the way, my man sent me a golden Tequila Panther. Did you get one of these? It's like Sex Panther's evil twin. It's a golden... It's like a liter, a full liter of tequila in this golden panther and has emerald eyes. Chad: Oh shit. Joel: It's insane. It has capped off my basement bar like I never thought I could. Chad: He sent me a tequila cowboy boot. [laughter] And it was delicious. It's already fucking gone, dude. It was delicious. I usually don't do tequila because it makes me bullet-proof and I get in fights. But I can do it at home, because there's nobody to get in a fight with. [laughter] Thanks Evan, we really appreciate that. Joel: Let's feed Chad as much tequila as possible in Vegas, everybody. Chad: Not gonna do it. Joel: Let's buy him all the tequila we possibly can. But yes, High Roller, that's our second gig and it keeps rolling from there. Chad: Yes, nothing like being locked up with Chad and Cheese for half an hour with all the drinks you can stand. Anyway, shout-out to plum.io. Not only are they awesome at making sure that we have great Canadian maple syrup for the next five years of our fucking life, Caitlin, Neil, Jason and the whole team, they're gonna make sure that Cheesman gets fed one night, and that's not cheap. So, thanks for dinner. We can't wait to see you. And if you haven't yet, go to plum.io and take that Plum Assessment. Joel: That's right. And this is no buffet, baby. So get the pocketbook out, pay in loonies 'cause we're eating on the Canadians. SFX: Take off, will you? We're doing our movie. Don't wreck our show you hoser. Joel: So then, it's back to business for us. And we've partnered with Workhuman to be in their booth for a whopping four hours of recording, palm pressing, baby kissing, t-shirt giveaways, maybe shots, maybe beer. Yeah, the party keeps rolling on in the Workhuman booth. So if you're there on Wednesday, make sure you stop by and say hi or listen to the interviews that we're conducting while we're there in the booth, but that's pretty exciting. Chad: Yes. And they have a, what they're calling a gratitude bar, but I'm not sure that it has alcohol. So, more than likely Chad and Cheese will be bringing the alcohol to the Workhuman booth. And they scheduled four hours which I think is legitimately crazy. But hey, I appreciate it. We'll be there. Joel: They've decided not to go all the way. So fortunately we'll be taking it all the way. Chad: So shout-out to Maya and the crew over at TaTiO for orchestrating another Drinks With the Chad and Cheese event at the Vesper Bar in The Cosmo. Have you seen this place? Dude... Joel: It's sick. Chad: It's gorgeous... Joel: It's totally sick. Chad: Okay, I'm gonna say that this is more of the Chad brand where if it smelled like Mexican pizza, it would be more the Cheese... This thing is fucking gorgeous man. I can't believe... Obviously, Vegas is above and beyond just about and everything that they do, but this bar in the Cosmo is, it just an amazing venue. So, thanks to TaTiO and hopefully you've been lucky enough to actually get your seat. If you haven't, go to chadcheese.com, click on events and then in the upper banner, the entire header, there's a click, just click for sign up and you might be able to get in. Joel: Chad, you mentioned Taco Bell and our next event might just lead everybody to Taco Bell. Chad: It will match Arnie, that's for sure. Joel: Just saying you were there at the first ever one is worth it. Chad: Yes. Joel: Talent Toke, I thought this was a joke when I first saw it. But our friend, our friend Evan has coordinated in an event at Bellagio? Chad: Yes. Joel: Is that right? Yeah. Chad: With the fountains. Joel: Oh the fountains? Chad: Yes. Joel: Okay, all right. So, apparently the best of the best green is gonna be available. Just go, 'cause you just said you were there, go to TalentToke.com, sign up, it's gonna be crazy. And yeah, I hope Gordon Ramsay's pub and grill are ready for the onslaught at Caesars after I get a whiff of what's going on at Talent Toke. Chad: Yeah. And from my understanding, we're getting the best of the best from Cookies, a brand of the Ganja. Can't wait to get a little Cookies. Joel: And what else could happen at Talent Toke? SFX: All right, all right, all right. Chad: Then right after Talent Toke, shout-out to PandoLogic who we're meeting at the Selfie Museum. We're going to the Selfie Museum for more drinks, food, craziness. I hope we can fit a fucking nap in there somewhere, because we're gonna need a little recharge. Joel: Oh my god, Monster, 5-hour Energy, I don't know. I hope Julie has her purse stocked with some 5-hour energies for us on that night. It's actually the Museum of Selfies, my friend. And as I was with my family, as listeners know, on vacation in Vegas. We actually walked by the Museum of Selfies and thought, "Oh, this might be something fun for the kids." Basically like, it's a, it's a glamor shots for the new kids, like it's... Chad: You've been there? Joel: I haven't gone in. But I was like, "What is this?" 'Cause I thought, Museum of Selfies... Chad: Yeah. Joel: Maybe it's like somewhere in 1862, somebody took a selfie and it's like all these historical selfies. No. There's many rooms and you can pick themes to have your picture taken. It looks like a blast, you know Pando does it right, so it's not gonna be some chump event. And also I just wanna throw this out, we're not gonna be there probably 'cause of the nap and the 5-hour Energy shots that we'll be doing. But at the Ice Bar friends at ERIN... Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: Erinapp.com, they're gonna be doing right across from our Museum of Selfies at the Ice Bar, they're gonna be having a party as well. Go check out erinapp.com if you want an invite to that. Chad: Little crazy, little crazy. Joel: Just a little bit, little bit. How old are we? How old are we now? Good god. Chad: I'm 25 motherfucker, that's how I feel. Joel: Good god, good god. And speaking... Chad: Yes. Joel: Of birthdays, Chad... SFX: Really. 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. Joel: All right. You know what that means, Chad? We got some birthdays to celebrate. Some of our fans are celebrating another trip around the sun, let's get to that list. Berry Doctor, Berry Doctor. Real name? I don't know. Let's check him out. Chad: Doubtful. Joel: Duarte Mendoca, Rick Kramer, Danielle Kasinski, Matt Lozar, Gia Johnston who was the winner of Rum with Plum. Happy birthday to you. Gia, happy birthday to you. Chris Bravik, Michael Simon Carl, Dave Larry, Jonathan Zilla, Steve Gilbert, Dan Wokee, Charlotte Adams. And our friend, Lars Schmitt, all celebrate another trip around the sun. SFX: Happy Birthday. Joel: Happy Birthday everybody, and if you like rum and it's your birthday, you can win a bottle of rum, but either way, you're a winner, if you go to chadcheese.com/free. This month's winners, we're gonna announce our Textkernel whiskey winner goes to Jim Schneider, long time fan and friend of the show. Chad: Nice. Joel: Our Aspen Tech Labs beer winner goes to Tom Hunley, Fishers Indiana. And I promise there was no playing with the votes on that one. And if you love t-shirts, we got JobGet sponsoring our shirts, go to the website, sign up, you'll likely get a shirt. And again, if you're at Unleash, hit the Workhuman booth on Wednesday. We'll have shirts there. Chad: Yeah. And don't doubt the polling of this kids because we have Dominion doing it. It's all good, it's fine. [laughter] [noise] Chad: What could that be, Joe? Joel: We know that sound in America, I don't know about Europe. Do they have the beep beep truck backing up? Probably something's on it. Chad: That probably sounds entirely different though, much like their police sirens and whatnot, you're like, "What the fuck is that?" Joel: By the way have you heard a Tesla back up before. Chad: No. Joel: It's like a space ship, sound like... [vocalization] Joel: And it gets higher as it goes like faster. Anyway, job search engine Indeed has backtracked on its plan to introduce paper application or PPA pricing. Chad: Say what? Joel: After customers complained of high bills and poorly explained guidelines. Instead, PPA will now be presented as one option alongside the legacy pay-per-click model. The company will also cap charging at 1000 per ad after customers complained that applications and pending charges piled up at overwhelming rates. Indeed is still came to introduce its new pricing model, called, Pay-for-results, it will be available next month to most employers in the UK and the US with a roll out to other countries to follow. Chad, listeners know what we're talking about 'cause we broke this shit back in the day, your thoughts on Indeed's back up? Chad: Big, big props to Greg Spencer over at the AIM group. And if you're not subscribed to the AIM group, they've got great market intelligence, go to aimgroup.com, pretty awesome stuff. But yeah, no, that's Indeed backing up the bus. So clearly, Chris Hyams, Hyams, Hyams, whatever. Joel: Our love child. [laughter] Chad: Have identified a major malfunction in their attempt to force every company using Indeed into a CPA or a CPSA model. This is what ego does, Joel, it drives you to make mistakes because of the worth you ascribe to yourself. All of the Indeed arrogance has finally come back to smack them in the fucking face so would you like to hear what they're going to do now? Joel: Please tell me. Chad: I'm gonna predict it. Joel: Oh production okay. Chad: Yeah, yeah, so it's simple, they're going to do what they probably had planned to do in the first place, they're gonna boil the frog, they will allow customers to use the old model and then slowly wean them off by forcing one group at a time, instead of everyone all at once. Seriously, we've seen this with Organic, first they kicked off job boards, then they forced them to pay, then they kicked off staffing, etcetera, etcetera etcetera. So this was a slow boiling of the frog model that worked, so why, oh why, would they go away from this model when they know historically, this is what worked for them. Joel: So you're saying they turned the heat up too fast and now they gotta dial it down a little. Chad: They just threw the fucking frog in the fire, dude. There was no water at all. They threw that shit in the fucking fire. Joel: Alright I got a prediction for you, you remember new Coke? [laughter] Chad: Yes. Yes. Joel: Okay, alright, so Coke has arguably the top three or four brand in the world next to cigarettes, and I guess Budweiser, so Coke decided, "Let's put out new Coke. That's a good idea." Well, they got kicked in the butt when they released new Coke which tasted not a lot like the old Coke, and by the way, everyone liked Coke the way it was, so why change it in the first place. So my prediction is Indeed is gonna come out with Indeed Classic, and they're gonna have that little classic under their logo and re-release it as like the old Indeed, although it won't be quite like the Indeed, everyone used to like. That's my prediction. Yeah, you said ego, I say hubris. There was a time where Indeed superpower was discipline, was focus, was keeping it simple. You and I both remember the days when Jobster changed business models every week. SimplyHired was like, "Let's do resumes. Let's do banner ads. Let's do all this shit." Indeed stood the course, and then you had another round of people like Monster launching BeKnown, trying to leverage social media, you've had these ebbs and flows, and Indeed through all that for the most part, has been really steady, consistent. Joel: People know what they're gonna get, aside from maybe vendors and agencies and whatnot. They've lost their way. And this really, I can trace back to Google for Jobs, that freaked them out. Programmatic started to rise, people started to ask questions of, "Why am I paying this per click when programmatic has given me much cheaper rates," and so then they went into two pan, they went into forced registration, they went to... So every move that they've made is based on fear, based on unknown, what Google's gonna do, LinkedIn is still out there for them. Getting back to basics is probably a really good idea for them, I don't know if they can or if they will. I will give them credit for doing the U-turn and saying, "Okay, our bad. We'll go back to the way it was or as close as we can to that." So I gave them a little bit of credit there. But every move that we've seen them make since about 2017 is rooted in fear, uncertainty and doubt. And a lot of that is traced back to Google and Programmatic and AI, who knows what they're thinking in terms of what's gonna happen in the business with that, but yeah, hubris fear, uncertainty doubt has been Indeed's downfall. I don't think they can get back on track. This is gonna be a slow burn. Chad: So they literally just slammed this down the throat of everybody all at once, and it just... They couldn't take... This isn't a u-turn because the CPSAs, out there, and the CPA is still out there. And any new customers that are coming on that haven't had CPC before, they're gonna be forced into this new model anyway. So it's going to be one of those... Again, it's a boiling of the frog type of a thing. Not to mention the 72 hours thing, really was just a fucking joke, where they said, "Hey, you know, we're gonna give you 72 hours to go ahead and decline any candidates that don't meet your requirements." Well, here's how out of touch these fuckers are, quote, "In the future, we may not even have a time limit referring to the 72-hour time limit for applicants to decline." Says, Mukherjee, Indeed's SVP and GM of employer, "It's not required for us. We believe so much in the quality of our matching." Are these motherfuckers delusional? Your matching sucks. Joel: Yes. That's what happens when you're a monopoly. You lose your shit. Chad: Talk to a client, you're matching fucking sucks dude. The arrogance is so thick, it's hard to breathe because I'm laughing so fucking hard. Now here's a response in reference to the CPSA being exactly the same as CPC, but costing shitloads more. So Mukherjee, I think that's how you say his name. This is what he said about that, quote, "There are ways to tackle the challenge, including by getting customers to share data, getting customers to share data showing how many applications results from clickthroughs from indeed.com." Again, how fucking delusional are these assholes? No employer in their right mind, no job site, no career site, no, quote-unquote "trusted partner" is going to give indeed their data. Why would they do that? It makes no sense. Not to mention, if you're a vendor that's out there today, I'm speaking directly to you right now, and if you're a quote-unquote "trusted partner" with this new candidate registration, mandatory candidate registration, they are taking all of your candidates so they can fucking close you out of the loop. You've got get that through your head. These guys are looking to just squeeze you until you are dead. That's it. And for everybody who's like, "Oh, no, Indeed is just doing the right thing for the applicant," you're full of shit. SFX: That escalated quickly. [laughter] Joel: I also love the $1000 cap. They have customers that are used to $75 on Craigslist. Chad: Yes. Joel: And they drop a $1000. They think that's nothing but to a lot of employers, a lot of small businesses. Chad: Delusional. Joel: That's significant. That's significant Remember the Pepsi Challenge? Chad: Yes. [laughter] Joel: I have no segue for that, but I just, I remember that as I'm talking about new Coke. That was... Those were good times. Those were good times. By the way, McDonald's is bringing back the Hamburglar. I'm just gonna leave that right there. Chad: Oh, Jesus. Joel: Let's go to another dysfunctional vendor. Per an email from CEO, Susan Arthur of CareerBuilder to staff that we got ahold of. The company is making an organizational change to bring the sales and marketing functions closer together in order to maximize lead generation and support revenue growth. Or at least that's the spin. Kristen Kelly, who joined as Chief Marketing Officer, late 2021, will now lead the combined sales and marketing organizations. What's more, Steve Cerny, who had been with the company for 17 years is leaving last one out. Turn off the lights. Chad, your take on this CareerBuilder news. Chad: Are they dead yet? I mean, Jesus. I mean, this is fun, don't get me wrong. But, so let me get this straight, Steve, a guy with 17 years of experience, at CareerBuilder gets the axe. A guy who, according to LinkedIn, worked his way up through the ranks at CareerBuilder in 10 different positions is out. Now Kristen Kelly, who is no slouch, she has great industry cred and held CMO positions over the years, but now taking the reins of revenue, sales? Take a deep breath, Kristen, because that is an animal. CMOs talk about when they're pissed off at their CRO counterparts, especially when they're drunk together at the bar. But it's usually not something that they want to touch when they're sober. I wish Kristen well, but the question begs, when has it ever been a good idea to have sales and marketing in the same hands? It's like the separation of church and state. To be quite frank, I don't know that CareerBuilder could do anything wrong because they've done everything wrong up to this point. So making a change, I mean it seems like it's gotta be natural, right? And Steve's been there for 17 years. If you wanna make a change, you kick out the guys who have been in the seat for the longest. Joel: Yeah. Speaking of companies that have lost their way, at least Indeed hasn't changed its logo yet. Remember when CareerBuilder did that? Yeah. What a bunch of bozos. Are we a job board? Are we a tech company? Ah, fuck it. Let's just sell the business and then like slowly die as we cut staff and office space and technology. And I mean, we've documented all this on the show. There's nothing really more that I can say, but, so I went... [laughter] I went out to some of the employer review sites. Chad: Oh Jesus. Joel: To get some to get some insight on some of this. So one comment was, "Sales is struggling and they are shrinking fast. Not sure how much longer they will be around." Well, this is kind of indicative of that. I'm sure they'd love to be a no sales company and just market stuff and milk their current client base until it just goes out to nothing, and two or three people are left at the company. And then the second one, which I really appreciated said they should rename the company CareerDestroyer [laughter] worst company I've ever worked for. Bad products, dishonest management, deceptive ownership, lousy brand opposite of customer centric, headed toward being dismantled. You should stay as far away as possible. [laughter] I got nothing that'll top that CareerBuilder. It has been nice knowing you, but your slow death while entertaining for podcast purposes is just kind of sad. Chad: Yeah, I've always told friends who are looking to join companies that are sinking ships, it's a win-win for you, man. I mean, seriously, the company was sinking before you got there and you tried to keep it afloat. Not to mention... Imagine the leadership experience you're gonna gain in those situations. So this to me is a win-win for Susan and Kristen, who will obviously get great pay days no matter what happens. But, what about those CareerBuilder employees who are bailing the water out of the sinking ship every fucking day? I mean, that has got to suck. So to me, this just feels like the extended version of wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald. Joel: Dude, someone hire Steve Cerny immediately. Anyone who's that loyal to this shit show will be your most loyal employee of all time. Like, Steve Cerny needs to be employed [laughter] by the time we go to Vegas next week. Good God. Chad: Good luck to Susan and Kristen. You're gonna need it, ladies. Joel: All right, let's take a break. Take a breath. We'll be back. All right Chad, Millerknoll, or commonly known as Herman Miller, if you've sat in their chairs before, their CEO Andi Owen, faced backlash this week after a video of her telling staff to stop asking about bonuses and focus on hitting the $26 million sales target, went viral. The video of the internal staff meeting showed Owen urging employees to spend their time and effort thinking about hitting the sales target, not about what they would do if they didn't receive a bonus. Some critics have questioned whether Owen's championing of workplace equity extends to forfeiting her own bonus in solidarity with her employees. Decide for yourself. Here's the audio for your enjoyment. Andi Owen: It's not good to be in a situation we're in today, but we're not gonna be here forever. It is going to get better. So lead, lead by example, treat people well. Talk to them. Be kind and get after it. Don't ask about what are we gonna do if we don't get a bonus? Get the damn $26 million. Spend your time and your effort thinking about the $26 million we need, and not thinking about what are you gonna do if we don't get a bonus. All right? Can I get some commitment for that? I would appreciate that. I had an old boss who said to me one time, you can visit Pity City, but you can't live there. So people leave Pity City. Let's get it done. Joel: Next up, pity city, Chad. The CEO of the Year award is over. Your thoughts. Chad: Oh, lead by example. Those three words, just amazing because reportedly this asshole, CEO Andi Owen is keeping her bonus as she talks about everyone else without a bonus living in pity city. This is the kind of bullshit and greed that has become prominent in many businesses that preach team and family. But what they really mean is that we need you to go out there and make a lot of money for me. Fuck off. Don't worry about your bonus. Get outta pity city. I need my fucking bonus. So if you're working for Millerknoll, how hard are you working right now? I bet you're working harder on looking for a new job than you are doing your own job. Because this is a morale killer. This is a sale killer. This is a brand killer. This is definitely an employment brand killer. Who the fuck's gonna wanna work for that asshole? I have no clue why the board hasn't thrown her out on her ass by now. Any CEO, any CEO who makes this kind of move should be gone. Joel: So after her remarks went viral on Tuesday, she emailed an apology to workers. She said, quote, "I want to be transparent and empathetic. And as I continue to reflect on this instance, I feel terrible that my rallying cry seemed insensitive. What I'd hoped would energize the team to meet a challenge we've met many times before, landed in a way that I did not intend. And for that, I am sorry." So just like Indeed backtracking a little bit of credit for the apology. Many CEOs would not make such an action so. Chad: She's afraid to lose her job. Joel: I'm not offended by this at all. We'll disagree on this. We have become so soft in this country that hearing get out of pity city, offends us. Chad: It's not the pity city. It's a fucking bonus. She kept her bonus and she's telling everybody else to fuck them and their bonus. Joel: That's not what I heard her say. Chad: That has nothing to do what you heard her say, of course she's not gonna say, I'm gonna give up my bonus because she didn't. Joel: I didn't research that part. If that's true, then that's... Well, if they meet their goal then they're gonna get their bonus. Chad: Again, lead by example. If they don't get their bonus, she doesn't get her bonus. That's what lead by example means. Joel: Then get a new job. Chad: Yeah, she should. Joel: And they should. If they're offended by this, if they're mad about bonus structures, they can vote with their feet. Chad: They're not mad about bonus structures. They're mad about her keeping her bonus while she's kicking them in the nuts and them not getting theirs. Joel: What I read was the offense taken was that the pity city, the pep talk was off tone deaf. Chad: You call that a pep talk. That was not a fucking pep talk. Joel: Dude. You and I played sports and growing up, this shit was said every day. My dad said shit like this to me every day. You were in the military, you heard stuff a hundred times worse than this stuff. If she were a man, would we be debating this? I don't know. Chad: Fuck yeah, we would. If he's gonna say lead by example and he is not giving up his bonus, that's not leading by example. I don't give a fuck what gender you are, what color you are, what your pronouns are. You act like this, you get thrown the fuck out. And you can't compare this to anything in the military, 'cause there's nothing to do with that. Well, not like I could quit the military in the first place. Joel: But they can, they can leave. You can't leave your family. I mean, technically, technically [laughter] a lot of us would like to. [laughter] Chad: Can leave them on Facebook. That's the easiest thing. Joel: I don't know. If the issue is she gets a bonus, you don't, to me that's a different story. If the issue is like, she offended me, I'm hurt. Her words were nasty. I mean, to me that's just, we are so soft in this country. Chad: No. Joel: That we need, we need to get over shit like that. Chad: My whole problem was lead by example. If they don't get a bonus, you sure the fuck don't get a bonus. Joel: If that's true, then I'm fine with that. Well, I'd like to say I'll review the story and get back to you, but I gotta prepare for Vegas. So [laughter] I'm getting outta pity city and I'm getting out of this story. But in short, if it's a, like I get a bonus and you don't, that's fucked up. The board should come in and, and fix that. If the issue is, her words offended me, I say get over it and grow some thick skin. Chad: Has to do with actions, not words. Joel: All right. Back to reality. Fama, or do you say Fama in the Queen's English? I don't know. Fama has acquired competitive service Social Intelligence. The deal expands Fama's network of background screening partners and builds on Fama's goal to become the largest online screening company in the world. Fama's AI technology searches over 10,000 online public sources to detect fraudulent or illegal activities and identify extreme behaviors that are detrimental to the workplace. Based on digital profiles found on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, as well as other online public forums. Chad, your thoughts on this deal, and be careful, your comments might show up in your Fama background check. Chad: God, I hope so. So in February of 2020, we had Ben Mones from Fama on the show. You can check that out. And then August of 2021 Bianca Lager from Social Intelligence on the show. Like it or not, this is gonna be a part of background checking and checking on current employees to make sure they're not saying stupid shit. This is part of the new world that we lived in, kids. Social Intelligence has two rounds of funding that weren't published. Fama around 18 million in funding through Series B. And I like that Ben didn't take more, because I guarantee you he could have gotten more. To me that shows just the health and intelligence of a startup. Fama had experienced 160% year over year net revenue retention. That's huge. Wallet share is expansion. I mean that's amazing. Chad: Increasing the size of background checking partners more than 75%, which is what Social Intelligence is bringing. There's a quote from the story. Fama has delivered more than 45 million reports to nearly 1200 customers. And Social Intelligence boasts hundreds of clients and 80 HRS partners. I think that's the big key here. They were going at the market and in entirely different go-to market ways. And that was the great part of acquisition for them, is when you are acquiring a company that had pretty much the same go-to market that you did, it's either about technology or, and or portfolio. In this case it's more like puzzle pieces. You're actually growing the go-to market in areas that you were really not focusing on. And so I think this is a really good marriage. I think it's pretty awesome. Bianca, Ben, good luck. Joel: So the background screening business is a convoluted clusterfuck of big companies, small companies, individuals, state specific, industry specific. Like, in the short time that I was in the industry, it's a incredibly confusing disparate business. So, Fama to me always felt like a piece of the background check business. Checking people's social media, definitely important. Companies are concerned about it. It is a slog to go back in, decades long worth of tweets, Instagram posts, and they look at forums, they mentioned 10,000 sort of points of content. That's a lot of work. It never felt like a must have, it never felt like a standalone product. It always felt like a feature that a sterling or a HireRight or someone like that should offer their customers, or even Checkr for sure. Joel: So, to me this was like a fringe business, a feature, two companies fighting for the same wallet share, which wasn't huge, probably comparatively to the background check business. So Social Intelligence has been around since 2010, I think. I don't think they've taken any money according to CrunchBase, this was a bootstrap business. I'm sure they were ready to maybe move on, saw the challenges in the recession, potential of the economy, maybe ran out of money, maybe lost a lot of business to Fama, frankly. And Fama went shopping, headed to TJ Maxx, probably got a pretty good deal. It's this consolidation opportunity, one less competitor off the board. And now they have a lot more leverage in terms of selling to a Sterling, a Checkr, whatever, and getting a premium for that sale. So to me it always felt like a feature that every background check company should have. And now I think it's a prime opportunity for a bigger background check company to come gobble that up. Sterling, we know is a public company, I think it'd make a lot of sense for them to go in and buy a social background check feature company like Fama that's really become the number one player in this space, which is a fairly new space and should sell at a premium. I'd say let the bidding begin if I'm Mr. Moans or is that Mones? Chad: Mones. Yeah, I don't know who had the better technology, but I think that if you take a look at just signals and being able to create context within what you're looking for as a company, then you can have an opportunity not to have a ton of people going through a bunch of tweets. You just have tech doing it. Right? And then they earmark the ones that are problematic. And then you start taking a look at individuals who are having a lot of those problematic tweets, posts, what have you. I think future scope, this is gonna be a lot bigger and I think it's gonna be something that, you know, we're all going to have to live with. So I think, I mean, you know Sterling a hell of a lot better than I do. They have a huge fucking wallet. You don't see them throwing cash on the table for this? Joel: No, I do. To me it's a feature any background check company would have. And if I were a buyer, I'm weighing one service over another, and one service provides like depth or deep background screening of social media footprints. Then I'm gonna pick the one that has the social media footprint. Particularly today with a more and more remote workforce, a more global workforce. I mean, who knows what the fuck... How many social media sites you don't even know about that other countries have and are popular in different areas. Like you need a solution to help you sort of manage and police all that. And I think Fama is in the perfect position to do that. And yes, Sterling would be the perfect check writer to bring a Fama into the the family. Chad: From a technology stand point, Sterling feels like this old kind of like old world, kind of like background check company where Checker seems like more advanced. Would I be wrong about that? Joel: Yeah, at least brand wise Sterling's been around for a long, long time, and a lot of the companies they've had have been with them for decades. Checkr obviously provides a streamlined, technologically focused solution that Sterling tries to sort of put some fresh paint on their solution they rebranded a few years ago, and they're trying to look cooler in the public market. Chad: Yeah. Joel: But even public market wise, they're still under $2 billion in valuation. And the last time Checkr raised money, they were at like a six or $7 billion valuation. So Checkr needs to make some moves, and they haven't in a while. This would be a really smart move for them to justify that valuation. Chad: They have close to 680 million in funding. Checkr. For me, that would be the smartest move. To see a sterling to try to absorb something like this would be kind of nice, but I just don't know that they could integrate it into their systems just because they probably have a shit ton of old antiquated systems. Joel: Yeah, and not even systems, but culture. Chad: Yeah, good point. Joel: I mean, the culture there is sort of old school. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And have been... Ben and his troops come in as this sexy, cool tech might freak everybody out. I don't know. Yeah, Checkr seems like a better fit. HireRight, maybe can work. Let's take a quick break and talk about Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and who knows who else. Joel: All right, Chad, OpenAI, Google's Bard And now Amazon Web Services is expanding its access to custom made chips that it says can run AI software more efficiently and cheaply than competitors. Unlike Google and Microsoft, which have announced products for the general public, AWS is targeting corporate customers. It wants to act as a neutral platform for businesses that want to incorporate generative AI features, allowing them to pick their own software and models. AWS is marketing itself as the Switzerland of the cloud giants by selling access to multiple large language models, including ones made by Anthropic Stability AI, and AI 21 Labs. Chad, it's a clash of the titans. What are your thoughts? Chad: Well, they'll all be doing this. Let's just go ahead and throw that out there. This is where everything blows up. Okay? AWS, Microsoft, Google are able to spin these up because of their cloud capabilities. And these clouds will provide their different types of instances like AWS is talking about right now. Now, look at our partner, Veritone. Now, they've been playing in the AI space for a while now. And then if you combine a player like them, a voice platform, with cloud instances that they're more attuned to their needs, in weeks you could have Chat GPT, create content for you, then feed it into Veritone. And then our clone voices could be legit, perform a podcast without us. We've performed over 1000 podcasts with about 700 of them or so having transcripts, which average about 6000 words per transcript, equaling 4.2 million words. Two things to understand here, ChatGPT can consume and train off the text, and then Veritone can provide tone and tenor to our cloned voices. Just let that sink in for a moment. That's where we're at. They're talking about these new chips and then they're talking about flexibility attuned to vendor. That's just one vendor. That's just Veritone. Right, this is going to get really crazy really fucking fast. Joel: So my mind was blown twice this week from AI. So, number one, sort of less exciting if you haven't watched the 60 Minutes segment when they go to Google and talk about AI and Chat GPT, and look at Google's R and D and the robots they're making and the crazy shit that's going on, watch it. If you have access to look back on old 60 Minutes. It was last Sunday. Watch it. The second one. So I had heard rumblings about Beyonce's voice on a song, or AI Drake. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Et cetera. Well, you know how much I love Oasis and they've been broken up since 2009. Anyway, some musicians got together and they took Liam Gallagher's voice and they AIed it. They basically wrote songs in the voice of Oasis or how Oasis writes song. They wrote new songs, had him sing these songs, and then they had human beings apparently do the actual instruments to these vocals. So if you go to YouTube, if you're a fan, if you're interested, go search AISIS. [laughter] It's AISIS instead of Oasis. So that's pretty clever. Go to YouTube search AISIS and there's literally like a 35 Minutes album of new songs by Oasis. It sounds like sort of old 90s Oasis. It's pretty mind blowing. And then you think about, what if you had Liam sing old Beatle songs, or do a duet with John Lennon? Or can you have Axel Rose sing Zeppelin songs with Robert Plant? And you just start thinking, as a music fan, how many mashups, how many crazy stuff can you do with AI? Anyway, aside from Amazon, my mind was blown twice because it was like, hands on. See this shit? It blew my mind. So, anyway, back to Amazon. So I'm in Bard's Test universe. Have you been invited in to Bard? Chad: Yeah. Joel: Okay, so I've kind of like tested. I've done the Pepsi Challenge with both, and I can tell you that as of now, OpenAI's results are better... Chad: Much. Joel: Than Google. Okay. You agree. That's good. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So they're different. Google's are more like educational professorial. Open AIs feel more like everyday common man kind of answers. So, anyway, the question to me is, is AI going to be a commodity or is it going to be different? Right? Like, when Google came out, search was going to be a commodity. Everyone was going to have the same results. Everyone was going to index all the same websites. Well, Google proved that it's not. They did a little bit better. They garnered more attention. AWS survives and thrives because they just have a bigger boat. Our servers and their servers. Servers are pretty much a commodity. If you have a bigger server farm and you can lease that out. And Amazon sort of a loss leader for their other stuff. Anyway. Server, commodity, AI commodity, I just don't know. But I'm kind of betting that it's not. I'm kind of betting right now that it's going to be different and we're all going to say like, OpenAI is just a little bit better. I'm going to use that one as opposed to Bard and AWS wanting to be sort of the bones or the power of all these businesses that are plugging in AIS or APIs and using that service onto their platform. Joel: I think OpenAI is going to have enough of a competitive offering, particularly with Microsoft in their back pocket, that I'm betting that AWS's, whatever they're calling it, AI Solutions, is going to be more like the Amazon Fire than it is Alexa. And I think it's going to fade into the ether like the Amazon phone did. Back in the day. Chad: Well, I think the big key here is that the AI is going to be much like cloud computing. You're going to choose whether you're on Azure, you're on AWS, you're on Google's, but you're going to choose which one you're going to be on. The big key here is again or the Veritones of the world, right? The ones who have domain specific knowledge, intelligence and their focus, their AI in a specific area, if they choose Azure or what have you. So the big three are definitely going to play and they're going to be really just playgrounds for these smaller companies to come pay them a lot of money to actually make more money themselves. So that's how the hierarchy, I see, actually just falling out. Joel: Yeah. And it may be last company standing or last company that cares. I mean, you and I remember Napster. Chad: Yeah. [chuckle] Joel: So you think about all these AI mashups with voices of rock and voices of hip hop. Somebody's got to get paid and all that. There's going to be lawsuits. Chad: There's going to be regulations that have to draw for that. Joel: The training data of all this AI, there was a time there with video where YouTube was basically out of business... Chad: Right. Joel: Because it couldn't afford the legal aspects of like, take my movie off YouTube, and Google came and saved them. So there's going to be a lot of expenses. A company like Google, Amazon and Microsoft can weather that. I think Veritone has to really be careful with that whole issue. Smaller players are going to run into landmines like that. It's going to be a lot of fun to watch. I'm going to sit back. I'm going to have a Toke at Talent Toke maybe, [laughter] and I'm going to relax and just watch the AI action. SFX: All right, All right, All right. Joel: We out. Chad: We out. Joel: See you in Vegas. Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the 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 took away and like Chad's favorite western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Zoom - yes, that Zoom - has made an acquisition in the employment space and to say the boys have an opinion is an understatement. Will it be enough to fend off Microsoft, Salesforce, Google and others? So we’re sayin' there’s a chance, and I’ll leave it at that. Then it’s time for Buy-or-Sell with startups Loopin, Pera and Equitas, which gets pretty ugly, no gonna lie. Lastly, “strategic autonomy” is something we should all add to our bandwidth as France’s Emmanuel Macron talks about moving away from the United States and becoming a third superpower. It all ends up in a pretty animated, colorful episode. 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. [music] S0: 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. On this day in 1987, the Simpsons first appear, thanks to the Tracey Ullman's Show. Just another American getting rich on the back of the British. Hey kids, this is the Chad and Cheese podcast does Europe. I'm your co-host, Joel 'Millhouse' Cheesman. Chad: This is Chad 'Dropkick Murphys' Sowash. Lieven: And I'm Lieven "Disappointed in France again" Van Nieuwenhuyze. [laughter] Joel: And on this show, Zoom go shopping. Macron sticks it to America. And a little... Chad: Macron. Joel: A Little buy or sell. Let's do this. [music] Chad: Yeah. That's what I'm fucking talking about. [laughter] Joel: It must be a special shout out from Chad Sowash. Chad: That's right, baby. Shout-out to Ireland for making President Biden look like a fucking rockstar every time he had an appearance in Ireland. President Biden recently came out to the Dropkick Murphys song, 'I'm shipping Up To Boston' which you were just listening to. Smoke, lasers, big ass Irish flag in the backdrop. Shout out to Ireland. They know how to make the old man look good. Joel: It was like a wrestling entrance. Chad: It was fucking awesome. [laughter] Joel: No way were those Irish people that excited to see Joe Biden. They had to be hopped up on Irish whiskey and Guinness. Chad: I love it. Joel: There's no other excuse for that. Chad: When aren't they? What... [laughter] Is that something new? Did they stop that? Joel: Yeah, it was around breakfast that they did this, that they had this celebration. So mine is Ireland too if you're done. Chad: Oh, there you go. Sure. Joel: So I'm gonna shout-out to Michael Daniel Higgins. Chad: Now that is Irish. Jesus. Joel: Yeah. So if you're not in America, many of this show's listeners aren't, this got huge press, 'Biden in Ireland'. This was a huge deal. So I'm watching this thing on TV and I'm watching Biden with the delegates. And there's this little guy next to Biden that looks like an extra from Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit. [laughter] And I'm like... Chad: It's Frodo. Joel: I'm like, "Who the hell is that guy?" So I researched it. It was Daniel or Michael Daniel Higgins, who is the president of Ireland. This guy is straight out of casting. He should have a pipe and a dragon to ride. And this guy is Ireland to the bone. Apparently, he's been there since 2011. He's only 5'4. He's literally the shortest world leader, male or female, on the planet. Chad: Holy shit. Joel: This guy reeks of Lucky Charms cover model. [laughter] And I was so impressed. He's in a tweed suit. He's got the bald head with the festive side. Chad: Oh yeah. [laughter] Joel: He needs some big lamb chops. He's got a Bernese Mountain dog. It was just awesome. So, this guy was Ireland to the bone, and I loved it. I had no idea who he was, but now he's my favorite world leader. Michael D Higgins, baby, shout-out. Chad: And it also made Joe Biden look better. Again, Ireland making Joe Biden look like a fucking rockstar. And that shit's not easy kids. Joel: Two white dudes in their 80s, tell me they're not partying up in Ireland. [laughter] Jesus. Save us, Lieven. We're going from Ireland to Montana with Lieven shout-out. Lieven: Right, right, right. I know Montana's not in Europe as Chad told me before the show, and I know Montana's on Europe, but I would love to... Chad: Geography, okay? Geography. Joel: Full of Europeans though. [laughter] Full of rich Europeans buying land. Lieven: Rich even. Okay. Shout-out to Montana for showing Europe how to ban TikTok and I've been complaining about TikTok since TikTok was launched, even in the show a few times. And Montana actually was the first state to put a ban on TikTok. So now it's officially illegal to install TikTok on a smartphone if you're an American living in Montana. So hail to Montana. [laughter] Chad: And all five people who live there. Lieven: And their cows. Joel: We have some live footage in the back of a ranch when the Chinese spy balloon flew over Montana. Lieven: That's the only right reaction. If you see a balloon, shoot it. [laughter] Chad: Watch yourself, Lieven. One thing that this country has that no other country has is an abundance of guns. So they will shoot shit. Okay? [chuckle] Lieven: I know. Chad: Not safe, not safe. Joel: Do they have the Yellowstone Show in Belgium? Lieven: No. And actually I would like to see it. It's probably on some paid channel, but I actually... Joel: Paramount. Lieven: Never watch tv, but I wanted to see it. Yeah. Chad: Paramount Plus. Joel: Paramount Plus in Belgium. Chad: Yeah. Probably gonna have to VPN it, but other than that, you should be good. Lieven: I know how to VPN something. [laughter] Outro: What are you doing, step bro? Joel: All right. Speaking of places to go and travel for both of us, Chad, we're on the move in Europe this year starting in July. I think we'll be in London for RecFest. Where else will we be in Europe this year? Chad: We've got Unleash coming up this week. My brain is on fire because of everything that we're going to be doing in Vegas this week. And then thinking about RecFest at Knebworth, and then Nashville later. Yeah, there's just so much going on. Listeners, go to chadcheese.com, click on events. Go ahead, register. Register for 'em all. Not to mention, we also have a move of the E-recruiting Congress from later this year to early next year. Joel: Yeah. Chad: So look for that. Joel: Lieven, we're pretty bum you're not gonna be in Vegas for Unleash next week. There's fucking pot parties. We're in a ferris wheel, drinking all kinds of stuff. We're doing a tattoo event again. You gotta get out to America, dude, and come party with Chad and Cheese one of these years. Lieven: Someday, someday I will. Promised. [laughter] [music] Joel: Topics. Alright. Zoom, yes, that Zoom has announced its acquisition of Workvivo, an Irish startup. There we are in Ireland again that focuses on internal communication and company culture. The acquisition will diversify Zoom's product suite and give it a direct connection to a number of big name enterprise clients. Workvivo is known for its asynchronous communication platform, which fosters employee engagement through an activity feed, people directory surveys, and a conduit for critical company communications. The deal's financial terms have not been disclosed, but Workvivo's founders and employees will join Zoom as part of the deal. Apparently, they're called zoomies at Zoom in case anyone was wondering. Chad, we rarely see deals like this go down. What are your thoughts? Chad: First off, zoomies are what dogs do when they're running around the house or around the yard when they just like for no apparent reason, they're like going full throttle. Those are zoomies. So we've talked about Workvivo on the show a few times. And it was kind of like a Facebook workplace style internet for companies. And I've always been kind of lukewarm on the idea as I felt that there are way too many other tools that are bigger and better like the Slacks of the world that are just components that vivo couldn't compete with. So I don't believe that I would ever buy a Workvivo, but where I would've swiped left, Zoom swipe right. And personally, I believe this is a great coupling. How can Zoom start to compete with Microsoft Teams? How can Zoom position itself as an employee communications platform beyond video and messaging and transform into a talent management hub? There's only one answer. That's Workvivo. Chad: How does Zoom inflate its lagging stock price? [laughter] How can Zoom open up its TAM and then the ability to gain more wallet share from their current roster of clients? I mean, there are so many good reasons why a company like Zoom, which I didn't see happening, would buy a Workvivo. So this I think is probably the best arranged marriage of the year. Joel: So we have talked about Workvivo a few times. They were founded back in 2017. They've raised roughly $40 million. They claim to have 1 million employees connect with their colleagues through their app and they count companies like Amazon, Lululemon and Liberty Mutual as their clients. So a lot of good things going on here at Workvivo. Terms were not disclosed, which is a little strange for a public company like Zoom. If they paid a good price for that, it seems like something that they would announce. You hit it round in the head when you talked about Microsoft. Look, Zoom was the darling of Wall Street during the pandemic. You had a few companies that were like, oh, they went from $20 to $300 a share and Zoom was one of those companies. Once the pandemic subsided, people went back to work. Teams got traction outta Microsoft. Zoom stock price has come back to earth in a big way. I think the AI component and what Microsoft Teams will be doing with OpenAI and the integration with ChatGPT takes it up another notch in terms of Zoom needs to do something. I think the other side of that is you have Salesforce which has been competing with Microsoft forever acquire a company like Slack and for the last year or so, Salesforce's share price has gradually gone up and up and up while Zoom stock price has been pretty much sideways for the last over a year really. Joel: So juice the stock, well, Wall Street doesn't really agree. Since this deal was announced, the stock really hasn't done much of anything either. That's 'cause no one knows what Workvivo is, which is quite possibly versus buying someone like Slack. Slack was a multi-billion dollar deal though, where I'm guessing Workvivo was nowhere near that much money. So I think Zoom has its work cut out for it. I think it's an uphill battle. I think Microsoft is an apex predator looking to just take Zoom out, and I think Salesforce is making waves. Obviously Google's gonna get into some of this. Even Facebook's a little at work, which we haven't talked about in a while is still out there as a social media communications platform. So this is a Hail Mary as far as I'm concerned. It's Zoom trying to compete with Microsoft and some others. I think it's gonna be a failed attempt and the stock is gonna continue to go sideways and down. I don't think it's much of anything. Good for Workvivo. They got paid and sold and everybody still has a job. But as far as long-term prospects for Zoom, I would not be recommending buying that stock anytime soon. Lieven: I kind of like Workvivo, but the problem is Zoom is the mothership and Workvivo is not going to improve Zoom, and I use Zoom a lot when I'm teaching. Zoom is a pretty good platform because it can speak to 100 and if you get a better account, if more people at the same time. And it's better for teaching than Teams for example, or Google Hangout or Skype or whatever. But it's not good. I mean, for example, the audio sucks. If you have several people talking at the same time, they are going to take one voice and lift it up and they're going to use some audio ducking on the other voice so they go down. So when people are in a meeting and meetings, good meetings have people talking to each other because they get animated, and then you just miss parts of the conversation. And that's something I don't have with Teams. For example, Teams is very basic, but Teams is doing what Teams should be doing, organizing meetings. So if Zoom wants to stay alive, it's not by buying companies like Workvivo, I think. They just should improve whatever they're doing as a basic. And today, I feel they're lagging behind. They had their moment like Joel said and the shares boom because everyone was pulling money from every company and investing in it. Chad: And the few companies who would get better through COVID and Zoom was one of those, but they totally missed the momentum, I think. And now buying Workvivo is like a silly effort. I don't know. I don't think they can compete with companies like Google Hangout, Skype, Teams, and buying Workvivo won't make a big difference. So I think it's a lost shot. Joel: Did he say Skype? [laughter] Lieven: They still exist, they still exist. [laughter], Chad: He's looking up competitors and the number one competitor that came up, and this tells you the history of the rankings was Webex. And I'm like, who the fuck uses Webex anymore. Lieven: Yeah, Webex. Joel: Blue Jeans. Lieven: Okay. They suck too, they suck too. [laughter] Joel: Next up, the return of Yammer everybody. Let's take a quick break and we'll play a little buy or sell. Joel: All right, guys. Who's ready for a little buy or sell? Yeah, that's right. If you don't know, here's how we play. We talk about three companies that have recently gotten funding or are raising money. We read a summary and each of us will either buy or sell the company. Are you ready to play buy or sell? First up, we got Loopin. UK-based Loopin has raised 1.6 million pounds in seed funding. The beta platform, which aims to help businesses measure and improve employee morale is expected to roll out a coaching feature also. Loopin is the first to develop a metric for measuring morale. And it combines with generative AI to change the way successful companies operate. Chad, is this a buy or just another loopy startup? Go. Chad: So it almost feels like this is a pivot of monumental size when they start talking about a morale platform. I mean, efficiency platforms. This is the time to be an efficiency platform, but yet they're trying to become a morale platform. I love efficiency tools. I can't get enough of them, but after watching the Loopin demos and digging deeper, it really feels like a platform that is about 10 years old. Kind of like Trello meets Google Calendar. You're using a platform, but if I'm still doing all the manual work, does that mean I'm more efficient? No. Integrating a virtual assistant into the platform, now that would be awesome. Recording meetings, transcribing, summarizing notes, being able to create actions and tasks for this pseudo Google Calendar thing that they have. In a world of chatGPT, we have to see more. And if you are going to make a big announcement calling it a morale platform, morale boosting platform, where's the wah, wah, wah at? 'Cause this is a sell. Joel: The wah, wah, wah is always at my beck and call, Chad. All right. I'm gonna go. This one's a little close to my heart. I launched an app 10 years ago called Morale, which is sort of similar ratedly, which I built looking at morale on review sites, and also poach, which use some natural language processing to kind of gauge, build almost like a stock chart of morale and what's going on with the company. Lieven: Sentiment score almost, right? Joel: Sentiment score, yeah. So this one's a little close to the vest for me. Although the idea is a buy because I've done it a few times and I can't like not be for it. I'm here to tell you it's not gonna happen because people don't care. Companies don't really care how you feel. I mean, everyone says they do. Everyone says that how our employees feel and their morale and they're excited to come to work is important. I think everyone being remote potentially gives this a shot, but ultimately, companies care about what you produce. They don't care about how you feel. And as long as you're producing and you're miserable, companies don't really give a shit. If you don't produce and you're happy... Chad: You're fired. Joel: Okay, great. If you're producing and you're unhappy, no one gives a shit. Basically, companies don't wanna know if you're happy or not. And as long as you're producing, they don't care if you're happy or not. If you're not producing, you're gonna get fired and you'll be unhappy either way. And it's certainly not something that, in my experience, companies are willing to spend a lot of money to do. So for me as well, the wah, wah is one of my favorites. This one, although a buy just 'cause it's close to me. It's a big sell because companies don't give a shit. Chad: So you don't think Jamie Dimon and DJ Saul cares about their employees that they wouldn't think this is big? Joel: No. Chad: Exactly. Joel: No, I don't. Lieven: First of all, we do care about our employees, but we don't need a employee morale booster based on AI generated content to care about the people. I mean, it's totally bullshit. What can you expect from a platform like that? Something like giving me motivational slogans every 15 minutes. "Hey, go, go Lieven." Or every oak was once a little acorn, go, go. I mean, seriously. So what's the morale booster going to do with people who are seriously depressed? Nothing at all. I don't think you need a coach to keep your employees from leaving. I think you need interesting jobs and a decent surrounding and capable staff, et cetera. And the best thing I feel to improve morale is to offer your people a common enemy. Chad: That's a different story. [laughter] Okay. Good talk. Lieven: But what I found interesting about TikTok. [laughter] What I found interesting about Loopin once that their CEO, Ben used to be a Royal Marine, and he claims the motivational stuff he learned being a marine, he's using now in his app. And that's an interesting thing. And I'm sure that if you're able to motivate a team in a terrible environment like the army, then you should be able to do it in a company as well. But how do you feel about it Chad? It's your business, armies. Chad: At the end of the day, that type of motivation is entirely different than the motivation that we see on the corporate side entirely. Lieven: Yeah. You fucking maggot get your lazy ass. That's not the kind of... Chad: Yeah, Because you could die. And if you're fucking something up, then literally there are lives on the line versus something like this. So when somebody says like, you're gonna take your motivational skills that you learned in the military, it's an entirely different world. So good for him. But yeah, I don't see it working. Lieven: Sell, sell, definitely sell. Joel: Three sells for Loopin. Chad: Wow. Joel: All right. Next up, Dutch HR tech firm Pera has secured 5 million euros. Pera aims to make recruitment faster and more accurate by analyzing the language used by job applicants and has a database of more than 5.5 million professionals. The funds will be used to develop Pera's technology, expand its footprint in the Benelux, is that how it's pronounced, Lieven? Lieven: Benelux, Benelux. Joel: Benelux, which is Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg, which I didn't know. That's news for me. And as well as the UK and continue to gather data to improve its algorithms. The firm's periscope tool examines applicant's responses to three open-ended question and compares them with a data set on the professional achievements of others. Chad, by or sell Pera? Chad: This is probably the fastest assessment. See what I did there? That I've made in a long time. And it all has to do with the following quote from Rina Joosten-Rabou. Is that how you say it, Joosten? Lieven: Good enough. Chad: Where she mentions, I analyze the following statement. "The research behind Pera's approach is based on over 30 years of science, where it has been proven that people's communication contains subliminal clues about their motivations, personalities, and behavior". What the kind of fucking cycle bubble bullshit is that? Subliminal clues? Do ferries also help in the predictive function of Pera? I mean, if I were a hiring company, I would run for the hills. If somebody calls you and says, "Hey, I'm from Pera", put the phone down. I can't sell this fast enough. It's done. Good luck. Fucking subliminal. Are you kidding? Joel: Okay. First of all, the website is ridiculous. [laughter] Joel: That is the most asinine weird website for a SaaS company I've ever seen. They must have spent a ton of money on this website and it's totally ridiculous. Just go check it out if you wanna see what I'm talking about. That was a big, like eeh, for me starting off. So the website says, "Your written language is like a fingerprint. It can reveal your key competencies and future potential. All we need is your responses to a three-question interview". Okay. Who the fuck writes anymore, okay? It's a lost art. Kids don't do it. Young people don't write well anymore. And if you need to be a solid writer to come across on this test as a good potential employee, a lot of people are screwed 'cause they just don't write anymore. Paradox is Traitify, which uses visual shit and apparently works, I think is a much better technology. Chad: Visual shit. Joel: I mean, if you want something simple, go with a Traitify or Paradox. If you wanna go all in on this stuff, use someone like Plum. I just don't see Pera cutting through with a three-question writing test. I do like their regional focus and I like that I've learned a new word like Benelux because maybe I'll use that at some point. [laughter] But for me as well, man, I just do this fast enough. This is crazy shit, Pera. Lieven? Lieven: First of all, if you say Benelux, you have to say Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, and not Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg as you did, because then the acronym is kind of lost but... Joel: Have patience, man. God is not finished with me yet. Sorry. Lieven: Benelux. Joel: Benelux. Lieven: Okay. But talking about Pera, I totally agree. I mean, they say on their website, three simple steps. The candidate answers three open questions online. There's no right or wrong. Then Pera registers the answers and extracts information from a language that subconsciously says something about the candidate. And then, well, the platform compare that data with the database of successful people in the same role. That's... In my opinion, it's bullshit. But who am I? [chuckle] And I asked Rina Joosten because that's the way how you pronounce her name. I asked Rena Houston on LinkedIn to connect and she already accepted. So I'm going to give her the right to answer and if she listens, maybe somehow will hint the show to her. Chad: Oh, she'll listen. Lieven: If she listens, she can contact me. We're connected now and I'm really interested because psychology interests me. And if she can prove that subconscious stuff like this could work, I'm happy to listen. But for now on, it's a very, very big sell. Outro: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Joel: That's six sells everybody. Let's see if... Chad: Geez. Joel: The final company can save it. All right. This is a crowdfunding deal that's nearing its goal of raising 700,000 euros. The company Equitas is an interview intelligence software aiming to support fair and inclusive hiring, helping companies build diverse teams. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Belfast, the startup says it's seen 800% year over year growth in the volume of interviews and have a sales pipeline of over 3 million pounds. 32 investors have already jumped in to invest, but I wanna know what you two think. Chad, by or sell Equitas? Chad: So co-founder Michael Blakley has experience in recruiting and deep experience in assessments. And what is an interview? It's an assessment. The platform provides structure to the interview, creating a standardized flow in questions including probing questions. No note-taking necessary as the audio is recorded and transcribed. Pretty standard nowadays. This is a very competitive space, but I always bet on industry experience and Equitas has that plus focus on the UK and Ireland. For me, gonna break the ice. It's a buy. Joel: Holy shit. [applause] Joel: Somebody had to. Lieven, you're champing at the bit. Do you wanna go or do you want me to go? Lieven: No, I wanna go. No worries. Joel: Go ahead. Lieven: I feel it's like very American software. I think it maybe useful for multinationals to prove in courts they don't discriminate because basically with the transcribing staff and all, that's what it's doing. It's keeping records of how this... The application process went and then it's offering proof. "We didn't discriminate because of this and that." But for most as I'm based in Europe and probably also for really big companies in Europe, we don't need software to do it. Lieven: I mean, the shortage of qualified candidates is structural. So we just don't have the luxury to choose between many candidates, let alone to discriminate. So I don't think many companies in Europe will be interested in buying software to prove they don't discriminate. And they definitely won't buy it because they don't want to discriminate. I mean, they don't wanna discriminate, but they just won't. So I don't feel this has big possibilities in most European countries, but maybe Anglo-Saxon countries, yes, they resemble America more. Could be, but for me it's a sell. Joel: Alright. We're back to selling guys. Okay, we're back to selling. All right. HireVue, Willow, VidCruiter, Vervoe, Paradox, Spark Hire, Wedge, Hire Fix, Indeed, TestGorilla, BrightHair... BrightHire, sorry. Should I go on? Chad: No. That's great market validation. That's a good point. Yeah. Joel: Equitas is a knife in a gunfight. If you want to invest in Belfast, buy a bottle of Bushmills. This also is a sell for me. If you're keeping track at home, that is eight sells and one buy. Alright. Let's get to one of our favorite or least favorite, depending on who you're asking. Leaders in Europe. French President Emmanuel Macron has called for Europe to reduce its reliance on the US. What? And avoid being caught up in a confrontation between the US and China over Taiwan. Speaking to journalists after spending six hours with Chinese President Xi during a state visit to China, Macron emphasized his support for his concept of, "strategic autonomy," for Europe in which Europe would become a third superpower. The French president argued that Europe should focus on boosting its own defense industries while reducing its reliance on the extra territoriality of the US dollar. European Council President Charles Michel seems to agree saying EU cannot "blindly, systematically follow Washington." Chad, what do you make of all this strategic autonomy talk in the old country? Chad: I make that I wanna hear from the European on this one first. Lieven: And that's supposed to be me? Joel: That is you, yes. Lieven: Well, first of all, Macron spent six hours talking to Xi Jinping and afterwards, he launches the idea of Europe as a third superpower. Seriously. Russia and China succeeded in convincing Trump to move away from Europe and NATO, but then Trump scrolled up and he didn't get re-elected. So now they have to try something else, and they try a different approach and convincing Macron that Europe needs to be a third superpower. And Macron obviously has a very big ego, and he probably sees himself as the president of that third superpower. That's ridiculous. In different times, I would agree on Europe needing to reduce its dependency on the US, but not today. These aren't the times. Without US, Ukraine will be a part of Russia by now, Taiwan would be Chinese. So what? I'm sure Putin think Poland and maybe the Baltics belong to Russia too and have no clue what China wants after Taiwan, but I'm sure we won't like it. Lieven: And China has been increasing their military budgets drastically in the past decade. It's not because they're afraid of NATO and they're afraid that NATO might attack them. So I don't know what they're planning on, but Taiwan is too small to justify those really big growths and military budget. And China doesn't have many friends. So you have North Korea, but there are many countries with common enemies like Iran, for example, idealistically, they are totally different with China, but they have the same enemy, the west. So I don't think we want a stronger China right now. It's really... It's a problem. I think it's a problem bigger than Russia is, but now getting a split up between the United States and Europe would be the biggest stupidity to do, but who am I? Joel: America. Chad: So yeah. So you mentioned a name, Trump. He was probably one of the best, was he? Helpful idiots that all the strong-armed men across the world had, the Xis, the Putin's, the... What's this little buddy in North Korea? Lieven: Kim Jong Un. Joel: Un. Lieven: Or something, Kim Jong Un. Chad: He's saying the things that you shouldn't out loud, which is another thing that Trump is saying. If you feel this, I totally get it. That this is not something you say on the world stage at this point in time. Do I believe in isolationism? No, that's total bullshit because we have to have redundancies. And we have to be smart because we do have a global economy, although you have to be smart. And from the EU, I see from the standpoint of you look to the EU first and then you look outward and number two is the US. Totally get that. Joel: So one thing neither of you mentioned was a certain riotous behavior in France currently going on because they're raising the retirement age. And what better way... Chad: A diversion... Joel: What better way to divert attention to riots in the street in Paris than to talk about being autonomous and leaving the US or relying on the US much less than they have? Look, historically, World War II happened. Europe was decimated. America basically said, "We're gonna police the seas, the oceans. We're gonna basically be a Kevlar vest over Europe, protecting you from everything. You won't have to build your military as much as you have in the past. We'll create a union and things for 50 years or so." We're pretty much like that. And America spent a lot of money to protect everyone and everyone lived really nicely and had nice welfare in Europe because they didn't have to build a military. Joel: They could spend all their money on their citizens and keep them happy in that system. Fast forward to today, America, I think is spending 5X on Ukraine versus what Europe is. We're still spending a ton of money for defenses of Europe and keeping Russia at bay in many cases. So it's sort of strange to say Europe is gonna be autonomous and less on the US. I see the reality of it in that if we do get into war with Taiwan, does Europe wanna be involved with that? Not really. They didn't really wanna be involved when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Now they did send troops ultimately, but we sent a lot more troops to Europe and money and resources than they did to... Chad: They were already in a conflict. Let's make sure everybody remembers that. Joel: Hold on. We wanted to... We're fighting a two-front war. They're fighting the Nazis. Chad: Again, they were already in a conflict. Joel: The point is they have no... Chad: What fuck did you want them to do? Joel: They have no history of saying the US is in trouble in Asia. Chad: France had given up. What did you want them to do, Joel? What did you want France to do then? Lieven: Even Belgium gave up after six days. Chad: Historically, you're all fucked up. Joel: Europe does not wanna get involved in the Pacific. Lieven: No, no, it's true. But... Joel: Am I wrong? Chad: When they bombed Pearl Harbor, what was going on in Europe at that time, Joel? Joel: War. Chad: Oh, no shit, no shit. They had to defend themselves. Joel: So we could have said, "You guys deal with Europe. We got the Japanese to deal with", but we didn't do that. Chad: No, we saw that shit coming to us, so we had to actually do something. That was an America first issue. Joel: Why could have Europe seen Japan coming their way? Chad: They could have, but they're already in a fight. Lieven: Japan is very far, and Germany wasn't. Joel: So we weren't in the European fight, but we got into it. That's okay. But your argument that they were already in a war, so they couldn't come to the Pacific. Chad: Dude, most countries were decimated. Lieven: Yeah. And America was pissed off because of Pearl Harbor, and then they had to be involved. But I'm not sure. Did they want to be a part of the second World War in the beginning? Chad: No. Lieven: In the first one, they only joined in '16 or something. When did the Americans come to Europe to save our asses for the... I dont know how many times. Chad: We're always slow. Yeah. Lieven: Yeah. But when you come, of course you change tie. Joel: So let me get around to my final point here. [laughter] Europe is destined to eventually... I don't wanna say be on its own, but America is going to support Europe less and less as the decades go on and on. And they need to figure out what their road is. Is it a third superpower that makes nice with both the China, Russia, Iran, axis of evil as well as America, and try to tow that line and trade with both? I mean, let's be honest, for energy, Europe had a really nice winter that was warm. This wasn't a huge issue, but energy is going to be an issue next year. So Europe has a lot of issues in terms of relying on stuff from Russia and energy that they need to at least act like we're not America's bitch. We can make our own decision. [laughter] So I think Macron in some ways and Europe in some ways is forced to be, "We can't just totally be on one side or the other. We have to try to play nice with everybody so our folks don't fucking revolt", which as Macron knows, they have a tendency to do. They wanna keep the peace, keep people warm in the winter, keep people fed. And to do that, they have to play on both sides of the fence. Lieven: But I think it'll be selfish from Europe to say, "Okay, when Russia is attacking Ukraine, America, please help us." But when China is attacking Taiwan and the Americas has guaranteed they will protect Taiwan, now Europe would say, "Now this, we don't wanna be involved." It just doesn't work like that. There has to be loyalty from both sides. Joel: I will tell you, if Russia had rolled through Ukraine and was at the doorstep of Poland, Europe would be singing a much different tune than they are now. Lieven: Definitely. Yeah, of course. And it was a possibility. Russia expected to do it in a few weeks, take the whole of Ukraine. Everyone actually so as I was surprised it didn't work out that way. So apparently, Russia's army wasn't as good as they expected. Chad: Crimea was a practice run. Lieven: Yeah. And we didn't react and they expected the same now. Chad: We did not. Joel: And I'm sure Russia would love nothing then for our attention to be diverted to the Pacific and China, which leaves Europe much more on its own than it does now. So anyway, the world is gonna get interesting, kids, in a not great way, I suspect. Chad: Get me a beach and an umbrella drink. That's all I care. [laughter] Joel: Portugal's fine, everybody. Let's go meet up at Chad's for pina coladas and sunbathing. We out. Chad: We out. Lieven: We out. S5: Thank you for listening to what's it called? The podcast, the Chad, the Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout-outs to people. You don't even know and yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese, not one cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. 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.

Warning: This episode might make you hungry, as Chik-fil-A, In-N-Out, McDonald’s and others get mentions. If you dare listen, however, you’ll get knowledge bombs on the trend of remote layoffs, how Hilton is turning happy workers into big profits and taking on AirBNB and whether or not employers are “going broke by going woke.” Google’s pay-per-click for job postings gets airtime too … imagine that. And chicken nuggets. Lots of talk about chicken nuggets. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability inclusion. Inro: 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. Think email spam is bad now? MailChimp just integrated OpenAI's GPT tech into its software, and the ladders couldn't be happier. Hi kids, you're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast Does Recruitment Marketing. I'm your co-host, Joel Hormel Cheeseman. Chad: I'm Chad Pass-Me-A-Budweiser Sowash. Julie Calli: I always forget the name. [laughter] Chad: That's why you write them down. Joel: How many shows have we done? Julie Calli: I'm Julia I don't know why I'm on this show Calli. [laughter] Joel: Oh, my God. On this episode, remote layoffs, Hilton gets it, and Bud Light triggers conservatives. See what I did there? Let's do this. What's up, kids? Chad: He's back from Vegas. So how'd it go? You had the family in tow. So did you take Jeremy to the Spearmint Rhino, or how'd it go? Joel: Wow. You just went right there, didn't you? So we went to Vegas but I wouldn't say we went to Vegas. First day was Hoover Dam, second day was Grand Canyon, third day was Red Rocks hiking excursion, and it wasn't until the last day that we did sort of the strip, and the Stratosphere and the roller coaster at New York-New York, had good meals on the strip. Yeah, I didn't put my six-year-old at the blackjack table and headed to the Sportsbook or anything. It was a family vacation. It was most like family vacations, it was equal parts loving, laughing, engaging, and then equal parts, I wanna punch you in the throat and I wish you were dead, kind of thing. Chad: Well, Cole being 16 and around that much sex, not to have access to it, that to me sounds like... That was not a good place. Joel: Why would you go Spearmint Rhino with my six-year-old and then sexcapades with my 16-year-old? Julie Calli: There's roller coasters. Joel: This is what happens when I'm gone for a week. Chad stuffs all this in and it's gotta come out on the very first podcast recording that we do. Chad: No, we've been talking about it all week. There's two podcasts we've been talking about this. [laughter] Joel: Yeah, yeah. So then now we're going to UNLEASH in Vegas in a couple of weeks. HR Tech's in Vegas, I'll be at Sherman. I might as well get a condo in Vegas at this point, we're gonna be there so often. Chad: [chuckle] Cole can take care of it. Joel: Yes, thank you for not bringing my daughter in to any of this, by the way. You do have some guard rails, which is nice. Chad: Hey, I was a 16-year-old boy at one time. I know the hormones that are coursing through that kid's veins. Joel: And you had a 13-year-old girl at one point, too, which is why you know not to bring that into the game. Chad: That's exactly right. Yes. I would kill a motherfucker. [laughter] Julie Calli: Well, here's a question, though. Did they enjoy it? Joel: Parts of it. Like any family vacation. I think there was probably too much hiking, at one point. [laughter] Joel: It was probably too much in the car, at one point. Chad: It sounds very Griswold. Joel: There was probably like, it's too cold out here, at one point. We did hit Vegas in a cold front. Chad: Well, welcome back. Joel: My 16-year-old loves In-N-Outs, so we did that. And he loves Gordon Ramsey, so let's go to Gordon Ramsey's restaurant. So you kind of balance out everyone hoping to be happy. And, I don't know, we didn't kill each other, so that's saying something. Chad: That is good. That is good. Yes, yes. Julie Calli: It's important, because it's the impression that you leave on them. So when you say, "Hey, I have to go to this event for work in Vegas," they're like, "Oh, that long car ride to the Dam again." And they think that's what you're doing. [laughter] Joel: I don't think they think that's what I'm doing in Vegas. No. I don't think that's it. I don't think that's it. Chad: Shout-out. Joel: I'll go first, since we're talking about In-N-Out Burger and Gordon Ramsey. My first shout-out goes to Chick-fil-A. Chad: [chuckle] Jesus, chicken. Joel: Regardless of how you feel about their political views, their employees step up at some point. So, Sarah Massey's dog, Molly, was put down on January 27th of this year. On January 26th, the day before, Massey went to Chick-fil-A to get Molly her favorite meal, chicken nuggets. And whose favorite meal isn't chicken nuggets from Chick-fil-A? Anyway, when she got to the window to pay, the staff told her they "took care of it" and didn't charge her for it. Massey posted a video of herself feeding Molly the nuggets on Instagram and Chick-fil-A later sent her a personalized painting of Molly along with a note expressing their condolences. Massey was touched by Chick-fil-A's gesture and said it will always hold a special place in her heart. Who says employees can't make a difference? It was employees that noticed this was happening. It was the employees that alerted the HQ, and it was the employees that generated this beautiful portrait, as opposed to like, I don't know, a cow outfit or a Chick-fil-A bib. Joel: I don't know what would typically go out. It was a custom gift. Chad: Was the dog with Jesus, though? That's the question. [laughter] Joel: It was cool. Chad: In the painting, did they have the painting with Jesus and the dog? [laughter] Joel: Taco Bell isn't doing this kind of shit. I'm not saying it's specific to Chick-fil-A but having solid employees that listen to customers and what's going on in their life makes a big difference and it made a big difference at this point. Chad: It does. Joel: So Chick-fil-A or not, employees make a difference, and I thought it was worth a shout-out to Chick-fil-A and Massey and her dog, Molly. Julie Calli: Great story. Joel: On this show. Chad: Yeah, that's beautiful. Joel: Chad, a man who loves dogs as much as you, that you're not touched by this is... Chad: Nothing. I didn't say that I wasn't touched. I'm just thinking of the painting that's hanging over the mantle, with Jesus holding the dog while eating a Chick-fil-A sandwich. Joel: I'm thinking like the dog is Jesus. Maybe it's like a last supper with the dog and they're eating nuggets. [laughter] Joel: That would have been awesome. Chad: Oh my God. Okay, Julie. Shout-out. Chad, we gotta get out of that. Joel: Yeah. Pull us out, Julie. Pull us out of this. Julie Calli: Well, shout-out to Google for finally having these... The testing being done, they're not giving us much information about it right now, but Google job ads. Paid job ads on Google. We have been waiting for this for a long time. So shout-out to Google for finally making it possible. Joel: And we've been predicting it for a long time. So we're finally glad that Google... Julie Calli: Everybody's just been waiting. Now, yet? Joel: Google stepped up. Julie Calli: Is it now yet, is now the time? Joel: Yeah, yeah. [automated voice] Chad: Yeah. I took a shot at it and I finally got it right. So that's my one prediction I'll probably get right this year. [laughter] Joel: Yeah, yeah, and I think I made it three years ago. It was kind of obvious if they took this seriously they were gonna do it. I can't wait till like cost per click comes out, and cost, like when all the data comes out, that'll be fun. And if the data kicks a certain competitors ass, it will be really interesting to see where things go. Chad: Yep. Julie Calli: Provided it's a better experience. Chad: Providing it's a better experience. Julie Calli: Yes. Chad: Shout-out to our friend Brett Marz over at BAMKO. That's right, he was a guest on the show. The name of the episode was called Marketing is Clueless. Brett, he's been selling and working with marketing for years, and he has finally gotten this epiphany: Hey, what the hell is going on, why aren't we treating our employees better so that our employees treat our customers better? The entire discussion was around that topic. It was amazing. We've got so many messages about that podcast, and so I appreciate it and shout-out to Brett. Joel: And the compliments came from people who are usually the most critical of our episodes. So the fact that they were complimentary, I think, says a lot that you should check out that episode if marketing is important and recruiting is important to you. Julie, there's a birthday that you're celebrating. Julie Calli: Yes. Chad: Ooh, do they get rum from Plum? Oh, that's a question. Julie Calli: Well, I'd love some rum from Plum. Well, happy anniversary to Recruitment Marketing. One year, we launched the site one year ago today. Thank you to our audience. We've spent the last year really listening to what resources, what can we provide to help better empower people in recruitment marketing and talent acquisition. As we're all going through transformation so fast, and things are changing so quickly, how can we help empower the people to make better change and advance the industry? Continuing to put out new articles and trends but what I'm really excited about is we're about to launch two new resources and experiences. One being a community for talent acquisition and recruitment marketing professionals. This community is free to use, and I believe is gonna create a way for people to be able to collaborate more on some of the biggest challenges we face. Chad: Is it gonna be vetted? Julie Calli: Yes. You do have to register with your authentic credentials and we are paying attention to who's coming into the community. So we want it to be a professional community, and that is a community that we're launching. But in addition to that we're also launching a marketplace to help people better understand the technologies, the solutions and the providers that are out there, so that we can build something that's really helpful for people to understand and find the right solutions. Joel: Hell, yeah. And you can become part of that community if you're not already, at recruitmentmarketing.com. [music] Chad: Topics. Joel: All right, let's talk remote layoffs. Chad: Layoffs? Joel: They're becoming increasingly common, as more and more companies allow their employees to work from home. McDonalds was in the news recently when they asked corporate employees who usually work from the office at least three days a week to do the job from home. The plan was to lay off hundreds of employees, and the company preferred to deliver its news virtually instead of face-to-face. The pros of such a move? Well, digesting the news in private, as well as the cost savings. The cons? There's no closure, and maybe a level of stress that's not healthy for workers. And how about the impact on recruitment, retention and the future of remote work? Chad, what is your take on the trend of remote layoffs? Chad: So we're evolving our relationship to work in America. We've bought into this rugged individualism narrative hook, line and sinker. I know I did. I jumped in with both feet. Then the pandemic hit, and as people died around us, literally, we started re-evaluating life. Not work, but life. So it was also evident that companies had been bold-face lying to us every day about their inability to support remote work. So as we started working from home, in rather a quick and productive fashion, we started to think about how work would look on our terms. Right? So I don't see remote work changing. I see our relationship with work changing. I was listening to the Pivot podcast about a week or so ago, and Liz Hoffman was a guest. She's a journalist from Semaphore. And she told a story about our favorite DJ, David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, he said he was at a country club during the weekday and one of his workers strolled up and said hi after enjoying a day at the beach. Chad: That interaction really pissed Solomon off. Why wasn't she at work, and what was he paying her for? This is the type of evolution that I'm talking about. Number one, the 40-hour work week was created in 1940 by Henry Ford, for manufacturing, not for desk jobs. Solomon is paying for results. Not so much... Solomon was also at the fucking country club. Right? So if you're getting all of what you're paying for, which is results, it shouldn't matter whether it's 10 hours, 20 hours, 40 hours, 60 hours. It all comes down to our relationship with work. And it has changed. The problem is we have guys like DJ Sol, who doesn't want it to change. They want it to be the 1940s, 1930s, they want it to be Henry Ford, and they want people at their desk. The problem is we're gonna see some flux. Some companies who need the best talents will go remote and they will get the best talents. But again, it's all about the job market, man. So I think it's here to stay. It's just going to expand and contract as the market does. Joel: Yeah, you know, remote work, we've talked for a long time that it's gonna be messy. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Companies are gonna figure it out, what's this look like? I think one of the sad... You mentioned evolution, I don't know if it's evolution or devolution, but the trend of laying people off in a non-face-to-face manner, that used to shock people. I remember stories of like, oh my God, they sent out an email to people or a text message, right? Now it's commonplace, and now we're talking about it being normal. Julie Calli: Yeah. Joel: There are pros to this. You get to get laid off on your own time, you get to do it from the comfort of your home. The fact that McDonalds would say, hey... They didn't say, people we're laying off, why don't you work from home for the rest of the week? And then they got laid off. Well, there's your cue. If you're told by the company to go work from home, you might get laid off. They're not the first. We talked about Google recently laid off thousands via email. Mark Zuckerberg announced plans of big cuts in a 2000-word memo to employees. Even Pepsi, a more traditional company is laying off people in a digital remote manner. Chad: What about Indeed? Joel: I think the sad part is... Chad: Indeed, 2200 people. Joel: Yeah. We're just, we're immune to it now. In fact, we're moving to like it's a preference. If I'm gonna get laid off, I'd rather be in my La-Z-Boy or enjoying a day at the park, whatever, than having to go to HR, be in a room with a table of five people, and signing papers and whatever else. I just think it's funny that we've moved from, holy shit, how can you lay people off in a non-face-to-face manner, to like, how could you lay people off looking at them and in a room with them? They should be alone in their house or apartment? It's crazy how quickly the world has moved from like, when you talk about serious things and you lay someone off, you look them in the eye and you have that face-to-face human connection. We've gone 180 from that. Aand whether it's good or not, it's a sign of the times, and it's the way things are gonna be, get used to them. It's a reaction or just evolution, I guess, of this remote work. We're gonna remote work, we might as a lay people off when they're at home and this is how we're gonna do it, and this is gonna be standard business practice from now on. Julie Calli: This is an outcome of pandemic, right? That so many people were terminated in such a short period of time and had to do that remotely, where companies had to face that very quickly, right? They had to. So that's what forced change. Forced it. And then companies realized, wow, there is a way to execute on this. And some companies did it very poorly, so let's start with that, like the bar was pretty low when we first all adapted to that in Covid times. But then we've reemerged from that. Now, we over-hired for a while to fill that rise in demand, so a lot of companies are trying to level out now. So I don't call this really a decline. I call this a getting back to normal levels from my viewpoint of it. And now companies are saying, yes, this is actually a more effective way to manage this communication plan, with consistency, with process, to manage the experience, so that it's not parted out and handed it out into individual managers who might fub up the communication and not execute on that properly, which can create risk. So this is a better way from a corporate perspective to execute on something like that. Julie Calli: But, wow, the little bait and switch of like, oh, you can work from home this week, and then find out, gee, you're laid off. Yeah, you're right; I'm with you on that, Joel. Now, if I were inside one of those organizations and someone said, "Oh, you can go ahead and work remote tomorrow,' I would pack up all the stuff on my desk, because I would be in complete fear that remote work now means potential to be terminated. So does that start to change the mindset of people, of, I need to be in the office or I might be on the chopping block? Joel: Well, people are gonna start saying, "You're not getting fired, we want you to work from home this week because of whatever reason." One little story, side note, in terms of being laid off at work. Back in the days when I was writing Cheesehead, I got a scoop on some big layoff at Career Builder. And I posted it that night, and so that morning everyone at Career Builder sort of saw that post. Chad: In the office. Joel: They didn't start... Yeah, in the office. Everyone saw it, right? So it spread like wildfire, and then they didn't start the layoffs until 2 o'clock that afternoon. So they spent an entire morning at Career Builder of people speculating, are there gonna be layoffs, who's gonna be laid off? And I talked to an executive there that said, "You wouldn't believe how much money we lost in productivity because of that blog post." So if everyone was working from home, it wouldn't spread as quickly if something like that happened, you wouldn't lose so much productivity. So in a side note, companies, if everyone's at work, they lose productivity because all the gossip around who's getting laid off, maybe they can control it better when they're in a remote situation, anyway. Julie Calli: Productivity, you're about to lay people off, what are you... Of course, you're gonna lose productivity. [laughter] Joel: But do you know it or not, is the question. I don't know. Chad: They throw that shit in the Slack channel, it's gonna be the same thing. Yeah. So take a look at what Indeed did, they laid off 2200 people but they had everybody come to a call, and then it took 10 minutes before they actually sent out an email to let the people know. So you're talking about your entire workforce being impacted during that time frame, so yeah. It's a figuring it out kind of a thing, and that's gonna be on the employer and the employee, you've gotta figure out what you want out of this. If you want to be one of those ladder climbers, that's awesome. You probably need to be in the office, you need to be... Like I used to, I was an hour early, I was... I stayed an hour late, I was the last one out of the office and I drove. I had a commute of an hour one way. But if you're not... It's one of those things where you really have to figure out what role you wanna play and what type of position you want, or does life matter more to you. Julie Calli: Yeah, personal choices and where you feel that you fit in the culture. And are you gonna ever find a company that's a perfect fit for that? Chad: Nah. Julie Calli: Companies change and their culture changes. Chad: And people do too. Julie Calli: Yes, so there's a constant evolution of at the right time, the right person, the right place. Yeah, that could be today and it could not be tomorrow at any company for any person. But I know that companies have to do these types of layoffs. That's a fact that they have to. Can they do it well? I think that there is better chance to do this in these ways that are remote and done so that you can manage with consistency than that one-to-one. So while I know that it does eliminate a lot of the humanized experience that we're used to, I do think it's an advancement towards making sure that it's done properly. Joel: By the way, in case anyone knows, Chad has promised me that when he lays me off, it will be face-to-face over a bottle of bourbon in case you are wondering. Chad: Well, I really don't have to because I already have your voice clone, so you're still gonna be there. It's all good. [laughter] Joel: Just make sure you send the check to the right address. We'll be right back, everybody. Let's go to Hilton shall we? Happy workers equal prosperous brands. What a concept. Am I right? Hilton apparently takes it seriously though. The hotel chain has worked hard to cultivate an energized workforce to deliver on its brand promises in addition to improving its workplace culture post-Covid, which has been ranked among the best in the world by independent organizations, Hilton is leveraging brand mash-ups and appealing to new age travelers. Chad, what's your take on Hilton's new strategy? Chad: It makes sense. Again, we talked about Brett Martz, our episode with him, he talked about an actual experience that he had at a hotel where they were understaffed and he got shitty service. Then he talked about another experience, it wasn't in a hotel, but it was still... It was a customer experience where the employees were treated like shit, so therefore they treated the customers like shit, so that just kills your brand. It just blows my mind that this has been such a large, large blind spot for big marketing over the years. Chad: They're now starting to understand that. Joel, you and I, in 2018 were in BAMF for the gathering. And we really saw, because we didn't really have that much engagement with CMOs and brand leaders at that point, then we started to realize these guys have no fucking clue about how they're treating employees, how the employees are treating customers, not to mention, if you go through an application process, they're losing people there too, 'cause it's shit and they go into a black hole. There are so many areas where marketing is literally dropping the fucking ball. Now that Hilton is finally found out, and now they're doing all these great things to talk about how they have finally... How old is Hilton? Jesus Christ. Joel: It's gotta be a 50-plus year. Chad: Jesus! Joel: It's gotta be 50, 60, 75-year company. Chad: Easy, easy. Joel: So I stayed at an Airbnb in my time in Las Vegas. We talked about my vacation. I don't wanna say I'm done with Airbnb but I'm pretty close. Not just for the quality of some of the housing and the customer service, which is none, it's the person who owns the house basically. And Airbnb customer service has to be a third man in that if there's issues. Now more than ever, if you're a traditional hotel, your employees are part of that huge differentiation from this juggernaut they call Airbnb. Julie Calli: It's such a great point. Joel: While it may be a convenient, tech efficient, pricing might be better. Your employees, if you're a hotel, are your differentiator from Airbnb because Airbnb has jack shit when it comes to employee support, a smiling face to welcome you, all that good stuff that we took for granted at hotels. And the good news is, market forces and competition have made hotels up their game in the level that we're talking about with Hilton, and it makes a difference in the customer service. I'm more apt to go to a hotel now because of the shitty experiences I've had with Airbnb, and I don't think I would have said that five years ago. I would have said hotels suck, Airbnb is where it's at. And there was a period where Airbnbs were all really good, it was like the best people, they really cared. Now, it's like people who buy investment properties and just do a little fix-up and hope that you pay for the cost of the mortgage. So I think that's key. I also love this brand mash-up thing. I know we talked, my wife and I were watching TV last night, and Peloton has a commercial about how Peloton... Joel: It's the hotel commercial, but how Pelotons are gonna be in the hotels, and it's not gonna be a regular, shitty experience. And my wife is like, "Oh, well that's a really good deal for Peloton. That's kinda cool." So the other is like having Starbucks have a lifestyle thing at the hotel, so for me, this is all really good but you need employees to make it all work. And for that, I think that's great, and I certainly expect the Hilton example to come to all hotels, certainly your high-end hotels because that employee is the differentiator from technology and the Airbnb juggernaut. Julie Calli: Yeah, and so many companies are having a hard time hiring frontline workers, and I'd put hospitality into that. Chad: Yes. Julie Calli: They're having a hard time hiring them, and now they're also saying, we wanna hire those that are energized and bring that high level of service to our brand. Okay, so now you need people and you need the right kind of people. That has everything to do with the experience that you're gonna bring to them, because if you're already struggling to fill the demand, we have a shortage of frontline workers and their interest to work in these jobs. So if that's the case, what are you going to do to attract them as well? Because this is a really important part. You can claim, we want an energized workforce, but can you make them come? Can they show up? That is gonna have to do with not just running great ads and doing great recruitment marketing, that is gonna have everything to do with the type of experience you provide your employees. And that then is gonna circle back into the potential to bring more. Because if you really are giving a great experience, if they really are enjoying the work, and that is leading to Hilton being a great provider, people are gonna be proud to be part of that, and that's the story you wanna tell that brings the full cycle around. Great employees are gonna give a great customer service experience, they're happy, they're spreading that around, that's a successful company, that attracts more people. That's how the circle of life works in this case. Joel: It seems like a small thing, but people love... If I say, I work at Hilton and someone says, "Oh, I saw that commercial, you guys got Pelotons in there, and that's really cool shit," that means something to people that work there. We think it's a small thing, but it does mean something. Julie Calli: Yeah, I love the brand mash-up, I think that there's so many people who are cult brand to Starbucks, Peloton, they love something about a brand, you have the ability to tap into that cult-like experience and bring it into your own, mashing these things up, I think it's genius to do that. Chad: And it's only taken Hilton 103 years to fucking get there. Great job Hilton. Conrad Hilton... Joel: Way to google, Chad. Chad: Yeah. Conrad Hilton is rolling in his grave right now. [laughter] Joel: Let's transfer from that to wokeness, shall we? Chad: Oh, my favorite. Joel: I know, I know. All right. So go woke go broke has been a popular rallying cry for conservatives as of late. Many high profile companies are struggling with political tensions around the country. Disney's Bob Iger said the company would "quiet down culture war controversies" back in November, and now it's come to beer with Budweiser triggering conservatives with a campaign featuring a transgender influencer named Dylan Mulvaney. In protest, Kid Rock shot cans of beer on Instagram. Chad, there's a lot to unpack here. Your thoughts. Chad: So there is one constant in this world, and that's change. And every woke initiative is forward gleaning, which is exactly what we want from companies. Instead of looking only to the next quarter, they are building for the next generation. And that's what scares the shit out of MAGA people like Kid Rock. MAGA people want it to be 1930 again and as younger adults have demonstrated, that just ain't gonna fucking happen. A couple of examples, we're talking about government, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, two young Black state representatives in the state of Tennessee were expelled from the house after joining a gun demonstration and then amplifying the sentiment on the House floor. Jones is 27 and Pearson is 29. They're not allowing this shit to pass. Chad: Jones was unanimously reinstated back into the Tennessee State House earlier this week, and I believe Pearson will be soon to follow. They are not allowing this dumb backward-looking shit to happen. Then last week in a pivotal Wisconsin Supreme Court race, young voters turned out to elect a pro-choice justice. So let's close the loop here. Kids aren't just voting, they are occupying seats in government and yes, also buying shit. Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Budweiser, has been around for 171 years, so they understand that next quarter's profits are important but making sure you're relevant to the next generation is fucking vital to their existence. So being woke isn't just good for business, it's the only business, and I bet Anheuser Bush would rather be called woke than caught yearning for the days of 1930. Joel: Yeah, the historic perspective is really interesting here, and I talk all the time about part of the benefit of us having a podcast, Chad, is we're old old people. Chad: Shut up. Joel: And we remember shit. I know. I'm sorry. [laughter] Joel: But there was a day where the only women in ads were in the kitchen making dinner or whatever. And it wasn't until Virginia Slim's you've come a long way baby, took hold, but the model then was like, we're gonna make a cigarette just for women. Yeah, it's the same god damn cigarette, but we're gonna say it's just for women, make it thinner or whatever. Chad: Or bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, remember that one? Joel: Yes, another example, and that was the '80s where women divorce and anyway, I don't wanna get into that perspective, but then we had... I remember Billy Dee Williams, pimping Colt 45, which seems super stupid and archaic today, but that was how it was like Black person promoting what we're targeting is a Black product, that doesn't work anymore today. All products are for everyone. Could you imagine Bud Light saying, we're gonna make a gay beer, it just doesn't... It sounds stupid when you say it but 50 years ago, that might have been a thing. So to me, historically, we have always had pushback or hesitancy or fear of combining certain people with different products and hey, they drink beer just like you do. They do this just like you do, they drive this car just like you do. Chad: They are human beings. Joel: Yeah, segmenting products and brands is just a really archaic idea, and I think it's just inevitable, history is on the side of Budweiser, whether you like it or not, and most of the people that are bitching about this are 50-plus year old White guys. Chad: Get off my lawn. Joel: Frankly. And I'm one of them, so I can relate to that perspective, but yeah, history is not on your side. History is on the side of inclusivity, I know not everyone's gonna love it, but everyone didn't like women cigarettes or Billy Dee Williams. To think about when gay couples or mixed couples on TV was like, what the fuck is that about? That's normal now, no one really goes nuts about like when Ellen kissed a chick on TV, that was a huge deal. Now it's nothing. So eventually we will get to a point where this is nothing but for now it's something and it's worthy of talking about on a podcast, but history is on the side of inclusivity on this one, and inevitably I think, Budweiser is gonna be applauded for this decision at some point. Julie Calli: Yeah. In today's world, it is almost impossible to be a neutral brand because then you don't stand for anything. Being authentic is standing for something. In this case, I'm very proud of Anheuser-Busch for even when all of the press and the publicity came back, they made a choice to still stand, to stand and not to give in to the transphobia behavior that was coming out against it. They didn't pull it back, they stood with it, they're standing for something that makes them a brand that then speaks to an audience. Now, the younger Gen Z demographic is the audience that they need to appeal to. Chad, I love what you said, they need to think about their future, 'cause statistically, the proud boys are gonna age out, and the Gen Z is gonna fill in the consumer market of the future, and that is an audience that cares about inclusivity. In the end, let's view this for what it was, it was a campaign. Chad: Yes. Julie Calli: Budweiser runs lots of campaigns, they work with hundreds of influencers. I'm sure that if you went through the list of every influencer, you'd find somebody you didn't agree with what they stand for but this isn't the spokesperson for their entire brand, this is one of many of the influencers. Influencer marketing is part of the world today, and brands, brands lean in on influencers to reach different types of audiences. This is one of them, there are many of them, and this is the one that's catching a lot of attention right now. So hey, that's actually a good campaign that brings out a lot of attention. And to watch now, Jack Daniels get thrown under the bus here too with this because they also have a campaign running to be expressing inclusivity. But in the end, your business. Where do you measure this is as a success? Go look at your stock, Anheuser-Busch's stock is up six points. [laughter] Julie Calli: Now, so is that because everybody's saying, I don't wanna buy your beer, or is that because they're buying 12 cases and shooting it up on their front lawn? Chad: Who cares? Who cares? Julie Calli: Whatever is going on, it is working. If the goal of marketing is to deliver communication about your brand that drives sales and revenue, they won, they did it. They increased their value, they're increasing their sales, their stock is on a buy right now, that is a success because they just rallied people who probably could have cared less about Bud Light, who now are gonna stand with the brand and be proud because of its standing for itself against the transphobia that's being expressed to it. So go ahead and shoot it up off your front lawn and pour the beer out. Julie Calli: But you know what, you bought that beer that you're pouring out on your front lawn. [laughter] You're giving them press, you're giving them the audience on a silver platter that they want anyways, so bravo, thank you for standing, Anheuser-Busch. And all of those that are being so judgmental of a single commemorative can, it's not even printed in all the stores, what are you doing? Take a breath. Chad: It's an easy math problem, you take a look at demographics today, and then you take a look at it in less than 20 years from now. Who do you want to appeal to? It's very simple, and to be able to make these types of big moves, it's not a big fucking move, it's one can, as you had said. It's not a big move, but yet they again, are really focusing on not the baby boomers anymore, not the... And in the population in less than 20 years, Caucasian is going to be minority, you're going to see a lot of this movement in the next 10 years at least, so as we talk about this today, get ready for the massive move, the massive marketing move. Joel: I will say it's really unfortunate in a time in America where we're dealing with shootings on a regular basis, that someone would take a semi-automatic weapon to beer cans, which essentially is representative of the trans community, I think you could loosely say, it's just a really bad thing for the country that we've come to a point where like, let's take guns and shoot up beers who represent this campaign of people of trans. So anyway, not marketing-related but still a sad commentary. Julie Calli: There's a lot of future here that we need to be careful. Like brands, brands are a thing of their own. But when they start leaning into people, they start to have the identity associated with those people. We're watching that a lot, like we can see Elon Musk and... But let me bring up Jared, which is a Netflix special right now. Who was the poster child... Joel: Proud user, Jared. Joel: For Subway, yes, and lost a few hundred pounds eating just Subway. They put him on tour. So he became the face of the brand. Then only to find out that he's a pedophile. Now, Subway wants to run away from that as quickly as possible but this is the problem, humans are perfectly imperfect and they're always gonna make mistakes and they're gonna do terrible things. And brands wanna remain this consistent forward-thinking inclusive area where they're not alienating any types of customers they can potentially have or any markets, they wanna remain open and neutral, but this is a dangerous game that we're gonna be playing as companies are leaning more in on influencers. Those influencers are going to have an effect on the brand. So that's what we're talking about here. Joel: So any time you tie a brand to a person, whether it's the CEO or a fat guy from Bloomington, Indiana, you run those risks, and we talk about brand mash-ups, Pelotons and hotels, and so like Peloton affects Hilton, affects other brands, so yeah, most companies just stay the hell out of I, but to applaud the ones that don't, Julie, to your point is we're talking about. Just like we're done talking on this episode. We actually agreed, all of us on a woke topic. How good is that? Kumbaya, baby. We out. Chad: We out. Julie Calli: 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 quit them either. We out.

Listening to Chad & Cheese is like going to your favorite restaurant: You know what’s on the menu, and you know that you love it … which is why you keep coming in for more. Cheese is back from vacation and the boys are covering acquisitions, artificial intelligence, robots, LinkedIn, OnlyFans and so much more. All the flavors you know and love. Specifically, Mitratech has gobbled up Circa and Trakstar, Textio is toast thanks to ChatGPT and the White House sounds off on AI best practices. Then, LinkedIn partners with Clear to verify IDs, Digidog is back on the beat in New York City and Walmart keeps automating to phase out more and more workers. Lastly, the boys introduce you to Claudia, OnlyFans' worst nightmare. 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 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 Cheesman: Oh, yeah, it's National Ex-Spouse Day. But let's reflect on all the positive moments we shared with our exes, Chad. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Hi, kids. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. This is your co-host, Joel, cheaper to keep her Cheesman. Chad Sowash: And this is Chad, keeping up with the ChatGPT Joneses Sowash. Joel Cheesman: And on this week's show, think twice before you stick it in to ChatGPT. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: LinkedIn finds a CLEAR path to ID verification. And who let the Digidog out? [automated voice] Joel Cheesman: Let's do this. Ooh, that was sound bite overkill. Chad Sowash: Wow. Joel Cheesman: How's that gonna sound? All right. Chad Sowash: You can tell you're back. My God. Sound bites all over the fucking place. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: That's right. [laughter] I got an itchy trigger finger, baby. That's an itchy trigger finger. Chad Sowash: A week away from the soundboard. This is what you get. Joel Cheesman: Quincy filled in nicely though. Quincy brought the funk. Chad Sowash: She did. She did. As a matter of fact, she's my first shout out because we had pretty amazing comments. We do generally get comments about guest hosts. But we never get the comments that we did for her. They literally, and we've had people say she deserves a third chair [laughter] on our weekly show. 'Cause she's smart. She knows her shit and all that other fun stuff, so that was pretty awesome. Not to mention she's been on the show quite a bit, so she doesn't have the butterflies or anything like that. So shout out to Quincy. Thanks for doing that. [automated voice] Joel Cheesman: Shout out for me to Rupert Murdoch. You'll remember, Chad, last time I was on the show, your favorite media mogul was getting married for the fifth time. Chad Sowash: Thanks, Australia. Joel Cheesman: 66-year-old, a former model. Yeah. It's time to scrap the wedding. The plans are off. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Rupert told Vanity Fair that Rupert decided to end things due to "her outspoken evangelical views". She apparently said that Tucker Carlson was a messenger from God. And Rupert said, "Nope, I'm out." Looks like a life of high-priced escorts and shots of Maalox from here on out for the 92-year-old. Shout out to Rupert Murdoch. Chad Sowash: You knew one thing, that was not a shotgun wedding. Shout out to the big-ass jug of maple syrup from our friends over at plum.io. So, it's funny because it came obviously from Canada. [automated voice] Chad Sowash: And the one of the slips was all faded. So I couldn't tell who it came from. So I put it out on... Joel Cheesman: Yeah, it was. Chad Sowash: On the LinkedIn, on the socials, and all the plummers started coming out to plum.io. Caitlin and the crew starts saying, hey, that's from us. But it's a big, it's over a gallon of fucking maple syrup, which is not cheap, my friend. Joel Cheesman: So this showed up at my house, and my Canadian wife just about lost it. She was so excited. She's like, "You know how much money this is? This is like $300 worth of maple syrup." And that next day, no lie. Because it was Easter, we had ham basically lathered in maple syrup. [laughter] We had a, some sort of maple syrup dessert and we had carrots that were cooked in maple syrup. So my friend, I'm gonna be maple syruped to the gills until that gallon jug of maple syrup runs out. So yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Plum. Chad Sowash: Diabetes alert from plum. Joel Cheesman: No, it's all natural. It's all paleo, man. It's all good. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Yeah. Yeah. So Sylvie Doré, a Québécois by the way, said that we should cook our eggs in maple syrup. Use it instead of butter on low heat. To me, yes, Canada is foreign but I didn't think that fucking foreign, I never thought of that. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: I kinda like that. I like that one. I like that one. [automated voice] Joel Cheesman: All right. So Elon Musk gets my next one. Chad Sowash: Oh, my God. Joel Cheesman: He revealed this week that Twitter has only 1500 employees down from 8000 when he took over the company. They're on track now to break even on cash flow as opposed to losing $3 billion. So Musk has fired roughly 80% of the company if you're keeping track at home. And the business is now arguably better off. I wonder now how many companies are gonna take Elon's lead and lay off a shit ton of developers. Wait and see for that one. Shout out to Elon for setting the standard for fewer developers is better developers. Chad Sowash: Yeah. That thing's going down in a pile of fucking flames, dude. Jesus. It's fucking ridiculous. All right. It's the dick move of the week, kids. That's right. Joel Cheesman: Oh, shit. Chad Sowash: An employee asked to go remote, her CEO says he outsourced her job to India instead and saved 40% on labor cost. Wow. What a dick move, right? What company would treat their staff in that way? Well, according to Inc and Business Insider, the idea came from Johnny Taylor, the CEO of the Society of Human Resource Management, aka SHRM early last year after one of his employees made a case that her technology position could be done from anywhere. She wanted to leave Virginia where she held a job at SHRM, she asked to work remotely in North Carolina. Johnny says at that point, then a light bulb went off. I could actually go ahead, outsource her for 40% less cost. So the dick move of the week goes to Johnny C. Taylor. That's right, kids. Johnny, humans-don't-matter-to-me Taylor, the CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management, taking the human out of HR. Johnny Taylor. Good job asshole. [automated voice] Joel Cheesman: And why would he actually admit that? Why would he actually go on record? Chad Sowash: It sounded like he was proud of it. Joel Cheesman: I know. It's so bizarre. It's so bizarre. How bizarre. How bizarre. Chad Sowash: How bizarre. Joel Cheesman: All right, my last shout out goes to Chris Russell. This is a solemn shout out to an industry vet that a lot of our listeners know, or at least know of. He said goodbye to his greyhound Chase this week. Appropriate name for a greyhound, I think. Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: Chase was 13. And that really hit home from me because Mr. Peepers, our dog just hit 12 this week. And I know, Chad, you've got some geriatric dogs at your place, too. So putting down a pet is just the fucking worst. Chad Sowash: Oh, yes. Joel Cheesman: So our hearts go out to Chris. And if you know Chris, send him a note this week. Send him condolences. And if you really know Chris, he's a vodka guy. I'll just leave that. I'll just leave that right there. But Solemn, shout out to our friend Chris Russell. Chad Sowash: Buy him a shot at UNLEASH. And that being said, events, kids, we're going to be at Unleashed. It's gonna be a party. Well, there's gonna be learning, networking, business but there's gonna be parties. And I understand that this year's ticket sales is up dramatically from last year. Right? So this is going to be the party, kids. I love the integrated community. And we talk about this all the time that UNLEASH has. But I'm really excited about all the shit that we have going on. So if you, listener, wanna come and meet Chad and Cheese, you want t-shirts, you want alcohol, wanna have a drink with us? Here's where you can find us. On Tuesday the 25th, Joel and I will be on stage during the vendor summit with our buddy Chris Conrad from Textkernel talking about the build, partner or buy conundrum that is a very common discussion for vendors. But now with the likes of, I don't know, ChatGPT, Bard and others coming into the market, do you build, partner or buy to keep up with the Joneses? That's the question. We'll be talking about that on stage with Chris from Textkernel. Then that evening we're going to be at the HiringBranch event at the High Roller. You're excited for this. I know, 'cause there's a bar and you're locked in with a bar for at least half an hour. Joel Cheesman: So excited. [laughter] Chad Sowash: So if you're not already a part of the party, reach out to our friends at HiringBranch to see if there's still spots available because that pod's only so big. Then we're running to dinner with the plum.io team. Caitlin, Jason and the team. Then on Wednesday you'll be able to find us at the Workhuman booth. That's day one. Workhuman booth from noon to 4:00, where we're gonna be giving away t-shirts, doing interviews, and probably drinking, more than likely. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: That's the Workhuman booth from noon to 4:00 on day one, then right after that, wow. We're gonna be busy. 4:30, we're gonna be doing drinks before dinner with our friends from Taddeo. We only have about 40 slots, so go to chadcheese.com, click on events. The banner up top. You can click on a little sign button if you get there fast enough, you might get a slot. Then the Talent Torque event right after drinks. [laughter] Is this all before dinner, shit. Anyways, that's, I think we have more on the calendar, but that's all I'm going for right now. So, see us at UNLEASH. Are you excited to go back to Vegas? [automated voice] Joel Cheesman: I am. And not with my family this time, no offense to my offspring and my wife but it'll be a different vibe this time around. My liver is less excited than I am, probably. Side note, I get to come home on the red eye, go to Louisville, and I'm in the mini marathon on that Saturday. So I get to spend a whole week of debauchery and suicide, basically to come back and try to finish a marathon. So pray for me everybody. Chad Sowash: And then right after that, we're gonna find ourselves back on the plane going back to the West Coast. Early May, we're gonna be at Coronado Beach in California for iCIMS Inspire. We're scheduled to close out the day on stage with special guests. So we're supposed to be doing a panel but they don't let us know who they are yet. Joel Cheesman: So secretive. Chad Sowash: That seems a little sketchy. No matter. Those are just two of the events on the calendar thus far for 2023. Go to register for them all at chadcheese.com. Click on events. We'll see you there. [laughter] S?: Really? 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. Joel Cheesman: That's right, Chad. It's time for birthdays. [automated voice] Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: If it's your birthday in any particular month, you could win a nice bottle of rum from our friends at Plum, as well as you gotta go to chadcheese.com. Click on the free link and you could win t-shirts, whiskey and beer from all of our great sponsors that you'll find on the site. Celebrating another trip around the sun this week is Sean Godfrey, Todd Burns, Amy English, Samilla Chevalakadu, Alakazoo Alakazam. Something rather. Chad Sowash: I love that. Joel Cheesman: Jason Casey, Patrick York, Arno Schafer, Zer Gut celebrating birthday. Jason Crowell, Rob McIntosh, Amanda Height, Lauren the intern, Queen Burger, Brian Moore, Carrie Noon and my second favorite Canadian turned American, Stephen dad-jokes-for-days Rothberg. [laughter] S?: Happy birthday! [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Happy birthday, everybody. Another trip around the sun. S?: Happy birthday! Joel Cheesman: Topics! All right. Hard hitting acquisition news. Austin-based HR software solution, Mitratech has expanded its portfolio through the acquisition of Milwaukee's Circa, a provider of OFCCP software and Seattle-based Trakstar, a talent acquisition, development and performance management solution. Terms of the deal not disclosed. The company says the acquisition will help Mitratech emerge as a leader in HR compliance and talent strategy. They hope to help organizations with a range of solutions for recruitment, onboarding and development. Chad, you're pretty close to this, your thoughts. Chad Sowash: Yeah, congrats to Patrick, Kathy, and the whole Circa staff. I bet Patrick can't wait to get out of the fucking door. Get out of this industry. For those who remember, Circa was a rebrand from a very, very, very old network of sites called Local Job Network. LJN was more of a mom and pop shop. They were SMB, they're an SMB player in our space and owned a number of sites like milwaukeejobs.com. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, Scott Molitor. Yeah. Chad Sowash: Yeah. It really was like the old jobbing model to some extent. Then they flipped into compliance and OFCCP job distribution for VEVRAA and 503. When Patrick came in as CEO of Circa, they started buying up all of their competitors, at least trying to so that they could expand their portfolio and drive growth. They bought AJE, Diversity Jobs, Job Finder, which I hope they bought that thing for a song for God's sake. Joel Cheesman: Oh God, I forgot about Job Finder. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Anyway, congrats to the team. Did you get a chance to watch the two-minute announcement video? Joel Cheesman: No, I had better things to do. Chad Sowash: Okay. Joel Cheesman: I assumed you did watch it. Chad Sowash: Oh, my God. Joel Cheesman: Highlights? Chad Sowash: Dude, you gotta watch it. So I felt like this was a segment in one of those '80s televangelist programs where they're sitting on like Mav chairs with a little table and a fake plant between them. It looks... Joel Cheesman: Between two ferns? Chad Sowash: Yes. Yes. It looks like they might have been filming in somebody's basement. Anyway, Mitratech had three acquisitions last year. TalentReef, AssureHire and Quovant. And this is the first two for this year. So it seems like, and I don't know, we might have to reach out to the Mitratech, Mitratech, whatever they call themselves, staff because it seems like a not so integrated portfolio. We have this portfolio of services, they're all over the place. They make sense, but it's not like we're going to integrate them to create one platform for them all because that shit costs money. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Yeah. This feels like buying your prom tuxedo at TJ Maxx where nothing's quite matching. Well, you're still in tuxedo, but you're not in the same tuxedo and you've just sort of piecemealed this whole thing together. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Which is okay. Joel Cheesman: I don't know, Mitratech's a pretty big company. Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: Like you mentioned, they're making moves. Circa, long weird history. Just a weird hodgepodge of acquisitions. And you're right, Jobbing pretty much owned every state.com, statejobs.com. And the other guys owned every city. So Milwaukee Jobs, Indianapolis Jobs, Cleveland Jobs, so dated model. This is like dinosaurs marrying government regulations. It's just a weird thing. Trakstar I know less about. They have apparently over 3,000 customers including like Dyson, Ben & Jerry's, they've been around a while. They've gotten a little bit of money. But they've also been around for a long time, I think. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: So, I don't know. We talk about consolidation and this is gonna be more common than not, but yeah, what a weird strange trip for Circa and to have it finally put out of its misery, I think that's just good for everybody. What a hodgepodge of crazy shit they were, man. Chad Sowash: Well, yeah, it's weird too because you take a look at the compliance landscape, which is incredibly important for major, major organizations because if they want government money and they all do, they have to abide by these regulations and they have to comply. There aren't as many players now, obviously since all the consolidation happens. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: Which means competition is not going to be there. Broadbean created their own platform, which was bolted onto CareerBuilder. Broadbean is dying on the Vine as we speak, I'm waiting for that thing to get acquired sometime soon. Because to be quite frank, all it has is a portfolio. It's got a good portfolio, don't get me wrong, and partnerships, but at the end of the day, it's not gonna grow. It's not gonna be anybody's rocket ship. So I see just this landscape really consolidating, which means, again, competition is going to dwindle, which means prices are gonna go up. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. And I think it's funny thing you mentioned Diversity Jobs. There was a day where like, that was diversity recruiting. Just because your job was on a site called diversityjobs.com and we are targeting a diverse candidate. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: Sort of thanks to AI, thanks to some tools that have been created in the last 20 years, I saw Diversity Jobs is just so antiquated. It's ridiculous. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: I mean that must have been just thrown in as an extra. By the way, looking at my notes, Trakstar is a 20-year-old company that looks like it was bootstrapped. So those guys just might have been like, we're done, we're done with this shit. We're gonna go hang on a beach and drink some beer. Chad Sowash: Lifestyle company maybe. Yeah? Joel Cheesman: Yeah. I think they're, are they in Seattle? Yeah, they got better things to do if they're in Seattle. But yeah, this is, it's not gonna move the needle. I don't know how much it'll, yeah, like diversity, OFCCP is your lane more than mine. Is it gonna drive up prices for companies to... Chad Sowash: I think that's the possibility. And you can't underestimate compliance 'cause once again, if you're not complying, then you don't have access to the loads of money that the government contracts out for. So these are incredibly important pieces. When we built a national labor exchange at Direct Employers, we went from 140 member companies, which took us five years to get to 140 member companies. In 18 months, we were over 400 just because of that initiative. That's how important it was. It drew that many brands our way. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. It's the gift that keeps on giving and will continue to give. All right. Moving on. All right, let's go to AI. A total pivot from this old school shit. All right. So the White House Office of Science and Technology policy, who knew that existed, has identified five principles to guide the design, use, and deployment of automated systems that protect the American public in the age of artificial intelligence. Call it an AI bill of rights, including rules around safe and effective systems, algorithmic discrimination protections, notice and exploration, human alternatives, consideration and fallback, as well as data privacy. Chad, your thoughts on the White House statement around AI? Chad Sowash: They're definitely steps that government should be taking, but this is all words. We're not seeing any action on any of these things yet. We did see action from Italy right out of the gate. They said that they were going to ban ChatGPT, and that brought OpenAI to the table for negotiations. And so those words were words of action and it resonated with OpenAI. A couple of things that need to happen here. We've already had problems with AI, algorithms, data privacy, all these things that they listed. Right? But it's all words until we see a major fine for one of these organizations and or a CEO wearing orange in a 6 X 8 cell. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. They actually put out a handbook for this. How government is that? Pick up a copy at your local postal service building, anyway. Yeah, this is like a driver's ed handbook without cops on the street. Here's your guide, friends but there's nothing out there that's got teeth and can bite you. So it's relatively harmless and meaningless until... Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: Until the cops do show up [laughter] and the cops do pull you over, the government will have something to say, hey, we told you, we told you this is what we were gonna do. We told you how this was gonna go down. You decided to speed and run that red light anyway, so don't blame us. We warned you that this was gonna happen. Chad Sowash: Well, then you're gonna be there at that house party in that TJ Maxx tux. That's what you're gonna get caught in. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: That was powder blue tuxedo, by the way. Chad Sowash: Oh, okay. That's a good call. Yeah. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. I think it's a good step. I think Italy, look, governments that ban this shit just means they're gonna lose to China, 'cause China's not gonna ban this. It's gonna run amok and... Chad Sowash: And see this is a step though. This is a step though. This brought OpenAI to the table. Joel Cheesman: This is different than banning ChatGPT. I'm saying guardrails and regulation, I'm letting people know, that's fine. You mentioned Italy, I just wanted to throw that out, I don't see that as a trend because you're just gonna lose to the countries that do have AI development. Anyway, talking about AI development, let's get to our next AI story. Our friends at Textio, they've reorganized their team cutting 15 roles and hiring for new positions as it seeks to prepare for anticipated growth. Ooh, the company's CEO, Kieran Snyder said generative AI features are becoming increasingly important to the writing experience as people's expectations for "magical and fast" experiences increase. Can you say disruption? Chad, your thoughts on the move by Textio? Chad Sowash: I can say that they can see the writing on the wall. That's what they can see. They've been around since 2014. They haven't been acquired yet. This is a company that should have been acquired, easily. They are, I think, living on borrowed time depending on how close they keep it, the secret sauce to their vest because this is all going to become a commodity, period. Large language models are going to start absorbing domain specific models. They're gonna be trained off of them. And to say this is for anticipated growth is I think totally a curve ball in saying that, hey, we've got to batten down the hatches and find a way to sell this thing quickly. There are organizations that are out there. It mentioned Textkernel just bought a chatbot, right? There are organizations that are out there that need these data sets. I don't know what the price has been for Textio but I guarantee you, it is sinking very fast. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, that's an interesting, interesting take. We said early on that ChatGPT was gonna be a large amount of pee in Textio's juice box, punch bowl, if you will. And clearly this means it is. They see the writing on the wall, just like you said, I viewed her comments as, we're going to do what ChatGPT does. But we're gonna hope you don't notice because we're doing it in a different way, even though it's probably about the right way or the same way. And you're gonna still pay the crazy-ass price tag for Textio in the process. It's probably part, sell this thing as fast as we can and part how long can we survive by saying we implement this stuff but it's different because it's Textio, it's got the Textio secret sauce in it. She's probably making a bet that they can survive long enough to sell. They've raised 42 million some dollars. So their price tag is not TJ Maxx bargain bin levels. This is not buying diversityjobs.com. Okay? Chad Sowash: Right. Joel Cheesman: So this is gonna be one hell of a dance prom that she's gonna have to go to and dance at to figure out who's gonna buy the company or how long we survive. Six months from now, if they haven't found a buyer or they're seeing not a lot of traction in companies, you're gonna see another round of layoffs. Six months from that, probably another round of layoffs. This thing could be a real slow death. For a company that was a high flyer for a long time, Textio was the darling of AI and job description and they were in that sweet spot of like everything for a while. And ChatGPT came out and kicked them squarely in the nuts. So, yeah, it's not, Textio is not a good place to be. They're gonna be a lot of companies disrupted by ChatGPT and they are the obvious first but they won't be the last. This will be an ongoing story for the next months to come. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Well, you see companies like Talkpush and Paradox who are more a part of the process and then also trying to find ways to gather data with a better user experience. And even Wade & Wendy with Pando, right? With PandoLogic. So these are mechanisms in which to actually gather the data and then again, build that huge heap of secret sauce that everybody needs. Textio doesn't have that front end, but I'm saying they are seeing the writing on the wall. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. To be a sales rep at Textio and get the comment of like, "Well, my ATS already has built this in to do what you guys do or at least get 80% there. Why am I paying for it?" [chuckle] That's a really uncomfortable phone call that Textio sales reps are gonna start having if they're not already. Chad Sowash: It's an expensive product when that starts to become, let's even just say 50% is good, right? Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: That that becomes a feature, Textio is gonna become a feature, not a platform, a feature in some of these major platforms. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Yeah. They've gotten leapfrogged in a big way from what I can tell. Chad Sowash: Quick. Joel Cheesman: All right. Sticking with ChatGPT, let's talk about their terms of service, which everyone should be aware of. A recent post by startup founder and angel investor Kai Uhlig warns against putting proprietary or personal data into ChatGPT. He cites an example of Samsung's semiconductor division using ChatGPT to check their source code, which OpenAI was able to access. While OpenAI has no interest in reproducing or copying user content, users should be aware that their data is being used to improve the models. Says it right there in the terms of service. Chad, your thoughts on using ChatGPT and the minefield that it is? Chad Sowash: Yeah. Most people don't realize that their interactions with ChatGPT, questions, prompts, all of it, you're training the algorithm, your data that you're putting into is training the algorithm. So if you're QAQC-ing code in the Samsung case, what you're doing is you're teaching the platform. So unless you're using the API, which have different terms of service, but they do have three options, or at least Kai, thanks again Kai for doing all this work, buddy. He has three options on how you can move forward. Number one, you can use the API for OpenAI. The terms of service are different. Number two, you can opt out. There's actually a form where you can opt out and then you can set up your own secure instance of Microsoft Azure. So there are ways to get around giving your secret sauce as we were just talking about with Textio, it's an OpenAI, but again, yes, buyer beware, user beware in this case. Joel Cheesman: So some of the kids, this might be a history lesson to them. When Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter all had APIs, everybody got all hot and bothered, man. They built all kinds of stuff on these platforms. You remember, Be Known, you remember BranchOut, I think built on Facebook... Chad Sowash: TweetMyJobs. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. TweetMyJob, all kinds of stuff. The rug got pulled out from almost all of them. And I was reminded this week because I register for a lot of services that are using Twitter APIs to collect data on public companies and stocks and stuff like that. Well, I got an email from one of the services I follow, they shut down because Twitter basically cut off their API unless you wanted to pay super exorbitant fees to use said APIs. As a startup, they weren't willing or able to do that. So it is a cautionary tale. As you use ChatGPT's API, keep in mind that they could pull the rug out from under you. Just something to keep in mind. Whenever you build on someone else's platform, it's very dangerous. Now, back to the topic here of putting data into ChatGPT. Yes. That's gonna be an ongoing issue. Joel Cheesman: You and I have talked to companies that are like, we can't use it because the company doesn't want proprietary information or stuff about our company going into the database. I think a lot of it's a little bit of undeserved fear but we'll see. It's definitely not worth getting bit over by having your source code [laughter] given by somebody like Samsung to ChatGPT. That's super dangerous. And certainly as we deal with employment, we've got profile data, we've got job data, all kinds of stuff that people may fear putting into ChatGPT to get answers for stuff and look for stuff and whatever. So it is something to keep an eye on. I love that he had here three strategies to get around it. You can get outta that. So if you are gonna use ChatGPT or you're worried about sensitive information, make sure that your belts and suspenders, cover your bases and make sure that you don't get pinched like Samsung did. That's bad. That's bad news. All right, let's talk a little. [laughter] LinkedIn, baby. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Drink down that Kool-Aid baby. Oh, here we go. Chad Sowash: Oh, God. Joel Cheesman: LinkedIn is partnering with identity verification company CLEAR. Maybe you've seen them at an airport. Chad Sowash: I have. Joel Cheesman: To launch new identity verification features for its users, enabling them to confirm their names and employers with a free government ID check. Additionally, the social media company is introducing two other ways for users to confirm their identities. A verification code sent to the company email address of the user's employer, and a partnership with Microsoft Intra to verify user's identities and employers through workplace IDs. The new feature will add a verification field to LinkedIn profiles, which will show which details have been verified. Twitter Blue, hold my beer. Chad, your thoughts. Chad Sowash: LinkedIn CLEAR. I like that they're moving down this path with regard to trying to at least possibly start kicking out some of these fake-ass LinkedIn profiles. There aren't as many as there are on Twitter but they are all over the place on LinkedIn. The problem it doesn't solve is portability and being able to have this as really your standard ID to apply everywhere. Right? Because Indeed, there's no way in hell Indeed's gonna allow this in their system. So there has to be a third-party that's doing this that isn't a "threat," let's say to an Indeed and or a LinkedIn. So portability isn't there. Then the credentialing piece is also something different. That's something that we do need now. There's not really that much user control behind this because who owns the data? LinkedIn does. Remember the HighQ case? LinkedIn owns this data. Fuck you LinkedIn. That's my data, right? So I like where they're moving. The problem is, this isn't the answer. This is at best one of those little bitty pinky bandaids that you put on stuff. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: The little round one with the little square cotton ball. Yeah. [automated voice] Joel Cheesman: All right. So I think this is huge, if... Chad Sowash: Huge? Okay. Joel Cheesman: If, and LinkedIn has no history of this, if they get it right. Fake profiles are a huge problem on LinkedIn. It's a huge problem everywhere. And partnering with CLEAR, not building it themselves, having these third-parties. So in your instance, does CLEAR become the ID company of record? Probably not. I filed taxes recently. A real joy for everyone, I know. Certainly for you as well, Chad. So on the government site, you can log in with, I think it's me.id or there's a global ID thing, which I've used in something else as well. They're trying to be a clearinghouse for all things identity. And the government has in its wisdom figured out that that's a good solution for that. You've talked about blockchain in the past, being sort of an all-encompassing resume or something you can take everywhere. But this is huge because LinkedIn has a huge problem with fake profiles. And if this helps that, I think that's great. Joel Cheesman: I do think it's a good move against the bots and the AI onslaught that's going to happen. You and I have talked about ChatGPT creating multiple profiles and applying to jobs. This'll help fight some of that. You could argue that it cuts off the blockchain threat before it becomes something really serious. And ultimately, algorithm love is gonna drive adoption, right? So if you have a little check, you're identified or you're verified by LinkedIn, they already have little in icon that verifies you. But if recruiters are looking through profiles and they see like someone is a genuine user, they're backed by whatever, if they move them higher to the top of the search results. If I'm a real person, my post and shares get more love because I am, that, the algorithm could drive a lot of usage on this, and it could become a really big thing. Time will tell if it's the thing, but it is a thing and it's a step in the right direction for LinkedIn. I say good for them. Chad Sowash: Little bitty bandaid. Joel Cheesman: Let's go to bots. Let's go to bots. [automated voice] Joel Cheesman: That's right. Who let the dogs out? Chad, New York City officials have brought back a robotic dog called Digidog, which was leased back in 2020 but the contract was cut short after critics called it creepy and dystopian. "Digidog is out of the pound," said New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who added the won't bow to anti-robotic dog pressure. Or is that he won't bow wow. Sorry. Chad Sowash: So bad. So bad. Joel Cheesman: Sorry. And at Chad's favorite place to buy sunscreen for his overly exposed head this summer, Walmart has said that the unit cost of moving goods will fall 20% within three years as warehouse robots play a bigger role in speeding up deliveries to customers. They've been investing heavily in automation in recent years to keep pace with Amazon and other rivals and said that the revamped supply chain would ease cost pressures tied to the rise of e-commerce and help end a decade of stagnation in US operating income. Walmart getting chesty, New York City Digidog, Chad, bots running amok this week. Your thoughts? Chad Sowash: Yeah. Eric Adams just doesn't give a fuck. He just, he doesn't, and I understand that the bringing the dogs in, people have to get used to them and they freak the out of some people when they first brought 'em out a few years ago. Joel Cheesman: Yep. Chad Sowash: So they've gotta get everybody used to the dogs. Totally get it. Until one of those things hurts somebody. But this is, again, this is very, very RoboCop-ish. We're going to see these types of things, especially since it's so hard to find police officers and to retain police officers. We need to have policing, and if we can't have humans to find policing, but at the end of the day, this is where we live with regard to staffing issues. Same thing with Walmart. Walmart has issues finding staff, keeping staff because of pay and whatnot. But they've done a better job over the past few years in those areas. But this is about trying to phase out jobs that people don't wanna have anyway. And if we can actually take those individuals and start to push them up the ranks, that's good for everybody. So if we are "getting rid" of jobs that are shitty jobs in the first place, then great. Joel Cheesman: You know, I was saying just Walmart real quick. As minimum wage goes up and companies like Walmart increase it, they're able to say, we're reducing costs that much more when they replace those people with robots. So instead of a 10% decrease, now it's 20 because we're paying these people more. It just, it struck me as like an interesting PR move. Let's pay people more and then we can say we're saving more with the robots. I haven't heard anything about that truck or them expanding the driverless truck program. I would love to see more of that. I think the warehouse robot and the janitor robot and the whatever robot, that's kind of boring. I'm wanna see more cars automated from Walmart going into the future. Now to the robot dog, Digidog. Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: Which I think is really cool. [automated voice] Chad Sowash: The Black Mirror episode. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Black Mirror, granted creepy as hell. But to your point, not only is it hiring cops is a pain in the ass, this helps fill that void. We talked recently about Hilton bringing in Peloton bikes and Starbucks, whatever entertainment centers or relaxation pods and shit like that. How cool is it to now wanna be a cop because you get to work alongside a robotic dog? Only a monkey in a truck is better than working alongside a robotic dog. So I think it would be a really cool training video or recruiting video to be like, you're gonna be on the new canine program and you're gonna learn Digidog and high tech shit. It is a cool, I think, employment branding play. Robot security is here to stay. This is gonna be a thing. I don't think it's gonna be RoboCop anytime soon where they take a man, a robot and really fuck shit up. And I don't think they're gonna be armed anytime soon. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Well, and then what about the Digi peepers? Joel Cheesman: For the real peepers might not like the Digi peepers. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: I don't know how that would work. A drone, he would like. You could make a drone/dog, like dog friend. The drone could spit out treats to the dog. It could talk to the dog in your voice, as well as fight crime in your home. I'm telling you, man, there are huge business opportunities in this marketplace. And I'm here for it, Chad. I am here for it. I'm here for it. Bring on the bots if it helps us say bye-bye to the bad guys. We'll say goodbye to the bad guys and say hello to Claudia. That's right. The AI creation has been receiving compliments and payments from red users for her supposed selfies and nude photos. Claudia was created by two anonymous computer science students whose post AI generated images of her online. Who didn't see this coming, Chad? The call for regulation and the potential harm this trend could cause are getting louder. And if this isn't keeping all the ladies on OnlyFans up at night, maybe it should. Your thoughts. Chad Sowash: This is gonna take catfishing to another level. That's all there is to it, man. Because you're gonna have all these... I can't remember the linebacker's name who got catfished. Joel Cheesman: Mateo? Chad Sowash: Manti Te'o. Yeah. Joel Cheesman: Manti Te'o. Yeah. Chad Sowash: You're not gonna know who's real and who's not. This is getting so crazy. Our voices are cloned. We're speaking in several languages. There are avatars that are coming out now, 10 guy just came out with an avatar that are lifelike avatars. And now you have these AI images which we're seeing all over the place now, MidJourney, just everywhere. Dahlia, catfishing is gonna suck. And OnlyFans, that's, man, it's just gonna be, it's gonna be a weird time. These are the types of jobs I don't wanna see go away because these people feel safe in their home. They get to make the money that they want. Maybe not $80,000 a month. Okay. But yeah, I'd hate to see this go away because Skynet is taking over porn. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. I fear this is the slow death of OnlyFans. Why pay $10 a month, not that I would know, for one real girl getting naughty online when I could pay $10 a month for unlimited amounts of girls or guys getting naughty when I can't tell the difference on a computer screen? Plus this new service will let me pornify, if that's a word, it is now, if it's not before. Pornify celebrities as well as my crush from college, complete with, as you said, their voices. Chad Sowash: So fucking creepy. Joel Cheesman: Forget the end of OnlyFans. This is gonna be the end of humanity. Big booty Latinas are going to kill us all, Chad. [laughter] S?: 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.

People love perks. Employees love them even more. Unfortunately, startups looking to make employee perks easy, scalable, and tax-compliant have come and gone over the years. Compt.io thinks they have a better mousetrap. That’s why Amy Spurling, CEO, and founder, has come on the Firing Squad. In a market expected to reach approximately $346 million by 2025, the stakes are high. Does Amy make it out alive? Gotta 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: 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: That's right. It's another Firing Squad, everybody. If you don't know, ask your parole officer. This is the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman. Joined as always, the rick to my Morty, Chad Sowash is here. And we are welcoming to the squad Amy Spurling, CEO and Founder of Compt. It's Compt and not Compt.io or Comptio? Let's get that out of the way real quick. Amy Spurling: It is just Compt. [laughter] Chad: Joel likes to add the io on all of the dot ios. Amy Spurling: Yeah. No io. Chad: Yes, he loves that. Joel: Comptio. Chad: Comptio, JobBoard.io. [laughter] Amy Spurling: No, just Compt. [laughter] Joel: JobBoard.io. [laughter] All right, Amy, welcome to the show. Amy Spurling: Thanks so much. Appreciate you having me here. Joel: All right. You know the rules. We gotta get a little bit about you 'cause most of the world does not know what makes Amy Spurling tick. So tell us a little bit about you and then we'll get to the rules of the game. Amy Spurling: Sure. So I'm a first time founder, but I've been in tech for 20 years, been part of building six prior companies and CFO and COO suites, so I've been in the tech industry, raising money, selling companies for a long time. I'm an avid hiker, spend a lot of time outside and trying get off the grid as much as possible. Chad: Love off the grid. Joel: Hiking Boston, that sounds fun. Amy Spurling: Oh no, I'm not hiking in Boston. I'm hiking outside the country for the most part. [laughter] Chad: There we go. Joel: Oh God. Chad: That's what I'm talking about. Joel: Chad just got excited. Chad: That's right. Amy and I are gonna share notes on... Amy Spurling: We are. Chad: Where to go in Europe for all the good hiking. Joel: For those that weren't in the green room, it was an episode of HGTV about how many international homes these two can purchase. As with kids are land-bound by the US state side. Anyway, enough about home shopping. Chad, tell Amy what she's won today as a guest on Firing Squad. Chad: Well, Amy, welcome to Firing Squad. And this is how it's gonna play out. At the sound of the bell, you're gonna have two minutes to pitch Compt. At the end of two minutes, we're gonna hit you with about 20 minutes of Q&A. Be sure to be concise or you're going to get hit with the crickets. That just means tighten your game up, okay? Joel loves the crickets, but still, tighten your game up. [chuckle] At the end of Q&A, you're gonna receive one of these from both of us. Big applause. [applause] Chad: We think you've got all the firepower necessary to win this one. Golf clap. Man, you've got the right idea, but you're probably going to need a little bit more ammo for this work. And then last but not least, you brought a knife to a gunfight. Time to adios and start over. That's the Firing Squad. Are you ready? Amy Spurling: I'm ready. Let's do it. Joel: Two minutes starts. Amy Spurling: So Compt is employee perk management software that helps companies design and administer employee perks so that everyone can get exactly what they need and want most. That's a lot of words. Let's talk about it a little bit. Now, the way we compensate people has really changed in the past two decades. Candidates walk in the door expecting a competitive salary for their industry, for their role. In a lot of industries, they also expect health insurance. These are now table stakes. So if you want to attract new talent or retain the folks that you have and make sure you're not poached by competitors, then you need to do something different to stand out. And I'm a three-time former CFO. I've been pitched every single perk company that is out there. They all say they help you attract and retain talent, this is not something new, but the problem is that no matter what you bring in or how amazing it is, if you're lucky, 5% of the team uses it. So it's really expensive and very ineffective, and CFOs hate this. So the thing is that you need to make sure that you find something that can actually engage everyone. Amy Spurling: I decided to start Compt because I believe that everyone should have personalized employee perks and they should have access to it because it's part of their compensation, but that this also needs to work for companies on a budget and compliance side as well, that these need to be taxed correctly and they need to support global teams, 'cause a lot of teams are global now. Compt is a reimbursement platform, so there's absolutely no vendors on it. Companies select categories for employees to use, things like wellness, student loan repayment, family, and then employees can spend on any vendor they want, wherever they're located, and then they submit a receipt and they get reimbursed and it's taxed correctly and all the nice things. And because of the approach that we've taken, for the past four years, employee utilization on Compt has been over 90%. So that's across 50 states and 60 countries, just insanely high utilization, because employees get access to that personalization. That's the key to unlocking employee utilization when it comes to this compensation. Joel: That's a tight pitch, Amy. That's a tight pitch. Thank you. Chad: Yeah, but where can they find out more? That's the question. Joel: Yeah. CEOs always forget that. You can find out more about us at... Amy Spurling: Www.compt.io. Joel: There you go. Amy Spurling: Or emailing me at amy@compt.io. Joel: Lauren, her marketing person, is like, "No! She forgot." Okay. Chad: Luckily we kicked her off. Luckily we kicked her off. Joel: Yeah, we did kick Lauren off. She's... Amy Spurling: We did. Joel: She's in the fetal position in the corner. [chuckle] Chad: Sorry, Lauren. Not really. Not really. [laughter] Joel: So your pitch said only 5% of employees use perk plans. Why is that? Amy Spurling: So every person wants something different, is what you find out. We actually went and took a sample... I mean, we obviously have amazing utilization and have for a long time. We took a sample of 8700 people about a year ago and watched 'em for a year and said, "All right, how many different vendors do they use?" Because that's what you'd have to bring into your organization to be able to support all these people and have high utilization. Guess how many different unique vendors 8700 people used in one year? Chad: Five. Joel: Five. Yeah. Amy Spurling: 27,000. Chad: Holy fuck! Amy Spurling: You cannot build a marketplace that will support your employees internally if you want high utilization. It's not possible. On average, every person wants three different things. So if your goal is utilization and to make sure that people are engaging with this, you have to take a different approach. If your goal is to, hey, throw something out there and hope a few people use it, cool, you like spending money on things that don't work. That's not my... The CFO in me gets a little bit sweaty on that. [laughter] Joel: I always ask about the name. I get the name. That's the good news. Dot io isn't that crazy? However, Compt.com is for sale. It's available. Have you tried to buy it? Why don't you go buy it? Why won't you secure the dot com as your name? Amy Spurling: It's theoretically for sale. So we approached that for the last like five years. No response. Doesn't matter who you go to. I have no idea who owns this, and so at this point, I just don't care because Compt.io is common enough. But yeah, so it's not for a lack of outreach, but whoever owns it, I think just has it in a portfolio somewhere. Joel: And chances are they're not listening to this show, so you're not in luck on that front. So you're a finance person. Why the hell get into workforce software? Amy Spurling: I managed finance and HR in all those prior organizations. So I wasn't planning on starting a company, I liked being that number two spot in all those prior startups, but I needed something to fill these compensation gaps so that you could attract people, so that you could retain them. And I waited for somebody to build the thing that I needed. I pitched it to engineers. I'm like, "Just build me the thing." I tried Jerry-rigging it with expense software, which was a disaster, and finally was like, "Look, if I'm gonna build another company, I need this to exist. So if I'm the only user ever, I don't care. I need this thing to exist," and so started the company five years ago. Chad: Okay. So you are not the typical CFO. At least the CFOs I know 'cause they're generally penny pinching. Joel: Careful. Amy Spurling: I'm a pretty cheap person. Don't get me wrong. We sit on some cash here. But it's looking at efficiency. I don't wanna waste money. I don't wanna spend more than I have to spend, but I wanna spend smart. I wanna spend smart on my team and I wanna do things in a as fair and equitable way as possible. But I don't wanna waste money. I don't like wasting money. Chad: As a CFO should not. Amy Spurling: I also like compliance a whole lot. I want my taxes to be done correctly and I don't want that coming off my exit price when they're like, "Wow, you have a mess. Let's just add a lot of [chuckle] things to your documentation." Chad: Let's talk about that, because that's interesting because you say that Compt is the only IRS-compliant perks software on the market. Really? Amy Spurling: When you're combining taxable and taxed. Chad: I mean, this is a huge market. Nobody else is IRS-compliant? Amy Spurling: Only if they're doing completely pre-taxed or untaxed. So if you're thinking about HSAs or commuter benefits, companies like WageWorks are of course tax-compliant, but they only do untaxed things. You cannot combine taxable and untaxed things anywhere else in the market other than our platform and have it be automated and tax-compliant. Doesn't exist. Chad: Holy shit. That's awesome. So you said 27,000 vendors. Amy Spurling: Just for that group of 8700 people. We've got a lot more people on the platform. Chad: How many providers do you currently integrate with? Amy Spurling: So on the vendor side? Chad: Yeah. Amy Spurling: Zero. Chad: So you don't have to... How do you actually get the data so that you can manage all these perks? Amy Spurling: So we don't have to suggest vendors. There's no path to suggest vendors in that scenario. If every person wants three different things, who am I signing up? That's not possible. I'm gonna have to sign up your dry cleaner and your dog walker and figure out who's got what nanny. That's not a scalable solution. So for us, it's much more around making sure that you've got the category set, and those are all based on IRS things, so things like wellness or family or cell phone or whatever. And then employees go and spend as they normally would, so they don't have to change their buying behavior, buy the thing that they want, upload it, tag it to that category, and then they get reimbursed through their payroll system and it's taxed there. Chad: Gotcha. Okay. So if they have a program, then the individual has to actually go through the process of... Again, it's taxes, so receipts, all that other fun stuff? Amy Spurling: Exactly. So receipts are a requirement until the IRS says, "Stop it," which would be great. Chad: Yeah, until we actually come into the 21st century. Are you fucking kidding me? Amy Spurling: Amazing, right? [chuckle] Chad: Jesus Christ. Anyway, 90% utilization? I mean, one... Amy Spurling: 91 for four straight years. Chad: 91. So okay, that's ridiculous, 'cause I thought right out of the gate that this is gonna be incredibly low, even at 20%, but 91%. So is there an app? What's the secret sauce when it comes to being able to engage these individuals to actually use their perks? Amy Spurling: So it's amazing that when you give people the free will of choice and treat them like adults that they just use the thing. It's part of their compensation. So we've got a 98% account activation rate, meaning 98% of people who get access to their account from their company, activate it. Payroll is the only thing that's higher, which of course, everyone activates their payroll account. Chad: Oh, yeah. Amy Spurling: So from there, the way we count utilization is that somebody uses some of their stipend. So it can't be you just logged in. We don't count... That's not useful for anybody. You have to use some of your stipend. So 91% of people on our platform have used their stipends for something within the year that they had them. The key to that is just making sure that you provide an easy-to-use platform. Employees can spend less than a minute on our platform. Chad: Is there an app? Amy Spurling: It's a web-based app, so it's a web app. It's mobile-optimized. It works on your phone. It can work through Slack. We're fully integrated with Slack, so you don't even have to log into our platform if you don't want. And so making it as easy as possible for employees, and it works. Onboarding is really simple. Usually takes about 30 minutes for our company, under a hundred people. We've got all the payroll integrations that companies need. I've been through enough HR software implementations, that's where all my gray hair comes from, that my directive to the team when we built this was, "Make it so easy that it's literally like turn the thing on." Because HR doesn't get access to engineers. HR doesn't have time for a long implementation. Employees have zero tolerance for anything difficult on their side. Joel: Is it fair to call you like a reimbursement engine? Amy Spurling: It is a reimbursement platform, so yeah, that is fair. But it's specifically around employee perks. So rewards and the recognition is part of it, so peer-to-peer recognition and then employee stipends is part of it as well. But it's very different from, say, an Expensify or a Concur, which is also a reimbursement platform. Those are meant for business expenses. They're not taxed, they're not tied to an individual. There aren't time periods where we can say, "Hey, you've got a quarter to use your wellness stipend." Joel: Got it. What does a typical client look? And I know that Drizly is a client and there's a good chance Chad and I are single-handedly funding their Compt account, [laughter] but what does a... [chuckle] Amy Spurling: I appreciate that. Joel: What does a client typically look like? Amy Spurling: So we get asked that a lot. It's anybody who is trying to attract and retain talent. So we've got about 17 different industries on the platform. It's in every state in the us. We're supporting employees in 60 different countries. It's not size-specific. Our largest customer right now is about 15,000 people, actually, in the Indianapolis area. And then the smallest is five or six people. So it really runs the gamut of, "How do I differentiate this piece of compensation in the most effective way possible for my team?" Joel: Got it. The most important question I'm gonna ask you is this... Chad: Oh, oh. Joel: There are tons of companies that do this. Bonusly just got a ton of money. I'm sure that you're well aware of that. I mean, Snappy, Fond, Achievers, Blueboard. OC Tanner is been given shit away at trophies, at conference. I mean, they run the gamut of engagement and perks and benefits. I'm sure your salespeople get this question every day, "How are you different from the masses of companies that offer this?" Amy Spurling: 91% utilization. [laughter] Chad: I love it. Joel: How would your competitors answer that? Amy Spurling: They would be really happy about 20% utilization. Joel: Really? Amy Spurling: Mm-hmm. If you're a marketplace, you might get 30 or 40%. If you're an individual perk, you're sitting in that 5 to 7% range. Like we don't see competitors in sales processes almost ever. Joel: I'm guessing this is anecdotal. They're not publishing papers about utilization numbers. I mean, is this... Amy Spurling: Some of them do publish because they do because... Joel: You got these offices tapped? Amy Spurling: No, because... I mean, I've bought this stuff for a long time, so I know lots of HR people, I know lots of CFOs. We all know what our utilization is, and it's pretty similar kind of across. And so if you're trying to reach folks, utilization is good. Joel: Utilization. Got it. So we were talking in the green room about how Gen X we were, but millennials, as we know, and Gen Zs are a big part of the equation building businesses and they love experiences, according to many articles that I've read. I didn't hear experiences as part of the perks that you guys offer. Can I go to Fiji and expense it on your platform? Amy Spurling: Could, if the company sets up either a personal travel or an entertainment or an experience category. We have all of those categories. I mean, there's 22 different categories a company could select and craft different stipends and things like that, so they absolutely could. It's just the whole point is not to try and do some... Like HR has been tasked with make everyone happy. One, that's not possible. And two, trying to do that with, "Okay, we're gonna offer experiences." Well, tell a mom with three young kids at home that she can go skydiving. Sweet. No time for that. Like, "This is not a good perk for me." [laughter] Amy Spurling: So it's meeting people where they are and allowing them to make the decisions for their own lives. Wellness is different for every single person. They're in different parts of their journey. We're all adults. HR shouldn't be dictating what wellness is. It's allowing for people to be treated like adults with their own compensation in a way that is still aligned with company culture. Chad: So I'm gonna go back to Joel's question, dig a little bit deeper. Who are you targeting go to market wise? You can do obviously top to bottom, that's awesome, but who are you targeting right now? Amy Spurling: So what's interesting is that almost all of our leads come in inbound. Companies come looking for us. So we have a really strong inbound engine, and that's the source of a lot of our leads because companies are actively looking for solutions for this last piece of the compensation. So they're actively looking for stipends, they're actively looking for employee perks. And we've got a very strong kind of SEO and content game, and so when they look, they find us. We're on, I think, the first page of Google for like 500 key terms. So that's where we don't have to target a particular industry because the problems are the same across industries. It's making sure that you're there and available for HR when they're ready to be in that process. Chad: Gotcha. Okay. So let's talk about the business model. Is this a seats-based per employee-based platform? Cost? How does this actually work out for an employer? Amy Spurling: It's a SaaS model, so there's a subscription fee for the platform. My CFO brand does not like per seat because I can never budget for that. "Okay. I add 10 people. How much now do I have to do across 15 different platforms?" So it's tiered, based on the number of employees when you start, but add as many as you want. We don't care. We're not coming looking for more money during the contract. We'll talk to you on renewal and figure out where you need to be then. So it's kind of guaranteed term of the contract. Chad: Okay. So this is an ARR kind of scenario then since you're not really fluxing? Amy Spurling: Exactly. Chad: What does ARR look like these days? Amy Spurling: Oh, it looks great. It also looks private. [laughter] Thank you. Agree with that. Chad: You've always gotta ask the CFO of that question. That's for sure. That's for sure. Amy Spurling: Yeah, not new here. [laughter] Chad: Okay. So let's talk about partners. And I mean, it doesn't sound really you need to get into integrations with ADP SAP Workday... Amy Spurling: Oh, we do. Chad: Okay, so talk about that. Do you have integrations? How does that actually work? Amy Spurling: So, payroll integrations are very interesting for us because that's how you automate a lot of this. It's all gonna be processed through payroll. Some payroll systems play nicer than others. We've got a great partnership with ADP we're fully integrated with them. We work with others like Bamboo and Colitis, Colitus [laughter] all the payroll players basically. And so that side of the house we spend a lot of time with. Other partners that we work a lot with are benefit brokers, so that's another place that we spend a lot of time. That's not a technical integration, that's just partners. Chad: Benefit brokers. So is employee perk management, is that something you guys came up with or is this literally been like a segment that nobody's paid that much attention to over the years? [laughter] Amy Spurling: No, it's pretty new. So when we started, we had to educate people on what stipends were. The term lifestyle spending accounts is now all over the place. The first woman on our team was a marketer. She invented that term. She did a very good job with SEO. She came out of HubSpot, so she understood, inbound very, very good. And now that term is everywhere. And we're sitting here going, "Man, we invented that five years ago. [laughter] like we should have just trademarked that." [laughter] But it's something that is relatively new. A lot of companies have gone the marketplace route. So, hey, here's 25 vendors your employees could use. Those have been around a lot longer. You mentioned Fond. They were just acquired, by the way, by Reward Gateway. And so there's a lot of kind of acquisitions in the space but those still get, if you're lucky, 20 to 30% utilization. So companies have been looking for, okay, what's next? How do I do better than that? Chad: Right. So let's talk about funding. Last April you received 13 million. What have you been doing with that money? What have you been putting it to? What's the focus on spend and your CFO brain? Amy Spurling: Yes. So the focus was one, build out a leadership team. Everybody on the team. We're a relatively small team. We're a pretty capital efficient team, no surprise. But everybody reporting to me is obviously a very bad plan as you start scaling. So, built out a really talented leadership team over the past year and then started spending a lot more money on testing out different pieces of the market for marketing spend, as well as different approaches on the sales side. Selling to HR is very different from selling to any other group of people. Joel: Amen. Amy Spurling: They're a pretty amazing group of people that fight fires all day long. Their priorities are never something that they get to control, and a lot of times they don't get to control their budgets. So you have to take a very different approach when you're selling to them and when you're marketing to them. And so that takes a lot of experimentation. I don't think anybody has cracked the book on that, and kind of cracked the code on that to figure out how that's works beautifully well. Chad: Well, that being said, HR does struggle with being able to kind of like show the ROI of who they are. You're a CFO, you should be able to help them do that. If you're coming to me and I need to pitch this to my C-suite, how can perks, how can your platform actually help my business? Actually, talk about the bottom line and impact in the bottom line. Amy Spurling: Sure. So the questions I ask them are, one, "Do you have trouble attracting talent that you need in your business?" If no, then okay, great. "Do you have trouble retaining talent?" If no, then fantastic. You don't need us. End of story. Now that's no one. Everybody is struggling with one of those two things and likely both. So if those two things you need help on, then the question is, "Are you paying competitive salaries and are you offering health insurance?" If you're doing both of those as well, then you have to do something else. And when you get to the have to do something else, the question is, "Okay, then what, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna pull in an app that 5% of your team is gonna use? Or are you gonna do something that gets you high utilization?" Because you know you have to do something in this space, or you're not gonna be competitive within your own team and talent. So it's really measuring against what else would you do with that portion of the compensation and how are you gonna use it most efficiently? That's the pitch to CFOs all day long. Joel: So in lot of that comment every business in our space is sort of prone to pain when the economy goes to hell. This feels like to me one of the first things that companies would look to cut. Am I wrong? Am I right? And if I'm right, is the current environment a threat to the business? Amy Spurling: You're right about employee perks. You're wrong about this version of it. So you're right about... So I was a CFO in 2008. I cut the heck out of everything. And so that was in the back of my brain when we started building this platform. The thing is, is that unemployment is still very, very low. In tech, it's 1.5%. There is virtually no unemployment in tech. We've been talking about all these layoffs, all of these things, less than 200,000 people in tech have lost their jobs out of hundreds of millions in this country. So you still have to figure out how you hire and retain. So if you're gonna cut something, it's gotta be something that's inefficient. So you have to find something that is the most efficient and cheapest way to be able to solve for that problem. And that's where something like this is a game changer in an economy like this, because you cannot just throw a whole bunch of stuff out there, spend a ton of money and hope that, it covers the board and you're fine. You have to be very intentional about your spend and make sure that it is very efficient. Joel: It sounds like remote work has been good for your business to... On the competitive side, does a remote workforce hurt some of your competitors? If you want to name names, feel free. But do some of the business models around perks suffer in a remote work environment? Amy Spurling: They do, and it's a lot of it... So it's remote and it's global. So we started seeing, we wouldn't global much earlier than I intended to. All my prior companies have been global. And because of that I've got plenty of battle scars. And so we planned on staying US-centric, but we realized that companies as small as 25, 50 people started having employees in other countries. And so to be able to support your entire team, you have to think about something. Basically the way that we built it, a credit card does not cross borders well. A marketplace does not cross borders at all. Taxation is an absolute nightmare when you start crossing borders. So you have to do something, basically the approach that we took and doing the tax compliance piece in order to be able to support an entire team. So that's one of the key places that, we really differentiate is the remote, but it's the distribution. If your team is all over the place, you can't have a book of vendors, that is based on in downtown Boston, because if no one lives there, that's useless. Joel: So I assume you're compliant in multiple countries, from a tax perspective, obviously the IRS is a big one for our audience, but can accompany in Stuttgart benefit from your platform as well, from a taxed perspective? Amy Spurling: They have to have a US legal entity. So my compliance requires US contracts. [chuckle] but you can have employees anywhere in the world. And so the way it works is that it's gonna be taxed in those countries because we're not... I'm not gonna say that we are tax locked down in 200 and some countries because quite frankly, I'd have to charge a heck of a lot more for this platform to do that. So we keep them on the conservative side, but we work with their teams. And if there's particular things that, like in Germany, don't tax this and Argentina don't tax that, we have the ability to do that. Joel: Let's chat on this one. AI surrounds all of us every day, particularly in our space. And we talk a lot about vendors and workforce software that are gonna be impacted by chatGPT, OpenAI, everything that's coming down the pike. This is one where I have a hard time thinking that AI impacts, you think about this stuff every day, how is AI gonna impact, if at all, the perks business? Amy Spurling: I think there is a place at some point, I mean, we're amassing, like we know what people are spending on, we know vendors that people are spending on. In theory you could say, people who bought this thing also like these other things, kind of like an Amazon marketplace that is less discovery and more suggestion. You could use AI for something like that down the road. It's not something that we have prioritized because we're getting the utilization we need in the meantime. But there is a place that you could do that, but it's not the first focus of what we're doing. There's a lot of other things we can do to support companies, employees in the meantime. Joel: Got it. All right, Amy, that is the bell. And that means you get to face the Firing Squad. Are you ready? Amy Spurling: I'm ready. Joel: Chad. Get her. Chad: Alright, Amy. The workforce and talent landscape has changed dramatically. It isn't what it was three years ago, you know that. It has rapidly evolved and employees are finally sticking up for themselves, quitting and asking for more. Companies are having a real hard time in getting in-office, hybrid, remote work. Those things, just those incredibly important things really hashed out. They don't have the bandwidth in many cases to think about things like perks. I personally believe perks are a must-have, but coming into this discussion, I wasn't sure that many penny pinching CFOs and weakass CHROs would be able to weave together a business narrative around why this makes sense. Until now, perks can help employee engagements retention and bottom line, I would only trust a CFO to understand how to connect those dots. 91% of the time, it's a win for me a hundred percent of the time, it's a big applause for Compt. Amy Spurling: Thank you. I appreciate that. Joel: Congratulations. But it's not over, Amy. You still have to face the big Cheese. Is that a little bit too egotistical? Anyway. [chuckle] Chad: You called yourself the big cheese. Really? [laughter] Joel: I did. That's the first time ever on the show and probably the last. [chuckle] I love this space because it takes me back in time to the OC Tanner booze at Sherm with plaques and trophies and the gold plated clock. It's evolved... Chad: So bad. Joel: So much from those... Chad: It was so bad... Joel: Those days, but I was gonna kick out of how that used to be. How we rewarded and engaged employees. So the global employee engagement software market is expected to reach approximately 346 million by the end of 2025. That means opportunity. I know there's a lot of competition, a lot of players in the space, a lot of well-funded players, but there's a lot of money in that pie and it's a big one. So I love the space. I think retention, I think engaging global employees is gonna be huge and will be huge in the future. The money's there. I love the IRS angle, I love the tax angle. I think companies hate dealing with that shit. The fact that you can support that I think is great. I do think you'll have to raise more money at some point. I think you know that as well, even as fiscally conservative as you apparently are. But for me, this is a fun space to watch. I wish you had said, AI was gonna be a big part of it and you were gonna like dive into that. But anyway, at least we're a long way from gold plated watches or gold watches and plaques for people to put on their wall for me as well. DJ Horn ends. Round of applause. Amy Spurling: Awesome. Chad: Double. Big applause. Amy Spurling: Double. I appreciate that. Chad: Hello? Joel: That's right. Congratulations Amy, how do you feel? Amy Spurling: Thank you very much. Fantastic. I'm gonna tell my mom. [laughter] Joel: Excellent. And one more time for our listeners, where can we learn more about Compt. Amy Spurling: You can learn about us on our website at Compt.io or feel free to reach out to me, amy@Compt.io. Joel: Chad, another one is in the books. I'm still waiting for my compensation. Until then, 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.

SUBSCRIBE wherever you listen to podcasts On this week's episode I'm joined by Quincy "Queen of Chatbots" Valencia as Joel continues his aspirations to be more like his idol, Clark Griswold, with a family Vegas vacation. I got nothin' man, seriously. Any who, this week's episode is packed with goodies like: Radancy acquiring Ascendify LeapXpert gives creepy a run for its money Kelly Fusion launches DIGITAL WORKERS! 300 million jobs to be replaced by automation Everybody gonna ChatGPT - Hireology, Beamery, Seekout, Phenom, who else?!?! Is GDPR Europe's secret weapon? ... and your office mates say that you talk too much, you never shut up! It's another tech packed episode and The Queen of Chatbots is holding court! You're welcome! 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, rash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. [music] Chad: It's a Cheese-free week, kids, welcome to the Chad and Cheese, HR's most dangerous podcast. I'm your co-host, Chad, always blame the new guy, Sowash. Quincy: Yeah, and I'm today's co-host, Quincy, I have opinions on that, Valencia. Chad: And on this week's show, Radancy stops the technical Botox. Kelly introduces us to their new sexy digital staff, and a LeapXpert is watching you, it's official. Everybody's gonna ChatGPT, let's do this. Well, hello. Quincy: Well, hello to you. Chad: Okay, listener, you guessed it. Cheesman is on vacation. Don't understand the whole taking a kid six-year-old kid to Vegas. [background conversation] Quincy: What? Chad: But that's what's happening. Quincy: Every six-year-old needs a flyer about the latest nudey show. [laughter] Chad: That's a very good point. All those cards that they pass out... Quincy: Yeah, when you're walking down the street. Chad: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Quincy: That's true. I should have named myself Quincy, the lactate of the Chad-Cheese Show, Valencia. Chad: The lactate. Quincy: Well, every time I'm here, Joel, isn't. Chad: Well, I gotta say, welcome back to the show Quincy. Quincy: Thank you. Thank you. Chad: I think you're actually eclipsing Tim Sackett's appearances on the show. Quincy: Woah! Chad: I think you now... Plus plus, I don't believe Sackett has ever guest hosted. So guess what kids? [applause] Chad: That's right. Quincy: This is my second guest hosting appearance. Chad: Wow, man, that's doubling up and nobody has done that, so let's go ahead and let's hear a little bit about Quincy. Anybody who has been in their pandemic bomb shelter and they're finally coming out, they haven't been listening to podcasts, they don't know who you are, give them a little Twitter bio. Quincy: I've been around forever, Chad, almost as long as you. Chad: Oh. Quincy: I can't help it. Chad: So much bullshit. Why do you gotta pull out the age thing? Quincy: Because it's all I have on you, Chad, despite my charm and personality, it doesn't hold a candle to you. You are like six months or eight months older than me, so I have to point it out. So I've been around, I've been a practitioner, I've been a technician, I've on product, and now I'm taking a seat in the analyst's seat, taking a turn there where I joined the analyst community for HR technology a year ago. On April 1st, not an April fools joke and it's been really fun. So I spend all day looking at new technology, old technology, the companies that provided what they're doing right, what they can do better, and then I talk about it. So kind of like what you do, only in a more formal way. Chad: And what Cheesman does, looking at OnlyFans and TikTok all day, so very similar. Just different ways... Quincy: Similar but different. Yes, exactly. So thanks for having me back. Chad: Alright, okay. Quincy, let's go ahead and let's jump in to shoutouts. Guest first. Who's your first shoutout? Quincy: So I relocated to South Carolina almost a year ago, and so my first shoutout as we enter the summer towards season... [music] Quincy: Is to all the great white sharks that are hanging out off the coast of South Carolina and washing up on the beach because... Yes, washing up on the beach, it feels very Amity Island, 1975. And I'm here for it, man. I'm telling you, I just... That's my life now. I came from South Dakota to South Carolina, and it's a very, very different feel. Chad: That is a different feel. You were in Atlanta, then you went to South Dakota, and then you went to South Carolina now. So what I'm hearing is this is not a 'Jaws' situation where you're not swimming nude in the ocean doing laps often. [music] Quincy: I never said that, Chad. You're putting words in my mouth. [music] Chad: Okay. Okay, okay. Alright. Enough of that. Shoutout to 10 Guy who this week launched a human-like avatar, get that, candidate application and recruitment platform, which mitigates bias and promotes a more diverse and inclusive workforce because that's what they have in Sweden. Long and the short of it, kids, the robot head is out and they've pivoted to the avatar. So what are your thoughts on that? Quincy: Well, I have to be honest, I think that their technology is super cool, and I've thought of that since the head came out, but I've also never stopped being creeped out by the head, so I'm pretty excited about this shift, I think... I'm much more likely to not... I'm less creeped out by the great white sharks off my beach that I am by the head. I think that using that tech to apply it in this new way is great, I'm excited to see it, and I haven't had a conversation with Elon in quite some time, maybe I need to have that soon. Chad: When we originally went to Sweden, and I think it was 2019, we talked about how the robot head is fucking cool, just from the standpoint of robots taking over the world, kind of cool, but we told them it's just not scalable, so from a novelty standpoint, they're going to get a lot of press, which is fucking awesome, but to be able to scale, they've gotta do something, and this is exactly, exactly what they should be doing, so I... Quincy: I agree. You know what, I think there's still a place for the head though, so I just suddenly got a thought of like... It's like the Wienermobile from Oscar Mayer. They can put that thing on a truck and they can drive it through the streets all over Europe... Chad: Oh my God. Quincy: And attract some attention for the really cool stuff they're doing that's not so creepy anymore. Chad: It is, it is. And we've always said that if you go into, let's say, for instance, I don't know, another Swedish organization like IKEA. And the first thing that you see is the 10 guy Bot who asks you if you need anything or just points in a general direction of kitchen or betting or whatever it might be. Then that could be a nice little Wienermobile moment as well. Quincy: It certainly could. It's 10 Guy is gonna be the Wienermobile of HR tech. But in a really, really good way. I really do love their tech, I think it's pretty awesome, I love this new thing, I think it's smart. Chad: Excellent. Quincy: Alright, shoutout number two from me, so I've been thinking about tech, 'cause that's what I do. Chad: What you do. Quincy: And what I've seen that's really kind of made a difference and made a noise that doesn't happen to be ChatGPT, it's the skill space stuff, man, and I just wanna give a shoutout to our friend, your friend as well, Jason Putnam over at Plum, he made the move into that space a little over a year ago, I think, and I think it's super smart what he's doing with Caitlin there and redefining really what skills mean? It's not just about, do you know Excel? Chad: Yeah. Quincy: It's about what soft skills do you have and what desire do you have, and where do you thrive as a worker, an employee in an organization and what they're doing at Plum I think is super cool. And the fact that Jason made the move there, I think it's a really smart move on his part, and on Caitlyn MacGregor's part to bring them in, so shoutout to Jason, hope he's well. Good stuff there. Chad: We say it on the show all the time, leadership is everything, and being able to get a guy like Jason who understands go-to market, understands narrative messaging, also has amazing networking power, then we... Quincy: Absolutely. Chad: Then we also have on the other side, more kind of like hard skills per se Maya over at Tadio. Quincy: Oh, she's my favorite. Chad: Yeah, and what they're doing. So we're starting to see... And what I would like to see is more of these assessments that are really focused on... If you can get it narrowed down like Plum or even on the hard side, like Tadio, to me, it just makes sense. So leadership, being able to bring these assessments really out of the shadows. Quincy: I agree. And then so the next time I co-host Chad and Cheese Podcast, I hope that my shoutout will be to those organizations who have the foresight and the vision to put their money where their mouth is and actually invest in some of these technologies and bring them into their workforce to make an actual difference and not just have them as platitudes on a wall. Chad: Throwing down the gauntlet. That's what Quincy does. Quincy: That's right. Chad: Alright, my last shoutout goes out to Arthur Grand Technologies. Oh, you're gonna love this one. In an article reported by Newsweek, a Virginia-based tech company that has sparked outrage after allegedly posting a job on Indeed, our friends over there that stated the business was only looking for white candidates for a business analyst role. Now get this, the tech firm has issued an apology on LinkedIn, which I think has since been pulled down and accused a "new junior recruiter" of adding discriminatory language on the job description when it was not present in the company's original text. Oh come the fuck on. It's the blame the new guy game, right. And that move, that move, I gotta tell you though, never gets old, never gets old. Quincy: Clearly not, but I just absolutely call bullshit on that. It reminds me of something that happened when I worked at Home Depot way back when Moby-Dick was Minnow. And it was a big push into putting things in the stores about... We're hiring for Spanish-speaking candidates, which is really smart. This is in the mid-2000, early oughts, I think when this... It was. It was the early oughts when this happened, and it turns out the minute that the bigs we're hiring sign went up, the day they went up in all the stores... Yeah, the translation that they used to create those particular we're hiring signs was of a vernacular that actually many Spanish-speaking countries understand it to mean we're soliciting as in we're soliciting a hooker on the street and that was the day that my friend and employment marketing had to go in front of the CHRO and CEO and explain how the hell that happened. Very similar vibe here. Some people had some fun recruitment, marketing, faux pas recently. Chad: Oh my God. Quincy: And in the past. To go along with yours. Chad: Well, and we'll see more faux pas possibly as we go to events, so the first event that we're getting ready, all geared up, it's gonna be a party is Unleash, so there's lots of learning, networking, business and parties and that kind of stuff, but... Okay, so I understand that this year's ticket sales is 75% higher. Quincy: Woah. Chad: Right now today compared to last year, so... You've been to Unleash before, right? Quincy: No, as a matter of fact, I have never been to an Unleash. Chad: What? Quincy: I know. Isn't that crazy? Chad: Dude, we have to totally, totally rectify that. And let me tell you why. One of the things I love about Unleash is that they've integrated the community where in most events that you go to, they split off practitioners from vendors, I mean it's really... It's two countries. Unleash doesn't do that. They pull them together. They are integrated on the Expo Floor with the stages actually being on the Expo Floor, so it's really cool, they have a main stage, they have all these sub-stages that are on the Expo Floor, and it's a pretty awesome, awesome event. I think Unleash and RecFest, just in my personal opinion, are probably the most different and most innovative events that are actually happening out there today. Quincy: So when we go to HR Tech, which we all do as one does, if you're in this industry, I think it's a great event, don't get me wrong... Chad: Oh yeah. Quincy: I see what happens up there, tons of opportunity to network and really see what's coming up, that's new and fun, so I love that there, but it's really sort of a vendor fest, if we're honest, a lot more vendors attend these days than buyers, that's where we're missing out, is that opportunity to interact with the people who are actually using this super cool new tech or the stale tech that just people who just have money to buy big boots. But that's another topic for another show. How is Unleash different from that? Chad: Very much, it's more integrated. So they're not trying to cordon off all of the practitioners. Quincy: So you actually do get to interact with people who are using the technology. Chad: And that's the vibe, man, the vibe isn't, oh, I know I'm hoity-toity and I'm gonna go out and be cordoned off, away from all the vendors and the vendors there's a respect that the vendors aren't always trying to be seeing blood in the water as they see practitioners all around them, so yeah. Quincy: Oh that's good. Chad: If you're going to be at Unleash, this is where you can find the Chad and Cheese on Tuesday, the 25th, Joe and I are going to be on stage during the vendor summit with our buddy, Chris Conrad from Textkernel, you know those guys? Quincy: Absolutely. Chad: That evening are gonna be at the HiringBranch event at the high roller. Have you ever been on the high roller? Quincy: I have not been on the high roller because I don't do heights. [laughter] Chad: It's much easier to do heights in the high roller because there's a bar in it. Quincy: Okay, well, that's a requirement. You might be talking me into it. Chad: It goes one revolution in half an hour, so it takes 30 minutes for one revolution. We're gonna see how many drinks we can actually get during that time, so that's the hiring branch, high roller party that we're gonna have, and then we're going to run to a dinner with our friends over at Plum. We're gonna see Caitlin, Jason and the team. Then next on Wednesday, this is day one, you can find the Chad and Cheese at the WorkHuman booth from noon to 4:00, where we're gonna be giving away t-shirts doing interviews and probably drinking. Go figure it. It's Unleash. That's the WorkHuman both from noon to 4:00 on day one, then right after that, I believe at 4:30, we're gonna be doing little drinks before dinner with our friends at Tadio, like we did last year in Vegas. Quincy: That was a great event. Chad: Or you're gonna love this one. Then it's the Talent Toke event, right after the drinks with Tadio, we're gonna walk over to the Bellagio, we're gonna toke up because weed is legal in Vegas kids, and we're gonna enjoy the dancing fountains while we are getting high, and this is all before dinner on day one, and that's just the start of our calendar, so we're really, really excited about Unleash, and if you haven't gotten your tickets, register, go to chadcheese.com, click on events, all the stuff is there. Then we're gonna find ourselves in early May, we're gonna be at Coronado Beach in California for ICIMS inspire we're scheduled to close out day one on stage with a special guest, that's so secret, they haven't told us who the special guest is yet. Quincy: That's exciting news. The last ICIMS event I attended, which was in November, I happened to see Arnold Schwarzenegger at breakfast. Chad: What? Quincy: I did. It's true. I have a picture. It was a fun-filled day, but I was trying to sneak and get the picture because you don't wanna be that one that goes up and says oh my god, can I get a picture. And so I happened to mosey over to somebody I didn't even know who was sitting at the other end of the breakfast bar and said, "Hi, we don't know each other, but would it be okay if we pretended to take a selfie, but really with our cameras faced the other way so we can both get a picture," and he said, "That's genius," 'cause that's what I am. So I now have that picture, so we'll see if you have any celebrity sightings at the next ICIMS event. Chad: The expectations at this point are now high, thanks to you. Okay, make sure you go to chadcheese.com, click on events, register for those events. We have plenty, long list of events this year, those are just two. Quincy: Hey, is Joel taking his kids to the Talent Toke event in Vegas? Is this a precursor event for that event? Chad: I don't think he's taking the six-year-old or the 16-year-old or 13-year-old to the Talent Toke event. Quincy: You never know. Chad: That was a good question. That was a good question. Quincy: Thank you. Chad: One thing that kids do like, and I think you do as well, is free stuff. Are you registered for free stuff? Quincy: I'm registered for free. I've never gotten any free stuff. Chad: Oh you've gotten a t-shirt, whatever. Quincy: I do. I get a t-shirt every year. I have a Chad and Cheese shirt collection, and I wear them all over the world and take pictures. Chad: I do love that t-shirts from JobGet. We also send beer, which is courtesy of Aspen Tech Labs. That's right. Beer landing on your front porch. What could be better? Quincy: Who doesn't want that? Chad: If you don't like beer, we got whiskey from Textkernel, so you get a bottle from Chad, you get a bottle from Cheese, so two bottles. Quincy: Now you're talking. Chad: And last but not least, if you got a birthday, don't forget the rum with Plum. Joel's not here this week, so we're not gonna go through through with birthdays 'cause that's his baby. But... [vocalization] Speaker: Really? Could you feel the tension in the air right now? I know I can. I can feel it all the way down in my plums. Chad: That's right. Go to plum.io. Get your assessment taken. You're gonna love it, I promise. And a Plum crew will see you in Vegas. [music] Quincy: What do got for us today, Chad? [music] Chad: Oooh, it's an acquisition alert kids. Acquisition straight from the Radancy blog, CEO Michelle Abbey... Quincy: That's obnoxious. Chad: Michelle Abbey writes, "Today, we announce that Radancy has acquired Ascendify, adding value to our Radancy talent acquisition cloud." What a fucking name. Radancy Talent Acquisition Cloud. Anyway, "through advanced candidate relationship management, CRM capabilities, this acquisition enhances our suite of solutions focused on helping enterprises maximize ROI, that's return on investment, kids, reduce costs and find qualified candidates to strengthen their business." Ascendify received $13 million in total funding according to CrunchBase, a seed of two in 2013 and 11 million series A in 2017, only 33 employees according to LinkedIn. So the team was pretty lean. Radancy gains a brand spanking new CRM and features, which include advanced sourcing functionality, whatever the fuck that means, workflow automation, interview scheduling and event management to augment their candidate marketing capabilities. Quincy, your thoughts? Quincy: Yeah, so Radancy is weird, it's a fine company, I'm assuming. But I don't understand, they're a talent acquisition platform when they really only play in certain parts of that space. On their website, or was it a Ascendify, no it's on their website, they said, Together we're delivering the world's leading TA platform to which I say, I don't really think that's true. I'm just gonna put that out there because it's limited and what it's doing, Radancy is a relic of what it used to be, which was TMP, which was really great in what they did, nobody's arguing that, and they're continuing to do that, they've had some pretty cool technological advances, and I will say that this acquisition makes a lot of sense because I think that Ascendify and some of the features that it brings, plugs in some holes that were in Radancy's offering, but I think that they're going a bit too far to say to the world's leading TA platform, and I take offense to that. What are your opinions? [laughter] Chad: So, in performing due diligence for CRMS and recruitment marketing platforms over the years, do you know what brand never came up and the... Check these guys out list Ascendify. Quincy: Correct. Chad: And here might be the reason why since 2012, Ascendify has served over 50, five zero enterprise clients, averaging five new clients a year with their leading CRM and recruitment platform that screams, I'm running out of cash and I need a sugar mama now. Right? Quincy: That's exactly right. Chad: And Radancy has a CRM and a marketing platform, so why buy another? Well, what's hitting Radancy in the face right about now, I'll give you a hint. TalentBrew, technical debt. TalentBrew been around for how long. Quincy: Ever. Chad: Right, you can't beat technical debt, it's kind of like aging, you can get Botox, you can get a face lift, lipo, you can do all the things, but you can't outrun time, so it's the same thing with tech, it needs to update or the amount of daily maintenance piles up and the platform basically is worthless, so you have to rip and replace, which is so fucking hard, we saw companies like Monster literally die on the vine because they couldn't rip and replace. Quincy: That's the truth. Chad: Much easier for an organization like Radancy because of all the different instances, clients, those types of things, but still... But I give Radancy a lot of shit, they hardly ever make the news anymore, but over the years, they've gotten well over 500 clients pounding on their tech, and this feels like a smart move, a rip and replace kind of provide better infrastructure. But at the end of the day, to answer your question, nobody, I don't believe one platform can represent all of the talent acquisition function without being able to integrate with partner point solutions. Speaker: Well, and they don't even try to. We know Radancy is a leader in its portion of talent acquisition, which is a really important segment of TA, but they don't go across the board, so I do think, like I said, and you've actually said as well, Ascendify brings some features and functionality that Radancy doesn't have today, so I think... And they probably got it for a bargain price, we don't know this to be true, but we know now. Well, we know some of that, but they're... Based on what they published, but I think that's really smart. I don't think it solves their technical debt issue coming from my last gig was in product, so I can tell you that doesn't necessarily do the trick, but obviously they saw something in it to add to what they have, and certainly it will add support to their current client base and perhaps give them an edge in prospecting where clients are looking for something that had pieces that Radancy didn't have so good for them, and good for Ascendify. Chad: I've gotta say that TMP, when they made the move and they started creating TaletBrew to be... And because every agency wants to say they're unbiased, TMP really was, I think the agency that move toward a biased scenario, they're only gonna promote their own shit, and they've gone down that road, so what they've done is they've flipped from an agency model to a tech model, why, because they want to get acquired by JAM spring. Because the technical platform is gonna have a hell of a lot higher valuation than just an agency. A portfolio... Quincy: Tech is good. Chad: Yes, sure and so you're 100% right. Quincy: Because tech is scalable, human-based businesses are not as much... Chad: Exactly. Quincy: And that is a universal and certainly the case in the HR tech space, and I think that was actually a smart move for them as well. I do know people who work there, I'm sure you do too, They're fine people, they're good at their jobs, there's reasons that they stay there, and TMP has done some things very well and tuning in becoming Radancy and what they've done. I still wish they wouldn't say that they're the world's leading TA platform. Chad: Everybody says it. Everybody says that, and on the other side of that, you have the Shaker recruitment marketing of the world who do not, will not acquire tech, just so they don't have to play these money games, 'cause obviously Shaker's not looking to get acquired, they've been around for over 70 years, and that's I think the big difference. Shaker is really looking for the purity of what an agency is, and TMP at the time before Radancy. Now, Radancy, they were looking to get acquired and to be able to get a much larger valuation, they had to get into tech. Now, the problem that they're going to have, that they're gonna continue to have is being able to keep up with the market, and then the technical debt that they have to pay every single year, I think they're gonna rip and replace a lot of their CRM capability. They're old, kind of like CRM light that they had before, 'cause they really didn't have a robust CRM before they're gonna rip and replace, and I think they got it for... I think they got it for a good deal. So. Quincy: Well we'll see. Chad: I think it's a smart move. Quincy: Can I just say about Shaker, who does what you do quite well. Every time I think of them though, I automatically think of Don Draper on Mad Men, which is a fine thing that gives me the warm fuzzies. Yes. Chad: And I'm sure Joe Shaker would love to hear that on with the show. [music] Chad: Oh, that's right kids, somebody got money, LeapXpert raises 22 million in a series, A round, 36 million in total funding from TechCrunch with the spike and work from home in hybrid work. We've seen an obvious increase on workers, dependence on personal devices, it's been a particular challenge for the financial service industry, which has strict governance and compliance requirements. In September, the US Securities and Exchange Commission fined a Wall Street banks. Listen to this, including Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, 1.8 billion, over failures in monitoring how staff use their personal phones to talk about work. Enter LeapXpert, which allows employees to message customers or colleagues through their popular apps, including WhatsApp, WeChat, iMessage, Telegram and Signal while monitoring and archiving their business-related chats. LeapXpert was founded with a mission to help companies seize the opportunity to transform business communication. Is it just me or is this about as creepy as employee monitoring gets. Chad: I can't... I hate everything about this. I can't even think of something I like, I try to do. 'Cause I try and be balanced, I hate everything about it. Look, I understand the challenges that these financial services companies have and they're real and they need to protect themselves, and then you know how you do that, Chad, you invest the money and you get your employees separate mobile tech. Because I know that they say they have ways to capture personal info and chat separately or do not capture those, but I don't believe it, and I haven't seen it, and I just... Yeah, this is about as creepy as it gets, I hate absolutely everything about it. Chad: And that's the thing is that we're talking about an industry that is fucking rich. [music] Chad: Rich. These fuckers have so much money, there's no reason that they can't have a separate device or separate mechanisms, so that you don't have to utilize my personal device. So at the end of the day, I think that employee monitoring is just a horrible thing, and it's funny 'cause Julie would call this icky, that's her term for this. Quincy: I agree with Julie is it is icky, I don't like it. I wouldn't invest money in it, I think that organizations who are touting people bringing their whole selves to work and providing a better experience for making people engaged, cannot do that when they're monitoring their every move, they need to suck it up and find a different way. This isn't it, folks. Chad: Amen, okay, let's stay on the creepy side of tech... Quincy: Why not. Chad: But it's a little less creepy, I promise. [music] Chad: Automation, you might have heard of it, kids. Quincy: Well, I've not. Chad: Straight out of CNN business news, "as many as 300 million full-time jobs around the world could be automated in some way by the newest wave of AI that has spawned platforms like ChatGPT. Quincy: Let's hear about it. Chad: According to those crazy economists over at Goldman Sachs, well, apparently Kelly Services got the memo, this one straight on a Yahoo Finance as companies face economic uncertainties and fierce talent competitions, and workers report unmanageable workloads and disengagement from their jobs, Kelly becomes the first staffing provider. Did you hear that? The first staffing provider to tackle these challenges by deploying... [vocalization] Chad: Digital worker, in addition to their not as cool human workers, obviously. What will these new sexy digital workers be called? You might ask, that's a great question. They will be called Kelly Fusion Digital Workers. Quincy: That's not a good first and last name, it's not even a clever middle name. Chad: I would have expected how Blinky the board, something of that. Anyway, these solutions will automate routine tasks and allow employees to focus on their more meaningful work, this sounds amazing. Quincy, am I right the first? Talk to me, goose. Quincy: It sounds to me like branded RPA, that's what it sounds like. It's been around for years and years and years, and it doesn't sound new. However, I'm gonna give prop to Kelly, for a couple of things. A couple of years ago, I was on your show, it was the prediction show, and I predicted... Maybe it was three years ago now, I don't know, but I predicted that RPA was gonna be a big thing coming up, it's been around, it's not new, but companies are finding new ways to employ it within their organizations to do exactly this, which is automate those things that should be automated. Giving their very valuable, actual human being employees, the opportunity to do more value add, more strategic, more fun work. I think this is smart on Kelly's part, do I think that they're doing anything new in revolutionary. No, sorry, Kelly, I just don't. Every system out there is doing this, exactly, you have automated interview scheduling, you have automated... You name it, you already got the stuff out there, but packaging it together, however, and having a central resource to do this work, if that's impact what it can do, I haven't seen it yet. Quincy: And then branding it, I think is smart, it would be a nice revenue stream for them, so, kudos to them for that. Chad: Yes. Quincy: What do you think? Chad: Well, I remember when Tim Meehan over at Pontoon created their RXO recruiterless solutions back in 2019, and it wasn't new then, what was new was the messaging, was the narrative, was the productization of exactly what you're talking about. It is much more prevalent now than it was in 2019, so Tim was way ahead of his skis, I think with regard to the market. Not to mention we had a pandemic. Now, everybody's ChatGPT, everybody is, how do we automate? How do we do all of these things? This is amazing marketing and productization, which is exactly what you're just talking about. Quincy: I'm hearing you say, wait, it's not the first? Chad: It's not the first. Quincy: Go figure. Chad: Yeah, I know, right? Who would have thought? A big question. Do you see RPO staffing? This to me, just makes a hell of a lot more sense because I believe in the keep it simple, stupid model where we try to package things to make it easier for people to understand this digital... Kelly fusion, like digital worker, it makes sense because it is working in conjunction with their "human workers." Do you see that happening more? With that industry. Quincy: Yeah, for sure. It already makes sense. I've worked for several RPO organizations in my time, and I will tell you that I have never worked for one that didn't do this already, they just didn't brand it and productive it, market it in that way, if they weren't doing it, they wouldn't make money. RPOs historically have been people-driven organizations, and that's why companies buy those services, it's been white glove, it's been hand-holding of the candidate, and in many cases, because RPO organizations are made of people who've been in this space for 110 years they do it better because this is what they do this is their day job. Quincy: Automating has been in the back end, because if they didn't do it this way, these organizations wouldn't be able to scale and make money, so it's been there for years, kudos to Kelly for putting it out there as an actual product. I think it's smart. It's gonna get some attention. I don't think it's new. Chad: Yes, the big difference between talent acquisition, staffing and RPO, is that talent acquisition, it's your job. The other two, it's a business, they focus on EBITDA, they focus on margins, they focus on all of the business aspects of it, which means efficiencies and less headcount is the biggest thing that they need to focus on, and that being said, everybody's gonna ChatGPT. This week, in addition to Hireology and B. Murries, ChatGPT news over the past weeks, we now have SeekOut and Fenham joining the ranks of the hyper-automation. Is everybody gonna have a ChatGPT instance here? Quincy: Oh, I don't know. I think anybody who plays in the ChatBot space should. It's the next level, it's the next step up, it's the next ability to deliver a more humanized experience, to deliver it in a way that brings empathy to the process, all the things that all of us have been talking about for years and years that are very difficult frankly, to deliver. And I'll call it a dumbbot the smaller language model, the ones you have to train for every single intent and bring back, so if you're in that space at some point, I think you should look to bring it in, I don't think everyone should put all of their eggs in that basket. I don't think everybody should put all of their money there, I don't think that the big players in the world should change their entire road map to incorporate it, but I don't think that it's gonna go back. Words and what it is that it's doing. What do you think about it? Chad: So I think everybody is going to have some type of instance one way or the other, either to look cool or to actually facilitate business. So take a look at a Textkernel, they are not using ChatGPT, but they did acquire a ChatBot because they wanted a better mechanism in which to be able to collect user data, it's not something that has to be synchronous, it can be asynchronous. Then you have companies like SeekOut, why do they need a ChatBot? Well, there's a ton of different reasons, and a lot of it has to do with experience. So I think as we start to see this big wave of everybody understanding that, Wow, now that the ChatBot's cool again, large language models are amazing, but the domain specific language models and all of that data that you're actually... You're training your algorithms on, 'cause everybody's training algorithms, how do you get that data easily, more data into that machine so that it can feed it. Well, chatbots, text, messaging, WhatsApp, what have you, I believe is the perfect answer. Quincy: Oh, I agree, and chatbots are not just chatbots. And if you move beyond that, we're saying that ChatGPT is a ChatBot and it is, at its core, but all the large language models can deliver a lot more than just a question response sort of experience. We've seen it. We don't need to go through all of them ad nauseam, although I will say that Fenham and their release, it looks like their list of features and what they can deliver are straight from a ChatGPT created list of what ChatGPT can do. Which is funny to me, I would love to see it. I think they probably can do these things, I think that organizations who are extending their functionality would be wise to examine doing it within the realm of a large language or generative AI model. Chad: And what I would like to say is that anybody who's doing due diligence on any of these organizations, I don't care if they have a ChatBot or not, you need to feel it, touch it, taste it, test it yourself, having a sales person demo this shit. Is not the fucking answer. Quincy: Amen to that. Chad: ChatGPT, being able to be as transparent as it has, where you can see it, feel it, touch it, taste it, engineering your own prompts, there's just it's like the new bullion, but it's better and it's cooler. Quincy: Well I used that same analogy in my head as I was preparing for this show. Chad: There it is. Quincy: We are in the same space. It's the new bullion. Chad: Yes. But that being said, GDPR... Italy just ban ChatGPT citing GDPR, access to personal information and privacy, Italy says Open AI doesn't have the legal right to use people's personal information in ChatGPT, these large language models are pretty exciting and scary at the same time, it's interesting 'cause one of my friends... One of my developer friends, John Rice on LinkedIn, actually said, "US tech titans were ruling the internet, ruling data collection and seemed unstoppable, the lead they had over most European tech companies was nearly insurmountable until GDPR." His focus here is like, Look, everybody thinks this is a compliance and privacy play. No, this is slowing American tech down so that Europe can catch up. What do you think about those two things? Quincy: Yeah, I think it's both. I think it bums me out, I think as a technologist and an HR tech fan girl, I get excited about the new applications that are coming up, and then GDPR regulation steps in, like the responsible parent who won't let you eat too much candy before dinner, and it bums me out. That said, I think there's truth to both. I think it is about data privacy, I think in general, that Europe has led the world in that way, and putting some breaks on some things that potentially... I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't think that everybody's out to get you, and then everybody's gonna bleed my bank account. That said, I think that some regulation and some caution and moderation is important, so I appreciate that, but I also think there's truth to the other bit, European tech needs to catch up and they are. We've seen a lot of it. You've certainly seen a lot of it, you and Joel talk about it on this show. But... Yeah, I think there's a little bit of both in there. What do you think about it? Chad: Well, I think all I have to do is say, Cambridge Analytica and SVB. If we don't find a way to fucking understand these Goddamn things that are happening, these new tech platforms that are popping up and we don't start providing guardrails, then we're going to find ourselves in a heap of shit, really. Again, we weren't ready for Cambridge Analytica, we wanna focus on TikTok and how TikTok is owned by China, ByteDance and China. Totally get that. Understand that, but yet we still have an organization in our fucking backyard, Meta, Facebook, that work directly with a non-US company to be able to provide Russia with data. It's one of those things where it's like, Oh my fucking god. This is all about narrative. This is all about being able to... I think in some cases, yes, maybe slow the US from an innovation standpoint, so the Europeans can catch up, but at the end of the day, Cambridge Analytica, SVB, we might not slow this down, Joel calls it, putting the toothpaste back in the tube. I think we have to, as the adults in the room, because I'm gonna tell you right now, corporate America, they're gonna go after that dollar and they don't give a shit on how they get it, and again, that's what they've been charged to do. Quincy: They have... So having that, the parent making you wash your hands and not eat too much before dinner is a critical part of this development so that we don't end up with a case where... We all remember the case of Amazon a few years ago, who had to pull back their recruiting engine because it was fraught with bias, and we don't want that, we wanna take the tech that I think can do amazing good in the world and let it be applied for good and not for evil. SFX: Shall we play a game. Chad: Get ready kids. On the other side of this break, we're gonna talk about one thing that Quincy hates. [music] Chad Oh yeah. Quincy: We go way back here now. Chad: Not just a Quincy pet peeve, but survey... Quincy: Survey says. Chad: 95% of people have worked with someone who talks too much. Preply recently surveyed over a 1000 workers and here are their key findings, go figure, 95% of respondents have had a co-worker who talks too much on average, chatty co-workers spend 90 minutes of their workday talking. Americans say the worst time to encounter their talkative co-worker is when they're trying to finish something up and go home, a talkative co-worker has prevented 71% of work getting done. Quincy: And yet let's all rush back into the office. Shall well. So, I mean, look, I probably have been... In fact, I'm sure I've been that chatty co-worker... Chad: At the end of the day? Quincy: No, never at the end of the day. Are you kidding me? No, I'm a morning person. Well, other people hate it, they haven't had their coffee yet, they don't wanna hear... When we started the show, today, I sang to you, Chad. Chad: You did. Quincy: I sang. Chad: I know. Quincy: So I'm a morning person, I'd probably been that person, but you know how I limited that, I work from home, and I've worked from home since 2008 before working from home was cool. I had a lot more done, I'm a lot more productive. People... I like you, you're nice, we'll have a drink after work, but during the day, leave may be. Just let me be. Chad: So, the top three things not to talk about because they're annoying as fuck. Number three. Quincy: ChatGPT. Chad: Kids. Quincy: Oh, wait. No. Sorry. Chad: Kids, maybe kids and then ChatGPT. Number two, politics. Number one, gossip, and then the three best ways to handle... That's right. Handle these co-workers. Number three, directly say that you can't talk, which is what I do, I'm busy. Number two, avoid them entirely, so just run or number one, listen for a bit and then say, Oh, I have something to do. What's your go-to? Quincy: I put my Team's messaging on Do Not Disturb, and then I forget it sometimes. It's like that all day. I don't know. No, yeah, you know what, here's the thing I do like chatting with my co-workers. It's fun, engage with them, we have a good time. It's certainly not all about work all the time, but there's a time and a place, and people need to learn to read the room or the computer screen and understand if people aren't available, I don't think that you should put people in the position where they can go I don't have time for you. Go away. It's uncomfortable. Chad: It is. Quincy: Even me, as saucy as I am, I don't wanna hurt people's feelings. Chad: Lies, lies. Yeah, I have to say that I... Especially building and managing sales teams, most of your best sales people are one or two people, one who just totally laser-focused and they just knock your shit out and they nail their goals, and then you have the other one who is just so fucking good, half of their time, they're nailing their goals, the other half of the time, they're talking to people in the halls, I mean, I know some of my best sales people, I had to lure them back to their office, Hey, leave him alone. He's not a goal. You are, I did it. [laughter] Quincy: I see, I've seen opposite, the people who are talking that much, the sales people, they think they're just that good, but they really need to be a little bit more focused on research and prep. Chad: Amen. So that being said, Quincy, thanks for joining us on another show. Quincy: Thanks for having me. Chad: We appreciate it. And next week, kids. I'm sorry, Joel's gonna be back. So we'll try to have Quincy back, but until then that's another one in the can Quincy. Chad: We out. Quincy: We out. OUTRO: Wow. Look at you. You made it t through an entire episode of the challenges podcast, maybe you cheated and 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, a Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your five 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, let's save some soap, because you will be back. Like an awful train wreck you can't tuck away and like Chad's favorite question, you can't quit them either. We're out.

Finland joins NATO, virtual cheese is now and thing and WOW, that whole Axel Springer taking Stepstone public isn't going well... Is it? After being acquired by Stepstone, Cammio, a video recruitment platform, is won back through a management buyout. Lieven professes his obsession with ChatGPT. Okay his healthy obsession, while we debate ownership, banning, GDPR, and some techniques. Plus, Buy or Sell with Patch, Cruit, and Epinote. If you're allergic to great content you have been warned, grab your EpiPen, a cold beer and 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. [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. Joel: Oh yeah. It's International Pooper Scooper Week. Pet Dogs generate over 4.4 billion pounds of poop every year. Almost as much shit as we talk on this show. Hey kids, this is the Chad and Cheese podcast as Europe. I'm your co-host, Joel Macron Garbage Cheesman, and I'm joined by Chad Portugal's, chief Pooper Scooper, Sowash, and Lieven Belgium three, Germany two, Vaughn D Hansen. On this episode, grand Cammio, Lieven's unhealthy relationship with ChatGPT, and a little buy or sell. Let's do this. Lieven: Europe has a bunch of countries in it. Chad: Okay, so is it me or does virtual Joel have a weird poop fetish? Anyway, it's a Cheesman thing, I think. Lieven: Cheesman thing. [chuckle] Chad: Again, we have virtual cheese, which is, I guess just as good as the regular cheese, if you're using your headset. If you're using the goggles and you're in the metaverse, Joel is with his family. Let me say this again, Joel is with his family in Las Vegas. Now, Lieven is Las Vegas a place that you take the kids? He has a six year-old. Lieven: It's the last place where I would take a six year old to. I mean, it's a place where you can make kids and you can afterwards deny you made them, but it's not a place where you actually take your kids to. Why would you? [chuckle] Chad: I'm sure we will have some detailed conversations around the pick. It might have been more of his wife picking things, I don't know. I have no clue. We will figure out. But this week kids, we have virtual cheese. He should be back for the next show. So let's move on to shout-outs. Lieven: First one is, I'm feeling the LinkedIn love for the first time. Chad: Oh God, are you drinking the Kool-Aid? Lieven: I'm still on coffee. No, no. [chuckle] Seriously, seriously. Last week I was invited by LinkedIn to their talent awards and LinkedIn offered me a decent dinner and they put me at a table with seven interesting young women. And they gave me an awards, the talent awards, which was well deserved of course. [chuckle] But still they gave it to me. Chad: Wait a minute, seven hot models and an award? [chuckle] Lieven: Yeah that's basically the whole idea. No, I said interesting women, I didn't say they were hot models. Chad: Oh, okay. Lieven: Interesting. Yeah, but they're real nice. Okay, so they put me on a table, give me an award, I was happy, happy, everything was nice. And I must say I always loved LinkedIn as a concept. I mean, we're recruiters and LinkedIn is a resume database, which keeps itself updated, so that's great. LinkedIn is cool. But in the past I didn't really like their commercial attitude. They were really commercial and their client services to a certain extent sucked sometimes. Chad: Okay. Lieven: But I must say, in the past couple of years, they really tried to improve up to the point where I feel that our client services now are best in class. And I'm just going to give one example. Chad: Okay. Lieven: We have done so many acquisitions within house of HR and all the companies we bought, I'm talking about over 30 the last two, three years, all those companies had existing LinkedIn contracts. So, it was really a hassle to check who's paying what and all different contracts with different starting dates, etcetera. So LinkedIn really succeeded in putting all those contracts together in one house of HR contract in a way everyone got more out of it. We asked Indeed to do the same thing and after six weeks, Indeed came back to us and they said, "Nah, we can't... No, it's too complicated." [chuckle] And then I realized LinkedIn has been improving so much and Indeed still sucks and I don't think it'll improve. Now they fired over 2000 employees. I can't imagine their customer service will improve by firing people. Chad: No. Lieven: So tons of love to Jenny Hestermann and Mike Ams from LinkedIn. And Boo to my contacts at Indeed. Chad: Models and awards over at LinkedIn, I love it. Joel actually from Las Vegas also has a shoutout. Let's hear it. Joel: Okay. My first shoutout is what I'm gonna call a disturbing shoutout to Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Hungary's leader has gone too far. As far as I'm concerned, Hungary needs to be kicked out of the EU. Chad: What? Joel: Why you ask is it their blatant disregard for the rule of law. Chad: Maybe. Joel: Mistreatment of the LGBTQ community. Chad: Of course. Joel: Or even Viktor Orbán is concerning ties to Vladimir Putin? Chad: Definitely. Joel: No. It's because of the atrocity that is oranges on pizza. Chad: Oh. Joel: During a visit to Kiskőrös. Chad: Oh. Joel: Orbán visited a pizzeria that created a dish in his honor featuring toppings such as chicken, jalapenos and get this, slices of orange. Pineapple on pizza is one thing, but oranges, oh, no. No, no, no, no. [chuckle] Hungary you gots to go. How do you say bye bye and Hungarian, Viszlát. Chad: So oranges, is that a thing in Europe, Oranges on a pizza? Lieven: Nope. Never seen it. No. Chad: How about pineapple? Pineapple is a thing here. We call it a Hawaiian pizza. What about over there? Lieven: So do we, we call it a Hawaiian pizza. And actually I'm going to order one for my kids [chuckle] after this episode. They're highly popular, Hawaiian pizzas, but Italian try to keep a distance from it. I was told. Yeah. Chad: More importantly though, my first shout out is to Finland, who is part of NATO now Kids. Joel: Yeah. Chad: That's right. That's a cause for celebration, right? [applause] Lieven: Right. Welcome Finland. Chad: Exactly, this from Reuters, Finland formally joined the NATO Military Alliance on Tuesday in a historic policy shift brought on by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Go figure, drawing a threat from Moscow of countermeasures. Take that Putin, suck it. Emotional Damage. Lieven: Suck it like an orange on pizza. Chad: Okay, let's go ahead. Usually we don't have an event until early July, although we've got something new that popped up. Usually we wait till the Friday show, but RecFest is happening in early July, and if you've never been, you're missing out on a chance to check out the best recruiting and technology carnival there is. It's an extravaganza, but if you've missed it before and you are in the UK or you're in Europe, here's how you get a free ticket kids. This is directly from Bobby Leonard's LinkedIn post quote, "Talent Acquisition and Recruiting Professionals. Yesterday, we announced a new initiative to get our industry back to work by providing complimentary RecFest tickets to all, open to work industry professionals. If you're seeking new opportunities and eager to learn, network and grow, don't miss this chance. To claim your ticket, follow these simple steps." First and foremost, you gotta go to LinkedIn, you gotta find Bobby Leonard from the recruitment events company on LinkedIn. Then comment on the post where he's talking about free tickets and they will DM you a unique code for a free ticket. That's it, kids, very simple. Kids over at RecFest wanna make sure that everybody gets a chance to network and enjoy the wonderful libations that happen at RecFest. Music. Chad: Topics. Joel: Cammio, a video recruitment platform has undergone a management buyout from StepStone Group, which acquired the company back in 2020. The buyout means that Cammio will operate independently under the leadership of co-CEOs, Sandhna Chintoe and Dimitri Knysch. Customers of both companies can continue to use their platform as before. So my take this rarely happens, especially when it's not with the original founders who wanna buyout the company. Although the two who want to buy it and did buy it are longtime employees of the company. Joel: During the pandemic, a lot of companies launched video or acquired video recruiting companies. Even if it wasn't an ideal fit for the business, it was a bet on the pandemic and the remote work phenomenon. I think that's what StepStone did here. They rolled the dice three years ago and with employment looking to slow down in 2023, they had to look in the mirror and realize video maybe isn't a real great fit for their business. Pawning it off to two employees was pretty convenient as opposed to selling it to another company. And here we are, StepStone gets to cut some fat and two loyal employees get to take the wheel. Good luck to them. I say they're going to need it. It's a crowded field of video solutions that they now get to take on. Chad: Wow. Okay, Lieven. So you have some insights. I don't know if you call this a very smart business proposal or if this was just a... Was a debacle that went wrong. Lieven: The timing is actually kind of weird of course. I mean, management buyouts happen all the time, but normally when there is an IPO coming, those people should be able to make some money out of it. If they were shareholders when they go make an IPO, then they get some money. So normally you would stay. These people maybe are not shareholders at all, but then it's weird that they would buy the company before it's going to get listed. So we could of course ask them why they did it and it would make sense, but it's much more fun to just speculate a bit on the possibilities. So I think it could be the management feels the company wasn't evaluated as it should be, so they got a feeling we could buy it for a bargain and we can make more out of it afterwards. Lieven: That's a possibility. Or as Joe was suggesting, there was some... They're probably losing money and they had to dump it before they are going to get listed. So just to pump the EBITDA. But then I think it's too late for that. If they're getting listed in 2023, those numbers will be still in. So it can't be that. Maybe it's like people working at Cammio just didn't want to be part of listed company and they refused and, they said Okay we're going to buy them as ourself and we'll do it ourself. Plenty of possibilities, but maybe it's just like, they feel they're leaving the sinking ship and they're better of alone could be as well. Because we've talked about StepStone, IPO already and none of us agreed at it or none of us thought it was because they were doing so well. Chad: And not great timing. Not great timing at all. I think you're 100% correct. I think that this is an IPO play and they probably got a great deal for a management buyout so that they can get rid of Cammio because as you're looking to go to IPO, you wanna try to slim everything down, you wanna try to make it look good. So I see this as an IPO play in StepStone's ability to integrate video is probably on pars with Monster's ability to integrate VideoMyJob years ago. It took forever and it shouldn't have. Why? Because a huge technical debt that Monster was fighting. And it never really became the video powerhouse everyone at Monster hoped it would be. So after buying Cammio and understanding the true obstacles to integration for an old platform like Axel Springer's StepStone, I think they took a look at it and said, "Hey, look, we need to shed this skin [laughter] and we need to set StepStone up better for an IPO and we can't do that with all of this internally." Chad: So as for the excited new startup platform that was reborn from this debacle, they've lost major grounds since the acquisition Cammio found itself competing against internal projects and new StepStone features just to gain oxygen and resources internally. That ground will be incredibly hard to make up. I say good luck to the new owners. That's awesome for them. But again, the market is much, much different than it was when they were acquired. Lieven: They were acquired only two years ago, 2020, three years ago. Chad: Yeah. Lieven: So I am... Just to have some fun [chuckle] I rewrote the press release, which was released back then and it's so fun. Chad: [laughter] Did you have ChatGPT rewrite the press release? Lieven: I did not but I could have. No, no, but I read it and I thought, okay, they were so happy about it and they were so enthusiastic and they must feel so disappointed now if they just let it go. In only two or three years, everything changes. And I know times are changing and situations change, but it was remarkable. And once again, the timing is weird. So good luck to them. Chad: It speaks volumes when we take a look at an older platform like Monster and how they tried to integrate a newer platform like VideoMyJob and this is pre pandemic and they thought they could turn it around pretty quickly, but it took nine months. They actually announced it, way before they were ready to launch product. It took an additional six months after the announcement, before they put product out. Because there's so much technical debt that Monster was dealing with personally. This is something that every platform that's been around for more than 10 years is dealing with. Monster's been around for 20 plus, so I mean, it was dealing with a lot. StepStone's been around for a very long time. Lieven: Since 1996. And I wonder, do you know if was StepStone before Monster afterwards? I can't remember. Chad: Well, I think it was before Monster, the online career center and the Monster board, those two that actually came together, those two preceded StepStone. So, '99 was when Monster.com was actually created, but that was emerging. But either way, I mean, StepStone... I don't wanna say they have old technology, but they're going to have more technical debt than most. And to be able to... And this is also a tale that I think has been told over and over and over, just through code breakers and press releases. When you look at something, you're like, "Oh, this looks like a great idea, oh shit, how are they gonna pull that off?" I just think they had a problem pulling it off and they just couldn't get it done in time to look good and start to make cash for an IPO. Lieven: Yeah. Something like, choose your battles and this one just took too much energy probably. Chad: Yes. Agreed. Agreed. Okay. So after the break, we're gonna test Lieven's ChatGPT, obsession. We're gonna talk a little bit about what everybody's talking about, but from some different angles. ChatGPT. All right. Lieven, who really owns the results of ChatGPT? Lieven: That is a very good question indeed. And it's going to bring some problems sooner or later, probably sooner, because when I enter a prompt... A very intelligent prompt, which sure makes me feel better... [laughter] Lieven: A great prompt, I'm a prompt writer. Chad: You're a prompt engineer? Lieven: I'm a prompt engineer, of course. Chad: Yes. Lieven: And the prompt triggers the result. So basically I'm at the start, but then you could argue, "No, you're not at the start because the algorithm has been studying existing content." So your content which was prompted by your prompt, has been created on content created by someone else or maybe they at least should get some attention for it or some value for it. It's hard and maybe in the disclaimer of ChatGPT, it says we stay the owner of whatever is created by ChatGPT. I never checked, I should? Chad: Right. Lieven: There are many parties involved and they all could argue they have at least a part of the rights to the IP and they all probably are right. But translations, if you translate something and you rewrite it a bit, and chatGPT does rewrite content a bit is a different content or is it rewritten contents? It's hard to tell. Chad: Well, Alexander Tchaikovsky posed a question on LinkedIn. A pretty fucking, creepy question by the way, but relevant to this. Alexander writes quote, "I have asked ChatGPT to pretend to be Chad Sowash." I don't know why he'd want to do that... [laughter] Chad: "And suggest ideas for a highly engaging LinkedIn post, we can discuss the quality of the topics, but can we ignore the fact that mathematically speaking, some part of Chad's work has been used to calculate weights in a neural network. The exact weights in other people's work are used to generate the output in a screenshot that he shared, so do I owe Chad something?" God damn sure you do. [laughter] Chad: If I use these outputs and ask ChatGPT to write a post pretending to be him. SFX: Shall we play the game? Chad: This is interesting because I also had another friend that... He created an AI assistant with ChatGPT, he modeled it after me. Grumpy, innovative... I'm like first and foremost, I'm not grumpy, asshole. Innovative... Lieven: Asshole? Chad: [laughter] Passionate, right? So it's like all of these things are coming to an edge. When do I stop owning me, Lieven? That's the question. Lieven: Did you ever own you? Chad: I hope so? [laughter] Lieven: I'm not sure. We could have a small philosophical discussion, I guess. Chad: Good point. Lieven: This is indeed a very relevant question. I don't think they figured it out before launching OpenAI. Chad: Well, should we start banning? Italy has already started to ban. Lieven: No, of course not. And I think maybe the question isn't that relevant and I'm just going to quote one of the best prime ministers Belgium ever had. He said, it's a translation, so it's not really quotes, but you only have to solve a problem the moment it's there. So let's talk about this when there actually is a problem. So now there are potentially thousands of problems, but let's solve them once they arise and they haven't risen, rise yet. We'll see. Chad: Well, I think that kind of philosophy worked at a different age when we didn't move so quickly. This is scary because we're moving much faster. AI is starting to show promise that we've been talking about since back in the Terminator days for God's sakes, so back in the '80s. So we've been thinking about this, but this is the day when we start to see promise of AI and start to think of, and let me throw this out to you real quick, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, nobody really saw that happening, but then it happened and it was an avalanche of shit, right? That we now have to take care of. So, do we just wait for the avalanche of shit before we start to work on it? Lieven: Maybe not. But then again there are so many possible avalanches of shits and some will never happen. So, you can't solve every problem before it happens. You can try to evade them as good as possible, but you just can't take everything into account. But, and I must say I was impressed, WEC, the World Employment Confederation last week they had their big conference. And for those who don't know the World Employment Confederation, it's like the federation of the Staffing Industry on a global level. You have National Federations, in Belgium, you have Federgon, in the Netherlands it's ABU, and France, it's Prism'Emploi etcetera. Lieven: But the global one is called WEC. They had a conference and they presented code of conduct for using AI, and the staffing industry. I'll share it with you. And it's actually... I was impressed by the way they think ahead of problems which will some day, and we have to think about them in those cases before they arise. That's right. Chad: So, also on LinkedIn, a friend of mine, his name's John Rice, he's an American. This is something that he wrote that I thought was interesting, "I'm surprised at the number of people who have not noticed the brilliance of GDPR. Having less to do with data privacy and everything to do with leveling the playing field with US Tech Titans. So, I thought I would write a concise statement of why." He further writes, "US Tech Titans were ruling the internet, ruling data collection and seemed unstoppable. The lead they had over European tech companies was nearly insurmountable until GDPR." What do you think about that? I thought it was interesting that he took it from the standpoint of, wait a minute, we need to put an obstacle in the way of these big companies like we see with Google and Facebook and some of the social, big tech social companies. What do you think about that? Do you think GDPR is really that much of an obstacle? Lieven: He's American, right? Chad: Yes. Lieven: Yeah. So, he wasn't involved with all the problems GDPR created for decent companies. Because so many consultants became very rich just by trying to help companies adapt to GDPR. And I agree with the necessity of blocking the big tech companies and gathering the data and definitely misusing it. And like you mentioned Cambridge Analytics, was a big problem. But by trying to realize that they also fucked all those little companies totally. And I don't get less spam than I used to, I got as much spam as 10 years ago, probably much more. But the people who spam, they just don't care about GDPR, it's mostly illegal. It's like those shady lists they got from the darknet and they just tried to sell me something, whatever. Lieven: The decent companies, they don't spam me, but they didn't before because spamming people isn't a good way to sell something. So, I think so many companies had to spend literally millions of Euros on becoming okay with GDPR. And nothing changed, only maybe for a few big tech companies. Well, they should have picked them and they should leave us alone. Chad: So, your thoughts were that GDPR was more of a pain in the ass for Europe than it has been for the US thus far? Lieven: Yeah. They should have been sniping instead of using a nuclear bomb. Chad: Carpet bombing. Yes. Lieven: Yeah. But I agree it was necessary, and maybe now the Americans should be a bit jealous of what we have. But it was terrible for many companies to just get aligned with all those new legislations. It's not easy. Chad: So, let's go ahead and go back to your ChatGPT obsession. So, as we talk about all of this, how has it impacted you most in your life? 'Cause you use it on a daily basis. Lieven: Yeah, constant. I started with just some testing. Let's write a vacancy, okay. The moment you write a vacancy, you get a pretty decent vacancy. And with a few minutes of work, it's possible to publish it. So, that's a time saver. But living in Belgium, a very small country, we constantly need translations. Normally, I had to send a vacancy to an agency, which would translate it within 24 hours, and they charge for one page, 300 Euros. Chad: Okay. Lieven: So now, ChatGPT can do the translation almost as good as they could. So, now I just use a proofreader, someone a native speaker who just checks, "Okay, some little words must be changed." It will cost me like 10 Euros. So, it's a big difference. Chad: Yes. Lieven: But then I started using it more creatively. I'll give you an example. For one of the board meetings, I was preparing the numbers from Federgon, at National Federation. "How is the staffing industry moving in January? It's going up, is it slowing down?" We constantly check all those numbers and compare them to us to see how much better we are doing, and we always are than the markets. I had to check with ABU, I had to check with Federgon, with Prism'Emploi, all the others I mentioned. And they all use a different way of showing numbers. And it's all more or less the same, but it's presented differently. And some of them just use plain text. So, now I was able to copy paste the plain text and engineer a nice prompt, "Could you put all the relevant data in columns and rows, I could copy paste into Excel?" And the system did it perfectly, it saved me like one hour. Lieven: And then I started using it for really everything. And this is possible for contracts and the recruitment business, just writing a contract. But also someone asked me, "We need a letter to let someone know he is not being fired." And ChatGPT did a great job. This is something I didn't come up with myself and I checked, "Could ChatGPT do it?" And they could. And this isn't a normal kind of letter writing, it's not like just, "You are fired. No, we told you were fired, but we made a mistake you are not fired." This kind of letters, and it did a great job. So, it's really GPT-4 is better than the average employee in writing these kind of things. And this will be a wave of disruption in our industry. You've been around for longer than I am, I've been in the industry for over 20 years you've been maybe longer. I've seen a few moments, which I would call a wave of disruption. Now, the first one was at the early 2000s when suddenly steps on a Monster came, and the print advertisements dropped. Lieven: And one year from millions and millions to zero. Okay. So, this was a moment and arrival of LinkedIn definitely was a wave of disruption. And you always have winners and losers, and that's typical. And it's coming all of a sudden and it's washing everything away. That's why it's called a wave of disruption. And I think ChatGPT is, will be the same. I mean, hundreds... 100 million users after only three months. That's massive. Tons of winners surfing the wave, but also lots of losers who are going to be washed away and disappear in the surf and they'll never appear again. And this moment, it's, really exciting. I love it, but it's pretty dangerous. And when I was last week at the World Employment Confederation, all those different speakers, all experts within the industry all mentioned ChatGPT. Lieven: And at the end, Denis Pennel, the CEO of World Employment Confederation said, "Yes, that's all very nice." But, and then he showed a whole reason of books all predicting the end of work, the end of jobs since the 1800s. There was like Keynes who said people only will need to work like 15 hours because everything will be automated. And there are tens and tens, hundreds of books all saying the same thing. And they have been saying it for hundreds of years. And then I thought, "Okay, ChatGPT is great, and I love it. And it'll change definitely many jobs, but it'll also create many jobs." And if you compare it to the invention of electricity, it's nothing. I mean, electricity suddenly at the end of the Victorian period, electricity arrived in the houses. Chad: Yeah. Lieven: And that was a game changer. And I don't think many people lost their job because of electricity. Some people had to be re-skilled and the next 10 years, everyone will need to be re-skilled but people will. And I think in the end we'll have more jobs. But once again, different jobs, like every 10 years, something happens, which will create some kind of a wave. And this is the one, and I like it and I'm happy about it. Chad: So once again, nobody's going to question Lieven's obsession with ChatGPT. Lieven: My healthy obsession. Chad: Your healthy obsession. Joel: All right, guys, it's time to play a little buy or sell. For those that don't know, we read a summary of three companies in Europe that recently got funding, and the three podcasters. Buy or sell the following companies. Let's get started. UK Startup Patch has raised 3.4 million Euros to support the launch of new hubs. The funds will be used to expand the team and further develop their vision. Patch takes empty or neglected local buildings and transforms them into community spaces where people can work, meet and discover local initiatives. It provides a flexible model of working and living that's accessible to all unleashing the potential of millions of people in hundreds of towns, that according to the company. Okay, is Patch a buy or sell? Two words for you. We and work, WeWork has been trying to crack this nut for over a decade. You know where empty and neglected buildings are? Shitty neighborhoods. And you think workers are going to flock to these neighborhoods? Yeah, no. WeWork's stock is down almost 90% this year, and it's for good reason. It's a bad business. And as far as I'm concerned, Patch is doomed. It is a sell from me. Chad: All right, Lieven. That's a big sell from Joel. What do you Think? Lieven: It sounds very nice. Refurnishing old houses and inviting people to join the neighborhood and to all work together and, shiny, happy people. But it's breaks. And it's like, restoring and renovating old houses, this isn't our business. This is just creating co-working spaces but putting a marketing sauce on it. It's a big sell. Chad: I believe the conversation of where we need to go with work, to perform work is evolving. As we start stepping away from the 1930s and 1950s models, after the pandemic help us all understand work is what we do, instead of just living to make an hour commute in and back from work every day. The world of work and where we work, it's got to evolve. But the question is, is Patch the answer? The rise of hybrid has become a landing point, in a negotiation of getting the best talent. But I believe many of these spaces already exists in bars, restaurants, coffee shops, hotels, WeWorks, right? They're all over the place. So I believe the evolution of work will happen, but unfortunately, it will look a lot less like WeWork or Patch, more like an app showing open spaces and already established businesses in your neighborhood with coffee, breakfast, lunch specials, those types of things. So for me, unfortunately as well, it's going to be a sell. Next we have Cruit. Joel: Recruitment referral platform, Cruit, has raised funding from Venture Capital, Slingshot Ventures and Angel Investors in the HR industry. The company says funding will be used to make the platform even easier for companies to find candidates through employee and community referrals. Cruit says it has already seen significant success with many companies reporting improved hiring outcomes, and increased employee engagement as a result of using the platform. So buy or sell, Cruit. Here's from the Cruit homepage, "Make referring a lovable experience with gamification. Upgrade your employee branding by letting your people share their enthusiasm with the world." Yeah, this is the proverbial knife to a gunfight. With so many established players like Bonusly, Aaron, Firstbird, Bluebird, Compt, and others, Cruit is in way over its head. I see nothing here other than shiny marketing, as well as empty sales rhetoric. Cruit gets the boot. Chad: There it is, Cruit gets the boot. What about for you, Lieven? Lieven: Well, after trying it myself and failing miserably, I totally lost my faith in referral. So sorry, it's a sell. And actually we had all the right cards to make it a big success. We had an existing app with over 30,000 vacancies on it, and it's really popular app, and it's used constantly by companies and by job seekers. And we put an amount of money between 150 Euros and 1,500 next to each job. So we had over 1 million Euros of bonus to pay. And we had users and everything was there and I was sure it was going to succeed. It was going to be a huge success, and it wasn't. And the only reason why, is people just don't trust it. Why would you give me 1,500 Euros if I bring a candidate? They just don't trust it. And the people who do trust it, because they're the only employees and they don't care, they don't take the time. And after once or twice trying, they just stop. So, I gave up, and I used to be a big believer in referral, but if this didn't work, I don't think anyone else will. So no. Chad: It's a sell from Lieven. Sell from Lieven. Okay. So, referrals work, right? I mean, most of the data that I've seen over the years always show referrals as the number one or number two source of hire, which is why most HR and TA departments don't use referral platforms because they're tripping over candidates and hiring them already without the expense. Or they spent money on a referral program before, and the platform isn't sticky enough, meaning nobody uses that platform after it's lost its initial luster. The biggest problem with referral platforms is that they don't deal with user stickiness. These problems are these types of platforms have to evolve into more marketing based engagement platforms. So, unfortunately we're batting a thousand on killing them. Let's go ahead. The last one. Epinote. Joel: All right. Polish startup Epinote has raised 1.4 million Euros in a pre-seed round offer solutions for a flexible workforce to tackle mundane tasks. Epinote deploys a mix of human hands and technology to handle arduous repetitive tasks such as data annotation, lead generation, and validation, and customer and candidate acquisition. The company plans to use the funds to expand its offering, and help more firms to become data-driven organizations. Epinote has over 50 clients on three continents. So buy or sell Epinote. I like the automation piece. Theoretically could fit into the recruiting stack and it's priced pretty favorably. My big problem is this is not a product, it's a feature. And it's a feature that tools found at OpenAI and others will likely solve for free. And just be a plugin for other companies to put it into their solution. So, this is not a product. If they ever become a product, I'll certainly listen and reevaluate and take another look. Until then, Epinote, that's a sell, and that's three sell ratings from your boy. Chad: That escalated quickly. All right, Lieven, that's three strikes and you're out from Joel. What are you gonna give Epinote? Lieven: Well, it does sound very interesting, and if someone can take over my mundane tasks, I'd happily pay them for it. But, I agree with Joel. I'm not sure if they're very future proof. I mean, if you combine generative AI and cheap workers at Fiverr, your mundane problems are solved, basically. So I'm afraid there won't be anything left for Epinote to solve. It's one to watch, and maybe they will come up with something ingenious, but for now it's a sell. Chad: Oh, so everybody's touting automation. They're touting GPT, they're... AI, RPA, it doesn't matter. Everybody's focusing on this. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to really try to figure out what the hell Epinote is doing. 'Cause I looked at the website and just broadly saying that you can solve an automation problem, that doesn't say much to me. So I went to their business cases and here's what their business cases sound like. Number one, quality data collection over five countries. Number two, using Epinote to power an outreach campaign. Number three, improving retail experience with Epinote mystery shoppers. Number four, managing over 3 million products with data enrichment. And last but not least, number five, data annotation for more sustainable aquaculture. None of those sounded the same. What the actual fuck do these guys do? It doesn't feel like there is enough focus for a startup in the EU where you really have to be focused. They desperately need the focus discipline, and a hell of a lot more than 1.4 million Euros. Unfortunately, wow, no buys at all. We hopefully will get another bite at the apple on the next show, but until then kids... SFX: Shall we play a game? Chad: Okay, Lieven Get back to playing with ChatGPT before Belgium bans it. Lieven: It won't. Chad: That's our show, my friend. We out. Lieven: We out. Outro: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast, the chad, the cheese, brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of 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. 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.

Thank heavens for tenue... How else would The Chad & Cheese's brash, challenging, and no bullshit attitude get in the same room, hell the same solar system, as NYU and UNC academics? Yup, tenue must be the answer. Bascially, earlier this year, NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, the 370 Jay Project, and the NYU Tandon Department of Technology, Culture and Society hosted a new discussion in the series “Co-Opting AI”, which included this humble podcast. This event was created to examine how AI intersects with recruiting and with gaining access to the labor market. Taking a deep look into the industry and providing insights on the HR tech sector. The players: - Ifeoma Ajunwa is an Associate Professor of Law with tenure at UNC School of Law. - Mona Sloane is a sociologist working on design and inequality, specifically in the context of AI design and policy.... and The Chad & Cheese of course :) Props to The Co-Opting AI event series and Mona Sloane. It is hosted at IPK and co-sponsored by the 370 Jay Project, and the NYU Tandon Department of Technology, Culture and Society, and the NYU Center for Responsible AI. TRANSCRIPTION SPONSORED BY: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Mona Slone: Dr. Ifeoma Ajunwa is an Associate Professor of Law with tenure at UNC School of Law, where she also is the Founding Director of the AI Decision-Making Research Program. She has been Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School since 2017. Her research focuses on race and the law, law and technology, and importantly, employment and labor law. Her work has been widely published in very many high-impact journals, among them the California Law Review, Cardozo Law Review, Fordham Law Review and many more. She also is an avid public scholar. She has Op-Eds out with The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and so on. Just testified before the US Congressional Committee on Education & Labor and has spoken before governmental agencies, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And she also has a forthcoming book called The Quantified Worker: Law and Technology in the Modern Workplace, which I'm also very excited about. Now, my other two guests are, kind of come together, Joel Cheesman and Chad Sowash. [chuckle] Joel: My God. Mona Slone: Joel Cheesman is a recruiting industry tech geek, his words not mine, from the late '90s when he worked at eSpan, one of the world's first job boards as well as JobOptions, CareerBoard, Jobing and Recruiting.com. He also did partnership stuff at employee screening IQ, but you probably know him from his days as Cheezhead. Joel likes to tinker, which means he has started a variety of businesses, and his latest venture is a market sentiment platform called Poach. He is the co-founder of The Chad & Cheese Podcast, which is the thing the two do together. And Joel does this together with Chad Sowash. Chad, if you could wave too, say hello. Chad: Hello. Mona Slone: Chad has actually worked... Hello, in the HR talent acquisition and HR tech space for over 20 years, consulting hundreds of Fortune 500 companies. He is a former Army Infantry drill sergeant, who cut his teeth in online recruitment in '98 with an outfit called Online Career Center before it launched in '99 as Monster.com. He went on to build startup DirectEmployers Association, steer RecruitMilitary toward revenue as CXO and build RandStad's, which is a big agencies first military veteran hiring program. He is also a professional podcaster today and is doing the The Chad & Cheese Podcast together with Joel. Welcome everybody. Thank you so much joining me today. I am handing it over to Dr. Ajunwa, who will set the scene for us. Ifeoma, AI deployment in 2023, what does that look like? Ifeoma: What does AI in HR or recruiting look like? Slightly bleak is probably my answer. So as you mentioned, I have a forthcoming book titled The Quantified Worker. As the title suggests, I do take a critical view to the role of AI in the workplace, and one of my chapters... Actually two of my chapters is devoted to automated hiring and the role that AI plays in that, be it in terms of sorting applicants through ATS Applicant Tracking Systems or through the use of automated video interviewing and what sort of like pseudoscience can come from that. So with the book, I'm really very interested in the role that AI is already playing in the workplace, which I think is somewhat getting subsumed by the conversation around chatGPT, DALL-E, all this generative AI that's supposedly going to put workers out of work and just take over the workplace. And then unbeknownst to us, we've already had AI... To be quite frank, I don't like the term AI. I actually prefer the term automated decision-making, because that's what really these things are. Ifeoma: But we already have automated decision-making in the workplace long before chatGPT and any of those generative AI. Currently, we have automated hiring systems that are actually very actively affecting workers' lives, and this is impacting who's considered a candidate for recruiters, it is impacting how the candidate experiences the hiring process. Even just putting in your application, you basically have to run the gauntlet of automated hiring algorithms that may be looking for certain keywords or may be designed to eliminate candidates based on gaps in employment and all the things like that that might actually have a discriminatory impact on workers. So I write about that in the book, so please pick up the book, The Quantified Worker, coming out soon. Available for pre-order. But I think what I really want to talk about with Joel and Chad is what trends that they're seeing with AI in HR, ignoring the... Well, not totally ignoring, but getting past the chatGPT hype, getting past all the generative AI putting people out of work. What is AI doing currently in the recruitment space? Joel: Well, first, I wanna thank Mona for having us on, and I particularly wanna thank tenure, because without tenure, I'm not sure a couple of clowns like us would be on a podcast or a webinar like this. I wanna thank tenure and thank Mona for having us on. And I think before we talk about current state and where we're going, which is very important, I think it's important also to look back a little bit at the history of AI. And in our intros, everyone knows that Chad and I are pretty old. And when Chad and I first got into the business world, you'd literally send a paper resume with a paper cover letter to an employer. In that world, it's very hard to apply to many, many jobs. The internet changed that. The internet enabled people to shotgun their resume to literally thousands of employers, and when that happened, employers were like, "Oh hell, how do we control the flow of all these resumes?" And the early days of filtering that was like pre-screening questions, it could be as easy as, "Are you 18 or over? Do you have a driver's license?" The filtering started in simple format, and it was generally not discriminatory against race and age and things like that. Joel: As technology evolved and we got away more from posting a job online, it became finding people online, and we can thank LinkedIn and others for that. So in addition to posting jobs, recruiters were then, "Okay, fine, people." And then services came out that tried to match these people that are online with jobs that are online, and the early iterations of that, as Chad and I know, were really, really bad and didn't really work very well. So technology evolved, databases of people, how do you search them, how do you find them, all these things have evolved into what it is today and what we're talking about today. But it's also important, I think, to highlight that there's no conspiracy to screw over people in this process. These are engineers that sit in a room and go, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could look at someone's face and how they answer questions, and are they more likely to be lying about this than otherwise?" Joel: There was no conspiracy to screw over people of diversity and diverse candidates. But it's kind of turned into that, unfortunately, and I think that's what we're talking about today. But I wanted to kinda set the table historically with how this thing was sort of born, and it's become a bit of a Frankenstein's monster that we're trying to figure out, "Okay, how do we fix this?" Government's involved, employers are involved, there's a lot of fear and uncertainty and doubt in this, and hopefully we can set some of that fear, uncertainty and doubt to rest as we talk about some of these issues, but that's sort of my take on the current state of things, looking at the past to explain the current day and future. Chad: Well, and a couple of things Joel was talking about, that's all scale. And that's what we're gonna be talking about today. But that's scale, when you had to actually mail or... You couldn't email at the time, you faxed. You faxed then your resume, you hand-carried it in. Well, imagine that day versus the next day when you got flooded with hundreds of resumes, what would happen. Most of those went into a black hole because recruiters didn't have time to get to them because they couldn't scale. That's the big change. Now, what we didn't ask then, what we should ask now is what Joel was alluding to with regard to facial recognition and all those things is not, "Can we?" It's "Should we?" Should we actually go that way? And talking about bias, the history of bias is rooted in humanity, not AI. The difference is scaling bias. Humans don't scale well. The best that we can scale is through training. We can train people to be biased, and then you have armies of people going out to be biased, but AI scales in an instant. Chad: So some of the best and most powerful systems can carry bias, and if we don't pay attention to the outcomes and feverishly audit the algorithms, we're going to have bias. Regulations do not distinguish between human and AI bias. Bias is bias. It's just that bias can scale much faster with AI. That's where we need to focus, where we're hearing all these glitz and glamor things about chatGPT, which I think is demonstrating that we're getting closer to the promise of AI than all of this vaporware we've been talking about for years. But then we talk about... And we know history from Amazon, building an algorithm, this is the, "Can we?" Yes, they can. They should have asked, "Should we?" And they shouldn't, because they automatically failed sourcing and hiring experiments by knocking out females. Why? Because they were feeding the algorithm, the machine, they were training it on data that was what? It was biased. That was human behavioral bias. And what happened? The machines spit out bias. So as we start to have these conversations, it's the can we, should we, but it's also understanding that we have to innovate. So as we innovate, we also need strong regulatory entities to ensure that the enforcements and the standards are clear, which we just don't have today. Ifeoma: Yeah, I think that's such a great... So many great points, Chad. And also to go back to Joel's point first about thinking about the historical development of automated hiring, it's funny that you brought that up because a co-author and I actually researched how did automated hiring come about, how was it even advertised when it first came out such that companies could take it on, and it was this idea that a lot of it was trying to find talent away from your geographical location, and it was actually the advent of software development that drove a lot of automated hiring development, which is that we need a software developer. We don't necessarily have them all concentrated in Silicon Valley, like you have now, let's find them wherever they are. And first, people would mail in their resumes on like a CD-ROM. They would do all their little coding tests on a CD-ROM and send that in, and that was like, "Okay, that's not so efficient. What if we had a centralized thing now that we have the internet where people can just access it from anywhere and do that?" And then when the first automated hiring programs are being developed, to go to Chad's point, one of the slogans, one of the advertising slogans was, "Clone your best worker." So just sit and think about that slogan, "Clone your best worker." Ifeoma: So automated hiring programs were never really meant to diversify the workplace, which is somewhat how they're sort of viewed now or used now by a lot of corporations, they were really meant to replicate exactly what you already had. So you take your best worker and you clone them. So if you think about historical bias, historical human bias, such as workplaces where women have been shut out, workplaces where there are not really a lot of minorities. When you have an automated hiring program then, what you're doing is not so much eliminating the bias, as Chad mentioned, but you're actually exacerbating it, because then you're just basically trying to clone your best workers. So unless you're very careful and thoughtful and deliberate, an automated hiring program is just going to come in and replicate bias. And do it at scale. That's also important as Chad mentioned, because as I mention in my book, one biased human manager can maybe affect, I don't know, thousands of resumes in there, tenure as a recruiter or a manager. But a program that's written in a way that's biased or trained in a way that results in bias getting included in can impact millions of people. It can impact millions of people. Ifeoma: As you touched on, Chad, it's just so important to start thinking about regulations. Thus far, I feel that automated hiring has been really a wild, wild West. It's really anybody can create an automated hiring program, and we've seen this. I know you've seen this in industry, and just make claims about what this automated hiring program can do, and a lot of the claims are about, "Oh, it'll just find you more diverse workers. Oh, it'll just create all these avenues of talent for you." A lot of it is snake oil, and the question is that why is that allowed to exist? Why do we not have regulations to curb misuse of automated hiring? Acknowledging that it can have its uses, like Joel mentioned before, it can allow for this efficiency in finding talent, efficiency in applying, efficiency for the applicant, but we need regulations. So my next question for you guys is... I mean, I have my thoughts on what regulations should be in place, but as industry players, what are your thoughts about what regulations we need? Chad: So any vendor that says that their tech is compliant and not biased shouldn't be trusted right out of the gate, because it's not the tech that's biased, I think we've already established that. It's the humans driving the tech, meaning the developers perspectively on the vendor side, but also the hiring companies. As we take a look at regulations today, it's focused on outcomes, and I don't think that changes. We have to take a look at outcomes, but again, we're scaling outcomes differently than we did just five, 10 years ago. So being able to take a look at the frameworks that we currently have, 'cause we know that government doesn't move as fast as technology and/or business, that we can take some of those frameworks that already exist and they work, and we just need to enforce them. Now, being able to move past that to some of the regulations and standards around auditing, like in New York City, I believe their move forward is smart. It sends a signal, sends a message, but they are going to have to work toward ensuring that there are frameworks and standards in place so that companies aren't throwing their hands up in the air saying, "Well, I don't know what to do." They do need direction, there's no question, although the direction right now is current regulation and outcomes. Joel: I think ultimately, there are going to be some features that are gonna have to be outlawed. I think automation with video, I don't know how that gets like rubber stamped approved. There are so many pitfalls in that, so something like that, I could see like your technology cannot do that. Now, other things like with people with disabilities that can't speak in a more fluid manner, like things that are gaps in speech can't be a feature that eliminates someone from getting to the next level of an interview. So to me, it's like ultimately certain features of the tech that pre-screen or get someone to the actual human being interview are gonna have to be outlawed. Many things in automation are great. I have a 16-year-old son that just got his first job, and I can tell you that applying through McDonald's with a conversational chatbot versus sending in a paper resume at your local subway, the McDonald's experience is far better. And then in terms of bias, it's like you pass the main stuff, we'll schedule an interview, you can manage all that with automation. That's great. Joel: But I think a lot of these core things that discriminate are gonna have to be outlawed and vendors won't be able to create those features and employers won't be able to leverage those features going forward. I think we're seeing that a little bit on the local level, state level, Illinois has a great case with facial recognition, a company called HireVue that a lot of people know, so these things are coming out at the state and local level, but eventually on a federal level, these things are gonna have to come into play. I think a real challenge though is everyone's work from home, it's a global workplace, we're hiring people everywhere, and then that creates a contractor versus an employee situation. So are there loop holes around this or where you hire. So again, it becomes really complicated, but here in the US, I think there's gonna have to be an effort to say, "Look, these features, we're not gonna stand for it because they're discriminatory." Ifeoma: I so whole heartedly agree, I'm so glad you brought up the video interviewing issue, that's also something I write about in the book and in my research for that, what I noted in speaking with people who had been subjected to it was just a great potential for accent discrimination. The great potential for the use of pseudo science where supposedly algorithms are able to accurately determine somebody's emotion or even determine somebody's trust worthiness or if they're lying, it's just rife with all kinds of potential abuses and known abuses. So I just think that video interviewing, especially when purporting to read emotion or do official analysis, that it just has to be banned. But this also brings me to a point that Chad made, which is this idea of, so in my book, I talk about ex-ante versus ex-post regulations, and so Chad touched upon audits as a type of ex-post regulation, which is looking at outcomes and seeing, are these outcomes good? Are these outcomes something we want? And if they're not, we need to change them, or we need to change how we got to them. So that seems like it's very ex-post where you've already launched the automated hiring, but I also want to push upon like we shouldn't forget ex-ante regulations, and outright banning is an ex-ante regulation. Ifeoma: It's like, we just know that's bad, we're just gonna ban that, we're not gonna try to do an audit, we're just not gonna do automated video interviewing, but should we also be thinking about ex-ante regulation in the form of design features? So for example, one design feature that I'm proposing, and I'm trying to push the EEOC to mandate is the idea that you actually keep a record. So right now, automated hiring programs are not required to keep a record of all the applications, whether they pass through to be interviewed by an interviewer or not, a human interviewer, and even the interview attempts. So I actually think we might need an ex-ante regulation, which is the design of the automated hiring has to allow or actually mandate record-keeping, where every person that applies there's a record of that. And even failed applications because with the research I was doing, I was finding that some automated hiring platforms, they were actually preventing people from completing the application. So they were already culling people even before they could complete the application. So just to give you an example of that, I know it's hard to imagine. Ifeoma: I tried to, as part of my research, fill out an application for a major retailer, this is a, think major huge clothes, groceries, everything in one place kind of retailer. And in the application, I pretended to be different types of people, and one type of person was somebody who has a limited amount of time to work per day, so somebody that could fit the profile of say, a stay-at-home mother, most of the time, like somebody that would need to pick up their kids from school at 12:00, 02:30 or 03:00. So I put my availability from 09:00 to 02:00. What I found, I could not actually complete the application even though I had checked that I was applying for a part-time position and my availability was certainly enough for a part-time position, I could not actually complete the application. The application just would not refresh to the next page until I checked that I had unlimited availability. Chad: Okay. So the question around that is, is that a technical issue from the vendor standpoint or is that a corporate issue? Right? Because the company could be dictating that. There's a separation between vendor and process and standard operating... Ifeoma: But the program is allowing that. The program has to be programmed to allow that. Right? Chad: Yeah. Ifeoma: So should we have basically design mandates, like you can't do certain X types of programs, do you see what I'm saying? So whether it's a corporation mandating it or the vendor, if the vendor says, "We can't actually legally design that for you," You see? Chad: Well, yeah. The question for me is, I mean, so first and foremost, that's what audits are for, and that's what being a, that's what standards are for. So being able to actually point out where they're going awry with regards to standards, and you can't apply because at that point you don't become a candidate, you don't become a candidate, then you're not in the audit and you're not in the talent pool, right? That's a step that you need to take to be able to actually be "part of the record keeping process." So they were stopping that. I don't think that is the vendor's fault, number one. I think it's, the difference between adding seat belts to a car and allowing somebody to actually take a left or right, whether they're taking the wrong directions or not. So we have to be careful around what we actually dictate vendors to do, is that their responsibility or is that the responsibility of an organization who could be following EEOC or OFCCP, being a government contractor rule. Chad: So I think personally, from my standpoint, being in the OFCCP space for a very long time, that's on the employer. Now, are there some aspects where the vendor should definitely stay away, much like the HireVue instance? Yes, I think, again, that's the can we, should we kind of conversations, and that's pretty much where Illinois, they stood up, they pointed directly at HireVue and said, "You're the problem." So we need to start pointing out platforms and features and issues that are the problem, and again, do that through regulation, and at that point, nobody's gonna buy it. And we are a capitalist country, so therefore people are not going to buy it if it is against the law. Joel: And there's a little bit of a buyer-beware highlight here, not to pick on HireVue, oh, what the hell, let's pick on HireVue. [chuckle] Chad: We always do. Joel: So HireVue in the last six months or so has updated their terms of service to essentially say that, "Hey, employer, if something happens legally, it's your fault, not ours." You're gonna see more and more vendors try to immunize or vaccinate themselves against legal issues and put the blame on employers. So if you're an employer, make sure the vendors you use, what kind of indemnity or threats or dangers might there be if their tech is discriminatory because you're probably on the hook if their tech is discriminating against candidates that you're interviewing and hiring. Chad: And I think that was in direct response to California, because California is trying to push their regulations that actually start to hold the vendors responsible for some of these issues. So again, we're seeing some play here, some gamesmanship, but again, there is a huge buyer beware, not to mention we talk about auditing, who should audit? Who was credentialed to audit, and who was just audit washing? We saw, I think Mona actually published a study around Pymetrics where they were audit washing, they were paying an organization to say everything was fine, everything is good, and this is I think before they were even acquired, which brings up some other issues, legal issues. At the end of the day, there are many of these steps that we need to think about. We need to be incredibly intentional and thoughtful about putting frameworks and standards in place so that we don't have organizations going off the rails like we've seen, vendors going off the rails and hiring companies going off the rails. Mona Slone: Thank you for those contributions. I'm so glad that we kind of got to the juicy bits right away, which is regulation and enforcement of regulation. [laughter] Chad: It's what we do. Mona Slone: Yeah, so on that, on the kind of capital A audit question, you brought up some very concrete issues and questions here, all three of you, thank you for that. With colleagues from data science, journalism and psychology, we actually conducted a stealth audit of two personality assessment tools that are used in the hiring space, Crystal and Humanatic. And we found some instabilities in there that kind of show that these instruments are not really fit for purpose. For example, we found that one of the tools would predict a different personality type for the same person depending on whether the resume was uploaded as raw text or as PDF, for example. So non-job-relevant kind of elements that skewed the result here. Mona Slone: Now, that work was extremely cumbersome, it was interdisciplinary, I think that that is definitely needed, that we kind of have not just a purely technical approach here and end up with a statement that says, "Oh, we just need to make the algorithm better," but there are reasons behind the fact that some of these technologies can't work because they are snake oil as Ifeoma said. So that was a long process and it was kind of a bootstrapped project, there isn't necessarily funding available for that, and so my big question for the two of you is how should we actually design that whole regulation enforcement process vis-à-vis audits. Who is gonna pay for that? We can all say we all need independent audits, we need stealth audits, but then what? Who is gonna do it and who is gonna pay for it? Chad: I have a shortcut. There are hundreds of thousands of government contractors that are out there today who receive hundreds of millions of billions of dollars, and they can easily, if they want the government's money, which they obviously do, they could definitely have to go through a battery of tests for the tech stack that they use. And Ifeoma was actually talking about the applicant tracking system earlier, which is really a relic of our past. We now work in a tech stack, where there's more than just one piece of tech, where before we just had an applicant tracking system, and that was our record-keeping process. Chad: Today, we are much more advanced, and there are some incredibly powerful systems that are out there today that are stacked, all the way from a programmatic outreach to the chatbot application process that Joel talked about, dynamic screening, matching, engagement, there are so many different things that actually happen. What we need to do is we need to find easy ways to at least start the process, and it's very simple, I'm a tax payer, if you want my money, you have to go through this battery of tests to be able to get those hundreds of millions and/or billions of dollars of contracts, that to me seems like the easiest way forward to get this moving. Joel: The answer Mona, and Chad touched on this, to all of your questions, is money. So when you look at the problem... Employers are driven and technologies are created in large part because of supply and demand, and features are built because employers say, "We want that." Right? So if you create a system where an employer says, "I'm not gonna buy your tech unless you've got the seal of approval from blank," then that vendor is then encouraged, if they wanna stay in business, to get that badge, whatever that looks like in order to sell their product to employers. Now, does that badge come from a government agency? I prefer it not to. Joel: I'd prefer private companies to create an audit system that is approved by the government, that then they can say, "Hey, we're gonna run a fine tooth comb through your tech, we're gonna do an audit that's approved by the government and we're gonna give you our seal of approval that is approved by the government agency or body that we've been audited ourselves by to provide this badge." If you created an ecosystem where the employer felt confident buying from the vendor, the vendor felt confident selling it because they've been audited by an approved auditor, then you've got a winner. Now, how we get there, somebody smarter than me is gonna have to figure that out, but that's I think the environment that you have to create for everyone to be comfortable buying and selling products and services. Chad: It's our current process now for OFCCP in distribution of jobs, it's our current process. We set a standard, the OFCCP has education and enforcement, then there is a layer of what Joel talked about, these organizations who know what the standards are and they help the companies abide by the standards, it's something that we already have in place. So it's not recreating the wheel, it's a process methodology that we already have, it's just new tech that we have to be able to credential. Ifeoma: Yeah, I fully am so on board, especially... Joel: Then we're done. [chuckle] Ifeoma: We're done, we're done. It's so funny, 'cause I actually wrote a paper about this in 2020, about creating something called, The Fair Automated Hiring Mark, and this would be a certification, and I likened it to how you have certified green buildings. So it could be, like Joel mentioned, a third party certifying that these automated hiring programs do meet the required standards of the EEOC, and I'm not sure that the EEOC can't get involved. It seems like you're very much against that Joel, but in my paper I'm more open ended, it could be the EEOC actually getting involved in issuing the certification, or it could be a third party. I see pros and cons either way, right? Ifeoma: So with the EEOC obviously, they are a government agency, they have a lot of other things on their plate as well, with the third party, that's a new market, there's going to be people who will want to enter that market and provide that service, but there's also the con of, could it be co-opted? Could we get certifications that are not necessarily on the up and up, but I tend to agree with you, Joel, that it is about money, so I don't think that most third party agencies will get away, I mean third-party certification programs would get away with certifying things that don't work because they will get found out sooner or later. Joel: They're a business, yeah. Ifeoma: And then, yeah exactly, then no one will go work with them, so that's exactly what I argued in my paper. So I tend to very much agree with you. I also see that audits are part of this process. So we had talked about audits as being an ex-post regulation, but I actually think it could be an ex-ante regulation where you audit the algorithm or you audit the program before it's even launched and that audit is what allows it to be certified. Now, would I say that audit is enough? Would I say that's the only thing you have to do and then that's it? No. So in my paper, what I actually say is that even with this certification, the EEOC should still mandate that the employer do internal audits on a timely basis, I don't know what the time frame for it would be, that's something they can work out, but that they are required to do these regular audits and also keep the results of the audits because then if there is a lawsuit, they would be required to provide the results of the audit. Chad: Let me enter real quick on that one, 'cause I don't think that being able to audit it before makes any sense, because when we're talking about AI, it's all about the information the algorithm is trained on. So if it's trained on nothing, then I mean, you're really auditing nothing, you're auditing behavior. Again, the AI itself is not generally the problem, the Amazon's AI wasn't really generally the problem, it was the information that was fed into it. So the machine is what it's fed, it's what it learns, right? So I do agree... Ifeoma: Right, but there're training models out there you can use. So right now there's been a big move for training models to be made available on an open source basis, so there are lots of training data that can be used for audits. Now, will it be specific to perhaps the specific corporation? No. So that's why I say that first audit can't be the be-all and end-all, the individual specific corporation still have to do the internal audits because then they're using their own specific data, but I still believe that you can audit the program before it's launched just using all the training data that's out there free of charge. Chad: It's gonna be an entirely different animal over the data that it's trained against, right? Ifeoma: Sure. Well, it's possible. Chad: So it's taken us 49 minutes to get to ChatGPT. ChatGPT could actually be an entirely different animal if it was trained on current data. I understand what you're saying from a basic philosophy standpoint, but to be quite frank, it can grow into using those standards moving forward, the biggest point of audit for me is after it starts eating that data. Ifeoma: Sure, but even using the chatGPT example, not to be pedantic, you're seeing the problems already, because what is ChatGPT right now if not, basically, a huge audit, right? Or basically everybody using chatGPT is beta testing for them, they're doing the audits for them right now. Chad: Yeah, it's genius. Ifeoma: So you have all this wide variety of data and you're still seeing problems, different types of problems, depending on who is interacting with ChatGPT and what type of data they're putting in, but you are seeing the genres of problems already. So I think that's useful. Anyway. Mona Slone: So before we go down further the ChatGPT rabbit hole, just another call to the audience that we'll be starting to ask the audience questions very soon. So feel free to drop them into the Q&A box to the right of your screen. I wanna shift gears just a little bit and talk a little bit more about the HR tech industry per se. We kind of have very concrete ideas about regulation, how this could be done, who should pay for it, but as people who are not in that sector, in that industry, it would be very useful to understand what does that sector look like? Who are the players? What are the specific tools, especially the "AI-driven tools" that are out there? And what are the tools that recruiters really like to latch on to, 'cause I know there are some that they're just being mandated to use and others that they really love. So maybe Joel and Chad, you can give us a little bit more inside knowledge into that whole space that is quite hidden from public view to be honest. Joel: Hidden from public view, the dark web of recruitment. We talk a lot about automated recruiting, and we talk about augmented recruiting, and I feel like the augmented stuff is catching on much more than the automated stuff in terms of recruiters. So you've got conversational AI, basic questions, 24 hours a day, ask a chat bot on your phone or on whatever career site you're on, like that's embraced. Conversational AI is not going anywhere. Scheduling, automated scheduling, scheduling is a pain in the butt, so if you can augment that for a recruiter, that's gonna be popular. So you have companies like GoodTime, most chatbots or conversational AI solutions have scheduling as well, that people can control that. The other one I think is probably like sourcing, in other words, we have a huge database of people, here's my job, now go find me people who qualify for that job. And the augmentation or the robot says, "Okay, here's everyone in this database that we think you should be talking to or recruiting." So those kinds of three things, or anything that is a real pain in the butt or time-consuming, is being replaced and embraced by recruiters from my perspective. Chad: Yeah. And my favorites, and I think has the most promise is that companies today spend hundreds of millions of dollars on recurrent marketing alone, and that's just pushing jobs out to be able to pull people in. Well, then they build these candidate databases that we call them the black hole, where candidates go. Well, they've got these amazing matching technologies that give you an opportunity to use that database that you spent all that money on to be able to draw those individuals back in to apply for like positions or positions that they could prospectively be more qualified for. So there's a lot of heavy lifting for that. That's just an invite, and that's something that is a lot of heavy lifting from a data standpoint, but if you have the behavior of the candidates and you have their past and you know what jobs they meet the requirements for, that's an easy match just to invite them back to apply for another job. There are some... My favorites, and we obviously, with the Chad & Cheese podcast, we have sponsors, but my favorites, you're talking about programmatic job distribution, you're talking about matching, you're talking about conversational AI. Chad: So the thing that I think that ChatGPT has brought to us is first and foremost demonstrating that the promise of AI is finally meeting today, we've been seeing vaporware for years, and vaporware is pretty much just a promise that just never came true. Today, I think the promise is starting to come true with some of these products, and now that's pretty powerful. And then being able to have transparency, which chatGPT provides. If we see more of that from our industry, in recruiting and outsourcing and on all these things, then I think we aren't trying to look into a black box, we have more transparency and we understand what's happening and how it's a part of the process itself, because to be quite frank, building a tech stack for most talent acquisition professionals is like trigonometry for goodness sakes. Joel: Yeah, it's a hard question to answer because there are so many providers. It's not like the days where, "Where do I post my job to make sure everyone in the US can get it?" Like, "Well, go to Monster, go to CareerBuilder." Your best tool is either a really good agency, recruitment ad agency that knows these tools, or go to a G2 or go to a Product Hunt, look at reviews, ask your colleagues on LinkedIn who they use, it's really dependent upon your needs, your location, what you're hiring for, like there are so many variables, it's a hard question to ask or answer. And Chad and I get that question all the time. Like, "Who should we use to solve all of our problems?" And unfortunately, there's no silver bullet that we can recommend that everyone can just get on easy street with their recruiting automation tools. Mona Slone: I'm gonna ask a question that I get often when I'm being asked about my own research on this topic, which is, how do you trick the system as a candidate? And that's also something that of course is interesting for our students, Ifeoma's laughing. We get that question, "How do I tweak my CV?" We have this kind of urban myth of, "Oh, you just put the key words in white font on your CV, and then the system picks it up and pushes you up on the ranking." So I hear kind of these myths, and then when I interview recruiters and sourcers for my research, they kind of categorically deny that that's even a thing and say like, "Absolutely not, you cannot trick the system and you cannot trick me." And I'm so curious to hear your responses to kind of that whole space, that whole question, candidates and AI. Chad: It's funny that you say the white text... Joel: How much time do you have? How much time is left? [chuckle] Chad: It's funny you say the white text, 'cause that's like circa 1998. Joel: SEO, yeah. Chad: Yeah, that was one of the things that we were doing. It was all keyword search back then. Joel: They're the tags. Chad: It was all and we were actually teaching employers how to HTML some of those key words at the bottom of their job descriptions as well, so that they would rank higher. So it was happening on both sides. And it will continue to happen on both sides, so the gaming and we talk about ghosting and how candidates ghost employers. Well, they ghost employers because employers ghosted them first. It's a learned behavior. So I think for me, the one that's hardest for me to believe is the psychobabble that happens out there in all these pseudosciences which I call psychobabble in most cases, because I can go through and answer questions differently as I think they want me to answer them to try to trick the system into what I think they want versus who I really am. Chad: And not to mention... I mean, if you take a look at a lot of the data that's out there, females won't apply for jobs unless they are more qualified, 100% qualified or even more, versus men who could be like 20% qualified and we don't care. It's like, "Ah, I can do the job." Right? So it's like how... That's almost like tricking the system itself, I see what the requirements are, but I'm gonna go ahead and just push past that and click on apply because I think I'm qualified for the job, whether they think I am or not. So it's been happening and as Joel said, there are so many different ways for a candidate to trick the system, but there's also even more ways for the employers to trick the system. Joel: I love this question because we talk so much about employment tools that are automated, the job seekers have automated tools too, but to get to the tricking your resume question, yes, those white text on white background, that's really, don't do that. However, there are some really sound SEO strategies that you should still be using, like a good title, like a structure, like this is for real, robots that are scraping your resume are dumb, make it easy as hell for a robot to read your resume. So go to Google Docs or wherever, get the most basic formatted resume and use that as your resume, don't get fancy with columns or images or graphs or just like... Chad: That will break it. Joel: Straight text, man, make it as simple... Like, imagine a robot is reading your resume, make it as easy as possible to get your content. Now, back to some of the other stuff that you're talking about, we had a story that we talked about on our podcast recently about an agency, an ad agency who vetted candidates for a job, a copywriter. And the copywriter answered every question with ChatGPT. So they actually didn't even answer on their own, they answered through ChatGPT. And they actually got through to the final round of interviews by using ChatGPT and then, of course, they were sort of like, "Hey, this is an experiment." Joel: But employers need to be aware that job seekers are gonna get really good at applying to a lot of jobs as if they're a human being going through the automated interviewing process, and how do you police that? How do you really cut through the best candidates if they're all using a natural language processor to answer your interview questions? It sounds like a sci-fi movie, but we're basically almost at a point where robots are interviewing robots to figure out who actually gets to speak to each other face-to-face. And that does nobody any good because it's not really who they are. So it's getting a little bit weird out there, we'll see how it shakes out, but the job seeker side of this equation is real, and it's something that we need to be aware of. Chad: And Mona, from the experiment that you talked about earlier where a PDF versus Word documents, some parsers will get broken with PDF documents, so therefore you will get different results if you're using a PDF versus Word. And that's happening and it has been happening. Most of the more advanced parsers don't have that issue, but not all. Joel: Text only, baby. Mona Slone: Text only, which is really interesting, 'cause it is really the talking with the machine and to the machine, and sort of how do we trick the machine so we can get around it quicker so we can actually talk to a human, whether that's actually a recruiter or a candidate. Joel: You're not really tricking it, I don't like the word trick, I like the word optimize, you're making it as easy for a robot to read your resume, index it, and then make it searchable, scanable, bring it together with whatever algorithms are sourcing that candidate. I think the word trick is not a good word. I know English isn't your first language, but like optimization or standards I think are better than teaching people how to trick the robots. Mona Slone: Yeah, be good data. Chad: Well, and tech is like a three-year-old at this point, you're doing baby talk to it versus trying to use PhD level... Joel: Oh yeah. Some of this shit, I don't know if I can cuss or not on this webinar, but some of this stuff is homemade. Some of these recruiters are like hackers, self-taught programmers, and they're making up their own stuff. So like that's super simple. So yeah, make sure your resume is as simple as possible kids. Joel: Be good data. I want to take the last 10 minutes that we have together to bring in the audience who have been extremely active actually in the Q&A, and we have a ton of questions. So I'm gonna throw specific questions to one of you. So I'm gonna start with one that I found really interesting, which actually says that, "Focus has been on AI in hiring, but should we pay more attention to AI in the firing process?" Ifeoma, I think that one is for you. Ifeoma: Yeah. So I'm so glad somebody asked that, actually, I have been looking at that and been thinking to write a paper in that. Here is the problem from a legal standpoint. You have more recourses when you are not hired and you should have been hired than when you've already been hired and then fired, as long as you were not fired for an explicitly discriminatory reason. So just to simplify that, most of the US is employment at will. So it means you can be fired for any reason, as long as it's not about your race, your gender, your religion, right? So it's a little more tricky for workers to basically have recourse when they're fired by algorithm, I'm calling my paper Firing By Algorithm. Ifeoma: So it really comes down to, well, okay, maybe you're not gonna be able to get your job back if you're fired by algorithm, but should there still be some sort of regulation about treating humans that way? Do humans deserve some sort of explanation, some sort of human contact when they're getting fired? I think so, right? But I'm also not a CEO of a major corporation with thousands of workers. So I'd love to hear from you industry people, like what do you feel about this trend towards firing people by algorithm as we've seen so many companies doing now, whether it's algorithm or just an email or some people got an automated text that they were fired. What do you think of this trend? Joel: I think... Mona Slone: Joel, you can take that and then we'll move on to the next questions 'cause we have a whole bunch. Joel: Oh, yeah, I'll take that one. So I think some of it is country specific. I think as, the thing I say on the podcast is, this is America Jack, and we're really good at firing people. There was a time where that was really taboo. I think we're getting away from that. I think getting fired via email, getting fired via text, we're just becoming either numb to it or we just accept it. Now, country by country, that's gonna be different, but in terms of America, I think it's gonna happen. Look, again to ChatGPT, we did a show the other day about the black hole and not getting a, "Thanks, but we've moved on to another candidate," right? So you can go to ChatGPT today and say, "Hey, write a letter to a candidate who didn't get the job saying you're sorry, blah, blah, blah for this job description." Joel: And ChatGPT will create a really nice little form letter that could go out automatically to these candidates. And that can also happen with employees. So you could really easily create a natural language processing strategy where letters go out to people that sound really nice and sound really human-esque to let people go. So I think, yes, it's the future, whether you like it or not. Corporate America doesn't give a shit. That's the way that it's gonna go because again, it's efficient. You don't have to have the uncomfortable conversation face-to-face about thanks for playing, but we're moving on. It's gonna be automated as well. And people will just take it like most of the things that they take in the workforce. Mona Slone: Thank you for that. I think we should have a whole co-opting on that one, maybe later in the semester. I'm gonna move us on and I'm gonna combine two questions from Sig Silberman and Heather Moffett. And so it sounds like in five to 10 years, we should be expected to see a lot of technical standards from bodies such as ISO, ANSI, NIST, IEEE to become important in this space. So question is, is that plausible? And I'm gonna tag on Heather's question, who's asking, what if there was a sample data set that could be used by this standards body, wouldn't companies feel more confident running through this to ensure no adverse impact prior to launch and help with the adoption of these technologies? Chad, this one's for you. [laughter] Chad: Yeah, I think... Joel: That's good 'cause I don't have enough degrees to even understand that question. Chad: Any organization that has standing, yes, that would be wonderful. We're in the Wild West right now, right? So I think the best we can do is start to create standards around regulations that we're trying to press as it is. We have laws that are on the books that are already supposed to be in play. Like in New York City, we've gotta wait now till April. Again, these are signals and companies should be taking these signals, but also the vendors who already do compliance audits and those types of things should also be taking these signals in building their own somewhat standards and working with local, state and federal governments to be able to apply them. If they have IEEE or what have you to back them, that is wonderful. I think those types of partnerships make sense. Mona Slone: Thank you for that. I'm gonna combine a couple of questions on sort of audits, and I know Ifeoma has sort of one she wanted to tag on here as well. So Jiahao Chen, who I'm glad to see in the audience, is saying that all of you brought up the ex-ante auditing as possible requirement for employment AI. Those are not only possible, but exist in other verticals, such as consumer finance. But one key difference is that employment AI are decision-support tools and not usually used in full autonomous business processes. And so just curious to hear what you think about how AI to aid decisions should be regulated differently from autonomous decision-making AI. Mona Slone: And then we have another question from Nilesh, who is saying, "Well, in sourcing, there perhaps also is bias in other parts of the process in sourcing for example reaching out to candidates on LinkedIn who worked at major consulting firms and went to Ivy League schools. So isn't the process already biased?" And so that is part of the AI auditing question. And then Ifeoma, I know you had one about sort of addressing that via the contractor idea that Chad articulated earlier. So I'm gonna toss it to you, and you can decide who gets to answer these three questions. Ifeoma: Yeah, so I think this is for Chad, and definitely Joel can jump in, of course. But yeah, Chad, you actually touched on a subject that I perked up immediately 'cause it's been something I've written and think about, which is the fact that federal contractors have these higher standards imposed on them for making sure they have frankly a diverse workforce, right? And in terms of including disabled workers also, for example, that corporations don't have. And you mentioned that this could be kind of a start for regulations and maybe for audits. And I just wanted you to touch about that, on that a little bit more because I think we're still sort of struggling with the idea of what would be a meaningful audit? What would it actually look like? So for other industries like the financial industries, we have Sarbanes-Oxley that lays out here's what your audit needs to look like. We now have established industries of auditors. They actually are certified auditors that will come and do the audits, but we don't have that yet in the automated hiring space. So let's say starting with the contractors, which I think is a good low-hanging fruit, what would a meaningful audit look like? Chad: Well, first and foremost, there is a robust set of contractors and advisors in that space. So if they're not already putting together solutions for this, I would be surprised. Because obviously, when you're talking about OFCCP, you're talking about 503 with individuals with disabilities, you're talking about VEVRAA, veterans hiring, you're talking about the whole scale of diversity and things that you have to do as a federal contractor. And once again, these are higher requirements because you are taking money from the federal government. So the federal government wants to ensure that you're meeting these higher standards. So again, I think this is very simple and could be pretty much along with OFCCP regulations. The thing is, they have to. And this is one of the things that EEOC did not do in their last webinar. They did not bring vendors on, they did not bring practitioners on. They had only academia. That is literally a tenth of what they needed because the work happens with vendors and practitioners, mainly. Chad: Academia is there as advisors, and I think that is amazing, research, advice, those types of things. But we need to ensure that we pull the community together, and we have a vehicle in which to do that. And the vehicle is money, and that money is government contracts. So I really believe we could pull that together. And again, that could be a part of OFCCP and the current standards and outcomes that they have to abide by. There will be additional work that has to be done around trying to understand how these outcomes happened from the scaling of an algorithm, but you still know what the outcome is. This is not something that we don't already see because the hiring is there. The talent pool is there. All of that is the same. Nothing's changed. So now what we have to do is dig into the algorithm to understand where it's going wrong. Mona Slone: Thank you for that. We are at time, so I wanna ask my kind of closing question to all three of you. Joel, I'm going to start with you. Where do you see this space in five years? Joel: This space being recruiting or the AI? Mona Slone: AI and recruiting and... Joel: Yeah, it's gonna happen. I think the guard rails, safety nets, whatever metaphor you wanna use, are gonna be put in place 'cause there's simply too much money to be made/saved in automating the recruiting process. Even now, we're seeing companies that are laying off thousands of people, recruiters and HR professionals are part of those layoffs. They're not being brought back or they're being brought back as contractors more than people would thought. And most people are looking for these automated tools, these platforms to manage everything from recruiting to payroll, to onboarding, to offboarding. Everyone's looking for technology to save money and create efficiencies around this. So it's going to happen. The legal asks, the issues around biases, they might not all get worked out, but they'll get worked out to a point where people aren't afraid to buy services and create new companies and sell services. They'll be guard rails created, and this space will be off to the races in terms of AI. Mona Slone: Thank you for that. Chad? Chad: Recruiting, also known as talent acquisition in our space, is literally the beating heart of every company. No product or service is ideated, developed, sold, serviced, customer-retained while it's opened without the actual talent that is acquired through recruiting. It doesn't exist. But it's incredibly underfunded, much like Joel has said. So being underfunded means you're flooded with tasks, and many of those tasks can be carried out by robotic process automation or AI. Those tasks, I think within the next five years, at least 70% of those tasks, we will see more augmented recruiters where 70% of their tasks are actually part of RPA or AI. And then those individuals, depending on the organization and their care for the candidates, will actually use their people to be more human. Today, recruiters can't be as human because they're doing all these stupid little tasks. If you give them their time back so that they can actually give it to the candidates and they can be more human, then we can put the human back in human resources. Mona Slone: That's a great... Joel: By the way, imagine a world where you apply to a job at Tesla, and Elon Musk is actually the one interviewing you on your screen for a job at Tesla. Chad: I'd hang up. [laughter] Joel: Yes, politics aside, however you feel about Elon, but we're going to a world where video of a human and an actual human, you can't really tell the difference. And Elon will speak different languages based on where you're located in the world. This is where we're going. Five years is a long time with how fast the tech is going. I think you'll be gobsmacked by what it looks like in five years. Chad: I'll give you a great example. We have a podcast that we put out in English, and we have had our voices cloned, Joel's voice and my voice cloned. It is now also in four other language: German, French, Spanish and Portuguese. The AI has translated and cloned our voices in those different languages. Joel: Yeah. All it needs is the text. Mona Slone: I will audit the German one. Joel: You sure? [laughter] Mona Slone: I'm gonna toss it over to Ifeoma... Ifeoma: Exactly. Mona Slone: For the last word before I close it off. We're a little over time already. Ifeoma: Yeah, I mean, I really can't add too much more, just to say that I do concur with this idea of a move towards more augmented decision-making rather than really some sort of a wholesale transition to AI. So I guess to be more colloquial, I see like basically half of the people that have been fired in favor of GPT, they're gonna be hired back, essentially, because we're then gonna realize that it's not the same. We still need the humans. So, yes, I do think there will be more helper AI, more sort of augmenting and also making more efficient the sort of mundane tasks, but we're still gonna need that human decision-making at the final say. 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 out.

SUBSCRIBE wherever you listen to podcasts If you’re tired of hearing about ChatGPT, employers and vendors behaving badly, money-grubbing startups, and millions being made on OnlyFans, then maybe this episode isn’t for you. But in the likely chance that these topics are just what the doctor ordered, Chad & Cheese cover: Beamery boarding the ChatGPT train, Deel and Chipotle losing the Employer of the Year competition in just the first quarter of 2023, Buy-or-Sell with Paraform, Workera, and Payday, and a lawyer giving up the legal professional for a lewd career on OnlyFans. Feel free to hold us in contempt of court, counselor! 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. Joel: Oh, yeah, it's Eiffel Tower Day, so let's protest pensions, burn some trash and throw out Macron. Hi kids, you're listening to The Chad & Cheese Podcast. This is your co-host, Joel Fromage Cheesman. Chad: Chad Sugarhill Gang Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, ChatGPT marches on, buy or sell and deal gets naughty. Speaker 4: What are you doing step bro? [laughter] Joel: Let's do this. [music] Chad: There it is. That's what I'm talking about. And in 1980... When was this? This was like maybe '70s. Joel: Yeah. Chad: I can't remember. Joel: Yeah, I need my knee-high aluminum boots. [laughter] Joel: And a nice rainbow jacket for this. Jeez, why are we playing that to start the show Chad? Chad: As we've been doing the European show, we start to understand the big differences between the US and Europe, it's not just the distance from across the pond. We were recently on Adway's show with Sara Dalsfelt. Anyway, she's in love with Swedish House Mafia, so I posed the question on LinkedIn, who is better, Swedish House Mafia, Jam Master Jay, Spinderella or Grandmaster Flash? And the Europeans had a shit fit, they just automatically were in the Swedish House Mafia EDM crew. And it was amazing because the Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, they evolved music, right? Joel: Yeah, yeah. Chad: Swedish House Mafia is great, I like listening to them, but they're not evolutionary at all. And as I was starting to think about this, I was like, this is a metaphor for the HR and recruiting industry, especially in tech. 'Cause there's some great tech platforms that are out there, some good tech platforms, but very, very few of them are evolutionary. Joel: Yeah. Chad: And I wanted to play Grandmaster Flash, so that's why we did it. Speaker 5: Europe has a bunch of countries in it. Joel: Next on CNN, Viking longboats sailing down the Ohio River to Columbus... [laughter] Joel: To a pillage the Sowash aboard. Nice, piss off the Swedes. That's always fun. Chad: I can't wait. Joel: And by the way, I'm glad that you offered me up for more Surströmming without my approval. Those that don't know, Surströmming is one of the nastiest things that you can eat. Chad: [laughter] It is fucking horrible. Joel: Rotted fish. It's apparently some Scandinavian delicacy and it's horrible. Google it, watch it on YouTube if you wanna learn more. But Chad has offered me up again. Chad: [laughter] They call it a delicacy, so dumbasses like us go and eat it. Oh, this is a delicacy? Oh, yeah. Put it on a plate. Joel: Yeah, yeah. Chad: Until they open the fucking can and they clear out an entire restaurant. [laughter] Joel: Yeah, when you have to open something under water because the smell is so bad, you don't want it to like totally... Chad: It was bad, man. Joel: Burn the nostrils of everyone within 10 feet of it. Chad: And you were right there. I was 20 feet away. Joel: Yeah. Chad: I could smell it 20 feet away. And we were outside kids. Joel: Yeah. Chad: We were outside. Anyway... Joel: Yeah, my first clue was asking a dozen Swedes if they've ever done it and they were like, "Hell, no, we've never done that shit." [laughter] Joel: That shit is awful, man. Awful. Chad: Yeah, so hopefully we'll be back in Sweden sometime soon, so that you can have more Surströmming, I can have a dance-off and we can play some Swedish House Mafia and some Grandmaster Flash. So, there you have it. Joel: Yeah. Although Sarah is moving to London, I believe. Chad: Okay. Joel: So, we'll change it to fish and chips. I much prefer fish and chips to rotted fish in a can, shit, that was stored back in the fucking Cold War era. Chad: All right, shout-outs. Joel: Shout-outs, Rupert Murdoch, Chad. Chad: Oh my god. Joel: Your favorite media mogul. Chad: What a fucking asshole. Joel: Get a load of this. Chad: Thanks, Australia. Joel: Yeah, Rupert Murdoch is getting married for the fifth time. Chad: God. Joel: To 66-year-old Ann Lesley Smith, a former model, and just one year younger than Murdoch's oldest child. The pair met in September last year following his August divorce from Jerry Hall after six years of marriage. If you're keeping score, Chad, that's six months between marriages. I guess when you're 92 years old like Rupert Murdoch is, turnaround time takes a whole new meaning. Shout-out to Rupert and marriage number five. You'd think at 92 years old he would have learned his lesson, but apparently not. Chad: He has a penchant for models, by the way, if you take a look at his divorcees. Joel: Jerry Hall famously married to Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger. Yes. Chad: Annulled. Yes, but annulled. Joel: Oh, was it annulled? I don't know. Chad: Yeah, it was annulled. Joel: I don't know. And she was in Playboy in the '80s, I think. I think I remember her from that. Chad: So anyway, to people who really matter, shout-out to Bradley DiPaolo over at CandidateHub. Apparently on road trips, Bradley loves the soft and melodic tones of The Chad & Cheese Podcast in his ears, or at least that's what he's saying on social media. So, thanks for listening, Bradley. We love your brother, keep sharing. Joel: [chuckle] We look good on a big screen in a car, by the way. We look good on a big-ass. Chad: We do, it's sexy. Yeah. Joel: Yeah, it is sexy. I'm glad we selected the yellow, somehow that pops really nicely on our logo. [laughter] Joel: All right, shout-out to Leverage. Chad. Chad: Ooh. Joel: This is from Fortune Magazine. Chad: Leverage. Joel: Despite recent efforts by employers to take back some of the bargaining power from employees, recruiting professionals predict that talent will continue to have leverage for the next five years. Fortune says this means Employers cannot low-ball candidates and must offer excellent compensation and benefits to remain competitive. In addition, DEI remains a priority for candidates and businesses will be held accountable for their societal promises. Shout out to Leverage and let the good times roll for our industry as vendors look to cash in over the next five years, at least. Chad: It'll go longer than that because salary transparency is actually what's forcing this shit, kids, recruiting experts. What the fuck ever shout-out to RecruitX, it's official kids RecruitX just announced to their customers that "Google job ads are finally here. This new long awaited product offers employers, the opportunity to dynamically advertise specific jobs in the most premium inventory Google offers via a feed of your jobs." Why is this important for hiring companies, because "Up to 73% of job-seekers start their job search on Google as the touch point to find employment, Google is an operating system, it's a lifestyle platform, all of the things that indeed will never be." Shout-out to RecruitX and Google for Jobs, paid ads, going into beta sometime soon. Speaker 6: That escalated quickly. Joel: Yes, and we've been talking about it, and we've seen screenshots, but it looks like it's official, which to me means Google is reaching out to these agencies and talking about, "Hey, we're coming into beta, let's get some of your best clients testing this thing." We talked recently on a show to tease a future episode about how Google is gonna make enough money to justify doing this thing, they can only go to so many LinkedIns and zip recruiters to get some low-hanging fruit. They're gonna have to build some bridges to the biggest agencies, biggest companies in the world, if they're gonna turn this into a billion-plus dollar business, clearly, they're starting to do that, they're doing the right thing, they're calling agencies, I'm sure they're calling all of them to get those budgets switched over and with all the fuck ups that Indeed has been having lately shooting itself in the foot. I'm sure more than enough agencies and clients are more than happy to explore Google as an alternative to Indeed. Timing is great on this one, timing is great. Chad: It is. Lucky and great. Joel: That's right. Shout-out to Bosko Vujatovic. Chad: Bosko? Joel: I think I said that right. This is via LinkedIn, super fan Bosko, while posting a pic in his new Chad and Cheese t-shirt. So damn sexy. He posts, "My wife bewildered says, some podcaster sent you a t-shirt? And they talk about recruiting? And you like it?" His reply. "Love it." And we love you to Bosko of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This shout-out is for you, my man, and keep listening on and looking sexy as you do. Chad: Looking good. Joel: In that Chad and Cheese T-shirt. Chad: It's very slimming too. Joel has is on. It's very slimming. Big, nice, warm, comfy. Joel: We picked the dark hues for the T-shirt. There's a really good reason. By the way, just like Bosko, you too can be stylish in a Chad and Cheese T-shirt, but you gotta go to chadcheese.com. Click the free link, click t-shirts, put in your information, t-shirts from JobGet, we got beer from our friends at Aspen Tech Labs, we have bourbon from our homies at TextKernel, and if it's your birthday in a certain month, you might win a nice bottle of rum from our friends at Plum. But you gotta win it. You gotta be in it to win it. Or something like that, you gotta go to chadcheese.com. Chad: Register. Joel: Click the free link and register. Chad: Come on people. Events, kids. That's right, we have Unleash coming up tickets. Get your tickets. That's right. Wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait, listener, listener, you don't have your tickets to Unleash yet? Are you serious? Are you fucking kidding me? At Caesars Forum in Vegas, late April, you've got some time. It's coming up fast, so get your damn tickets. We're gonna be on stage with Chris Conrad from Textkernel, our buddies over there. During the vendor summit and our dance card is just about full with dinners, drinks, parties, including a little private soiree with our friends over at Plum. And then there's a Chad and Cheese, the drinks are on Tadio listener events that we're looking to put together. Joel: Nice. Chad: Talent toke with our boy Evan White, who is an event genius, get this, we're gonna be... We're gonna watch the Bellagio fountains while we're getting high, yes kids. Weed is legal in Vegas. Also, I think we're going to be making an appearance at one of the bars inside of the high roller, it's that big ferris wheel that's right in front of the Caesars Forum. I think we're gonna spend a half hour in there, possibly do whatever we can. Shots, half an hour. Who knows? But anyway, we're gonna have a blast. That's Unleash. And you haven't been up in the project, have you? Joel: I have not. It seems like a trap like open bar for 60 minutes in a glass, a glass egg. Chad: It's only 30 minutes. Joel: It seems very dangerous. It seems very... Okay 30 minutes, I guess I can deal with that. Talent toke. Chad: Yes. Joel: Talent toke. Yeah, that's gonna be interesting. Chad: It's gonna be a blast. Joel: Are cameras allowed in this event, 'cause I could see a... Chad: It's gonna be outside. Joel: That the authorities... I can see the authorities tracking those of us in non-legal states, and by the way, our travel is powered by our friends at Shaker, folks find out more at Shaker.com. Chad: And then we go to iCIMS, I'm pretty excited about this event, we're going to be on stage closing out day one with a half-hour session during our prelim tech check yesterday, we made it pretty clear that we wanted to be drinking on stage because we knew right after that we have the expo, and we have drinks, but yeah, I'm pretty excited about that, if you don't have tickets to any of the events, we have got plenty others that are happening. Go to chadcheese.com, click on the events in the upper right hand corner and register for them all. Joel: And we have got discounts for some of them. Chad: And we have got discounts. Joel: This is fucking Group on it, Chadcheese. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: It's good stuff. Good stuff. Chad: It's Groupon. Speaker 7: Really. Can you feel the tension in the air right now? Chad: I can. Speaker 7: I know I can, I can feel it all the way down in my plums. Joel: Oh, yeah, Chad. You know what that means? We got birthdays to celebrate. Speaker 8: Happy birthday. Joel: Another trip around the sun for some our favorite listeners, Megan Sharp, Dan Cheeseman, no relation whatsoever. Chad: Really. Joel: Believe it or not, and he spells his name incorrectly, so we're not... We're not related. James Holloman. Hallow Balliger. Thomas Ohero, Simon Evans, Robert Omarwa, Tod henford, Derik Christiansten, Nate Menard, Elan Oberg. Martinzen, one of our favorite streets speaking event, celebrates their birthday. And Last, but definitely not least. Chad: Yes. Joel: Jeremy Cheeseman, turns six years old. Chad: Six. Holy shit. Joel: Six years old this week, ironically the same age as our podcast, it coincides with my last and final child that I will put on this earth. That is birthdays. Thanks for listening and enjoy your special day this week. Speaker 8: Happy birthday. Joel: Topics. Layoffs. I think we have a lay-off alert Chad that came across the wire today as we were creating notes for the show, what's up? Chad: At talent.com just laid off about 80 people, equaling about 25% of its workforce. I was amazed that most of these arbitrage players, they're not innovating at all. We talked about this with music earlier, how can these companies actually separate themselves from the Indeeds of the world as opposed to just doing the same shit and feeding each other. Right? And you got to ask, "What do companies want?" They want qualified candidates, so how can companies like talent.com send more quality? That's the problem they should be solving for that Indeed is not solving for. We're seeing that now Indeed is all over the fucking place, it's almost like vendors are fat and happy just drafting off of indeed. So I don't know, what do you think? Joel: I think if we believe Indeed is scared about Google and Google monetizing, think about what talent.com is thinking internally about this development, it's hard, it's the game of spend money, and hopefully you're spending less than what you're getting in clicks or postings or fees or whatever, banner ads that you have on the site, and it's a game of arbitrage, and it's very, very difficult, and as companies pay less per click in some industries, certainly tech has fallen off in I think the last news that I read was 300,000 tech jobs have been lost in the last year, that's a lot of... Those are high priced clicks, and all that revenue is stagnant right now with these companies, and that leads to layoffs 'cause they have to save money if they can't make money, and you're seeing a lot of layoffs, this I think was 20%, you said 80 or so employees? Chad: 25. Yeah. 25. Joel: Okay. So they're pretty lean organization to their credit. Chad: Yes. Yes. Joel: So that's the good news. But yeah, it's a tough business. It always has been, always will be. Chad: Well, we did... A little teaser, we did talk to Michael Woodrow earlier this week, and he doesn't think that there's gonna be any arbitrage game off of Google because Google is so expensive, so it's gonna be a big change, I think, for the industry, and we really have to stop thinking about traffic, and we have to start thinking about targeted qualified individuals, that's more important than quantity. Joel: Yeah. At the end of the day, a brand matters, and Indeed early on got all their traffic from search SEO, and when that dried up, they built a brand, they spent money on ads, and because of that they're well known. I've never seen a talent.com ad, I've never seen a Jobcase ad. A lot of these companies that are looking to make a big dent in this game, aren't spending the money to build a brand to where they can leverage that and grow off of it, even in bad times, so until I see some of that stuff, these guys are sort of fringe businesses. Anyway. Let's talk a little ChatGPT, Chad. Chad: Everybody is. Joel: Because it's in the news, believe it or not. Chad: Go figure. Joel: And a few things here. A new Korn Ferry survey says 46% of professionals are currently using ChatGPT as part of their daily work, what's more Open AI announced a product extension for ChatGPT allowing the chatbot to interact with external data and services. With plugins ChatGPT now can search for real-time information on the web, order groceries from DoorDash and book flights, hotels or rental cars on KAYAK. One expert believes plugins have transformed ChatGPT into an app platform that could challenge the iPhone in the not so distant future. Joel: Beamery has launched TalentGPT to generate new job descriptions and generative AI reported more than 200 new AI tools were released just last week, including ChatBotkit, which says it's the fastest way to make your own advanced chatbot. Chad. It's ChatGPT's world. We're all just renting. What are your thoughts? Chad: Dharmesh Shah, the founder of HubSpot, just announced that he bought chat.com for over $10 million with his own money, by the way, apparently he didn't have enough planes and Yachts. But he bought chat.com. He didn't buy a conversational.com. Right? Joel: It's conversational.AI. Chad: Yes, no, so I mean, it's one of those things where this is incredibly important, Google just reshuffled their virtual assistant unit and they're focusing more on the barred AI side of the house, as we're talking about the Beamery's, we're talking about all of the companies out there. This is gonna be a me to effect. Everybody's gonna do it. And I think what you're talking about with regard to the app extensions, that to me is pretty amazing. Just to be able to point at data sets that you want to train ChatGPT off of, I think is incredibly smart. But here's the thing, is everything gonna get paused? Chad: So a story in Gadget yesterday, an open letter signed by tech leaders and prominent AI researchers has called for AI labs and companies to immediately pause their work, signatories like Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk agrees risks warrant a minimum six month break from producing technology beyond GPT-4. Allow people to adjust and ensure they are benefiting everyone. So do we need a break? Is this happening too fast? Joel: We need a break is like telling someone to put the toothpaste back into the bottle. [laughter] I don't see how you put the genie back again on this one. I mean, unless you have some serious, global government regulation around the processes and investment that's going into this. I mean, by and large, most people haven't been excited as excited about a new technology, since maybe mobile. I mean, almost a decade. Web3... Chad: IPhone. Joel: Is kinda, eh, VR, AR, that's sort of stalled, for sure. [laughter] So I mean, the talk of like AI is the most dangerous thing that we face right now, is it makes great headlines. But I don't know how you put that genie back in the bottle. I do love also the Korn Ferry 46%, of professionals are using ChatGPT I posted that on LinkedIn and I was shocked at the pushback on that. Like people were Pitchforks, Korn Ferry's bullshit. Joel: Yeah. Right. Okay. Does thou protest too much? I mean, [laughter] I bet if you look really deep into some of these people, they either work for a company that's threatened by ChatGPT or AI, or have something to lose. This thing has been around just since November of last year, and it's penetrated the zeitgeist of everyone. I think we can agree that this is a force to be reckoned with, whether you're mad about it or not. I think also the amount of apps and integrations that we're seeing... Chad: That's powerful. Joel: To me, you're looking at, people question how this is gonna auto... Or how this is gonna monetize. Don't think Google, think AWS. These guys are gonna power much of the internet in just a few short years probably anyone that has a software is gonna have to plug this in, in some form or fashion, and they're gonna get a tax for all that data that comes in and out of these sites. So to me it's a juggernaut in terms of monetization. I got the Bard, Google Bard invite, this week. So I've been kind of playing around with that. Joel: I still think that OpenAI has a more robust product at this point, but it's really early and there's gonna be a lot of money thrown at this space. So it's just really exciting. I like talking about it. I think, Beamery, we talked about Hireology, those are two press releases that said they were the first to integrate this stuff [laughter] So how many more first PR we're gonna see, will be fun. Get it out there fast kids, 'cause it will ultimately, you won't be the first after 10 or 12 firsts, that come across the wire. But exciting stuff as always. And we'll like talking about it. Chad: Again, it's a me too conversation, but this around for the most part is, is general the generative AI side of the house. It's large language models. In most cases, what our practitioners are gonna care about the most is domain specific models. Ones who have been training on domain specific data for a very long time. So we just need to educate and help those companies, those practitioners better understand what they should be looking for, what problem they're trying to solve. Because in many cases, if it is just a general, we want to get a thanks, but no thanks letter out there. Fuck ChatGPT will do that in seconds. Joel: Yes, it will. Oh shit, Chad, that's the bell. You know what that means? Time to play a little buy or sell. Chad: Buy or sell. Joel: Our listeners that don't know, we talk about three companies that have recently gotten funding. Read a summary and then Chad and I will either buy or sell the company. Are you ready to play, buy or sell? Chad: Yes. Joel: First up, we have Paraform San Francisco's Paraform has raised $1.4 million in Pre-seed funding. Paraform has developed a marketplace format enabling tech companies to post bounties for open roles with anyone able to profit if they refer a successful candidate. Although 90% of its users are currently professional recruiters, Paraform plans to expand to all professionals in the near future. Chad, are you a buy or sell on Paraform? Chad: All is, old becomes new again. How many systems have we seen over the years that have been focused on bounties that have just miserably died very, very quickly? I mean, it's crazy. The timing here really sucks. And only experienced veterans in the space could actually pull this off. So at the end of the day, it's a timing thing. It's an experience thing. It's an easy sell. Joel: Oh, that's a sell from Chad. All right. Yeah. H3 came to mind when I first heard it. Like, everybody can refer everybody's a recruiter. And H3 was a great technology. I actually got paid, back in '05, '06, when I referred people and it didn't work out. And this was like great, great executives, good technology. And it didn't work. Talking to Hans, which we both know was CEO of the company, he thought maybe social media and the evolution of social media might change it. Joel: Maybe Mobile will change how we refer jobs. It just doesn't work out for whatever reason. People don't just... People don't wanna be recruiters who aren't recruiters. People don't wanna just like shotgun job postings across social media. That's not cool. So it just seems to fall flat every time. And then you look at, "Well, okay, maybe it can just be like a recruiter thing," but then you've got bounty jobs, scout, talent drop. Like there's so many like companies that do this, that are much more well established. Is your differentiator that we target startups? Like I don't think that's a long-term business plan. Chad: No. Joel: So yeah, for me as well, like... [laughter] It's a sell. All right. Let's get to, Workera. Palo Alto's Workera has raised $23.5 million in a series B round. This brings total funding to forty-four and a half million dollars. Workera says it enables organizations to develop their talent by providing a deep understanding of their employees skills. Workera will use the funding to expand its comprehensive ontology of over 7,000 skills including soft skills assessments, and to develop more frequent skill check-ins for ongoing workforce measurement. Chad, buy or sell Workera? Chad: So actually giving your employees the skills and paths to better paying jobs has actually did become important. Again. Can you believe that shit? Go figure. Remember when it was last important. When it was one of the only ways companies could receive tax writeoffs. That's when it was really popular. We had an incredibly skilled workforce because companies had to either pay taxes on those dollars or develop their employees. And that stopped in the '80s with trickle down bullshit economics. And ever since then, we started to hear about this new thing. Chad: It's not really a new thing anymore. But that thing is called a skills gap. And every single year it's grown and grown and grown. Now companies have no fucking choice, but to look at the skills gap as a problem and institute upskilling quickly. Attrition rates are higher because we're not helping employees build their skill sets, find other internal jobs and stay. An internal Amazon report demonstrated that through attrition they had lost $9 billion. Upskilling is a huge wave that I am on, and if companies, practitioners don't get on it, they're gonna fucking drown. This is a buy for me. [applause] Joel: Nice, nice, nice. Speaker 6: 60% of the time it works [laughter] every time. Joel: So talent intelligence is a really competitive space for a reason. This business is very complicated to me. It's a lot of pie charts and graphs, a lot of mumbo jumbo, psycho babble. But I understand people that want that. It works at least 60% of the time. So you've got Plum, you've got Eightfold, Gloat, you've got a ton of money in this space. I love surfing a big wave, which makes it really hard to not buy this company. Unless this whole space does become psycho babble bullshit and they all burn, in their own feces then there are gonna be a lot of winners in this space work. Joel: Workera's CEO has a really nice resume. He's got Stanford, he was a founding member of DeepLearning.AI and he has pretty easy access to some pretty deep pockets. So for that reason and more, I'm also gonna buy Workera. All right, let's get to Payday. It's not just a great candy bar, Chad. [laughter] They've raised $3 million in a seed round. Payday offers African remote workers and freelancers the ability to send and receive money in dollars, euros, pounds, and 20 other currencies. This brings total funding to $5.1 million. The company has grown its user base and transaction volume significantly since its June, 2021 launch, ending last year with over 100,000 users, which has since grown to more than 300,000 users. Chad, buy or sell Payday. Chad: So today more than 60% of Africa's population is under the age of 25. By 2030, young Africans are expected to constitute 42% of global youth. Africa is the future. Paying people is the future. Having infrastructure to do so is the future. Payday obviously is the future in this case. And as you talked about, 100,000 to 300,000, pretty easy, easy traction for them. So Payday has already smartly turned down an acquisition set at $15 million because I believe, by the end of next year, they could get 100 times that. It's a buy for me. [applause] Joel: Yes. Chad, who is in Africa this week? Vice President Kamala Harris. And what is our vice president's visit to Africa signal? It signals a shit ton of money that's gonna be going into Africa. Even mentioning it in her speeches saying that we're gonna get rich and you guys are gonna get rich and not, I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea. China's in Africa in a big way. Chad: Yes. Joel: Capital, European capital pouring into the country. These guys are gonna have to work not to be successful. They're gonna have to work at fucking this up. Capital's gonna flow. People are gonna get paid. Money is gonna need to flow in a lot of different directions in a lot of different currencies. So yeah, for me, like this is, they're gonna have... They're gonna have to work to fuck this up. This is a screaming buy for me from Payday. Let's take a quick break. [music] Joel: Listen to some smooth hip hop. And when we get back, a little naughty Chad. [laughter] [music] Joel: Uh-oh, companies have been naughty, Chad. Chad: Go figure. Joel: Naughty. Naughty. All right. Deel, that's D-E-E-L. Chad: Damn it. I like those guys. Joel: The $12 billion startup in our space has been accused by some of its workers of potentially misclassifying them as independent contractors. At least half of the company's 2000 workers worldwide are classified as independent contractors and some are concerned about their labor rights and missing out on benefits. Of course, Deel insists that it complies with relevant labor laws and empowers workers. Meanwhile, Chad, over at one of my favorites. Speaker 9: Oh my God, I love Chipotle. Chipotle is my life. Joel: That's right. Chipotle's been ordered to pay $240,000 to ex-employees at a Maine location that tried to unionize. Despite denying wrongdoing, the settlement falls short of reopening the closed location, but former employees will receive between $5,800 to $21,000 and be put on a preferential hiring list for one year. Chipotle also agreed to post notices at 40 stores saying they won't discriminate based on union support. Only one Chipotle location has successfully unionized so far. Chad, we got naughty, naughty from Deel and Chipotle, what's your take? Chad: Yeah. A quote, in an article about Deel is how can you trust a vendor to help you [laughter] be compliant that aren't compliant themselves? [laughter] I mean, and it's eating your own dog food kind of thing. It's like, "Oh, we can help you do X, Y, and Z." Well, shit, you're getting dinged for it yourself. This is amateur hour kids. I mean, it feels like Deel is really just trying to fool the system like Uber and Lyft has for years. Chad: It's not about freedom to choose, especially here in the US. It's about a company's opportunity to cut costs by not providing employee benefits. The CEO saying, that he's listed as a contractor is like Chris Heim saying stupid shit like he'll cut his salary by 25%. Dude, you're making a shit ton more cash than your employees. This is a total, let them make cake moment. When I read this, I was mad because I think platforms like Deel and Remote, I mean, there are plenty of them. Atlas. I mean, there's some great EOR opportunities that are out there, but this is a huge, huge strike for Deel. If they were in the RFP process for me right now, they would automatically be out. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. It's funny you mentioned, Mr. Heims. I don't know if it's public or not. Somebody told me he makes $14 million. Chad: SEC filings. Yeah, total comp. Joel: Yeah. That'll buy a lot of beer. So good for you for taking that pay cut buddy. Chad: Yeah. Fuck off. Joel: So apparently the CEO at Deel is a contract that was in the story. I'm not sure how that works. Does that justify it? Chad: No. Joel: The dude's worth how much in stock? I can't imagine. Like that's always the game. I'm only gonna take a dollar in salary. Look at me. I'm one with the commoners. Yeah, I agree. Like there's so many players in this space, Oyster, Remote, Velocity Global. If you're looking at some of these companies, yes, this should be a little bit of a red flag to move on, and go to the next player. This is bad optics for them. The union game to me is really interesting. Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks went to Capitol Hill and performed pretty well. Starbucks in comparison or in contrast, has seen more than 290 of its location unionize, just over the last year. Joel: So who would you rather invest in at Chipotle or Starbucks? I'd rather eat at Chipotle. [laughter] But that's beside the point. I mean, unionization, ultimately, I think both of us wished. The federal government would take more of an active role, in making life better for frontline workers and not let the marketplace take so much of a lead on this. But until then, we're gonna have stories like this where unions are either trying to get crushed or some smarter employees are trying to lift up unions when they can. Chad: Yeah. Well, and as long as this is allowed, and in this case, they had to pay... It was back pay. There's no fine. This isn't a big sting for corporate Chipotle. I mean, give me a fucking break. So as long as the federal government continues to allow these little check your cushions for a quarter of a million dollars, which you can find in Chipotle HQ, they need to do that, the back pay piece, and then they need to fine the shit out of 'em. Joel: Yeah. Chad: And that needs to go toward revenue, total national revenue, and then they will stop this shit. When you start smacking 'em hard, then they stop playing the stupid games. But this'll continue. And to say that they'll put those employees on hiring lists, I can only imagine. I can only imagine the interviews. Can someone actually ask if you're pro-union or not on an interview because I almost guarantee you, that's just a quick knockout question for them. Joel: And I'm pretty sure that these employees electrical bills and plumbing bills and rent, I'm pretty sure that didn't pause while this case was sorted out. I'm sure that those hardships were still there. Joel: Work from home, Chad, this is from the Wall Street Journal this week. A recent labor department report showed that working remotely is becoming increasingly rare with 72.5% of business establishments reporting that their employees teleworked rarely or not at all in 2022. This is compared to 60% in 2021. More workers were onsite full-time in 2022 than the previous year with employers pushing staff to work onsite more often as recession fears prompt an increased emphasis on worker productivity. Joel: Some large companies are now expecting their employees to report in person more often viewing remote work as a liability. However, remote work is unlikely to disappear entirely with 13% of current job openings being for remote positions. Chad, the frog continues to boil. Your thoughts. Chad: And it will continue to boil. I mean, it's interesting because we started treating... We had to start treating our employees like adults. And the problem with the US market is that for decades, the US has put GDP over happiness, not caring about the employee as much as the shareholder value. And we know this, right? So then in the pandemic, we saw that every job that could be performed remotely, magically was remote overnight. In those jobs, we saw great productivity lifts and happier employees because they had autonomy, which means we can have both great GDP and happy employees if they treat them like adults. Chad: And therein lies the problem. The 1950s management style crowd does not want to treat employees like adults. They can't have that control measure that they always want. Now, in the last LinkedIn report, the number was 13% of jobs on LinkedIn were remote. 50% of all clicks went to those jobs. And if that's not a signal, I don't know what the fuck is. Seriously, companies are having problems retaining and attracting talent while the talent is... They're telling you what they want. Joel: One of the things I think that we don't talk enough about in this issue is commercial real estate. And with the crash of SVB Signature Bank and a lot of things that banks are going through, everyone that I listen to is predicting a total collapse of commercial real estate, which has to weigh heavy on corporations and banks and let's call it the establishment in terms of like the world of that... World falling apart or not. And an easy solution is get your workers back into the office and we won't have to have this calamity. I think it's... I don't know how big of a piece of it that it is, but I think a lot of CEOs are getting together and say like, "If we don't get people back into the office, the whole system is gonna have a lot of problems." Joel: Now, I personally think this real estate could be turned into, I don't know, places to live for people. Apparently there's a huge housing shortage, in the country. They can be put in new services, different businesses that can be put in there. Some laws may have to be changed to make that happen. But I think the commercial real estate has a lot to do with this. The CEOs and executives in the story talk about the initial, like work from home was a sugar rush of like, people wanted to stay at home, so they worked harder. Now they're getting back into their old habits of going on PornHub [laughter] and extended lunches or whatever instead of working. It's a control thing. Obviously talking about culture and rubbing together. I think part of it also is whether we're in a high unemployment place or not. Joel: Certainly if employment's going up, then the ability to let these people go that wanna work from home is easier to do. They're the easiest people to lay off as many companies are going through layoffs. I'm still optimistic that when the dust clears, our children will and their children will be in a more remote workplace, a more fluid, lifestyle where they can work in multiple places, go different places. I'm still optimistic that the future is going to bend toward more autonomy, more remote work opportunities. But for right now it's the pendulum is swinging a little bit back to the power of the employer. Chad: Any leader that says productivity is a problem, that's a leadership problem. If they're saying that things aren't getting done, that's a leadership problem, that's not a people problem. It's ridiculous. If they're not getting projects done, if they're not meeting quotas, I mean, these are things that we put in place to be able to analyze how a person's spending their time and if they're actually getting to those goals. So it's fairly simple. Those are individuals. If they're underperforming, they get put on a PIP or they... And or they get fired. That's it. Right? Chad: So yeah. I think these are all just kinda like traps. Whether the company is... The real estate is being used or not, with the productivity, they've been making more profits. So who gives a fuck? Write out the lease and then get rid of the goddamn thing. The big thing that we talked about before is taxes. And will some of these cities come back at the companies and say, "Hey, look, you said that you were going to have thousands of people come in, which was going to boost more, more spending in the actual city." That's something that I think is legit. But then we have to talk about and how we evolve work and then how those different areas outside of the city actually evolve too. Joel: Yeah, good point about the government benefits and tax breaks the companies have been getting. I'd forgotten about that almost as much as I had forgotten about OnlyFans which we have not talked about in months. Chad: We have not. Joel: So if you've been missing it, like I have, [laughter] stick around kids. Chad: Oh, you haven't been missing it. Joel: All right, Chad, let's talk a little OnlyFans. Chad: Okay. Joel: Jazmen Jafar. Chad: Huh? Joel: I'll spell that for the kids that wanna Google it later, J-A-Z-M-E-N, Jafar J-A-F-A-R. Chad: Sounds like a Disney character. Aladdin. Joel: I'm pretty sure it's not her real name. Jazmen Jafar, the 27-year-old attorney or should I say former attorney has left her law career to join OnlyFans where she has earned over $180,000 in the first three months of 2023. Chad: What? Joel: Through subscriptions costing $6.99 per month. Chad: Wow. Joel: Jafar had been working in law for just under six months when she decided to change her career. She had created an OnlyFans account in early of 2021, but had only dabbled in content creation. Jafar said that she only went into law to please her parents, who I'm sure are just thrilled of her new career choice and is now much happier as an OnlyFans creator. Chad, your take on our first lawyer. I think turning to OnlyFans. We've had a cop, a nurse, a teacher. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. Joel: Now we have a lawyer. Your thoughts? Chad: It is amazing. And for some, some people I mean, 'cause I'm sure men do it too, just not as many. It's liberating and being able to create content, do what you want, and mom, dad doesn't like it, buy 'em a fucking house, they'll be fine. Right? At the end of the day. So it's really interesting that she... I think it actually said she made per month what she made all year, her annual salary as an attorney. So yeah, I mean, if you're a hot person and you don't mind a little risque, then OnlyFans might be the side hustle for you or new gig. Joel: Yeah. There's somebody for everyone on OnlyFans I'm sure. [laughter] So yeah. So $180,000 in the first three months of OnlyFans she was making, $75,000 a year as a lawyer. Chad: Wow. Joel: As far as I'm concerned, anyone objecting to this career change is likely to be overruled, Jazmen Jafar. Speaker 4: What are you doing step bro? Joel: Good on you and 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 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.

Too often, marketing and Human Resources seem to speak different languages, which is a shame, because they have so much in common. The message that happy employees equals happy customers is ignored by too many companies. That’s we brought Brett Marz, co-founder at BAMKO (not to be mistaken for Ronco). Haven’t heard of BAMKO? They’re a more than $200 million company that designs, manufactures, and delivers award-winning branded merchandise for some of the world’s biggest brands, typically supporting employee engagement items. Needless to say, he has a lot to say on the disconnect between marketing and talent acquisition, and you’re going to hear about it. Enjoy. 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. If you don't know us, ask your mother. This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman. Joined as always, the Bonnie to my Clyde, Chad Sowash. And today, welcome co-founder at BAMKO Brett Marz. Welcome to the show, my man. Chad: What's going on, dude? Brett Marz: Thank you, guys. Joel: BAMKO, not to be mistaken for Ronco. Brett Marz: We are not Ronco, and thank you for having me. I am excited to be here. Joel: Some of our listeners may not even know what Ronco is. What did he make? He made a sandwich maker or the turkey rotisserie thing? Chad: Was it all food? I think it was Ronco. Joel: Mostly it was food, Ronco. Chad: I think it was. Before the Home Shopping Network, these were the commercials that you receive, right? Joel: Yes. And the guy's name was Ron, which was really creative. Chad: Ronco, yeah. Joel: Yes. It was all rotisserie chicken makers [laughter] and dehydrators. He had a dehydrator. [laughter] And the pocket fisherman. Yes. [laughter] Chad: Pocket fisherman. Okay so Brett, that's not you. So, we know who you're not. Tell us who BAMKO is. Brett Marz: That is not who we are. But now I'm gonna do some research and try and dive into that situation. BAMKO is a company I co-founded with Phil Koosed my elementary school best friend in college, we went to USC. We started selling promotional items to sororities and fraternities. We quickly realized that there was a lot of opportunity for growth. And so we started getting into the merchandise category. And today the business is publicly traded, company called SGC bought us. We are 8800 people working with 4000 brands and outfitting 10 million plus people a day, from Walmart to Target, to CVS, to JetBlue, Frontier, Applebees, IHOP, Denny's, and working with the world's biggest companies out there on their merchandise strategy and also their customer retention strategy and their employee retention strategy. So we do a lot here. Nobody probably even knows who we are, but you walk into your house and you would find product that we make on behalf of brands out there in the world. Joel: Is the college campus custom t-shirt business dead? Has the internet officially killed that business? Brett Marz: It is not. When we got into that business, everything was sold through a catalog and so our whole thing was like, well, maybe we could be better by being in person. You can touch and feel the shirts. It was a fun business, I'll tell you that much. But sororities, there were a lot of incredible opinions, and fraternities when we used to go and collect our money would tell us that they just blew it on their last party on alcohol and whatever else. And so they never could pay their bills. Chad: Sounds enjoyable. Brett Marz: A fun business, a fun business. Joel: Sounds fun. Sounds like a blast. Brett Marz: Yeah. But one that wasn't always easy to deal with. [laughter] Chad: So you deal with brand leaders, from major, major brands on a daily basis, and there's no way in hell that you started off with retention, employee retention and attraction or experience or any of that. How did that even come into the part of the consultation or a part of what you guys did for companies? Brett Marz: Yeah, great question. So I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I started selling Pogs, if any of you remember what those were. At the age of 12 on the Santa Monica Pier here in... Joel: Sorry, you gotta let us... Define Pog. I feel like if you tell me, I'll remember. Brett Marz: You don't know a Pog? It's like these little disks that you would trade and there were slammers. Chad: Oh, yes. Brett Marz: Oh, man. Okay. All right. Well, look 'em up. They're like, garbage pill kids or baseball cards. Joel: Beanie Babies was my passion. Brett Marz: Or Beanie Babies, there you go. [laughter] That's awkward. But that's cute. No, that's awesome. Joel: Don't judge me. Brett Marz: So, that's where I was at the age of 12 getting arrested on the Santa Monica Pier. Joel: That escalated quickly. Brett Marz: And so I've always been coming up with businesses. And so when we sold the company in 2016, one of the things that I was really passionate about was taking the knowledge of working with all these companies and all these brands and doing something more with it. Merch is a great category. Displays, promo, all fun categories. But at the end of the day, if you could take these products and do something more meaningful for a brand with them, that would be really cool. So we had all these resources, we had all these people, we had all this ability to do more with brands. And I told my partner and our team, I said, "I think I'm gonna go be an entrepreneur in residence on behalf of big brands and I'm gonna go start working with these chief people officers, chief human resource officers, chief brand officers, chief marketing officers, chief membership officers. And I'm gonna help them with, I think an area that a lot of companies struggle, which is how to retain talent and how to retain customers." There's a lot of similarities. You do nice things for people, you treat them well and they're pretty happy to spend money at the brand. And they're pretty happy to work for the brand. Chad: Well, yeah. But they, generally companies just care about the customer part. They don't care about the employee part. Brett Marz: You're right. Chad: They're spending more of their time on trying to attract customers, but they're not really worried about the "experience." So you were just telling us before we hit record about a conversation that you just had with a brand leader. Tell us a little bit more about that conversation. Brett Marz: We work with a lot of really large companies. Your Fortune 100. And of 'em recently brought us in and said, "We've got a customer retention issue. Our NPS scores are very low. Our customers basically hate us." And I said, "That's terrible. [laughter] That's really not good." Chad: That sucks. Brett Marz: That's really bad. And they said, "We'd like to do a really nice gift for these customers that hate us." Joel: A nice beefy tea will cure what ails. Brett Marz: Yeah, that's it. Like, let's get 'em a koozie and a frisbee and that'll solve it. [laughter] And I basically said, "I don't know if that's gonna be the route. Talk to me about why they hate your brand so much." "Well, when they come into our stores, our employees aren't really always nice to them. Don't treat 'em that well." I said, "Great. So let's pause for one second. What are you doing for your employees to make them feel appreciated by your own brand?" "I don't see how that's related." "Well, I'll tell you, it's really related. Your employees are miserable and therefore they're making your customers miserable. Do you see this? Do you see the... You see where I'm going?" "No." "Well, okay, let me back up." [laughter] Chad: These people are in charge of experience. Joel: Yeah. Let's underscore that these are Fortune 500 companies. Brett Marz: Oh yeah. This isn't Joe's Hardware. Joel: Yeah. This isn't the college campus t-shirt shop. [laughter] Brett Marz: Nope, not at all. We're talking to big, big, big companies and I said, "Well look, one of the things that we talk to brands about is making their employees feel appreciated, feel special. And in turn what will often happen is those employees will tell their friends how great the brand is, tell their family how amazing their employer is and they'll actually become a walking billboard for you." And this concept is like, I'm not... Am I talking in a foreign language? This is simple, right? Do nice things for people. They will in turn do nice things. And I think one of the brands that I always actually look at is In-N-Out Burger. So we work with a lot of quick service restaurant companies out there in the world. You name one of 'em and they're probably someone we've worked with or are working with. Brett Marz: And their biggest challenge is retention and turnover. And the employees feel like the brand doesn't care about them. If you've ever walked into an In-N-Out Burger, and I know it's a West Coast thing, although they did just announce Nashville, their employees are really happy. Their employees don't wanna typically leave the brand. And it's because their founder and their entire team takes so much pride in how they treat these people. And they do picnics and they do incredible things. They have all these safety programs and they have awards and recognitions and they take them on amazing trips. Now you might say, well what does that lead to? It leads to a customer walking into In-N-Out feeling really good because the employees are happy and they're smiling. Joel: I will say you feel better after you leave In-N-Out because you've just eaten in and out, but you are happy going in. I agree. Brett Marz: That's true. Joel: Feels like you're going back in time to the '50s when you go to In-N-Out. Brett Marz: It's an incredible brand. It's privately owned, they've done a fantastic job, but they've created a culture where people wanna work there and they're happy to work there. And I think that that is something that is so missed by so many brands that are so focused, we just need more customers. That's it. We just need more customers. Joel: And guess what, right Brett? They have friends who are looking for jobs that wanna go work for In-N-Out. So it becomes this self-fulfilling recruitment machine where your employees are happy, they tell their friends about it and their friends go, "Well I wanna go work at In-N-Out too. Can you get me a job there?" The money they save in recruiting dollars and retention must be amazing in the service sector. Brett Marz: Their retention is not even a fair comparison to any of their competitors in their space. It's just not even close. And people say, "Oh, because they pay so much more per hour." They actually don't anymore. They pay well. But look at Target, look at Amazon, look at Starbucks. They're paying plenty per hour and they don't have any comparison in terms of the turnover that they're having. And I think that brands historically have always said, we'll just pay more and that'll be the solve. But if you look at today's demographic of who's working in these hourly jobs or just in general, people want more. And if you play that well, that's a walking billboard. You think of these companies that have hundreds of thousands of employees out there. We trust people that we know. We trust our family. We trust our friends. Not to say you don't trust the Kardashians. Brett Marz: I'm sure many people do when they post, people go, but there's a lot of people out there that no longer trust as many of the influencers out there. They go to their friends and family for trust. So play that out. I'm an employee at a company and I start telling my friends and family shop at this brand, buy from this brand. They are an incredible company. What does that cost the brand? No extra money. These are employees. They're being paid anyway. So this is the bleed into marketing that I'm seeing that is often being missed, marketing saying, let's just get more customers. Right? I am the chief marketing officer, I'm the chief membership officer. We just need more customers. But why is HR and marketing, why aren't there more conversations with those two departments strategizing on, well, look, we got 500,000 walking billboards. Chad: I think from a marketing standpoint, marketing already has a blind spot with HR and they don't think that they have any connection to HR, to be quite frank. And I think that's demonstrated through the conversations that you've had. And then I think HR is just, in most cases they're too afraid to go to marketing, to be able to ask to combine forces and or prospectively get some budget to be able to do some things to fill in some of those slots. 'Cause I think here's the biggest issue from marketing standpoint and sales and the entire business is that if you don't have the people, the product's not gonna get made. Chad: It can't get sold. You can't be serviced. There's nothing that can happen without the actual people in place. And then if you don't have enough people in place because of attrition, then the people that you do have, you spread too thin. So you might have somebody who really eagerly wants to do a great job, but they can't because they're spread too thin because you can't fill all the positions. So, from our standpoint, we've been trying now for, hell, years with marketing and going to the Gathering and working with a cult brand to be able to talk about marketing and their blind spot and how they don't realize that, again, this is something that doesn't just impact the employees. This impacts the entire business. Brett Marz: I talked to a top five airline recently and we were talking to their HR team and I said, "I called you airline recently, and I was put on hold for two hours to add my baby, a lap child." And by the way, I am very high in the status of this wonderful airline. And they said, "Oh yeah, we've got a big, big problem on the hiring side and keeping these these employees happy." I said, "Well, what if we did something for them? What if we put together a really cool program and started doing nice things?" At some of the brands we work with, they do birthday gifts, they do anniversary gifts, they do all these wonderful things, new parent gifts. And their answer was, oh yeah, we can't spend the money on that. Brett Marz: And I'm sitting here saying, you can't spend the money on your employees, but yet as a customer who's very high on the status tier, I'm done with your airline because I don't wanna sit for two hours to add a lap child. And I don't want to be treated the way you treat me on the airplane anymore. So my loyalty, despite all my points with you, it's out the door. But yet you're sitting here telling me you're gonna put new colors on the airplane and you're gonna make pretty lounges and you're gonna do these things, but you're still going to put me on hold for two hours. You're still not going to invest into your employees. And I'm still, as a customer going to be treated pretty poorly. Is something missing there, am I not following here? Chad: It's the correlation to gaining business or losing business. Now, there was reportedly $8 billion of loss from attrition for Amazon, they actually, somebody put that into a dollar figure, right? 8 billion from an attrition standpoint, that means something to Amazon. They know they have a problem. How they fix it is an entirely different discussion. If we don't make the connection between you being on hold for two hours and losing a platinum diamond, one world star kind of guy, if you don't make that connection, then they don't care. It just seems like they don't care and talent acquisition and HR, it is upon us to make that connection. And we have not been doing it. Brett Marz: I go to these conferences from marketing that are out there in the world and everything is about the customer and the advertising and the commercials and that's great. But if you don't keep those customers, you're done. If you don't treat them well, you're done. Look, venture capital, as you guys have seen, have had a few years of fun, spending money frivolously to gain customers. Chad: Yes. Brett Marz: I work with one of these on-demand companies and many years ago I said, "You're all gonna be fighting for talent in this on-demand space." And they said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, you're all fighting for the same person that's either gonna pick up a person in their car or pick up groceries or deliver food or you're all fighting for talent. Do you think it makes sense that we build a program to help you differentiate yourself so that these people that are contractors working for your brand, feel loved, feel appreciated, want to work with your brand more than the next?" "I don't get it. Why would that be good for us?" What do you mean you don't get it? And guess what, we all saw this. Everyone's fighting for the same pool of talent and that's okay because we have venture capital money and we can just keep giving 'em $5, $10 coupons to keep shopping or buying or spending at our brand. And that'll last forever. And it's okay. We don't need to make money ever. We just won't make money as a company. Joel: Brett, you touched on something there, which was the gig economy. When there used to be a cartel of local jobs that all paid about the same, right? McDonald's, Applebee's, Chili's, Walmart, there wasn't a whole lot of delineation from the opportunities in a local market. Now you have a position where freedom is the number one value that most people want and they can live modestly enough. But the freedom to drive when I want, deliver food when I want, deliver groceries when I want, that seems like a really hard thing to fight against if you're not in and out. Or I would put Chick-fil-A maybe in that same breath, or Starbucks for some people. For the local, long John Silvers that wants to lure the Uber driver to their opportunity, can they do it? What advice would you give them? Brett Marz: One of my favorite stories was I got in an Uber recently and the driver's wearing a Lyft jacket. [laughter] Brett Marz: And I said... Joel: And a DoorDash hat. Brett Marz: No, he had that in the trunk. He had the DoorDash shopping bags. [laughter] And I said to the guy said, I said, "Hey, I know I clicked Uber, but I see you wearing a Lyft jacket." And his response is, "Yeah, Lyft actually cares about me and I wish you would've clicked the Lyft button." Joel: Wow. Brett Marz: "But you clicked the Uber button and I'm on both. So I responded." I said, "Well, what do you mean they care about you?" He is like, "They just do, look, they gave me this awesome jacket, they gave me this nice swag, they care about me." And I'm thinking, my God, if Uber knew that I'm in their car with the guy wearing the Lyft jacket, promoting Lyft, would they care? I don't know, maybe they wouldn't. But that is really powerful. You don't walk into, I don't know, pick a store, Macy's, Target and them sitting there, the guy's wearing the Walmart shirt saying, "Go to Walmart. [laughter] You gotta go to Walmart. This place sucks. They suck here. You don't wanna... WE don't wanna shop here." In what world? And I think we've... Brett Marz: Look, we went through COVID and it was like, some things were acceptable and it's okay. It's COVID, we're dealing with it. Okay, well, we're past that now. Now we have to go back to remembering what it was like to care for people. Now, during COVID, I don't know if you realize how many companies sent all these gifts to their employees. We love you. We care about you. Here's a gift, here's a workout kit. [laughter] Brett Marz: Here's a S'mores kit. The amount of gifts we sent, it was hundreds and hundreds of thousands of kits sent to people's homes. And then it just like, it was it, that's it. We don't care about you anymore. [laughter] Brett Marz: That's over. Go back to work and yeah, keep going. Joel: And get back in the office while you're at it. Brett Marz: What happened? Look, you obviously are watching the layoffs. There's clearly a way to do that well, and there's clearly a way that will end you in... [laughter] Brett Marz: Quite a few lawsuits if you read what's going on with some brands out there. And I think that those people, the 10,000, the 20,000 that were just laid off, either it was a good experience or it was something out of a horrible movie. And those people now become wonderful walking billboards, or they become the CMO's worst nightmare because they will go and destroy the brand every day. That's all they're gonna do day in and day out. They're gonna tell people this story. Anyone that will listen, "You wouldn't believe how they laid me off. I showed up and my key card was either red or green when I swiped it. It was like a game show but this was my life. This was my job, and I'm out. Don't shop here, don't buy here, don't use this tech company. They're the worst. They don't care about people." Chad: And these aren't just front line either. This is all the way up and down the hierarchy. We're not just talking about the guy at In-N-Out Burger that's delivering your sandwich. We're talking about every position that is being treated like this right now, other than, maybe in the C-suite. [laughter] Joel: And by the way, Brett, with social media, their ability to extend the reach of that commentary is exponential to what it was 10, 20, 30 years ago. Brett Marz: I'm not sure if you're following some of the stuff that's on the employees at Google on social media talking about, "And I started my day at the coffee shop, and then I went and had a snack at the snack bar where I could choose 25 different kinds of nuts. And then... " [laughter] Brett Marz: "I went in the pod and took a nap. And then I got laid off." So you can't treat people so well and give them pods to nap in and unlimited snacks and Michelin three star chefs, and then be like, "And get the hell outta here." This is their life. This is... People dedicate 10, 20, 40, 50 hours plus a week to these brands. That's a lot. It's a third of their day is spent at these companies and we're missing it. We're missing the mark so badly. You go to a hotel... I was just on with a big hotel chain. You go to a hotel today and I don't know, you'd pick a brand, whether it's the Courtyard by Marriott or it's the Waldorf by Hilton, or it's whoever, you're paying more than you've ever paid in your life for that hotel. It's just a fact. And then you're gonna go to that hotel and tell me how that experience is. They're short housekeeping. They're short staffed in the kitchen. They're short staffed, the bellman, luggage, they're short, but you're paying more. And now you're gonna leave that brand and be like, "What just happened? I just spent all this money." Chad: Why go back? Brett Marz: And why am I going back? I went to a hotel recently and I checked in and they said, "We're short on housekeepers." I was like, "Oh. So no one coming into the room?" "Well, there's a towel in there, and if you need more, come down to the front desk and we'll give you more." I said, "Okay, great. Is the gym still open?" "No, the the gym is not open." "Okay. But COVID is over." "Yeah. Well, the machines, some of them just aren't working anymore, so we're just on... It's not gonna work." "Okay. By the way, anywhere I can get a bite to eat?" "No, sorry, the restaurants are closed." I was like, "So room service available?" She like, looked at me and laughed. [laughter] Brett Marz: No, we have no food. There's no water. You're getting one towel and good luck. Chad: Why are you open? [laughter] Chad: Why are you open? Brett Marz: It's a massive hotel in New York. And I was like, "Where am I right now? Is this a do-it-yourself facility? Am I in an Airbnb? I'm confused. What's going on right now?" So we have a choice as employers, we can treat people right, do right by them, or we can just keep spending on marketing and get more people in the door and hope that that's the end all. Joel: Brett, where are you on automization? I think a lot of employers are hoping the clock winds down on having to hire people to do jobs. We know Amazon is implementing thousands of robots every month in their warehouses. But you also lose the human touch. Could you ever imagine In-N-Out being a kiosk and one person bringing you food? So where are you on automation and all this? Brett Marz: This is a perfect topic right now. So I went into Starbucks yesterday and grabbed a coffee. Now, we have taken the human element out of Starbucks. You mobile order. It used to be you'd walk into a Starbucks, "Brett, Brett, is Brett here?" "Hey, I'm Brett." "Hey, how are you? Here's your coffee." There's not that anymore. That's done. So I walk up to the counter because mobile ordering is shut down. And I said, "Hey, I notice the mobile ordering is shut down." "Oh yeah, we just turned it off." "Oh, any reason?" "It was just annoying us. We just turned it off." [laughter] Chad: Not paying me enough to take mobile orders, Brett. Brett Marz: Apparently they have the ability to just turn it off, and that's the end. You get what you get. So I said, "I'd like a Venti coffee whatever." And I noticed next to the register, they had a joke of the day, a riddle of the day. I said, "That's neat. You have a riddle." They said, "We're trying something to try and interact with our customers in a better way." And I said, "That's fantastic. So you have a riddle of the day. And we tried to solve it and I didn't solve it." And I said, "But your mobile ordering is down." "Yeah, we don't want to... It's just annoying." "Okay, so you wanna do riddles, but you don't wanna do mobile ordering, which made our life very easy because you wanna make this experience more interactive for everyone." Brett Marz: "That's right." "Okay, I just wanted to make sure I got that all right. I'm just trying to take notes for when I launch a coffee shop in the future." Later on that day, I went to Westfield, which is a large shopping mall. And I go in and you get the ticket from the automation machine. And as I'm on the way out, the line is 20 deep and it's only machines. However, every machine now has a human standing there. And so as I'm on my way out, I hand the ticket to the lady and I said, "Aren't these automated machines?" "Yeah, nobody can figure 'em out. And so we have to stand here." So instead of the booth that was one person, you now have six people standing in front of six automated machines. What happened? Where'd you go wrong? So we wanted to automate that, right? Brett Marz: And instead of automation, they now have six people doing what one person used to be doing. And God knows how much they spent on these machines. And I can keep going through this. I was at Target last week with my kids. I pull up with a cart. I don't know if you guys have three kids. When you go through Target, you got a full cart. And that's just how it's gonna be with my three kids. As at the ages they are nine, six, and two, and I go to the checkout and there's no more person at a register, they're all closed. There's only self checkout. Now, let me tell you what that's like with the kid, the baby screaming and the other two wanting to run around as I'm trying to scan my groceries out of the thing. [laughter] Brett Marz: They're not working. They have a code. You need to enter the password. It's locked. There's a sensor. I need the sensor person to come undo it. And I'm like, "Wow, you've really created a wonderful experience for me as a customer that is just about to spend $500 on your wonderful self-checkout system." So while we are trying to use automation to make it easier, it's also not working in some cases. Now, you might argue, but it's better because they don't have to have employees. No, they're just pissing me off more as the customer. [laughter] Brett Marz: Because I'm now the employee. I now work for Target when I go to Target, because I now do my self-checkout. Chad: Where's my W2? Brett Marz: I'd like a discount. [laughter] Brett Marz: I'm sitting here for 30 minutes, scanning my groceries out of your place of business, and I'm paying you for that experience. Joel: Devil's advocate here. There are some serious issues to think about. Like a million people died from COVID in this country, 77 million baby boomers are retiring or are getting to retirement age. We've more or less shut off the border, or we've said to immigrants, "We don't really want you here anyway." You can keep paying people more, but you have the gig... It's a very complex issue. So if it's not automation, certainly everyone can't treat every employee like the best employers do. Realistically, what's your solution? Brett Marz: Okay. So they can't treat everyone the best that they can do. But you gotta improve it a little. I talk to so many chief people officers on a daily basis, and my question is simple, what are you doing for your people? What are you doing for your employees? And again, we're in the uniform business. So we outfit all these people every day when they start work. It's simple things. I'm not saying you have to spend a lot of time or money, but Joel, if I start working at your retailer, restaurant and I'm working five days a week and you give me two t-shirts, what are you saying to me? "Wear your shirt multiple times in the restaurant." It's okay. It's gonna smell, it's gonna be disgusting and dirty. Or go home and do laundry every night because we're not gonna give you five t-shirts because that would cost us another $7. Brett Marz: These aren't... I'm not asking you to spend a fortune, maybe a handwritten note. "Hey, welcome to the brand. You just committed eight hours a day, 40 hours a week to working at our company. Thank you. Here are some things to know about our brand." I don't think this is rocket science. I'm not saying you have to revamp and spend tens of thousands of dollars. There are the extremes. I don't know if you follow this company, Chewy. They send out millions of handwritten cards. They send out flowers when your pet passes away, they do portraits of your pet. They do all these wonderful things. They're a dog food company. That's what they do. They sell dog food. How come people don't leave the brand? Because they show that they care about you as a customer. And guess what? They do the same thing for the employees. Brett Marz: They do nice things, they treat them well. I'm not expecting that. I think that's the extreme. But I also think that they're simple things you can do as a brand to show your appreciation. I talked to someone the other day and she was hitting her 15 year anniversary. I said, "Oh, what'd they do for you?" She goes, "What'd they do for me?" I said... [laughter] Brett Marz: "Yeah, what'd they do? It's your 15 years." She goes, "Nothing." I said, "Oh, they gotta do something." She's like, "No, zero." I'm like, "God damn, that's a miss." Chad: How do we get marketing to understand that this is actually part of the experience? Because what they're doing is they're looking back at HR saying, "No, it's just those guys." Or it's the rest of the business. It has nothing to do with us when in fact it does because it impacts the experience. It impacts revenue, it impacts being able to even open more wallet share up for more of these. So, what do we have to do to shake marketing enough to get them to fucking listen? Brett Marz: Marketing needs to start going to the HR conferences and or the HR conferences need to be part of marketing or HR and marketing need to start coming to say, look, every time you talk to someone in HR we're the stepchild, we were really exciting during COVID because people were like, "Holy shit, where's HR? We need HR. This is a disaster. Our people, our people, our people." What happened? Where'd that go? Why don't we... Why aren't we still caring about the people? So you have Chief Human resource Officer, Chief People Officer. We'd like to introduce you to the Chief Marketing Officer. Y'all work for the same company. How often do you talk? Not enough. Not enough. Marketing has all the money. They have all the money. They're gonna just keep running commercials and spending on ads and doing wonderful things. Give some of that money to HR. Brett Marz: This is mind blowing to me that HR is back to being the no, no, no. That's HR. We can't... We don't have money for that. We gotta put it into marketing. No, HR is marketing. Marketing is HR. Your people are marketing for the brand. You just don't realize it. They are... We had a company the other day call us and say, "We really gotta step up our swag game." And I said, "Oh... [laughter] Brett Marz: What's that mean?" Joel: Yes, you did. Brett Marz: "Oh my God, our competitors are sending out these really nice welcome kits to their new employees. And we don't really do that." And I'm like, "Oh, okay. So what does that look like to you?" "I don't know. We just gotta have better swag so that when they post about it on LinkedIn and social media, people will see that we too care about our people." "Okay, well we'll give 'em a Frisbee and we'll call it a day." "Okay. That's it. That's the solve?" Joel: Marketing sees their brand on LinkedIn and they see we need to advertise more via our employees. They don't think we need to make our employees feel better and they're part of the brand. They're hoping to get more brand awareness through social media. I think they look at it... Chad: When they can do both. Joel: Probably differently. Brett Marz: Yes, they can do both. They can do both. Joel: I agree. Brett Marz: It's one and the same. If I sent you out today despite poor Southwest Airlines, they've had a rough go for the last couple months. They're the only company that sends me a birthday card every year. They remember my birthday like clockwork. It's so nice of them. I spend the least amount with that company. But Joel, if I sent you a gift today from your current employer, which would be awkward 'cause you're kind of the employer, but if I sent you this wonderful gift that said, "Happy birthday, Joel, I hope you're having an incredible day. You're friends at Tan Cheese." What would you do? You'd be like, "Wow. It was really nice." They remembered my birthday. And by the way, I could send something simple. Brett Marz: I could send you a postcard, but now you're gonna go be... You're gonna go tell your friends and family all day. You wouldn't believe my company sent my wife a gift for her birthday. And it was yesterday. It was Valentine's Day. So you don't screw that one up. Just no, don't screw up your wife's birthday that is on Valentine's Day. So my company sends her a gift and it's signed by the president. Now, do you really think our president's sitting there picking the gift for my wife? No. She ran into my office. "You wouldn't believe it. Your president just sent me a birthday gift." Guess what? Five of her friends texted me, your president actually sent your wife a birthday gift? I was like, "What is she talking? How do her friends know that my president sent her a birthday gift when he didn't even send it." Chad: But in her mind, president did. And that's all that mattered. Brett Marz: That is all that mattered. Joel: Take a tip from Chad and Cheese, free liquor and t-shirts are some of the best marketing you'll ever buy. [applause] Chad: Brett, if our listeners wanna find out more and maybe even connect with you, where would you send them? Brett Marz: I am B-R-E-T-T at B-A-M-K-O.net. We couldn't afford.com when we started 23 years ago. So it's brettbamko.net. And I am passionate about this topic. I need more marketers to understand that they need to connect with the HR side of things within their company. Joel: Chad, we're done. I'm gonna go buy a pocket fisherman at Ronco. [laughter] 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 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.

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] Chad: Hey it's Chad and today we have a special edition of the Chad and Cheese podcast for you. [music] Chad: That music can only mean one thing, a Swedish twist. As Sara Dalsfelt, Head of Brand & Community over at Adway invited Joel and myself to come on her show to talk about building a TA powerhouse through tech, automation and revenue growth. That's right, revenue growth. [music] Chad: With over 1800 people registered for this show, Joel and I knew that we had to bring the heat, so we did. Enjoy. [music] Sara: Good morning, good evening and good afternoon from Sweden and welcome to this month's livestream with Adway on the topic. Build Your TA powerhouse with tech, automation and showcasing revenue growth. We are finally back and we have over 1800 signups so we'll give you, everyone a couple of minutes to get settled. And in the meantime, if you're excited, fire away with emojis, show your energy and let us know where you are tuning in from. For anyone that's new, my name is Sara. I'm a part of Adway and we do automated social recruitment marketing enabling a 24/7 storytelling experience in social media to attract your most desired candidates, fully automated while leaving the bias out. Sara: Now everyone for the moment you've been waiting for, the coming 30 minutes will be a game changing livestream featuring the ultimate disruptors of TA. They fearlessly challenge the status quo in recruitment, boldly embrace cutting edge TA strategies and relentlessly advocate for the power of TA to drive business success. So this is your moment to learn from the trailblazers who are shaking up the industry and transforming the way we approach talent acquisition. I introduce to you ladies and gentlemen, the most requested guests of the show, the cheesiest TA duo, Chad and Cheese aka Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman. Welcome. [applause] Joel: Pleasure to be here. Did you say... Chad: Cheers. Joel: Did you say 1800? Sara: I said 1800. Yeah. What do you think? Joel: That's a lot of unemployed recruiters that have time then. Who doesn't watch this? Sara: Welcome, welcome, welcome to the live... Joel: Game changing, Chad. That's a lot of pressure. Sara: Yeah. Yeah. How about that intro guys? Like that sets the scene, right? Joel: Yeah. That's the page, yeah. We're to underperform and overpromise. Chad: You should be our hype girl, that's for sure. Sara: Yeah, yeah. Hundred percent. Joel: Yours at the night club by the way. Sara: Yeah. Before we jump into the intros about you guys let me just remind everyone watching live with us that if you comment "summary" you'll be sent the full summary with all the key takeaways and the recording. So bomb away in the comment section if that is in your interest. So Joel and Chad, you've been the North Star for TA for years at least Adway's and mine. But for anyone who's new to you can you tell us how you are changing and disrupting the industry of TA and what you're doing to help us get even smarter and wiser? Joel: It's a low bar for disruption. That's how it is. Sara: Oh, no, no, no. Joel: I dunno. I mean, I'll let Chad... I mean you can see both of our bios everywhere online. Obviously a lot of people are connected on LinkedIn to us but I mean we're just old guys that have been around and have history. Yeah, we're old Chad. Sorry. And we have perspective. We've seen a lot of stuff. We can bring historical context to what's going on, which helps you predict the future, which gives you the ability to sort of analyze current things in a way that a lot of people that have been in the industry for just a few years don't have. I think we're lucky enough that we have some chemistry whether it's a grumpy kind of old guy chemistry, I don't know. We definitely have a face for podcasting and just kind of on a whim and both of our wives telling us to do something with our lives, we bought a couple of mics and started a podcast and here we are six years laters. Sara: Here we are. Joel: Believe it or not. Chad: Here we are. Well and I mean and we don't report to anybody so we don't have bosses other than our wives. And so we're not afraid to say what everybody else is thinking. And that's a problem with our industry mainly is that we think a certain thing but we're afraid to say it because of being PC or whatever the guideline is, right? So it's speaking truth to power a lot of times, we see a lot of stupid shit that happens in the industry and everybody points at it but nobody says anything. It's our job to say something. So we have people that now I mean almost like insiders at many organizations who help us to be able to dig up what's actually happening in some of these situations. So it's been a blast. I mean our following has been really a cult following. They wear t-shirts, they get... Sara: They do. Chad: We send them booze. We send them beer. So yeah, I mean this is about what we feel, two middle-aged White guys feel like the industry needs. We need truth. And so we try to bring it, we do our best. Put it that way. Joel: And honestly, it's as rewarding for us as hopefully our listeners that do listen. The fact that we're on a video call with Sweden from our homes in Indiana to the rest of the world is just a fascinating thing to sort of digest. Sara: It's speaking, it's speaking, guys. Joel: But it's an honor to do what we do frankly. And there's probably even more joy in what we do than the people who listen in and love our show. Sara: Yes. And I'm happy to say that that honor is also ours. Like we've been following you since day one of Adway. We're just a five-year old company though. But I mean the way you are approaching and like just not... 'Cause I mean we love talking, right? It's an industry, a lot of talks, a lot of seminars, a lot of sit downs, a lot of round tables. You actually you guys are demanding action and I love that. That's what we love about you guys as well. So that takes us into today's topic where we're sort of gonna describe the ultimate way of building your TA powerhouse like utilizing automation tech and of course showcasing revenue growth. So if I were just like straight up asking you like what is your recommendations on how TA can and should build the most resilient TA setup, built upon these three factors, what would your short answer be? Joel: So we get asked this a lot. A little historical perspective like I mentioned in my intro there, this game used to be pretty simple. It used to be post some jobs, where do I post them? Well, okay here's some good places where you can do that. Okay. They go into a little ATS, you interview them, schedule some shit. I mean it was pretty straightforward and your options were pretty limited in terms of your strategy. Today it's so fucking confusing. I mean Chad and I... I'm sorry, can you F-bomb on this show? I guess I just did no matter what. Chad: Just did. [chuckle] Sara: You just did. Joel: Oh, sorry. My LinkedIn profile is now gone apparently. No but everyone wants like a silver bullet for Chad and I to drop on them that's gonna solve all their problems. And there is no silver bullet to solve all their problems. It's very custom, it's very localized, it's very business specific. Now there are great tools out there like G2, your own network, obviously there are podcasts, blogs, YouTube channels all over the place talking about this stuff. But you have to do your homework. You have to do your due diligence to find the tools that are gonna work best for you. Joel: I think for me the tech stack in being successful really goes back to three things that if you don't have these foundational pieces, it doesn't matter if you do have a silver bullet, it's ultimately going to fail. And one of those things is simply treat people like human beings. We treat people so often as resources, we're ghosting people, the application process sucks. So I mean just treating people well is number one in the mission here. Number two is pay them well. Treat them well, pay them well. We're fortunate at least in America where pay transparency is trending. And your inability to not tell people what you're paying them is quickly going away. So paying them a good wage. Joel: And number three is giving people hope, that they're not stuck where they are, that they can move upwards. Upskilling is a huge topic on our show. But if people feel like they're in a dead end, go nowhere opportunity, they're gonna leave. So if you don't have, treat people well, pay them well and give them hope, it doesn't matter how good your technology is, it's gonna fail. Sara: Yeah. Absolute foundation. Yep. Chad: Yeah. And Joel and doing the homework that's what we at least help organizations do their homework or at least start to look in different areas where they should be smarter, they should be focusing. And in our industry, we set up systems that last for years and that is wrong. We need to be fluid. People are fluid, the market's fluid, everything is fluid. But yet we buy a piece of tech and we just let it sit there and fester. Then it becomes an open wound and then we point at it and say we have shitty tech and it's the vendor's fault. No. It's not the vendor's fault. If you didn't do your due diligence upfront number one and understand the capabilities of the tech not to mention also roadmap and those types of things, major due diligence and then if you just let it sit there and you didn't provide the fluidity, right? Then that's a huge problem. Chad: And then how do we pay for it? We've got today... We used to have an applicant tracking system and job boards and that was it. Right? Today we have so many different point solutions, so many different versions of tech stacks and things of that nature. Then we have to be able to really understand business to pay for these things. Right? We can't just do business and sit back like Oliver Twist and wait for more fucking gruel because it's not gonna happen. We have to be the business drivers. We, not sales, not marketing, we have to be. Sara: Love this, love this. And so many are also like just accepting the inherited tech setup. Like we've inherited this, this is the system now. I don't know. You have to question that each day. Love it. And you guys, as passionate as you are, let me just jump into the first question where I'm like really want your feedback. So if we start around like implementing automation in the recruitment process, I would just like to point up yes there's a lot of talk of the rise of AI and automation in recruitment. Companies are looking to streamline their hiring process while improving the digital candidate experience. So my first question would be, how would you say to most successfully implement automation in recruiting including best practice selection in implementing technology and strategies for integrating automation into the existing workflows? So again we sit with a lot of ERP system, open APIs but where do we begin? Due diligence was really good. Joel: What a very Swedish question in like eight different parts. Sara: Sorry. [laughter] Joel: Remember we're Americans. Keep it simple. Chad: That's how he asks questions. Whatever. Joel: Yeah. Keep it simple. Yeah. I love the term streamline hiring which basically means to me is companies are trying to find ways to get rid of you, recruiters. It's all over the news. Yeah. They would like to do it. You can argue whether they will or not. I would argue that there are certain processes which will be automated. I think where it becomes important is the augmentation part. You as a recruiter, look at your skillset and if you think that your skillset can be replaced by automation, then you're not gonna be in the recruiting profession for a very long time. However, if you learn to use the technology in a way that other people cannot, in other words augment your current skills with technologies that are gonna make you in a certain way RoboCop which is dating us 'cause that's a movie from the '80s where there's like half robot, half cop is patrolling the mean streets of Detroit. That's how you're gonna be successful. Is learning how to augment your current skillset and work within that. I think there're gonna be a lot of specialists. Joel: You're going to have people that are really, really good at a certain vendor technology or a certain function or strategy. Think of like sourcing from back in the day. There are gonna be people that learn how to use ChatGPT in unique ways that no one else knows. And those people are gonna have jobs in the future. So I would just... To answer your question, I'll pass it on to Chad and we'll keep going down this road but I think it's important to know that you're in a profession where they want to replace you, they look at you as a cost center and we'll talk about that as to why you're not and how to justify your existence. But by and large, companies, you're kind of a pain in the ass and you're a cost center. So you gotta find ways to prove yourself as a money-making machine and someone that's indispensable if you're gonna survive in the future. Chad: Yeah. I remember when Windows 3.1 came on the market that was much like what we're talking about today. Recruiters needed to learn the new word processing and then get on the internet. This is nothing that's new, kids. We've been doing this since day one. Right? These are just new pieces of technology. These are tools. And you have to remember that recruiting in itself is a job full of many tasks. Most of those tasks and maybe not most of them but a good amount of those tasks are pains in the asses. They're administrivia, they're dull. It's horrible. Now, taking some of those tasks and being able to automate those tasks so that we can actually give the humans more time to provide white glove services, that is where we should be moving. So the fluidity of yester year in today it's the same. We just have different names for the tools, right? Sara: Yeah. Yep. Chad: Now when we're talking about integration and process methodology and those types of things, if you haven't blown up your entire process, re-engineered your process and then started shopping different solutions, point solutions and building your tech stack, what the hell are you doing? Fire yourself. Okay? Fire yourself right now. If you're still thinking in the same process methodology that you were 18 months ago, then you're not doing your job. So when it comes down to being able to build these new stacks, fluidity is everything. And again we can't think of 18 months ago, we have to think about today and tomorrow. How do we put something in place that can be fluid to build for our next need? Because our need tomorrow is definitely not gonna be our vital need of today. Sara: Quote. Love it. And technology disclaimer, what I always like come back to is in TA you don't have to be an AI expert. You don't have to be a data engineer, you don't have to be like a coder but you have to be tech comfortable. Let that sink in. That's a total difference. But tech comfortable means you know the questions to ask, you know the processes. You've been in Excel. You've built it and you know what you are looking to augment, to quote you. Chad: And you're not afraid to ask. That's the big key here, right? Sara: Yeah. Yeah. Chad: Don't act like you know when you don't. Sara: No. Joel: They play hockey in Sweden, right? Pretty popular sport. So a guy named Wayne Gretzky who probably everyone on the call knows. Chad: Canadian. Joel: Had a great quote, don't go where the puck is, go where the puck is going. Chad's got a great point with Windows 3.1 but Windows 3.1 didn't write job descriptions like ChatGPT does. So whereas tech does stay similar in some ways, there is tech that does things now that's quite frankly a little bit mind blowing. And frankly not since like search and email and mobile stuff have I been personally as impressed with the opportunity that this technology has. So there's an element of like the more things change the more they stay the same but also be aware of where the puck is going and going where the puck is will help you keep your job and be successful. Sara: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And just a reminder to everyone on the livestream, if you still... Keep commenting "summary" you will access all these key takeaways and the sources mentioned in this live stream. So keep... Joel: Game changing takeaways, is what we're drawing. Sara: Yes. Game changing takeaways. Keep pumping in the comment section. Moving on, if I were to continue and ask how to leverage though the data-driven recruitment processes and what I mean is data analytics is massively helping companies optimize the recruitment strategies. Not like change out any recruiters but optimize for better funnels, for making better hiring decisions at the end. Could you guys discuss with us how to leverage data to identify talent trends to measure the effectiveness of recruitment campaigns and improve the candidate engagement? Chad: Yeah, I mean we have transparency today through data that we've never had before. Back in the day we talked about big data. The problem was with big data, is we didn't have the processors to be able to break it down like we do today to be able to provide the insights and the visualizations that we have, right? So the biggest key is this is market research that is specific to your organization and the individuals who are engaging your organization. So this is incredibly important. Not to mention you take that data and then what we were just talking about AI, we allow AI to start to synthesize that data. We audit it obviously but then it can start to advise us on different ways, different decisions to be able to make. Because in many cases, labor market information that's out there, we've got information that is is inside the actual system. Chad: Using those two pieces of information can help us better understand, hey we've got openings in X location, we can't find anybody. Well that's because if we take a look at the LMI and we go against our needs they don't exist. So what do we do at that point to be able to create talent pipelines either in the same location or flip those over to a location where we can see there's actually a talent pool that's there? So data visualization is incredibly cool because we're just I mean a step up from monkeys for God's sakes. We've gotta have something easy to look at, right? Joel: Yeah, I mean, neither Chad or our data scientists and... Sara: Aren't you? Joel: I'm guessing most of the audience members are not data scientists either, I'm gonna go out on a limb on that. So two things with data. There are a myriad of vendors looking to take data, tons of data and help you better make decisions to recruit and better justify your existence, LinkedIn's tool alone, think about the data they have with many profiles that they have and know who's moving where and what locations are trending and where people are getting degree... LinkedIn has tremendous data, companies like Eightfold have gotten bucket loads of money to try to sort of solve the internal talent intelligence game and who's most likely to be your next executives and what track should people be on. So I'm not gonna sit here and say I know all the answers to data 'cause I certainly don't but there are vendors and really smart people with a lot of people... A lot of PhDs on staff to try to figure this shit out, I would just do your due diligence for the tools that will help you. Joel: I do think, however, data is gonna be your best tool to justify your existence to the C-suite and we get the question all the time, like, how do I convince my executives that we're not a cost center, that we're invaluable, etcetera? In most cases data, it's gonna tell your story as to why you should get more money, why the money you get is justified and how you can grow the company. We got a great interview with Jeff Lackey on the show for people that listen but Jeff commented that HR, if you don't know how the company makes money and where the company's going, it's hard to tell a story as to why you should exist and why you should have a seat at the table. And the fact that we're not even to a point where HR folks and recruiters know how we make money and where we're going as a company, tells me that we have a long way to go and data is just something there to use but we gotta get through that really short bridge of like, how the hell do we make money and what's our vision for the future, get there first and the data can come in after. Chad: Yeah and we have to get away from... Let's put it this way, we have to take time to fill and cost per hire further. Those... Sara: I was just gonna say thank you. Those KPIs mean nothing to a board. Chad: They mean nothing to a CEO, they mean nothing to aboard, they mean nothing to a CRO, a CMO, none of that. So quit using those stupid metrics. Yes, they are a starting point to be able to get... To get you to the actual bottom line numbers that you need to be able to talk about. Sara: 100%. I mean, I was just gonna say that was 100% spot on. Basically where we're looking... What we've been doing the whole time, I mean, even in our company, we've been looking at marketing metrics for a long time, we've been looking at cost per click or cost per conversion or time to hire, all those and those are brilliant as a starting point but in order to prove your revenue growth, basically how you keep building upon the bottom line, you have to translate that into the business language so basically turn those short KPIs into your actual business case. So you're building your business case further to the board. Sara: And as we were discussing previously, Chad, where like, well, you could have your seat but how do you keep it? Like how do you really make sure you're supposed to be there. So data is like just a bit vague but turning those numbers into business OKRs, if you may, I mean that's the whole game changer. So on that subject, some would even start like, how do I showcase my revenue growth. How do I support the bottom line? Where would you guys... Where would they start? In many cases, we could say with LTA, there would be no business but then again, you wanna support that with the data. Joel: You can... Again, back to the Jeff Lackey conversation, we talked a lot about net promoter scores and there's a direct correlation with your net promoter score which everyone can Google it but it's basically how happy your customers are and people that use your services are. A direct high score of that is a direct relation to how much and how successful the company is. So that metric alone can start indicating of like, Okay, if we have millions of people coming through our system every year looking for a job and we're not giving them data... Information on, we've got your application, here's why you were turned down, or here's... We're giving them that experience, what does that mean on our net promoter score and if it lowers it, it means we're making less money, if our employees give us a low net promoter score. Joel: So just that one thing and it's something I think a lot of executives understand, marketing for sure understands it, that alone can start telling your story as to why it's important. Because if you have unhappy employees, you're gonna have unhappy customers, which means you're gonna have an unhealthy business. Chad: And the first thing that TA/HR needs to understand is that they've actually put themselves in this cost centers narrative and TA is the living, breathing heart of every organization. Nothing gets ideated, nothing gets produced, nothing gets sold, nothing gets serviced and wallet share doesn't increase without TA bringing talent into the fold. Now, how do you do that? First off, you have to understand the company's business and how money is made, then you have to break it down department by department, you have to understand how... What a vital position is for sales and what actually what that costs to have a position open every single day, an open senior exec position or what have you, same thing with marketing, product, etcetera, etcetera. So when you get into more bottom line talk, then you can start to have the C-suite understand exactly how what you're doing is impacting day-to-day revenue. A CEO of a small business that actually said currently she has 30 people on staff. Chad: If she had another 15 she could drive 5 million dollars more in top line revenue. Now, when the CEO starts thinking like that and TA isn't, we know we have a problem. Joel talked about Jeff Lackey, who was at CVS with over 200000 employees. 90% of his budget, I think that's a correct stat, 90% of his budget came from other departments, the other departments were internal funding sources, because Jeff went to them and said, Look, where are your vital positions, what do you need to fill today? Why are they vital? Let's take a look and see how they actually impact the bottom line. If they don't, then it's not an opening, then it goes away, it doesn't exist. Chad: At that point, he actually had one of his staff members, I think it might have been a chief of staff, she was actually responsible for bringing in 10 million dollars to their bottom line budget-wise from other departments. This is all internal funding. And then we spoke to Amy Butchko, who was over at SAIC, who has about 180000 employees. She worked directly with her CRO to budget an entirely new tech stack, because what she did was CRO came to her and said, Why are we having issues filling my top exec roles, my revenue drivers. She moved to the actual application process through a hard 45 minutes. And the CRO said, how much is this gonna cost? And she said this, let's do it, let's do it. So we have to be smarter about building a business case and taking those stupid HR metrics that we have further and make them business metrics so that we can get internal funding but you have to remember, you get internal funding, you gotta produce. Sara: Right. I love the internal funding, that's how you become the business strategist of your company, that's basically where you level up. I love that. If in this process, like if anyone ever struggles, like where would you recommend them to start? Like are they going to the CEO, where are they starting? Chad: Well, it depends on the organization and the need. In many cases, one of the biggest, the loudest people in the organization, generally the CRO because they drive revenue. You can have those types of conversations with understanding how... And it's usually easy for them to break down what an open position means for their bottom line, 'cause they know what their quota is, they know what their top line revenue needs to be. So you can start that. Then also reaching out to, again, people in the space like Jeff Lackey who is now an advisor who has dealt with this and actually built these types of programs and been really more of like a chief of staff to the CEO when it comes to business operations. I think it's important to start to open up the discussions in all of the departments and understand that their OKRs are going to be different sales from your CMO versus your product versus your CFO but once you understand that, then you can speak the business lingo. And you can make it happen. Joel: Quick note. Chad is the CRO of the Chad and Cheese podcast, which makes it okay for him to be an asshole. Sara: I was sure I was gonna ask. Joel: I agree with in terms of sometimes you need a translator. Sometimes the discussions about, what do we do? How do we make money? Where is the vision, where are we going? Sometimes that's out of bounds for a lot of people to have that conversation. They're uncomfortable conversations to have typically but if you feel like mentally you're not there, having a translator, someone that's been doing this for 20, 30, 40 years, that has done HR and done the executive and knows how to talk to all those pieces, maybe it makes sense to write some checks to get a translator and they're calling everybody to the table and figure out and talk everyone's language and then get everyone going in the right direction. Sara: I mean, if you're in TA and you're currently a victim of budget costs, you're not approaching the problem from the right angle. That's the starting point. Joel: That's a good point. Chad: You're probably cowering, you're probably in the fetal position, in the corner with your thumb in your mouth, that's the problem. We need to stiffen our spine. Joel: Yeah. Which is not a road to making yourself invaluable if you're not having those conversations. Sara: No. We have to quit being the victims and take control and start showcasing business growth. I mean, definitely. That's the same conversation as being tech comfortable. You don't have to be an engineer but you have to come in the game, otherwise, another TA specialist with the tech comfort will take your place. That's basically where we are. Quoting on quotes. So time is tipping, I love... Tipping. [chuckle] Ticking. Chad: Slipping away. Sara: Slipping, yeah. I love this sort of conversations, I just look at you and I feel butterflies in all parts of my body, I'm so excited. I love this topic. If we're to summarize two of your most important takeaways from this conversation and with some of the questions, where would you start? Like if anyone is supposed to take anything with them from this session, what would that be? Chad: Blow up your process and go further with regard to metrics, go past your HR metrics, go toward business metrics. Those are the two things. Joel: I would just say try to take a 30000-foot view of what you do. We get so involved in the minor details, putting out fires every day. John Lennon has a great quote. Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. And I would just say, take a second, these big picture items that we've talked about, how does your company make money, what's the vision for the future? Having these big conversations, that is what's gonna drive the ship, these little fires that you put out every day, before you know it, you're gonna wonder where the hell the time went and did we achieve anything that we wanted to. So my only take away from this is like, take a step back, take a breath and look at the big picture. Sara: I love it. And there's a lot of questions on this topic. I will actually spend some time after this session and going through them all but we have one here with Mark. He agrees on the metric comments, so he said, I 100% agree with the metric comments over complicated reports are boring to produce and present. Yes, if you can't present data quickly and simply highlight the key points to your audience, forget about it. This is basically quoting like what we've been touching upon. This is for... Time to hire is vital but you have to put it into context, what is time to hire for your tech department? Joel: Mark wasn't hugged a lot as a kid, 'cause this isn't even a question, this is I wanna get on the show. I just want to get on the show. Chad: I love it Mark. Thanks, Mark, we appreciate that. Sara: We appreciate you, Mark. You should be on the show. Chad: We appreciate that. Yes. No, we definitely need to take it further and we need to understand again, if that... Again, time to fill is 60 days. Okay, great, who cares? What does every single day mean to the bottom line, what is the cost to the bottom line every single day? That is what you are trying to solve for. That's what we're trying to solve for. Joel: I will say that we tend to get into trap in life where we think everyone looks at the world the way we do and I would just present to mark that some people love over complicated reports. Chad: Not many. Joel: Some people love diving into numbers and metrics and it's your job to know who your audience is, whether that is an audience of a job candidate or an audience of someone in your company and if you find that it's someone that loves data, like you better present some data, if it's someone like me, I wanna see pictures and charts and graphs... Chad: Infographic. He wants an infographic. Joel: Paint me a big picture of what's going on 'cause I can't get the new shit. Know your audience and realize that not everyone thinks just like you. Sara: And the context it's presented to. Love it. Bring it. Chad: Well, presenting to a CFO is much different than presenting to a CRO. Joel: Or CTO. Yeah. Sara: Quote. Quote. Quote. Joel: Totally different countries. [laughter] Sara: Totally different countries. Brilliant. Actually, the time has ran out. I'm so thankful for having you guys on the show. I mean, you have to come back. We have to do all the TA techno stuff that we talked about. We'll see you at breakfast, we'll see you anywhere we can. Potentially, I'm moving to the UK, we can do some cool events. We'll see about that. Look out for us, coming. Joel: Such a tease. Sara: Such a tease. Yes, so thank you to everyone joining us live and everyone watching this in repeat and have a great day. We'll see you soon. Brilliant. Chad: Late. Sara: Thank you, bye-bye. 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 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 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! Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Indeed dropped a layoff bomb this week, saying adios to 2,200 employees. Paradox officially launched an applicant tracking service, telling Fountain AI, “hold my beer.” Rippling slimes us, Ghostbusters-style. The boys play a little Buy-or-Sell with Rain and RiseKit. Karat acquires TripleByte’s tired ass and Dice gets a proverbial smackdown from the Feds. Whew! There’s a lot of meat on the bones of this week’s show, you lucky bastards. 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 Cocktail Day in America. Would someone pass the old granddad and the old fashioned mix. Hi kids, you're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. This is your co-host Joel 'Make the next one a whiskey sour' Cheesman. Chad: And this is Chad 'Hunger Games' Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, it's a Paradox Fountain Smackdown. Indeed gets a haircut, and today's cocktails are generously donated by our friends at Rippling. You'll understand what we mean in a second. Let's do this! Chad: Greetings and salutations my friend. Hello, yeah, I actually have some cubes that are for like easy old fashioneds, and I know that Christine loves old fashioned so there are these really cool cubes that have all the ingredients in it. You just put it in, muddle it up, and you're good to go. Takes seconds. Joel: She loves old fashioneds as long as they're made with Canadian rye. [vocalization] Joel: So we had some fun with the Swedes this week. Chad: Been a blast. Joel: That was a good time. That was a good time. Chad: Yeah. Good time with the kids at Adway... Joel: In Sway. Chad: Over at Adway, yeah. Joel: Adway. Nothing says Sweden like an Amway sounding name like Adway. Chad: I wonder if they even had Amway. Joel: No, it's probably Swedeway. Sweway. Probably did not... She probably doesn't know what Amway is. Chad: No. Joel: If it's even still around any more. Chad: Multi-level marketing fiasco is what it is. [laughter] Joel: Oh my god. Was it Avon, that was the beauty stuff? Chad: Yes. Joel: Yeah, my mom did Avon. She would have these parties and have these scents and they always had the cologne that was like in a car. Shaped like a car. Chad: Yes. The Batmobile. Joel: Yes, and the gas tank was where the screw was and you'd be like a little aftershave with some Avon Batmobile car. Holy shit. Chad: That's awesome. Well, still... I digress. Adway, thanks for having us on. It was a great time. I guess there were like 1,800 registrants and there was a shit ton of people who actually watched us live. [applause] Chad: We will be putting it out audio-wise coming up probably Monday or Tuesday next week, so you can check it out there or you can go to the video on LinkedIn. Joel: Absolutely, and if you want us as a guest on your show, we have a lot of fun on these things, so hit us up, hit us up. But let's get to shout outs because... Chad: Shout outs. Joel: Like you said in the green room, there's a lot of meat on this skeleton this week. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So my first one goes out to Upwork. Nickel and diming has come to the gig economy, Chad. Beginning April 26th, Upwork will be implementing a client contract initiation fee of $2.95 on Upwork's talent marketplace and Project Catalog. This is assessed when you make your first initial payment to a freelancer with an estimated 225 million remote knowledge workers in the world. If just one contract is connected to each person, that means over 663 million more dollars to Upwork's bottom line. By the way, that's ticker symbol UPWK in case you're interested in investing. I'm not a shareholder but shout out to nickel and diming at Upwork. Chad: Can't wait until Upwork starts the whole Twitter/Facebook checkmark thing with the users. I mean, because they'll do that too, right? There's just these little nickel and diming ways to hit employers and contractors. I mean, it's gonna happen guys. Joel: It's gonna happen. Maybe Indeed's gig economy can put them down and we won't have to worry about nickel and diming. Chad: Cost per gigger. Joel: Cost per gig, initiated gig. Yes, CPIG. Chad: Initiated gig. [laughter] All right, you keep going. I've got one big shout out at the end, so you finish yours out. Joel: All right, cool. So, Hireology, shout out. Let the ChatGPT races begin. Our friends at Hireology have launched Beaker. Remember Beaker? They were a thing for a while. Beaker.com. Anyway, I digress. Beaker is an AI-powered recruiting assistant that can generate job descriptions in seconds. Beaker is powered by ChatGPT. The tool is designed to automate some of the more time-consuming parts of the job creation process, freeing up time for recruiters and managers to focus on other tasks. Me thinks they won't be the last to use ChatGPT, and I hope vendors like Textio are paying attention to this automated job description creation thing. Shout out to our friends in Chicago. Get your Chicago dog in your deep dish ready at Hireology. They're going ChatGPT and as their press release says, they're the first in our space. I don't think they'll be the last. Chad: We don't know though because last week we talked about Fountain AI. We're not sure if that was ChatGPT. They didn't go into any type of details about that one. So, who knows, right? Who knows anymore? Joel: First is usually just, "We're the first with a press release," that says we're the first. Chad: Well, all I have to say though is get ready for the ChatGPT-like gold rush kids. It's happening. Joel: Yep. Chad and I have seen demos. We know a little bit about about what's coming. And my last shout out before you get to your mega shout out goes to Jay Dotson, Director of Talent and Management. This is a recent comment that he had on LinkedIn. But anyway, we're gonna talk about layoffs at Indeed. Here's a little bit about Indeed's performance lately with all the changes. Jay says, "Recent Indeed issue that I found when using EasyApply recently, resume parsing isn't coming into my ATS. I only get the resume. Takes my recruiters much longer to review them. All my other sources parse including LinkedIn. Ran the numbers and I get just as many applicants from LinkedIn. I stopped sponsoring as much with Indeed after Jim Durbin, the Indeed whisperer, came on your show. Indeed just wants us to go to their site just like you guys say." Yes, shout out to Jay Dotson. Suck it, Indeed. Chad: Suck it, Indeed. Yeah, I mean, again, this product is so full of fucking holes. Well, we'll talk more about that later. I don't want to get up on my stump just yet. So my shout out is very sombre and celebratory at the same time because we lost pretty amazing dude, Scott McCray last week. I was lucky enough to actually have spent some time with he and Adam through advising candidate ID. Loved working with both of them, whether it was on Zoom calls, texts, at conferences, arguing about go to markets. I tell you what, let's have Adam Gordon talk a little bit about it because he's much closer than any of us were to Scott. So play that beautiful beam footage. Joel: You got it. Adam Gordon: Okay, so what can I say about Scott McCray? Probably many people listening to the podcast will have met Scott at the events he was at, the many events he was at in Europe and in North America. Rocking his kilt on stage, waxing lyrical about talent funnels and spearfishing, unleash HR tech, both in Europe and in Vegas, at a hiring success in San Francisco, winning awards all over the world. Back in 2015, Scott taught me that there was an established solution to the problem of not truly understanding which candidates were clicking. And that was marketing automation. We spent about 18 months trying to work out how to build a tech product because none of us have done it before. And then he eventually launched Candidate ID in January 2017. Spent the next six years touring the world selling marketing automation to TA teams in our kilts. Adam Gordon: Scott brought some real sophisticated thinking to our industry in the context of talent nurture, personalization, automation technologies, and everyone he met learned from him. I absolutely loved turning up at events, like the evening events in particular, like the workday parties and stuff like that. And Scott and I would turn up, we'd just like high five each other at the door, and then not see each other for five hours. But I catch glimpses of him all, like, regularly just go over to people and introduce himself, groups of people he didn't already know and just start talking. And, everybody enjoyed his chat. Adam Gordon: Before Candidate ID, Scott had a really interesting career. He started in sales and marketing with P&G, and then at Hugo Boss, and then in the wine industry, which took him on a big adventure to New Zealand. So he literally turned up in New Zealand, and told some vineyard owners that he'd teach them sales and marketing if they taught him how to make wine. And one of them, one of the big ones said, "Okay, that's a deal." And he spent 18 months there, just learning how to make wine and helping them with their sales and marketing. And that's just what he was like in search of adventure. The world was literally open to him. It was his playground. And then more recently, of course, after we sold Candidate ID to iCIMS, he became very popular within the business, helped iCIMS guide their strategy around marketing automation technology, and led on the RPO efforts as well. So from making wine to working with RPOs on their tech strategy, he was pretty adaptable, I think you'll agree. So I announced his death on LinkedIn a few days ago, and I had a real surge of emotion when I saw the comments coming in. He had so many friends in our industry, despite only being part of it really since 2017. He was very well liked. So Chad, Cheese, I know he loved you guys. And thank you very much for inviting me to say a few words about him on the show. Look after yourselves, everybody. All the best. Joel: Yeah, the word adventure stood out to me. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: And both Scott and Adam, and all the Scotts I know sort of exemplify adventure and... [laughter] Chad: It does. Joel: Sort of enjoying the moment and meeting new people. That's kind of my takeaway. You knew Scott a lot better than I did. But yeah, I always got a warm, fuzzy feeling when we hung out. Chad: He always had stories, and he always listened and wanted to be a part. I mean, just the interactive and amazing and incredible business smarts as well. So we're gonna miss him, but we should all cherish the time that we had with him. But one thing that Scott did love, which is where we're going next, Scott loved events, because that's where the people were. And we're going to talk about events where we're going to be at Unleash America, April 25th through the 27th, happening in Vegas at Caesars Forum. They have new digs. They moved from the MGM. They're upgrading, kids. They got that gambler upgrade, I think is what they got. [laughter] They're gonna be at Caesars Forum this year, right next to that big ass London Eye ferris wheel thing... Joel: Yeah. Chad: That takes 30 minutes to get around. They have bars. You can drink in those cabs and stuff like that. So that is going to be a blast. Joel: You've had drinks in one of those, haven't you? Chad: I have. Joel: Yes. [music] Chad: I have had drinks in one of those. Joel: Chad speaks from experience. Chad: Pretty amazing. And I know that there are going to be companies that actually rent those things out. And then they take people up and they have drinks and talk about business and all the other fun stuff. But if you have not registered yet, again, it's coming quick. Go to chadcheese.com and click on events in the upper right hand corner and register. Then after that, we're going to go to iCIMS Inspire in Coronado Beach. Speakers are being announced now today on LinkedIn. We're one of the headliners, which is kind of scary and fun at the same time. SFX: All right, all right, all right. Joel: It's very scary. Very scary. We're entertaining though. We'll be good. We'll be a good time. We'll be a good time. Chad: Yeah. Well, I've never met Brian before, so this is going to be really fun. Now, meeting Steve and then talking to him, doing interview with him and whatnot. Now, Brian, he's an unknown entity to me right now. So, I might have to do a little research. Joel: Yeah, and he's agreed to be on stage with us in less than a year of being in that job. So I hope he knows what he's signing up for. It'll be a good time. Chad: I'm sure he doesn't. SFX: Whoo! Really? 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. Joel: That's right. That soundbite means we've got birthdays to celebrate this month or this week, Chad. And if you don't know if it's your birthday, if you've signed up for free stuff, then let me just quickly talk about that, you've got to go to Chadcheese.com, click on the free link, submit your information. Your birthday needs to be in there. And if it's your birthday that month, there's a chance that you can win a rum from our friends at Plum, but otherwise there's t-shirts from JobGet. There's whiskey bourbon from our homies at Textkernel and free beer from Aspen Tech Labs. We're creating a lot of smiles out on LinkedIn. If you haven't seen them yet, a lot of stylish, good looking people on our t-shirts and yes... Chad: You could be one of those people. Joel: But you got to play to win Chadcheese.com. Click the free link and celebrating a birthday this week, here we go, Timo Hillhorst from Melbourne. I don't know in Australia, is it Timo, Timo? Chad: Timo? Joel: Timo. Timo. Chad: Okay. I like it. Joel: Anyway, and Timmy Smith. Timmy and Timo are celebrating birthdays. Josh Winwright, Brian Barnes, Hayden Hughes, Derek Bond 007, shaken not stirred probably. Chad: Very nice. Joel: Melissa Malcolm in the middle, Audra Knight, punk rocker, by the way, she's got some good tunes. Jason Warner, Keith Robinson, Jamie Leonard, one of our favorite Brits celebrates a birthday, and my big sister, Holly Cheeseman Bricker celebrates her birthday this month. Chad: There we go. SFX: Happy birthday! Joel: Happy birthday to everyone and thanks for listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. [music] Joel: Topics. Oh, no. We're back to... SFX: Playoffs. Joel: That's right. We got layoffs this week, everybody. Let's go through these real quick, and we will comment in depth afterwards. Amazon, another 9,000 layoffs. Meta, 10,000. Bonusly, we don't know how many, but they just got funding, which seems to be a popular thing to do in our industry, get money and then lay people off. Workhuman laid off 130. That's according to layoffs.fyi. But most notably, our favorite punching bag Indeed has cut 2,200 workers or 15% of its workforce due to the, "Cooling job market outlook for the coming years." The cuts affect, "Nearly every team, function level and region," of the company, including Indeed's workforce in Singapore and employees at its sister site, Glassdoor, to the tune of what we hear is 140 employees. CEO, Chris Hyams, who looks like our love child by the way, Chad, he's a bald guy with glasses. Anyway, he says the US job market is expected to decline to pre-pandemic levels of about 7.5 million or lower over the next two or three years, prompting the job cuts. Chad, our mailbag blew up after this one. What are your thoughts? Chad: Yes, it did blow up. I picked two. The first one was actually from an Indeed client. And here's the quote. Holy shit. The Indeed layoffs were apparently ugly. They had a 15-minute webcast with the CEO in which they announced the layoffs and that you may receive an email within the next 10 minutes if you are among the folks laid off, at which point the webcast ended and the screen went dark, which apparently sparked mass hysteria, as you can imagine. They put job seekers first. And when it comes to laying off employees, they go with the, "Fuck them kids approach." So that was from a client. Okay. And then we've got one from an ex Indeed employee. "The problem is Chris Hyams. He is so, so bad. He switches models at the worst possible time, which makes people look at what they are spending just as applications are increasing. So suddenly you don't have to sponsor jobs because your organic gets good results. Then he offers a 25% pay cut, but he's paid so much that nobody cares. So the guy is totally out of his depth. Chris Hyams should tend his resignation today." Chad: So could this CPA, CPSA be the Trojan horse that Indeed unleashed on itself? They've been the Trojan horse launcher for other organizations for years. They've been known to do that. This feels like they're launching one on themselves. Joel: Yeah. The proverbial shooting yourself in the foot has been a theme of Indeed's for years now. And it sort of really started with Google for jobs, some fear of that, let's launch some new stuff, try some new stuff, buy some companies that didn't work out. And I think it's all coming to a head with the current state of layoffs everywhere. There's some nice cloud cover by your boy Elon Musk and laying off people is an okay thing to do. I thought Indeed might avoid it. I thought they might, we're such a big swinging dick that we don't have to lay off people. They are human. They do bleed. And they laid off 2200 people. Obviously, that's a shame. Heart goes out to all those people that were laid off. However, if you listen to our show, a lot of companies in this space are raising a lot of money and need a lot of good people that have experience, which these Indeed folks do have. So hopefully, I know that a lot of Indeeders listen to the podcast, hopefully they've got a short list of companies that have raised money that they can go apply to and land on their feet. Chad: Timing is horrible, new product is horrible, which we actually had somebody earlier say. Clients are tightening their budgets, ChatGPT and other chat platforms are prepping a run-on jobs for prospectively fake resumes. Google for Jobs beta testing their paid jobs. The list goes on and on and on, and Hyams makes this very bad move. Although, I don't believe Chris should take a 25% cut in pay. He should, much like you said earlier, he should tender his resignation. If you're going to cut that many people, if you're going to impact them with these stupid ass product, I mean, holy, bad product moves. His total comp SEC filings was close to $14 million. Take some money, take some money, go buy a fucking island and get the fuck out of Indeed and let somebody clean that shit up. Joel: Pretty sure Art Zeal and our man, Scott Gutz might be open to a new CEO gig in our industry. [laughter] Chad: This opens the space for a company like Monster, not just to ascend to the mountain top again, but to at least make some ground. If you think about it, if I'm a Monster sales guy right now, I am licking my fucking chops. Joel: Yeah, I'm sure all seven of them are foaming at the mouth to call on those, all those Indeed accounts. Chad: If you're a sales guide, you're always foaming at the mouth. Joel: Alright, that is our layoff update. Let's get to some real news, shall we? Paradox, somebody who hasn't laid off anyone, I think, at least they didn't announce anything. Chad: Oh, knock on wood? Joel: Yeah, I think they may be the one immune to all of this. Paradox has launched its conversational ATS, which automates tasks such as screening for requirements, interview scheduling, reminders, offers and new hire onboarding to re-imagine the high volume hiring process. The ATS uses a conversational UI to make engagement feel what it says are simple and seamless and helps global clients reduce time to hire to hours or days. Paradox is also launching high volume solutions built to work alongside enterprise ERP and HCM platforms like Workday, who we've speculated could write a check and just gobble up Paradox, and SAP, another big check writer, by the way. Last week, we talked about ATS for high volume hiring at Fountain. They launched Fountain AI, that's creative, a conversational AI, and now we got Paradox. It's Tyson-Holyfield without the ear biting. A lot to unpack here, Chad, what are your thoughts? Chad: Yeah, it's too early to calling it the ear biting by the way. This is welcome to the next generation of applicant tracking system wars, baby, and it's about fucking time. We saw this coming with Paradox. We talked about how this new generation of applicant tracking system would look, exactly like Paradox and/or Fountain. Most traditional ATSs are jamming a square peg in a round hole when it comes to volume hiring, and as we already know, the apply process for a data scientist needs to be much different than that for a hotel concierge, but we're still jamming everybody into that square fucking hole, but not any more. Chad: Chat allows a different and much better mobile engagement that I don't have to complete the app before my session times out. It can be asynchronous. It can also nudge candidates to finish their applications, be ready for interviews tomorrow and prepare for their first day of work. Here's the biggest point that needs to be made. Paradox is now saying that it can be your system of record. That's fucking huge. Anyone who has ever had an audit understands that record-keeping is a make or break situation. I do find that it's interesting that as Fountain comes out with Fountain AI, their conversational product last week, Paradox, this week, says, "Hold my beer." That's just something that Paradox CMO, JZ, we know JZ really well. Joel: You think they pushed a button on that one? Chad: Josh Zywien does better than most. He keeps his powder dry, and you know Aaron much better than I do, but he's been more patient around Paradox and rolling things out. And the last thing I'll say is that Paradox's new President, who used to be their Chief Product Officer, is one of the best product people in the business. Back in 2016, he was building Gen 1 of this product, with baling wire, low budgets and duct tape. Now, Adam Godson has budget and he has the opportunity to go out there and build what he knows works. I said last week, I love the Fountain-Paradox collision, because we need those types of brands and products in the market to be able to ascend from a competitive standpoint. That's how innovation happens. SFX: That escalated quickly. Joel: It was more Olivia than it was Paradox when it first launched. And I remember the first time Olivia was at an HR tech or one of the charms, and Jobing was still alive and well at the time, still is, it just doesn't belong to them anymore. Recruiting.com, which they own as well as a thing. But I remember the excitement in Aaron's eyes, and you mentioned I know I'm a little better than you do, and I do say that's a true statement, and when Aaron gets excited, you kinda know if you know him. And there was a level of excitement that you thought, he's got something here because he knows he's got something here. And he was demoing the product, and I remember people would come by that are knowledgeable, would say like, "Well, how does it integrate with the ATS?" And you could tell he would kinda grit his teeth because I don't think they integrated with any ATS at the time, but you knew that he knew, at some point we're gonna have to integrate with the ATS. Joel: So it's really, the tables have turned in this fact that they're becoming the ATS, and you point is, I think, well taken, and I had in my notes written this as well, is that if you can create a new technology or a new product that already leverages what consumers know and what they're used to. Part of ChatGPT success is that Google got people used to writing words in a box and getting stuff back. That wasn't always a thing. One-click apply, that works because people are used to one-click shopping. If you can tap into what consumers know, you're well ahead of the game. And if you can apply to a job via something that you know really well, that resonates with almost 100% of consumers, well, by God, you got something. ATSs are not organic to people's usage of the internet. Chad: No. No. Joel: It's clunky, it's a pain in the ass, it's cumbersome. Paradox is not. Paradox is a search box like you would text your wife or friend, and you can apply through that process. Having an ATS is a natural progression of this service. I think if you're a traditional ATS, you're a little nervous about this. To what degree? I don't know. You mentioned high level executives versus frontline workers. I don't know. I think it could work for any level of employee at this point. There was a time where like, "Oh well, if I'm an SVP, I don't wanna go through a chat bot. I wanna apply like... " I'm not so sure. If it's easy and it's something that you do every day, I'm not sure that it can't be any level of job. The question is, is it easier for a chat bot to become an ATS or an ATS to plug in a chat bot? I guess we're gonna find out exactly where we go. Joel: But if you believe the future is in chat conversational AI, then my money is on the company that started with that is their DNA versus one that started out as an ATS and then they're trying to plug in a conversational AI. This is gonna be a lot of fun to talk about, not just the you guys like Fountain and Paradox, but what's iCIMS's move? What's great Greenhouse's move? What's SmartRecruiters move? Etcetera. It's gonna be a lot of fun to watch. Because ultimately, these services are gonna get acquired and companies are gonna be forced... There won't be any more to buy. They'll have to build their own, and the ones who have it are gonna win, and the ones that don't are gonna struggle, I think. Chad: I think when you start looking at big enterprise clients that have more than high volume, that have to take coding challenges, they have to take assessments, they have to take all these things, so they have to go through more of a process than just a quick apply like you do as high volume, so companies like iCIMS, they'll be fine as long as they stay away from high volume. But the Greenhouses of the world, that could be a problem 'cause they're more on the SMB side of the house. And most of those positions, not all, but most of those positions could easily fit into Paradox. Paradox is doing enterprise. Don't get me wrong, they're just doing it on the high volume side of the house. Chad: So I think there's room to play on both sides. It's all about go to market. And the thing I gotta say though, and again, and what we're kind of like fanboying over what's happening at Paradox is Aaron has been in this industry and he succeeded, and he's also failed, and that means more, I think, than anything else, because he knows where he went wrong. Then he got JZ on board, he got Adam Godson on board, he got some heavy, heavy hitters and he's provided them with the autonomy to go out there and just kick ass and take names. Again, I can't wait to see what Fountain comes out with next, and then what JZ and the rest of the team come out with Paradox. It's gonna be fun. Joel: Yeah, I no doubt. Battle scars, they count for a lot playing within the same industry. Chad: They do. Yeah. Joel: And I'm waiting for the shopping to happen. I'm waiting for clearance rack to really be appealing and some consolidation to happen. I'm waiting for that shoe to drop. That'll be really, really interesting. JazzHR is another one that should be careful. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Alright, let's talk about Rippling. Chad: Do we have to? Joel: More SVB drama. Rippling has raised $500 million. Chad: Fuck. Joel: Valuing the company... [music] Joel: At $11.25 billion. Okay, stay with us here. The funding round comes after Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, taking with it the funds of Rippling clients. Rippling extended $130 million of its own capital to fund its customers payments with the hope of recovering most of it from the FDIC. The remaining funds were recovered by Sunday afternoon after the FDIC guaranteed deposits. Despite the sudden resolution of the problem, Rippling went ahead and proceeded with the funding round because it believes the price reflects its performance and allows it to focus on building great products. Who could say no to $130 million anyway? Did I mention $500 million at an over $11 billion valuation? Chad, Rippling, go. Chad: As Winston Churchill famously said, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." Over the weekend, the SVB collapse happened, and we had a bunch of people reaching out to us saying, "We should go on now, we should tell listeners, on Monday, things, they're gonna be horrible. It's gonna be crazy." And my response is pretty simple, government won't allow that to happen. How many times have we seen that the government allows something this large that could prospectively impact hundreds of thousands of Americans? It's not gonna happen. Parker Conrad and Rippling, who had already moved some of its banking business to JP Morgan months earlier, they played off fear and uncertainty on this one, and they didn't let a crisis go to waste. Did they need more money? Who the fuck knows. It's all about solvency, but I'm gonna tell you right now, I wouldn't trust Parker Conrad as far as I could throw that fat bastard. SFX: That escalated quickly. Joel: Yeah, if you think that this sounds slimy, listen to your gut. If it sounds kind of like shady, it probably is. Parker Conrad, I wax poetic on him a year or so ago. If you wanna go Google him, Google Parker Conrad and Zenefits for the whole back story on who he is and in his past. It's pretty transparent out there. Look, if companies go out of business because of too much money, these guys are gonna be the poster child for a crash and burn. [chuckle] By the way, if you wanna a really good account of this, go to TechCrunch. They have a pretty good post about this. But frankly, dude, I don't like giving this company oxygen, I don't like giving this cat, Parker Conrad any oxygen. So as far as I'm concerned, I'm done. Let's hear from our sponsors and get on to the next topic. Joel: Oh yeah, it's time for a little, who'd you rather? [music] Joel: That's right. If you don't know, we read two companies, start-ups, if you will, that have gotten funding. I read a small summary, short summary, and Chad and I pick who'd we'd rather. Are you ready, Chad, to play a little, who'd you rather? Chad: Let's do it. Joel: All right. In this corner, we have Rain. Clever name. Rain is raised $116 million funding, including $66 million in equity and $50 million in debt. Rain offers on-demand pay or earned wage access to workers, enabling them to access their pay shortly after completing a shift instead of waiting for payday. Rain service is offered for free to employers who provide it to their employees as a voluntary benefit and employees pay a small fee each time they withdraw their earned wages. The funding will be used to support expansion throughout the United States. Joel: And in this corner, we have RiseKit. Chicago-based RiseKit has secured $4.75 million in funding. The company software allows employers to track candidates and scale their community hiring and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives by finding untapped diverse talent through community organizations. RiseKit aims to reduce the time and cost of sourcing talent for employers while improving job seekers confidence and journey. The new funding will be used to build behavioral and skills-based machine learning models. RiseKit's vision is to help job seekers have equal access to employment opportunities regardless of their zip code. That is Rain versus RiseKit, Chad. Who'd you rather? Chad: 2:00 AM in the bar in the morning, I look to the left, I see Rain, and I see a predatory lending by transaction, is really what's happening here. If they want this to happen, they should have the employers pay for it. You're trying to... Again, it's payday loans, but it's a transaction at a time. And so that's how I feel about Rain. RiseKit, man, I started reading about that, I'm like, "Man, this is amazing," but here's a little breakdown of leadership. First and foremost, no experience in this space. The best way I can describe the tech is that right now, it just looks like vapourware to me. And why is that? Well, I went out to go check jobs at RiseKit, I clicked on a job so I could go work at RiseKit, one of their own job postings, it sent me to a Google Form, a Google Form. Not even... Is that their tech, to a Google fucking form? Chad: Then last but not least, behavioral assessments and AI are not necessary. They're just words to help drive more funding, which they got. I have heavy experience in building hiring communities around military veterans, and Julie, as you know, my wife, she does the same thing with individuals with disabilities, building around community-based organizations. So we know this space. Everything that I'm reading about this is counter to what actually needs to happen. So Rain is predatory, RiseKit is vapourware. Once again, it's 2:00 AM at the bar, it's closing down, and I'm not happy with my choices, I'm going home alone. Joel: Oh, no. That's two who'd you rathers in row where you're going home empty... Chad: I know. I really, really wanted to like one of them. Joel: Empty-handed. Empty-handed. Chad: Fuck. Joel: Alright, man, you mentioned payday loans, let's talk quickly about the predatory business of payday loans. So some numbers here. On average, one in five borrowers default on their payday loans. More than half of all borrowers who got their installment loans from an online lender default on their balance. Payday lending is illegal in 12 states, and roughly 12 million Americans take out a payday loan each year. I do not, however, consider Rain a payday loan service. I view them as a take money out today, they take a small fee, not a percentage or an interest interest rate on that loan. So to me, they're almost the anti payday loan. They're fighting the payday loan system. Joel: Employees can voluntarily sign up for this service, employers can offer this service, and money comes out of the check as opposed to waiting for it a week or two weeks from when they would get it and the money is deducted. They get less money in their paycheck because they took money out ahead of time. So for me, any company that's trying to take a bite out of the payday loan business is the one that I'm gonna pick. RiseKit seems kind of lame to me. [chuckle] You mentioned the vapourware. I just think any company that's willing to sort of take on the payday loan system for me... SFX: What are you doing, step-bro? Joel: That's the one that I'd rather. Joel: Last valued at over $1 billion, Chad, Karat with a K, who calls itself the world's largest interviewing company. I don't know if there's a third party that does that or not. Chad: That audits? Yeah. Joel: They've acquired Triplebyte's technical assessment product and team. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition will add a skills-based assessment to Karat's suite of interviewing cloud offerings, claiming to help organizations identify and hire the best tech talent faster, more accurately and fairly. The adaptive assessment technology adjusts to the skill level of each candidate, collecting more information from each question asked, enabling recruiting and engineering leaders to unlock high volume applicant pools and reduced bias. Triplebyte's sourcing business, Magnet, and its candidate, Talent Network, will wind down effective March 31st. Chad, this is 10 Karat gold, right? What are your thoughts? Chad: Well, get ready for more of this, kids, because Triplebyte ran out of runway, and Karat was their savior. They got them on the cheap. They got them on the cheap. But I think my biggest problem with Karat's model is that it won't scale because the human interviewer element. So buying Triplebyte allows more screening before the interview, which weeds out unqualified candidates, and it eases the sheer load of human interviewing. So this is a smart move, although they need to go further down this automation rabbit hole. One question, I jumped on Karat, and I'm like, "Who the fucker is doing their marketing?" They bought a Forrester consulting study entitled The Total Economic Impact of Karat, and it's the hero image on their fucking homepage. No product. No testimonial. A Forrester study. I almost fell asleep when I opened the fucking page. Chad: So I went to the YouTube channel looking for a video series that would break down this study, 'cause it would be more snack-able and easier for most people to want to actually understand. Nothing. You take this shit... I don't know who's doing marketing over there. You take this great information, you turn it into fucking content, videos, posts, social, all this other stuff. I gotta file just most of this under companies with unicorn valuations and rookie mistakes. Triplebyte, I think was good. They need to go further, but they are nowhere near valuable, as valuable as their valuation shows. Joel: Yeah, with $169 million raised, you think Karat's marketing would be just a little bit sexier than what it is. This is like run-of-the-mill standard consolidation stuff. Triplebyte, $48 million raised. Founded in 2015. Runway gone. Money ran out. Time ran out. Tech layoffs are in every headline. So if you're a tech hiring service, this was all working against Triplebyte. That's when you go call the sugar daddies, and sugar daddy on the list for this one, they swipe right on Karat, and Karat also swiped right on this one. And whether it's a marriage made in heaven, I guess we'll find out. Clearly, they need some marketing help. So hopefully, Triplebyte, although the name does not really scream marketing excellence, might be able to fix the problems. To me, this is pretty much a snoozer. I guess we'll keep our eye on it and see if anything comes of it. But yeah, mostly two dinosaurs cuddling up, hoping that the meteorite doesn't Kill them off. Chad: It feels like who'd you rather. Karat had a who'd you rather, and they went home with Triplebyte. [laughter] Joel: Yeah, that's definitely, everyone's going home alone on that. I think that's not good for anybody. Alright, the hits keep coming, kids. After this break, we'll talk about Dice. Alright, Chad. DHI Group, what a great name, which runs tech job search website, Dice, which is a pretty good name, has reached a conciliation agreement with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or as you call it, Chad, the EE to the O to the C. They're gonna settle National Origin Discrimination charges. The EEOC had discovered that DHI violated Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act by allowing customers to post job positions that excluded Americans of national origin. Ouch! That's not good. DHI agreed to re-write its programming. They had some developers, that's good news, [chuckle] to search for potentially discriminatory keywords... Chad: Off Upwork. Joel: And job postings, and their job search works apparently, and revise its guidance to customers unacceptable job posting language. Chad, you're all over this one. Whatcha you got? Chad: That's a big fucking news, dude. Notice the claimant went after Dice, and there's no mention of the companies who actually posted the job. So we talk about Section 230, which protects like Facebook and other social media companies from the impact of content posted on their networks. This smacks down that siding with Title 7, which prohibits employers, employment agencies and labor organizations from publishing an employment notice that indicates a preference or limitation based on national origin. So DHI violated Title 7 through their customer's job postings. Let that sit for a minute, kids. These jobs were likely scraped from a customer's website. Chad: So DHI has to re-rewrite their scraping algorithm, which means everybody else needs to re-write their scraping algorithm. And think about this, all of the job boards that are out there right now that have backfill from all of these other companies, they have no clue what's on their fucking site today. This is big, because if the EEOC wants to actually start going after organizations and just targeting, for God's sakes, they don't always need to claimant, kids. They can come after you. Get your shit tight. [music] SFX: It's Corona time. It's Corona time right now. Joel: Then the stock is down 30% this year. Art Zill in his clown car must go Scott Gutz will meet you at the bar because it is National Cocktail Day after all. 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's 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.

If you hear “CTO” and think chief technology officer, you clearly don’t work for United Airlines, where CTO now means chief trash officer. That’s right, United has employed Sesame Street’s Oscar the Grouch for their latest ad campaign. Don't worry, it’ll make sense after you listen. Additionally, Recruitics has published a great piece on ChatGPT as it pertains to recruiting and we discuss. We go from Grouch to Grinch to end the show, as we chat about Elon Musk’s recent foot-in-mouth actions that make DEI fans cringe and champions of serfdom cheer. Again, just listen, it’ll make sense. 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. [music] Joel: Oh, yeah. 70% of Twitter's top advertisers have cancelled or reduced their spending, which means more ads coming to your favorite podcasts. Hi kids, you're listening to The Chad & Cheese Podcast does recruitment marketing. I'm your co-host, Joel un-skippable Cheesman. Chad: This is Chad GPT Sowash. Julie Calli: This is Julie and Chad stole my middle name today, [laughter] Calli. Joel: Oh shit. Oh no. Julie Calli: Chad GPT. Chad: Chad GPT. That's right. Joel: Alright. Anyway, so on this week's show ChatGPT's benefits to recruiting starts taking shape. Oscar the Grouch gets a job, and Elon is still off the rails. Let's do this. What's up kids? How's the snowpocalypse in the Northeast, Julie? Julie Calli: Oh, I'm enjoying it. It's March, and it's snowing. [laughter] Joel: And you can't see her, but she is cozy. Yeah. Julie Calli: Yes, I got my warm sweater on, I got the heat turned up, it is chilly here today. Chad: Velveteen rabbit sweater, no just the velvet. Joel: Yes, yes, rapper and velvet everybody, that's what... The state of Julie Calli. Chad: Shoutout. I'll go first. My shoutout goes to Elena Valentine, Abby Cheesman, and all those crazy kids over at Skill Scout. So if you've been watching, and I know you have Julie, Skill Scout did an amazing video series for VF brands, the same brand that's the umbrella over Vans, which is a cult brand organization, and they have put out some of the slickest, smoothest, cult brand, beautiful videos for employer brand that I think I have ever seen. Joel: Are you a shareholder? What in the world? Jeez! Chad: No. God. I hope I get some shares off of this, Jesus. SFX: Alright, alright, alright. Chad: Are doing a great job, but what I'm seeing here is a huge divide in companies feeling like they have to do this. Well, we have to do these slick, really beautiful videos, or we can do these TikTok-like style videos. And personally, I think there's room for both. What do you think, Julie? Julie Calli: Yeah. I mean, the TikTok style is very authentic, right? Usually, you got a messy bedroom in the background and it's okay, it's short. People aren't over-examining it, it's more about the human connection and the communication, but these over-styled ones where they're very structured and they're very branded, and there's a lot of opportunity to be creative with those. Joel: Oh yes. Julie Calli: But it's almost like stock imagery, if you see somebody, perfectly stock photo, it's like, "Oh, that doesn't look real." You just look past it. Trying to keep authentic and creativity in something that's produced, that's hard, that's really hard. Chad: Yeah. Well, VF brands in this case, they actually had Skill Scout out, they were doing rock climbing, they were at the skate park, they did all these things with... So it wasn't stock, these are things that Skill Scout actually did with the brand, and the brand felt that that embodied them and the people that work with them, and they showcased individuals who work with them that are climbing rocks and running marathons and that kind of shit. So it was really cool, it was incredibly authentic, but it was so slick. And it was one of those things where it's just like, "Oh, maybe I should check out jobs with that company." Julie Calli: Yeah, that's good story telling. Joel: You had me at Cheesman frankly, after that it was all butter after that one. [laughter] Chad: Not related to Joel, by the way. Just so everybody knows. Joel: Not whatsoever. And there's a Cheesman at Jobcase now. So they're reproducing. It's getting very crazy. It's gotta be a... Chad: That's just sad. Joel: It's gotta be a sign of the apocalypse. I'm gonna give a shout out to our friends at Workday. Most people have seen Workday's new ad, which premiered during the Super Bowl, but critics have been largely complimentary of the advertisement. USA Today ranked it in the top 10 of their ads, The Washington Post put it in the top five, and Ad Age ranked the ad at number six, with one expert saying, "I started with no idea what Workday does. In the end, it was fun enough for me to search what is Workday?" Little victories. The stock price, however is down 3% since the ad went live at Super Bowl. You can't win them all. But for the most part, shout out to Workday for their advertisement. Chad: They should have used the money to actually build a recruitment system that's worth a shit, that would have been fucking awesome. Joel: You're such a wet blanket. [laughter] Joel: Julie. Julie Calli: Well, shout out to all of the poor people out there who are trying to manage not having their paychecks because of... Joel: SVB. Julie Calli: Silicon Valley Bank. I've heard some incredible stories of CEOs taking their own money to fund their own payroll at their organization, and shout out to them and all the people that are just significantly disrupted by this, I feel for all of them. Joel: But shout out to the folk... I know Aaron Matos over at Paradox and a few other executives came to LinkedIn and said, "Hey, if you're connected to SVB and need some advice or maybe a short-term loan, hit me up." So it was cool to see the community sort of gather around potential victims of that meltdown. So shoutout to anyone on LinkedIn or in the community that help those that may have been hurt by the meltdown. Julie Calli: Yeah. Joel: Let's move on to ChatGPT, shall we, because we can't get enough of ChatGPT, although I don't think we've covered it extensively on this show. So let's talk about a recent article on Recruitics from Cory Kapner. He created a detailed article on how employers should begin thinking about ChatGPT. As companies turn to invest in technology to improve recruitment practices, ChatGPT is learning from conversations it has with people and uses reinforcement understanding to answer questions, write code, gather information write copy and more of the tool can be used to create job descriptions. Enhance employer branding, improve email marketing, stay ahead of trends, communicate with candidates, manage social media and create all kinds of content. Its benefits include streamlining processes and maximizing productivity. Julie, what is your take on the evolving technology that is ChatGPT? Julie Calli: Well, first of all, I'm not surprised Cory put this article out. If you don't know Cory, he's probably one of the most huggable people in the industry, usually a line to talk to him if I ever go anywhere with him. So great job on putting this out, especially focusing towards our industry, there are so many use cases for it, and we haven't even fully discovered them all. I feel like just a few months ago it was a question of like, "Have you tried ChatGPT yet?" And now I can't go five minutes without hearing it. It's everywhere, everyone's talking about it, and I absolutely love all these conversations because I'm so curious how people are using it. Julie Calli: There's some obvious things that we can use it for in the industry, definitely a lot of things around content, but there's even the opportunity and solutions out there now that help pick imagery for you as well, a really time-consuming thing. You write an article, now you're gonna find an image that goes with it. So this is incredible that this is gonna accelerate a lot of ability to produce content, but we're already producing so much content. So how is this going to impact people's lives? And that we have this so accessible to us now, I feel that this is gonna disrupt how we use search engines that obviously Microsoft is putting that directly into Bing for search, they're already integrating it into Microsoft Word docs, so you can produce content in that way. And colleges are even starting to approve that people can use it to write their papers as long as a certain percentage of it does not exceed. Julie Calli: So we're adapting to having this very quickly. I can envision very quickly ATSs saying, Oh, you need to post a job, just what job is it? Automatically writes a job for you. You need to create a website. Tell us about your company, automatically produces a website for you. There's so many ways that this is gonna change how we do work right now. Joel: So you're at the interesting nexus of practitioners and vendors, how do you see ChatGPT evolving? 'Cause when you look at sourcing for example, how do you manipulate Google and DuckDuckGo and back in the day of finding people? And then companies eventually came around like SeekOut, Hiretool, etcetera, that did the Boolean searches for you. How do you see this? Are both gonna use it in tandem, will we see the individual users first and then the companies come in? How is this gonna evolve from your perspective? Julie Calli: I would say we're trying to create as seamless as we can experiences to the user. So if you view yourself as a user, then what do you have access to? So I see a future in which access to be able to use something like this to search all the people that are out there by skill is a license is an access, being able to search all the jobs out there using this type of intelligence is access. So people for recruitment, people for dating, Real Estate, anything that you can think of in which we use lists and that we research against that, that is gonna be elevated to us just simply asking for it. Julie Calli: So there's lots of opportunities, not just in at job search and job journey, because people sometimes move when they look for a new job. Oh, I'm happy to go to a new location. So if you think you could string all of those things together, find me the best job for me based on my skills, find me the best manager to work with, based on the feedback that other people have given towards that type of manager, and then find me the best house for me to live in based on my criteria. It can start to really deliver entire maps of information back to you, if it has access to all of those things. Joel: You mentioned ATSs writing job descriptions. And that would just sort of be a part of that. To me, that screams disruption, and if I'm making a short list of who's gonna be disrupted by this, like Textio comes to mind, who does job descriptions. Now, they do it... Chad: And they're expensive. Joel: They're very expensive. Doing it... It's a unique way, but if I'm doing a cost analysis, is it better to just use this new tool that I am paying? So what kind of disruption do you see? Any companies that come to mind like, Oh shit, they better pivot or figure it out or else this technology is really gonna be tough to maneuver around? Julie Calli: Well, just because AI can produce content, doesn't make it good. And then if everybody's having content produced by artificial intelligence, is it all the same? So getting a really unique output is going to be important, otherwise, AI is answering the same question over and over with the same answer, and if everybody's producing that as content and calling it their own, there's gonna be a lot of duplication. So the real skill with ChatGPT is to be able to get your own unique outputs of that, giving it the prompts to get a unique output. Joel: When you say many employers copy and paste job descriptions and just kind of bake them from the net, unique content is not unique in job descriptions. Julie Calli: Right. But... Chad: Well, it doesn't make it any better than. We're just regurgitating in the old same shit. Joel: Right. We're just doing it easier. Chad: It's garbage in, garbage out. Julie Calli: Oh, and people do it now. They go Google or go on LinkedIn or Indeed, and they search for a job that's similar to the one they're looking for, and they copy it and then they edit it. So many of us are guilty of that, me included sometimes, but... So you do that, but then you have to make it unique to yourself. Well, that's where creativity comes into. I do think AI will get to those points of creativity, but this is often where people are bringing in creative agencies to help them identify what is my employer brand, right? What is my value proposition? Is AI going to be able to figure that out for you? I don't know. That takes a level of creativity, usually that we have humans involved with. So can it go that far? Can it write a job description? Black and white AB. Sure, but can it put in a selling value factor for a human to spark an emotion? I guess that's what we're gonna be challenging it with. So are there companies that are gonna be disrupted by this because some of their value may be diminished? Yes, I do think that that will happen, but where it will elevate out is the creative part, where AI can't be humanly creative. Chad: You take a look at job descriptions and the expectations are very low 'cause they're garbage for the most part. And then you take a look at CVs, resumes, that kind of thing. So we start talking about matching, we still have the same problem that we had before ChatGPT. And that's we have garbage data, period. So if we want ChatGPT to work off of garbage data, then we're just gonna get... It's just a different way to get the same result. We're just gonna get garbage back in a different form, it's the same stuff. So I think from a ChatGPT standpoint, there are the coders, the content, the people that are making content, so on and so forth. I agree that there's gonna have to be some human intervention to ensure that they're getting great and quality content and not just quantity, but it's all about quality. But when it comes down to our domain-specific, being able to do all those things that you were talking about, I could see where it could prospectively talk about going to Zillow to look for homes in this area, and so on and so forth, but it is not ready, it is not even close to ready to be able to match the domain models that we have in recruiting in our vendor space. Chad: So I'm interested to see on the general where we can use it and how we can use it, but when we start talking about... And this is where we really have to educate our industry is if you're looking for this to do something as specific as you were talking about, the expectations, no. It will not, and if it does, it's gonna spit out garbage. So just get ready for the garbage, but it'll learn, it'll learn, but it's not ready for that. Joel: Julie, you've seen some fads come and go from Twitter jobs to QR codes to... You name it. Is this a fad to you, will we not be talking about this in a year, or if we will continue talking about it, why? Does this technology really matter, should people not think of it as a passing fad? Julie Calli: I don't think I'd call it a fad. I think it's more that we are talking about ChatGPT, but this is really artificial intelligence and it's doing it in a textual use case. Now that's great, but it's gonna expand in every direction, it's gonna be with images, with videos, the words are just one part of it. So artificial intelligence is not gonna be a fad, it's a future for us and it's gonna become like a leg and an arm, we're not gonna look at it as a fad, it's gonna be like, "Oh yeah, and then it was introduced to our lives and nothing was the same." Just like the internet. Internet was like a big boom thing and was it, "Oh, it's gonna go away." No, no. It's gonna be here forever. It's gonna evolve, and I think that's the case. So it's not something to ignore. Joel: So for me, there's email that made you go like, Oh shit, that's important. Search, that's important. Social media, mobile. Would you put that... Would you put this in the same buckets as sort of those innovations? Julie Calli: Yes. I would. And I think it's actually rises above all of them. Joel: Wow. Julie Calli: Because the future is that we are the Jetsons and we're just yelling out into our house like toothbrush, and the toothbrush appears because your little Roomba bot went in, and got it for you and brought it to you. Legit, like the future is that we can just say things out loud, and artificial intelligence will be able to communicate with the internet of things that are in our household and turn our coffee pots on and make sure our refrigerator is running at an optimal temperature. And then communicate to Instacart that we are running out of milk and it needs to be delivered. Like everything is going to communicate with each other and we're going to have a future state where we just say things out loud and they happen for us. Chad: Julie is describing the movie WALL-E, by the way, that's already... That's pretty much mostly the case in China now. I'm just not sure that the internet of things and that connectivity here in the US is gonna be something that is as embraced as quickly just from as privacy rolls out. The Jetsons are great, but yeah, I'd take my disconnected TV instead of a Smart TV, I'll plug in my Roku when I need it. Joel: Are we dating ourselves with the Jetsons? I feel like the young folks... Julie Calli: Maybe I did. Joel: Won't know what the hell we're talking about.' Chad: Meet George Jetson... Julie Calli: Meet Julie Jetson, there's my call, right? Chad: And his wife. Joel: Yeah. When we get back, we'll talk about another historical figure from our childhood; Oscar the Grouch. Alright, kids. United Airlines has a new employee. They've launched a consumer education campaign to raise awareness of the benefits of sustainable aviation fuel, which is made from used cooking oil and agricultural waste. And to help them spread the word, Sesame Street's Oscar, the Grouch has been named as its first Chief Trash Officer. The campaign includes more than 30 pieces of original video, digital, social and out-of-home content featuring Oscar alongside real United employees. No word yet on whether Oscar will be featured in job descriptions, recruiting campaigns, or perform deep fake interviews with candidates, but it could actually be a thing. Chad, what's your take on Oscar the Grouch becoming United Airlines' newest employee? Chad: I guess it's got a cool spin. But when they teased it the first few days, I think there was a three-day soft launch, they said nothing other than they were talking about a Chief Trash Officer and the last thing I wanna have associated with my brand is trash. There was literally... There was no understanding of, "Okay, why are we talking about this brand and trash at the same time?" Now, Oscar the Grouch, cute little guy, still in a trash can. If it would have been me, and I said right out of... When they were teasing this, I would have gone with the Cookie Monster and would have been Chief Snack Officer or something of that nature... Joel: I like the Count. Chad: Then... Yeah, the count. Joel: Cheaper prices with the Count. Julie Calli: More revenue. Chad: And then they launched it and it made sense, so it was like, "Okay, that's cool." But still, trash, my brand, I get the end goal, but I'm still not 100% on this one. Joel: No, no. You're a sell on Oscar the Grouch. Chad: I'm more of the Count or Cookie Monster on this one. Joel: Julie, what's your take on Oscar? Julie Calli: I gotta say, chief trash officer, I've heard a lot of strange chief titles and that definitely raised my eyebrow, like, what are they talking about? So I'm with Chad. At first, I was like, "Why would any brand associate trash?" Chad: And are you calling your CTOs trashy? Julie Calli: Yeah, [chuckle] like, what is that? Joel: Yeah. If I'm a CTO, I'm like, "Wait a minute." Julie Calli: But the very question of why use trash? The answer is what the whole campaign is about, and I think that's pretty smart in questioning that, making him a representative of something that actually has value. But what really I think is incredible about this campaign is corporate social responsibility is layered in here, but in an interesting way that they're trying to use social responsibility in finding ways to convert trash into fuel and also let people invest in that. I find that really interesting. It's like, Yes, we're investing in it, but you can join us in this journey and invest in this as well. And I think that's an incredible way to build a cult brand of people who care about the planet and the future and wanna get us off of fossil fuels, can get behind a company and a cause. So this absolutely screams cult brand to me, because they're bringing it all together in this campaign. Chad: Well, stick with me for a minute though. So instead of CTO, they could have easily teased it as CFO, Chief Fuel Officer, you wouldn't have the association with trash, you could have actually talked about it and why. The tease was, "Why the hell is Oscar the Grouch going to be the CFO?" You know what I mean? And then you lead into it and you're like, "Oh, Chief Fuel Officer," then you don't have that trash... I don't know, I just think it could have been much better. Joel: I'd say CMO, Chief Muppet Officer would be my opinion. That is a buy from Julie Calli, by the way. Alright, I'm gonna chime in here. Who loves the environment? Millennials and Gen Z. And who does United want to recruit? Millennials and Gen Z. And who doesn't love Sesame Street? Hell, most millennials are still sitting around watching Sesame Street. So I say this is a good move in making Oscar an employee instead of a consultant or pundit, is a solid decision in my book. I hope they take this to the next extreme and put Oscar in employer-branding campaigns. ESG plus Sesame Street equals recruiting gold in my book. I also am a buy on Oscar the Grouch as CTO. Now let's go to Oscar the Grouch, to maybe the ultimate Grinch. Joel: Elon Musk is in the news, everybody. Julie Calli: Ooh, nice transition there. Joel: Alright, Elon Musk... Chad: Imagine that. Joel: Elon Musk engaged in a Twitter dispute with a former Twitter designer who founded the design agency, Ueno, which Twitter acquired in 2021. The designer who has muscular dystrophy tweeted Musk asking if he was laid off, but Musk replied by questioning his work and disability. The two engaged in a bitter argument with Musk ultimately revealing that the designer was not fired because he wasn't working in the first place. More from Elon, he is reportedly planning to build a company town called Snailbrook where workers from his companies can live in homes rented out by the world's richest man. 35 miles from Austin, Texas, rents are expected to start at $800 per month for a two or three-bedroom home, below market rates for the area. But if you're fired, they only give you 30 days to move your shit out of town. Chad, what do you make of the current state of your boy, Elon Musk? Chad: Imagine that, Elon coming up with this idea of a company town, [chuckle] he's going off the rails in so many different areas. I think he even offered to buy SVB, and he's just... Yeah. So, you can't take anything that he says and actually try to put it into reality until it actually happens. So the guy is obviously incredibly smart. Tesla is not a bad organization. He's putting spaceships up in space and they're landing back here at home, so very smart guy. But my God, he has gone to crazy town. And that's what they should name this instead of Snailbrook, it should be called Crazy Town. Julie Calli: He's like a walking example of what every Chief People Officer or head of HR would say, "Don't do that. Really, don't. This is... I'd advise against this." If he had somebody hovering around him all day, they'd be like, "Don't do that, don't say that, don't... " He's a walking poster child for that, and yet, he still has an incredible following of people who view him as a cult-type leader. So, I find him to be just so different in this way. People love him, follow him, fandom him, and yet he's doing all the things that you're not supposed to do as a leader. I would never, ever advise somebody to get in a Twitter public battle with one of your employees that has a disability and challenge them about their disability. Oh my goodness! What a dangerous area that is. Yet, he did it. [chuckle] So, I just am constantly in awe and in shock of him doing things the way he just wants to do them, and he maintains a following. He has 1300 direct employees and over 110,000 impacted by all of the companies that he's invested in. So he's got a substantial amount of people that work under his leadership. Joel: And if you're one of those people working for Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, what do you think about... There's nothing good about this from an employer perspective. The last earnings call for Tesla, my man was so unfocused, sort of reading from a script, totally uninspired. And we talked about United and Oscar the Grouch, at least they stand for something that people care about. Elon is getting into the quagmire, it's like Napoleon going into Russia. There's nothing... The hubris has taken over, he's gonna get slaughtered for this. They need a CEO for Twitter so he can step away from this as soon as possible. We're talking about Glassdoor ratings and what people think about him, so this is great. So right now on Twitter, for Twitter, he has a 15% approval rating, which has to be in the top 5% of worst approval ratings for CEOs, especially at a tech company. Only 41% would recommend working at Twitter, and I think that's a cumulative ranking, it's not a dated ranking, so that includes the... Chad: Yeah, over time. Joel: It's probably much less than that at the moment. My favorite review that I looked at was, "Twitter 1.0 was great and amazing. Twitter 2.0 is awful and terrible." I think that pretty much sums up Elon's time at Twitter and do needs to move on as soon as he possibly can. Even the GOP and a TikTok ban can save Elon Musk in his foray into Twitter. Chad: Yeah, I think we saw the real Elon Musk show his dirty little head during the pandemic, when he was demanding people come to work. He doesn't care about people. That's the thing, he doesn't care about people, he just knows that he needs them to build his shit until he can have robots do it. Him and Jeff Bezos are one and the same. Get the humans in there, give them the shittiest jobs they can, pay them as little as you can. And during a pandemic, if we have to force them to work, we have to force them to work, piss in garbage cans, that kind of shit. And since then, he has gone off the deep end. The whole individual with disability situation. There was a time before Trump that that would have just killed somebody's career. But we've gotten into the separate fringes on the left and on the right fringes, that there is no more sensible middle, and this is the kind of shit that happens. And he knows that, he's smart enough to know that he has to play to the fringes now as opposed to the middle, and that's exactly, unfortunately, what he's doing. Joel: We did actually get a quote from Elon. Joel: We out. Chad: We out. Julie Calli: 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 tuck away. And like Chad's favorite western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Over 7 million men in America have opted out of the workforce. That’s a big problem for a lot of employers, but it’s an 800 lb. gorilla kind of problem for manufacturing businesses. So what the hell is going on? Thankfully, we invited Patrick O'Rahilly (pronounced like “O’Reilly”), founder at FactoryFix, a company dedicated to curing what ails such businesses. The boys didn’t quite solve this complex problem, but they sure had a lot of fun trying. Almost as much fun as you’ll have listening. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for The Chad & Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oooh, yeah. If you don't know us, ask your mother. What's up, everybody. It's your favorite degenerates, also known as The Chad & Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman. Joined as always, the Fred Flintstone to my Mr. Slate, Chad Sowash is in the house. Chad: More like Wilma. [laughter] Joel: We're excited to welcome Patrick O'Rahilly, founder at our friends FactoryFix. Patrick O'Rahilly. God, even the Irish are like, "This guy is too Irish for us." [laughter] St. Patrick's Day is coming up. What are you gonna do? Is that like your only holiday every year? Patrick O'Rahilly: Yeah, absolutely. It's the holiday of the year for us. And yeah, I'm gonna party my ass off. Joel: And you're in Chicago, is there... I guess New York is the only... Maybe Boston, in terms of St. Patrick's days? Is that that? Patrick O'Rahilly: Yeah, I mean, Chicago does it right, for sure. We dye the entire river green. [laughter] It can't be good for the river, but we do it anyways. Chad: Can't be good for the river and/or the citizens [laughter] who's downriver. Joel: It's not nearly as bad as all the dead bodies that are in there from the early 20th century, I'm sure. Chad: They dredged those up. Come on. Joel: Yeah. [laughter] That's just flavor. That's just that that cheese steak or that... Sorry, Italian B flavor. [laughter] Chad: Excellent. Patrick, I tell you what, you are the founder of FactoryFix. What beyond that should our listeners know about you, about the person, about long walks on the green rivers? Joel: How many Irish Setters do you own? [laughter] Patrick O'Rahilly: Yeah. No, I mean, nothing of note other than... Look, I grew up in this industry, I had a company before this, we built robotic automation systems for manufacturing companies, so... [music] [laughter] Chad: More sexy than robots, baby. Patrick O'Rahilly: Absolutely. Chad: Unless they're sex robots, of course. [chuckle] Joel: Fembots. Patrick O'Rahilly: Not sex robots, but [laughter] in a weird way, we're selling the same pitch. We're saying, "Look, you can't find people. Let us put a robot in there for you." And now we're trying to put actual people in there for you. So grew up in the industry and just trying to figure out how to get more people working in manufacturing, which is not the easiest task these days. Chad: Why make that pivot though? You were on the robot training. You were chugging along with robot training. And automation is huge, especially manufacturing, so why switch over to the human elements? Why do that? Patrick O'Rahilly: Yeah, so the reason was we weren't making any money building those robotic automation systems. [laughter] SFX: Should we play a game? Patrick O'Rahilly: They're not the most profitable ventures in the world, at least the way we were doing it. And we started this company right out of college. We had no idea what we were doing at first. And so we would try to build any machine that we could sell. So we would go into a factory, see what they were doing manually, you know, putting cups in a box or something, and we'll say, "We're the cup box packing expert. Let us build a machine for you," [laughter] and we would quarter right there, we'd come up with a number pen and paper and build the machine, run it off in our facility, install it, and then service it over time, and that's where we saw the opportunity. Chad: Was maintenance. Patrick O'Rahilly: Yeah, totally. Like after we installed these systems, our customers had a hell of a time maintaining them or doing anything with them 'cause they didn't have the people on their full-time staff that had those skills to do it. Chad: Oh yeah. Patrick O'Rahilly: Yeah. Joel: Patrick, we actually have some hidden footage from one of those sales calls. [video playback] S?: 60% of the time, it works every time. [laughter] Joel: Yeah. Yeah, it sounds like a good business plan. So you pivoted to FactoryFix. How's that going? Patrick O'Rahilly: It's going well. It's going well. FactoryFix, in and of itself, has had many pivots. So we originally started, like I said, we were like a on-demand app for automation experts, like Uber for automation experts is the idea. And we'd have these customers that Compass sold machines into that I would say, "Hey, if you need service, use FactoryFix. Click a button and we'll send someone with those skills to fix your machine," so that was the idea. Fast forward ahead, we end up selling Compass. Tesla actually buys the company in early 2017. Chad: I know that company. Yeah. Patrick O'Rahilly: You know that? Joel: So you know Elon? [laughter] Patrick O'Rahilly: My partner at Compass worked directly for Elon for a long time, so he's got many stories on that front working with him. Chad: Spooning on the floor at nights with Elon Musk in the factory. Yeah. Patrick O'Rahilly: Exactly, exactly. [laughter] So I take FactoryFix, I think it's got an opportunity... I mean, this is back in those days where it's like, everyone's doing Uber for whatever. Chad: Yeah. Patrick O'Rahilly: And I think FactoryFix, we're gonna raise venture capital and be the next big thing, and three or four pivots later, here we are doing... Essentially recruiting automation for manufacturing companies, which is a far cry from on-demand automation experts. Chad: Yeah, but I mean, it's kind of like starting somewhere in the funnel, because you have to be able to create that database and you have to be able to credential them to be able to get to that Uber. You just can't be Uber overnight. Especially when you're talking about... I mean, Uber is for drivers. If you have your own car and you can drive, tada! But for you guys, credentialing is something entirely different. You can't just say somebody, a CNC Operator, 'cause you have to have a base of those. So very naive, yes, but a few pivots [chuckle] later, I get it, I get it. Patrick O'Rahilly: Yeah. Joel: To set the table for us, I'm a man myself, usually. Chad: Really? Joel: And I find the current state of the male worker, young males, fascinating. We have 7.2 million American men that have just said, "I'm not participating." Chad: That's 25 to 54, so that's a big span. Joel: Yeah. What the fuck is going on? Patrick O'Rahilly: I mean, it's wild. It's wild. Well, in manufacturing specifically, all the talk before the pandemic was around the skills gap, where this workforce is aging and the people coming into the industry, one, there's not enough of them, but two, they don't have the skills to support all the new technology that's come into manufacturing, with the robotics and the automation industry 4.0. So it was all about skills, skills misalignment. And now after the pandemic, we have all of these workers that have left the workforce, we have all of these workers that don't want to work in person, so the whole remote work movement, and what we're left with is a pure labor shortage now in manufacturing. We're now not just a skills gap, now it's a labor shortage. We can't even fill our unskilled positions, and turnover's so. It's a real problem for the industry. And so... Joel: Is it a labor shortage or a participation shortage? Patrick O'Rahilly: Exactly. That is a million dollar question. I think the people exist, it's just what are they doing. And your guess is good as mine, but my thesis is that it's gig economy stuff, and you'll find someone that works for DoorDash and Uber and Amazon Delivery and jump from gig to gig and work when they want, and the number of people that wanna work five days a week in-person on first, second or third shift in a manufacturing facility has really fallen off a cliff. Chad: In this actual CNBC story that we saw from late January, it said 98% of men in 1953 had jobs. They were in the workforce. Today it's 89%. Well, there are plenty more people in the populace today than there was in 1953. But in 1953, the composition of the labor force, the workforce was entirely different. So only 34% of women were actually working. So we're seeing a shift because there are now over 50% of women in the workforce today. So back then, it was one of those things where men go to work. Today, we're not that way. We're more of a blended community where the woman can actually go out, make more money than the dude does and he just stays home. Maybe he's with the kids, maybe he's playing Nintendo, who the hell knows. But do you see that could prospectively be a very thick slice as of hat onion that we're peeling away? Joel: Chad's blaming women, everybody. I want that on the record. [laughter] Chad: I'm empowering women. I'm just saying if that's the case, then we've gotta think about... Joel: Blame, empower, yeah. Chad: We've gotta think about all the factors. Do you think that's one of the big factors? Patrick O'Rahilly: Yeah, I think certainly that could be the case, but honestly, you're asking the wrong guy when it comes to women in the workforce, 'cause in manufacturing, it's like non-existent. And that is one of the major movements going on with organizations like the Manufacturing Institute, which is the workforce arm, and the National Association of Manufacturers. Their big push is getting more women in manufacturing, and it is an uphill battle in manufacturing, especially. They've almost been excluded, and I think it's the industry's fault, frankly. But there are jobs in manufacturing that women are better suited for, frankly, than men, and we need them to participate even more than they are, even though it's trending that way in other industries. So manufacturing is a difficult industry to ask that question. Chad: Well, living here in Columbus, Indiana, where is the international headquarters of Cummins Engine Company, which is the biggest diesel engine manufacturer in world, a lot of my friends are females, work at Cummins. So it seems like to me... And from that aspect, Cummins has always had the idea of going into the community and pulling the community, training the community to come work for them. Not to mention also a lot of H-1Bs for diversity and those types of things, it just doesn't seem like most of the manufacturing community itself has embraced that kind of feeling. They would rather say, "Well, it's a skills mismatch, the government needs to help," as opposed to actually taking it upon themselves, going into the community and being a part of the community and drawing them in to these great jobs, 'cause advanced manufacturing jobs are not the manufacturing jobs in the 1950s at all. Patrick O'Rahilly: Yeah, one of my biggest worries for manufacturing recruiting is that it's so short-sighted. It's all about putting out fires, this machine is down because someone just quit and we need to fill this job today. Find someone that has experience working on this machine. Hire them. I don't care what their next progression in their career is, 'cause there isn't one, frankly, here, or I'm not investing the time in setting up a career path for that level of machine operator. So it's very reactive. And we're trying to do our best to really push a more proactive approach where you can hire entry level people, convince them that manufacturing is a great career choice because in three, four, five years, you can work your way up and make really good money without any college debt even. Joel: Chad, curious, in Columbus, is Cummins going to the high schools? Chad: Yes. Joel: Do you see advertisements in Columbus around women? Chad: Community colleges, high schools, yes, all the way through. And again, to be a part of... Actually be a part of the community, and it's not just about the charity and the giveback, it's also about building talent pipelines. And we hear companies talk about talent pipelines and they're totally full of shit. They don't even know what a talent pipeline was if I hit him in the fucking head. These guys understand it, which really blew my mind when I came to live here, because they still have vocational in the high school where they ripped it out of my high school back in North Central Ohio years ago, which is exactly where it should still be. So yeah, the answer is a big yes. Joel: This seems to be an issue that's been politicized quite a bit. Mike Rowe, famous for his Dirty Jobs show, said in an interview that Uncle Sam was basically footing the bill for men getting out of the workplace because it's easier to take government checks and play video games into this to actually work. On the left, you have the upskilling argument, which you highlighted in one of your comments. Where are you on the political spectrum in this argument? Is it getting too politicized? What's your take on that aspect of this argument? Patrick O'Rahilly: Yeah, I think there's something to what Mike Rowe said in that. I do think stimulus may have gone a little too far, which I understand at the time in the fog of war. You had to do what you had to do. No one knew what was going on. But it certainly gave the opportunity to a large percentage of the working population to give them the freedom to hang out whether seven hours a week or seven hours a day, whatever, we figure out. But yeah, I don't think that money's fully run out yet. I think we're starting to see signs that it is and participation slowly taking up, but the labor market, I think, is one of the last things to go. And these people are gonna hold out as long as they can, they're gonna start racking up credit card bills to maintain their lifestyle, and then once you start seeing some default rates tick up, that's when you'll see those folks resurface in the workforce. So that is part of what I think is going on there. Chad: I feel the shift for me is females in the workplace, they're not really attracted to manufacturing jobs. Skills mismatch, where companies aren't actually going into the communities and drawing those individuals in because there are tons of people who wanna work with their hands for a living. I see that here, locally, there are HVAC and plumbing companies who pay for certifications and they go into a contract, so you have a three, four-year contract after whatever certification you get, much like the military. The military does ROTC, where they pay for your education, but then you owe the military three to four years of our life. So it almost seems like the answer is there, but we're just not getting to it, and I don't understand why because in many cases, it seems fairly simple. Patrick O'Rahilly: Yeah, I agree. I think the Cummins example that you brought up is great. I think they're doing it right, and I think there's a lot of those large centralized manufacturing companies that do invest in it and do have a good pipeline of talent coming in. The problem is that 98% of manufacturing companies are either smaller than that, or they're decentralized, so there's a lot of facilities all over the place, and each facility is essentially on its own for recruiting and talent acquisition development. So they're just resource-constrained, and that falls below their line of what they need to do that day. And that's part of what we're trying to build into our platform, is trying to automate those things for them, even down to the awareness and getting people excited out of high school. We partnered with the National Association of Manufacturers in their Creators Wanted Campaign, and they're spending millions of dollars going all over the country trying to get these high schoolers excited about careers in manufacturing. And we're getting all that talent and making it easy for them to find jobs in manufacturing, and you just have to make yourself super attractive to that audience, 'cause like you said there are people that wanna work with their hands. Chad: Yeah. Patrick O'Rahilly: We're not gonna get the MIT grads and the people that want to be computer scientists. Forget about them, let's find the people that wanna work with their hands, that wanna start making money right out of high school, and you have to win those. You can't let them become Uber drivers and work at Chipotle. Chad: Well, talk a little bit more about that partnership and actually being able to together, almost like a symbiotic relationship in building a database in which companies can come to you, NAM, one and the same, to be able to find that kind of talent. So talk a little bit about that, talk about the outreach methods, those types of things, 'cause I think that to me is incredibly important, that you guys are working directly with an organization association to be able to try to bridge that gap. Patrick O'Rahilly: Yeah, so NAM, the National Association of Manufacturers, they're surprisingly big, like I was surprised once I learned how big they are. It is the association in the US for manufacturing. They have 14,000 manufacturing members, and their big campaign is called Creators Wanted, which is basically a campaign to get young people interested and excited about careers in manufacturing because all of those members have told them, "Look, we need help with workforce. There's this labor shortage, there's this skills gap. Please help us." So they take all this association funding and have launched this campaign. It's really cool. They've built out this whole escape room experience in this trailer, and it teaches kids about careers in manufacturing as you solve the escape room and have fun with the game experience, but... Joel: Clever. Patrick O'Rahilly: Anyways, they're getting tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of students coming through, getting them excited about manufacturing, and then what we've done is we've powered their jobs platform on their website in this campaign to help those kids find their first job in manufacturing right out of school and find one that aligns well with their interests, so if they're more mechanically inclined, they can find something where they work with their hands, if they're more electrically inclined, they can find something related to programming or whatever. So yeah, it's pretty exciting. Joel: Patrick, I'm a novice compared to you, but it seems to be like two things that we could do to solve this or make some big progress into solving it. One is giving formally incarcerated folks another chance or incentivizing companies to give... Chad: Big applause. [applause] Joel: To give them a second chance. And the other one is immigration. We have a lot of people that would love to come to this country and do the work that is not getting done. What's your view on both of those issues, immigration and formally incarcerated folks? Patrick O'Rahilly: 100% for it. There's a lot of legal red tape that I'm not familiar with that needs to get solved there, but second-chance citizens for sure is an under-represented audience that we need to reach out to as an industry to get them set up with jobs in manufacturing. And the Manufacturing Institute has a program directed towards them that I know is gaining traction, that I'm really excited about. Immigration is another one. I know COVID threw off the whole immigration game pretty badly and now it's just getting started again, but honestly, I don't see any other solution to fill in some of these low-skilled jobs in manufacturing facilities, 'cause the workforce... In that article, you pointed out, the workforce has proven that they'd rather sit at home and just not do them and figure out something else, jump gig to gig or whatever. They're just... Chad: Or the wife is the primary, yeah. Patrick O'Rahilly: Or the wife is the primary. They're just not gonna do it. So they're either gonna sit on field or we need to fill 'em with immigration and underrepresented audiences, or we need to automate them all, and I think a combination of those things are gonna happen. Chad: So Karla Trotman, who is the CEO of Electro Soft, a company outside of Philadelphia that makes circuit boards, said that she wishes she had 45 people that worked there, but she can only find 30, costing the company about $5 million in top line revenue. So when you're going to talk to companies on a daily basis, are they starting to understand that, like you'd said before, that machine and not having a person there operating it is costing the organization dollars every minute, but do they really understand, can they quantify what that dollar looks like? Because I think they would move harder and faster if they did. So are you starting to see them come around to that, or do you think it's gonna take some more time? Especially with these smaller organizations. Patrick O'Rahilly: It's gonna take some more time. 100%. Like you said, the best manufacturers, the biggest manufacturers, they know their numbers, like the Cummins of the world. The best recruiters think like marketers, and they know every metric, not only at the recruiting funnel, but they know how many dollars they're losing based on how many hours their machine is not running. And so manufacturers, they make money when they produce parts, and so if that machine isn't producing parts because there's no operator or a programmer on it, it's just burning money. So yeah, that's part of our job, is to show the ROI there and to show that downtime matters, and frankly, we just need to help you find a person to get that machine running again as fast as possible. Joel: What role, if any, do unions have in this problem? And I'll give you an example. When I was a kid, unions were strong. They always got the message of, "Hey, do this job. Join the union, something bigger than yourself. We'll take care of you. We'll fight for you." That message seems largely lost today. What role do unions, if any, play in solving this problem? Patrick O'Rahilly: Yeah, I think the weakening of unions over the past couple of decades has correlated with the troubles in filling manufacturing positions, frankly. I think the manufacturing industry has struggled to market itself to incoming employees, mainly because that was part of the unions' job a couple of decades ago. They were the ones out there recruiting the young kids to get in and join the union and join the industry. Without that, you're just left with employers that try to do that job on their own, and now they have the ability to move wages up and down to align with what they think the market is for that given person, so... Look, I'm not saying it's a bad thing that unions have weakened, I'm not saying it's a good thing either, but I know it's affected the manufacturing workforce. Joel: Patrick O'Rahilly, everybody. [applause] Chad: O, O, O, O'Rahilly. Joel: O, O, O, O'Rahilly. Patrick, for our listeners who wanna know more about you or FactoryFix, where would you send them? Patrick O'Rahilly: You can hit me up on LinkedIn or my email, patrick@factoryfix.com. Factoryfix.com is the website. Chad: Amen. Joel: Chad, 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 & 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. Let's save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful trainwreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Let’s see, Ted Lasso is back, St. Patrick’s Day is here and March Madness is in full effect. So how exactly are we supposed to muster the strength for a podcast? Well, OK, anything for you, you loyal listening selfish bastard! Here’s what's on tap this week: More Silicon Valley Bank drama, Fountain goes after Paradox, Acquisitions by Textkernel and Andela, Who’d Ya' Rather with Upduo and HeadRace A tale of two cities … one in Florida and one in New York (I know, the suspense is killing you). Now, back to the Jameson. Sláinte! TRANSCRIPTION SPONSORED BY: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. SFX: Excuse me, I'd like to request $17 for a push broom re-bristling. Why, it's that delightful TV leprechaun. I am going to get your lucky charms. Oh no. My brains. 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. Ted Lasso is back, Saint Patrick's Day is here and March Madness is in full effect. Can we just stop the show right there and just not do it? Alright kids, what's going on? You are listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host, Joel, everyone's after me, Lucky Charms Cheesman. Chad: And this is Chad, I love me a crab boil Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, you're down with SVB, fountain squirts and Florida's gonna Florida. Let's do this. Chad: Back on East Coast time, baby. Yes. Joel: Yeah. Indiana, the East Coast, baby. Let's do this. Chad: I'll take it, Jesus, I'll take it. Being eight or nine hours behind Europe because nearly half of the calls we take are usually European. I don't know how they do any business with Europe whatsoever. It's hard enough to do business with the East Coast. Joel: Yeah, legal weed and really good micro-brews. I think that's how they do it. Chad: We have great micro-brews here and we can get weed from Michigan or Illinois. Joel: I don't know anything about that, man. I don't know anything about that. I'm a little bitter today, check this shit out. So my 13-year-old daughter's volleyball team has practice on St. Patrick's day, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM. What kind of sadistic, heathen shit is that? Chad: It's called carpooling. That's when you just don't pick your fucking kid up. Joel: Do I take my kid in an Uber and drop her off and then pick her up in an Uber? Chad: Don't you have friends? Doesn't she have friends that she can actually go with? Joel: They're dropped too. They're not gonna go to volleyball practice. Chad: Somebody's responsible. Joel: I don't know. She's got a bike. It's only about 10 miles away, at 9 o'clock at night. Chad: I do have to say thanks to all the friends on the West Coast. We were in Spokane and Portland, splitting our time. We had an amazing crab boil. One of our friends is... Was a chef, he's now a fish monger, they still exist, which means he can get the best fish ever. So we had a whole crab boil. It was amazing. We did a five-hour drive, five and a half hour drive from Spokane to Portland, which was probably one of the most beautiful drives, right on the river. It was gorgeous. So we had a good time, but I am happy to be back. SFX: Alright, alright, alright. Joel: How about some shout-outs, Mr. West Coast vibe, coming back to Indiana? Chad: Let's do it. Joel: MOD Pizza. Chad: Oh, we've heard of these guys. Joel: MOD Pizza. Yeah. Each year, Chad, 650,000 individuals in the US exit the criminal justice system. While too many employers whine about not being able to find people, they refuse to give people who, yes, have made mistakes, but wanna work and get a second chance. MOD Pizza has been an incredible example of an employer who embraces second chances. We've talked about their ads showing a worker in an ankle monitor, and I encourage employers to go visit modpizza.com and see that they have an entire page now, about employees that they've given a second chance to, including a recruiter from the site, quote, "We found many justice-involved individuals are ready to get to work and have the grit and resilience we value in our people," end quote. Amen and shout out to our friends at MOD Pizza, which is where I'm going to lunch today, to support... Chad: That's awesome. Amen. Yeah. We should actually have them on the podcast. Let's make that a thing, this year. My first shout out goes to the US Army and US Navy recruitment ad. So this morning, Julie and I were watching the news, having her morning coffee, when the US Navy, they had a commercial pop on and it was promoting its newest website, buildsubmarines.com. The US Navy is going niche and trying to get people interested in joining by enticing them to build next gen subs, which I thought was fucking awesome. Then, I pulled out my phone and I played the Army's new Overcoming Obstacles commercial for Julie. And right out of the gate, she saw a battlefield with Jonathan Majors, an actor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He was in the Loki series, and he's also in the Antman's newest movie. But anyways, it's an ad that shows the long history of the US Army's ability to overcome obstacles, as Jonathan Majors walks through Revolutionary War, World War I, World War II battlefields and ends up on a bus full of recruits, headed to basic training. It's one of those inspiring commercials, and Julie loved it mainly because at first, she thought it was a marvel movie trailer. [laughter] Shout out to the US military. [music] Old US Army Jingle: We do more before 9:00 AM than most people do all day. [music] Old US Army Jingle: Hey, First Sergeant. Good morning. Joel: Alright. Shout out to Uber, Lyft and DoorDash, some of your favorite companies. Chad, remember back in 2019, when California passed a state law requiring it... Requiring them to treat drivers as employees? Yeah. About that. It went to the courts after Prop 22 passed in opposition, and a California appeals court ruled this week, that companies such as Uber and Lyft can continue to treat their drivers as independent contractors, exempting them from state laws requiring worker protections and benefits. Uber stock was up 6% on the news. Shout out Uber, Lyft and DoorDash. Chad: The opportunity to treat their people like shit. That's awesome. Shout out to Eightfold, who was in The New York Times, in an article entitled, quote, "An AI startup boomed, but now it faces a slowing economy and new rules," end quote. Not the kind of article I want my two founders, uneasy faces as the social share image and they look awkward, they look like they're constipated or something's happening, I don't know. But, it was an interesting article. It was kind of half take down piece and then half inspirational AI's here to save the day. It was... I don't think it was incredibly well done. What do you think? Did you read it? Joel: I don't know. Let's check in on Eightfold right now. Oh, shit. Chad: The rumor mill, though... The rumor mill says, and we don't have this confirmed yet, so it's just a rumor, kids. Kamal, Eightfold's President is out. And as I was receiving, and I have been getting these messages just this morning, we also received messages that TotalJobs' CEO, John Wilson and CRO, Gemma Hennen are both out, as StepStone restructures. And if you remember, back in December, StepStone announced that they will be looking toward IPO. So cutting high-priced heads while thrusting those responsibilities back to the mothership could be the start of tightening up the belt. Just speculation thus far, but we're gonna stay close... SFX: That escalated quickly. Joel: Yeah, so word at EightFold that I've heard is, things are going well from a monetary standpoint, morale isn't too bad, however, they were initially shocked by the amount of layoffs, and a lot of people that they thought wouldn't get laid off, did. And, a lot of the tasks have been obviously passed over to people for extra work, so the foundation may be cracking at Indeed and you and I will be watching closely. Chad: At EightFold, you mean? Joel: At EightFold. What did I say? Chad: Indeed. Joel: Well, them too. [laughter] Fucking all of them. Well, where it's not cracking, Chad, where the foundation is not cracking, is our listeners that get free shit. So I got new winners from this month. You ready? Textkernel, our whiskey winner this month was Katie Gentry. Our beer winner, sponsored by Aspen Tech Labs is our own Jonathan Duarte. He may come up later in the show. And our Rum with Plum, remember if it's your birthday, you might win some rum from our friends at Plum, and that goes to Greg Fiorentino. If you haven't signed up for free stuff, kids, what the hell are you doing? Head out to chadcheese.com, click the free link, fill out the form, and sign up for free stuff, which normally will include a free T-shirt from our friends at JobGet. But, no matter what, if you're listening, you're a winner no matter what. Chad: Jonathan Duarte did a commercial for Aspen Tech Labs after... He was like, "I wanna show you my beer," then he did a commercial for Aspen Tech labs. Joel: He was really thankful for the beer. Chad: Oh yes, he was. Joel: He was really thankful. Chad: He was ready. Joel: He needs to get out more. I don't know, Jonathan. Chad: Events, baby. Okay, so Unleash is happening in Vegas at Caesars Forum, late in April. I'm really excited about this one. We're going to be all over the place. I know that they have a podcast booth. We're gonna spend a little time there, but we're gonna be bouncing around, having an amazing time, probably having bourbon, cigars at VIP events, all of that fun stuff. Joel: You think? Chad: Yeah, I think so. I think so. Any plans for you thus far, other than also the toke thing that we're doing. It's this little... Joel: Oh, can we talk about that now? I thought it was under wraps. Chad: A little event. Well, we can talk about it. We just can't invite people yet. Joel: We're teasing it. Chad: Yes. Joel: God. Talent Toke. Is that what it's called? Chad: Talent took. We're gonna be meeting around the Bellagio, and we're gonna do weed while we're watching the fountains dance. SFX: Alright, alright, alright. Chad: We'll talk more about that later. Joel: Stay tuned, kids. Chad: Yes, yes, yes, yes. So then we're going to iCIMS INSPIRE in May. We're both gonna go in early, to meet Terry Baker and Ryan Steelberg for a day in Newport Beach, and then we're headed back to Coronado, where we're gonna be on stage, I believe, and a day, doing an interview with the CEO and whomever else they wanna put up there with us. Joel: Whoever they dare to put up there with us, is the correct... Chad: Don't scare them. Don't scare them. Joel: Geez. That's a lot of days in California. I don't know if I can cope with such a thing. Chad: That is, that is. And then RecFest in Knebworth Park, early July, just north of London, kids. It's an easy train ride from London, about half an hour, just pop on the train. Chad and Cheese are... We're gonna own the disrupt stage, that's our baby. Nothing but technology, all day, we'll be MC'ing and we'll be trying to cause as much havoc as we possibly can. Those are the next three events that we're going to. Go to chadcheese.com, click on 'events' in the upper right hand corner, register for all of them, partake in the discounts, come partake in all of the wonderful debauchery and learning that's gonna be happening at these events. Joel: And leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform, while you're at it. Chad: That's good. SFX: Really? Did you feel the tension 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. That sound bite means we're gonna celebrate some birthdays this week. Celebrating another turn around the sun, Iron Mike Shafer, Ashley Collins, Barb Francello, Jeffrey Wagner, Viot Michael Mueller, he's European. I'm assuming that's how you pronounce 'beat' in Switzerland. Bill Fanning, Jasper Sponjart, James Beaver Cleaver, Deb Andrew Chuck, and Craig That's not a knife, that's a knife Watson. SFX: Happy birthday. Joel: Happy birthday, everybody. And thanks for listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. Topic. Oh, we got some more Indeed insight. Chad: We sure do. We have plenty of people who are not incredibly happy about what's happening in Indeed, and then also other people that just wanna give us updates. So we have Matt Woodcock, who actually... I tell you what, just roll that beautiful bean footage. Joel: Did you say Woodcock? S?: What are you doing, step-bro? Joel: Here's Matt. Matthew Woodcock: Greetings, gents. I hope you're well. It's Matt here, from the UK, across the pond. So let's talk about Indeed. From the first of February, a bunch of our clients we put on the CPAS, CPSA model, now, from the first of March, we've been putting all of our clients on that model. So, how has that affected them? Well, we are seeing some pretty good results, but whilst there is still the re-engineered model from the customer click, I'm waiting to see amazing results. But, Indeed is still doing a great job for us and they do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of high volume recruitment, but it's to be confirmed. So let's see how that goes. That will be coming to America on the first of April. I had that confirmed the other day, so one of our clients is gonna be on that model from the first of April as well. We found out today as well, that the CPA model in the UK, it is coming into effect very soon. They're still in testing. Matthew Woodcock: They're still testing it, although a lot of the publication is on the website. Now with that, it's only gonna be available in the SME market, just like the States, so I can only imagine it's gonna have the same backlash. But, you're gonna be able to reject unqualified candidates within 72 hours, and if you don't, you have to pay for them. Now, also, that isn't gonna be available to the enterprise level clients spending tens of thousands of pounds a month for the foreseeable future. So whilst the SME market is able to reject candidates, the enterprise level clients have to pay for everything. But I will leave that for you gents to review and I look forward to hearing from you. So from me, for now, cheers. Chad: So you can tell Matt is British, not just from his accent, but because you can hear the fury hiding deep down inside, that he really wants to let out, but centuries of sensibilities just won't allow it to happen. Joel: I counted twice that he says, "Indeed is performing magnificently, but." Chad: And he says re-engineered. It's like, "No, no, they just repackaged the same shit." Anyway, we've already covered the problems with Indeed's bait-and-switch, but let's run through it really quick. Mandatory registration. And we're talking about CPA first. So the CPA can flood with applicants due to one click apply. So you have a job out there, applicants already registered, very easy to apply, click, click, click, floods of applicants are hard to manage, which means the black hole grows and that's horrible for user experience and your brand. Unqualified applicants denied in 72 hours. Who has time for that shit? I mean, 72 hours for a small company to be able to go in, you're literally going to have to have somebody manage that shit for you. Now, on to cost per started apply. Registration still mandatory. Even though the info is not used to apply. Chad: Why? Because the user is pushed to the corporate career site to apply through your process. So the new CPSA is literally just old CPC with a new label and a higher price tag. That was the re-engineered that Matt was talking about. It's total bullshit. Enterprise companies cannot deny applicants for a refund. Those are just the highlights of some of the new products. So this is the big question that I just can't get an answer to here is, why did Indeed rush to market with these products, when they are so full of holes? Joel: Remember last week, when we talked about Aaron Rogers going on like a four-day retreat and total blackness. [laughter] Chad: Yes. Joel: I'm pretty sure the executives at Indeed were at this escape as well, because I don't know what the fuck they're doing anymore. They sound scared, they sound totally intimidated by what Google's doing, ChatGPT, they're probably scared to death about what's going on there and the fraud that they're gonna have to deal with, and all kinds of stuff. However, their new gig economy, I'm sure will totally save the business. Really, I got nothing. I don't know who's behind the wheel there, if anybody. It feels like total disarray. Recruit Holdings is buying some makeup company or make... Did you see this shit? It's on the makeup site, for beauty site. I just... I'm at a loss, man. I got nothing. But either way, that is our Indeed update for the week. Joel: Now, let's get into some real news, shall we, Chad? In case you missed it, a couple of banks went under since we last chatted, and things have gotten a little crazy with implications for some companies in our space, particularly Silicon Valley Bank, which was closed by regulators and put under the control of the FDIC, after a botched capital call and a rush for depositors withdrawing their funds. The bank's position as the go-to bank in tech, made it a huge beneficiary of the Silicon Valley boom through the past few years, as billions in deposits flowed to the bank. SVB decided to park that cash in securities rather than turn those deposits into loans to customers, and invested the bulk of these deposits and securities. As rates went up, the value of these assets plunged, and eventually SVB had to sell some of the securities it had invested, hoping to have enough cash to return money to depositors. It failed, of course, and an old-fashioned run on the bank torched them, and here we are today. A lot to un-back here, Chad. Your thoughts. Chad: What a fucking mess, man. I mean, so what did we learn that we didn't already know from 2008? And once again, capitalism is amazing, but it doesn't work without government bailouts. So this is just kind of the... The shit that happens when you allow the animals to run the zoo. Europe saw impact. SVB-UK sold for one sterling pound to HSBC. Talked about this earlier this week on the Europe show. Go check that out. But not because it had the same problems as their U.S counterparts, but the UK needed to pivot the optics away from the US's instability into something that was more stable, like HSBC. CrunchBase, then we talk about the market cooling off. CrunchBase had an article where it had a quote, "venture funding has contracted sharply in Q4 of 2022. North America startups investment was down 63% year over year" end quote. So I fear, this is going to cool off funding even more. But the big question is, is that a bad thing? Because we are talking about companies on a weekly basis that literally, conceptually, experientially, leadership wise are shit. They shouldn't be getting money anyway. So is this really a bad thing for us? Joel: It's not a bad thing for podcasters because we enjoy talking about companies getting money and failing and getting acquired by other companies. So for us, it's probably not a good thing if the money... The money dries up. It's important for me to note that this is not my lane. I don't think it's your lane. Like discussing, banking and what goes on there is not what people tune into this show for. Chad: I can tell you where to make investments. That's for fucking sure. Joel: Yeah. However, there is... This does reach into our industry. A couple of things... A couple of thoughts for me here. ThisWay Global sponsored the show and great friends over there. They actually sent out a note to their investors saying that they had previously put funds into SVB, but that they had since moved their money into Chase. So it was like nothing to see here. Everything is good. So I can't imagine a lot of other companies that were sending out notes to customers, investors, people of influence in the company like, hey, we're okay, we're fine. I hate to be on the other end that people were like, oh, shit, things are going to get a little chaotic here in the near future. Joel: Notable firms listed as SVB clients include ZipRecruiter in our space, in addition to other well-known companies like Pinterest and Shopify. A friend of the show in Silicon Valley resident Jonathan Duarte told us in an email quote, the SVB closure is going to have a big impact on HR tech, but no one knows the impact for sure exactly. He added, quote, "SVB was the primary bank for probably 80% of the US VCs. When a VC raised a fund, that money went into SVB accounts," end quote. Interestingly, Jonathan says SVB got into private banking services such as mortgages, which is a real shit show. And he ended his note with, quote, "My assumption is the shit's going to hit the fan in our HR tech market really fast and it's going to be really big news," end quote. Well, if Jonathan's right, we'll have a lot to talk about. And this is nowhere near the end of the story. Chad: Yeah, I mean, the dollar is down what, like 600 points since yesterday? I mean, there's obviously more than just this that's happening. But, the big question is, how do we add stability back into... And trust back into the system? And the easy answer is to reinstate something like Dodd-Frank, which was rolled back. Dodd-Frank was instituted in 2010 after the 2008 financial crash. So we actually put guardrails in in 2010 and then we took them out and then we expect to keep the fucking train on the tracks. And we can't even do that anymore. So, I mean, it's one of those things where we we have to get better at understanding that pure systems don't exist, right? We have to have a good meshing of, yes, capitalism grows and thrives, but it has to have adults in the room and we can't allow the fucking animals to run the goddamn zoo, which is exactly what happened here with SBB. There could have been tens of thousands, if hundreds of thousands, possibly, depending on how the dominoes fell, of people who could have lost their jobs. This could have been... This could have been something that was much larger if the US government, the UK and these governments didn't step in and take care of it. Joel: Speaking of optics, Barney Frank of the Dodd-Frank bill was on signature's board, I believe. So government in bed with banking, no matter what political party you're talking about, is never good. It looks bad. Credit Suisse, you probably saw this morning, bailed out by the government out there. So its stock is back up. I don't know, this whole dance of government, banking systems, bailouts is going to come to a head at some point. I don't know when that is or how that works out, but it's not good. Now, the good news is SVB, I think, is the 16th largest bank in the US. So it's not like a 2008 situation where you had some really huge banks take a shit. So unless this is... SVB sneezes and everyone else catches a cold, it may be more of an isolated incident than we think. Time will tell. But yeah, it's not good. It's not good. And overall, it creates uncertainty in everything. And when people are uncertain, they don't know about the future, like they just stop, right? Chad: Yes. Joel: Stop funding, stop doing shit. And that's obviously bad for a machine that needs a well-oiled engine to keep things going. Let's get to Fountain. The ATS for High Volume Hiring has launched Fountain AI, a conversational AI feature they say streamlines the hiring process for recruiters and candidates. The feature automates tasks such as applicant screening and data collection and offers 24/7 support for job candidates with real-time responses. Kind of like a chatbot. So Fountain is well-funded and by all accounts, crushing it. So should Paradox be shaking in their comfy, cozy desert boots or is this much ado about nothing? Chad, your thoughts. Chad: High volume is a huge market. And I think the paradoxes of the world need the fountains of the world and the fountains of the world need the paradoxes of the world, right? I think it's interesting that they say this is streamlining because Fountain was already an automation and efficiency process engine for high volume hiring companies in the first place. So they're adding a new layer of UX. I mean, that's really what's happening here. So they're just doing more of what they already did. The big question to me is with chat GPT and all of these new big data models popping out, is this just going to be a jump on the bandwagon kind of scenario? And every organization, especially the ones that are well-funded right out of the gate, are they just going to start glomming on to chatGPT in these chatbots? I say yes. But the thing that we need to do, especially on this podcast, is we have to separate and educate the two models. Chad: We have the domain specific models, much like Paradox has, right? And they've been training on domain specific data. So that being said, domain being just client data, that information that happens inside the system that is not available to the outside world, that nobody else can train on, Paradox has been training on that for years now, right? Then you have the general model, which is broad based and it's trained on whatever you want it to train on, but it's more large data models, right? So we have to understand the difference between those two and that they can also be linked. Chad: If you listen to our podcast with Ryan Steelberg talking about these different AI models, he goes into more detail about it. So check that podcast out. But this is going to be incredibly interesting because we're going to have to, or at least practitioners are going to have to better understand what the hell is a chatbot? What will this one do for me that that won't do for me, etcetera, etcetera? Joel: It's quickly becoming a feature of the cool kids. And we've seen this before with like, are my jobs SEO friendly? Can I do text messaging? Can I like these things happen and customers are like, why don't you guys have this? This is like a hot new thing. It's trending. Like, why don't you have it? And then salespeople go bitch it at the executives and the executives ask the web people like, hey, can we design this? Can we develop it? Like, what's it going to take and how long? And then the developers go, oh, yeah, we can do that, knowing that it's going to be nowhere near probably what Paradox has. Right? Or our company that really specifically does this thing. The news was pretty... Pretty foggy. Like, I don't... I mean, did they build it themselves? Did they partner with somebody? Is this white labeled? We don't... We don't really know. So we have to sort of assume that they made it in house. Joel: It has WhatsApp and SMS in there. So a couple more things that the cool kids are all talking about. They had to throw in there. My question is, if you're... If you're as big as Fountain and you're an ATS, your platform for frontline workers, high turnover jobs, why not build a marketplace? Why not have... Why not give Paradox the ability to build their... Put their conversational AI, Wade Windy? I mean, who... Predictive hire, whatever the hell their name is now, but, put their chatbot. And then as a customer, it's like, oh, I really love Paradox's conversational AI, but I love Fountain's interface and products. Like, why can't I just marry those together? By forcing someone to say like, hey, use our substandard conversational AI because you can check it off the list of functions and features that we have. I think ultimately customers lose in that and Fountain probably loses because their product isn't going to be as good as a company whose core competency is around that. Yeah. Why not build a marketplace? The time that your developers built a conversational AI, they could have built a platform for a marketplace. That to me is a much better use of your time and investment than building one feature. Build an entire platform where people can come build all kinds of features and your customers can get value from that. Chad: Yeah. You wonder how the founders of Alio and Maya feel right about now. I mean, if they could have actually spent and focused and been more disciplined, right? And they could have kind of like lived a little bit longer than they could have made it to the chatbot is cool kind of scenario. But again, the explorers, they get the arrows. Joel: Yeah. And it goes once again that most people don't go out of business for too little money. They go out of business because they took too much money. And the two companies you just mentioned are in that category. All right. Let's take a quick break. Guys, listen to the ads. There's no show without the sponsors. And then we'll talk about an acquisition conversational AI thing that might actually make sense. All right, Chad, we got two acquisitions from two pretty big players. This is no small ball that we're talking about here. Textkernel, our friends in Holland and Andela, one of the big new kids on the block with a lot of funding, have made acquisitions. Let's talk about Textkernel first. They've acquired fellow Dutch company Joboti, a candidate engagement tech firm. Joboti's automated recruitment processes, which include job alerts, GDPR checks and interview scheduling, are designed to streamline the recruitment process and reduce recruiter workloads. Textkernel says the addition of Joboti's capabilities will allow them to offer clients an automated recruitment solution, freeing recruiters to focus on high value tasks such as engaging with human beings, imagine that, while reducing costs and increasing efficiency. We actually have a soundbite from our friend, Gerard Mulder or Gerard, if you're in the United States, about the acquisition. Take a listen. Gerard Mulder: So you can look at this as a natural extension of what we do already. We retrieve good matches, but do not engage with candidates ourselves. Now, most of our customers are looking for more channels and more advanced ways of reaching out to those candidates and automate more in that process. At the same time, they're not looking to replace their CRM or ATS. So this is another best of breed solution, which we can self integrate it or stand alone. And next to that, we see an increasing interest to use our matching technology on the career sides. And combined with Joboti's chatbot, it creates a more candidate friendly and better converting process for all types of positions. Joel: Chad, your thoughts on Textkernel's acquisition of Joboti. Chad: So picture this, you post a job in your applicant tracking system, Textkernel receives the job, searches against your candidate database in your applicant tracking system and then starts engaging with candidates automatically. Recruiter didn't have to do a goddamn thing. I've always said that the matching engines are the heaviest lift in our space because of the parsing, contextualizing and then matching against job descriptions and then against CVs. Now add WhatsApp messaging into the fray and it's strong as hell, man. It's not just strong, it is sexy too. So this makes a lot of fucking sense. You take a company who has been doing this, acquire and then attach it to a very strong engine. The biggest organization in the world from a matching parsing standpoint being Textkernel after buying Sovereign and then being able to put this messaging capacity on top of it. This is exactly what a big release should look like. This means something. This is impactful. Joel: Sexy is the word that you use and that's probably the word that I would use too. I have visions of these two Dutch companies hitting up a coffee shop in Amsterdam to get deals signed. Chad: Those air quotes by the way, coffee shop. Joel: Would have loved a bit of fly on the wall. Yes, two Dutch companies making a deal happen. So full disclosure, we love Textkernel. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: They're a sponsor. We love Sovereign, one of our first sponsors and an awesome product. Pretty much everyone that was everyone in the US used Sovereign. Textkernel acquiring Sovereign was one of the understated gangster moves of probably the last five years. Textkernel left the throws of CareerBuilder, which was a gangster move. They partnered with Main Capital who has more money than us to bankroll some of these things. They're making really intelligent sort of organic complimentary acquisitions like the one that they did here. For now, they don't seem like they want to be all things to all people, which so many companies are trying to do. Textkernel is making intelligent acquisitions. They're one to watch. They're doing it really intelligently. Gerard, as we know, is one of the smartest cats in this industry. We've met a lot of the members of their team and they're obviously top notch. We're a little biased, or at least I am, in that we love these guys, but we definitely do applaud this move of Joboti. My only criticism is that I hope that they eventually change the name of the company to Jobooty. Chad: What is the capital of Djibouti? It's Djibouti, yes. Joel: But I'm not going to hold my breath for that one. Joboti. Jobooty. Joboti. All right, let's get to one that's easier to pronounce. Andela. Andela, the global job placement network for software developers has acquired Qualified.io, a coding assessment service for an undisclosed amount of money. Andela will add the 3.6 million software engineers who use Qualified's training service, Code Wars, to its global talent community. The acquisition will allow Andela to expand and accelerate its ability to source and expertly assess talent. That's according to CEO Jeremy Johnson. The expanded platform will also allow companies to create hiring processes that are predictive of on-the-job performance. That's according to Qualified CEO Jake Hoffner. Chad, Andela making moves. Your thoughts? Chad: So imagine this, you are looking for software developers and you go to Andela and not only can you find software developers, but you can actually see how they've been assessed in different languages, right? So now Andela not only has the pool, but they have the opportunity to have credentialing on top of that talent pool. This is fucking powerful, powerful, not to mention how many profiles? Joel: 3.6 million, the Code Wars. Chad: 3.6 million added into... I mean, so overall, this just starts to build the types of ecosystems that aren't for everybody. If I'm looking for a marketing person, this is not where I'm going. That's fine. This is really focused. It's really disciplined. And this acquisition is stupidly smart. Joel: I like it too. So you have acquisitions like text kernels where complimentary services are brought on. And then you have these sort of like big fish eating little fish acquisitions, which Andela can do when you have $200 million in funding. Let me repeat that, $200 million in funding. And when you have that kind of money, you'd better start buying up some other companies by the behest of their investors. I'm sure that's what is happening now. Qualified has been around, if you're listening to Crunchbase 2015, if you look at LinkedIn 2018, either way, they're probably at their runway ending at this point, which means liquidation, I'm guessing a lot of their investors were like, Let's find someone to take this thing over. The Code Wars feature apparently is incredibly popular, but they weren't crushing it in terms of revenue. One report I saw had $2.5 million in revenue per year. Obviously, nothing to sneeze at, but obviously, if you're in business that long, investors are looking for more money. It also made it a really appealing acquisition for Andela. They just had to look through the couch cushions to find enough to go buy this company. So, to me, this is as simple as you had... You have a motivated seller, you have a sugar daddy looking to hook up, and that's what happened. Hard stop, love happened, baby. Love happened with Andela. Chad: And I predict they acquire Wilco next. Joel: Ooh, you heard it here first, kids. You heard it here first. Chad: Listen up, Andela, look at Wilco. Joel: All right. Time for a little, who'd you rather, Chad? That's right. I read two companies that have gotten money recently, and we decide who'd we rather. First up, we have UpDuo. Up yours, no UpDuo. All right. Peer-to-peer learning platform UpDuo has raised $4 million in seed funding. The company uses data-driven teams to offer short one-on-one video conversations which use gratification features to help workers feel recognized for their achievements. Since 2020, over 500,000 learning sessions have happened on UpDuo with teams located across more than 1000 customer locations. That is UpDuo. Next up, we have Headrace, a recruiting platform founded by three former members of Uber's marketplace team. They've raised $6 million in seed funding. Headrace aims to bring network effects to the recruitment sector, offering employers access to tenured recruiters via curated recommendations or postings. The platform shows recruiters placement records and allows them to collaborate with each other, potentially speeding up hiring times. Headrace also helps independent recruiters to expand their business and save on overhead costs. So Chad, UpDuo, Headrace, who'd you rather? Chad: So UpDuo, who benefits from peer-to-peer training? In the military, you've got to take the time to ensure that everyone on your team is sharpened up to speed because you're on the battlefield, right? So that just makes sense. But the corporate world doesn't work that way. Corporate America doesn't build team players. We build me players. So will me, helping the team member to the left or right of me, get me a bigger commission bonus or wage increase? Not traditionally. The dollars just go to the top. So the question here, why? Or Headrace. I love the idea of Uber rising hiring, but this ain't it. If you're a company looking to use this platform and you see your recruiters in it for the side hustle, this platform goes sideways quickly. It's not like driving a truck during the day and then driving an Uber at night. Recruiters are doing side hustles, but they don't want it out in the light of day. So who'd I'd rather at 2:00 AM. In the morning on my way home, I'm looking around the bar and I'm going home alone. I'm not choosing either one of these companies because I don't think either one either one are long for the world. Joel: Oh man, you just flipped the script on who'd you rather. All right. So Chad, in 2020, your boy Josh Burson wrote an article about how recruiter marketplaces were about to blow up. Headspace is only three years too late to the party. Fuel 50, Scout, Telenya promoted itself as the Uber for recruitment almost five years ago. Chad: All different models. Joel: And non-industry types, Uber execs have a pretty bad track record in our industry. So UpDuo, you've got upskilling, you've got remote, you've got employee engagement, you got some gamification in there. All the cool kids are talking about all those things. So for me, yeah, it's probably a 2:00 AM, 12 beer night. But if I had to choose, I'm doing UpDuo. Chad: Beer goggles. Joel: All right. Let's take a quick break, clean ourselves off and talk about two cities that are near and dear to our heart. All right, Chad, we're going to end this show on tale of two cities. First up, St. Petersburg, Florida. The US Department of Labor has recovered more than $190,000 in back wages from St. Petersburg restaurants, Red Mesa Restaurant and Red Mesa Cantina for violating several provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The restaurants withheld workers wages to cover operating costs, charged employees for their uniforms, what? Paid an incorrect overtime rate and did not combine hours for employees who worked at both locations during the same week. Ouch. The back wages were recovered for the 89 employees affected for the violations. Now, Chad, let's go north to New York City. Pay transparency in action. A New York City tech worker, Kimberly Nguyen, who works as a contractor for Citigroup as a user experience writer, found out that a job opening with the same title as her current role was posted on LinkedIn, offering up to $90,000 more per year due to a new salary transparency law in the city and one that we've talked about. Joel: She learned that the intended pay for the new hire would be $32,000 to $90,000 more than her current salary, prompting her to apply for the job. Nguyen says she earns $85,000 per year working as a contractor with Citi and has been asking for a raise for months. The company caught heat in November, you'll remember, Chad, when the New York City law went into effect for listing some jobs with a salary range of zero to two million. That was a fun podcast. A Citi spokesperson told CNBC that the company pays Photon, a contractor service, and that Photon negotiates the individual's pay rate. They have nothing to do with it. Chad: Of course. Joel: Kimberly says she's actively looking for a new opportunity... No shocking there, after she made a visit to HR after this thing blew up on social media. Chad, we've got Florida and New York in the same show. Your thoughts? Chad: So the similarity behind all of this is government. So first and foremost, the government has to, again, enforce and actually look after these piece of shit companies who want to screw people, subminimum wage in some cases, workers out of their tips. And that's how these people get paid. And that's how they make the house payment. And then you go to New York and the government did what? They said, pay transparency. We're going to start... We're moving toward equity. So this is all around the government being able to do exactly what they needed to be able to do with SVB is have that oversight. We don't want too much of it. We're not talking Patriot Act shit here, okay? We're not talking about enemy of the state stuff here, but we're talking about things that we need to do to ensure that the little guy, the American worker isn't getting fucked. SFX: I can make you rich. Joel: Government plays a part. Social media played a part in this. Citi, corporate governance plays a part in this. For Citi to say that they don't have anything to do with Photon and what salary ranges are going on... I mean, they were already on the shit list for having a job with a pay range of zero to $2 million. Like you'd think at that point somebody in the ivory tire would say, okay, let's get our shit straight around like what we're paying people and like what's being advertised out there. So in some respects, the community and the policing that social media has become... Took Citi to task and let's hope they don't fuck up again and Photon gets their shit together. So you're right. Like government plays a part, the marketplace plays a part, social media plays a part. These are just two fucked up stories by generally two fucked up areas that we'll continue to talk about on this show. But until then, Chad, it's St. Patrick's Day. I say we end the show with a little slantcha, a little Jameson, maybe a little Guinness. Sound good to you? Chad: That sounds amazing. I'm going to go get me a creamy head of Guinness right now. Joel: Happy St. Patrick's Day, everybody. Chad & Joel: We out. SFX: 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's 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.

You’ve heard about the meltdown at Silicon Valley Bank, right? Well, did you know that startups that employ more than 10,000 people and have raised venture funding totaling £3.5 billion in the UK were banking with SVB? Sometimes, when Corporate America sneezes, Europe gets a cold. We discuss. Then it’s time for a little Buy-or-Sell with Jobgether, Desana and Horsefly. And what podcast episode in 2023 would be complete without ChatGPT, this time with a European spin? It’s the perfect cocktail of recruitment news and commentary, just in time for St. Patrick’s Day. 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. Joel: Oh. Yeah. March 15th is International Eat an Animal for PETA Day or as I call it, Wednesday. Hey kids this is the Chad and Cheese podcast Does Europe. I'm your co-host Joel Hammond Cheeseman. Chad: This is Chad. Here comes the son, Sowash. Lieven: And I'm Lieven waiting for GPT5 so I can retire. [laughter] Joel: And on this episode, Silicon Valley Bank contagion hits Europe. Microsoft Germany announces Chat GPT4 and a little buy or sell. Let's do this. Chad: We're all over the place for God's sakes. Lieven just outside of Brussels. Joel in the Midwest. And I'm all the way in Portland watching the sun fucking come up. Joel: Who's in the best location? Not me. It's snowing and cold as shit. Chad: Lieven. Lieven. He's in Europe for God's sakes. It is a bitch waking up and we do a good amount of work with Europe. Joel: Mm-hmm. Chad: And waking up eight to nine hours behind, that's some bullshit man. I don't know how anybody does work on the fucking West Coast with Europe. I don't get it. Joel: Everyone not in Portland drinking micro brews is crying a river for you right now. Better beer Belgium or Portland Oregon. That'd be a good contest. Chad: Oh. It's a different beer conversation. Joel: True. Chad: They've got great beer here and amazing beer in Belgium. Joel: Yeah. And they have about a 2000 year head start. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. But still, America even though we are young, we do IPAs better than any country, period. Joel: Yeah. Lieven: Whatever. Joel: Even Lieven shaking his head that he agrees with that although he's never stepped foot in Portland, Oregon or Oregon for that matter. [laughter] Lieven: It's true. Chad: Hey. You don't have to. Lieven: That's true. Chad: Don't worry about it. I did it for you. I did it for you [laughter] Joel: All right. Well, multiple time zones, various degrees of awake and wanting to go to sleep and in a happy hour. So let's get on with the show, shall we? With... Chad: Shoutouts baby. Joel: A few shoutouts I'll go ahead and go first. My shoutout goes to the Six Nations. I know Chad you get a boner over over soccer and Ted Lasso Season three is coming soon so I know you're excited but alien to most Americans is rugby, so I wanted to shine a light on one of the coolest sporting events in the world, Six Nations where Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales, France, and Italy square off for athletic glory. As of this recording, Ireland with Saint Patrick's Day this week, is leading the contest followed by France, Scotland and England. Wales is too busy apparently cheering for Wrexham and apparently Italy is still wondering why they weren't in the World Cup. Anyway, an event Chad and I will eventually attend in some form or fashion before we die. Shout out to Six Nations. Also streaming on Peacock for those Americans out there that actually have Peacock. Chad: The only rugby match I have ever watched, and I'm proud to say this, is when we were in Saint Patrick's Day in Cork Ireland and we watched Ireland beat up on England. So that was amazing. And I think that to be quite frank, is the zenith of my needing to watch rugby. Joel: I shamefully put 20 quid on England to win that match. And I walked into an Irish betting booth and said, "Can I put 20 on England?" And he said, "No. You can't." Chad: No. [laughter] Joel: He took my money anyway but he had a good time sticking it to me. Chad: Yeah. And literally took his money. So Lieven, do you like rugby at all? Is that a Belgian sport at all? Lieven: No. No. Really not. I don't think we have five teams so they're probably constantly competing each other and I think they run out of fun long ago. Joel: It's all about soccer in Belgium, right? What else? What else is hot? Lieven: Cycling, of course. Joel: Cycling. Okay. Lieven: Yeah. We have the best. We call it the Gent-Wevelgem. Cycling in the field. And only the Belgium's, the Netherlands and I think Czechia does it. But we have the best in the field cycling world. Chad: We'll stay in the area with my shout out to Herald Mulder. And the team over at Textkernel. They're just over in the Netherlands for the acquisition of Djibouti. A... Joel: Who? Chad: A WhatsApp messaging platform. Yes. Djibouti. What's the capital of Djibouti? Djibouti. Now this is Djibouti. Congrats to Textkernel and Djibouti. We're gonna be digging into this a little bit deeper on The Shred this week and the Weekly Show. Also Herald was in a skiing accident recently. So get well soon buddy. Joel: Are we sure Djibouti is not a porn star? I don't know. Chad: I am not sure. Joel: More on that. We'll dig into that issue. We'll dig into the issue for next time. Lieven: My shout goes to Accent Jobs for launching their open-minded hiring campaign. It's a very open-minded thing to do. And I must say I was a bit afraid clients would not like it but in fact they did. So we only sent CVs, resumes, totally anonymized to our clients and they actually accepted and it was all over the newspapers like it was a big thing which we didn't even think it was. It should be normal. But now there aren't any mentions of ages or names or gender etcetera. And over 70% of the companies in Belgium claim they accept it and they will go with it. So open-minded hiring now is the new big thing in Belgium. Chad: That escalated quickly. Joel: Very nice. Very nice. Chad: We're gonna be very open-minded as we are coming to the UK in July. Kids. That's right. Get those tickets for RecFest... [music] Chad: Knebworth Park. It's not that far from downtown London. Just take the train, come on up, the kids... Now don't bring the kids. But bring every single person in your TA operation. This is a day where we get together and we just enjoy Beautiful day... Might be raining, might be sunny, but we're together drinking beer, learning about TA stuff. So great. RecFest. Go to Chadcheese.com, click on the events in the upper right hand corner and register. Joel: By the way, Chad and Lieven, RecFest could be an extra cheese event. Word is my 16-year-old son is gonna be there and drinking beer is legal in England for 16 year olds, so it could get a little crazy... SFX: Watch out. Watch out. [music] SFX: Topics. Joel: All right. You guys down with SVB? Yeah. You know me. Maybe you've heard the US's second largest bank failure occurred last week. Well, America sneezes and Europe sometimes gets a cold as SVB had operations in the UK. In light of the failure around 210 startup founders and leaders signed an open letter to UK Chancellor Jeremy Hunt warning that, "The majority of us as tech founders are running numbers to see if we are potentially technically insolvent." The signatures said they employ more than 10,000 people and have raised venture funding totalling 3.5 billion pounds. To save the day, HSBC has bought the UK arm of Silicon Valley Bank for one pound following the US's banks collapse. The purchase has brought relief to tech firms that feared they could go bust without help. The UK SVB arm had over 3000 business customers. The deal was arranged by the UK government and the Bank of England and no taxpayer money was used. The UK arm of SVB was small, but its collapse could have presented a risk for a sector that the government considers pivotal to the UK's future economic success. SVB was shut down by US regulators after its customers were hit by rising interest rates. Chad, your thoughts on SVB in Europe? Chad: I'll tell you what, man. The US has trains and banks going off the fucking rails these days. It is ridiculous. We repealed Dodd-Frank and this is the kind of shit that happens. We roll back regulations on trains, and we have trains going off the track. So I mean, as we focus on what we need to do as a society to get shit pulled together, we need to have guardrails. That's number one. And when we take away the guardrails, this kind of shit happens and it impacts the entire world. So, although the US parent was in financial trouble, the obviously SV Bank and in UK was, "In reasonable financial help" before it was bought for a pound. One sterling pound by HSBC. So this feels kind of like a stopping of the dominoes before they actually start falling in the UK. The optics of SVB failure could have triggered a run on the bank in the UK. So let's just stop it before anything crazy happens. It's crazy. We did see that companies like Beamery signed a letter that was out there. The CEO I believe of Beamery signed as the signator to the government and the UK government came through. Joel: And in the state, ZipRecruiter, I know has sort of been publicly affected by the bank closure here in the States. So it's interesting that Beamery over in the UK... Chad: Long list... Joel: Yeah. Do you know who else is on that list? Some of this stuff is unfolding. Chad: We'll have that. We'll have the US list for the weekly show this week. It is a long fucking list... Joel: We'll be sure to tune into that. My thing is that SVB took on a lot riskier loans than would normally be taken by a more conservative bank. And part of that is the DNA of being in Silicon Valley. A lot of startups, a lot of money that was loaned out when interest rates went up, when inflation goes up, the ability to pay back those loans is a lot tougher. Squeeze play happened and the resulting collapse is what we're seeing on the news today. Now, my thing is that if one bank that is embracing risk is done, what message does that send to other banks in terms of loaning money to startups to giving loans to startups, to taking what essentially is a pretty risky bet. You're not loaning money to Coca-Cola or a big company. The ecosystem requires that that has to happen. But if there's more aversion to risk, I think that affects a lot of companies not just in our space, but every space. Joel: And those companies employ a lot of people. If there's less money in the system to take bets on startups that obviously impacts everybody. And a theme of this show has been the amount of money that's been going into startups in Europe. If that starts to dry up, that's a problem. And I think if we don't see the unicorns that we've been talking about on the show that are in Europe, the person-ios, the high bobs, the job and talents, if they start failing, then it becomes a real problem with getting money into the system and getting innovation hyper-charged in Europe. That's my takeaway from the SVB collapse and its impact on Europe. Lieven. Lieven: Sometimes I felt it was too easy for startups to get money to a certain extent, but... Chad: Yeah. Lieven: I just read an article in a Belgium newspaper from the Sea of Showpad. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Showpad. It's one of the... I think it's unicorn already, or on its way to becoming a unicorn. It's from origin, a Belgium company. They went to Silicon Valley, and I'm not going to explain whatever they did, but it's a typical Silicon Valley style company Showpad. And they actually worked with Silicon Valley Bank and they said that the bank understood what they were talking about. This was the first bank they set when we were talking. They got what we were doing. They got our needs, and they invested money because they believed in us. And Showpad actually did very well. And I think it was a very good investment, but they wanted options on Showpad's future profits. And then Showpad left the bank for another bank. So they... Just a few months ago. So they were extremely lucky. They didn't lose anything at all. But apparently, that was the business from Silicon Valley Bank taking some kind of optional future profits, not just a percentage on whatever was loaned. Chad: Yeah. I like how the UK actually allowed HSBC to cut swoop in and buy them. And there's kind of like, it's not bailing out the bank being SVB, but making sure that obviously the holders are... They're taken care of. There's a security net there. The problem I think that we're gonna see in the US is we're just gonna bail out SVB. And SVB in itself is a failing business. They went long on bonds. So you're talking about putting money into something that takes five to 10 years to get your return back. And most of these are short term, I need my money now, types of businesses. So when you don't understand who you're actually serving and the flow of cash that happens and then you start buying along when everything is short, I mean, it just makes no sense whatsoever. So from a CEO standpoint, from a business model standpoint, SVB needs to die. Joel: A little bum they didn't come to us for that acquisition. I feel like one pound could be something that we could take on. [laughter] Joel: The other thing that mentioned here is SVB was a little bit of an old boys club. And we talk a lot about the old white guys controlling things. I mean, there was probably a lot of dealings that were going on sort of at lunches and things like that, that normally wouldn't happen at regular banks. And Peter Teal pulled all of his money before the collapse happened. And then you had social media, which this thing created a brush fire of people running getting their money outta the bank and it escalated very, very quickly. That might be something unique to SVB that a lot of other banks won't have an issue with. Chad: It's gonna be interesting. It's gonna be interesting as they dig into this because there were PE firms who had portfolios that the entire portfolio went after the money. It wasn't just a couple of companies that were running on the bank. I mean, we're talking about PE firms sending their entire portfolio to run on the bank. So, I mean, this... It's gonna be interesting once we get into the forensics on what happened here. Joel: Oh. Yeah. There's gonna be some congressional hearings to get to sort of the bottom of some of this. Chad: Yeah. Joel: All right. When we get back on the other side of the break, we'll talk about some companies that may or may not have taken money from SVB. SFX: Europe has a bunch of countries in it. [laughter] Joel: All right guys, who's ready for little buy or sell? That's right. Chad: Yeah. Joel: We talk about three companies in Europe that have taken money recently. I read the summary, the boys and I buy or sell. Are you ready to play the game? Here we go. First up, Job Gather, a Brussels-based startup, which we've determined is the first Brussels-based startup on the show, they've raised €1.4 million in seed funding. This brings total funding to €2.3 million. Job Gather uses geotargeting and AI to help identify the score, and score the most flexible employers creating what the firm calls, "flex score," for its users. Founded in 2020, the company employs 29 people. Chad, are you a buy or sell on Job Gather right now beetle style. Chad: Jesus. Geotargeting and AI for something that's... I mean, it's literally a very, very simple equation. I believe the latest LinkedIn data around remote work showed that 13% of the jobs on LinkedIn were remote jobs and they were receiving 50% of the clicks. Remote is obviously popular and in today's world of delivering a targeted group of individuals by the click and or jobs by duration, it's a validated business. The question is, does it need to be over-engineered with AI and geotargeting and etcetera, etcetera? I mean, who gives two shits about geotargeting if I wanna work remotely? That doesn't make much sense to me. I jumped into the system. It says it had 60,000 jobs, which is not a lot of jobs, kids. Chad: The system was slow and lethargic. I mean, it was... I don't... It was very heavy on the graphics, which is probably what's slowing it down a lot. It just feels like this organization doesn't understand how to run a web business. It doesn't understand the actual industry itself, because to be quite frank, you don't have to go through geotargeting and AI, and all that other bullshit to make some great cash on all of those clicks and duration-base dollars that you could be getting. I went into the site to see how they monetize. I have no clue. So until it's clear to me, I love this space. I love remote. There's so much opportunity that's here. But for the ability to not understand the go-to-market for spending money on shit that they really don't need to, it's easily a sell for me. Joel: Lieven, I really wanted to love this first Brussels-based startup. Intro: I know. I know. Joel: But it's a job board wrapped in AI, remote geotargeting, geofencing. I mean, they could probably throw a few more buzz terms at it, but it's essentially a job board. My guess is they launched in 2020 as a job board, the shit wasn't going the way that they wanted to, and someone said, "Let's throw AI in remote work post pandemic. That's definitely gonna work. We'll have somebody invest on our site that way." So if you go to the site, Chad mentioned it's a bit slow maybe that's 'cause he's in Portland where the Internet is always slow, but... Lieven: Probably. [laughter] Joel: This is a quote from the... Lieven: 'cause of by the weed. [laughter] Joel: Yeah. The Wi-Fi is on weed in Portland. Okay. So it says, "How does it work?" How does this site work? Number one, enter the search criteria that really matters to you. That's the first step. Number two, save your search. Number three, receive email alerts with new flex jobs. What does that sound like, kids? It sounds like a job board. It sounds like a job board. If it sounds like a job board, walks like a duck, or quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. There's far more better services that can do what these guys do they don't have a whole lot of funding. At the moment, I think... And you guys laughed at me 'cause I was sleep-deprived last time, and I said, "What a pistol in a gunfight." Lieven: Yeah. [laughter] Joel: Yes. This is gun meet Cannon job gather is a big, big sell for me. Sorry, Brussels. And sorry, Lieven. Lieven: You're just mean because I'm from Brussels and your president... Your former president sets Brussels was a hell hole and you believed him but Trump... Chad: I did. No, I did not. [laughter] Lieven: But I must say, I looked into it very happily because I thought, as you said, the first Brussels start up, we're going to talk about, but I thought if they succeeded in offering well-paying, high-quality remote work, this might actually be successful. But if it's just one of those shady scraping sites, reposting old vacancies, so it's a sell and they bring... What was it? AI to chatGPT world. So they're late. They're late once again. So I'm afraid it's a sell as well. Sorry, Brussels. Joel: That's three sells. Three sells. Maybe we can do better on the next one. A startup based in Scotland. SFX: Welcome to all things Scottish. Our slogan is If it's no Scottish, it's crap. [laughter] Joel: Alright, Edinburgh-based Desana has raised $7.4 million in a seed round, this brings total funding, the $12.1 million. The Desana Software lets employers connect to on-demand workspace in more than 600 cities across 60 countries, and includes an interface for managing flexible workspace bookings and meeting rooms underpinned by time scheduling portal that permits invoicing on the hour. The fresh funding will be used to boost growth, particularly in the United States. Founded in 2016, the company employs 36 people. Chad, are you ready to bust out some Bay City Rollers in sport a kilt or is Desana a sell? Chad: So, we just talked about Gable, a very similar start-up, a couple of weeks ago on the Weekly Show. New research shows that hybrid is where companies are starting to find common ground with their employees, so instead of having the come... Everybody all in the office fights against the remote work, they're trying to have this hybrid kind of discussion which all lends itself to these types of platforms, either in the office or outside of the office. And that means being able to coordinate days in the office and workstations. The Desana model is like Airbnb for a workspace. And you know I love me some Airbnb, so it's got to be a buy. Joel: There we go. There we go. Alright. So it's only strike really is that it doesn't own desana.com. Desana.com is just a landing page. They need to take some of this money they have just gotten and acquired desana.com. Anyway, the rest of the story is great. Chad mentioned Gable, which I think we both gave a rousing applause on the weekly show. Airbnb for office space by the hour, genius. There's competition, but the business model is a home run as companies look for ways to engage employees, give them space to get out of their studio apartment, see the world, have meetings with clients somewhere other than your apartment lobby or the Starbucks down the road. Yeah. I think this company's time has come, you're gonna see a lot of companies like Desana and Gable be successful. I still think my prediction that Airbnb will get into this space at some point will hold true as Chad shakes... Chad: No. Joel: Shakes his head. But for me, Desana just like Gable is a buy. Lieven. Lieven: I agree. I like the whole concept. If it's like an Airbnb for business, it might work as long as they're focused on meeting rooms, not just desk space because when I'm in a city abroad and I need desk space, I go to the local Starbucks or to the library or wherever I can put my laptop. But if you need really a meeting room or to record a podcast, something like that done, it might work. If you need some place to you to work quietly, this could be nice. And their headquartered in Edinburgh so it has style. It's a buy. SFX: Welcome to all things Scottish. Our slogan is If it's no Scottish, it's crap. Joel: Like a smooth drag of Lagavulin. It's a three-way buy for Desana. Alright. Let's get to Horsefly. Private Equity company LDC, a subsidiary of Lloyds Banking Group, has invested in Liverpool-based talent acquisition platform, Horsefly enabling the platform to expand internationally. Horsefly subscription-based SAS platform provides companies with insight on recruitment, including global talent sourcing, diversity and pay benchmarking as well as workforce development and planning. The company has already doubled its revenue in 2022. Chad, are you a buy or sell on Horsefly? Chad: A labor market information or LMI is a concept that I'm very familiar with working with state and US Federal Government to build a national labor exchange years ago. Horsefly has hot markets in the staffing and RPO world where those groups need to understand where the talent lives and grows. Government markets are always looking for new ways to look at data and tell a story, so there's money there too, but I'm not quite confident that talent acquisition leaders will pay for this kind of market data. Either way, two out of three bad in this case, so it's a buy for me. Joel: Alright. So if you go to the site, it says, "The most comprehensive and accurate labor data market available." I love data, I know Chad loves data, the world loves data, and Visier competitor, I would say in this space, has received $216 million as providing data to this space now, terms of the deal were not disclosed, which I typically do not like, I like to know how much is going in. Otherwise, it's hard to comment on exactly if it's a buy or sell, it also helps global organizations to improve recruitment planning and employer branding, which I think is an interesting spin. Companies... Company clients include Coke, EDF, Manpower, Indeed, Jaguar and Land Rover as well as Virgin Media. So for me, without knowing how much they've actually gotten, it's hard to say, but I'm gonna go with a buy on Horsefly. Lieven. Lieven: For me as well, data is everything. If you want to make a decision, and they offer accurate data that's something you just can't skip. No. I think it's a buy. [music] Joel: That's a triple buy for our friends at Horsefly. By the way Liverpool, a hidden gem of the UK, if you have not visited... Lieven: Really. Joel: I highly recommend it. Lieven: Liverpool, really? Joel: Let's talk a little. Little chatGPT have... Chad: It doesn't sound like it does it. Joel: Can we... Which Lieven has not been able to comment on, which I'm kind of excited to get his take on this. So Microsoft, Germany CTO has said that GPT-4, the new large language AI model from OpenAI will be introduced this week. GPT-4 is expected to be exponentially more powerful than its predecessor GPT-3, and will likely offer multi-modal... Chad: Modality. Joel: And will likely offer multi... Lieven: Models. Multi-models. Joel: Models that can draw information from videos and images in addition to text, that means it will be able to turn text into video, a feature already included in Google and Meta AIs. On the workforce front Antwerp-based Stellar Labs, a company that helps organizations improve the effectiveness of their training programs has raised 1.5 million Euros to expand using chatGPT to facilitate the design process with Stellar Labs own tools used to validate and customize the resulting training courses. Let's talk some ChatGPT, shall we? Lieven, Chad and I have talked a lot about the technology on various podcasts, but you have yet to voice your opinion, what are your thoughts on chatGPT? Lieven: It's a different chat to chat. That's nice. You could be chatGPT yourself. Joel: No one's buying the ChadGPT extension. Chad: It's sold out. All across the nation. Lieven: For me, it's... I'm looking forward actually to the chatGPT-4. We're using 3.5 now and for me, it's... But I'm maybe easily flabbergasted, but for me, chatGPT was amazing. It's a discovery. Chad: So you're using it, but are you talking about House of HR and the different companies too? Lieven: I'm using it constantly. It's like always open on my laptop and whenever I need a translation and in Belgium you constantly need translations, it actually works. Google Translate sucks. If you throw something... If you throw a word in it, it will translate a word probably to something pretty okay, but it never takes into account the context, etcetera. ChatGPT, I've translated whole texts, whole letters to French, for example, and after reading it, I had to change two or three words, but only that. So it saves a lot of time. So for us House of HR employees, but also for me as an individual, it works definitely. And we are still scratching the surface of what's possible. Lieven: So I was looking into the chatGPT-4 like an eager kids watching Santa Claus, and now I think measly 175 billion parameters used in chatGPT 3.5, are as I said, measly compared to the trillions, they are predicting in GPT-4. I have no idea what this is all about but it sounds very impressive. Trillions of parameters used in chatGPT-4. So I'm looking forward to it, but also apparently they confirmed there will be the possibility to generate video and that's impressive. Generate images and not just like Dali where you can have some kind of a picture painted in the style of whoever, but really video and images. So now they're bought by Microsoft. Lieven: Let's say I want to make a PowerPoint for Microsoft. It should be pretty easy to integrate this into PowerPoint. I'll just give a small briefing and they create a whole PowerPoint from, A to Z. This is going to change a lot. And for us, for our business this will change a lot as well, the moment, it has an impact on employees everywhere it will have an impact on the dumping business. Let's say a lawyer agency, they have 30 lawyers and they have three, what we call, paralegals. With chatGPT, they might only use two instead of five or three. It will definitely change things and we're just trying to figure out how to make good use of it. Joel: Do we know what languages it works in? I know it's fairly limited right now. I know Russian, French, German, I think our language is an addition to... Lieven: Dutch. Joel: English. Lieven: It works perfectly in Dutch. It's understands Dutch, it's speaks Dutch to me. It's perfect. And Dutch isn't the most common language. We have only like 16 or 17 million Dutch speakers in the world maybe a bit more but... Joel: Will it give you answers in Flemish though, is the question? Lieven: Well Flemish is just a... It's a local accent from Dutch. It's the same language actually, but it's just... It sounds a bit different, but it should be the same one written. Joel: It's no Scottish, everybody. Lieven: Nah. It's... Chad: So you were talking about has 175 billion parameters currently and in their predicting... Lieven: Trillions. Chad: 100 trillion parameters. So it's... That's just opening up the data model itself. Lieven: Plenty of zeros. Chad: Yeah. A lot of zeros. Image and audio with Dolly and Whisper. The topics that we should be really addressing right now are the... These are large language models. They won't be able to work in specific domain space. They can do kinda like the general pieces. We have... I don't wanna say chatbots. We have conversational AI, we have transformative age AI in our space that is specific to the domain and the big difference here is what the data or what the model's being trained off of. Most of the models that we care about being a company are the behaviors and the conversations and those things that actually happen within our systems and within our candidate interactions and those types of things. None of that data's available to ChatGPT. None of it. So for us to be able to use those together, we talked to Ryan Steelberg from Veritone where they're calling it a linked type of a system where you have the very general large language models that link with the more domain specific. I think that to me is going to be exciting. And Joel and I already know companies in our space who have domain-specific powerful language models and they're also starting to use this linking of now the generalized on the ChatGPT side. So this could be exciting for both sides, more specific and then also general. Lieven: But do we think it'll be possible to isolate the algorithm from ChatGPT? Because it's open AI, so it should be open source and to run it, if that's the word I can use, on your own private database with let's say tons of contracts within whatever kind of legal contracts. So it could generate contracts based on perfect data because it's our data. We developed it. It's proven to be correct. So if you only feed it with this kind of data, which is correct data, then the results should be perfect. But I'm not sure if it's possible using their API. We're looking into their API's right now and I know we can integrate it in our own apps, for example, to help people answering questions but I was wondering could it be possible to use the algorithm on isolated data and only return information from there? That would be interesting. Chad: We've gotta remember that those more domain specific models already have I guess pretty much algorithms that have been training on that data for years. So it's much different when you have ChatGPT which is incredibly powerful, but it's still a puppy and it's just let... If you give it this new data, it's gonna take a while for it to train up on it where these other domain specific models have been training for years and years. So I don't know if it's going to supplant right out of the gate, I think long term, It perspectively could, but I think the domain vendors for recruiting and talent management, they don't have anything to worry about just yet. Unless you're selling fucking vaporware. Joel: And turning text into video. What could possibly, possibly go wrong? 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 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 out.

We are total suckers for the ‘80s. That’s why we love Wilco’s website so much. If you haven’t checked it out, do yourself a favor if you love Pac-Man, Galaga, and Donkey Kong … basically, all-things 8-bit. Anyway, back to business, On Freund and Wilco has created a sort of knowledge base for developers within a company to not only learn new skills but also get the occasional refresher for the more seasoned professional. Is it the next big thing, or destined to the dustbin of history, along with Custer’s Revenge? 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 & Joel Cheeseman are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they got what it takes to make it out alive? Dig a fox hole and duck for cover kids the Chad and Cheese Podcast is taking it to a whole other level... Joel: Oh, yeah, what's up everybody? Ask your mother about us, it's the Chad and Cheese podcast. [laughter] I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman, joined as always... Chad: Don't ask her. Joel: The peg to my Al, Chad. And today on Firing Squad, we are happy to welcome... [applause] Joel: On Freund. On Freund: Thank you so much. Joel: CEO. And also a lead singer of Wilco, I actually made [laughter] that lead singer part up. On Freund: I do look like him though, a bit. [laughter] Joel: You have facial hair, that's about the extent of how much you look like. On, welcome to the show. On Freund: Thank you so much. Chad: Give us a little Twitter bio about you, you as On not the company, we'll get into that stuff. Give us a little, little love for the listeners. Tell a little bit about you. Joel: Love for the listeners... On Freund: Love for the listeners, yeah. [laughter] [music] On Freund: Oh my. [overlapping conversation] On Freund: Careless whisper. Wow. [laughter] Chad: That's a sexy sax. Joel: That escalated quickly. [laughter] On Freund: Amazing. If you ever seen the video to that it's all ropes. I don't get it. [laughter] Like ropes hanging from the ceiling. And he walks... I don't know. Joel: I remember the yacht... On Freund: There's a yacht but then it turns into ropes. [laughter] Joel: Yeah, and I wanted that yacht. On Freund: With knots on them, I think. I don't remember it anymore anyway, apart from being a Careless Whisper admirer and huge fan, my name is On born and raised in Israel, I've spent most of my career managing software teams, so was VP of engineering at Handy, and at WeWork... Chad: Wait a minute, WeWork? On Freund: Yeah. Chad: Well you spent how much time at WeWork? That's the question, and... Did you have easy access to Adam? Because everybody wants access to Adam. [chuckle] On Freund: Everybody does. That's true. So I was at WeWork for six years, working right next to his office, I got to spend time with him. It's a unique experience. He's definitely... Chad: Did you meditate together? On Freund: We didn't meditate together, but... Chad: No? Okay. On Freund: He's the most charismatic person I've ever met. Joel: Did you wear shoes? While while at WeWork? On Freund: Sometimes. Joel: Sometimes? On Freund: Sometimes. [laughter] Chad: Excellent. Well, more about you beyond, beyond, WeWork if you have a family kids or... On Freund: Yeah. Chad: Take long walks on the beach. What else? On Freund: Well not on the beach, but long walks are okay. [laughter] I do have a wife, she's an immunologist profession that no one cared about up until three years ago, and now everyone is excited to hear what she has to say, which is great. [laughter] She's been vindicated. Joel: That'll be handy when this startup thing doesn't work out. [laughter] On Freund: At least our immune system will work. And I have three kids, and in my spare time, I like to play music, I'm a drummer, not for Wilco, the band, and I also love tinkering with the home automation which is just super cool. Joel: What does that mean? Home automation... Chad: What does home automation mean? Joel: Like your oven cooks spaghetti by itself. What does that mean? [laughter] On Freund: Does an oven cook spaghetti ever even not by itself? Joel: Yeah, I don't cook a lot as you can tell. I guess the stove. Chad: Oven bakes. Twice baked spaghetti. [overlapping conversation] On Freund: Well the stove isn't automatic, it doesn't automatically do spaghetti, but a lot of things are automated from the blinds and the windows, lights, AC. Joel: Okay, is it true that everyone in Israel does military service? On Freund: It is true that everyone is mandated to do military service, but then actual numbers might not be as high as you'd think. [laughter] Chad: So much like in the US? If a draft comes on, and you're rich, you can pretty much pay your way out of it. [laughter] On Freund: No. It doesn't really work that way. It's not about... Chad: Not about capitalism, okay. On Freund: It's not about social economical status, but it's complicated. Let's not go into Israeli politics. Chad: Okay. On Freund: We can do that for hours. Joel: Let's tell him, tell him what he's won today, Chad. Chad: Welcome to the Firing Squad, On, here's how Firing Squad is going to play out. At the sound of the bell, you're gonna have two minutes to pitch Wilco 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 your answers, or you're gonna hear the crickets. And that's just a sign to tighten your game up at the end of Q&A, you're going to receive one of these three from both of us, a big applause. [applause] Chad: Welcome to the big time, pop some champagne and prepare yourself for a golden shower... Wait, wait a minute. No, no, my bad. That was supposed to be showered with gold. Yes. Joel: Big difference. Chad: Showered with gold yes, yes, yes golf clap. You don't have time for a shower, you're on the right track, but there's still way too much to be done, and last but not at least the Firing Squad. No amount of soap and water will make this stinker smell good, wrap it up and start something new. Are you ready for Firing Squad? On Freund: Born ready. Chad: Excellent. Joel: All right, you are on on in three, two... On Freund: So Wilco is kind of like a flight simulator but for software engineers instead of for pilots or for software instead of aviation. Engineers don't really have a good way to gain experience, they do it on the job, which is slow, error prone and doesn't provide equal opportunity. With Wilco, you join a fantasy company, that company has a production-like system with logging, monitoring, analytics, load balancing a real data set, but more importantly, colleagues, team leads, support people, DevOps, etcetera, etcetera. And on top of that, you go on what we call quests, and a quest could be, "We have a performance problem in production. Please figure out what happened, what's the root cause. What's the extent of the damage? Fix it and communicate it to stakeholders." And the focus is on all of the skills, both soft and hard, that go beyond coding that you really only pick up on the job. If you wanna learn more, you can always visit us at trywilco.com, and sign up for free and try it out. Joel: Super tight, super tight. Left some time on the clock, but that's okay On. We'll get to the questions and get to the... On Freund: Let's do it. Joel: Real stuff here. All right, the name Wilco. Did you know it was a popular alternative band from Chicago when you named the company? Was it a consideration? Talk about the name, how you came up with it. Roger Wilco, for those who don't know, is sort of expressing compliance or agreement, usually in a radio correspondence. Was that part of the name? Like talk about it. On Freund: Yeah, so Roger Wilco was definitely part of the name indirectly, by the way, it's also part of the reason for the name of the band, but that's not related. So Roger Wilco, which stands for I received your command and I will comply and execute it, is very commonly used by pilots. As I said earlier, we're kind of like a flight simulator, just for a different domain. It was also the name of the protagonist for a series of video games from the '80s called Space Quest. Chad: There it is. Getting in to the 8-bit video games. On Freund: There it is now, for the video game, it was actually a pun, that was the reason behind the name, we liked it so much, we love the '80s style video games, especially quests, and we call the simulations on our platform quests. So aviation, quests, putting those two together. Wilco. Joel: So the 8-bit branding was not some fancy agency in Tel Aviv or somewhere in Europe, [chuckle] this was home-grown from your love of '80s video games? On Freund: Yeah, the first logo was designed by one of my co-founders, [laughter] and then the designers came in and said, "Oh, actually this is one pixel off and we need to change that, and that gradient needs to be a bit tighter," but it was completely home grown. Joel: Okay, okay. As much as I'd love to ask about Adam Newman or his wife, or the summer camp parties, if you haven't seen it, check out Hulu for the a docudrama, I'm gonna ask about your experience at WeWork, and what it was about what you did there that sort of stimulated, the idea for Wilco. What did you bring from WeWork to Wilco? Build me a bridge to the current business as to your experience from WeWork. On Freund: Sure, so at WeWork I was there for six years, like I said, and went through several roles, but started as VP of Engineering, managed a team of software engineers. You can ask me, "Why does WeWork even need software engineers?" We can spend an hour on that, but I don't wanna get the crickets. [laughter] So we did have an engineering team take that as a given, and both at WeWork and at Handy and other places I've been to, I realized that those engineers don't really have a good way to practice. And there is so many resources for them if they wanna learn, but nothing if they wanna practice. And somebody gave me a great analogy. On Freund: A good friend, he said, "If you wanna know the state-of-the-art in medicine, you're going to go to someone who just graduated med school, but if you want someone to operate on your shoulder, you're gonna go to a surgeon with 15 years of experience. And that surgeon might know less than the recent grad and maybe they even forgot some of the things that they knew, and they might not be as up-to-date, but you know that they're gonna do a great job on your shoulder, and if something goes wrong, they've been there done that, they know what to do, and there's so many other skills that they've picked up throughout the years." Same goes for software, we want seasoned engineers who've been through a lot, and their battle scars kind of taught them everything they know, but everything that we see, outside is so focused on helping them learn how to write the code, which is just one skill out of many, and pretty soon might not be a relevant skill anymore anyway, given things like ChatGPT and Copilot. On Freund: So looking around me, I just thought, "How do I give these people more experience, whether they're brand new, whether they've been doing this for 10 years, 15, 20, whatever, I wanna take the level they're at and give them the ability to practice and become even more experienced." Chad: So do developers embrace the whole 8-bit, OG of gaming, is that one of the reasons why... I mean is this kind of like something that the entire community just loves? Joel: What's old is new again, Chad. On Freund: Well there used to be a saying, "Is the Pope Polish" but he's no longer Paul Polish. So... [laughter] But yeah, developers do love it, [laughter] and a lot of the developers around us, the more seasoned ones have grown up on '80s video games and they like it, some of them have grown up when retro was a thing, and they like it for that reason too. Overall, we think the 8-bit theme really conveys a lot of what we stand for and really conveys the fun aspect of our platform, because when you're on Wilco, it's not just about picking up skills, you're actually having fun in the process, so there's a reason we like games. Chad: Well, then talk about that, how are you attracting developers or wanna be developers to Wilco? On Freund: Various ways, some of it is through influencers, people who have a large following and work with us to promote Wilco. Some of it is through our quest partners. We have companies that appeal to developers and have developed quests on our platform so that third-party developers can gain hands-on experience with their product. So CircleCI, Docker, New Relic, Armory and many, many more Mixpanel have either build quests or are currently building quests on top of our platform, and they bring in their users to experience that as well. Joel: Are you paying influencers or they are organically talking about the company? On Freund: Most of it is organic. Sometimes we would pay when there's a lot of effort done by them, so if they're producing a video that's very specific to Wilco and investing a lot of their time and effort into it, then we'd wanna compensate them. But in many cases, we've had influencers that just picked up Wilco started playing and streamed the whole thing without us even knowing about it. Chad: Talk about go-to market, who were you trying to actually target? Obviously, you want developers to be able to come in, you're starting to do that through partnerships, but how are you actually going to monetize or how have you been monetizing, and tell us a little bit about how it's been going since the last round of funding, a little over what? Nine or seven months ago... Joel: Seven million. On Freund: Since the funding announcement. But yeah, so. Chad: Oh, okay. On Freund: We monetize and we'll monetized through companies that buy Wilco for their teams, so if you have an engineering team... And that's kind of how Wilco was conceived in my mind, I also have two co-founders who both had similar ideas and eventually it's the synthesis of all three that made Wilco what it is, but for me, it all started with the need to upscale my team, and therefore it makes perfect sense for me to sell this to teams. And engineering teams actually put a lot of time and effort into things like post-mortems, something happens, they create a document, spend a lot of time gathering the lessons from whatever happened, and then the document, you know what happens with it the next day? Chad: Buried. On Freund: Yeah, goes into the archive. No one ever reads it, even though it's actually really good, in many cases. What if instead they built a quest, a quest mortem, if you will, and allow people to relive the experience again and again, and because it's fun people will actually wanna do this. You do this enough times the organizational history of your team exists in the form of a Wilco quest, and that means someone new joins the team, no problem. "Here are the seven quests that you need to go through to get up to speed." You switch from one area of the product to another, "Here are the five things that represent the delta between what you know and what you should know." You join the on-call rotation. "Here are the three most common scenarios you'll encounter while being on-call," etcetera, etcetera. Chad: Okay, so are you developing just a quest machine that companies can come in, and they can develop quests, or are you also going to be developing a community/pool of candidates for companies to be able to come in and actually get qualified candidates who have been vetted through Wilco? On Freund: So we mainly focus on the former, but the latter is kind of a side effect of that we don't have a talent marketplace or anything like that, but we do have several stories of people who found jobs through Wilco... Not through Wilco, but by playing Wilco. And they were able to elevate their skills and then get either better jobs or in one case, even the first ever job as a software engineer. We then give those developers the ability to brag through their portfolio page where they can show the quests, they've played the quests they've built, the code that they've written as part of those quests, the achievements that they've unlocked, and that bragging page can help them get their next job, but also help employers find the right talent. Now, we can also take this a step further and have companies build quests that represent a typical work day, "You know this is how cool it is to work for us, check this out. And by the way, when you're done, send us the output and let's see if you're a good fit," Joel: So your Wilco profile is almost a passport that you can then take to any organization that you're working with to create quests, learn from quests, etcetera. So if I go from one company to another, my team will know that I did stuff for another company, and they could be like, "Hey, who else from company A might we wanna bring over?" Is that sort of a slick way to use this as a recruiting tool, but not necessarily something you're trying to do? On Freund: We're not trying to help people poach and what you play within a given company is a private context that doesn't really extend out of it. I mean, your score and your achievements will, but the actual quest that you've played within a given company are private. But people can also play our public catalog, whether they're employed or whether they're just doing it on their own as individuals. Chad: So you're not looking to monetize that aspect of it yet, or at all? Joel: It's more of an up-skilling tool, it sounds like to me like if you were gonna sell this to recruiters or employers, it would be, "We're an up-skilling platform," Chad: Well that's what I'm trying to ask if the road map actually has monetization for the prospect of actually targeting qualified candidates? On Freund: So up-skilling and internal certification, knowledge sharing these are our fortes, talent acquisition is an interesting use case, but not one that we're investing a lot into right now. Chad: Gotcha. Joel: I wanna go back a little bit to your recent grad and 15-year experienced surgeon, I'm not real smart, so maybe I need a little bit help with that, who uses this... Like who's the target audience for this product, is it the newbies? Is it the experience to help teach the newbies? Is this an enterprise tool? Is it start-ups using this service? Are you global? Are you specific to English, a certain set of languages? Talk about who this is for. On Freund: Yeah, so our vision is for this to be for everyone, regardless of your background, regardless of your skill level as an engineer, you always wanna gain more practice than what you currently have, or more experience than what you currently have. And I gave you the flight simulator analogy earlier, even if you have 20 years of experience and you're logging a crazy amount of flight hours, you still need to go through the simulator because a regular flight is not going to prepare you to land on the Hudson, for example, and same goes for software engineering. So we want this to be available to all skill levels, and we want this to be available to all stacks. Currently, if you build a quest, you can build it on any stack that you want, if you're looking at the quest that we've built, they're available in some of the most common platforms out there, but not all of them. For example, we don't do Golang just yet. We hope to in the future, but you can always build your own quest and do it in Golang. Joel: Are you global? On Freund: We are global, we're not localized yet though, so the product is in English, which at least for software engineers is a very commonly spoken and understood language. We do wanna support other languages as well, it's gonna take some time. Joel: Okay. And then enterprise startups, like what's sort of your sweet spot of who uses Wilco? On Freund: Sweet spot would be a traditional company with a large engineering team for now, but we think it appeals to basically any engineering team of, let's say, 50 or above, once you actually wanna start preserving the knowledge within the team and investing in professional development of their engineers. Joel: The seven million you've raised, how did you spend it, or what are you planning on spending it on and when's your next round? On Freund: Private jets and drugs, of course. Joel: Okay. [overlapping conversation] Chad: You learned a lot from Adam, that's awesome. On Freund: Other than the private jets and drugs, whatever was left of it, no just kidding. We really built an amazing team, both on the software engineering side, on the design side, I think it really shows, on the marketing side. We have an amazing team. I can honestly say this is the best team I've ever been part of. And that has been where most of our funds are flowing to. Like I said earlier, we didn't have a branding agency or anything like that. Everything was done in-house. Joel: Anyone in marketing? 'cause your last Instagram post was in August. On Freund: Apparently, Twitter works better for us. So if you go on Twitter, you'll see that we're actually very active. Chad: Yeah, well, in the social communities, what is it going to GitHub... Where are you guys actually saying... Because again, I can see where Instagram or some of the other social media platforms might not be the developer platform, which ones do you guys go to? Have you integrated with them? Are you partnering with them? On Freund: So Twitter is very popular with developers, if we're talking about true social media, not a developer platform. But then if you wanna target developers specifically, you have all sorts of communities like Daily Dev and those types. There are a lot of Discord communities out there for developers that we're a part of, we have our own discord community for Wilco people. And then all of the usual suspects for platforms, but in many of these platforms, it's mostly about being active and genuinely producing good content, it's not as if we're putting any ads on Stack Overflow or anything like that. Chad: L&D is generally an HR... Kind of like under HR's umbrella, who is your buyer, who are you actually going to and who's putting their signature on the bottom line for you guys? On Freund: What you see very often in engineering teams is that there is an HR budget for L&D, but it's at the discretion of the engineering team. So under the books, it's written as part of HR, but the VP of Engineering is able to make that decision. In many cases, they'll want the L&D team involved or part of the picture, but the actual decision is made by the VP of Engineering. Chad: Let's talk about partnerships real quick with regard to being able to overtly grow the community, what do you have in place? From growing the community to also monetization partnerships that you have in place. Do you have both of them rolling or just working on one, mainly? On Freund: From a partnership perspective or mostly focused on growing the community, creating good content on our platform. In the future, it is something that we plan on monetizing specifically when our partners monetize themselves. So if they wanna run their certification program on top of Wilco instead of doing a multiple choice test kind of certification program, then we'll happily charge them for it. Chad: So how big is the community and within the community, what's the average amount of quests that a profile might have gone through? On Freund: Yeah, so we've had close to 20,000 people on Wilco already, they're super engaged, most of them are... Not all of them. A lot of them are very engaged, we see people come back again and again. We see people play about a quest and a half per month after they finished the initial onboarding into the product, so... Yeah, those in general are our numbers. Joel: So on the surface, I wanted to throw you into the GitHub hacker rank touring sort of platform in talking to you and getting some education, it sounds like they are not competitors. On Freund: Correct. Joel: Would you put someone in your competitive universe or you consider yourself a stand-alone in terms of what you do? On Freund: So we're definitely not stand-alone, but we are taking a unique approach to this domain compared to everyone who came in prior to us. So on the one hand, you can pay a company like, let's say Thoughtworks or Pivotal Labs to come and do a workshop, and they'll come in for a week, you'll pay them probably like 100 grand or sometimes even more and to train a handful and maybe a dozen of developers. It's very expensive. It doesn't scale. On the other hand, you have Pluralsights or [0:24:52.1] ____, or all of these, and they're very scalable and at a reasonable price point, but they focus on the theory of the learning part and not the skills and hands-on experience part. What we're trying to do is bring you the value of a Thoughtworks workshop, but at the scalability and price point of Pluralsight. Joel: You mentioned ChatGPT, is that a threat to your business that people can just run queries around code and get information? If not a threat what are some threats to the business? On Freund: So ChatGPT quite a contrary, we think it's a great viber for us, one of the main hypothesis we have at Wilco is that code writing is just one skill out of many, and all the focus unjustifiably goes solely into it. What ChatGPT does is basically take that the importance of that skill away, people are letting AI write their code, but they still need to architect the systems, they still need to communicate with their peers, they still need to understand how to maintain a production system. They need to be able to design components or redesign components, understand security and performance implications, learn how to build a system in a way that's well articulate or could be well communicated to other people on the team. So if anything, ChatGPT really makes our business better. It makes it clear that to become a better developer, you don't have to know how to write better code, you have to pick up other skills that are important for your job. Joel: Chad said this sounds really fucking expensive. Chad: It could be. Joel: On tell us about pricing. What can I expect to pay? Is it per team member? Price this out for us. On Freund: Sure, so a regular seat would cost you $600 a year for basically any software engineer could get that for $600 a year. If you factor in what engineers go through in a single year, that's actually not a lot, so $600 is probably a third of a percent of their salary. Yet, you can onboard them more efficiently, you can make sure that when they join the on-call rotation they're ready, and thus are able to field problems better. You can onboard them into new tech, maybe you're transitioning from one vendor to another or from one language to another... So you're getting quite a lot for your buck. Chad: Are you currently working with any human capital management platforms or learning and development platforms, the L&D platforms for integration, and then also a partnership to prospectively get into their huge portfolios? On Freund: Yeah, we are working with a few of them to a, get integrated and b, get into their marketplace, some of those HR platforms have all sorts of marketplaces that you can pick up HR tools through them, or maybe if an HR tool recommends investing in up-skilling we could be one of the vendors that they would recommend picking up. We don't have any integration ready at the moment, but it is something that we're working on behind the scenes. Joel: Oh, that's the bell. Chad: That's it. Joel: The bell means that it's time to face the firing squad. On Freund: There were no crickets at all, I'm that efficient. Joel: You've got that going for you, my friend, you've got that going for you. So I'm gonna go ahead and go first On reviewing this company, we did a buy or sell on a Wilco when you guys got your $7 million, I believe in summer of 2022. For reference, I was a buy. Chad was a sell. Let's see if six months later our views of the company have changed, well, number one, love the branding, I loved it then. We're kids in the '70s, '80s Chad and I. So we love the branding, but then the reference to the '80s video games is great, it doesn't have any to do with your service, but I just love the branding. There are so many boring ass websites in our business, it's nice to see someone that sort of goes zaggy when everyone else is zigging. In terms of the product itself, I think having a knowledge base, whether it's for your product, customer service, etcetera, is fantastic for businesses. Joel: I think this is essentially a knowledge base for a team of engineers at a company, something that new people can go in and look at old archives and projects or quests, as you call them. I think it's really unique in what you guys do. I think there's a lot of opportunity. I think Chad touched on it with the recruiting side, or how do you access talent. The gig side of things, how do you integrate gig workers to come together? I think would be something interesting that you can do as that is growing, leaps and bounds. I think the global opportunity for this is incredible as technology continues to grow, and more and more companies around the world need engineers and need engineers that know what the hell they're doing. The kicker for me was in the green room, and our listeners don't get to hear the green room, but Chad asked On, if Adam Newman's new venture asked him to come work for him, what do he take the gig? And On answer was "Because of Wilco and my energy around that, I would not accept the new position with Adam Newman's new company," and so many times Chad and I see people that come out is outside the industry and they're kind of a tourist. Joel: They're kinda like, "Hey, I'm really smart, I'm gonna solve all the problems of recruiting," and then they're gone 24 months later. So the commitment there on your side On, I think is really commendable, and for those reasons and many more that I talked about in buy or sell, check it out at chadcheese.com. If you wanna hear what I said then, is echoed now. On Freund: Awesome. Joel: Wilco in addition to being a great alternative band, a great start-up that everyone should check out. On Freund: I guess that's a form of retention. I retained you as a loyal believer. Joel: You've got Chad to face now though, so don't get too... On Freund: Worst case he doesn't like us again, that's like... Chad: I said, we would come back in six months and I would see where you guys are at. Now, we've got a deeper, deeper dive into this. I think it's awesome. There's no question, it speaks to my heart with the 8-bit website, just in itself, when I landed on it, I just automatically... Even eight, nine, 10 months ago. I just loved it. Still love it. I think it's amazing. I think Joel's talking about you're not being a tourist in this space because you're playing on the fringes, you're not really... You're not talent acquisition, you're not really deep into the HR side, you're really focusing on the engineering teams and being able to try to get penetration and usage from those teams and then seeping into L&D and HR. But L&D is a huge money maker for this space, being able to have integrations, being able to build into some of these bigger systems is to me a recipe for acquisition exit and obviously more time where you would be able to get on the beaches, walking on the beaches with the kids. On Freund: Barefoot. Chad: Yes, and most L&D systems are relics and they don't focus on a lot of the new tech quests, those types of things, so I think you would definitely... There's no question, breathe a breath of fresh air in. The hardest part here is timing for you guys, for any startup, it's timing, and right now companies are shedding developers left and right. So I think it might be good from the standpoint of being able to pull new individuals into the community, but maybe not because they're looking for a new gig and/or they're transitioning and they just don't have time. On Freund: But then by the way, if you're, like you said, shedding developers left and right, you really wanna make sure you're making the most out of whoever is left at the company. Chad: It's my turn On. Joel: Zip it On, zip it. On Freund: I just wanted the crickets. Chad: I think at the end of the day, you guys have an amazing product, there's going to have to be some hyper-focus, and not to mention also, I think trying to get at least some advisors or some people on staff that are really focused and really entrenched in this market. Because I think this could actually really catch like wild fire, but you need to have that type of go-to market and those types of relationships to be able to get there. So I am not a firing squad, I am not a big applause, I am a golf clap, 'cause I think you're on the right road, but it's not time for the shower kiddos, it's time to do the hard work and focus on the go-to-market, so there you have it. On Freund: All right, I survived the firing squad. Joel: Chad was swayed a little bit there On, I think you're on track, man. How do you feel? On Freund: I feel good. It didn't hurt. And I survived. What more can I ask for? That's like the start-up mantra, to survive and everything will be okay eventually. No, just kidding. This was fun. Thanks so much for giving me this stage and not digging too deep into the WeWork story. Chad: We'll do that after we stop recording. On Freund: In separate episode. Joel: So many walks on the beach. Chad another one is in the books. We are out. Speaker 1: This has been the Firing Squad, be sure to subscribe to the Chad and Cheese podcast so you don't an episode, and if you're a start-up 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.

What a week! Fast Company celebrated LinkedIn’s 20th birthday, Indeed relaunched its Gig platform and TikTok is getting closer and closer to a ban in the U.S. Good thing Chad & Cheese are here to help you make sense of everything. In addition, AI has made resume carpet bombing easier than ever, and “body doubling” is now a thing we get to talk about in workforce circles. Money keeps flowing, which means more Buy-or-Sell, this time with Barley, Fount, and Glider AI are on the chopping block. More corporate insanity: Salesforce looks seriously out of touch, laying off thousands of employees while paying actor Matthew McConaughey $10 million annually to be a "creative adviser and TV pitchman" for the firm. It can all make you want to sail away, which is good because a new cruise line promises to be your floating workplace of the future. Ships ahoy! Let’s do this! 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! [music] Joel: Oh yeah! It's National Bagpipe Day, somebody cue the Bay City Rollers and grab my kilt. Hi, kids, you're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. This is your co-host, Joel 'William Wallace' Cheesman. Chad: This is Chad 'Darkness Retreat' Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, Happy Birthday LinkedIn, Body-Doubling, and Work Cruises. SFX: Alright, alright, alright. Joel: Let's do this. Chad: Have you ever pondered a darkness retreat? And if you did, would you tell everybody about it? This Aaron Rodgers thing is becoming weirder and weirder. [laughter] Joel: It sounds like torture. Do people pay to be in these totally dark rooms? Chad: Yeah, yeah. Joel: People go nuts in full darkness, people trapped in caves go crazy. Chad: I would have rather gone the sweat lodge with the peyote kind of like direction if that was the case. Joel: I'd rather smoke the poison frog and take the Mike Tyson vacation into Neverland. Chad: What team... You've gotta be pretty fucking desperate to pick up Aaron Rodgers, at this point, in his career. And he's totally gone off the rails, let's just call it what it is. Joel: He's still good, you know they will. He's only one season more from MVP. Chad: Oh my God. Yeah. Joel: We're totally losing all of our non-US listeners, by the way. We're going right into Aaron Rodgers. [laughter] Joel: Let's get to some shoutouts that people might actually care about. My first one goes to Charles, or Charlie Hsieh, formerly Blind's VP of marketing. Blind, if you didn't know, is quietly becoming a tour-de-force for content about companies and what's going on. They've really sparked since, there have been all layoffs in Silicon Valley. Anyway, Charlie will now head up Blind's talent marketplace, seemingly they wanna take on LinkedIn, who we'll get to later. From this LinkedIn post from Charlie, "Talent leaders, we are looking for limited early customers to provide us with valuable product feedback." I say it's one to watch. Blind is pretty interesting. They've been around a long time, and they are very influential in the West Coast market. Chad: I think it's interesting, and I love that they're actually using LinkedIn as a platform to promote Blind to be able to topple LinkedIn. That's pretty awesome. My first shoutout goes to firing squad alumni Oras Al-Kubaisi over at jobdescription.ai for understanding the teachings of ChatGPT. "What teachings?" You might ask. Well, ChatGPT is so damn popular, because they created a user interface for the whole damn world to play with. Oras, being a very apt pupil, last week, he launched a real time market analysis tool using Google for Jobs data at rta.jobdescription.ai. Was it perfect? Did people pull out the sniper rifles and start shooting at it? Yes, of course. But guess what? That's the fucking point. ChatGPT has flaws, and in being transparent about how ML and AI works, they're educating everyone. Keep it up Oras. And hopefully, we'll start to see some of the bigger names in our space do the exact same thing. Get that out there, show that it's not vapor-ware. Let us play with it. SFX: Shall we play a game? Joel: My second shoutout goes to Ahryun Moon. GoodTime's CEO and founder celebrated her new pregnancy on LinkedIn this week. Chad: That's a good time. Joel: It's not my baby, Chad, in case you're wondering, that's not the shoutout. Ahryun... Call her Jackie Moon shared, "My pregnancy has been a rollercoaster, but I learned to handle it well. I still make biz trips and meet with customers, I still work very hard and enjoy work." Her story is inspiring, I don't have time to go into it on shoutouts, but check her out on LinkedIn from her trip to Korea, to Canada and all the way to being CEO of a startup. Shoutout to Ahryun Moon, and congratulations on your new baby. [applause] Chad: Yes, another Firing Squad alumni, by the way, too. Joel: Our first, wasn't it? Or second? Chad: It was close. Yeah. She was one of the first. She was the first handful, yeah. A Google for Jobs update shoutout, kids. Yes, from a very reliable source who has been working this story and its developments received the following quote from Google to clarify the beta testing on Google for Jobs, "These ads are not related to AdSense at all. These are a new format we're testing for search and akin to our shopping/search campaigns work." So all those people out there who were saying that this was going to be just an AdSense thing, it's not gonna be a Jobs thing. It can be both, kids. You can go out, and you can use AdSense, but you can also use this new Google for Jobs pretty much like booster that they're putting out there. So create more clarity, we're getting more every day. Keep the info coming, kids, we love it. Joel: Love the info from Google as always. [laughter] Joel: Well, from one evil empire to the other, my shoutout goes to TikTok, it's been nice knowing the CCP's popular app. The White House threw its support this week behind a new bipartisan Senate bill that would give the Biden administration the power to ban TikTok in the US. Looks like it's gonna be, Cheesman one, Sowash one, on the predictions for 2023. And it's only March. Shoutout to TikTok, it's been nice knowing ya. Chad: If we do ban it, how long do you think it'll take for business, the machine of business in the US, to actually finally get a deal with TikTok, and then they'd put it back up? Because there's no way in hell that this is gonna stay gone. There just... There's too much money involved. Joel: There's too much money involved for Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn. And if you talk about stocks, you should be looking at buying with TikTok out of the picture. I don't know, this is a bipartisan, everybody wants to do this. It's so easy. It's low-hanging fruit. Young people don't vote. It's such an easy thing, I think, that they're gonna be able to do. Now, whether or not they Hail Mary this thing, and all the servers are in the US, everything is monitored by United States officials. Maybe like your point of, there's so much money in this. I just think that the heat that's going up with China is irrefutable, and TikTok is like an easy, suck it China. I say, if we let TikTok stay, then we make them accept Facebook and Twitter. That seems like a fair trade-off. Chad: I think it's interesting that we forget about Russia, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, and yet we're trying to prop them up because they're an American company. Although they were selling data, the user data to another country. So it is interesting because this is a Chinese company that everybody is on board of saying, "Let's shut this bitch down," when we already have an instance, a proven instance where a American company sold shit to Russia and yet, guess what? That motherfucker's still afloat. Joel: I'll take teen depression and Russian collusion any day over Chinese infiltration about that. I don't know. I'm not saying Facebook is perfect, but they're not trying to make Americans feel worse about the capitalism and make us feel a little worse about our government and everything else. Chad: Hey, you're full of shit, you are totally full of shit if you think they're any different at all, you're full of shit. Anyway... Joel: I feel bad about myself on Instagram, I feel bad about America when I'm on TikTok because big booty Latinas and bug fights make me feel less patriotic, Chad, that's the bottom line. [laughter] Chad: I was gonna say, I thought big booty Latinas and bug fights were your things. That's exactly what... TikTok's giving you exactly what you want. SFX: It's corona time. Chad: Oh my God. Okay. So next... SFX: Hey, it's corona time right now. Chad: So next shout out goes to Indeed Gigs are back in play, kids. That's right. Indeed had problems, Indeed had problems before when companies like Instacart would propagate a single job to thousands of locations where those opportunities did exist in those areas, but Instacart would then flood the Indeed Index and obviously the main job search. So it's not a great experience when you're doing a job search and you're getting nothing but Instacart types of jobs. And then you've got the Ubers, the Uber Eats, the Lyfts and all those things. So they had to pull back. They had to pull back. So apparently Indeed has control over the issue for the time being, and the gig jobs will be flowing back into the main search. Joel: So I'm gonna pull out my crystal ball real quick and see where this business, this new thing is going for Indeed. [noise] [laughter] Joel: Okay, there we go. [laughter] That's what the Crystal Ball says about this new business. Much better than the fans that sign up for free shit on our site, Chad. Yeah, we got to mention it every week. Chad: Yes. Joel: If you haven't signed up for free t-shirts from our friends at Job Get, Bourbon from our homies at Texkernel, free beer from Aspen Tech Labs. And if it's your birthday, you might win a really nice bottle of rum from our friends at Plum. But you got to play it if you're gonna win it. Head out to chadcheese.com today. Click the free link to get free stuff or a chance to win free stuff. Those will be going out for this month very shortly and we'll announce the winners hopefully next week. Chad: Nice. Props to Caitlin and the Plum team. Rum with Plum. She was quoted in a New York Times article this week, the $2 billion question of who you are at work. So it revolved around assessment. So, good job and at least from the PR team. Outro: [laughter] Really, 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: Chad, our travel schedule is heating up. Tell the audience where we're gonna be. Chad: Unleash in Vegas, baby. In late April, If you're not there, what are you thinking? Vegas the first part of the year. You got to love it. Then we're going to iCIMS Inspire in San Diego in early May. And then last but not least, we have RecFest that's happening in Knebworth Park just north of London in July. For all of this information to register. I mean, we have like 10 plus events that we already have scheduled this year. Go to Chadcheese.com, click on the events link in the upper right hand corner and register, and catch them all. SFX: Alright, alright. Alright. Joel: Let's go to our birthdays for the week, Chad. Chad: Yes. Joel: And you remember last week we missed a whole week, so we got a few birthdays to go through. Bear with me. A lot of fans wanna shout out to them. All right. Michael Deloya. SFX: Happy birthday. Joel: Mels Gatson. Evan White, our West Coast. Chad: My man. Joel: Robert Williams, Tracy Morris, David Altman, Leanne Chase, Dean DeCosta, Bruce Gee, Amanda Hahn, Ryan Estes and Kirby, I mean, Kyle Hager all celebrating. [laughter] SFX: Happy Birthday. [applause] Joel: Another trip around the sun. Happy birthday everybody, and thanks for listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. Chad: That's right. And don't forget that you can also listen to how Indeed sucks in four additional languages, not just in English, but also in French, German, Portuguese and Spanish. That's right. Veritone has cloned the Chad and Cheese voices and translated our weekly podcast into more languages. So again, you can listen to how Indeed sucks in more than just English. [music] SFX: Topics. They say it's your birthday. SFX: Happy birthday. Joel: Fast Company is celebrating LinkedIn's 20th birthday saying, "Born during the doldrums after the original.com bust, LinkedIn arrived at the same time as a flurry of other social networking upstarts, mostly of which quickly fizzled." Today, more than 4,500 job applications are submitted and eight hires are now made every minute on the platform. It's revenue surpassed $14 billion in the past 12 months. Chad: Woo. Joel: Close to quadruple the figure at the same time it was acquired by Microsoft for $26.2 billion back in 2016. Chad: Wow. Joel: All is not rosy however Chad, also this week an article by the information says, Recruiters are getting really pissed about rising prices at LinkedIn. And Fortune says the company has entered a "cringe era" blurring the lines of professional and personal. Highlighting a recent share, "Phil died while doing what he loved, networking and promoting our brand." Chad, 20 years of LinkedIn, you and I were around for all of it. What are your thoughts? Chad: 20 years, what we call that kids is technical debt. One of the reasons why LinkedIn doesn't innovate is because they have old ass infrastructure. Happy 20th kids. It is becoming more cringey for some, to be quite frank, I think we are experiencing more of a professional and personal melding since the pandemic. Some people don't like them, don't like that. Well, fuck them. They can stop following me. They can stop following somebody else. Who cares? And that's the thing that bothers me is when people says, they say, "This doesn't belong on LinkedIn." It's my LinkedIn. I put on it what I want to put on it. You can stop following me if you want. Go away. And then the price hikes, it's gonna continue to happen as talent acquisition continues to put their eggs in baskets that they've known for 20 years, like Indeed and LinkedIn, and they don't diversify it. Chad: They're just gonna continue to bloat, bloat, bloat the prices. But the one beautiful thing about LinkedIn is at least they're not putting a new label on some old ass technology and charging you 10 times that. Much like Indeed is doing right now. So at least they're being a little bit more transparent and they're just saying, "Hey, you're gonna pay us more." SFX: That escalated quickly. Joel: My kids won't touch Facebook Chad, I assume yours won't either. Chad: No. Joel: Their kids probably won't touch Instagram or Snapchat, or God help us if TikTok is still around. But where they'll all likely end up? LinkedIn. And you could argue, that makes LinkedIn the most successful social network in history up to this date. To your point, is it off base to talk about LinkedIn as a monopoly? Well, we never do for whatever reason. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Although we probably should. I think being owned by Microsoft maybe gives them some cloud cover in that. Still presence in China. Others don't. 100 million users they just celebrated in India. LinkedIn is really just getting started. They've grown organically. They didn't have this huge spike and then fall from it like other social networks. They've just been slow and steady and winning that race. The thought of a human directory for the entire world makes them incredibly valuable. Joel: I think startups like Poly work don't have a shot in hell of kicking them off the mountain. Google Plus came and went, Twitter is a meltdown. And I think part of the social or the personal stuff on LinkedIn is in part because Twitter is dying. And people feel like they need a place to put little snippets of thought and things that are more personal. I'm with you, if you don't like it, don't follow me. I feel like the people that say, "Hey, this is not the place for that," is falling. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And in part because of, it's just more common. And LinkedIn is getting more, they had stories. They tried to be the cool kids that way. But they're open to more polls and pictures and videos and... So to me this is arguably the most successful social network that we have today. And I think 10 years from now, it will still be a thing, and 20 years from now. Because it has tapped that professional market, which like I've said before, if you're 21 years old outta college, where do you want to be? You wanna be on LinkedIn. You want to grow your network, you want opportunities, you wanna sell shit, you wanna make inroads with new businesses. I mean it is in the poll position to be the social network for the next 50 years. And I say congratulations and happy birthday LinkedIn. [applause] Chad: Remember when it started off, it was the whole idea was the six degrees kind like from Kevin Bacon. Joel: The Kevin Bacon. Yeah. Chad: Yeah, exactly. Remember it was everybody knows each other by six degrees and we're gonna prove it with LinkedIn. It's definitely interesting. I think that as we have said many times on this show, that platform should be much more powerful from the standpoint of being able to take my data, which you have more of my data than any other platform that's out there today and match me up against jobs, be able to introduce me to people that I should know, but maybe I'm not connected to, those types of things. And it's really piss poor at that. It is making a lot of money off of 20 year old tech, is really the basis of it. So they're going to have to change from an infrastructure, from a technology standpoint, because this thing will collapse at some point in time. You can only hold it together with bailing wire and duct tape for so long. Joel: [chuckle] Yeah. I mean, it's Applebee's. [laughter] Joel: It's not the greatest, it's not like somewhere you wanna go, but ultimately, once or twice a year, you find yourself on Applebee's and you're okay with it, but you're not in a hurry to get back to it. I remember, LinkedIn didn't know what the hell it was gonna be. It was like a professional, put up your profile, and when I was writing Cheese Head, I remember LinkedIn contacting me and letting me demo the recruiter product, and they were just throwing spaghetti at the wall and it's become just a juggernaut in recruitment. But, they didn't really know at the beginning, what the hell they were gonna be, having every recruiter use it pretty much. I think the hiQ legal case that we've been covering means fewer, fewer companies are gonna try to go after their profiles or scrape their content. They're in a really good spot for profitability and reigning. And in that scenario, like you said, there's not a lot of incentives to set the world on fire with new innovation and technology, but they'll be crying all the way to the bank with Microsoft, as they suffer fools. And recruiters, complain all you want. It's a monopoly for the most part, and you're gonna pay whether you like it or not. Joel: Power to the people. Ever heard of body doubling, Chad? No, I'm not talking about the Brian De Palma movie of the 80s. Chad: Wasn't that an erotica flick? [laughter] Joel: It was naughty. My dad took me to see that when I was like 15. Chad: No. Joel: Whoo, okay. Chad: No! Joel: I'm like, "This is how adults do it. Okay, that's nice." It's not quite as bad as seeing Porkies when I was 13. [laughter] My dad's taken me to some weird flicks as a kid. I remember... This is a true story. He took me to a double feature on my birthday. It was The Blues Brothers, which is great. And the next movie was Cheech and Chong, which I assume my dad didn't know was gonna be like a weed... Chad: Up in Smoke? Joel: Yeah, one of those. I don't remember which one. We actually walked out of Cheech and Chong. He was so upset that he took... But, sex was fine. Porkies, Body Double, that's all good. Anyway. Chad: Oh my god. Joel: Remote workers are apparently adopting a new practice called body doubling, in which they watch strangers online. AI hasn't solved loneliness yet, but it is empowering job seekers to distribute their resumes in new ways. Tiktoker Jerry Lee revealed how he uses an online chat bot to do the tedious work of filling out forms and answering application questions to the tune of 200 jobs in two days. And there's also a new service called Lazy Apply. You can get that in your favorite Chrome browser. It uses artificial intelligence to apply up to 150 jobs per day, body doubling and resume carpet bombing. Power to the people. Chad, your thoughts. Chad: So I thought it was interesting that Firing Squad alum, Hireproof's Nick Barth, who is Co-Founder and CEO over there at Hireproof, he actually does the body doubling and he live streams his coding on Twitch, where people watch and they actually QA/QC his stuff, his code. It's amazing. He earns about 150 bucks a month, beer money, off of people tipping him while they watch him do the gig. It's amazing because it gives you kind of like this hyper-sensitive of somebody actually looking over your shoulder. And from our standpoint, we've talked about this, about monitoring; employers monitoring employees, and that's not something that employees think is cool. Although, this is something entirely different. If I have peers that are watching and they're QA/QCing my code and they're doing those types of things, and they're throwing money into my tip jar, it's pretty amazing. Chad: And the story goes into ADHD, and where people have problems focusing on a task. But, when they know that somebody's watching them, they seem more hyper-focused on that task. So it's really interesting, in being able to body double and then hearing one of our Firing Squad alums actually does it. It's happening. It's weird, but it's... I guess it's kind of cool too. Joel: Do you remember Chatroulette, Chad? Chad: No. SFX: What are you doing, step bro? Chad: No. Joel: So, you know what Russian roulette is, right? Chad: Yeah. Joel: You put a bullet in the gun and one gun and... So, you would basically click through different video screens of people and you could randomly chat with them if you wanted to. It has quickly devolved into video cams of penises and other body parts, when you would click through it. So Chatroulette has fairly quickly disintegrated under the weight of porn and all kinds of other regulations and things like that. So when I see a news story about body doubling, where you're gonna watch other people work, I instantly thought of Chatroulette and where this thing could go to, which had all kinds of naughtiness in my visions or imagination of it. So the ADHD thing is interesting. I know nothing about that. That's not my lane. If your ability to watch other people work helps you focus, that's really interesting. I think this is an opportunity for a vendor to say like, "Hey, watch your co-workers work as well," as opposed to random people. I don't know where that's gonna go. It seems like it could go to fairly dark places. Body doubling. Sure, I'll watch it and see where it goes. Joel: Now, the carpet bombing of resumes is really interesting to me, because you have employers figuring out, "What's AI? Is it legal? Who can we use? What's going on?" And while employers are confused and trying to figure it out, job-seekers have already found out ways to shotgun their resume into 200 jobs in like a day. So, that means there's gonna be a lot of people getting through the system and the filters, that you didn't necessarily want to get through the filters, and that creates a problem, in terms of resources and time, to go through that. That means the employer bots have to get better at screening, a lot more people are gonna leverage chatbots and conversational AI to handle all of this flood of resumes. Joel: So ultimately, it's really good for the paradoxes of the world, to go say, "Hey, you're getting 200... You're getting all these applications that you've never had before. Help us pre-screen, help us manage that whole process," and there are a lot of companies that are set to benefit from that. I think ultimately, it also creates a market for a startup to come along and say, "Hey, we'll be able to figure out which of these applicants are bots, which ones are automated and we'll help you filter out those in addition to the ones that we're already filtering out." So you're gonna have startups that are created to help filter it, and then maybe other technologies that filter through the filters, and it's just like a whack-a-mole situation, of getting through to apply to jobs. Robots screening robots, basically. Robots interviewing robots, that's where we're headed. And this is indication of just that. Chad: We wonder why Indeed pushed cost per application through so quickly. It's like, "Oh, oh, no. You're gonna get more qualified candidates from this. Oh, wait a minute. Here come the bots." [laughter] Joel: You know how much money they're set to make, if this shit becomes mainstream? Chad: Yeah. Yeah. And why should they stop it? What is their advantage in stopping this? They have no advantage. They make more money. Joel: None, none, none. We were talking about click fraud last week, in... Click fraud, when you're making 10 cents a click, that's one thing. If you can fake or fraudulently apply to jobs where the profit is $15, $20 per, that's a real incentive. Of course, in this case, Indeed's getting all that, not their partners that are pay-per-click or any other API system. So yeah, Indeed, indeed is the evil genius set to make a lot of money from this process. Chad: And this is a way to actually push people into their Indeed system, because if it's an applied start, that's something that they can't stop. So if the bot goes through and they're pushing and starting the apply, let's say, then they can't stop it 'cause it's happening on the applicant tracking system. But, Indeed can say, "Well, wait a minute. If you start using our system for interviewing, screening, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, we can go ahead and put a block on that." So again, there are some strategies in play here, where they're either gonna make a shit ton of cash... Well, they're always gonna make a shit ton of cash, and they can start to leverage people into using their system and paying more to use their system. Joel: Damn you, Indeed. [laughter] Joel: Buy or sell when we get back. Alright, Chad. You ready for a little buy or sell? Chad: Mm-hmm. Joel: Here's how it works, gang. Alright. We talk about three companies that have recently gotten funding. I read a quick summary and Chad and I either buy or sell the company, and here we go with. Buy or sell. First up, we have Cupertino, California-based, Glider AI. They've raised 10 million dollars in a Series A funding round, which will be used to further develop the company's proprietary technology and grow its global team. Glider provides screening assessments, coding video interviews and up-scaling software to help global enterprises and leading staffing firms transform their hiring practices into remote-centric, skills-based processes. Founded in 2020, the company employs 105 people. Chad, are you a buy or sell on Glider? Chad: Glider. Isn't that a brand of lube? SFX: What are you doing, step-bro? Chad: The founders look like career CEOs and they have pretty major connections, which means they have access to money. I like that Glider went after the staffing segment first because that segment has money and they will be a much better bar for validation than any traditional hiring company can. I love skills validation because we're not just talking about someone's word that they can do it. But, we're testing to see if it's true and then also, the level of their skills. I'm an advisor for TADIO, another skills and competency-based platform, and I believe these types of platforms, accompanied with the appropriate credentialing and a portable CV, are the future, which all these things could literally kill LinkedIn. And yes, you know what's gonna happen. All this is gonna be on the blockchain. You won't know it, you don't have to know it, but from a validation standpoint, it's all going to be verified on the blockchain. You won't even know it... You won't have to. You'll just buy into it because it's yours, it's portable, and it's credentialed. I'm a buy. Joel: There's an NFT for that. I wanna like these guys. They have a nice portfolio of clients on their site, if logos are to be believed on start-up websites, although I don't think they typically always are. It's usually... It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission on some of that stuff, and I should know 'cause I've been guilty of it. Anyway. But, the one platform to rule them all, to me, has been played out. There are better funded, more established players that I think have a much better shot at making that happen, than the 10 million dollar Series A that Glider just put up. It feels like they're trying to be everything to everybody, and in doing so, I feel like they're becoming nothing to no one. So for me, Glider is a sell. [music] Joel: Alright. Let's go to FOUNT, Washington DC-based employee experience software provider, FOUNT Global has raised 8 million dollars in a Series A. This brings total funding to 10.8 million dollars. The funding will help FOUNT develop its solution, which allows companies to identify and resolve friction points that affect employee productivity and engagement. Founded in 2022, they employ 30 people. Chad, are you a buy or sell, on FOUNT? Chad: This just sounds like a different way to pull off pulse surveys, being able to survey the individuals in the organization. I thought it was interesting and almost like the virtual comment box to some degree. So I went to the website, which the URL is kind of funky, fount-ex or some shit like that. Joel: Stole my thunder, man. Way to go. Chad: Check out the pricing. There was no pricing on the website. They have co-CEOs. They already have three locations, Hamburg, London, and DC. They're trying to solve this very different problem with a worldwide posture right out of the gate, with only around 11 million dollars in funding. So this feels like a solution looking for a problem, too many locations right out of the box, too much too fast. Slow it down, FOUNT. It's a sell, for me. Joel: Yeah, you stole my thunder on the URL. I almost didn't make it past the rest of this. If you got a hyphenated URL in 2023, "Dude, come on." fount-ex? Was foundx.com taken? Why do you need the hyphen? There's no... It's so bad that... Anyway, alright. I'm gonna try to get past that. They quote the number 764 million dollars lost annually through lost productivity, burnout, and attrition. I'm not sure how you measure that. That's an interesting number to me. Chad: Wasn't that a per company or some shit like that? Joel: I don't know. It sounds really good. It sounds like there's a Tam that is really impressive, and these guys... Chad: Sounds like bullshit, it's what it sounds like. Joel: Dude, honestly, the URL, I had a hard time getting past that, but I spent a lot of time on this site and I still really can't tell you what the hell they do. They need a good explainer video, like nobody's business. They need like a 30-second... Go hire someone on Upwork or Indeed's new gig platform and have someone make an explainer video for you, 'cause I do this shit for a living, and if I can't figure this shit out, someone who's a prospect is gonna have a really hard time figuring out what the hell you guys do. If I don't get it, I can't endorse it, I can't buy it. For me, yeah. It's a sell. Joel: Let's get to... We have a Canadian company alert, Chad. Alright. Toronto-based Barley has officially launched, following 4 million dollars in seed funding. The company is aimed at making it easier for employers to understand how to structure pay decisions and explain them to employees. They'll use the funds for product development and to expand go-to-market teams. Founded in 2021, they employ only 11 people. Are you a buy or sell, on Barley? Chad: So Syndio didn't need validation, but every little bit helps. Joel, you're a fan of waves, and I'm not sure there is a bigger wave than pay and comp equity. Then we look at the numbers. 4 million dollars in seed funding is pretty damn substantial, which is just another signal to the market. What company doesn't need a good pay band or salary benchmarking platform? It all sounds boring, but it's shit that everybody needs, as they start to see regulations pile on. Oh wait, probably don't have any of that shit set up. So either... It's been a buy for Syndio, it is definitely gonna be a buy for Barley. [music] Joel: Look at you. Chad: I love it. Joel: A sexy, sexy buy. Alright. The question here to me is, can someone be Pepsi to Syndio's Coke? And if so, is Barley the one to do it? Or are they destined to be Fanta or Dr Pepper? I love me a good Dr Pepper, but not quite the market share. Chad: RC Cola. Joel: This space is pretty full of competitors. Salary.com, Assemble, Market Pay, Pay Factors, Compart and others. It's hard to see room for a company named Barley, out of Toronto, to make any significant waves, although it's a good wave, Chad. This one is a triple sell edition of Buy or Sell for me. As much as I love Canada, I gotta sell. Chad: Oh. Cheesman's got the... Keeping the wallet in the pocket today, kids. Joel: Alright, from Canada to Texas and the West Coast. SFX: Alright, alright, alright. Joel: California-based Salesforce, the cloud-based software company is laying off 8000 employees while paying Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey 10 million dollars annually, to be a "Creative advisor and TV pitch man" for the firm. CEO, Marc Benioff stated that the success of the business is paramount, but company resources are being allocated to peculiar places, to say the least. The company had previously hosted expensive celebrity conferences and wellness retreats, and insiders reported that Benioff frequently involved his celebrity friends in strategy discussions. What the hell is going on here, Chad? McConaughey, Salesforce, your thoughts. Chad: Optics, optics, optics. What the actual fuck is Marc Benioff doing these days? He was a huge proponent of remote work, and now he's not. He's fired 8000 people, while Matthew McConaughey is on the books for 10 million dollars and for some type of position he just wants to have one of his buddies on staff for. Marc Benioff off himselves total comp in 2021 was 25 million dollars. So to me, we've seen many irresponsible CEOS, and that has led to thousands of people being fired. There's no negative impact for them at all, other than saying, "I'm sorry. Have a nice day. Here's a severance package." So I don't know. Just from an optics standpoint, I don't know what the fucks going on with Benioff, but he's all over the board right now. [chuckle] Joel: So Silicon Valley has had this, I don't know, this attraction to fame and celebrity over the last decade or so. We see Mark Bezos sleep with a TV anchor, get divorced, shave his head, lift weights and put rockets in the air and move to DC, where they have all the good parties and the politicians. We see Elon sleeping with whatever pop star it is, whatever her name is. So there's been a long fatuation with Silicon Valley and Hollywood. And Benioff, if you know, is a pretty colorful guy. He's toying with park mullet in his hair, so he still sort of grasps to that Hollywood image, a little slick back. He's like Gordon Gekko meets the 80s mullet. Now, in his defense, a lot more people know about Salesforce since the McConaughey ads. I don't think they're nearly as appealing as the McConaughey Lincoln car ads from back in the day, with the bull on the road. Remember those? Those were pretty good and the Jim Carrey skits on SNL, of making fun of that. Joel: But yeah, when you get in bed with Hollywood, optics matter. Workday has been able to kind of avoid this. They've had some stars in their ads, their new one with Kiss and other stars, but Salesforce has really tied themselves to themselves to McConaughey. And when they do something like this, it obviously looks bad. I don't know how you get out of it. You need marketing, you need a budget, McConaughey a great brand to tie yourself to. I think people will ultimately forget about the layoffs. Those people will get jobs and McConaughey will still be making pretty ridiculous commercials about going to space and walking in downtown areas with 1000 people behind him. And more and more people will know Salesforce. And by the way, the biggest building in San Francisco has Salesforce written on it, and the biggest building in downtown Indianapolis has Salesforce written on it. I don't know if that says he's compensating for something, Chad. But it could be. It could be compensating for something. Chad: Yes. And those buildings were there before McConaughey was a part of the conversation. Joel: How does he not say... SFX: Alright, alright, alright. Joel: In any of the Salesforce ads? That is a crime, I tell you. That is a crime. We'll be right back. Call it the SS STD or The Love Boat, Chad. Miray Cruises is offering a three-year world cruise that covers 130000 miles and visits all seven continents and 135 countries for the low low price, starting 30000 per year. The cruise line is aiming to attract remote workers by offering amenities such as a meeting center, 14 offices, meeting rooms and a lounge, all passengers can freely access everything. The cruise line also offers utility-free accommodations, WiFi, medical visits, Port taxes and service charges and food and beverage charges are covered. The standard inside cabin costs 30 grand per year, while a superior outside cabin costs 41000 per year, and a suite with a balcony, or what I call the Sowash suite costs just $110000 per year. Chad, are you ready to say, "Ships ahoy," dump your real estate empire and start doing Chad and Cheese on the high seas, or not? Chad: No fucking way. I mean, if you're into cruises and you think $30000 is a good investment, then yeah. Why the hell not? But personally, I'm not a fan of floating petri dishes. Think about just flu outbreaks or maybe, I don't know, a new strain of covid. Nope, nope, nope. I can travel in many different ways and not be stuck on that capsule for years. But if you're a kid, we actually did a story on a developer. I believe it was a developer that works for AWS, or it was a bigger brand and he is buying a condo on a ship, for a 15-year time frame. It's like, "Holy shit." Joel: Facebook, I think. Wasn't it? Chad: Yeah. It's amazing. So this is just a different way again... Ever since the pandemic, we've really moved in a different way. I think it's awesome. It's not for me, but for those it is for, that should be a blast. [music] Joel: Chad, I tried to think of something funny to say, but the sun is out, spring is coming and who doesn't love a good Christopher Cross sailing sound bite. Oh yeah. I'm down if I was about 20 years younger, unmarried without kids. Otherwise, not for me, my man. Have fun at Portland. It's been fun. Sail Away. We'll see you next week. SFX: Alright, alright, alright. 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 is no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, and 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 took away, and like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them, either. We out.

You've heard it before: "HR deserves a seat at the table." It's far from reality for most organizations that see talent acquisition as a cost center and not the heartbeat of any successful company. That's why we invited Jeff Lackey, founder and CEO at JKL Advisors and podcast host of 'Growing Your Business with People' to come to give some sound advice on how Human Resources can get off the sidelines and into the game. A great discussion for newbies and grizzled veterans alike. 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. What's up, everybody? It's your favorite degenerates, aka the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman. Joined as always... The Rice to my Montana, Chad Sowash is here. We're happy to welcome Jeff Lackey to the show. Jeff is founder and CEO of JKL Advisors and also the podcast host of Growing Your Business with People. He's also an Ohio State grad, which we got to mention on the show. Jeff, welcome to the podcast. Jeff Lackey: Oh, yeah. Giving you the O-H-I-O, baby. Joel: The O-H-I-O, baby. Jeff Lackey: That's right. Joel: Yeah. We got faces for video on this show. Jeff Lackey: I love it. Joel: So, we do podcasts... Jeff Lackey: Faces, yes. Joel: We do voice. Jeff Lackey: Yeah, that's right. Chad: I can't believe you came out... You came out of the freaking pipe with a San Francisco reference after they just got... Purdy just got nailed. [laughter] Joel: Gronk and Brady was close but I decided to go Montana, Rice, 'cause based on the demographic of this podcast, I thought that was more relevant. [laughter] Yeah, middle aged White guys on a podcast. Chad: The catch, you thought it was more of a Dwight Clark type. Gotcha. Well, Jeff, thanks for coming on show, man. So, for all of those people who don't know you, give us a little Twitter bio about you. We'll get into the whole business stuff and all that other fun stuff later but... Joel: Who's Jeff? Chad: Long walks on the beach? I mean do you like hiking on snow-capped mountains? What does Jeff like to do? Jeff Lackey: So, hey, thanks for having me on your show. Bottom line is, is that I'm a pretty normal guy, I got four kids, my wife and I. We have one dog, two cats. And so, we just like to enjoy life. We do a lot of stuff. The fun thing we just got done doing this most recent period was my kids are all getting to that place, my youngest kid just turned 18. So, my oldest is 25. Chad: Nice. Jeff Lackey: We were always the house that everybody comes to. Everybody comes to our house. So, my wife decided, hey, all the friends come over. So, she decided we're gonna have a pajama party. So, the pajama party, we were just like... [laughter] That's right. [music] Jeff Lackey: We get green ones for the boys, red for the girls. The whole thing. She's got Cuddl Duds pajamas for all of them, she got through Kohl's. So, nothing risque. Joel: Cuddl what? Jeff Lackey: Cuddl Duds. It's really soft. They get softer as you wash them. They're amazing. [laughter] Joel: In case you need a Valentine's Day gift. Chad: Joel's gonna go get a pair. Jeff Lackey: Get two. Get two. Yeah. Chad: Get two. They're small. [laughter] Jeff Lackey: So, we have all these people. We have 30 pairs of pajamas. 30 kids over here. And we get everything. We got pizza. We got stuff, all sorts of stuff. We did some barbecue. Anyhow, we also break out the 20 year old chocolate fountain. This thing is amazing. This thing is... It's top of the line 20 years ago but after 20 years, a chocolate fountain can go bad. Chad: No wonder everybody wanted to come to your house. My God. Joel: That escalated quickly. [laughter] Jeff Lackey: Exactly. Chad: Of course, they have a chocolate fountain. Who the hell would not want to come to Jeff's house? Jeff Lackey: Exactly. Joel: This is the most random Twitter bio ever. [laughter] Jeff Lackey: It is. Chad: I love it. Carry on. Jeff Lackey: But we have this chocolate fountain. And unfortunately, the heating element may be going after 20 years. So, we're trying to keep the chocolate melting. Unfortunately, if you think about it, the chocolate fountain has an auger in the very middle that's pushing the chocolate to the top and then flowing off the sides very beautifully. But whenever that doesn't happen properly, eventually the chocolate in the middle starts to harden. And the auger which was originally pushing up chocolate, now becomes a spiral that shoots straight up into the air, spreading chocolate all over the place and then proceeds to go straight into the trash can. Jeff Lackey: I can't even make this stuff up. So, if you wanna describe what it is to be in Jeff Lackey's family, that chocolate fountain describes it all. So anyhow. And on top of that, I had a little career places, like CVS Health and Rolls-Royce and what have you. And my team's helped hire over a million people across eight different industries in 70 different countries but honestly, the fun part of my life is where I get to do fun things with my family and my kids. So, there you go. There's your Twitter bio. Joel: And you have a podcast. Tell us quickly about that. It's brand new. Chad: It's brand new. Joel: Three episodes. Jeff Lackey: So, my podcast is Growing Your Business with People. It's a podcast that's dedicated to business leaders, CEOs who really wanna get their MBA in people, 'cause you can get an MBA in Finance, in Marketing, a lot of other things but very few places, you're getting a real MBA focused on people. And what most would tell you is that people are your only asset. They're not just your best asset or most important, they're your only asset. So, we have people that are Fortune 100 CEOs, heads of the business, subject matter experts, best-selling authors. We have people that are international superstars but also we have the former head of recruiting for the CIA. So, if all else fails, we have an interesting lineup of individuals that I get to talk to that give practical advice to these business leaders but we could never hope to be as entertaining as Chad and Cheese. We always hold you up on a pedestal of like, wow... Joel: Say more. Jeff Lackey: If we could just do that. [music] Chad: Jeff hit on it a little bit there. He's been a practitioner in talent acquisition for a long time. Dude, you've been around the block. Okay? Jeff Lackey: I have. Chad: Companies like Corning, Rolls-Royce and your last gig at CVS as VP of Talent Acquisition. So, that's how you can get those amazing talent types of people on the show. I wanted to bring you on the show today because you are one of the few TA leaders that actually sat at the adult table with the C-suite. And as the Chad and Cheese podcast does, we're always challenging TA leaders to get out of the fetal position and stop talking about hiring metrics and start talking about business cases and business metrics, which you are famous for doing. So, that's why you're here today. So, to be able to help our listeners knuckle down and start to understand what a business case looks like. Yeah. So, the first question, during the pandemic, HR and TA became a major player as companies started to understand that they couldn't develop new products, sell those products, retain customers or even build those customers without the people. So, why are HR and TA still at the kids' table? Jeff Lackey: Great question. And Chad, what I'll tell you right now is that the first thing as a TA professional you need to learn is how does your business make money? Because without knowing how it makes money, you don't have a hope to be able to have a real conversation. And then the second part is understanding what is the strategy your business has to be able... Is it a growth strategy? Is it a cost-saving strategy? Is it a market capture strategy? What is the strategy that you're going after? If you understand those two things, then you can start to think about, Okay... So you need to ask yourself the question, how does this tie into the business case? And then how do I relate the metrics? Jeff Lackey: So for example, we were big on a growth capture strategy, we were about to deliver 70 million vaccines and 50 million tests during the middle of Covid. Part of that was to say we had an opportunity to access customers that people who weren't otherwise our customers coming in our stores but if we couldn't do those things through our talent acquisition, there's no way... If we couldn't get the people to deliver the vaccines and to deliver the Covid test, we weren't gonna be able to have the ability to capture the market and service the public. Jeff Lackey: So what do we do? We said, okay, if we are able to do it, we're gonna do things that are completely out of the box and different, because 50 million customers is a big deal and you almost can't outspend how much it needs to be to be able to do that. So we said we're gonna do things like a campaign where it's just dedicated to hiring 50,000 people in a day. We're going to go after capabilities in specific target areas that other people are struggling to get but we're gonna capture those people because we're gonna go after it in a completely different way and we're gonna unleash every single barrel that we have. Jeff Lackey: And I'm gonna talk with the business leaders like Sharon Vitti, who's the CEO of ATI Physical Therapy now, who was the president of MinuteClinic back then. And she and I would have nearly daily conversations about where our staff levels are, how's our progress and what are the things that are standing in the way. And the last thing that you do is don't be afraid to have the conversation with the business leader directly, because that business leader has the capability to clear obstacles that you have no idea. So I work with Harry Travis, who'll actually... Also a guest on my show. Who was the SVP of operations, essentially like a COO for the PBM, $180 billion business. He and I would have weekly conversations at the least, to talk about how our staffing plan was gonna match up with what his was, because he was running $180 billion of business. Jeff Lackey: And he wanted to get very into the weeds, because if he didn't hit his numbers from a staffing plan, he could not hit his numbers from a business delivery plan. And those things were completely tied at the hip and he understood that. So while you have to work with a lot of people, you need to be connected to that senior most business leader and be able to speak their language about the things that are important to them. And be able to have an iterative dialogue and you gotta be a little thick-skinned, because sometimes they're not always happy with the news and you have to be able to stay creative and growth minded to say, okay, things aren't working the way we planned it, 'cause they almost never work the way you planned them, what are we gonna do to learn, pivot and change quickly and agilely. Jeff Lackey: I think Sharon called it scrappy. It always felt like we were being scrappy even though we were a Fortune 4 company, because we were willing to pivot, change based on data and information. Hopefully that gives a start to somebody who's listening on the podcast. Chad: It almost feels like TA, in many cases, they don't go far enough, they just... They don't have a spine in many cases. They're just waiting to receive what you need as opposed to going further to see what the business needs, not just what that department but what actually the business needs. What's your advice to a TA leader to actually go further and not to be afraid? I think that's our biggest issue, because I've had so many CHROs actually say, "Chad, we're a cost center," they see themselves in that manner, so therefore they're automatically in the fetal position and cowering and not ready to ask for money when they need it. So how do you get out of that mindset? Jeff Lackey: Oh, I love that question, that is so good. Two things. One, I'm gonna take you back to when I was an executive recruiter like 25-years-old, hiring CEOs and other people. I was completely ill-prepared for that type of work. But the first thing that I did was I actually imagined myself as a CEO, as a peer to the people that I'm working with, I did not consider myself subordinated to them. I put myself into their mental head space and I wanted to be there toe-to-toe, shoulder-to-shoulder and think like them. Now, I wasn't capable of thinking completely like them but in my mind, I imagined that I was and I got the respect and I got the people to pay attention to me and listen to me even at 25-years-old. The second thing though, you need to be able to understand what is the business case and how does it translate in the money for them. Jeff Lackey: One of the things that I talk frequently on my podcast and I've talked frequently with the executives to say, "How important is a customer to you?" And they'll be like, "Well, they're everything," like, "No, how much does it cost you to do this piece of business?" "Oh, okay. Well, it costs me this much." "How much, if you don't have the people, is it costing you per day? How much per day is it costing you not to have the people?" And see, if the answer is zero, don't hire them, shut the rack down, you don't need that person. But if there's a cost... If that CEO or business leader says there's a cost and knows what it is, then they should be able to articulate it. And then you say, "Okay, let's take a look at what we're doing to invest in hiring against that position or those series of positions and see if that makes up for it." Jeff Lackey: Are we doing 10% of the cost of the impact, 'cause we don't wanna erode all of the value of hiring of the new person but we do have to re-invest to be able to capture some of the value here and that's part of the investment. The other thing is that, as I talk to CHROs and business leaders, I tell them, I say, "What do you think the cost is for having a poor candidate experience?" Especially those business leaders that don't seem to care how they treat the candidate? And they go, "Well... " And they give some answer and I say, "Well, you might be surprised to find that depending on the research, between 40% and 80% of all candidates who have a poor experience thus will become a detractor, a six or less on a net promoter score are likely to abandon the brand." I had 10 million candidates coming through my pipeline every single year at CVS, I could not afford that large of an abandonment rate and neither can any TA professional. Chad: Well, what about at Rolls-Royce though? Because you weren't a consumer products organization. I wasn't going out and buying a jet engine. So you have many companies that say, "Well, that's not how our business works." You thought that way at Rolls-Royce too. How did you work that in your mind? Jeff Lackey: Well, the pitch is a little different. So, not being consumer products, you don't necessarily go after that but you still keep it firmly in your head that actually attracting candidates... You have to remember that building your brand with the candidates is gonna lead you to hiring better people. So the spin is different to say, okay, do you want the second best or the third best or do you want to alienate your candidates so that they go to the competitors and they talk bad or do you wanna get your first pick? Jeff Lackey: Because even though this person isn't your first pick, I use those relationships for referrals and to be able to get to other individuals. So they might not be the first pick for that job but they might be very well the first pick for another job within Rolls-Royce. And they might very well be the influencer that you don't even see. That is the person that leads another top tier pick to be able to be hired by Rolls-Royce. So I hit that. The other thing is cost. Rolls-Royce was big into watching pennies. And I'd say, well, guess what, if you want me to spend less ad dollars, you need to treat your candidates better. That's the bottom line. Joel: Jeff, that's just radical thinking by the way. That's just radical thinking. Jeff Lackey: I could show cost per hire differences between the leaders with higher NPS scores versus the leaders with lower NPS scores and show them side-by-side. And it was staggering, the difference. Staggering. Joel: You want to name a number or two or just say it's staggering? Jeff Lackey: So staggering is pretty big but I would say in at least two that I'm thinking of off the top of my head and there were literally thousands of cases that we would have. But in two that I was thinking of, there was between a 50%-75% difference in cost per hire. Now, if you think about that being several thousands of dollars, that also... And that's on a per hire basis, that's real money that starts to add up. And whenever I was sitting and talking with the COO and CFO of Rolls-Royce in Buckingham Gate, literally 300 yards away from Buckingham Palace, at 7:30 at night, talking about hiring, one of the things we talked about was the fact that, "Hey, guys, you want to drive down cost? So do I. Treat our candidates better. And let me show you how that drives cost down." Jeff Lackey: And they were like, "That makes a lot of sense. That's intuitive but we'd never really considered that that way." And so the COO and CFO started to encourage their leadership, first line to say, "No more missed interviews, no more last minute changes. No more treating them the wrong way. You have to be... You should be held accountable to treat them the right way." And that changed things. Joel: I want to jump back real quick and then come back to the sort of branding experience question. I had to bite my tongue and not drop a no shit Captain Obvious when you said, "We have to know how we make money and what the vision is of the company and how you fit into that." Chad: So alien. Joel: Which makes me think that more than 50% of HR leaders don't know the answers to those questions, otherwise you wouldn't have said it. But I also think there's a disconnect in the C-suite level when you have CEOs all over the place saying people are our most important resource. Those conversations clearly aren't happening. And it's a two-way street. And we obviously focus on the HR side. Why aren't CEOs having those conversations with the HR leaders? Jeff Lackey: Because they're afraid. They're afraid to have the conversation because they don't know what they're talking about because they never got an MBA in people. They could talk intelligently about marketing and operations and about everything else but when it comes to the talent acquisition or the people side of it, that is very, very fuzzy to many business leaders. They know how they like to manage and how their management routines... Joel: But every CEO knows how they make money and they know the vision of the company. They should be able to talk about that. I understand they may not be able to talk about... Jeff Lackey: There's a translation issue because HR's talking about... Joel: How do we get those conversations to happen. Jeff Lackey: You watched my podcast. That's exactly it. [chuckle] Well and here's the thing here, there's good information out there. The HR folks are just using the wrong language. They're not using the language of business, the TA folks are not using the language of business when talking to their business leaders. They're not using the language of finance and operations or marketing, et cetera. They're using their HR language, which doesn't necessarily compute because these people haven't been trained in it. So it's literally like talking a separate foreign language to somebody and that person going, "I know what you're saying. I need to understand but I have no idea what to do with what you just told me." Joel: So someone like you would be a translator. Jeff Lackey: A translator. That's right. Chad: Well, I mean that in itself though, if you think about it... 'Cause cost per hire and time to fill just doesn't go far enough. Jeff Lackey: It doesn't. Chad: Yeah. It's almost like the starting point, believe it or not. I mean, there's a good amount of work that actually get there but you have to be able to demonstrate how that time to hire, as you'd said earlier, impacts the bottom line. So if I have sales positions open, what does that key market managers actually cost per day revenue to the bottom line? If you know that, you extrapolate it over a month, you can say, this is what it's costing because we have a shitty experience and because we can't get people hired within a 60 day timeframe. I'd like to cut that to 30 days. Jeff Lackey: 100%. Chad: And here's the budget I need to do that. Jeff Lackey: One of my clients... And most of my clients now are not Fortune 5 companies, they're more mid-market companies. And so we're talking EBITDA. As you talk about that, one of the first things I ask every client is, "How many openings do you have right now?" If we're talking talent acquisition. And, "What is the cost of all of those openings to your EBITDA? How much are they costing you on a daily, weekly, monthly basis?" In one case, not mentioning any clients, that was literally between $20 and $25 million worth of EBITDA. Now, for those people who don't know what EBITDA is, we're talking in everyday conversation, profit. It's profit after interest and after taxes and after deductions and amortization and all that. But it's profit. So the question to you is, if you had $20 to $25 million worth of profit sitting on a table that you couldn't access, how much would you be willing to spend to get it? Chad: Yeah, 'cause it's there. Jeff Lackey: It's there. All you have to do is scrape it off the table. And the only thing that you had to do is be able to get the people into those roles, because in this case and scenario, those people were directly related to that profit. Their ability to deliver services were directly related to the ability for revenue and then ultimately profitability. But what the other thing is, I always say talk head and heart, because CEOs also often have a big heart. They have a big head, they have a big heart. And you say, What is our mission? What are we trying to do for our customers? If we have these people on there, not only how much more money are we gonna be making but also how are we gonna service our customers in a way that really matters to them? Jeff Lackey: If you have patients, maybe if it's a physical therapy, like I had extreme sciatica, extreme. And I was diagnosed, I got physical therapy, sign off, I go straight there from the doctor's office as soon as they gave me that and I walked in and she said, she goes, "Okay, we'll see you in two weeks. We'll get your first appointment." I'm not even joking. I could have cried at that moment. I was in that bad a pain. And she just saw it on my face. So what did she do? She worked her magic and kinda worked in and the next business day, she got me in but you know what that was, that was at the expense of that physical therapist who probably was already overloaded in that moment taking just one more patient on but if they had plenty of people, they would have just said, "Oh yeah. Tomorrow, we'll get you in, we'll get you set and no problem," and that wouldn't have over-taxed that physical therapist. Jeff Lackey: That's what you as a TA professional are doing by helping to... You've talked about cycle time and cost per hiring, all this sort of stuff. Talk about the real impact to real people. Actually talk to the people who you're recruiting in the field and who are delivering service to customers and oh, by the way, go with your CEO whenever she or he are doing that and both of you have the conversation with those people and say... I would go to stores and I'd say, "So tell me about it." During the pandemic, one of the store managers broke down in tears because he couldn't find people fast enough. You better believe I moved heaven and earth to make sure that that store was never again in that situation and I wish I could have done it for all 10,000 all the time. Chad: But you could have easily lost that individual and then you would have had a bigger position to fill. And that's the thing, is that I think in many cases, we're not articulating back to the business units. They want those people but as you had said, as hiring managers, they're missing interviews. They're doing stupid shit that impacts the candidate experience but it also impacts their team because it stretches them too thin and then retention falls to shit and people are gone before you know it. So if you think about, let's take a look at the positions that are open right now. Chad: Now, if you're not doing your job with regard to the process of getting those positions filled, then you're gonna over-stretch your team, you're gonna lose more people and then that's more money you're gonna be missing to the bottom line or retention because of customer service or technology and product being developed. To me though, Jeff, why is this such a huge stretch? As Joel was just saying, this seems so common sense. We're here for a reason but we only go so far. We only go up to the line of cost per hire and then we just stop. Jeff Lackey: Because... Joel hit it on the head. He hit it on the head. There's been a transference of accountability for the hiring to TA. TA does not hire. TA, Talent Acquisition, does not hire. My purpose statement for my team was, we help our leaders higher great people. TA does not hire unless they hire for themselves. Leaders hire. Start with the leader and keep accountability where it's supposed to be with that leader. Second, own the parts that you can own to make the process better but do it with the leader. Stop going off into La la land and developing something that may or may not be useful and doing it without the input from the leader. That's ridiculous 'cause they'll never use it. They don't want it. They don't want you to do that. So here's a dirty little secret. I know you guys like the dirty little secrets here. Chad: Always. Always. Jeff Lackey: Do you know that between 30% to 50% of my budget was not actually given to me from HR? I had business leaders who were essentially putting money and resources and people into my recruiting organization, because all I did was tell them, "This is what I'm staffed to do. This is what I can do with what I have but this is what I could do if I had this." And they said, "That's all you need?" And I say, "Yeah, that's all I need but I couldn't get it from any place else. If you give it to me, then I will have it and then you will get what you want." And 95 or more... I still remember one of the business leaders or one of the executive directors worked for me. She actually generated over $10 million worth of new income into TA's budget in one year. [laughter] Chad: So again, working directly with the business units... And we've heard a great story from Amy Butchko, who used to be at SAIC, where she was working... And this is a true partnership. She was working with the CRO, because the CROs are like, "Why can't we get our positions filled fast enough?" She showed the CRO, she showed her the applicant tracking system, how it was old, decrepit, it just wasn't working. They went, they got the budget, they imploded the entire applicant tracking system and they moved more to a core talent platform, more of a tech stack and it was a major difference in hiring, not just for the CRO but for the entire organization. Jeff Lackey: 100%. And the funny thing is, you as a leader will have to sharpen your wits because all of a sudden, you have investors. You have basically internal venture capital, private equity who are funding your organization and they are really gonna be looking for a return on that investment. If you don't give them a return, they're gonna cut you off and your name is gonna be dirt and you will not get it from any other business leader within that organization again. So it's a high risk move, because you're putting your reputation on the line by doing it but if you're confident and you're betting on yourself in these things and you think you can pull it off, you just gotta be ready with the metrics and the measures and the accountability to talk to it on a regular basis with those leaders who gave you the money. Joel: You gave a great definition of EBITDA. Do the same for NPS for those that don't know. Jeff Lackey: Sure. So Net Promoter Score, so here's the gist of it. Net Promoter Score is a zero through 10 scale typically. And one through six, zero through six, if somebody says that, that's a detractor. Anybody who gives a zero, one, two, three, four, five, six on the 10-point scale, with 10 being high, zero being low, is a detractor. Seven and eight are considered to be neutral. Those don't give you anything positive or negative, they're considered neutral. And then nine and 10 are considered to be promoters. So in the definition, Net Promoter Score, when they call about net promoters, what that means is that you take your nines and 10s, your promoters, subtract your detractors, your zero through six and that's a score that you come up with. Jeff Lackey: People often use a 100-point scale, they translate it into it. So say that you had... Out of all your promoters, say like 70, 70 out of 100 were promoters and say 10 out of 100 were detractors and the others were neutral, so you do 70 minus 10, so your Net Promoter Score would be 60 at that point, which actually is pretty solid. My Net Promoter Score for my leaders tended to be closer to 80, which is rock star. My Net Promoter Score for candidates was between 70 and 80, with some cases being as low as 50, depending on what part of the organization but it's hard work to get that NPS to go up and you have to really understand the feedback, take it on and be able to deal with it as real time as possible. Joel: And you broke down the dollar value in terms of cost if your score is lower. So what I heard in terms of how we get that score up, I heard branding, I heard better tech, less friction. Maybe automation plays into that. Dive into that a little bit. Maybe rank the importance of some of those. What did I miss? How do we get that score up if we think it's low or know it's low? Jeff Lackey: Right. The first and foremost is understanding your leaders get that it's important and why. Once you have that, the rest of it starts to fall in. I'm a big tech guy. I love tech. I installed 37 different pieces of technology in CVS Health to make it a total of 38 in place. Some of it, I lived to regret, most of which I was happy with eventually because I was able to create an ecosystem that supported the candidate but that tech allowed us to be able to do things like we hired 105,000 in 2019, we hired 212,000 in 2021. You can't do that type of a jump without having a pretty amazing tech stack. Jeff Lackey: The second thing is the brand. Brand awareness, you have to have a brand but anybody who knows about brand knows that brand starts in the inside, so it's how you treat your people, how you treat your candidates, that's where it starts and then you can really... You do the personas, the promotions and you have amazing people, like I had in my recruitment marketing team doing brilliant things to promote the things that were already being done in the inside, where people were leading with purpose and doing amazing stuff for the organization. Jeff Lackey: And then the last part is what I call process. It's like reducing that friction. And that's just to say, how are we using the tech and the people and we're looking at it as a system perspective to say... In my case, I had a dream that said, "Hey, we can get this down to a two-hour hire." I did not get to two hours, I'll tell you. In some cases, we got it down to a day or a little bit less for a hire but the fact is, is that how do you get that friction down so that the candidate's experience is less about process and where they need to... It's only about people. Jeff Lackey: The only part that they should be touching is where they actually have a human-to-human experience, whether it's needed. Like with a leader or maybe with an early-stage recruiter talking about the position because they don't know if they wanna join or not but you shouldn't be talking about, "Click here, push this, send this form, X, Y, Z." That should be very, very fluid. And with all the government regulations, so CEOs who are listening, I try and remind them like, your HR and TA team or DMLI, government regs and it's gonna take creativity to be able to break through and change that around but it's worth it. It's worth the effort. Joel: I'll let you add on this. Pay transparency is a hot topic these days. You are actually talking to the leaders in this space. How do they feel about pay transparency? And for someone who isn't keen on it, how would you change their mind into embracing it? Jeff Lackey: That's an excellent question. So a lot of leaders are not familiar with pay transparency. HR leaders are, business leaders often aren't. So I'm often educating them on what it is, where it's going and how really it's a tidal wave of legislation that they really need to get ahead of. In my own opinion, so let's start with that, I'm a big supporter of pay transparency. I am not a supporter of confusion and I think having all the different laws in every different metro area and state is... It's just the early days of any change that happens. Until you get to a place where standardization, people understand where it needs to be standardized and how, there's gonna be some level of confusion but for leaders, I tell them, Why is it important? Jeff Lackey: Because it levels the playing field for you but it also, it opens an opportunity for you to differentiate yourself in the market by maybe going into that direction before others do. And quite frankly, most CEOs would say, "I want transparency be one of the foundations of our culture." If you want that, let's start with the one thing that's already out there that's being created for you, it's an environment that you can adopt and embrace and then you can point to it and say, "Hey, look, this is what... We did this before others did it." That's a great win. A big W for you as a leader. And it's not even hard. You're probably gonna have to do it anyhow. Chad: Well, Jeff, we appreciate you coming on the show. We want to... [applause] Chad: We're gonna have you back, because more of an MBA on people is something that we need... Joel: I feel smarter. Chad: Our leaders need and they need to hear it from somebody who has done it down in the trenches, then all the way up to the C-Suite. Jeff, if somebody wants to find out more about you, they wanna connect with you, where would you send them? Jeff Lackey: I would tell them, go to jkladvisors.ai and that's ORS, jkladvisors.ai or go to my YouTube channel, it's youtube/@jkladvisors or you could just Google or go to YouTube and find "Growing Your Business with People." We have some really cool episodes and it's a great compliment to the awesome stuff that you guys are doing, Chad and Cheese, in your podcast, to take it... Say you're focused on a group of folks, I wanna focus on the CEOs who really need that translator. So I'm like the United Nations translator over here, [laughter] connecting CEOs with HR and that's my job. So I really appreciate your time on the show. Joel: I can dig it. Jeff, thanks for being here. Chad, another one in the books, go bucks. 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 and 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.

Joel is haggard from 2,000 miles on the road this week, but that's nothing a beer, chicken tenders, a LIVE recording from a bar in Columbus Indiana, and BIG NEWS can't fix. What big news? Google for Jobs PAID ads present a serious risk to Indeed's new CPSA model ChatGPT presents a serious risk to Indeed's new CPSA model Indeed's model change wasn't timed well Workday's A.I. goes to court Mercer gets a shot of LeapGen botox and Buy or Sell with WorkLlama, Bonusly, and Gable... Sit back, pop a cold one, and enjoy what we do best - drink and talk. You're welcome! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability inclusion. Chad: We are recording. Joel: We are recording. Levels, level's good. Level's good. Chad: Yeah. Looking good. 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: Oooh yeah. Anything to declare? Yeah, don't go to Jackson, Tennessee. Hi kids, you're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast, this is your co-host, Joel super-A-Cheeseman. Chad: And this is Chad 1, 2023, prediction down, baby, Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, Google for Jobs tells Indeed to hold its beer. "Workday like George Bush hates Black people, and a little buy or sell. Let's do this. [chuckle] Will Cheesman: Emotional damage. Joel: What a week? Chad: You look a little ragged. Joel: So my father's 83 years old. Chad: That's a good life. Joel: Lives in Houston or live in Houston. I've driven 2000 miles this week to pick him up, put his house on the market, move him out, sell his shit, throw his stuff away. It has been one hell of a week and I have a new side hustle, if I ever want it. Chad: Yeah. Joel: It's called two-week move out. [laughter] Joel: Because I myself have moved out of a place, listed it, trashed it, cleaned it up in two weeks and in two weeks I was able to get him in the same predicament. So I have a side business if I ever want it. Chad: Could be a business model. Yeah. Joel: Twoweekmoveout.com Chad: Twoweekmoveout.com Joel: That's right. Chad: Well, we're glad to have you back in the Midwest. Joel: We're not even home yet. Chad: I know. Joel: I took a pit-stop here in Columbus, Indiana, to do this stupid show. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. [chuckle] Joel: And have some beers with you. Chad: We're here at 4th Street Bar and Grill in little Columbus, Indiana drinking beer, we're together. We don't do this enough. We only do that because we have events. Joel: It's been a week since I've had a beer and it tastes pretty good. Chad: Oh my God. Joel: I gotta tell you. I gotta tell you. Can you do no booze January or whatever that's called? Chad: That's fucking ridiculous. Joel: They're demented and sad. I can't imagine. Chad: Oh yeah. [laughter] Joel: I'm as unprepared for this show as any show that we've ever done. So who knows where the hell its to go and I'm drinking. Chad: And listener, that's not saying much. That's not saying much. Joel: Yeah. Don't go to Jackson, Tennessee, by the way. [chuckle] Joel: And don't stay at the motel 8, they're super lame. Chad: Shout outs. My first shout out goes to Be My Eyes App. Joel: Be My Ass? Chad: Be My Eyes. Joel: Eyes. Sorry. Chad: Which is an app. Joel: Sorry. Chad: Okay? Okay. Yes. I appreciate the clarification. So Julie and I were sitting on the couch earlier this week, settling in for a night, catching up on The Last of Us on HBO Max. And she gets a call and she's as excited as I have ever seen her to take a call because she hates talking on the phone. Joel: Yeah. Me too. Chad: She answers the call, the video pops on, and all you see is somebody's house slippers. And I'm like, "What the fuck is going on here?" I have no clue what this is." So I have no clue what this is. Well, it's the Be My Eyes app. It's for... It has over or around half a million individuals who are visually impaired or blind, and they need somebody to tell them what color sweater they're grabbing so that they don't miss match. Or in this case, which was incredibly cute, this blind guy just... He has a new puppy. They're potty training it, and in the area where he had the puppy he was like, "Oh no, what if it shit?" So he was showing Julie the floor around just to make sure not... First and foremost, he didn't step in something. Joel: Yeah. Chad: And secondly, if there was something there, she could actually be his eyes to help him clean it up, which was amazing. I automatically joined as a volunteer, go to Be My Eyes. It's an app. Joel: And she didn't know this person? Chad: No. No. Joel: They call randomly... Chad: Yes. Yes. Joel: And you agree to take the call... Chad: Exactly. Joel: And help them. Chad: There are 6 million plus volunteers, which is just amazing. But anyway, that's... Joel: That's very cool. Chad: My short story. Joel: Have you seen Bird Box on Netflix? Chad: I have not. I have not. Joel: Okay. I won't spoil it for you. Chad: Okay. Joel: But the blind win in the end. [laughter] Chad: Boom. Joel: Totally did not ruin that for you whatsoever. Chad: Boom. Yeah, thanks. That's awesome. Yeah. Joel: Okay. I got a shout out for the Adult superstore, Chad. Chad: Hello. [laughter] Joel: These cathedrals of all things American erotica that appeared off the side of the freeway in small towns across the US, are something you don't see when you take flights like you and I do to most of the destinations across the world. It's nice to know that in a world complete with Porn Hub, OnlyFans, and Adam and Eve, that Bricks and Mortar stores like the Adult superstore are still a staple across small town America. And if you dare travel from Indiana through Illinois, Tennessee, Arkansas Texas and back... Chad: They're everywhere. Joel: You will see your fill of Adult superstores. Chad: Yes. Joel: Almost as many as Jesus saves billboards, and Jesus is real and God is real. Chad: Yes. Joel: Shout out to the Adult superstore. Chad: There is like a super superstore just north of Kentucky, in Jefferson village. [laughter] Joel: Is there? Chad: Yes. Joel: They have different names. There's like the Lioness superstore. Chad: Yeah, it's fucking crazy dude. Joel: There's Mirandas superstore. [laughter] Joel: Yeah. Chad: This one was Truckers delight, I think it was called. Joel: Yeah, it is America... Chad: Oh fuck. Joel: To the hilt. It is America. Chad: Oh Jesus. Okay. Something else that is American to the hilt is Oscar the Grouch. Shout out to Oscar the Grouch. United Airlines new advertising campaign shows Oscar the Grouch looking through a newspaper and seeing a United Airlines help wanted ad for, guess what? Chief Trash Officer. This is great PR for Sesame Street and Oscar the Grouch. But what brand, let alone what airline wants their brand associated with trash? I would have personally gone with the Cookie Monster as Chief Snack Officer Trash. I'm not sure that I would want associate with my brand. Not to mention, I don't know that I would want to call CTOs trashy. Joel: Yeah, or like the count. Like count the dollars you'll save by Flying United. Chad: Save? Joel: Yeah. We... Chad: So many options. Joel: Why don't people hire us for their advertisers campaign? Chad: Fucking... Joel: I have a funny Oscar the Grouch story. Chad: Okay. Joel: So I dated a girl in college. Chad: Oh God. Joel: Her last name was Mayer. Chad: [laughter] Okay. Joel: And she was a Ted Salty one night, and I called her... Chad: Thank you. Joel: I called her Oscar. Chad: Oh, that is such good beer. Joel: She thought it was for Oscar Mayer, the wiener... [laughter] Joel: Producer. And she thought it was cute. And I was like, no, Oscar the Grouch. Chad: Oh. Joel: And she didn't take kindly to that. I don't... Chad: You should have stuck with the first one. Joel: I don't think that we were with each other the whole night. So anyway, that's my Oscar the Grouch story. My second shout out Chad. Chad: Yes. Joel: You know, I love a good fast food shoutout. Chad: What? Joel: Especially when they have historical. Chad: Reference. Joel: Context to my own life. Chad: Yes. Joel: Shout out to the KFC or Kentucky Fried Chicken as it's still called in Kentucky, by the way. The KFC double down. Chad: Double down. Joel: What the hell was the double down? Well, remember when paleo was first all the rage back in the day. Chad: Yep. Joel: And no one wanted sandwich meat or they didn't want bread. Chad: No one want the breads. Joel: Everyone got protein style or no bun. Well, KFC was in a bit of a pickle with their chicken option. Chad: They were in a big of a pickle. Joel: They had the great idea of putting two chicken thighs, which by the way, are still fried chicken. I guess people don't consider the breaded fried chicken as part as bread. But anyway, it is probably less bread than the bun. Anyway, you put two thighs together. And who doesn't love to do that? Chad: I rather like them up apart. Joel: And you put some cheese in there, some pickles, other condiments, and the meat becomes the bun essentially. [laughter] Joel: And they wrap in a little thing and you eat it, sort of like, a taco or a sandwich. And they're bringing it back for some reason. I don't know if it's like a keto thing, I'm not really up on the new diet bads of the world. Chad: [laughter] Yes. Joel: So who knows. But this is historical. This is a little bit McRib-ish. A little bit. Chad: Very much is. Yes. Joel: By the way, the milkshake is back for just in time for St. Patrick's Day. Chad: Oh yeah. The Shamrock Shake. Joel: Shamrock Shake. Yes. Chad: Shamrock shake. Joel: Sorry. Chad: I love those as a kid. Joel: Yeah. [laughter] Chad: I loved them as a kid. Joel: Frozen ice. Chad: Yes. Joel: That's colored green. [laughter] Joel: It's delicious. Chad: Alright. Alright, alright. We're getting into events. Alright kids, Unleash America happening in April in Vegas. Obviously you want to be there. HR practitioners. Guess what? You can get a discount through Chad and Cheese. That's right. You go to Chadcheese.com. Joel: We got a coupon code? Chad: Oh, we got a coupon link. Joel: Okay, alright. Chad: You just go to Chadcheese.com and, go to events. And guess what? All you have to do is find the events that you wanna go to. This one obviously being Unleash America, and register. Guess what? You're gonna automatically get a percentage off, get a discount. Then we've got iCIMS Inspire, this May in Coronado on the beach. Joel: Oh yes. Yes. Chad: We're gonna be closing out the main stage on day one. I have no clue what we're gonna be doing there. I just know that we're gonna be talking shit and enjoying life. Joel: Snapping checks and writing... Wait. Snapping necks and cashing checks. Chad: There you go. Joel: That's what we're gonna be doing. Chad: That's what. That's what. Joel: Sorry. My brain is moving a little slower tonight. Chad: And then, last but not least on at least this, we can't go through all of our events, kids, we have way too many. RecFest London in Knebworth. It's a party. It's a carnival. It is under a big top. It has a Ferris wheel. Holy shit. It's in July, London. You got to go there for all of these. And a long list of other events that Chad and Cheese are gonna be at. Go to Chadcheese.com, click on events, and, you never know. You might even receive a discount when registering for a ticket. Joel: It's even rumored that Cole Cheeseman, who has a spanking new driver's license. Chad: What? Joel: Might be designated driving people to and from Knebworth. [laughter] Joel: We'll see how that goes. I'm not sure he wasn't tested on the other side of the car... Chad: I was gonna say. Joel: Or the Steering wheel. Chad: Or the other side of the road. Joel: It could be tunes as the cat driving over a cliff moment for everybody. Chad: Talk to me about free stuff. I like free stuff. Joel: Free shit. I Love free shit. I'm wearing a fine t-shirt, by the way. Chad: That's our first one, version one. Joel: This is the OG shirt. Chad: Yep. Joel: It's still a warm hug from both of us to this day. Chad: Looks new. Joel: It is, it's totally looking new 'cause I've never worn it before. [laughter] Joel: And, you gotta... If you want a t-shirt, if you want free beer from our friends at Aspen Tech Labs, Bourbon from our homies, in Denmark from Tex Colonel. And if it's your birthday this month, you could win some rum from our friends at Plum. That's good marketing once again. But you gotta sign up to get it. Head out to Chadcheese.com, click the free link, sign up. And there's a pretty good chance that at some point in your life as long as this show is airing that you'll win something. Chad: So, Bas Van de Haterd who was... He has not received his t-shirt and he's knocking on our door. I'm thinking he feels like Job Gett should just send him a whole box or something. I don't know. [laughter] Joel: Yeah. So I mentioned my 16 year old doing driving duty at Knebworth. My t-shirts are managed by my 13 year old daughter. [laughter] Joel: I think people think somehow we have some warehouse in Middle America churning out t-shirts and shipping shit. Chad: That's great. Joel: This shit takes time. We got a lot of fans. It's not personal. Chad: Relax. Joel: Just sit tight. Just sit tight. Okay. Chad: Plus we're coming to events. Joel: If you really want one, fly your ass to Indianapolis, I'll take you to lunch. We'll get some drinks and I'll give you a shirt if you really want one that much. Boss, Indiana's beautiful in the spring. We'll see you in a few weeks. Chad: Yeah, or come to one of those events because more than likely we're gonna be packing kids. We're gonna be packing. Topics. Okay. Acquisition alert. Acquisition alert. Joel: Yeah. You sent me this at like midnight last night. Chad: I sent you this, you probably haven't even read through this. Mercer acquires Leapgen, Mercer a business of Marsh McLennan on the New York Stock Exchange. As M-M-C announced the acquisition of Leapgen. A leading HR Technology Advisory Firm focused on digital strategy and transformation, workforce solutions and improving employee experience. Mercer's latest research indicates that US organizations increasing their total HR spend. 63% are spending more on HR tech in 2023, despite increased investment, nearly 60% of HR leaders don't believe they have the right stack, hence consolidation on consulting. Is this big news, not big news. What do you think? Joel: It's potentially big news and we don't talk a lot about the shred on this podcast. But the shred, if you're not listening and subscribe to our show, you can't get it on the website. It's exclusively, you gotta sign up for the feed. Chad: That's for subscribers kids and it's free. Joel: But it's nice because I read it every week and it's good to get a sense of like, Who's getting money? How much money? Who's getting acquired for how much? Like who's acquiring? What are the trends that you see? And I'm lucky enough to get like a 30,000 foot view of what's going on. Obviously when we started it was like," Oh, Someone you never heard of just got $70 million. Oh, that's fun. We'll talk about that on the show". And then, it became kind of, they're getting 20 million, 15 million and that's more of like what we're seeing today. And we're seeing a little bit more of the acquisition drives. And you and I have talked a lot about with the pandemic happening and money not flowing the way that it is, a lot of companies are gonna be looking to sell. A lot of companies are gonna go shopping. This is gonna be the TJ Max of our industry where for shit's, shit may not fit. Right. But it's cheap, so let's buy it... Chad: [laughter] There you go. Joel: And see if we can dye it into it or maybe have enough chicken wings that we feed into it later. Chad: Or tailored. Yeah. Joel: And to me this sounds a lot like that, like there was probably a clearance sale at Leapgen. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Is that... Okay. Leapgen and a company that had money and resources went out and bought it. Now as I read the Shred and the news, we're getting more and more acquisitions and I think that the trend will be less money raised and more companies buying companies. So in that case, I would say this is potentially a trend that we're gonna see and could be big news and a sign of things to come. Chad: Yeah. I'm gonna say that I think Mercer was really an old and crusty brand and Leapgen is kind of this new, they do a lot of content, they've got a lot of thought leadership, a lot of that stuff. And Mercer's really missing that. So what they really needed to do, Is either develop it or buy that shit. I know from sources that Jason and Mike, who are co-founders and also the C-R-O Tanya, are locked into a five year agreement with Mercer. That's on the rumor wires and consulting services for vendors. This is low hanging fruit because you know those stacks don't work right together. They're shit, it's fucking horrible. So I think what's happening here is Mercer is trying to get a injection of Botox to look better, to feel better about themselves. You know what I mean? Joel: [laughter] Yeah. Supercharged the staff. Look at this cool shit we got. Chad: Ooh. It's amazing. So I just hope that they don't suffocate the Leapgen brand with their old crustiness. I hope that the Botox lasts long enough. Joel: Yeah. Chad: But we'll see. Time will tell. Joel: Yeah. It almost never works out that way. [laughter] Joel: It's like a sugar high. Chad: Yes, yes. Joel: And it's back to the same old processes and big co-shit that everyone is used to. So it'll be fun for a while. Enjoy the cotton candy there Mercer. [laughter] Joel: Alright. Some other news. Chad: Yes. Joel: Google for Jobs while. Chad: So another beer. Joel: Yeah, Another beer please. Chad: Thank you. Joel: Can you grab a water too, for the young man walking up the sidewalk there with the 1988 Oakley Sunglasses. [laughter] Chad: I love him. Joel: Anyway. Chad: I love him. Joel: Sorry. I won't go into it. My Dad is joining us kind of at this podcast. Sorry. So Tom Chevrolet. Chad: Let's go with Chevrolet. It makes him sound sexy. Joel: Chevrolet, Chopping Buffalo, Chief Product Officer at App Cash shared a screenshot of Google for Jobs providing sponsored ads on specific searches. Most of you out there won't see it, which means it's in a testing phase. Chad: Beta. Joel: Chad predicted this would happened this year. I was a little early predicting it in 2021. Although I said it probably won't happen until 2024, but I'll give you credit for it but we both predicted it. Chad: Of course, you will. Joel: Google's doing it. LinkedIn was on fire over his share. Lot of comments, lot of ridicule, criticism. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: Not a lot of love. What's your take on Google for Jobs advertising? Chad: Well, first and foremost, the time is upon us kids. My sources say that many of the big programmatic players and some reputable Job Boards are actually they've been baiting this product for a minute. It's still hands down the worst job search UX in the game. But when you have the kind of traffic in usage that Google does, you can get the UX wrong and still find results for hiring companies looking to get away from vendors like, I don't know, Indeed that are currently holding clients hostage. If you're a hiring company and you already have your jobs marked up in the Google for Jobs feed, there will be a one click option. Did you hear that? One click option to elevate your job to a paid position. So I think this is definitely not perfect. We'll be talking about. Joel: Is that confirmed or is that... Chad: Yes. Joel: Okay. Chad: That's confirmed. This is not perfect, much like ChatGPT. Right? This is evolving. But I tell you what, when you have the type of traffic that Google does, Google is a lifestyle platform. Indeed is not. This is an incredible development I think in our space. The question is, will they stick with it? Joel: Yeah, so the criticism that I saw was... Gee it took 'em long enough. Chad: Really. Joel: To me this is... Okay, so this thing launched in '17, it's been six years. We've had COVID. We've had some shit go on, let's call it a five year let's see where this goes test. Chad: Well, they also had monopoly cases in courts and shit. Joel: So antitrust cases, is this gonna be safe to launch? Let's figure out this shit. Chad: They had to get it right. Joel: So to me like the criticism of like, "Oh it took 'em long enough," is kind of bullshit. I mean this isn't their business. This is like a side project for Google. Chad: [laughter] It's 20% time. Joel: Yeah. So time was sort of stupid. I mean ad dollars are down, people are advertising less. So adding a new channel that, by the way, is a multi-billion dollar channel potentially makes sense. ChatGPT is putting pressure on their business. The other thing, and you mentioned this, is that it's ugly. Chad: It is. Joel: God help us. It's ugly. You and I remember Google when ads used to be highlighted in green and purple and weird shades of colors. Now you don't even notice the ads. There's like a little ad text between that. So they'll figure out the design of this. It'll come around. They'll do user testing. They'll get data around this. That's not a big deal. The other thing to me like the big thing that no one really talked about on the LinkedIn post was like, timing is perfect because Indeed is busy pissing everyone off. Chad: Yes, yes. [laughter] Joel: And charging too much for this new bullshit product that they've rolled out. There's gonna be more people ask what other options are there? They're gonna be calling their agencies. Chad: Thank you. Joel: They're gonna be calling their consultants. And wow, just in time Google has an option that we can spend some money. This is guaranteed to take money out of Indeed's pocket, out of Glassdoor's pocket, which a lot of us should be celebrating because maybe it'll get them back on the right track. So timing is perfect whether they like woo hahaha in the back rooms with cigar smoked bars or whatever, figure this out or maybe just happened on circumstance, but timing is fantastic. You mentioned Zip and LinkedIn are beta testing this, and the screenshots that were shared by Tom showed that LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter were actual advertisers for this product. So they've already gotten after the low hanging fruit which is, "Hey, call our buddies at LinkedIn and then see if they'll write some checks for sponsor jobs. Call our buddies at ZipRecruiter to see if they'll spend some money." So they've gone low hanging fruit. They're gonna hit the biggest ad agencies. The agencies are gonna buy. Chad: They're adding programmatic guys in. Joel: Because the agencies are gonna be happy about telling their clients, "Oh, we're leveraging Google now to sponsor your jobs that'll eventually filter down to smaller companies. There'll be an ad campaign at some point." I think this is really good for Google. I think the criticism is not warranted, if you're looking at the big picture. Clearly, it's a five year experiment that Google thinks it's good enough, it's effective enough and popular enough that they can now start monetizing it. I think sky's the limit in terms of what Google can do to monetize jobs in the future. Chad: Agreed. Joel: And Indeed should be a little nervous by what just happened. Chad: Well, also this isn't being tested, or at least from my understanding, it's low level tested in Europe and let's be frank Indeed in 40 plus countries is number one in six of them. Okay, so, if this does launch in Europe, they're gonna eat Indeed's launch overnight. It's gonna be much harder in the US, right? But not so much in Europe. Joel: Yep. By the way, do you use Gmail? Chad: Yes. Joel: Have you noticed on the sponsored are now within... Chad: Yeah. Joel: They're not just at the top. They're actually within the ads. Chad: Integrated into it. Joel: That's just not me, right? Chad: No. Joel: Okay, yeah. So Google's monetizing more now than they have in a long time. And Gmail, those ads have been around for 10, 15 years. So Google takes a while sometimes. Don't fret it people. Chad: They do. You know who doesn't take a while to... A Workday. Joel: Workday, let's segue into Workday. Chad: To get smacked on the fucking face. Joel: Alright. Workday. Kinda like the commercials, by the way. Chad: That was a good commercial. I liked it. Yeah. Joel: Workday is facing a lawsuit alleging that it's artificial intelligence systems in screening tools discriminate against black, disabled and older applicants at a disproportionate rate. That's a triple, triple threat in discrimination. The suit followed by a Black man over 40 who suffers from anxiety and depression seeks to represent all applicants in those protected classes who have been disqualified by the discriminatory screening process. Workday provides its screening tools to hundreds if not thousands of companies and allegedly allows the pre-selection of applicants outside of protected categories. Workday believes the lawsuit is without merit. That's a shocker. And is committed to trustworthy AI. Chad, your thoughts on the news outta Workday? Chad: Okay. So let me preface this by saying Workday is probably the worst recruitment software system that any company can plug into. Number one, from the release which you started reading, Workday is committed to trustworthy AI and acts responsibly and transparently, keyword, transparently in the design and delivery of its AI solutions. Awesome. How can I get a peek at your algorithm? Where can I access this open system? I mean, they said transparency, so it's gotta be open, right? No, it's not. What's happening is Workday has fallen into a trap and they don't even know what to say. They're having problems. I mean, this is big but here's what vendors need to do before they can find themselves in a class action suit. They need to understand that if their system have bias built into them and/or does the problem lie within the client's process, big vendors like Workday should have a process team that consults their clients on these issues. That's actually a money grab right there, to be quite frank. Chad: But the problem here is that Workday doesn't even know where the problem is. We'll see some companies enlist an army of lawyers but that's not what they need. They truly need to understand where the problem is so that they can identify it, then they can start to actually solve the problem that's going on because AI's not going away. If they try to fight it with lawyers, they're just gonna get killed by the US government, while smarter AI systems focus on being more persistent around understanding process and being able to consult their clients. Joel: This to me feels a lot like LinkedIn versus hiQ in this way. Whatever is decided by the courts will probably be the precedent by which this whole question is answered. Right? So if Mobley wins... By the way we're talking age, race and disability. We're talking like triple threat in terms of discrimination. Chad: Yes. Joel: So this is a big case and he's not suing a company. One of the biggest publicly traded companies in our space. I don't know who he's represented by, the guy clearly has the CV to be... Chad: He meets the requirements. Yeah. Joel: Like college education, network systems administration. He has enough there that he should be getting engagement from employers to get a job. So to me this is gonna go to court. They're gonna make judgements on, hopefully, it goes to court. They're gonna make judgements on AI, who's responsible, what processes need to happen? If Mobley wins, it's going to send a chill among all the vendors in our space about what is AI, how do we audit this, how do we get government approval, and our webinar with our friends at NYU and UNC goes into some of this. But if Mobley wins, it's going to send a cold chill on the back of every vendor because they put themselves at risk. And now there's a court case to set precedent by which you have done this to me. If Workday wins and the parallel case, LinkedIn won against hiQ, although that was company versus really small company. This is a person versus a vendor. It's gonna be very interesting how this plays out. We're gonna watch it very closely and report on it back or report back on this, on the podcast. But to me this is precedent setting. How is AI regulated? How is it thought of, how does the government get involved? This is potentially the case of the decade in terms of AI and employment. Chad: I think what's gonna happen is we're gonna see Workday have to defend it's algorithm. And the beautiful thing about this for attorneys everywhere, every algorithm is different, every data set is different. So every single case brought up is different. This is gonna be... This is gonna represent what happens to Workday, but this is gonna continue to happen over and over and over. This is not gonna stop things like hiQ and LinkedIn. It's not gonna stop the scraping. Joel: It'll set a precedent, if Mobley wins, you're gonna see a lot of people come forward and say, "I've been discriminated against." Chad: If Mobley wins the dam bursts. Joel: Yes, yes. And that's why it's incredibly important. Chad: I agree. I agree. Joel: No word yet as to whether or not Ozzy Osbourne and Joan Jett will be taking the stand in this court case. Chad: [laughter] I think Billy Idol is going to. Joel: Oh, Billy Idol will be good with the chainsaw. That's nice. Alright, let's take a quick break and we'll order a few more beers and get back to you with Buy or sell. Speaker 3: Emotional damage. Joel: Alright, Chad. Time for Little Buy or Sell. Chad: Buy or Sell. I love it. Joel: You know how we play. We talk about three companies that have recently gotten funding. I read a summary and both of us buy or sell the company. First up, San Francisco based Gable as in Clark Gable, a startup that enables distributed companies to manage office space for their workforce has secured 16 million in funding. Gable's online platform enables employees to see where their coworkers are working each day and book a desk alongside them. While the company can manage budgets and monitor employee satisfaction, Gable has grown rapidly and will continue to do so with more than 50 companies and 5000 employees using its platform. Founded in 2020, the company employs 27 people. Chad, are you a buyer or sell on Clark Gable? Chad: Did you see the domain on this one, Gable.to. Joel: I did not. Gable.to. Chad: So, any top level domain that's two letters is owned by a country. So T-O is actually owned by the Kingdom of Tonga. Just a little... Joel: TO Tonga, dances with wolves. Chad: Little TLD knowledge for our listeners out there, just want to geek out with it. Remote. Still a big part of today's conversation, 13% of the jobs on LinkedIn are remote, but they are receiving 50% of the clicks meaning that's what people want to do. New research also shows that hybrid is where companies are starting to find common ground with their employees. And that means being able to coordinate days in the office and workstations. Gable's model is like Airbnb for the workspace and I believe blends the remote distributed model incredibly well with the permanent office/hybrid model. So companies using Gable have seen employees interests in coming into the office jump 75% just release features, extend the ability to reserve desk space at a company's permanent office. This is like Airbnb for workplaces. I mean, I love me some Airbnb and I love me some Gable. This is a buy. [applause] Joel: That's a buy. All right. Yeah. Speaking of predictions... [laughter] Joel: That we talked about earlier in the show and your Google for Jobs prediction. Chad: Yes. Joel: I predicted a while back that Airbnb would get into the work management... Chad: You did. Joel: Business. They have not. Although, like I always say, predictions are never wrong, they just haven't happened yet. Chad: And Gable's that prediction. Joel: So Gable has essentially taken the void that Airbnb should have taken up by making it very flexible for employees, companies to get workspace. I love the whole, like when are my buddies working at the same time? You can manage that, go to lunch together, build that culture, build that engagement that we talk about is so important. Although, we both agree that people are gonna go back to work more than they're not, I think hybrid is definitely something that's here to stay. So those days that you're not in the office, product like Gable is gonna be in high demand by companies as well as some others. I forget the name of the company where you can rent out, like coffee shop, tables and restaurants. You can get in and restaurants give you free soda if you go and work there if your company provides that. This is definitely a good idea and it sounds like with the funding Gable is on the cutting edge of making this a reality and being successful with it. San Francisco, obviously, a lot of money's there to help make this happen. So for me as well, Gable is a buy everybody. [applause] Joel: Alright. Save the drama for your LLama, Chad. Chad: Oh, Jesus. Joel: WorkLLama... [laughter] Joel: Has raised $50 million. Is that right? Is that a typo? $50 million for WorkLLama? Chad: Yes. Yes. Joel: Okay. The funds will be used to grow the company's team, accelerate product enhancements, embark on strategic acquisitions, invest in continued automation, and expand its presence across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. That's what the kids call APAC, Chad. WorkLLama aims to help connect talent with roles that are meaningful and allow them to engage easily with brands in their chosen field. Since it's founding in 2016, the WorkLLama team has grown to 112 employees with customers across four continents. Chad, are you ready to ride the LLama or not? Chad: [laughter] WorkLLama's been around since 2016. 2016, and it shows there, and this is their only funding by work base. So this is our crunch base. Joel: Do you remember making fun of them at HR Tech? Chad: Yes. Yes. I do. Joel: Okay, make sure it wasn't just me. Chad: So I checked out. They have one video on YouTube. They've been around since 2016. Joel: Just one. [laughter] Chad: One video. And this is something revolutionary. Yeah. Sit back, sit back. They talk about branded talent communities. That's right, kids, 2004s calling, averages old school shit is now a WorkLLama. I'm not done. They also have a chatbot and they also have an app. That's right. An app. It's fucking crazy. First and foremost, it's all retro throwback. Secondarily, their total addressable market is ridiculous. They talk about staffing, enterprise. Their platform delivers, VMS, HCM, platform, onboarding, HRIS, diversity. The list is long. There's no way they can cover this tam and also deal with this retro bullshit. This is a sell for me. [laughter] Joel: Yeah. Okay. We talk a lot about companies going outta business, not because they take too little money. Because they take too much money. Chad: And they promise too much. Joel: Hello. WorkLLama. If you're trying to be everything to everybody, you're typically nothing to no one. Chad: Exactly. Joel: Too much money. Too stretched. This thing is a hot pile of steaming garbage. I can't believe they raised $50 million. Whoever invested in this, this Turkey, in this LLama, is gonna regret it. Work Turkey, I mean, WorkLLama is a sell. Bonusly. Chad: Oh, okay. Joel: Bonusly. Yeah. Founded in 2012 when everything was ly, remember that everything was ly. Chad: Yes.ly. Yes. Joel: Bonusly has secured 18.9 million in a series B funding round. This brings total funding to $31.4 million. Bonusly's platform fosters employee recognition with 93% of customers noting improved engagement according to the company by offering realtime data on how organizations work and how workers communicate and connect. Bonusly's Analytics capabilities can be used by HR teams and managers to understand how they can improve employee morale and retention. They employ 118 people. Chad, are you a buy or sell on Bonusly? Chad: So they got 18.9 in this round, 31.4 total. They've been around since 2012. Wow, right off the website. I like this kids, "Companies that use employee recognition programs are up to 20% more profitable... " Hear that word profitable, "than those who don't", damn, that's dropping that. That is dropping it right there. But let's play this out real quick. Amazon reportedly lost $8 billion to attrition. That's right, kids. When your workplace sucks, people leave and that costs your organization money. But would a virtual pat on the back change a company's culture enough to make people stay? In Amazon's case, I would say no. It's a good band-aid and Bonusly is a very cheap and easy band-aid, but it won't change Amazon's culture. And that is a real problem. So I love the retention equals profits angle. They need to play that all day, beat that fucking drum, but it's just not enough for me. It's a sell. Joel: Oh. So I met these guys, I think at HR Tech around 2012. They were at the kiosk party. I think they were next to Workly and Employly or something. Chad: Start up village. Joel: Yeah. They were the startup village, the corridor of startups that get a kiosk and an internet connection. [laughter] Joel: So, when I talk to them, I was like, "Okay, I get this. It sounds good." They're from Boulder, Colorado, so they're pretty laid back, easygoing guys. Chad: Smelled like weed. Joel: I was into it and we talked about Plum last week. Plum also founded in 2012, Chad, if I remember correctly. So similarly to how Plum sort of grew organically, grew intelligently, didn't take a ton of money, and immediately kind of grew into their shoes. The world kind of came to them and needed their product more than maybe they did in 2012. I feel like Bonusly has been on a similar track. They've grown organically. Anyone that's been around since 2012 is doing something right. And I think the world work from home remote work, it has made employee engagement, how do you recognize folks, more important than ever, companies are looking for a solution to make their people feel warm and fuzzy. And I think Bonusly is in the right spot at the right time. For me, we're gonna disagree on Bonusly and I'm gonna buy. Chad: Hell, yeah. Joel: We gotta talk about chatGTP right on this show at some point? Chad: Yeah. Yeah. I did. See, we can't even get the name right? ChatGPT. It's hard to say. Joel: What did I say? Chad: Its like GTP. I know, right? It's just... It's fucking crazy. Anyway. Joel: ChatOPP that's what I can remember. Chad: The first thing we're gonna talk about is workers being replaced by chatGPT. Resumebuilders.com surveyed 1000 business leaders in the US who either use or plan to use chatGPT. Fortune reported nearly half the company surveyed had already begun using the chatbot, and 50% of those surveyed claimed that chatGPT had already replaced workers at their companies. What jobs you might ask? 66% writing code, 58% copywriting and content creation, saw that coming. 57% for customer support and 52% meeting summary. So a note taker. What do you think? Joel: So we had this crypto period... Chad: Yes. [laughter] Joel: Where Web3 was gonna change the world. Chad: I still think it is. Joel: No one actually gets it. A few people say they get it. I'm a little cynical if they get it. Like I kind of get it. And then there are things that happen where people like my 83 year old dad are like, "Okay, that's kind of cool. I get that." Chad: I can use that. Joel: And chatOPP or GPT or... Chad: You know me. Joel: Whatever the hell it is. Yeah. Like, you know me, when you show someone the power of what this can do, people get it immediately. It's like search. Chad: Yes. Joel: It's like email. Like there are certain things that you know this is gonna be huge. Chad: Yes. Joel: And how to write code. We know we talked about another startup recently. Software that builds software was their tagline. And we're gonna see more and more of that. So you mentioned code, text, the customer service was interesting. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I'm not sure how that would... Chad: Chat bots. Joel: Like chat bots. Okay. Chad: FAQs, those types of things. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Okay. I mean, so many of these professions are obviously in trouble and at risk because of chatGPT. The other part of chatGPT I know we talked about was job seekers and Job Boards getting inundated with... Chad: We'll get there. Joel: Okay. We'll get there in a second. Alright. Then I'll stay on task with what we're currently talking about. I think it's gonna be tremendously disruptive to all of those professions. I think you're gonna get people on Fiverr and Upwork that are coders that are simply like writing code through GPT. Maybe they're approving it or whatever. Chad: How do you stop it? Joel: You're gonna get copywriters that are just using the technology and just people that don't know about it, they're just gonna do it. They're gonna scale their consulting tremendously and have way more clients than they can normally pull off, until the world catches onto it. But yeah, this is a hugely important technology. This isn't Web3 where people are like, I don't know what the fuck that is. [laughter] Joel: This is like legit shit. Companies are using it, consultants are using it. Chad: Yeah. Joel: This is gonna change the world. Chad: Totally agree. I think that we're finally gonna be able to see HR Tech look at how chatGPT has come to the world, and they're going to start to emulate that. I'm hoping, I'm hoping that companies do that. Not just chat bot companies, but any company that just makes their platform more transparent to get out there, use it, feel it, touch it, taste it. And I agree 100%. The thing is, are they gonna overwhelm the job board? So Alexander Chernovsky tweeted, "Am I the only one who thinks this is a weird coincidence that Indeed moves to CPA now that chatGPT massively enables generation of fake applications." Then Jim Durbin writes on LinkedIn, "In fact, the CPA model, which is designed to improve quality and focuses on results over work, is about to be overwhelmed by AI created resumes, messaging and soon the bots." We got Alexander and we got Jim saying, guess what? ChatGPT is going to fuck this CPA thing up. And they could do it to Job Boards overall. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. It's a real problem. So click fraud has been a thing for a long time. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Right. So when there was a paper click model and Google created AdSense where, hey, put our code and our search results on your page and we'll pay you for clicks. Well, obviously people found ways to build bots that would just click these links over and over and over to make money off of Google. And a lot of people did it in the early days. They were like... Chad: They did. They did. Joel: People, I remember stories of like... Chad: Click fraud. Joel: I made a million dollars last year on creating robots that would click ads on my blog. So we're gonna see some of that initially. Now, in this case, I don't think Google... Or Indeed is sharing revenue for applications that are off somebody's site, so you won't see a lot of the third party just driving traffic. But Indeed will be carrying all the positives in terms of, they'll drive traffic to Indeed and the job postings. And then once they apply, they'll make money from that. So the automated mass applies that come in, Indeed will get all that money. They won't be sharing it like Google did back in the day. Now it's up to the consumer to figure out like, Wait a second, I'm paying a lot of money. I'm getting Jack, I'm getting Bagel in terms of responses or any clients whatsoever," they're gonna have to push Indeed in this case to monitor this stuff. Chad: Yes. Joel: That's gonna take six months to a year. Google's gonna... Indeed's gonna make so much money off of this, they might make their own bots. I didn't just say that. Indeed is not gonna make their own bots to apply the jobs and make money for free. They're not gonna do that. But there's eventually gonna have to be a system where, "Hey, I know this is AI. There's a policing system. There's monitoring that goes into it where, hey, click Red Flag. This is not a person, this is a robot." And just like click fraud, there will be policies in place to do that. Again, this goes back to what we've been talking about. Robots are gonna, like pre-screen robots and interview robots. And these job seekers are on this train. Employers are on this train. We literally are going to a place where robots interview robots and at the end of the filter, at the end of the funnel, two human beings meet, and hopefully they work it out. Chad: You know what fixes this? Joel: Human beings. Chad: Web3. Joel: Web3. [chuckle] Chad: Fucking blockchain baby. You know why? Because you were certified. Joel: Sir Richard solves this. That's how. [laughter] Chad: You have a certified account, you have certifications that actually demonstrate what you can do, what you can't do, assessments, all those things, unless you come through this validated process. Guess what, kids? You're fucked. This is how Web3 comes into the system. Much like cloud computing, everybody is like, "What is cloud computing?" Guess what everybody is using today kids, they don't know it. But guess what, this is gonna happen, it's gonna be Web3, it's gonna be integrated because these bots are gonna fuck over these systems, unless we put something in place that is validated and Web3 blockchain can validate it. Boom! Will Cheesman: That escalated quickly. Joel: Sir Richard just rolled up in his Maserati wearing my dad's Oakley, looking cool as fuck. That's how we solve it. Chad: Beverly solves it all. Joel: Ed Beverly, yeah, don't call her Joan Crawford. [laughter] Joel: Alright, guys, we're gonna take a quick break. Maybe or not order another beer and talk about over time. Speaker 3: Emotional damage. [laughter] Joel: Alright, Chad, let's talk about over time and how to define it. Chad: Well, first off, Indiana didn't need it twice in beating Purdue, twice this year. Joel: Wow, you went to the basketball reference, which lost about 80% of our audience. Chad: Basketball, very, very global. Joel: March madness, March madness is coming. Chad: Very global. Very global. Joel: Alright Chad, the US Supreme Court. Chad: Yes. Joel: The US Supreme Court, not some state has ruled that Michael Hewitt, an employer of oil and gas company, Helix Energy Solutions is entitled to overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Despite earning more than 200,000 per year, the court ruled six to three in favor of Hewitt, who worked 84 hours a week supervising 12-14 workers on an offshore oil rig between 2014 and 2017. Hewitt was paid a day rate and did not receive any overtime pay. The court found that his pay structure did not meet the FLSA salary-based criteria for an executive exemption from the over-time rule. This sounds important, Chad. What you got? Chad: [laughter] So on this week's Europe show with Lieven called... Joel: Virtual cheese was there. Chad: Big in Dutchland. Lieven shadowed out the naughty Americans who were giving workers manager titles so they didn't have to pay them over time. In America we do one thing well and one thing better than anybody else is fuck our employees, that's exactly what we do. Joel: Adult superstores. [chuckle] Chad: Helix, the company, in this case, will probably only change their method of pay out. A daily rate is way too close and assimilated to an hourly rate. I bet Helix will probably move to a true salary, and all the old dogs will stay where they are, but anybody who's coming in new, will be on a "salary" to pay out. Joel: Hoppopotamus is what I got. Chad: That's it. Joel: Thank you, sir. Chad: So I see that we're just gonna have employers playing the game differently, they'll look at Helix and they go, "Okay, we're just gonna hire individuals," and this is hard fucking jobs, we're talking about working on the oil rigs. Joel: Sure. And he's managing those guys that are working on oil rigs. Chad: 80 hours. 80 hours, right. And they're trying to screw him out of over-time by giving him a "Title". Unless we put our foot down and stop this stupid shit, this is gonna continue. Just in a different way. Joel: Yeah. Remind you, I said US Supreme Court. Chad: Yes, that's big. Oh, that's big. Joel: This is where the big stuff goes to get decided, and I applaud the Supreme Court for this judgment, by the way, I'm mostly conservative Supreme Court for laying down this judgment and the companies... Chad: That says something. Joel: Companies and particularly HR departments of companies whose main job is to keep the company out of court, especially the US Supreme Court. Chad: Oh fuck. Joel: This is gonna be important, this is gonna be an important legislation and companies need to be on the alert that this sort of, I don't know, dancing on the line of what's a full-time employee and a salaried employee and an hourly employee or seasonal or daily employee in this case will not be tolerated by Washington and I, for one Chad, as I'm finishing my second beer, say cheers. Chad: Cheers. Joel: And cheers to my father, 83 years old. Will Cheesman. Dad, say hi to everybody. Will Cheesman: Hi everybody. Rock and roll baby. [laughter] Joel: There you go. He can't just say hi, he's gotta throw in a rock and roll baby in there. And with that, I'm hungry, the chicken fingers smell good. 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 is no doubt you wished you had that time back, valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal and taco bell. Enjoy a bottle of your favorite whiskey or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. Now, you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, let's save some soap, because you'll be back like an awful train wreck you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Joel takes this week off from the Europe show but leaves a little Virtual Cheese behind for the listeners. On this week's show: American companies make a vanity play with workers, Facebook steals instead of innovating, Lieven digs into House of HR's big acquisition in Germany Buy or Sell featuring Willo, Crew, and Brigad Plus the newest Serbian delegate to Pornhub Gern geschehen! 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. Joel: Oh, yeah. The Golden Visa program in Portugal has been canceled one year after the Sowashes moved to town. Coincidence? I think not. Hey, kids. This is the Chad and Cheese Podcast Europe. I'm your co-host Joel Victor Orban Cheesman. And joining me as always are Chad, the party pooper of Portugal, Sowash and Lieven, the muscles from Brussels Van Nieuwenhuyze. [laughter] On this episode, House of HR gets healthy, buy or sell and a little naughtiness. Oh, yeah. And a little bit of virtual cheese. Let's do this. Chad: Virtual cheese. You know what that means, Lieven? Lieven: No idea but I like cheese, so I like virtual cheese as well, I hope. [laughter] Chad: Joel's not with us this week, although we do have recordings of his thoughts and intros on all these, because we wanted to include him. He's off skating around Texas right now since it's snowing there. Lieven: Okay. Then you need to go to Texas. I totally understand. [laughter] Chad: I do not wanna to go to Texas, let alone when it's snowing, because you know what's gonna happen. Their grid's gonna freeze up and they're gonna lose electricity or some shit like that. Lieven: And isn't that where the cactuses... I always imagine Texas having only cactuses. [laughter] Chad: Isn't it bad for the cactuses? Lieven: Yeah. All the snow. Chad: I think it's bad for the Longhorn steer. Lieven: Yeah. And the cowboys freezing their balls off. Okay. Chad: That's what happens. That's the kinda shit that happens, right? So I've gotta get your take on something that Joel and I talked about last week, sending of probably the oldest president known to man to a war zone. So Joe Biden went to Ukraine last week. Surprise visit. Surprise visit but he pretty much stuck his middle finger up to Russia and said, "I'm coming, whether you like it or not." So was that even a thing over in Europe? Did you guys see it on the news? Lieven: Of course. Chad: So tell me a little bit about it. Lieven: It was big news. Biden coming to Europe is news in any case but Biden going to Kyiv and going there when even our own prime ministers et cetera don't, some did. But that's definitely big news. I only thought it was a bit... A shame he mentioned it to the Russians three hours in advance. I'm coming to Kyiv, so don't you fucking bomb us. Something like that. [laughter] I mean it's a bit... It's fake. I mean, he should be braver than that. He should have been braver but I don't know we were happy. We were happy. [laughter] But don't you think it's a risk, telling the Russians that the President of the United States is coming to Kyiv. Chad: They tell them anyway, just to ensure... They've got this special line. I can't remember what they actually call it but they tell them when any type of movement's happening, just so that they don't fuck things up and shooting an airplane down or bombing Kyiv when the President of the United States is in Kyiv so it would've happened anyway. Lieven: But don't you think it would just motivate Russians to extra bomb Kyiv? [laughter] Chad: Not unless they wanna start World War III. We've already talked about sending Abrams over to Kyiv and training the Ukrainians to actually utilize these weapons. Next thing you would know, if something like that happened, we would have Abrams with American troops on the ground. We would have F-22 Raptors. The Russians would not want that. Especially since Ukraine's kicking their ass by themselves right now. Lieven: Yeah. They don't need the Americans doing the same thing. [laughter] No, probably not. Chad: No. That would not be good. Lieven: But it was big news. And also because at the same moment China just sent some kind of an ambassador and not Xi Jinping, what's his name? The Chinese president. So when the biggest president of the whole world, so the biggest ally of Ukraine is coming in person, Biden is coming in person to Kyiv and then the biggest ally of Russia is sending some minion to do the same thing. Russia once again lost face. Chad: Yeah. They're losing face left and right. Joel said last week that he was scared of World War III. And I said I don't believe it unless there's overwhelming force from NATO going into Russia. I don't think that we have to worry about that. Lieven: No. Chad: What do you guys... I mean, you're in Russia... You're not in Russia. You're in Europe. So what do you guys think? Kinda on the same line? Lieven: I think so. I mean, if there's something we need to avoid, it's that word, enlarging. I mean, we don't want World War III definitely, because we will be in the playing field, so no way. Just like you, I don't think it would be a problem as long as we don't invade Russia. I mean, Russia... There's talk in Russia about invading Poland because the Polish people they're sending arms to Ukraine. They're supporting them openly. They're trash talking Russia constantly and it annoys the Russians. So the Russian propagandists always keep saying, we should invade Poland after we won the war in Ukraine. No way they can do it. I mean, then they would... Europe would be forced to do something, NATO would be forced to do something. Something Russia just couldn't handle. So I think it'll end and I hope the Chinese will have it up to there with Russia's behavior and they will tell Putin to take Crimea and leave the rest. And then maybe this might end. Chances that Crimea is taken back are small, I think but... Chad: Yeah. I don't know at this point, we shall see. Okay, let's hit shoutouts. You go first. Lieven: Shout out. Okay. My shoutout is to the naughty Americans. I just read an article and I kind of liked it, an article in the Belgium newspaper. Apparently, something is going on in America. By making everyone a manager or director, they don't have to pay people overtime. So just giving them a title, which sounds very expensive, enables companies not to pay them overtime. Is that true? Chad: Yeah. If you put somebody on salary, then you don't have to worry about that overtime, because they're not being paid by the hour. So yes, this is a trick that companies pay... They try to play toward your vanity and say, "Hey, I'm gonna put you in a management position. We think you're ready for this. We really think you're ready for this. We're gonna promote you into a management position. You're gonna get more in your salary." Well, overall, you're getting screwed because all the overtime you're going to have to work, you would've gotten paid more with the lower responsibility of not being a "manager." Lieven: It's incredible, I mean. Chad: It's American way, man. How can we pay people less? Lieven: A hotel in America actually was making the receptionist the first impression director. [laughter] The person could work like for 15 hours because he was the first impression director. And from a director, you can expect to be working 15 hours apparently but no overtime. That's creative. I like it but too bad this wouldn't work in Belgium because I don't know, we have common sense and people just wouldn't take it. Chad: Yes, you do have common sense. Here in the US it's more about titles. And we were talking before the show, since 1978, here in the US, CEOs have taken a pay raise of 1322%. Now our laborers, the ones who are actually doing the hard work on a daily basis, have received an 18% raise. So this is how we do things. Which is the American way. Pay the laborers less and try to push as much money up to the top as you possibly can. Crazy, crazy, crazy. Lieven: The rich get richer. Chad: Yes, they do. And then there's a revolt. Speaking of revolts, my shout out is to Meta. Yes, aka Facebook and Instagram will be copying Twitter. How? You might ask. Facebook parents, Meta has launched a new subscription service called, get ready kids, Meta Verified that will allow users to add the coveted blue check mark to their Instagram and Facebook accounts for up to $15 a month by verifying their identity. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Sunday, tapping a new revenue channel that has returned mixed success for its smaller rival Twitter. Does this surprise you at all? It seems like Meta, Facebook, whatever, the only thing they can do nowadays is acquire companies and copy them. They can't innovate themselves. Lieven: It's the big company syndrome. It happens all the time. Companies are small and creative because they need to be creative because they're small. And the moment they get too big and too rich, it's just easier to buy something creative than to develop something of your own but in this case, it's totally ridiculous. I mean, for Twitter... From Twitter's point of view, I could even understand it. It was important that people are who they claimed to be. If I'm speaking on behalf of my company, people need to know for sure that it's me, the spokesperson but on Facebook, I've been on Facebook for like 20 years always pretending to be Lieven Van Nieuwenhuyze and people believed me. So why should I pay for... [laughter] It's totally ridiculous. So Zuckerberg won't get rich from me. Chad: Nothing like a money grab from from those companies. But I do agree that a lot of these larger organizations, they just lack innovation. And then what has happened again here in the US and we're starting to see all over the world, is that those large companies, they're copying the smaller companies and they're becoming monopolies in some case. So we have to... And well, one of the things that we haven't done over in the US and you guys have done a much better job, is crack down on monopolies and fining and not allowing some of those acquisitions to happen. Lieven: But then again, I had that discussion a few times with other people. You can't blame companies for being too successful if they're so good and they buy their competitors. Who am I to say you're not allowed to buy this one because you are just becoming too big? There's nothing wrong with being successful and being big as long as they don't screw people [laughter] which they probably will. Chad: But the hard part is though when you... A lot of those companies actually acquire the smaller companies and then they take the more innovative tech, they put it in the closet. Lieven: Yeah. To protect their own existing models. That's different. Of course. Yeah. Chad: The old model. They're protecting the old model. And we saw this... When I was at Monster, we had, I don't know how many startups we bought and just threw in the closet. Didn't use 'em just because it was a threat to our current model. And it was interesting that they didn't do that with Indeed. Lieven: Yeah. When I was working for job ads in Belgium 15, 17 years ago, I said pay per click is becoming a thing. We need to go into pay per click. And in those days it was pay per vacancy and you paid 800 euros for a vacancy to put it for four weeks online and I said, pay per click is becoming a thing. And the director back in the days, he said, "Yeah but let the others try it." And suddenly there was Indeed playing everything away because they knew how to do it and they did it and pretty late. And this happens constantly. Always. Chad: It does, it does. Okay kids, it's that time for topics. And guess what, we also have... We're talking about virtual Joel. So [laughter] he wanted to be a part of this show so badly. He did. Lieven: We miss him. We miss him. Chad: Well, he misses you. And he wanted to be so badly that he actually did all the intros to these. So here we go. Here's the first segment. Joel: House of HR has announced its intention to acquire Pluss, that's Pluss with two S, a German company that specializes in temporary recruitment for healthcare and social services. With this acquisition House of HR aims to become one of the leading HR service providers in the doc region with the collaboration of two other German HR service providers, Avanti and LD Personalvermittlung, which were also acquired by House of HR in 2021 and 2022. The acquisition of Pluss is House of HR's third in German healthcare staffing. And it plans to expand its market presence to become one of the most significant players in the country, kicking much ass. I know Lieven has a lot to add on this one but for my two cents, House of HR continues to make smart laser-like acquisitions under Rika Coppens leadership. If there's a slam dunk business to be had in 2023 and beyond, it's healthcare, especially in Europe. The old country is aging fast, which means health issues and the need to care for the elderly is going to be huge. By 2060, most European countries will have a proportion of people aged 80 and over of about 10%, which is an increase by a factor of nine. I can smell the Euros. Nice move, House of HR. Chad: So you're obviously now big in Deutschland but the question I have, is it Pluss or is it Pluss? Lieven: Depending on who's saying it, it can be Pluss or Pluss. But let's just for the sake of it call it Pluss here, which sounds more English but probably Germans would say Pluss. I'm not sure even. I'll ask them, how do you pronounce yourself? [laughter] Chad: You've been busy. You've had things going on and tell us a little bit about Pluss. Lieven: Last year we did 16 M&As and Pluss is the first one this year, the first major one. It's not a really small one. 157 million, I believe revenue, I'm sure. So, it's pretty significant within healthcare. And as Joel already mentioned in his intro, we already had Avanti in Germany and he calls it LD Personalvermittlung or something but it's locum doctors LD, which means some kind of segment of doctors. And now we have Pluss, so consolidation is important in Germany. It's still a very fragmented market and healthcare is really strategic to us and not only to us, because like Joel also said, it's the structure... Or the shortage is structural. I mean, people will only... On average and the age will become older aging population, it'll only get worse. So there will always be a need for healthcare professionals, everyone knows. Lieven: And I'm sure someday stuff will be automated but the social aspect will stay very important. And even if you can automate some things, you'll still need the human touch. And I think healthcare is probably the last place where this will disappear. I strongly believe this is a very good evolution or a very good investment for House of HR. The only possible problem I see and I definitely speak on my behalf, not on behalf of the company here, is legislation. Since healthcare in Europe is mostly paid by the government, the government isn't doing a very good job in Europe, mostly in Belgium in keeping its economics under control. And they might get the stupid idea into their heads to save on healthcare and then they might just change legislation. So that could become a problem. Just to give you an example, in Belgium, for example, nurses working in hospital suddenly quit their job and they went working for a company like ours and then they were leased back to that same hospital and they made more money. Lieven: Because suddenly they were working for a private company and the hospital desperately needed healthcare professionals, so they needed to get in touch with these companies. And then of course, I can understand government saying, yeah, we are just losing money to give them a different status. So, they could change legislation and they probably will but not in Germany for the moment. There's no problem there. And we will adapt, I think, if something like this happens. Chad: Right. So is that what you're talking about when you're talking about fragmented... You're talking about public versus private? Is that where the fragmentation is or is there fragmentation in different areas? Lieven: No, just fragmentation in temping companies, in secondment companies, because there are so many. In the rest of the world, you have Anstalt, which is huge and you have Adecco and they're really big in almost all countries but in Germany, because I think temping wasn't allowed until pretty recently, relatively recently, so there were many small companies starting and growing together and instead of five companies being really big, there are 500 being small. So consolidation is happening now and companies like ours, bigger companies are buying others just to grow more rapidly. And this is something you can't do in France anymore. France is a really mature market and it's hard to buy small companies since the market is dominated by big companies but in Germany there are so many small companies and they could work together to become bigger and you know the advantages of being big of course. Chad: Yeah, of course. So are you looking at also consolidation in other countries? I mean, Germany is the largest GDP in Europe. Also, I mean, France you just mentioned how it's much harder to be able to go through consolidation there. What about some of the other countries in Europe, where do you see prime targets? Lieven: France still is possible but in certain niches. You can't just say we're going to become the biggest temping player in France. That's impossible. Maybe someday but not immediately. And you can't just buy Adecco or Anstalt, they're too big. But there are smaller niches. We have... For example, we bought a company StaffMe, which is doing exactly the same thing as NOWJOBS was doing in Belgium. So it's for students and for flex workers, people who work short, second jobs or something. It's difficult to launch a company in France because they're chauvinistic. A Frenchman likes Frenchmen. So we just buy a company like that and help them to grow together with us on European scale. And that's a possibility. And the other countries were... Yeah, the biggest countries for House of HR are Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and France but we are active within over 10 countries right now. And we will grow, we will probably do some consolidation in different countries but stick to our core region is probably the most sensible thing to do right now. Chad: Yeah. I think for larger companies it's much different, obviously, in the US than it is in Europe. The way that House of HR keeps the brands consistent with the actual country is genius because as you had said, I think it's more than France but maybe very hefty in France, that they wanna buy from a French company. They want to, they feel like they need too, same in Germany, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In the US we don't care. Whether it's a company that's in Alabama versus Ohio, it doesn't matter. We don't see the segmentation that way. So we just try to stuff everything under one brand where you guys are going at it much differently. And it's interesting because, obviously Ronstadt being able to try to pull everything up under Ronstadt, giving it that one label, I don't know if this is the main reason but one of the big reasons why they can do that over here and it's successful is 'cause we don't care but in Europe, that's gotta be a failed strategy for them, because they seem like this huge umbrella of... I mean it's not French, it's not German. It's nothing that I can actually get into from a nationalist standpoint. Lieven: Yeah, I agree. But from a marketing point of view, it's so much easier to put one brand into the market. So it makes sense also to choose a one brand position but we've decided on multi-brand and I think in the end and definitely in Europe, it's the best way. Why buy a brand and then change it into something it's not? It doesn't make sense. Lieven: Sometimes it's easier to have one brand. Like in Germany, we used to have ZAQUENSIS and TIMEPARTNER, two temping agencies doing basically the same thing but in different regions. We rebranded them all to TIMEPARTNER. So we have now over 300 offices in Germany, all TIMEPARTNER and that's easier. So in some cases we will rebrand a company but mostly when we buy a company, we buy them because they're doing better than the others. They're the best in class and we don't want to force them into something they're not. And indeed the US situation is different, I think because you speak English and in the whole of the United States, they speak English and every other people entering the United States will be able to explain himself in English. So English is the common denominator but if you go to France, people expect you to speak France. French, sorry. Chad: Yes, they do. Lieven: Yeah. And if you go to Denmark, people will be nice to you and they speak English but in the end they'll expect you to learn Danish. And in Norway they'll expect you to learn Norwegian. It's such a different way of doing business and you just can't rebrand a company into something that the local people have no affinity with. Chad: Yes. Compared to last year, you had 16 acquisitions. You're running one... It's a big one. You're running one this year thus far. This seems, or at least it feels like it's a year of acquisition. Are you feeling that on the landscape too? That acquisition is going to be much more heavy than it was last year? Lieven: Probably. And I'm keeping track of who's buying who, of course. Just as you are. One of the reasons I do it is because of this show of course. [laughter] We need to have something to talk about. But I was surprised nothing much happened since December. And really nothing much... We had some companies getting money but not many acquisitions and last year was a different thing. So I'm not sure what's the reason. Maybe it's because of people are still a bit afraid of the upcoming recession, even though in Europe, I believe things are settling down. We're not talking about recession anymore. Now, it could be a reason or people are waiting a bit. I'm not sure or maybe just everything got sold last year. I'm not sure. Chad: I feel it too. There's apprehension in the market. There has been and I think there will be through Q1 but I personally believe my prediction is in Q2 through the rest of this year, it's gonna run gangbusters because everything is starting to stabilize. Lieven: Okay, stop. What is gonna run gangbusters? Is that a good thing? I have no idea what it means. [laughter] Chad: Yes. Lieven: Okay, that's a good thing. Okay. Yeah. Chad: Thanks for clarification. [laughter] There's going to be an excessive amount of acquisitions that are happening this year. Do you agree? Lieven: I hope so, because it's always fun and things have to keep moving and I'm sure we will be doing our part but I was surprised suddenly two months it has been quiet. So we'll see. Chad: Well, excellent. Well, congratulations to the House of HR and Pluss for the acquisition. We'll be right back after these messages. All right. We're gonna bring virtual Joel back. Are you ready? Joel: Hell, yeah. Chad: Here we go. Joel: All right. Who's ready for a little buy or sell? Here's how we play the game. We talk about three startups that have recently gotten funding. I read a summary and then everyone chimes in on if it's a buy or sell. Are you ready to play? First up we have Brigad, I'm guessing that's how you say it in French. By the way LinkedIn should have an area for company pages where you can say audibly how to say a company's name. That would be really helpful, by the way. Just like you can do it with people's names, do it for companies' names too. Anyway, French startup, Brigad has raised $30 million in funding round. Joel: The company operates a marketplace that enables restaurants, caterers, private clinics, retirement homes and hospitals to find freelancers for short-term missions. It has began in the hospitality industry but has since expanded into healthcare, which now represents a quarter of its business. They take a 20% cut on each transaction and have completed 200,000 of these so-called transactions in 2022 alone. So because I'm virtual, I'm gonna take the first Biostar rating. Okay. We know that the gig economy is huge. We talk about Upwork freelance, Fiverr all the time on this podcast. However, they've never really gone into the healthcare space, which is kind of, I guess, sort of surprising but also not so much because it is a huge opportunity. We talk about companies like Nomad Health. Joel: This is a huge opportunity and I expect to see a lot more gig companies, platforms to provide healthcare workers just because there's such demand for it. By and large, healthcare workers hate the hours that they have to work. They would love some flexibility. And by and large, just the opportunity to just put your profile up there and be hired on a contract basis hasn't been really mainstream. So Brigad is looking to do that in France as well as the UK, two really big markets. I assume that it will be a larger market that they will be targeting at some point but for now, I think this is a huge opportunity. The money is not huge but the opportunity is. So for that alone, I'm gonna give Brigad a buy. Chad: Alright, so that's a buy from Mr. Virtual Cheeseman. What say you, Lieven? What say you? Lieven: I tend to agree. As I mentioned already, you can't go wrong with healthcare these days. And I think $30 million is pretty impressive. With also the $5 million in debt, $35 million, that's... It will keep them going for a while. And what Joel said about healthcare and Fiverr, Fiverr never got into healthcare. I think it's pretty normal because the risk is just too big. If someone claims to be able to create a logo for me and he screws up, I've got a bad logo. [laughter] But if someone claims to be a nurse and then something goes wrong, you have a problem. Companies like Fiverr accounts protect their clients from their freelancers, so I wouldn't take the risks in their place as well but a company like Brigad can of course and they can put people under payroll, check their licenses, their degrees; are they capable of doing what they should be capable of? And I think the problem for them will be to find the right nurses, find the right people to help them but they started in hospitality and from hospitality to hospital, which really is a small step; hospitality, hospital [laughter] so it's easy. So I think they will manage. It's a buy. Chad: It's a buy from Lieven. Alright. So overall, Brigad has raised a total of over €50 million. The hospitality and healthcare industries are very much alike with regard to their need for talent but that's where the likeness stops. Other than... You're right, the spelling. It's very close from a spelling standpoint. I'll give you that. But accessing and attracting the different talent pools, that's difficult, right? And you're talking about hospitality talent pool versus a hospital/healthcare, not to mention there isn't really a big problem with demand for this. There's a problem with supply, right? That's where I have the big issue here. The CEO has no experience in either of these worlds, hospitality or healthcare. One of the co-founders who does have some healthcare chops, he's also a current co-founder of two other companies currently. Chad: So I see a lot of lack of discipline here. Are we gonna be in hospitality? Are we going to be in healthcare? Do we actually have expertise to go and find the right people? Like you're talking with Fiverr, right? Do you actually have the expertise to find the supply? So for me, I believe in healthcare. I think it's gonna be incredibly big for those who know what the fuck they're doing. I don't think these guys do. So for that, I'm gonna go ahead and keep my money in my pocket and it's gonna be a sell for me. A sell for me. So two buys and a sell. Now we're going to go to the next, which is... Joel: French HR Tech startup, Crew, has raised $2.3 million in a seed funding round to continue developing its all-in-one recruiting CRM system. Think HubSpot for recruiting. Crew CRM tool combines an outreach automation tool, nurturing capabilities and an actionable database, along with smart reminders and workflows for speed. The company has a hundred corporate clients and a thousand monthly users. The funding will be used to raise headcount and increase AI functionality. Buy or sell? I'm going first, again, I think the first time I ever wrote HubSpot for recruiting was somewhere probably around 2014. [laughter] Been there, done that. Lots of competition. And frankly, there are gonna be a lot more well-funded players getting into this space. I don't wanna call it a commodity but it's sort of getting that way. Hell, even HubSpot has a HubSpot for recruiting some of its clients leverage. So for me, this is a pistol at a gunfight, major... Chad: Major sell. Okay, so we gotta talk about Joel and his analogies, a pistol to a gunfight. That's what you wanna bring to a gunfight. Jesus. Alright, Lieven, all on you, my friend. [laughter] What do you think? Lieven: I was also thinking, okay, in some cases a pistol would be preferable over a gun in gunfight but [laughter] I'm not going to agree with Joel on this one because everything he said is right, it makes sense but I looked into the people who were actually putting their money into Crew and it's immense selection of C-levels from the recruitment in the digital industry and if you look at those people, you can at least expect they know what not to do. And that's already more than we can say about most startups. [laughter] Lieven: Those people will know what not to do because they've been through a lot. And we're talking about people from Indeed, from... Look into the article, it's plenty. They know the business and if they invest their personal money in it, they must be on to something. And I think they are offering what I'm trying to make happen at House of HR, automating as much as possible with new technology. And if they have a plug and play system, I would be happy to listen to them. So I think this might work. And it's still a startup, so if you put a little money in it, you can make lots of it someday. It's a buy. Chad: It's a buy from Lieven. Alright. So, Crew, $2.3 million is a great seed round, right? That's a great seed round, especially these days. Starting a recruitment CRM unfortunately was revolutionary nearly 20 years ago, with companies like Avature, when they did it. Avature saw that they needed to do more, so they evolved into an ATS. Having newer, well-funded platforms like Beamery and Phenom... Personally, myself, I've seen this segment. It's been around forever. So to try to start one is really hard. Not only is it really hard but you see all of these other platforms saw that they couldn't do it just as a recruitment CRM. They had to become something much larger and they had to do it quicker. I think the competition in this space is big with a bunch of unicorns. So at that point, my appetite is a sell. I've gotta be a sell on this one. So we got two sells and a buy for Crew. Last but not least, this is one that you've heard before, kids. Joel: Oh-oh, it's a Chad boner alert. [chuckle] Video interviewing company, Willo has raised $1.8 million in a funding round led by 1818 Venture Capital. This brings total funding to $3.1 million. The Glasgow based firm has committed to opening a new office in New York City and expanding operations in the US, UK and Asia. Co-founder, Euan Cameron said, "The way the US market has embraced Willo's technology has been astounding. And this latest investment will enable us to meet the booming demand for async hiring tools among businesses and organizations. Organizations easy for me to see of all sizes." So, is this one a buy or sell? I'm gonna take it. So the Gen Xer in me wants to hate video interviewing, screening resumes and the like. It's not that efficient. A lot of people hate being on video. Some people, especially poor people, or people without the means don't have high speed access to do video. Joel: And they're a pitfalls galore from a technical perspective. However, I'm open to the fact that there's a cultural change with young people who prefer video and can't write very well anyway. And in a remote world, video can be incredibly valuable. I also appreciate that AI tools like ChatGPT will make well-crafted text answers a breeze but it'll be written by a bot and not an actual human being. And although AI will probably make its way into video as well... Hello, deep fake. I'm going to buy Willo, even though my gray hairs might want to shoot it dead. Willo, you are a buy. Chad: There you go. A buy from Joel who wants to call himself a Gen Xer but I feel like he's more of a boomer. I always wanna say, okay, boomer. So, okay, Lieven, knowing you're not a boomer, what do you think about Willo? Lieven: I'm definitely a Gen Xer. And I think the only reason you should make a video is when you apply for a video producing company, because nobody else likes videos. A recruiter in Belgium, for example needs to know you got... Let's say 30 applicants, needs to know, does the person speak French? Yes or no? I do not want to watch a whole video to check at minute 2.7 he's going to say if he maybe speaks French. So video is a hassle. It's a hassle to make. It's a hassle to watch. And the time we elaborate it by using ChatGPT, I want to spend it at a pool grilling my burgers. I do not want to spend it watching videos. And they claim to remove the bias but in my opinion, video is the base of all bias. We have, in Belgium, open-minded recruiting, meaning we're going to remove the name from the CV, the date of birth, et cetera. Open-minded. So just look at the facts. And I kind of like it and watching a video, nothing is open-minded anymore. I make my impression the first few seconds I watch someone so it's a sell. Chad: It's a sell. Okay. So Willo CEO... You and Cameron was on firing squad August of 2021. Joel gave him a golf clap and I gave him the firing squad. Since then, he and the team have done amazing things. I do like video. Do I like video interviewing? I'm with you with regard to blind interviewing, even blind resumes. I really believe trying to pull the bias out means only give the pertinent information. 1.5 million pounds to invade the US and Australia, that to me doesn't make any sense. Australia's GDP isn't even ranked in the top 10. So why are you targeting Australia? Especially when you've got Europe there, it is all there for you. You're right in Scotland. Not to mention you want to ensure that you're not spreading it too thin. So maybe coming to the US, the New York offices, I would've went for somewhere like North Carolina or something like that, that's a little less... It's less expensive. I love Euan, I love Willo, the hardest part for me here is the same thing that I gave him the firing squad on before. It's discipline, it's focus and it's really not getting too broad, which is why it's a sell from me. Chad: All right. Last but not least, Lieven, you're gonna love this. This is one that I can't believe Joel didn't give us an intro. Virtual Joel is not a part of this one and I can't believe it. And here's why. There's an unhappy ending for Serbian MP who was forced to quit after being filmed watching hardcore porn, featuring X-rated messaging during a parliamentary debate. [laughter] Yes, he was in parliament and they were debating. That's right, Lieven. This one, straight out of Daily Mail. Nobody is surprised to this one. Saying his name is gonna be a task. Zvonimir Stević, 65, a veteran politician, long involved in Serbian-Kosovian diplomacy, was caught flicking between hardcore porn on his phone during a discussion on Serbia's ties with Kosovo. This is his area of expertise, okay? The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia asked the MP to resign and said, "Wherever you appear, whatever you say, you will always be known as the porno MP." [laughter] So Lieven, is this too harsh? I mean, Jeffrey Toobin, a CNN legal analyst, was allowed back on the air after his Toobin incident on Zoom, where he was caught masturbating in front of a bunch of people. [laughter] Lieven: I still remember. Chad: He's back on the air. Lieven: It's my worst nightmare. [laughter] Chad: So do you think this is too harsh? He's 65. We should just be happy that he's still enjoying the good life. [laughter] Lieven: To be honest, I really feel sorry for the man. I mean, having lived 65 years and then this happens and it screws up your whole career. I mean, stupid, yes but I understand that. I mean, he was bored and he felt like watching porn, it probably was still on since he went to the bathroom half an hour ago and maybe he didn't even mean to look at it but he just put his phone on and the photographer... Well, he was screwed. But I think at 65, it's a nice moment to leave the theater and give it to some young people and call it a day and maybe people will forget him if he quits now but otherwise he will always be remembered as the PM who watched porn during the debate with Kosovo. And those Kosovarian people, they won't forgive him because they just never forgive Serbs, not even when they watch porn during debates. [laughter] Chad: Well, personally, I think now there is a new career that is actually opened up for him as a Pornhub delegate in Serbia. [laughter] Thanks to Virtual Joel and once again, thanks, Lieven, for coming on the show. There's nothing else, man. We talked about buy or sell, we talked about you guys buying or selling and we talked about porn, so I think we're good, don't you? Lieven: We got it all. Chad: Excellent. We are out. Lieven: We are out. Chad: Well, thank you for listening to... What's it called? The podcast with Chad & 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. With 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 grub cheese. It's so weird. We are out.

Reunited, and it feels so good. Last time we talked to Teddy Chestnut cofounder at Brighthire - the self-proclaimed “first interview intelligence platform” - they were cleaning on big applauses on Firing Squad. That was way back before the pandemic, and needless to say, the world is different. So how are things going. Chad & Cheese bring Teddy back check-in on the startup that was founded back in 2019 and has raised almost $40 million. Even Peaches and Herb would be envious. 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 kids? It's your favorite guilty pleasure AKA The Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, the Kobayashi to my Joey Chestnut, Chad is in the house and we are reunited today and it feels so damn good. Everyone welcome Teddy Chestnut co-founder at BrightHire back to the show. Teddy, greetings and salutations. Teddy Chestnut: What's up guys? Glad to be back. Joel: Good to have you back. Chad: How are you doing big guy? It's been a couple of years since you've been on the show. Teddy Chestnut: I was just looking, almost two years to the day. Joel: Anything weird happen in the world in the last time you were here? Anything? Teddy Chestnut: I definitely had COVID during our last recording a 100%. Chad: Really? During the actual recording. Teddy Chestnut: I'm pretty sure. Chad: You're gonna claim that? Joel: Are you sure you just didn't feel sick talking to us? Teddy Chestnut: A little foggy, came out a little foggy. [laughter] No. Yeah it's been... Yeah a lot's happened in the world in the last two years. Chad: You shaved. Teddy Chestnut: BrightHire and otherwise I shaved after four years... Joel: You did shave. Teddy Chestnut: Not that everybody could see or know that but now I look like my LinkedIn profile so people are confused when I get on Zoom. Joel: Very executive. You shaved the beard. Chad: He does kind of have the country and Western shirt on though. If he had a hat and maybe a belt buckle I think he could pull it off. Joel: I think it's kind of Eddie Haskell. I don't know if it's quite [laughter] Merle Haggard. Teddy Chestnut: I could tell you I have a belt buckle on right now and nobody would know 'cause it's just audio. It's big, three inches diagonal, Texas Longhorn. Chad: Yeah. It looks like a dinner platter. Joel: We're not gonna talk about anything below the belt today, Teddy. Nothing below the belt. Teddy Chestnut: Just at the belt. Okay. Mental note: Next piece of swag, BrightHire belt buckle. Chad: There it is. There it is. Joel: Ooh... Teddy Chestnut: I'll wear it to SIA in Miami. I'll send you a pic. [laughter] Joel: That is unique. Chad: That's sexy. Well why are we here, kids? We're here because Teddy a couple of years ago actually came on Firing Squad and he did pretty well whether he was in a COVID haze or not. And this is the reunion show where this is what's gonna happen, Teddy. You don't have to actually go through the Firing Squad, you already did that. But what you do have to do and the torture that you do have to face is listening to your two minute pitch from two years ago. Then after that we're just gonna... We're gonna talk about the journey. What went well, what sucked, how to kick PE in the nuts. Who knows? There are gonna be plenty of things that we can talk about today. Joel: And most importantly how many more servers did you have to buy after being on our show? Because the traffic was obviously off the chart. [laughter] Chad: Does anybody buy servers anymore? Joel: I know right? I know it's like Super Bowl ad and Chad and Cheese interview basically. Teddy Chestnut: For a platform that records and transcribes interviews, hopefully listening to myself is not that painful. I should have a handle on that at this point. Joel: No... Chad: Okay. Joel: You have a sweet voice, goes down smoothly. So without any further ado everybody, here's Teddy's pitch from two years ago. Teddy Chestnut: At its heart, hiring is human. Every hiring decision is driven by what we are doing right now, talking to each other and it's a series of conversations. And because hiring is human it's also inconsistent. It's inefficient and there's a tremendous amount of space for subjectivity room for bias. I co-founded BrightHire because I saw an opportunity to transform the heart of the hiring process and specifically to build a new kind of interview platform that could drive better, faster and more inclusive hiring decisions. Now BrightHire does that first by raising the quality of interviews in a real time. So when a recruiter or an interviewer uses BrightHire, they have an interview assistant riding along with them as a heads up display to guide that conversation. And as that conversation unfolds, it's recorded, transcribed and annotated. They're producing real evidence to support more rigorous and fair hiring decisions. So instead of relying on shorthand or scribbled notes or nothing but our best recollection to fill out a scorecard and make a decision, you can quickly pull up candidate highlights to recall key details and make a decision based on that candidate's merits, not your memory. And then you can share those highlights across the hiring team to make a seamless handoff or calibrate based on real substance or check each other's biases. Teddy Chestnut: And for the first time teams can actually effectively all be in the same room together for every interview. We can actually work together to make better less biased hiring decisions. Every other team, design, product, engineering, sales has had a collaboration platform built specifically for them. Now finally hiring teams have one, too. And then finally we give people leaders transformational insight to improve their hiring outcomes or to enable their teams to predictably replicate success. So whether that's through search or analytics or alerts, we're also enabling teams to hold up a mirror to their own hiring practice, let's see how it's done and make data-driven improvements to ensure they're running a consistent, quality and fair hiring practice. And one last thought. Our first value as a company is candidates first and a big part of our mission is to give candidates a hiring experience that they deserve by reducing bias and instilling good practices where it matters most in every interview and hiring decision. Joel: That sure was tight. Teddy Chestnut: That was pretty good. Chad: That was good. Joel: It was the $6 million man of pitches. Chad: That was good in a COVID haze which I still don't believe. I don't believe he was in a COVID haze. That was way too clear. So after having the weight of the world on your back coming to The Chad and Cheese Podcast to be on Firing Squad, how did it feel after we hit stop and the recording was over? Teddy Chestnut: Like a relief. Relief, man. Well 'cause I thought you were gonna fail me 'cause you guys were throwing a lot of shade and there was the Joey Chestnut stuff and I wasn't sure if there was like I've done video interviews before but man like passing grade. I'll take it. Big relief. No it was fun. And then we had to go do a bunch of work to make all that real. Joel: Reconnection to Joey Chestnut is aces in my book, Teddy. Teddy Chestnut: I really like, I'm still holding to third cousin twice removed something. Joel: I'd go with that too. I'd go with that. Chad: Anything that has to do with eating, Joel's a big fan of. [chuckle] When you left you had a product, that product of yesteryear, literally two years ago. I mean, tech moves fast. How fast and how many changes did you... Let's talk about the journey a little bit. When you stepped off what was the next thing you had to do? Obviously there was funding that happened, there were new features. What happened to the platform? What happened to you guys? Teddy Chestnut: We had secured funding already but we had just gone to market like commercially at the end of 2020. And so you called us right after we signed our first cohort of clients, really. I think we've since we probably like 10X-ed our client base. And so a lot of the work to do immediately afterward was get those teams up and running. We had the baseline product, that was ready to go. We were just shipping a set of integration still to make it seamless in the workflow. But a lot of the work was change management. It was introducing the idea of recording and transcribing interviews beyond the champions who saw the potential and signed up for it and rolling that out to the rest of their teams, recruiters, hiring managers, interviewers. Hiring's a team sport. Not everybody was involved in the sales process and so a lot of the work was changed. Against people... Chad: Well, onboarding sucks, right? Onboarding sucks. And you hadn't had to do it really before, so now you were starting to do it with a cohort of companies. Talk about that a little bit. What changed? What did you get right? And then what did you get wrong? Teddy Chestnut: We had rolled out BrightHire back in late 2020 first just to recruiting teams. A couple really big ones, but primarily was like recruiters and early '21 was the first steps toward rolling out toward eng and sales and product and the rest of the org. And obviously that's a partnership between TA and those orgs. Like they don't roll up into TA, they don't report into TA. And so working with our buyers and that heads of talent acquisition and the recruiters to put the comms and the rollout plan together and to socialize BrightHire with the rest of their teams and to help them understand the why, that was the work to do coming right out of that conversation. And it's a different message, right, to a hiring manager than is to a recruiter about why you should be on BrightHire and the value to you. And so developing that language in partnership with our early clients to nail and kind of stick the landing, that was a lot of work. Joel: So one of the things I mentioned to you in our first interview was that I thought you needed to raise more cash which you then quickly raised $20M, so [laughter] I don't know... Chad: A little bit of cash, yeah. Joel: I don't know if my advice was pression in that or like... [laughter] Teddy Chestnut: I hadn't actually even considered it before you... [overlapping conversation] Joel: I know, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Teddy Chestnut: Always to go get some more. Joel: Yeah. So good to raise money. That sounds great. Teddy Chestnut: Let's go do it. [laughter] Joel: So what have you done with the money? Are you gonna go raise some more? What's the state of the funding of the business? Teddy Chestnut: Yeah, well capitalized. Yes. We raised that the like $20M series B only like six months after the series A. And so that was really a momentum and conviction play on the size of the opportunity and the fact that we could become a leader in the market. That we've invested primarily in R&D and eng. The pitch that I gave around the workflow interview assistant and in the moment and the analytics and the insights, we had built the rudimentary components of a lot of that when we talked but a lot of that capital's just been invested in actually realizing that full vision over the last couple years and then scaling up our CS and support team to be able to onboard and support new clients pretty beautifully. Joel: So you've raised about $36M total. Any plan to raise more? And if so, what's the environment right now for raising money? Teddy Chestnut: We're fortunate. Building a startup, there's big doses of luck and timing involved and we had the fortunate opportunity to raise a bunch of capital back in '21 when the market was really hot and do it at a really nice valuation. And so we're in a fortunate position where we don't have to be out raising capital right now. I don't envy the teams that have to be 'cause it's a very different environment. So no, we're we'll capitalized, not thinking about raising any time soon. Mostly thinking about continuing to invest in the product and the team and kind of grow our current install base. Joel: Invest in the team. So have you had layoffs? If not, what's been your secret sauce to avoid those and are you hiring? It sounds like you are. Teddy Chestnut: We did scale up and then we scaled down primarily on the go-to-market side, like a lot of teams did because we saw what the market looked like in the first half of last year which was just ripping and then obviously things hit a wall for a lot of our clients, high growth tech in the back half of last year. And so we rightsized the team a little bit. Now we're continued to invest in product R&D, kind of resetting the sales team and our territories and kind of our targets to make sure that we go after the teams that are still hiring really aggressively and the segments that are still really healthy. Joel: Got it. And one more real quick before I toss it back to Chad, you were brighthire.ai when we interviewed you, you're now brighthire.com. Did some of that money go to somebody to get that.com? What was the story there? Teddy Chestnut: Just vanity, pure vanity play. [laughter] Teddy Chestnut: Yeah. Brighthire.com was not an expensive investment, thankfully. We bought it for two reasons. Three, one pure vanity two the.ai was confusing people. They would presume that we were using AI to evaluate candidates and it would start this conversation about that which we don't. And so we didn't wanna confuse people and if you're the category leader in your market you gotta own the.com. And it's just something you gotta do it. Chad: It is what it is. So let's talk a little bit about that around the competition side 'cause everybody wants to do interviews now. It's a video interview, it's a that interview. So talk a little bit about the competition and then being able to really focus on messaging because at the end of the day as you've just said, people were looking at AI and they thought, "Holy shit, we don't want the face recognition shit going on or the voice recognition or any of that stuff." So talk a little bit about that. Talk about the perception, market perception and then messaging and then the competitor landscape. Teddy Chestnut: So that's another thing that changed pretty dramatically. Like the next thing I had to do after we got off of our call two years ago was talk to somebody about why recording interviews was a good idea. Because interview intelligence, this idea that we were gonna record and transcribe live interviews was still not even out in the world in any kind of material way. Whereas fast forward two years and Josh Bersin is up on stage at HR Tech talking about how interview intelligence is one of the most exciting categories of new technology in recruiting tech. So that's great. Market development is incredibly important and with market development comes competition and other kind of startups in the space. We've seen that, which is again, I think great. The more people are thinking about recording and transcribing interviews as a foundation for a quality, fair, efficient process, that's great for us. In terms of the actual competitive landscape, still very few deals. Conversations are multiple players kind of going at the same opportunity. It's still just a tremendous amount of white space. Teddy Chestnut: And our approach on it has always been just obsessed about the customer, not the competition. Just listen to them and figure out what's important to them and try to serve their needs, which have changed a ton. That's another thing, like in the last six months, it went from, again, 2021, even two years, hire as fast as fucking possible. [laughter] Teddy Chestnut: Like, gimme a button. I need like 35 butts in seats and and half of those are recruiters. Just scale up as fast as possible to now we gotta do more with less, we gotta be more agile, we're only making the key quality hire so it matters a ton. So the whole marketplace has shifted around what they care about. And so our positioning and messaging and the use cases for BrightHire have changed along with that. Chad: Now, is it hard to be able to skate to the puck when you have no clue and when there are 20 pucks in the rank? [laughter] Chad: Because as we talk about talent acquisition, we talk a lot about strategy, but there's more tactics that happen even at the "strategic level". They're just talking about what's happening in the next six months, if you're lucky, let alone 18 months or six years. So is it hard to skate to all the pucks? Teddy Chestnut: Yeah, I think especially that can be exacerbated or made more challenging depending on the segment that you're working with. If you're working with Fortune 500, they're doing annual planning on their headcount, but those TA teams are still thinking two, three years strategic transformation. And they're like their timelines are a little bit longer. When you're serving Angie or Figma or Roblox or Mr. Beast, which is a client of ours, that time horizon is much shorter. And so you have to be more reactive and you have to be reactive with your clients to the pressures that they're facing or the reality that they're operating in. What we've tried to do is keep a true north on the core value propositions that we know will differentiate us over time. Gather a ton of data about what's happening in conversation so we can actually add value, give people guidance in real time so they know what to ask and what to cover and serve recruiters beautifully. Recognizing that they might have a different job. I might have the same title in the same company and have a job that feels very different today than it felt nine months ago or 12 months ago. Chad: Do you find yourself as companies talking to you about where they're skating, trying to divert them, knowing that they're probably going at the wrong puck at the wrong time? Because again, you're seeing a lot more from more companies, you're more in-tuned with the market, especially with your product. Is there a lot of consulting that's happening these days? Teddy Chestnut: The best relationships are consultative. You have to develop really deep trust in order for somebody to take your consultation from the outside and have it truly influence their strategy. That's what we aspire to. But it would be a little heuristic to try to have us come in from the outside and say, "I know you're focused on this, but you should be focused on that," and expect somebody to actually make that change in a short amount of time. So you do a lot of planting of seeds and starting the conversation then coming back to it later on. I think that's probably the story of many of the startups that you've worked with that are developing markets is like, "We're gonna have a conversation about this thing that's really important and I know you've got five other priorities that you're working on." So cool, now you know we exist and let's come back and talk, six, nine months from now. Now that you've cleared those things out and you realize that that thing that we talked about that was really important actually is really important. Joel: The fact that you work with Mr. Beast just might have made me cool with my teenagers, at least for tonight. I want to thank you for that, first and foremost. Chad: It's never gonna happen by the way. I just want you to know. Joel: Just for a night, I said. Chad: It's never gonna be cool. [laughter] Joel: Just for one night. Just for one night. And then I'm back to dorky dad. [laughter] Joel: What would be an unexpected, maybe a curve ball that you weren't expecting that really changed the business? Just something that startups have to deal with, a story that, oh man, this thing that happened to us was just sort of nuts and I had to deal with it, aside from COVID or something macro? Teddy Chestnut: Or the global slowdown and pull back in tech hiring. I mean, that's been it. Joel: Which is another one, right? You are a human-centric business. People use the product. It's not automation as much as some of the others. So there are less recruiters in the world. How has that impacted the product? Teddy Chestnut: Two ways. One obviously is there are fewer users [laughter] out there. Joel: Is that a bottom line situation? Do people pay by the seat? Teddy Chestnut: The bottom line from us more so is how much hiring are you doing? And so that certainly has an impact. And we've aspired to be thoughtful and creative to meet clients who've loved our product, where they are when they come up for renewal and they're like, "I was hiring 100 people a month and now I'm hiring 10." Just try to think long term with those partners because we know that there's a tremendous amount of value, but that absolutely has an impact on building the business. The other side is it creates a lot of opportunity. I talked about the messaging changes and the use case changes. And one thing that we're seeing in the market right now is this concept of recruiter agility. I might have had a team of specialist recruiters, design, product, eng, CS and I could afford to have people focused on one specialist. I can't afford that anymore, 'cause I went from a team of 20 to 10 or 100 to 50. And now I need that product person to also design and eng and maybe on a one-off CS role. And it turns out that it's really helpful to use BrightHire in that context to get smart on roles quickly and to shift and kind of do like mini onboardings every time you take on a new rec. So we've actually seen a lot of positive feedback around that kind of a use case for BrightHire when teams are more constrained and have to do more with less. Joel: Aside from being a guest on this podcast, what have been some of your best marketing decisions, best platforms to use? We have a lot of companies that are looking for that silver bullet from a marketing perspective, what's worked best for you? Teddy Chestnut: Co-marketing has been great for us, honestly. Joel: Say more about that. Teddy Chestnut: Yeah, we decided to make pretty deep investments with other players in the HR tech space. We got a bunch of them up and running on our platform. We've hosted webinars and events with them that extends to ATS platforms, Greenhouse, SmartRecruiters, Lever, but also other partners like Checker and GoodTime, SeekOut, Gem. We've done a lot of work 'cause we talk the same profiles and we wanna reach the same audiences. And having conversations with the market alongside those kinds of brands about topics that are just important to to our buyers has been super productive. Joel: So content marketing, but leveraging partnerships and relationships to amplify, I guess the message. Teddy Chestnut: Yeah, and that's strategically they are investing in partners that share a similar view of the world as we do, or that are actually really important platform partners for us, again, like the ATS platforms. Chad: Was that always your go-to-market? Was it always try to force multiply through partnerships? Teddy Chestnut: Our head of marketing, Linda made that a big part of her strategy when she joined, and I think she'd had some previous experience doing that kind of work at her last company and saw the success there. So really pretty soon after she joined, we started to do a lot of co-marketing work. And then also we took an approach where our product and customer experience could be our marketing. Trying to market a product that people haven't had their hands on before in a new category, people's experience with it saying, "Wow, this was amazing," can be really valuable. And so getting the product in the hands of a ChartHop really early or a GoodTime is really valuable. 'Cause then those teams are talking to our same buyers and can reflect on the fact that they've used the product and we've been great partners to them and that goes a long way. Chad: Well, and also from a market strategy standpoint, they're not developing that product or at least looking to prospectively develop that product because they've got such tight partnerships. Now that being said, on the marketing standpoint, did you also take the same type of path for your sales go-to-market and being able to leverage those big names or those partnerships to also leverage their portfolios? Teddy Chestnut: Because we've been playing primarily historically in the mid-market segment, there's been less of that. Lever, Greenhouse, they play more of like Switzerland when it comes to those partner ecosystems, unlike say a Workday where you can get plugged in and then they're gonna put you into every single deal. It hasn't been a huge part of our strategy yet, but as we think about upmarket, that partnership strategy I think will become more important. Chad: Talk a little bit about product expansion. Being able to go from where you were to where you are now. Teddy Chestnut: Yeah. Chad: And then the vision of moving past that. Where does Teddy Chestnut see BrightHire in the next six months to 18? Teddy Chestnut: So if you think about an ATS as the system of record, that's a foundational layer, right? That's who are we talking to at what stage of the process for what role? Now, that's the foundation. On top of that are all of the things that humans are doing to actually assess and select and sell candidates, plan the interview, write the job description, plan the interview, figure out what questions we wanna ask, run the interview, make a decision, figure out what happened after that decision, and tie it back into how we plan and run and decide so that we get better over time. And the vision for BrightHire has always to been to be that layer on top of the system of record, helping people do the full range of jobs that they need to do really well in order to make great hiring decisions exceptionally well. And where we started was, let's capture the interview, that was like the big black box. Let's record and transcribe and give people the right context to make decisions. And you can think about then horizontal expansion into, well, how do we plan interviews really effectively? How do we run those, how do we gather all these data to then continuously improve? And we had lightweight parts of a lot of those pieces and a lot of the product roadmap is around extension and depth in those areas. Teddy Chestnut: I'll give you a great example on the insights side. We started with like, how many interviews are people running on BrightHire and what are their talk ratios? Like really easy stuff to get. But now we can tell you, are you running interviews consistently between men and women? How many questions are you asking? What kinds of questions are you asking? What's the candidate's sentiment. And going deeper on what are the dynamics of these interviews really look like and start to answer questions that head of TA really cares about. So that's an example of like, we started in insights, we had like a V1, then we go V2, V3 and go deeper and deeper and deeper. Chad: This is actually helping companies kind of like QA, QC their process because in some cases... Teddy Chestnut: Totally. Chad: It's just the Wild West. They ask whatever the hell they want, they take whatever time they want and it's not fair and unbiased. What you're saying is our company's actually taking that data and then starting to go out and train their managers. Teddy Chestnut: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that we built was a training module, actually. [laughter] We literally built there's like BrightHire training and you can take examples of highlights from your interviews or examples from candidates and build that into a playlist and then give that back to managers to actually consume. And that can be informed by what you're learning. Another great example, we'd worked with one client where we found that men and women who were getting the same scorecard scores were being hired at different rates. And then we went into the interviews and we found, well certain topics were coming up when men were interviewing women like sports or remote work, and that was having a material impact on those candidates passer rates. So to be able to shine a light on that, call it out, put it back into training, close the loop on it and then track those passer rates over time helps influence the way that a team hires in a way that they never would've had visibility to before. And that's the work that I'm really excited about. Joel: You mentioned remote work in light of COVID were a more disparate workforce than ever before. The bright side of that, or the BrightHire side of that is that there's global growth opportunities for companies and we talk to companies all the time that talk about global growth. How has that been for you? If you haven't, what's the go-to-market strategy around that? What percentage of your business now is global? Talk about that. Teddy Chestnut: We have client teams operating in probably four continents from North America, South America, yeah, APAC and Europe. Most of the teams that we serve are still headquartered in the US, but we have teams that are headquartered out of the EU like Revolut's a great example. And we've had to adapt to that from call recording in GDPR and data privacy and all. We've laid all those foundations. One thing that we've seen, and this is actually in a different segment, on the staffing side, a lot of staffing teams are globally distributed and the coordination that they can achieve using BrightHire when I've got a team in the US and a team in the Philippines, getting those teams on the same page and sharing candidates and being on 24/7 has been a real value prop for BrightHire. Chad: Reunited and it feels so good. Joel: And it feels so good. Teddy Chestnut. Chad: That's Teddy Chestnut from BrightHire, everybody. Teddy, if somebody wants to find out a little bit more about you and/or, I don't know, maybe BrightHire, where would you send them? Teddy Chestnut: Brighthire.com. Chad: Oh. Joel: Does the AI still redirect? Teddy Chestnut: 100%. Yeah. You can also... [laughter] Joel: All right. If you know him as ai, then that still works. Teddy Chestnut: For anybody who hasn't cached the browser, just go back to brighthire.ai and you'll end up in the right spot. Joel: Teddy, it's been fun. Hopefully we get to see you on a face-to-face basis this year as the world continues to open up. Chad, another one in the books. 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.

SUBSCRIBE and LISTEN You’re gonna feel this one, way deep down in your plums. While the number of companies getting over $50 million in funding these days is light, the number of companies getting millions isn’t waning. That’s why we highlight companies like Plum.io, Workpay, LaborWorx and HireLogic, who’ve gotten funding this week. Want some AI with your startups, we cover news of artificial intelligence algos making layoff decisions at employers. Want some news from the world of remote work? Got that too. Amazon is pivoting to 3-day workweeks, a study of companies going with 4-day workweeks was a great hit and employers who’ve take tax incentives may find themselves forcing employees back to the office. Of course, what episode would be complete with more roasting of Indeed and their new pricing structure; expect this time, the trash talking comes from the buyers on the ground. 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. Did somebody dial 9-fun-fun. Hey kids, you're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host Joel cocaine-bear Cheesman. Chad: And this is Chad "Dark Brandon" Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, get your ass back to the office or the AI will fire you, non-stupid people and a little buy or sell. Let's do this. Chad: Dude, what a fucking gangster move this week by the White House, literally calling Russia and saying, hey, just so you know, we're coming to Ukraine, we don't give a fuck if you like it or not, we get shot down or something like that, get ready for World War III. [laughter] Joel: Jeez. Otherwise, you're a soldier. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Do you see World War III coming? Because China is squirrely, Iran... It just seems we're progressively getting to a really bad place. Chad: Yeah. China is not squirrely, China is probably the smartest of our adversaries, they think 100 years in the future, where we think 100 minutes. So I think they're looking long-term with regard to how they could perspective-ly crush us from an economic standpoint in buying up more countries, at least stakes in more countries like Africa, and being able to get those minerals to be able to leverage against us. Oil is not going to be something that they can leverage against us, there are going to be other things that we need to be able to create batteries, whatever it might be, so yeah, and Russia, I think Russia is a perspective issue. I just don't understand why a country with that much land mass and such a low population wants more land. It makes no sense. I know they have a population problem, but because not only are they not growing, but they have people that are leaving because they're afraid, well, even before they could be put in the army, so yeah, I just don't see an issue, I think dirty bombs might be an issue, but I don't think the big ICBM is gonna be popping out. Joel: I don't know. It's scary, man. It's scary. I'm scared, almost as scared by the way. Chad: Hold me. Hold me. Joel: As my first shout out. Chad: Oh, God. Joel: First shout out goes to Cole Cheeseman everybody, who got his driver's licence this week. Yeah, talk about scared. Chad: Jeez. Joel: Anyway, proud of him. He got a whopping 99% in his driver's education class. I'm not sure how he lost 1%, but it's humbling as a father to have a 16-year-old that can drive. It's humbling. Chad: The instructor took a percentage point off because he needs a haircut, that's what it goes to. [laughter] Joel: Dude. He's like Fabio. Chad: He is. Joel: Are you kidding me? He's like 6'4" Fabio. Chad: Without the six pack, yes. Joel: God damn. It's like scary how... How sexy he is. And he looks just like me, which is the sexiest part. Chad: Oh, which now you've just blown the whole thing. Okay, shout out, and shout out to our listeners, more specifically, David Pluto, who loves the new Morgan Freeman outro, which is amazing, by the way. Jen Meyers, thanks for pimping the podcast on LinkedIn. Chad Madsen and Chris Murdock for starting off the week with Chad and Cheese t-shirt picks. We love them kids. You get a Chad and Cheese t-shirt, you put it on the socials, you gotta wear it. Okay? And last but not least to Evan White for using ChatGPT to create this little ditty about the Chad and Cheese. Here it comes. Chad and Cheese, a podcasting pair, talk HR tech with style and flair. Their insights are bright, their humor's a delight, a podcast that's beyond compare. That just tells me right there that AI is not going to take our jobs any time soon kids. Joel: Yeah, yeah, by the way, you mentioned t-shirts, and I'll put in the free plug here real quick. You have to go to chadcheese.com/free or click the free link to get those t-shirts, pretty much everyone that signs up gets one for most part, and thanks to JobGet for footing the bill for the shipping, handling, and creation of those shirts. I wanted to throw it out there, so we don't have to do it at the end of shoutouts. My two shoutouts... Chad: Yes. Joel: In a row go to Spotify. Chad, I know you're a Spotify user. I'm a loyal sheep that uses Apple music, of course, but I find the new DJ with AI feature on Spotify really freaking cool. Chad: Really? Joel: So basically, I don't know if you've seen this, but you can play a station with an AI-generated DJ talking to you and playing the songs that you like, so if you go to Spotify, there's a video, and it's like, hey, Max, I noticed you've been... I noticed the summer's coming around, summer's right around the corner, let's check out some summer tunes that you loved last year, and then they'll play like some songs and the DJ come back and play some more... It's like your own personalized DJ playing the songs that you like. I think that's really fucking cool. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And if you look at how it transfers into employment, imagine you're own employment DJ, who every morning is like, hey Joel, I found a great new marketing job at such and such in downtown Indie. I feel like that's where this could go. As opposed to you saying, hey Alexa, how do I get a job at McDonald's? Alexa will just talk to you in the morning and say, hey, man, I know you're looking for a job. I found a few cool options, you want me go ahead and apply to those for you? And then like, bam, it happens. Chad: And right after that for you, they will tailor it and they will play Bananarama. Joel: DJs at Spotify, and then I've got ZipRecruiter, Chad. I don't know this, you're a big Marvel fan? Chad: Yes. Joel: Have you seen the new Ant-Man movie? Chad: I have not. Joel: Okay, well, ZipRecruiter has partnered with Marvel Studios in its release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, try to spell that, for a co-branded campaign that promotes the employment platform's one-click apply feature and matching technology. Paul Rudd does not make an appearance in the ad, which is a little bit anti-climactic... Chad: Anti... [chuckle] Joel: Thank you. I was not even gonna come with that, you came up with the dad jokes this week, and nothing on the home page of ZipRecruiter talking anything about this partnership with Marvel. So I'm not exactly sure what's going on there, but they paid a lot of money, I assume, to partner with Marvel and you don't even see anything on ZipRecruiter's home page. Chad: Yes. And Indeed is dropping the fucking ball, and this is a great time for ZipRecruiter to pick that fucker up, I got nothing. Joel: They should have spent the money and turned this Phil guy, their little AI dude, and turned him into Ant Man for like a month, and have Ant Man man be your job concierge for a month, now that would have been some marketing people, that would've been some marketing. Chad: Yes. Too easy. Shoutout to professor, Mona Salone over at NYU for having us on the co-opting AI recruitment discussion. It's pretty awesome. I mean, we had a... It was about an hour and a half, discussion around how AI is being co-opted in some cases, by vendors and/or companies, etcetera, etcetera. So I had a great discussion and/or slight argument here and there. It was good times, it was good times. Joel: Would you ever have thought 15 years ago that higher education would be having guys like us on a webinar talking about what we do as part of their educational enhancement programs? I certainly did not. Chad: Yeah. 15 years ago, yes, 'cause I've worked with universities for years. For a couple of decades now. Joel: That's true. Chad: So it's interesting, it's interesting because when they get outside of their domain, their experienced domain, they are just as dumb as you and I, my friend. Joel: I hope to God my wife does not listen to this episode. 60% of the time it works, every time. Chad: Everytime. Joel: Alright, so I mentioned t-shirts for free. We're also giving away booze, which people love even more than free t-shirts. Chad: Of course. Joel: So we're talking about Textkernel giving away free bourbon. You and I both pick a bottle, send it to the lucky winner, we're talking free beer from our friends Aspen Tech Labs, and if it's your birthday month, we've partnered with Plum to send you a pricey bottle of rum. Get it? Rum with plum. So if you haven't signed up yet kids, go to chadcheese.com and get your free shit on. Chad: Get your free shit on, some bourbons, we just sent some bourbon to a lucky winner. Thanks to Textkernel. Joel: Yes, we did. That was Carlos Fernandez of the Houston metro area, who got two fine bottles of bourbon from the both of us. Chad: Little bullet coming from me. Joel: He's very excited. He says, the next time we're in Houston, let him know, he's gonna hook us up. Whatever that means. Chad: Okay, okay. Wait, you might find out soon. Joel: We got a date in Houston, baby. Let's do this. And speaking of dates Chad... Chad: Yes. Joel: Birthdays are here again. Chad: Let's talk about it. Joel: Let's go through real quick of who's celebrating another trip around the sun again, the birthday promotion is sponsored by our friends at Plum. Ryan Filmon... SFX: Happy birthday! Joel: Who I think was a bourbon winner back in the day. He won something back in the day. Rebecca Horn, Kristen Urban, Vaishali Umrikar... Chad: Hello! Joel: I think I said that right. Collin Parker, Lynn Harker, Christopher Chimento, Ethan Bloomfield, Mike Weston and one of our favorite Irish sons of Ireland, Adam Chambers all celebrate. SFX: Happy birthday! Chad: There we go. Joel: Another trip around the sun everybody. Chad: Probably the only Irish man who knows how to salsa. Joel: Yes. Do we know where he is right now? Chad: Yeah, he's in Mexico. He's in Guadalajara. Joel: Sure. Okay. Chad: Why not? Joel: Is he listening? I don't know. I don't know. Chad: I'm sure he is. Of course he is. Joel: St. Patrick's day is coming up. He better be sipping on some Guinness and Irish whiskey, or if he knows what's good for him. SFX: Happy birthday! Joel: And then we have travels Chad. Chad: Oh, we do have travel. Oh shit. I Almost forgot about events. Oh my God. So guess what kids, Unleash America is coming. Vegas baby, in April. We've started a phenomenon, I think with podcasts at events, you're going to see podcast booths popping up all over HR and TA events this year. I promise, just check out the expo halls, including Unleash America, which is gonna be at Caesar's Forum in April, then we've got ICIM's INSPIRE at Coronado Beach in May. And then RecFest London at Knebworth Park in July. The Chad and Cheese are going to once again, have the Chad and Cheese disrupt stage. It was going to be nothing but technology, heckling, and elbow to elbow, it's gonna be standing-room only just like it was last year. Joel: Oh my God. Chad: If you want to go to one of these events, you should go to all of these events, go to chadcheese.com, click on events in the upper right hand corner and register for 'em all. We want to see you there and obviously have a beer with you. Joel: Oh my God, my liver hates me. Chad: Your liver is fine, you gotta check up. You're good. Joel: I got my annual check up. I'm good. My cholesterol, not so much, but that's a different story. If you were... Chad: Burgers. Joel: Fish and chips in London this time... [music] Chad: Topics! Oh, gotta get my news here, we got news from the trenches kids, you're gonna love this, this is a... This is a new one. Joel: Oh-oh. Chad: Over the last couple of weeks, we've reported and shared our opinions of Indeed's latest bait and switch move, and here are some comments from people in the industry, this one from Queen of chatbots, Quincy Valencia. Quincy states easy apply is a disaster. I've had countless clients who got significantly higher traffic from Indeed than other sources, and so they considered it a success, but when you look down funnel, there are very few, if any, hires, that's called a complete waste of money in my book. Then we've got Peter Suchy over at CVS, the quality issues of any easy apply, quick apply, have been compounded with salary transparency, I think many folks get hyper-focused on pay rates and the ease of applying, ignoring many of the qualifications, knowing that so many searches on Indeed start with a blank what field, perhaps they should or could filter easy apply roles for those searches. Don't make it easy to apply when there is no matching data for the search. That's right kids, because they should be using their tech for good, not for just fucking evil. Chad: Then we've got Keith Sedlak who's a national manager also in talent acquisition, the service from Indeed in this last year has been shocking. Account reps are constantly on "Indeed days off" or otherwise not available. Hey, that'd be great. But we need some help over here. Your clients, he's saying, my mission over the next year is to move completely away from Indeed and specifically slash any spending with them. Amen. Joel: Yikes. And that everybody is your Indeed update. Alright, Plum. Chad: Yes. Joel: We mentioned them with rum, but they're in the news this week. Chad: They are. Joel: Talent Assessment Platform Plum has secured $6 million in a growth funding round led by Pearson ventures. This brings total funding to $14.5 million. The Ontario, that's Canada Chad, based company platform, uses psychometric data to help employers make better hiring decisions and improve internal career mobility with the aim of matching human potential to job needs, the funding will be used to boost sales, marketing and product development, founded way back in 2012 the company employ 46 people. Your thoughts on the Plum news? Chad: Well, we have friends over at Plum, right? We've talked to Kaitlin, we know Jason, he actually won the fancy football last year, came in almost dead last I think this year, so I reached out to Jason and said, "Hey dude, can you give me a little snippet? Give me a little love. A little statement." So Jason Putnam is actually the CRO over at Plum. Play that beautiful bean footage Joel. Joel: Here's Jason. SFX: Really? 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. Chad: I don't think that was him. I don't think that's him. That guy get's... Joel: No, that's not it. That's not it. Sorry. Alright, here's Jason everybody. Chad: Joel and Chad asked me to hop on and provide a quick statement about our funding round we announced yesterday, so happy to do that. There are a few things in life that are guaranteed as we've all heard, death, taxes, the Buffalo Bills breaking your heart, and sponsors of friends of the Chad and Cheese podcast, raising capital with very, very amazing terms, which is what we did yesterday. We've spent the last decade harnessing and perfecting the combination of science and technology, and it all proves that when people flourish, business thrives, and that's really what we care about. We want those people to flourish and we want the businesses to thrive. We're on the heels of really an amazing year, that's all 100% year of your growth, and we've seen velocity really speed up exponentially as we've headed into 2023, really looking forward to utilizing these funds to double down on sales and marketing, and add to the RDMAs and clients that we have today, and ensure we can add more clients who see their business thrive by their talent blossoming. Thanks to Joel and Chad for allowing me to give a quick update, as always appreciate it, keep listening, and if you need to know anything about Plum, please feel free to reach out. Chad: I think I actually got bingo on my buzzword bingo after that. Joel: Can I give you a sound bite guys, can I give you a sound bite? Not our CEO, I wanna do it. Chad: He loves the show. Guy loves the show. What are you gonna say? There was something missing from the press release that was glaring. Did you notice what it was in today's age? Joel: You're gonna tell us. Chad: So AI wasn't mentioned at all. Plum isn't slapping AI on their platform like everyone else has. Do you think that helps or hurts them, in the age of ChatGPT and "AI?" Joel: Well, first of all, I wanna highlight the fact that this is another fine Canadian company that has raised money, so very few... We have very few opportunities to highlight a company that's in the 10-year-old phase, that organically grows, that raises money in a methodical manner, that sort of grows into their market opportunity, and I don't think they had to feel as if they were in that AI hip group that came out between, I don't know, 2019 to '22, and still is sort of out there. They've grown with their companies, with their customers, and a lot of it feels as if the world has caught up to them. And the product that they have is something that people need more than ever with a remote workforce, with hoping to have the ability to assess people in a way that works, and they've been honing this for a long time, so when you say like, am I surprised there's no AI in the press release? I just feel like this is a company that we love in regards to, it grows organically, it doesn't get too big too fast, which usually means it goes out of business way too fast. Joel: These guys have done it right. I feel like they're cooking on all cylinders right now, and it's fun to watch, they've been a friend of the show. We did an interview with their CEO that you should check out in the archives everybody, if you're interested. So I'm not surprised just because they have their eye on the ball, I don't think they're too worried about external hype or what everyone has on their HR tech booth. I think they're taking care of business. Chad: After the co-opting AI conversation that we had yesterday, this to me is a huge win, because I believe that AI... The AI auditing layer of due diligence will be incredibly messy for any vendor in our space. And that's one that Plum... That's a hoop that Plum is not gonna have to jump through. Also, they mentioned diversity wants, all of the DEIB claims that other competing platforms are making, it's like they're trying to create a... Not Plum, but the rest of the market is trying to create this DEIB easy button, right? It's like this easy button which is... We all know is just total bullshit. So if you check out the plum.io website, you're gonna see solution results that demonstrates the ability to hire a more diverse talent pool. But they aren't plastering it everywhere and calling themselves a "DEIB platform." So I'm a big fan of any vendor who can stand on results and not just try to create this artificial hype train. Joel: I still wish they would have named the company Egg Plant or Peach. SFX: What are you doing step bro? [laughter] Joel: Alright, there weren't any layoffs to talk about this week. However, layoffs are in the news as well as AI. So as companies continue to lay off large numbers of employees, the use of AI to decide who gets cut is becoming increasingly prevalent. According to a survey of 300 US Human Resources leaders, 98% of them plan to use software and algorithms to help make layoff decisions this year. I'm assuming those are pretty big companies that they surveyed. AI tools originally used for hiring and identifying skills are now being used to identify who should be sacked basically, such as performance grades as well as who's a flight risk which I think is pretty interesting. However, concerns have been raised that algos may be making bias decisions, imagine that, which could result in lawsuits. Oh, boy! Chad, time to bow down to our layoff overlords. What are your thoughts? Chad: And we wonder why we have a loyalty problem here in the United States, go fucking figure. Now, we've got robots that are firing us. So hearkening back to yesterday's discussion, at-will employment, those were the words uttered by Ifeoma Ajunwa, a tenured professor at UNC, which she said yesterday during our discussion, The US has good regulations around hiring and a lack of regulations regarding firing. Plus, is an algorithm any different than pulling leadership in a room and saying, "We need to cut 20%, go figure it out."? What this is actually doing is just allowing managers to say, "Hey, I wanted to keep you. I wanted to keep you but the algorithm said you had to go." So I think there's more of a finger pointing that's gonna be happening here if it does happen, but this will do nothing more than expand the loyalty divide between employer and employee. Employers just keep stepping on their dicks with golf spikes, I just don't get it. Joel: Yeah, this is gonna be great PR for corporate America, isn't it? I mean look, ghosting we've talked about for a long, long time. Chad: Yeah. Joel: People hate, hate rejecting people, whether it's for the interview, whether it's for I want this job and no, I really don't, and it's much easier to just say like, "I'm out, I'm not returning your calls, your emails, I'm just out." Right? Chad: Mm-hmm. Joel: And what's more uncomfortable than face-to-face or talking through the interview process? It's through the firing process. No one likes, unless you're a psycho freak, laying people off. Chad: No. Joel: CEOs hate to do it, HR people that have done it for a long time hate to do it... Chad: Yes. Joel: Unless you're George Clooney in a Hollywood film, you hate doing it. So, hey, AI to the rescue. AI is gonna like grade everyone, look at all your productivity, see what you've done in terms of sales or efficiencies, etcetera. And if you can't cut the mustard baby, the AI says you're out. It's not on me. The email they send out automatically, they do it once a year, ghosting is a thing, why not ghosting in layoffs? The sad part is, Americans will get used to this, it'll be a story for about a year or two just like email layoffs and texting layoffs. And then we get numb to it and it's just the way that it is. It's a sad, scary, creepy future that our kids are gonna inherit, it's unfortunate. But telling people face-to-face bad news is not fun, and we've apparently found an algorithm that'll make life a lot easier and more comfortable. Chad: Yeah. I think it's gonna backfire, I don't think we will go this way. And managers will be told, you're getting paid to manage and part of the management process is firing. So the brand loyalty number one, we start taking a look at brands that actually buy shit, that's gonna be the first domino to fall, because they're gonna say, "Holy shit, we're pissing off people who are actually buying stuff." And they know people, and oh, wait a minute, we had all this PR out in the press and those people buy stuff. So that's gonna be the first domino. Then you're gonna have all these companies who hear about being fired by algorithm, by a company A, B, C, so I think it's gonna backfire and I think this is not gonna be a part of it. Will AI actually spit out reports that you can reference to be able to perspectively shortlist? Yeah. But we have reports that do that anyway. If this moves from human firing to algorithm firing, it's gonna backfire and then we're gonna just see it go back to the old way of doing things. Joel: It'll be fine, dude. We'll put a Starbucks coupon code in the firing letter. [laughter] Joel: Or the AI will know what you like. So I'd get a Mexican pizza from Taco Bell and it'll make it all better when I get fired. [laughter] Chad: A year's worth of Mexican pizzas. Joel: Bingo baby. Problem solved, problem solved. We'll be back. Who's ready for a little buy or sell Chad? Chad: Ooh, pick me, pick me, pick me. Joel: That's right, that's right. All right kids, here's how we play. We talk about three companies that have recently raised money, we do a little summary and then Chad or I will buy or sell the company. Are you ready, Chad? Chad: Let's do it. Joel: All right, Virginia-based Higher Logic, an AI-powered hiring interview intelligent solution has raised $6 million in a Series A funding round. This brings total funding to $10 million. Higher Logic uses conversational analytics and AI to listen to interviews and provide objective candidate insights for better hiring decisions. The investment will be used to advance the platform's capabilities, expand go-to-market activities and meet the demands of the firm's growing customer base. Founded in 2021, they employ 15 people. Are you a buy or sell on Higher Logic? Chad: AI-enabled hiring, interview intelligence solution. Can you imagine auditing this fucking thing? They talk on the website a lot about structured interviews, you don't need AI to analyze structured interviews. If they're structured, you understand what the responses are, you can actually score off the responses. Having AI actually score off of the responses to me, is black box hell. And you can't sprinkle enough AI fairy dust on this solution to make it worth my while, so it's a sell for me. Joel: So this company sounds like if Nick Livingston and the gang at Honeit got really stoned or drunk one night and decided that this thing was a good idea. [laughter] Joel: I think Honeit needs a Pepsi to its Coke, someone that can transcribe interviews and shareable and coordination with other recruiters. There are very few companies that do this. Unfortunately, Higher Logic is not it kids. Nick has sobered up and everything is back to normal. If you're looking for something that does what Higher Logic does, give the kids at Honeit a call for those transcription interview recording needs. Chad: Yes. Joel: This one for me also is a sell. All right, Georgia-based LaborWorx, that worx with an X, a tech-enabled staffing startup that connects construction and manufacturing companies with on-demand workers has raised $4.2 million in funding. The platform matches understaffed farms with certified professionals and aims to combat the skilled worker shortage facing industries such as manufacturing. The funding will be used to grow the existing team in Georgia, expand in Texas and the Carolinas, increased client acquisition and introduce a mobile app this summer. Founded last year, the company employs 15 folks. LaborWorx, buy or sell. Chad: These guys have really entrenched knowledge and experience in this space. The problem is they don't understand the basic economics, supply versus demand. They're playing toward the demand side, they don't have enough fucking supply. This feels like a new truck ran out of gas before you actually get off the showroom floor. If we want to be able to create solutions for construction, manufacturing, so on and so forth, we have to create the talent 'cause it does not fucking exist. We don't have a demand problem kids, we have a supply problem. This is a sell for me. Joel: That's a sell. So you know I love a good wave, Chad. I'm a big surfer from way back in the day, the Lake Erie Surf Club was part of my extracurricular activities. [laughter] Chad: You'd be on Alum Creek. Joel: Anyway, I love a good wave and I think the shittiest company you can imagine on a good wave can have a pretty good business. And you and I talked to Patrick O'Rahilly at FactoryFix this week, be on the lookout for that interview everybody. But there's clearly an issue, 7 million American men basically opted out of the workforce. They need to somehow get manufacturing jobs filled, people are writing blank checks for the promise that you can fill my manufacturing positions. I don't really care what this company does or who's managing it, they're in the right place at the right time which means they're gonna get customers. This one is a buy from me everybody. Let's go to Africa, shall we? [music] Chad: Ooh, Toto. [music] Joel: Kenyan-based HR payroll startup Workpay which by the way in autocorrect becomes Workday every time you type it, but that's a different issue. They're set to expand their services across 40 African countries, nearly double its current reach after raising $2.7 million in a Pre-Series A round. This brings total funding to $5.3 million. Workpay offers tools that allow employers to pay salaries in local currencies across Africa, file taxes and process employee benefits. It also enables employers to track and manage employee time, attendance and leave days. Founded in 2017, the company employees 69 people. Toto time. Africa's Workpay Chad, are a buy or sell? Chad: One word here, opportunity. Africa is a growth market. Sub-Saharan Africa has more than one billion people, half of whom will be under the age of 25 by 2050. This is a market and a continent that is going to hit a development patch, and that companies on that path will have to pay their people. Economic growth has stalled since the pandemic but I predict it's gonna pick up for Africa and African companies. This is going to be long-term, but I think big buy for me. [music] Joel: Yeah, we love India, Africa, South America. Talk about areas with young populations, the work, remote work. These areas of the world are primed to blow up. And you may have missed it but LinkedIn this week announced that they now have 100 million users in India... Chad: In India. Yeah. Joel: Of all places, right? Chad: Wow! Joel: So here comes India on the LinkedIn train... Chad: Yeah. Joel: Which is good for business, and the Kool-Aid is even sweeter at LinkedIn. But that's not what we're talking about, we're talking about Workpay. I love Africa. 7% growth yearly now in most of those markets. Most are open to business, open to opportunities, open to investments. Companies from China to US, to European companies are gonna be moving in. My only fear for these guys is you have global competitors with a lot of money, the remotes, the deals, the oysters, etcetera, that are all in that marketplace. So either this is a really nice acquisition for somebody, because I really knew there's something to be said for local companies, locally... Chad: Yes. Joel: Owned businesses that are doing business with people in the local market. Chad: Yes. Joel: So a big platform like Remote or whoever should write a check ASAP, in my opinion, to buy these guys up. Keep the brand, keep the management, keep it as an African company... Chad: Yes. Joel: And really build a footprint in that continent because it is gonna be blowing up in the next century, not just decade. It also is... [music] Joel: No. You know what? [music] Joel: It's a sexy buy for me. Chad: It is sexy. Joel: Damn it. It is so sexy. Chad: Yes. [music] Joel: Almost as sexy as a four-day workweek. Alright, let's get to some news here rapid fire style. We call it the Back to Work Block everybody. Number one, we've got the world's largest four-day work week trial which involves 61 companies and 2900 workers has concluded, and 56 companies have opted to continue the experiment with 18 making it a permanent change. Companies also reported a 57% reduction in staff departures doing the trial period. This was a huge story on every network here in the US this week. Also in the Back to Work Block, we have Amazon, they've announced that the company is ending its full-time work from home policy for corporate employees. Employees will now be required to spend at least three days a week working from the office. Previously, individual managers could decide when and if their employees were required to be in the office. Joel: And last, some companies may be encouraging employees to return to the office in order to maintain state and local tax breaks negotiated on the assumption that employees filling offices will support nearby businesses and pay taxes. Cities and states are projected to start enforcing the terms of these agreements. From New York City, Mayor Eric Adams is reconsidering his requirement that city employees work in the office five days a week because people aren't applying to those jobs. Four days, three days, all the days to keep your tax benefits. Chad, what's your take on this Back to Work Block? Chad: Imagine that, putting your employees through bullshit commutes and additional time away from their families, so that those companies can hold on tightly to those corporate welfare from the cities and states. Here's my prediction, this is what I think is gonna happen in the US, they're going to weaponize the four-day work week. And here's how it's all gonna shake out, and companies are gonna roll this out. They're gonna say, "Hey, we're gonna boil the frog here. We're gonna move to a four-day work week, but you've gotta come back to the office." And after a year or so, they're gonna declare that the four-day work week was a bust, and the demand that everybody goes back Monday through Friday, it's definitely the boiling of the frog. We saw Google, we saw Amazon, we saw tons of companies say, "No, work from home forever." And now guess what, it's time to boil the frog kids. Tax breaks, control, all of that shit, and this is the road map. That's my prediction. Joel: The tax incentives was something I never considered, I don't know if you had or not, but that is a huge thing. There's a lot of companies, particularly in America, I don't have a good feel for the rest of the world but many local governments, state governments... Chad: Yeah. Joel: They roll out the red carpet to get companies to come to their state or local market, and they give tax incentives to do so. And part of those agreements really are, you gotta build a headquarters or a warehouse or something, you gotta employ people that live here in this market, so that we can get our tax base up, that we can make them happy and we can get reelected. It's a huge deal, I can't believe I've never thought of it or it's never come up until now in this Bloomberg story from this week. But you're right, man, this is the boiling of the frog. As if like empty office space and paying for that wasn't like tough on companies, now you're getting a lot of companies that are facing angry governments that are asking, where are the people that are supposed to be spending money and getting salaries and paying taxes in this local market? Joel: I think this is a no-win situation for workers, unless you're a really small business, really agile, if you were built like this beforehand. If you're an old crusty established company, there's a really good chance that you have some tax incentive somewhere, some office space somewhere. And whenever, wherever has become three days, three days will become four days and they'll look at this study and say, "Hey man, four days is awesome. See, the studies show." And then before you know it, like it's five days or four days out of five, is still pretty good. You can still lease office space, you can still tell the government, "Hey, our people are here four out of five days a week." That's probably the way around all this stuff. We're headed, just like casual Friday, it's the no in the office Friday and everyone will become used to that, and it will be a four-day workweek everywhere. Chad: Now, we hear when the politicians are out, welfare moms and that kind of shit, we should be talking about the welfare corporations, because that's what this is kids. All the taxes are being paid off of the employee base, not the actual company, which is one of the reasons why we have issues with infrastructure. You don't have money put into the system, it's hard to buy roads and infrastructure and I don't know, get rid of lead pipes and shit like that. Joel: Make our railways safer. How about that? That'd be a nice start. Chad: Yeah, let's not just make them safer, let's do fucking high speed. Come on. [laughter] Joel: Alright, so we know what the stupid people are doing, when we come back from the break, we'll find out what the non-stupid people are doing. Alright Chad, this is from our beloved Ohio. A pizzeria in Columbus has sparked controversy after displaying a sign that reads, "Now hiring non-stupid people," on their fence. While some found the advertisement hilarious, others found it offensive and some said they would not eat there or work there. The owner, Jayden Dunigan, said the sign was meant to be a joke and not targeted at anyone. She added that the meaning behind the sign was that many of their hires have no work ethic. Get off my lawn. Chad, your thoughts. Chad: The irony here is that comment is stupid. Okay, so non-stupid people, oh wow, that's amazing. You're making a stupid comment. Working fast food means low salaries and little to no benefits. And while the franchise owner in many cases is out enjoying time with the family on their boat in Alum Creek just north, on the north side of Columbus, and yet nobody wants to work anymore. So owners are going to have to start slinging pizza dough or closing the door. Capitalism is a bitch. [applause] Joel: Chad, I applaud this move as the best PR campaign of the year. This story was everywhere, I guarantee you they sold a hell of a lot more pizzas. They probably got a good number of candidates that apply to these jobs, and they probably even made some hires. Now for some historical context here, a Texas business owner, this is shocking, I know, a Texas business owner pretty much did the same thing back in 2022 and the business, according to the owner, attracted three solid applicants within one day and made a hire within three days of that sign being posted. Desperate times, desperate measures. Unfortunately, there's no word yet if there's an AI algorithm that will fire non-stupid people. Joel: We out. Chad: We out. Morgan: Wow, look at you, you made it through an entire episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there is no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey or just watch big booty Latinas 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. Let's save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful trainwreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite western, you can't quit them either. We out.

LIVE from Unleash Paris - If you believe Europe is a major player in the HR tech landscape - we certainly do - then you need to pay special attention to Germany, Austria and Switzerland, a region where much of the continental growth is happening. To prove that point, Chad & Cheese had Wolfgang Brickwedde, Director of the Institute for Competitive Recruiting on the podcast while hanging out at UNLEASH in Paris. Based in Germany, "Wolfie" is uniquely positioned to give us a deep dive into this crucial region's role in recruitment globally, not just in Europe. 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 Cheesman: Oh, yeah. What's up everybody? We are early morning unleash, unleash Paris, France. Chad Sowash: Fucking crazy, man. Joel Cheesman: First interview of our session, so it's gonna suck. No, it's gonna be great. Chad Sowash: No, it's gonna be great. His name's Wolfgang. How can it suck, how can it suck? Joel Cheesman: Wolfgang. Can we call you Wolfie? Wolfgang Brickwedde: No, no. You cannot. Only my mother calls me Wolfie. Joel Cheesman: I know that there are people who call you cheesy, but I wouldn't. Wolfgang Brickwedde: Cheesy does it, Cheesy does it. Chad Sowash: He likes cheesy. Joel Cheesman: All right. So welcome Wolfgang Brickwedde. Hopefully I said that correctly. He's director at the Institute for Competitive Recruiting. Specifically an expert in recruiting in Europe within Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. So we're getting really meta on this one. Chad Sowash: DACH region. Wolfgang Brickwedde: DACH region. Yeah. Chad Sowash: The DACH region. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. We learned that. We learned something today. Chad Sowash: We're here in Europe. I'm hoping that we're gonna learn something. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. We've been doing a European show for a while. We should know the DACH region. Chad Sowash: I mean, there's a bunch of Countries. Joel Cheesman: I blame leaving. Chad Sowash: I mean, they have these Benelux things, these DACH things, these kind of like groupings that happen. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: Why is that a thing, Wolfgang? Why are you guys all about clustering? Is it because those three countries are so much alike? Wolfgang Brickwedde: It's mostly language. Chad Sowash: Mostly language. Okay. That makes sense. Okay. Wolfgang Brickwedde: Germany, Austria, it's the same, but Switzerland is 60% the same. So that's why we call it the DACH region. Chad Sowash: Let's take a look at it from an economic standpoint. You speak the same language. How are the economies? Are they pretty much in line with each other? Do they feed off of... They've gotta feed off of Germany, do they not? Wolfgang Brickwedde: Yes, they do, but for Germany, for example, the biggest export nation is the US. So it's not Austria or Switzerland, but France is pretty close, but Austria and Switzerland are rather small in terms of like 10% of the GDP in Germany. So it cannot be the biggest. Joel Cheesman: So we've been hearing for a long time with the war in Ukraine, Germany's reliance on Russian oil. Winter is coming. Give us a sense of someone on the ground. Is recession coming? How bad is it in Germany? What can we expect from the rest of the world this winter? Chad Sowash: And how's it gonna affect recruitment? Joel Cheesman: Employment as well. Chad Sowash: Yeah, employment. Wolfgang Brickwedde: Yeah. That's a very paradox recession, I would say. We will have slight downs turn in their economy. They expect around 0.5 something for next year. But 75% of the companies are expecting to hiring more people. So it's really... It's never been in a recession before. Usually you had high inflation layoffs and these kind of things, but not now. Chad Sowash: So job creation's continuing, or at least that's what we're seeing. Joel Cheesman: Will that be all sectors? Wolfgang Brickwedde: Not all sectors. Some sectors. Of course, if they are highly intensive, then they're cutting down, but lots of other sector. You see it in each and every company in the window they look for people. Joel Cheesman: So frontline workers, technologists, healthcare, all of those are gonna be full steam ahead. Wolfgang Brickwedde: We have search and recruiters. Like for 93% more recruiters, search for the job ads. It's really amazing. Joel Cheesman: And how has the globalization of recruitment impacted Germany? I know in the US people are moving all around the country. It doesn't matter if you're in Silicon Valley or Boston, Massachusetts. How is that impacting Germany? And maybe part of that as well, how is the influx of Ukrainian workers impacting Germany in parts that you're covering? Wolfgang Brickwedde: First of all, the Germans don't move as much as the Americans do. Chad Sowash: As as everybody else. Yeah, yeah. Wolfgang Brickwedde: It's quite the opposite. The willingness to move for a new employer is going down. So the people like to go buy bike or whatever, very short-term to their new employers. So the mobility is going down. On the other hand, with the globalization remote work, the talent pool is expanding. So companies come to the idea that they can hire people or hire people in other countries. Yes. We have just had like deal our globalization partners. Like these kind of companies, they're coming into the country and tell them, "Yeah, you can hire people in other countries and we deal for you, we deal for you." So that's coming, but not in all the companies. Lots of companies, you have to speak German. English wouldn't be enough. So especially in SME area and the Ukrainians are not allowed currently to work. Joel Cheesman: Ukrainians are not allowed to work in Germany. Chad Sowash: Wow. Well, that's shitty. Wolfgang Brickwedde: Sometimes they are, but most of they are not. So it would help a lot more, but you have then to look into the education, is it equivalent to the German one? And then they can work. So it's not that easy. Joel Cheesman: Now can you hire a Ukrainian remotely? Wolfgang Brickwedde: Yes, sure. Joel Cheesman: But not if they're in country. Wolfgang Brickwedde: Not in the in country. Chad Sowash: Wow. Joel Cheesman: That doesn't seem backward at all. [laughter] Chad Sowash: God. Joel Cheesman: Oh, Europe. Chad Sowash: The German employment bubble. Wolfgang Brickwedde: And we still have 2 million unemployed people. And it comes from this side. And so first if you should hire a German one, like in all countries first hire their own people, and then you are allowed to hire from other countries. Chad Sowash: Germany first. Joel Cheesman: Germany first. That's right. Wolfgang Brickwedde: Yeah. Germany employees first. Yeah. Joel Cheesman: And I assume Austria, Switzerland has the same rules. Wolfgang Brickwedde: It's the same rules. In Netherlands, it's quite interesting. They have more open positions than they have people to look for Jobs. Chad Sowash: So if that's the case... Wolfgang Brickwedde: That's the case. Joel Cheesman: Immigration. Chad Sowash: Yeah. What's the whole deal with regard to 2 million who aren't working? Are they just not in the labor force? Wolfgang Brickwedde: They're not yet in the labor force. They have been say unemployed. Chad Sowash: Well, I mean, are they unemployed, but they're still available? Wolfgang Brickwedde: They're available. Yeah, yeah. They're available. They're looking for Jobs. Chad Sowash: Some individuals actually drop out of the labor force, right? Wolfgang Brickwedde: Okay. No, they are still looking for jobs. Chad Sowash: So is reskilling and upskilling a a huge... Germany does that well, right? Wolfgang Brickwedde: That's what they do in the official agency then. For a federal official agency for labor, that's what they do. That's their business to reskill people, but also in the companies themselves in terms of the new challenges, they need to upskill the people. That's a big deal currently. How can we upskill our own people so we don't have to hire new ones? Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: We're also hearing that Germany's gonna be committing more money to the defense of the country. How is that impacting jobs? More soldier jobs, more jobs around defense? Wolfgang Brickwedde: No soldiers. [chuckle] Not that I have... Joel Cheesman: No bots. Wolfgang Brickwedde: No. But material, so some companies are getting more money, but it doesn't have to be only German material. It can be somewhere else. So they buy even US fighters. Chad Sowash: So defense, technology, weapons, those types of things. Okay. Joel Cheesman: She'll be buying, but not necessarily having more bodies employed around defense. Wolfgang Brickwedde: Currently not. Chad Sowash: The puns are 2.0. It's coming. Joel Cheesman: You had to go there, didn't you? Chad Sowash: What? Joel Cheesman: You had to go back. Chad Sowash: That's a great tank. It's a hell of a tank. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, that's true. All right. Let's get off the military 'cause this is gonna go... Chad Sowash: Okay, sorry. Joel Cheesman: Let's go back. Chad Sowash: Okay, okay. Joel Cheesman: What other trends are you seeing? You're here at the show. What are you hoping to learn? Find out more about what's hot. Wolfgang Brickwedde: Yeah, that's my reason why I'm here. I like to see future trends, and I see the first one is that we need to empower the companies and the employers to deal with uncertainty, a lot more than before. Like in plan, if they had one, we need to hire 100 people next year. So in former times, it worked and they hired against the plan, but in the future, we have a recession, might be a slowdown in hiring. Chad Sowash: So contingencies, they need to start having contingency plans. Is that what I'm hearing? Wolfgang Brickwedde: Contingency plans and to a brace with the business, to be able to brace with the business. And they are not employed for this. So that sets needs to change and it could be RPOs, it could be any contingent work, a tip that would help, but they need... The mindset need to change, because in two years time, we need all the people back. And that's something that they need to deal with. Joel Cheesman: Are you bearish or bullish over the next 12 to 24 months? Do you feel good about the future or... Wolfgang Brickwedde: Two years time, yes, but the next two years will be bearish. Joel Cheesman: Burn down the hatches. It's gonna be rough. You heard it here first, Chad. Chad Sowash: We give the scoop from doc. Joel Cheesman: From unleash, everybody give a big round of applause. We have no audience, so I don't know who's applauding. Wolfgang Brickwedde, if they wanna know more about you or your organization, where would you send them? Wolfgang Brickwedde: LinkedIn. Chad Sowash: LinkedIn. Joel Cheesman: LinkedIn. Wolfgang Brickwedde: Otherwise competitiverecruiting.de would do it as well. Chad Sowash: Okay. Joel Cheesman: And with that, another one in the can. We out. Chad Sowash: We out. Wolfgang Brickwedde: 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 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.

SUBSCRIBE and LISTEN Lieven and Chad dig deep into this week's topics as Joel takes time with family in Texas complete with a 6-pack of Lonestar. The boys talk about the impact of foreign job cuts in the EU. Is a maddening inflation-bloated economy the reason or just an excuse for Ford and others to bring jobs back to the U.S.? Welcome to the Jungle receives a big funding round and the boys break down the good, bad, and ugly aspects of the platform. Plus, a game of Buy or Sell with Coverflex, Emocional, and new Metaverse player Gemba. All the industry intelligence you can handle - No spy balloons necessary! 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. Chad: Yes. Welcome to the Jungle. I'm Chad you're gonna die Sowash. Lieven: I'm Lieven about to be replaced by ChatGPT Van Nieuwenhuyze. [laughter] Chad: This week Harry Kane scores. Welcome to the jungle cashes in and Lieven follows Whitney Houston's lead and gets more and so emotional over a little buy or sell, Vamos. There was... Hey Lieven. What's going on man? Lieven: I'm fine. How are you? Chad: Another day in Paradise. I heard you were on the Alps or something like that. Where the hell were you? Lieven: Yeah, Austria. Last week we went on a skiing trip with REDMAR, one of our companies and they had the decency to invite me to their annual skiing trip. And I hope it's a source of inspiration to all the other CEOs who also organize skiing trips and they do not invite me. [laughter] Chad: So you know who they are, the ones who don't invite you. You know who they are, okay. Lieven: I will let them know. I remember. [laughter] Chad: Talk about first world problems. Lieven: Yeah. Thanks to Edwin for inviting me. Thank you Edwin. It's appreciated. And it was fun. Chad: Very nice. Well, I can't wait to get back to Europe myself. I'm not much of the skiing type, but, I'll do everything I can to find a beach that's for damn sure. Or you're not a beach guy. You're more the skiing kind of guy. Lieven: Depends on the season, in the winter I'm going to the Alps and summer I go to the beach. It's how it's done In Europe. [laughter] Chad: It's how it's done in Europe. 'Cause it's pretty easy to do. All right, let's get the shout out before we get there. Yes you are missing, little Joel Cheeseman action. He had a family emergency. So Lieven and I are going to do a little cover, but we do have a little excerpt of Joel just for all you kids who are missing later in the show. SFX: Hell yeah. Chad: So, shout outs Lieven, I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna go first just because I'm so excited that Harry Kane. That's right kids, scored his 267th goal and becomes Tottenham Hotspur's top scorer claiming a record that stood for over 50 years. Lieven: You are talking soccer, right? Chad: Yes. Lieven: Okay. Chad: Football. You don't know Harry Kane? Lieven: I've Never heard about him. No. Chad: You're gonna get your passport revoked. That's all I gotta say. Your turn. Lieven: Okay. Mine is not about sports, but basically it is about sports. It's about eSports. Chad: Okay. Lieven: Shout out to Randstad for launching Endgame advertisement in GTA online. And when they do something stupid like buying Monster, we keep repeating it and we keep talking about it, but when they do something smart like endgame advertising, we mention it too. Only once, but we'll mention it. So shout out to Randstad, well played. [laughter] Lieven: I like everything concerning eSports. Chad: You guys did that fast though. I mean, you guys got deep into eSports before they did. So it sounds like they're just following the leader on this one. Lieven: Yeah, but that's smart. Following the leader they should be [laughter], but I know you're right. We organized the finals of the some eSport cup on the last edition of the e-recruitment Congress. But, it's interesting and I'm definitely interested in seeing what they're going to be doing. Chad: Awesome. Are you gonna have eSports in this year's version of the E-recruitment Congress or have you guys flushed that out yet? Lieven: No, no. Probably we'll be just doing something but I'm not sure exactly what we'll see, but we're staying active. Chad: Yeah. It was really cool to watch the finals happen last year with Belgium taking the win. Lieven: Yeah. Chad: Taking the win over those crazy Dutch. So that was fun to watch. That was fun to watch. Lieven: Yeah it was. Chad: My shout out. I'm taking back to sports from sports to eSports to sports. Women's tennis gets a shout out. The Women's Australian Open Final scored a 1.43 million viewership and the men's where Novak Djokovic, a very known entity, Djokovic claimed a historic 22nd grand slam title where he only saw 1.3 million viewers. So shout out to women's tennis Lieven, I guess at this point, should women's tennis players make more than the men's side if they keep this up? Lieven: Of course, but I guess they already do. Chad: I think they do in some cases, but... Lieven: Yeah, maybe not the male number one compared to the female number one. But like we said last time, where I live in Belgium, the best tennis players are women and they definitely make more than men. Chad: Yeah, they're ranked higher than your men are though. Lieven: Yeah. They used to be number one and Kim Clijsters. Chad: Here's the big question. And we're always talking about equal pay for equal work. Women's tennis, they don't do equal work to the men's. They don't have to play five sets in the final, men's do. So the men actually have to do more work. And in this case, as we're talking about viewership, they actually get paid less. So what do you think about that? Lieven: We're getting discriminated again and it's a constant. It's a constant. Try being a white 45 year old manager. Try to enter a boat. It's impossible. They only need women. Discriminated, I tell you. [laughter] Chad: Yeah. Not because it's been flush with old white men forever, but yes. No, we get it. Lieven, it's hard for life. Lieven: It's hard. It's hard. Yeah. [laughter] Chad: It's hard being a white dude in Europe. I'm sorry, I'm sorry about that. Lieven: But we cope. We cope. [laughter] Chad: Let's hit events. Unleash America's happening in Vegas in April. Are you coming out for that one? Lieven: I might, I need to check because I'm going skiing. I know Again, the second week of April, I need to check if I can make it. Rika from time to time expects me to work. But I can say it's work. It is work going to [0:06:12.6] ____. Chad: It is. It is. Then we have Wreckfest in London happening on July 6th. Now if anybody out there is listening, whether you're in Europe, whether you're in US, it doesn't matter, go to chadcheese.com, click on events. We have a long list of events that we have already committed to. Yes. In early February. We've already committed to, check it out. Go to unleash. We'll see you in Vegas. Go to Wreckfest. We'll see you in London. Both are amazing, amazing parties. It's time for topics. Chad: Lieven, Welcome to the Jungle. This one starts with an article in TechCrunch entitled, welcome to the Jungle, grabs 54 million for its slick job platform. French Startup, welcome to the Jungle, has raised a new €50 million in series C Funding the startup helps companies recruit new employees more easily by creating sophisticated profiles packed with a ton of information. Welcome to the Jungle, sends a photo and video crew to your office so that they can shoot some high quality photos and record some quick interviews with employees. Essentially, a profile on the platform should look like a feature article in a fancy magazine. Do those still even exist? Fancy Magazines. Clients also add job postings and more information about benefits, company culture and the existing team. Job seekers can then browse job offers and learn more about the companies on Welcome to the Jungle's job board. Okay. Lieven, are you and the house of HR ready to enter the jungle? Lieven: We are the jungle. But I like the reference to Guns N Roses, and I always say names are important, so they got the name right, it's something which will stay. Welcome to the jungle, I like it. Chad: What do you think about this model though? It's incredibly content rich. There's gotta be a shit ton of resources that actually go to creating all that content, sending crews and resources. It's gotta be expensive for the company who's actually buying it. But is it really sustainable as a model for a company that's really just a pretty job Board? Lieven: It's difficult. But I've been looking into them because I was interested. They started out with launching their platform to reach out to engineers and then they added different verticals. Chad: Right. Lieven: And it's always a good approach, I think if you launch niches because people want specialists and we know we are who you want to hire, something like that. I like the approach, but they claim to reach three million unique visitors each year. And they said something like that in their press release. Three million unique visitors. Chad: Unique visitors A year or a month? Lieven: A year. Chad: Wow. Lieven: I think they say a year. If it's a month I definitely won't believe it. A year I find it hard to believe because if you look into France, there are 67 million inhabitants at the total population, 67 million. So I think the active population will be about 30 million, something like that. They say they reach over 10% of the active population. I find it hard to believe that's really a lot because only 7% of the population in France is unemployed, so that means... No, it's just too much. It's impossible. Basically because they're focusing on engineers and 80% of the people just are not engineer. They will never be engineer. So I have some problems with the numbers, maybe it's wrong in the thing I read, but I liked, as you say, I liked the content and, I liked the concept about, adding content. Lieven: And it's nice, but it's not like it's so different from LinkedIn. It's what LinkedIn is trying to reach with their company pages only, they don't succeed. And here they succeed because they center on teams to clients. And to answer your question, is it sustainable? I don't know, maybe if you sent really cheap teams, had the impression I liked it. And we have a company in France, hiring engineers, Billson's so when I looked into them, I was really interested, but after a while I had a feeling this really isn't that new. 15 years ago, we did the same thing. It's like adding video to websites and adding information. And make user experience as smooth as possible. But I had trouble finding their website through Google. I was looking for (something in French). And they were on the second page of Google. On the first page was like always indeed and some others. Chad: Gotcha. Lieven: But they were on the second page and I did lots of tests with a VPN pretending to be in France, and I did it as it should have been done, and I couldn't really find them. And you can have a great website, but if people don't find it, it's useless. In the end I wasn't really convinced about the whole concept. And then I think they got a lot of money and they need to prove a lot still. Chad: Doesn't all this information already exist on the corporate career site? Or shouldn't it exist on the corporate career site? Why are companies driving candidates to third party sites for researching information that should be driving people to your own site? And if they don't have the major hammer like Indeed does for SEO and search engine optimization, then why? It makes no sense whatsoever. So personally, this feels like the Muse here in the US for France. And the Muse hasn't even received as much money as welcome to the Jungle has. The Muse was created back in 2011. And Welcome to The Jungle was created in 2014. They've only recently started saying mad funding. Welcome to the Jungle. So no clue why this old model that deters and it's more third party centric, deters away from the actual original job and content. It doesn't make that much sense to me. Chad: Welcome to the Jungle is more... I think at this point a promise to the total addressable market increases, their new funding is, they had created an applicant tracking system, which I think is just ridiculous. And they're also broadening up to do more than just tech jobs. As you had said. I like the expansion out of tech jobs. It does make sense, but they're expanding out of tech and they're also eyeing the US for a perspective invasion itself. So trying to do all these things at once with a measly €50 million [laughter] What do you think about that? Lieven: I love the word measly. [chuckle] I think it always sounds good to an investor if you claim to be having plans to reach out to United States and to grow, and it's a huge markets but it's mostly talk to get investors happy I think. I don't see it happen. France is a big markets on itself, but it's very isolated and it's hard to get out of it. It's hard to get into as well, but it's hard to get out of it. Chad: Right. Lieven: It's a different world sometimes. Chad: Yeah. So, question, why wouldn't they focus on more of Europe? It is conquering different countries and if you're gonna conquer another country, you might as well go to the US. It's easier from a linguistic standpoint, but still you would think that you would have strength closer to home, to me, it seems like a hail Mary for investors and it seems rather delusional knowing that here in the US this model was popular shit 15 years ago. It's not so popular today. Lieven: I agree. And I had the same impression. We did similar things 15 years ago, and they're still doing it. And they're adding, like you said, a magazine. And they even used to have Amature. They still have it. They used to have a yearly coffee table book, something really fancy. You had to pay for it. [chuckle] about let's say the career guides for engineers in France. And people actually bought it. And it's nice. It's doing something different. And RETO is in, if this was a buy or sell, I wouldn't be buying. Chad: I think I'm with you. This would definitely be a double sell. On the other end of this break. We are going to do just that kids a little buy or sell. Stay tuned. SFX: Europe has a bunch of countries in it. Chad: All right. Lieven. You ready for a little buy or sell? Lieven: Buy or sell. Chad: Excellent. Okay, kids listen up. What we're gonna do in this segment, is I'm gonna give you a little synopsis about the company who just received funding, and then Lieven and I are going to buy or sell that organization. We have three startups. Lieven, are you ready? Lieven: Totally ready. Chad: Here we go. This one's from tech.eu. Launched in 2021 Portuguese HR tech startup, Coverflex has raised €15 million in a series A funding round that will see the company launch its compensation solution in Italy, as well as strengthen its position in Portugal. Coverflex is addressing the cookie cutter problem. That customizable solution allows employers to go beyond the "Traditional" and powers up health insurance, meal allowance, fringe benefits, and discount programs. Coverflex is also positioning itself as a service for recruiting. Imagine that. Hoping to attract the best talent by offering such flexibility. According to the company, since launching in 2021, very new they're used by more than 3,600 companies, culminating in a year on year growth of 400%. No real numbers we're provided just those crazy percentile numbers that really don't mean much of anything to anybody. So Lieven, are you buying or selling Coverflex? Lieven: It's a really interesting company. And so they offer compensation package supports, which is a growing business and a barrel to our salaries are text into oblivion. So that's definitely interesting. They have a very clear offering. I like their website. I like what they're doing, and I noticed they claim to have Natixis as a client, and Natixis as the investment bank of Maxicup, which is our private equity partner. And a part of it sold to Bain, but we know them pretty well and I know Natixis and Maxicup are pretty intelligent people, and if they work with them, then I'm convinced already. So in this case, definitely a buy. Chad: Definitely a buy excellent. [applause] Chad: All right, so 15 million in a series A is no joke and managing comp is a pain in the ass. So a platform/app that helps employers manage their own childcare vouchers, retirement, healthcare insurance, worker's comp and much more is a huge weight off of HR's neck and or back. When a vendor shoulders HR's weight and identifies other areas of expansion, in this case Italy, I become interested then throw in, they are a Portuguese company and I just gotta get on board. Coverflex is a buy from me. [applause] Lieven: Are those creative compensation packages a thing in the US as well? Because in Europe it's really, it's a lot. I mean, because taxes are so high on labor, you have to offer people something different. And those compensation packages are, is it the same thing in the US? Chad: Oh yeah. I mean, comp packages are all over the place, which is one of the reasons why companies trying to get their arms around them in many cases it's not easy. So these types of platforms, again it makes it easy. So not just in Europe, but if they want to jump the pond one day and come to the US, there might be a market here for them as well. So a double apply for our Portuguese friends over at Coverflex. Next we have Emocional. Redarbor, the leading human resource technology company in Latin America has made it an investment of €400,000 in Emocional, total funding €800,000. The startup develops AI compatible of detecting emotional state and personalities. Creepy. It does so through images and videos to improve people's mental health and create emotional sustainable companies. Emocional will use the funds to improve and optimize their AI models, which will work with super computing centers to turn its technology into an international benchmark capable of helping and improving emotional wellbeing in companies. That's a lot of emotional going around. Lieven, is this startup getting you emotional buy or sell Emocional? Lieven: Definitely a sell and I could talk 10 minutes about this. I won't, it's really easy. I didn't like the name because when I tried to find a website, there are 50 million references to Emocional. It's just a common words. Chad: Yes. Lieven: It's really hard to stand out. Chad: Yes. Lieven: So that's a bad thing when you're trying to launch a new company. And also, like you said, it's creepy AI and emotions and me, it just doesn't get along too well. So, no, it's a sell. Chad: Belgians aren't a fan of emotions. Nope. Noted. Lieven: Well, we keep it inside where they belong. [laughter] Chad: Okay. So that's a big no from Lieven. My side. It's fairly simple. Nope. Nope. And nope. Anything that monitors Slack teams and other business communications is a no-go for me. It's way too dystopian. 1984 and it's mental health narrative to me is even more creepy. It's for your own good. Lieven: Yeah. Chad: Right. That's what I'm hearing. It's for your own good. It's okay. So anything that sends us further into an enemy of the state scenario is a huge sell for me. So, have you seen Enemy of the State, the movie Enemy of the State, Lieven? Lieven: Nope, I didn't. Chad: Okay. It's a 1998 movie listener. You gotta check this out. It has Will Smith and Gene Hackman and Enemy of the State. Put it on your list. Watch it tonight. As we start to make these types of references, you have to understand where we're going. And it's an amazing movie. You're gonna love it. Moving on to Gemba again from tech.eu, a London-based enterprise Metaverse developer Gemba aspires to build virtual worlds for corporate training. It's announcing an 18 million series A raise led by New York investor Parkway Venture Capital, raised at a 60 million valuation. This funding is expected to help grow Gemba's business in North America, while also honing in on EMEA. You know Joel had to weigh in on this one because it's the Metaverse, right? Joel: Hey, what's up boys? Sorry I couldn't be with you this week. I'm on a Chinese weather balloon on my way to Texas. I bet that's never been said on a podcast before. Anyway. I hear you're doing buy or sell this week, talking about VR startup Gemba, by the way, that's the Japanese term for actual place. Okay. Let's see. Virtual reality, work from home, upskilling and an ESG spin with Apple's VR coming soon. Ready to raid enterprise budgets all around the world. Check, check, check, check and check. Plus clients like Unilever, Nike, Carlsberg, and Lieven 's Automaker of choice, Bentley. And I say, cue the Careless Whisper kids. Gemba is a screaming by from your boy. And that's it. That's my review. Choose. I'm out. Chad: Go figure. It's a big buy from Joel. It's VR, it's metaverse. Nobody's surprised here. But what are you gonna do? Are you gonna buy, you gonna sell Gemba, Lieven? Lieven: First of all, Bentley is for football players. I think it's very ordinary. I wouldn't like to be associated with it, but question was buy or sell. I think short term, it could even be a buy, because I think every company wants to do something in the metaverse and they need companies like this to just get there. But after two years, they'll notice it just doesn't work. And nobody gives a shit and then they'll leave. So that's when you need to sell before this happens. So if they're really cheap now, I might buy, but for a really, really short period of time. So this sounds like a sell more, I think. Because it's just, I never seen any of those companies that went beyond the gimmicks. So far, it all sounds nice how you have to do something in the Metaverse. You have to use VR for training. But I've tested so many tools, I've seen so many tools until now, I haven't seen anything which was better than the real world. So maybe someday. Chad: Maybe someday. So I think growing business in the US and honing in on EMEA, to me is a problem. I see this as a mistake for startups all the time. No, you go where you're getting traction and then you start to spread out with expansion through your current clients. That's called wallet share kids. You start where they're buying it, and then you spread out. So don't split your luck, especially if you're getting traction in the US which many EU companies have problems with right out of the gate. So that being said, the practical application in healthcare alone makes this company worth a look for me. And the money that will be thrown at it, at about every single step until they get acquired. I agree. Right out of the gate, they're going to be an organization that, you're going to see a lot of people, I think try to go and acquire, but I think they hang on. Chad: I think if they can continue to get this type of cash and they are focused on go to market in the US. To me, I think this is a buy just from the standpoint of it's gonna be too big to fail. There are too many people in healthcare who want to try to get people up to speed quicker. And this might be a great way to do so. Okay, excellent. So we're gonna move on to something near and dear to both of our hearts. The Ford Motor Company. Just kidding, just kidding. Lieven, has the EU really gone mad? Here's an article from the Express entitled EU Madness Blamed. As Ford moves toward thousands of jobs, going back to the US. Ford is moving most of the positions concerned from Germany back to the US including roles in product development and administrative areas. Up to 3,200 jobs will be moved across the whole of Europe as the automaker cuts cost by shifting production toward electric vehicles at the Aachen's site on the border of Belgium and the Netherlands where Ford has a research center, 220 employees are fearing they could perspectively lose their job. Did I say that right? Is it Aachen? Lieven: Aachen, Yep. Chad: Aachen. Okay, I'm getting there. I'm getting there. I read this article and I didn't understand where they tied this to EU Madness. Can you connect the dots here Lieven. Lieven: Yeah. It's just about taxation and all kinds of legislation problems. But basically, if I'm right, I think Ford needed to retreat to the US because of tons of reasons I'll get into it later. And they needed someone to blame. So when you're retreating to the US, why not blame the EU. I mean. It's easy. The problems are not the EU, it's not the EU going mad problems. And the car manufacturing industry, there are tons of problems. I mean, there's a switch from combustion to full electric. There are logistic problems, problems in Belgium, for example, Volvo cars the car manufacturer they have a big factory in Belgium. Chad: Yeah. Lieven: They had to put most of their production workers on technical unemployment because they just couldn't get the spare parts to get a production line rolling. So it's close for 10 days now, just because they don't have the parts. And I guess with Ford it's the same thing. You have a Tesla reducing their prices. You have the rising costs for battery components when every car has to be an electrical one and there is a shortage. You get a problem. But in Europe, and probably in US as well, you have a terrible inflation, which has a big impact on the salaries. So salaries are going up pretty fast. And all these things together I think created a perfect storm for Fords. And if they were having troubles, this might be the perfect moment to retreat. But blaming the EU is probably just a cheap way to to explain. Chad: It's a great way to point fingers. 30 years ago, the US opened itself up to the outsourcing of manufacturing in a very, very big way. Canada, Mexico, Europe, and many other countries benefited in this major move toward globalization and let's be clear, we are a global economy, in the US and obviously in Europe, but the snapback effects were bound to happen especially after a pandemic and manufacturing supply lines were halted because a part and an American company needed to produce a final product for the market was being held up in a lockdown Europe or Asia, much like depending way too much on Russian oil. Europe needs to shore up its own manufacturing instead of leaning so hard on the US. Europe needs to have global ties, no question. But they also need to become much more self-sustainable. I don't believe in the bullshit of America first or EU first as we are global economies. Chad: Although we have to create sustainable and responsible growth instead of just focusing on the cheapest way to deliver a product. I think again, we made the choice as the US and this was going to happen sooner or later. It took 30 years. So Europe benefited for 30 years, but I agree 100%. I don't think this is the EU's fault. I think they just much like Russian oil, they got addicted to the Russian oil. They got addicted to the US cash and jobs, and you just can't put all your eggs in one basket. So I don't see this as the EU's maddening per se. Lieven: No. And 3,200 jobs, that's a lot. But then again it's really nothing. Those people won't have much difficulties finding a new job because every company in Germany is craving technicians engineers. Chad: Yeah. Lieven: Most of them won't have a big problem. I can imagine Ford not being happy at the moment, given all the circumstances. But to be honest, we prefer German cars and Ford try to make American cars in Germany. It's just not a German car. And In Europe we like German cars. So Fords good riddance go home by. SFX: Boy that escalated quickly. Chad: Well, I have to say that when I spend time in Europe, I don't see a lot of American cars over there anyway. And the ones that I do see most of are Fords. Lieven: Fords. Yeah. Sure. Chad: But those are... They're more the fiestas, the small, the incredibly little cheap ones. That can fit into a parking space very nicely. But you don't see, I mean, you don't see, I think I've seen maybe one Ford, one or two Ford trucks in Portugal and in Portugal, especially in the Algarve, you have much more space to move and those types of things. It's not like a big city. So I would've thought that I would've seen more of those, but no, that's just not the case. Chad: The Ford Raptor and the Ford F-150 or what's it called, those really big pickups. I like them. Deep inside, I'm a redneck and I would love to have a pickup and a porch and shotgun, but in Europe it's just not practical. I mean, driving a pickup through Paris is not something I would like to do. But Fords like you said, we have the Ford Focus or Ford Fiesta the smaller ones are pretty spread. I think they sell a lot. The Ford Mondeo, those others I used to see more than I do now, but this could be my impression. Maybe I just don't look at them anymore. They are for company cars and many people here have a company car, and those are mostly German cars because for so many reasons. But reseller prices are higher. Chad: I do have my eye on a Puma. Have you seen the Ford Pumas? Lieven: Yeah. Chad: When we get down back to Portugal, I think I wanna buy me a Ford Puma. But at the end of the day, this is Ford. This is one organization, but much like we saw it with Twitter, Twitter started doing cuts, right? And then you started seeing all these tech companies making cuts and they're pointing their fingers at Twitter saying, well, if they can do it, we can do it too. Do you think other companies will point at Ford and say, well if they can do it, not to mention with all the pressure to get manufacturing back into the US after 30 years of stupidity here in the United States and focusing on nothing but college and not technical degrees, right? Do you think that there's going to be a much larger snapback than just this initial 3,200 jobs? Lieven: Could be not in the current industry, I think and other industries could be definitely we'll get reshuffle of everything that's going to go fast because the coming years will be hard. I'm not a macro economist, so I'm not going to make heavy predictions about this. But you are probably right, it will happen. Chad: I'm not a macro economist, but I do play one on a podcast. Big shout out to our buddy Joel. Hopefully everything's is going well with the family. And we will see you back here on the Chad and Cheese behind a mic saying stupid shit. Before we know it. Lieven: Promise. 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 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.

SUBSCRIBE and LISTEN Pretty standard stuff this week: Industry layoffs at Eightfold.ai, Jobcase, and others. Unicorns. The Indeed Cartel. Buy-or-Sell with Moonhub, Listo, and Disclo. Workday's sugar daddy complex and pushes toward a 4-day work week. But while the menu is a bit vanilla, you can rest assured the spices that Chad & Cheese mix into this dish are guaranteed to leave you with a horrible case of heartburn. You have been warned, even though you know you can't look away. 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 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. Pat Benatar, Deep Purple, and James Taylor have announced summer tours. Someone passed the Cialis and the Liquid Death. Hey kids, you're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host, Joel, ready for some football, Cheesman. Chad Sowash: And this is Chad. Are they really calling it Bard? Sowash. Joel Cheesman: On this week's show, in Deeds Monopoly, Workday wants to be your sugar daddy and a little buy or sell. Let's do this. Chad Sowash: Welcome back. Welcome back, brother. So, how many six packs of Lone Star did you actually go through this week? Joel Cheesman: So, there's really only one evening where drinking made sense and no one else drank. So, I found it hard to do a whole six pack. So, I bought one of those super-sized Coronas. I don't know if you can find them in Indiana, but in Texas, they're everywhere. Chad Sowash: Yes, go figure. Joel Cheesman: A lime and a big Corona was all I needed for my little trip to Texas. Sorry, I couldn't be there for the European show this week, but I hear it's awesome. You should check it out. Chad Sowash: Lieven and I held court, and it was all good. It was all good. Fun stuff. Fun stuff. Joel Cheesman: Lieven is blossoming on that show. It's a lot of fun to watch. Chad Sowash: He misses you, though. You should have seen the tears in his eyes when I told him that you weren't going to be able to make it. Joel Cheesman: Well, speaking of Texas, I should see him in Texas for TAtech in a few months. Chad Sowash: Oh, nice. Joel Cheesman: So, we'll have to get some good barbecue and Sixth Street time with Lieven. Chad Sowash: Austin. Joel Cheesman: Austin. Chad Sowash: Good times in Austin. So, let's hit some shout-outs. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, let's get to some shout-outs. So, you mentioned Google a little bit. You kind of teased it there. So, Bard, not as in Simpson, but as in just B-A-R-D, it's Google's answer to ChatGPT. I didn't think anyone could do a worse job of branding than ChatGPT, but Google said, hold my beer and name theirs Bard. Anyway, things are off to a bad start, Chad. After making an error in a recent public demo, the stock took a hit to the tune of 7% and $100 billion in market value destruction. Ouch. Holy innovator's dilemma. Come on, Google. Chad Sowash: So, I mean, I don't think Bard's a bad name. I mean, it's short. It's easy to remember, and anybody who understands what a Bard is just kind of makes sense. You think of a poet or a singer, a Bard, per se. So, yeah, I think it's better than ChatGPT. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, here's my fear. They fucked it up on the demo, so they're going to come out with a new version. It's going to be Bard Plus. That'll be the official brand. Chad Sowash: Here's the thing is that fucking up a demo or the product not being 100% ready, right, it's not fully baked, in this situation doesn't mean anything. I mean, you take a look at OpenAI. They put out ChatGPT, and it starts putting out some really cool shit, but a lot of it was bullshit and not real information. It was actually learning off of disinformation. So, it's one of those things where we're starting to evolve, I think, in seeing that we understand that as we've talked about on the show, AI is a puppy. You got to train that puppy, right? Well, this puppy is bigger and it's been trained well. Imagine what ChatGPT 4 or 5 looks like. It's going to be amazing. So, this is evolving. Joel Cheesman: You can't mess up the demo, man. You can't mess up the demo. You know the questions. Chad Sowash: Not that big of a deal. Joel Cheesman: It's all staged and they fucked it up, man. Chad Sowash: Not a big deal. Not a big deal. My first shout out goes to Hubert Wartza, who apparently is our new Polish hype man. Hubert is a listener, loves the podcast so much that he had to sing it from the highest peak, AKA his LinkedIn account. We do appreciate the public demonstration of affection for the Chad and Cheese podcast, where PDA is always welcome, kids. Shout out to Hubert. Joel Cheesman: Holy pierogi. That got me all warm and fuzzy when we got a little love from the Polish sect of our listeners. Shout out to our friend Chris Russell, a super fan of the show. You know, his name used to be CM Russell, and he changed it to Chris. I don't know if CM was hard for people to pronounce or not, but formerly CM, Chris Russell, recently on his job board secret site published the top five Job boards according to traffic. I bet you can guess who number one was, Chad, our friends at Indeed at 250 million. Chad Sowash: Monster didn't win that one? Joel Cheesman: Monster did not make the cut. I don't want to ruin the top five for anybody, but this is all based on similar web data. Indeed comes in at 250 million monthlies. LinkedIn, which is it a job board or not, obviously a lot of non-job board traffic, they're about a billion and a half per month. Glassdoor, the sister company to Indeed, is 40 million people. So combined, let's call it 300 million visitors per month between those two. ZipRecruiter comes in at number four at 34 million actives per month. And JobCase, maybe a little bit of a surprise for some people, but not if they listen to this show, came in at 24 million. And that is the top five, which was not the top five 20 years ago. So you got to pay attention, kids. These lists do change. Chad Sowash: And you wonder how much of that traffic is like bot traffic that is all arbitrage. Joel Cheesman: Are you saying B-O-T or B-O-U-G-H-T or both? Chad Sowash: Arbitrage is what I'm saying. Joel Cheesman: Okay. Okay. Chad Sowash: Yes, we'll talk a little bit more about Indeed later. Joel Cheesman: Yes, we will. Chad Sowash: My next shout out is to Wrexham, who made it further in the FA Cup than Chelsea, Aston Villa, and Everton, all premier league teams. They beat Coventry, who plays three leagues above them, and it took Sheffield United, the number two team in the championship league, two matches to finally put away Wrexham. So Sheffield United will be playing in the Premier League next year, and it took them two matches. So it was amazing watching this little bitty team out of Wrexham, Wales actually come out of nowhere and get this far in the FA Cup. It was pretty amazing to watch. I enjoyed watching every match. SFX: Europe has a bunch of countries in it. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, I didn't understand most of that, but I will admit to watching a Wrexham match, because the Philly football game had one of the owners from Wrexham at the tailgating with an actual booth, an eight-fold style booth from HR Tech with gear and big screen TV. So I was like, oh, it's on right now. I'm going to go check it out while I'm waiting for football to start. And it was entertaining. They took a lead, and then they got tied, and then Ryan Reynolds is there. It's kind of a fun thing. I'm glad that you enjoyed it, but I didn't understand much of anything that you said in that shout-out. However, a lot of our people hopefully will understand this. [music] Joel Cheesman: Our friends at Shaker Recruitment Marketing, at shaker.com, make one hell of a sexy career site. Chad, like me, you've probably ordered lots of food on DoorDash late at night. Chad Sowash: No. Joel Cheesman: But if you haven't checked out DoorDash's career site recently, you should. Shaker crushed it. This is from their Instagram account, their being Shaker, "We wanted candidates to feel the culture through the site experience. This web flow built and hosted site is not only dynamic and efficient, but this new design also provides a significant reduction of annual back-end tool cost." They also increased the overall site performance by 70%. Shout out to our friends at Shaker who know how to build a pretty good website. And DoorDash is a good example of how to do it. Chad Sowash: A couple of quick shout-outs from me. Bill Fanning, friend of the show. He is the new CEO of a newly hatched startup called Greetr. That's G-R-E-E-T-R. Joel Cheesman: Like Flickr. Chad Sowash: Exactly. But Greetr. And then congratulations to Omar Khateeb, CEO of JobPixel and his lovely wife for bringing in Gianni into the world. That's right. She did a lot of work because that kid was over nine pounds. Joel Cheesman: There you go. There you go. My first was 10.6 pounds or 10.6 and Stella was 9.6. Chad Sowash: Wow. Jesus. Joel Cheesman: Jeremy was a month early. He was like seven something. Chad Sowash: Oh, my God. Joel Cheesman: So he was small. But he was a month early. Chad Sowash: That's the land of C-section right there. Joel Cheesman: You've seen Cole recently, right? Maybe you haven't. He's eating Fishers Indiana as we speak. And speaking of eating, let's talk about drinking because if people have signed up for our free shit, if they've gone to chadcheese.com, click the free link, they could win free beer from our friends at Aspen Tech Labs, whiskey from our homies at Textkernel, or if it's their birthday this month, they could win rum from Plum. And they can do it while wearing a fashionable Chad and Cheese T-shirt sponsored by our friends at JobGet. But you have to play if you want to win. Go to chadcheese.com and click the free link. Chad Sowash: So Sarah Berlin won beer courtesy of Aspen Tech Labs this week, and that was pretty awesome. I was making fun of the boys over at FactoryFix because they didn't win. But speaking of Aspen Tech Labs, you don't know how many startups I've talked to who have full teams. I'm going to talk about startups. They're spending a lot of resources on spidering jobs. And I tell every single one of them, it's a waste of your fucking time. It is hard, there's a lot of maintenance. Call Aspen Tech Labs and have them do that hard, heavy lifting for you. So if I got to put any type of shout-out out there, it's for Aspen Tech Labs and doing some of the hardest work in the industry for some of the biggest vendors in the industry. Joel Cheesman: Speaking of FactoryFix, Mike Schaefer, I think, celebrated a birthday recently. Chad Sowash: There we go. Joel Cheesman: He was highlighted on the show, which brings us to birthdays. Chad Sowash: Yes. SFX: Happy birthday. Joel Cheesman: The week is the second week of February. All right. Again, friends, this is sponsored by our friends at Plum. Celebrating a birthday, we've got Andrew Moll, Jennifer Kangas. Chad Sowash: JCK. Joel Cheesman: Jonathan Zube, Saheed Ahmed, Charles Bratz, Jim Kurtz, Jim Carragher, Brian Ravina. Coley Nichols. That sounds like a spell check change. Sorry. Sorry, Coley, if that's not your name. Matt Reardon, Nicole McKeon, Jackie Scherenberger, Brett Minchington, and my favorite Indeed employee, Scott Stum, all celebrating... SFX: Happy birthday. Joel Cheesman: A birthday this week. Happy birthday, kids. Chad Sowash: That's right. Chadcheese.com/free. Get in there. Put your birthday in there. You never know what you might win. And you can win right now if you go to Plum.io and you take their assessment. It's kind of gamified, kind of fun, kind of cool. Check it out. Joel Cheesman: Chad, it feels like we're getting close to travel time. What's going on with our travel schedule? Chad Sowash: We are. And I'm pretty fucking excited because UNLEASH America is coming up in April, and they are switching forums. We've talked about this before. They're usually at the MGM. They're going to be at Caesars Forum, a much larger area, which is amazing. Then you and I are heading off to iCIMS at the iCIMS INSPIRE in May at Coronado Bay. That shouldn't suck. And then last but not least, it's time to go back to Europe. Yes, in July. RecFest. SFX: Europe has a bunch of countries in it. Chad Sowash: In London. We've got a long list of events that we're going to be at this year already at Chadcheese.com. Go to the upper right-hand corner. Click on events. Register. Go to UNLEASH America in Vegas. Go to iCIMS if you're invited. I think that's a velvet rope kind of thing. And last but not least, RecFest. You got to go to RecFest. That's a fucking party, too. So we'll see you there. [music] Chad Sowash: Topics! Joel Cheesman: All right. As is the tradition recently, we've got... SFX: Layoffs. Joel Cheesman: Layoffs. That's right. A little bit of a layoff update. Okay. Gusto, in our industry, had a 5% haircut, roughly 126 employees. Sana benefits, 19% cut. Omnipresent, Eightfold, one of the big ones recently, rumored at 20%. Chad, you had a little exchange with Alexander Cohen, one of their comms guys. How'd that go? Chad Sowash: So I reached out to Eightfold CEO, Ashu, for a comment and received the following response from Alexander Cohen, Director of Corporate Marketing over at Eightfold. "Eightfold AI does not comment on HR-related matters." Let that sit for a second. "Eightfold continues to focus on capitalizing on its enormous market opportunity. As part of this process, Eightfold maintains an unwavering commitment to ongoing customer success." Your thoughts on that? What do you think after hearing messaging going public, knowing that Eightfold did not go public with any messaging whatsoever? This is the second time they've not, right? What are your thoughts? Joel Cheesman: Well, first of all, I'm upset that you didn't ask him if they were going to have another 16,000 by 16,000 booth at HR Tech this year. Chad Sowash: My bad. My bad. Joel Cheesman: But secondly, and you underscored this, definite lack of transparency in an industry where we're trying to encourage and highlight transparency. Chad Sowash: Crazy. I mean, well, first and foremost, they say we don't discuss or we don't comment on HR matters. You're a fucking HR company. You're a vendor, right? You should actually hold yourself above bar and you need to be transparent. So saying Eightfold does not comment on HR-related matters is total bullshit, 100%. Then from a business standpoint, let's jump the fence and go to the business side of the house. Your investors deserve you to stop hiding your fucking tail, being in the fetal position in the corner and not making public comments. You have way too much fucking cash in funding from investors to not say something, not to mention what was the severance, all those things. How did you take care of those people? If I was a company and I was looking for systems in RFP process, I would not include Eightfold because I do not want a company that treats their people like shit. I don't know. They could because they weren't transparent. I don't want them to be a part of my tech stack. Joel Cheesman: They need a spreadsheet, Chad. They need a spreadsheet of everyone who's been laid off with contact information and a LinkedIn post by their CEO. Chad Sowash: Was that Oyster? Who was that? I can't remember. That was fucking funny. Joel Cheesman: It doesn't really matter. It's going to be a trend anyway. We need a spreadsheet, people. Chad Sowash: Oh, my God. Joel Cheesman: Spreadsheet with people on it. The layoffs keep coming. Chad Sowash: I just got a message as well. I got a message as well from an insider that JobCase also had 50 that were... Hit a riff as well. Joel Cheesman: Okay. Not a huge number. I'm going to guess five to 10 percent-ish of their folks. Chad Sowash: Good question. Joel Cheesman: I guess we can look into that. Chad Sowash: Good question. Joel Cheesman: Not 50%, 50 people. Chad Sowash: No. Yes. Joel Cheesman: Right. Okay. Make sure I get that. All right. Well, yeah, the layoffs keep coming. But let's get to some real news, Chad, and talk some Workday. Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: Well, after a round of layoffs last week, talking about layoffs. SFX: Layoffs. Joel Cheesman: Workday has announced a $250 million expansion of its Workday Ventures Fund. They'll focus on emerging technologies like AI and ML. Workday Ventures has already invested in 43 tech companies in our space, including Guild, who we actually just interviewed and published. So you should check that out, kids, if you haven't already. Beamery, JobCase, and Paradox, some show faves. Chad, your take on the news out of Workday. Chad Sowash: This is a great spin from last week to this. So to try to obviously stamp out the whole layoffs conversation and pivot into, hey, look, we've got money. We're going to spend it. I think it's smart. The three areas that they talk about are AI and ML. And within that bullet point, they mentioned Paradox by name. So hello, acquisition of Paradox. We've talked about this before, right? We talked about they have 43 companies in their portfolio. We've talked about like the Beamery's of the world, who've taken $223 million in funding. Are they a prime target? I don't think they are, to be quite frank. I think they need something like a Paradox. To me, for them to literally highlight them in the AI and ML side, I think that's fairly telling. The intelligent automation piece is around accounts payable, which I think accounts payable for the most part can be almost completely automated. And then, you know, serving targeted markets. I mean, they want to grow the portfolio, but I also see the opportunity for some, you know, obvious acquisitions to happen. Joel Cheesman: In addition to the layoffs, they have a new co-CEO, and co-CEOs always do so well. So this might have been a little bit of a distraction for that. But why more companies don't do this is a mystery to me. I mean, I know you have the occasional Indeed investment and things here and there, but Workday takes this shit really seriously, and we talk a lot of shit about them. By the way, be sure to watch the Super Bowl this Sunday, kids. Workday has a new ad campaign, which is exciting and we'll be sure to talk about on next week's recruitment marketing show. A little teaser there for everybody. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: But they get this part right. Their business aside from the monetary benefit, it helps Workday get closer to the trends that will help its own business benefit. It gets them closer to acquisitions, like you mentioned, and that isn't just the companies they put money into. It's also the companies they say no to. For every company that they say yes to, there are probably 100 that get a no. However, Workday is able to keep its finger on the pulse of the industry and fill in a product map for trends that they like from the companies that pitch them their businesses. Somewhere in that $250 million investment is probably a billion dollars indirect and indirect ROI. I, for one, applaud Workday for their Ventures project. Chad Sowash: Yeah. On the recruiting side, you can't have a worse, more rigid piece of shit platform to work with, which is one of the reasons why I think Paradox moving into that space might be pretty sexy to them. Joel Cheesman: And we love sexy, Chad. Which brings us to the unsexy. Let's talk about Indeed. What's up? Chad Sowash: Indeed's shady practices, kids. That wasn't something I said. It was something that actually a CEO said. So on LinkedIn this week, Erin Craven, CEO of an SMB organization, detailed how her $100 per week budget on Indeed suddenly turned into $1680 as Indeed shifted her from CPC to pay per applicant. She said in the post, "In our example, we had 112 applicants, and they charged us $15 per applicant. This change is so shady in my opinion, and will continue to hurt small business owners. Time to rethink where we post." Then a few job board vendors who make loads of cash off of selling Indeed traffic and could benefit greatly from this change, they started immediately carrying water for Indeed by saying Erin and other employers were informed and it was all their fault. Chad Sowash: Meanwhile, Mitch Gerson over at The Gerson Agency posted the following, "In January around the 5th, they, Indeed, did send out this helpful little 200-plus page, feel the sarcasm there, of terms of service via email in case you missed it. Buried in there, are these changes to PPA from PPC. That occurred. They announced it on October of '22, and laid low until this week as they rolled them out. This appears to be a very uneven roll out only affecting the smallest companies at first from our observations, but we don't know for sure how, why, when all employers will be updated." So that's how Indeed's new rollout's going, what do you think? Joel Cheesman: A wow. Indeed, price gouging color me surprised. By the way Erin is Canadian and they were able to piss off a Canadian. So congratulations Indeed, you're even ticking off the Canadians, which are pretty... Chad Sowash: Not easy. Joel Cheesman: Pretty tough to piss off. Let's go back to my shot-outs for a second, shall we? Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: Number one and number two traffic sites in the world, Indeed and Glassdoor, 300 or so million users. They'll probably never get pinched for being a monopoly, but they sure are acting like it. Sadly customers are letting them get away with it. In a traditional monopoly, the company has no check on its power to raise prices or lower the quality of its product or service. Here's the rub though, Indeed and Glassdoor have competition, but employers are apparently too lazy, short-sighted or incompetent to put their money somewhere else. I say quit being a victim of the Indeed cartel and find in other places to spend your recruiting budgets. Vote with your wallets, go somewhere else, let Indeed know that what they're doing is bullshit, and maybe they'll change. And if they don't, they'll go out of business some day. Chad Sowash: Or they'll fall down the mountain like Monster did. Joel Cheesman: Sure. There's no newspaper ads, Chad. Chad Sowash: Exactly, exactly. So this story is not done. Okay, so now we're gonna jump into the land of forced registration. Next is the pure hypocrisy of Indeed's new forced registration process to anyone who wants to apply. So back in 2017, we're gonna go back in time. Back in 2017, Indeed shut down company hiring platforms that we're using Talent Network forms to collect basic data before the candidate was sent to the applicant tracking system to apply. Hiring companies created that process because such high injection rates in the application process. So the hiring companies wanted some form of information to try and coax the candidate back to finishing the application. Chad Sowash: Indeed said that it was causing market confusion and damaging the Indeed brand, so they actually cut off the talent network forms. And we're talking about back then, companies like SmashFly, they literally ripped SmashFly out of the process, even though that was the process that the company wanted. So during that time frame, high level talent acquisition leaders took months to negotiate Indeed off that ledge. One actually said to me, I quote, "It was like we were negotiating with terrorists." So why does this matter? It provides historical context for what Indeed is doing now. Indeed is now forcing candidates to create an Indeed profile before applying for that job on the corporate career site. Chad Sowash: Yes, they've created their very own talent network forms of sorts. It's the evil empire, kids. They'll do what they want. They'll call it job seek... It's for the good of the job seeker at every single turn, but they're doing exactly, exactly what they said was bad for the job seeker just a few years ago. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, it sad. A little history lesson for the kids in the mid-2000s when Indeed came out, the job board landscape was riddled with NASCAR ads, not actual NASCAR ads, but sites that looked like cars and NASCAR with ads everywhere. Give us your Social Security Number, making you put in your email address and your contact, you have to upload a resume, and Indeed comes along and it's a breath of fresh air. Chad Sowash: It was. Joel Cheesman: You don't have to register. It's every job that they can get a hold of, it's not just job board. It was a breath of fresh air. Chad Sowash: It was Google for Jobs. Joel Cheesman: While the Ladders and the CareerBuilders and the Monsters of the world, were getting their ass kicked by Indeed. Indeed is now falling back into the trap of acting like a bully, a terrorist, a monopolist, and they should take heed and call their founders and sort of get a refresher on what made Indeed great in the beginning. And it was not this bullshit about pushing people around and acting like you're the only game in town. Ultimately, the chickens do come home to roost, karma is a bitch, and this shit will probably come back to kick you in the ass. Call me Nostradamus, but this is not good for Indeed long-term. I don't think they're gonna pivot and change the best that the market can do again, is take their money elsewhere, but I doubt that's gonna happen. Chad Sowash: The very high level talent acquisition leaders that I talk to, actually said back then, they knew that they needed to start looking for alternatives. So having that in their brain back then they've been looking and they've been formulating, so whether they can put it in place or not, we'll see. But companies, again, historically have to understand the behavior of the vendors that they're working with. Joel Cheesman: Let's take a quick break. DailyPay... More news Chad before we get to buy or sell, which I know you're excited about, but... Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: Just hold on a second. DailyPay, a financial technology company has raised 260 million to fund a more growth product innovation and international expansion. This brings total funding to $1.1 billion. That's right, you guys. The funding is divided between a revolving credit facility provided by Barclays and Angelo Gordon and a term loan from SVP Capital and Neuberger Berman. That's complicating. Alright, Kevin Coop CEO of DailyPay says he expects the funding to propel the company's position as the market leader in on-demand pay. Chad, your thoughts on the new funding at DailyPay. Chad Sowash: Yeah, that's funding. That's not the valuation. The funding is $1.1 billion. Joel Cheesman: Oh, it's still unicorn worthy though. Chad Sowash: That's fucking crazy. Oh, well, of course it is. That means that what's the date of valuation, but let's be clear, payment tech in the US is lagging, and that's being nice. People in China are paying with their faces, it's creepy, but it's very advanced technologically. In little old Portugal, we're paying with the QR code from our banking app. While here in the US, we're finally seeing tap to pay as a standard, but we're not quite there yet. So the opportunity here is huge, and then visioning the standardization of a global on-demand payroll system is obviously an enormous opportunity. So in an under-developed market, like the US, this type of tech could help us finally get up to speed, actually pass and leap frog to where we need to be. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, this company is so in demand and so successful right now that Chime, that you've probably heard of, a new fintech, spent much of 2022 trying to buy DailyPay, but both of its offers, they had two, including a $2 billion bid, were rejected. That's according to people with direct knowledge of the deal and talks via story by The Information. Chime offered $1.6 billion in May of '22, comprised of $300 million in cash and $1.2 billion in stock and a $100 million in restricted stock units. It sweetened the deal a month later to $2 billion with $700 million in cash and $1.2 billion in stock and $100 million in RS use. You know, my son Cole, he's working, he's working now. And his money goes into a bank account that I manage. And pretty much regularly he asks me if he gets paid, has money gone on my account? I keep telling him it's every two weeks, every Friday. Chad Sowash: Does he have an app so he can see it? Joel Cheesman: No. He's 16. He'll get access eventually. We'll see if he can drive his... Get his license and drive the car. Okay, but anyway, I digress. Cole doesn't have any bills. He's buying camo pants from Finland, that's the kind of purchases that he has to make with his money. So if he doesn't have bills, and he is asking every day, imagine people who do have bills and need cash on a daily basis. Frankly, how soon before employers that don't pay daily, get behind the eight ball and just get crushed by all the companies and employers that do? Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: I think this is gonna be a must-have, a low bar for every employer that's in the service industry to have. Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: And if you don't have it, you're gonna lose a lot of people and prospects. So for me, like it's a trend that's gonna happen almost 100% for those kinds of companies, and DailyPay is in the catbird seat to take a lot of market share, and companies like Chime are willing to write some checks. I see an IPO in the future. Maybe that'll be in '24 predictions, but the future is so bright, they gotta wear shades at DailyPay. You're ready for a little, oh, I don't know, buy or sell? Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: Alright, here we go, kids. You know how the game is played. We talk about three startups that have recently gotten funding, we read a summary and then Chad or I buy or sell the business. You're ready to play Chad? Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: Here we go. Alright, first up is Moonhub, San Francisco-based Moonhub and AI-powered recruiting platform has raised $4.4 million in seed funding. The platform aims to revolutionize the way that recruiters search for candidates by looking beyond keywords and looks at billions of data points from the public web to analyze a candidate's profile and identify their potential fit for a role. The company hopes to use the funding to grow and expand. Founded in 2021, the company employees 17 people. Chad, buy or sell Moonhub? Chad Sowash: So they go really heavy on the keyword search era kind of thing, which I totally agree it. We're moving away from bullying and keyword search and focusing on contextualizing resumes and backgrounds and those types of things. Makes a lot of sense, but this is too far. This has gone way too far, way too fucking fast. Then they wanna... They wanna slap a ChatGPT on this here sometime soon. And this is my prediction, which is fairly easy. ChatGPT will be the new AI. And what I mean by that is from the standpoint that every company known to human kind will start slapping ChatGPT on marketing and sales pitches. This has gone way too far, way too fast. So this is... Especially when we're talking about auditing and compliance. And this is a hell no, sell, sell, sell for me. Joel Cheesman: Okay, Chad, tell me if you've heard this one before. Stanford grad, who's done some time at Oxford and worked at Facebook thinks they can revolutionize recruiting even though they're barely out of diapers. I think we've seen this movie too many times for this to be a buy. Founder Nancy Xu or Juh, will be bored in a year and onto something cooler, and also Moonhub, the name blows, it's a major sell for me as well. Joel Cheesman: Let's see if Disclo, D-I-S-C-L-O, can do better. Disclo an Atlanta-based startup has raised $6.5 million in known funding so far with the most recent being a $5 million seed round. They develop software to assist employees in asking for disability accommodations at work and help employers to manage said requests. Joel Cheesman: The software anonymize the employee's disability, telling the employer that the individual has filed a notice and what the accommodation request is. The startup hopes its existence will raise awareness about disability and accommodation rights. Founded in 2019, they employ 12 people. Chad, are you a Disclo duck or is this a death by Disclo situation? Chad Sowash: Such a great song. So I'm close to this one, not Disclo the company, but the actual problem is Julie, my wife, as you all know listening, is the executive director for Disability Solutions, and she's worked for over a decade to build talent pipelines which include training, accommodations, retention, and more for the disability community. Plus working, my work in creating the National Labor Exchange with local, state and federal government, plus community-based organizations who represent a cross-section of workers who are also disabled. Needless to say, Disclo has identified a portion of the real problem that companies need to address on a regular basis. So knowing this is a problem and having a tool to be able to jump in there is somewhat of an easy button, which is exactly what companies want for something they don't understand. Is a buy for me. Joel Cheesman: So I'm glad I waited on this because sometimes I think you're gonna love something and then you flip it on me, like, "This is some bullshit because of A, B and C." And this is something you're way closer to than I am, so I was kinda waiting to see what I was gonna do before I got you. So I'm glad I was leaning yes, but I'm glad that you confirmed that. So I will also add to Chad's comments that if you go to their website, a big red line with a headline at the top reads the following "North Memorial Health to pay $180,000 to resolve EEOC disability to discrimination lawsuit." Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: Most sites have a streaming headline at the top, it's like, "Hey, we just got money," or "Hey, we just got some... " This is like people are gonna get their ball sack crushed if they don't abide by this shit. So what are three things HR never wants to hear? Lawsuit, EEOC and fines, our industry has a history of giving blank checks to companies that promise to never go to court by hearing words like EEOC, lawsuit and fines. So for that reason alone, Disclo should be staying alive for a long, long time. It's a buy and an awesome set of dad jokes from me. Alright, let's go to Listo. Provider of HR services for globally distributed workforces has raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding from angel investors. Joel Cheesman: The company's platform automates HR functions for clients with global teams, providing outsourced worker payments and transparent single-line monthly invoices. Listo also offers global recruiting services and assistance with immigration processes. The company aims to "lift people everywhere" by providing meaningful employment and competing against established players like remote.com and Turing. Chad, is it about damn time for a company like this, or does the truth hurt those are Listo jokes, by the way, because I'm hip like that. Chad, buy or sell Listo? Chad Sowash: Listo means ready in Spanish. It sounds like a stripped down version of what you were talking about, more of the well-funded EOR companies that are out there today, remote.com, Atlas, Deel, Oyster Papaya, Velocity Global, there's a ton of them. But this is a very broad TAM unicorn segment, which is why we're seeing companies jump into it. If there was a segment to get into that will score and deserve high valuations, it's this one. And knowing most of the others have taken large sums of funding, this makes Listo a cheaper option as an acquisition target right out of the gates. But they need to make a lot of noise and punch above their weight. I think they can, and I think... I love this segment, so this is a buy for me. Joel Cheesman: That's a buy for Mr. Sowash. And we officially disagree on at least one buy or sell company. This one is easy for me. Too little, too late, they're bringing a knife to a gun fight, Remote, Deel, Oyster, Turing, and Andela and others are going to crush them like me with an empty beer can. The rumors are true, this company has no juice. It's a sell. Alright, let's take a quick break. Talk about Maryland. Chad Sowash: Maryland? Joel Cheesman: Let's talk about Maryland, I think for the first time on this podcast. Chad Sowash: We never do that. Joel Cheesman: Some famous sons and daughters of Maryland, by the way, Chad, Michael Phelps, Harriet Tubman, Babe Ruth, Frederick Douglas and David Hasselhoff. That's right, I need an excuse to say David Hasselhoff on the show. Chad Sowash: Who's big in Germany, by the way. Joel Cheesman: Anyway, a new bill called the four-day work week act of 2023 has been proposed in Maryland, incentivizing public and private employers to transition to a four-day work week for at least 30 employees without reducing pay or benefits. Employers would receive a state income tax credit of up to $750,000 per fiscal year for two years if they participate. Yowza. Chad, did you and Maryland just become best friends? Chad Sowash: This is more corporate welfare for god sakes. It's like, you should be doing this anyway, you're giving your employee's reasons to love you and stay, but yet the government has to subsidize that. So welcome, corporate welfare all around. The International Labor Organization published a study that demonstrated "Americans take fewer vacations and work longer hours than most Europeans, and health problems related to workplace stress kill thousands of us every year." Chad Sowash: So in the US, we have been pretty much born and bred to live to work, where in Europe it's more of work to live. So we're trying to change our culture after the pandemic, which I appreciate. And then the HR Dive article, which we're talking about here, also states, "Preventing a decline," when we talk about productivity or, well, they gonna lose productivity because we're going from four days to five days. So preventing the decline, the key is to prioritize tasks that deliver outcomes that really matter to company success and dump time wasters like unnecessary meetings. So if you listen to that statement, why the fuck weren't we do in this before? I mean, this is... All this is doing is helping us cut the fat. We had a ton of, let's say, bloat time during the regular 40-hour work week period, sat around the water cooler, BS with friends, took long lunches, had bullshit meetings, that kind of stuff. Now, what we're trying to do is say, look, when you're at the job, do the job, but guess what? We're gonna give you more you time. And I think that's a great benefit. I don't know why the government has to pay for this to happen, because it seems like a smart evolution of work, but here we are. SFX: That escalated quickly. Joel Cheesman: So yeah, the marketplace should determine whether it's a four-day work week or not, which brings us back to my old adage of the answer to all of your questions, my friend, is money. I don't know why the government would do this. Is it one day less off or one day more off that they're gonna be spending money and we can tax your sales? Is it because like I just don't know why the government is doing this. And frankly, I'm too sleep-deprived right now to figure it out. So instead, Chad, I'm gonna throw some other fun Maryland facts your way. Are you ready? Chad Sowash: Okay. Joel Cheesman: The first successful man to balloon flight in the US was via Baltimore. The Ouija board got its start in Maryland. And the Maryland Blue Crab is the official state crustacean. 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, 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 Latinos and bug fights on TikTok. OUTRO: Now, who you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off on the guilt. Let's save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite western, you can quit them either. We're out.

SUBSCRIBE and LISTEN Roe v. Wade being overturned has caused a wave of political upheaval in the United States, and many employers are being impacted. It's a big deal, especially for those who hire and employ Millennials and Gen Zs. That's why the boys invited Dr. Tana M. Session, an award-winning consultant, speaker, performance coach and best-selling author to the show. We're breaking down the tough issues and challenges companies are facing with the issue of abortion rights, and even throw in a little pay transparency debate for good measure. 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 Cheesman: 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 Roe to my Wade Chad Sowash. Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: And today we are just giddy to welcome Dr. Tana M. Session, an award-winning consultant, speaker, performance coach, bestselling author, and so much more. Dr. Tana, welcome to the podcast. Dr. Tana Session: Thank you so much Joel and Chad. I'm so honored and excited to be here today. Chad Sowash: We're excited to have you. This is... This is a... Joel Cheesman: Let's ask her again at the end if she's still happy to be here. Chad Sowash: Yes, yes, yeah let's do that. Well, this is a great topic, but before we get to that, you know, what did Joel miss in his intro? Tell us a little bit about Tana. Dr. Tana Session: Sure. So over 30 years of human resources experience and 10 of those as the head of HR for different organizations and been in the diversity space since 2007 when the first millennials started graduating and entering the workforce. [laughter] So I had to wrap my head around that new workforce very quickly. And live here in Los Angeles with my husband and have two grown sons. So we've been empty nesters since 2013, which allowed us to take a sabbatical. Last year we took a month off and traveled through five countries of Africa and this year we took two months off and traveled through eight countries of Africa. We touched all four corners. Plus the very southern, the most southern tip of Africa. We were able to go and touch it. Chad Sowash: Excellent, excellent, excellent. Joel Cheesman: Do you have a good wilderness story? Something on the plains... Dr. Tana Session: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: I love a good bug fight. Was there any sort of lion takedown that you got to see? Dr. Tana Session: I saw so much. [chuckle] Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Dr. Tana Session: It was... It was mating season for the lion, so we caught them on their honeymoon and for... Chad Sowash: Hello. Dr. Tana Session: Over a course of seven days they go at it. [laughter] Yes, absolutely. Over a course of seven days. They go at it about eight times a day. So we got to see six of those times. Joel Cheesman: Hello. Chad Sowash: Dang. Dr. Tana Session: [laughter] And we also got to see two water buffaloes fighting it out for dominance over the herd. And we watched the fight for 30 minutes and they were still going at it. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Oh yeah. Joel Cheesman: Fighting and dancing in Africa. Chad Sowash: That is amazing so... Joel Cheesman: As if I needed a better excuse to go visit Africa. Dr. Tana Session: Yeah. Chad Sowash: What's your favorite area of Africa? If you go back and you only had like a week to spend, where would you go? Dr. Tana Session: Zanzibar in Tanzania. Joel Cheesman: And why? Dr. Tana Session: The beach is by far one of the best. I always create my vacations around beaches. Chad Sowash: Yes, Amen. Dr. Tana Session: I'm a water person. I'm an Aquarius, so I'm a water person. And that Indian Ocean when you see the low tide where you can go walk out into the middle of the ocean, for about six hours a day, it's just unreal. Like something out of a movie and it's just a beautiful country and beautiful people. Chad Sowash: Yes, I am excited. My, the first place that I wanna go is Morocco. We actually just bought... Dr. Tana Session: Yeah. Chad Sowash: A place in Portugal just right across, right... Dr. Tana Session: Yep. Chad Sowash: So we wanna hit that, but Zanzibar, I... That's on the list now. Dr. Tana Session: Yeah. Well, we just... Actually just left Morocco, we were there for... Chad Sowash: Nice. Dr. Tana Session: Yeah. We were there for five days I think it was, and toured three different cities. Chad Sowash: Excellent, excellent. Joel Cheesman: Chad's gonna start with just the tip. He's gonna ease in to it. Chad Sowash: Just... [laughter] Dr. Tana Session: Okay. Chad Sowash: All we do. That's what we do. It's all we do here. [laughter] Dr. Tana Session: Okay. Chad Sowash: Frame it up Cheesman. Joel Cheesman: By the way, Dr. Tana hasn't heard our show before, so she's gonna be... Dr. Tana Session: I'm a virgin. Joel Cheesman: She's gonna hit it with a lot of stuff. We'll try to be gentle. Dr. Tana Session: Please be gentle. Chad Sowash: It's gonna be the pack of lions happening. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Anyway, [laughter] not going there based on what we just heard about the lions. All right. So we're here to talk about abortion, a legal precedent was recently overturned. I want you, because you are more abreast of this issue than we are. You're the expert. Set the table for our listeners. What happened, what's the current state of what's going on? And particularly we're talking about companies and the sort of where they're on the line on which side, or dancing on the line, or how that's working out from a corporate perspective. 'Cause our audience is mainly employers, recruiters and business folks. Dr. Tana Session: We can take it back to the original case of Roe v. Wade, where the Supreme Court decided that a woman had a right to basically her own healthcare choices, which included the right to abortion. And what happened in 2022 was... Well, it's been on the docket for quite some time. But what happened in 2022 was that the Supreme Court heard the case again based on occurrence lawsuit, and they decided that they needed to return the right to the States. And then so what they felt was the overall opinion was that the previous Supreme Court had an overreach in making this basically a federal law and they've now turned it back over to the States. So with that individual states, all 50, 51 of them are now able to decide whether or not they want to have this as a codified law or if they want to change it in some way. And many of them took the chance to change it or eliminate it. Joel Cheesman: And company's response was interesting to say the least. Talk a little bit about that. Dr. Tana Session: Yeah, I mean, some companies chose not to make any statements at all, but there were some that were very bold in their statements very quickly. Which, you know, proved that A, they were paying attention to this and hopefully HR was behind that with the executives, the C-suite and some of them came forward and said, "Hey look, we have employees that are gonna be negatively impacted based on where they live, and as a result we want to extend or offer additional benefits so that this won't be a detriment to them." And other companies said, "We don't have a comment, we're gonna leave it up to the individual, and their medical professional to decide how this should be handled." Joel Cheesman: And I know we here in Indiana, Eli Lilly is a major employer here in the state. And I know, they had even sort of alluded to the fact that they may have to open up shop in other states in order to sort of recruit and retain top talent. So that was another sort of initiative that a lot of companies took in light of this law. Dr. Tana Session: Yeah. Definitely happened with a lot of companies based in Texas were very quick to say that as well. Chad Sowash: You take, take a look at just companies, and again, they're kinda toeing the line. Some of them are saying nothing, they're being incredibly silent and some are actually speaking up. And according to Yale and their, their workforce analysis, they had a group of companies that they call pretty much early adopters, and tech companies were major supporters. 30% of companies that offer travel support, for the tech sector, where the average age of tech workers in the US are 35. 70% of companies were providing travel support and finance and 12% in the professional services. But here's the problem, the early movers only represent 101 companies and only nine of those companies are headquartered in red states. So to me, this feels more like political pandering than support. What are your thoughts around this? Dr. Tana Session: Yeah, I agree with you, and I'm hoping that it's not performative and that's my concern. Even with some of my clients I've been talking to about this since this got overturned last... Late last summer, to ensure that whatever statement they make A, they're willing to commit to it, and is for the long-term. It's not something that's knee jerk or something that they feel they have to put out there just because their competitors have done something similar. So my hope is... And those numbers are concerning, my hope is that more companies over the time have started to consider what type of benefits do they want to offer their employees so that they aren't negatively impacted. Chad Sowash: So, when it comes down to it from a company standpoint, we know travel support is important, right? But to me, it feels just like it's a band-aid. So what can companies do aside of moving out of the state? Dr. Tana Session: Yeah, well, one are the things that I think would be helpful is the healthcare provider, so whoever their insurance is through. Let's say their insurance is through Anthem. I'm just gonna throw a name out there, Anthem. Don't be upset with me. Chad Sowash: Sure. [laughter] Dr. Tana Session: But let's say it's Anthem, working with their healthcare provider to see what, if any additional coverages they can offer their employees, that, again, is long-term sustainable, that still falls under HIPAA protection, where the employee's private business doesn't have to be exposed to the company. And that they can freely utilize this benefit, in the privacy of their own healthcare. So I think that's one of the first things to do, is to really partner with the healthcare providers to see what, if any, additional benefits or extension of benefits they can offer. And those healthcare providers may be limited as well, based on the law, based on where they're based, all of those different things. So it's somewhat of a ripple effect, but I think the conversation needs to start there. And I do agree with you, I think the travel benefits is a band-aid, but it's to start it, right? So you may have employees that need to leave Texas to come to California, let's say in order to perform a legal abortion. Dr. Tana Session: My only concern with that is, who do they notify? Who's involved in that decision making process? Is it taxable income? Do they have to report it somehow? It's like so many questions that unfolds with that. Chad Sowash: That's... Yeah that's amazing. And what about the states that don't allow travel? There are states that do not allow travel. So it seems like the individual and perspectively the company, their hands could be tied. Is that pretty much the feeling right now? Dr. Tana Session: Yeah. But the federal law has come out basically and said, "Look, you can't stop employees or individuals from crossing state lines even for medical care." So whether this ends up in court is yet to be determined, but that was their counter to ensuring that employees did have the right to travel across state lines if necessary. And there has been reports that that has happened, right, over the last plus six months. So I don't think that that's going to permanently stop. What my concern is are neighbors reporting on other neighbors, or employees reporting or ratting out another employee? Because they get wind of the fact that this person took time off and, you know, came to California to get an abortion. So it's kinda like turning people against each other from that perspective, especially when they have a bounty out, which is what I call that reward. They have a bounty out of up to $10,000 in some states. Joel Cheesman: Michael Jordan famously said, "Republicans buy tennis shoes as well," in regards to whether... Why he wasn't more politically active or verbal. And he still sort of takes that stance. My question is, companies who do come out, why do you think they do? Is it recruiting retention? Is it just a good headline? Is it virtue signalling? Do some... Like what percentage really do feel the way that they do? Are you cynical about this or do you think that that it's genuine? Dr. Tana Session: I am cautiously optimistic. Much like I was back in the summer of 2020 when a lot of companies made statements about Black Lives Matter and, you know, wanting to be supportive of their Black and Brown employees and, you know, putting all these promises out there. Some have followed through with those promises. Some are still along the tailwind of following through and others fell off the radar. So I could see this being the same case here, especially again when politics do get involved. Because you have companies that either donate to certain political parties or perhaps receive some lobbying from certain political parties. So there's a certain sense of self-preservation I think in some cases with these companies where they can't necessarily be so aggressive in their statements or their promises to employees. The ones that have been, I feel like it's kind of like throwing caution to the wind. Dr. Tana Session: It is about retention. It is about being able to recruit and hire the best talent because it is still a competitive label market right now. And ultimately wanting the employees to feel that this is a place where they can be psychologically safe, where they can feel completely inclusive, that they can be their true, authentic selves. All the things that fold into diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging as well. This is part of that, part of that in terms of equity is ensuring that you have benefits that are equitable for all employees. Joel Cheesman: I appreciate the optimism. Dr. Tana Session: Cautious. Cautious optimism. Joel Cheesman: Cautious optimism. And the election that we just had here recently in the US. I'm guessing helps support that optimism. Talk about the red wave that didn't happen, the voting block of abortion rights activist that came out to maybe create that wave and into a ripple or not much of anything. I assume you were emboldened by the election. Talk about that night. Dr. Tana Session: I tried not to pay too much attention to it only because we were getting ready to go to Africa. So my husband and I mailed in our ballots here in California. We were like, "We're out. Whatever happens, happens, right?" But we were pleasantly surprised. And I think when you think about the workforce, first of all, let's talk about the new group of people who are eligible to vote, 18 year olds. Gen Z. Gen Z are the most culturally, ethnically, and socially diverse group to ever enter the workforce. And 18-year-olds are empowered and emboldened by the mistakes of the previous generations. And I think Roe v. Wade pissed them off. And I think that they are much more vocal about these types of things, and they speak truth to power. And what they did was they used their vote to do that. I also think about the Gen Z and Gen Y, Gen Z workforce. They're over 50% of the workforce. So those are the childbearing ages of employees, right? I'm 53. I'm no longer thinking about childbearing, I'm not even thinking about grandparenting, grandchildren. Joel Cheesman: Stop. You are not 53. Get out of here. Dr. Tana Session: I'll be 54 next month. I'm proud to say. Joel Cheesman: No, you stop, you look amazing. Chad Sowash: Not a day over 30. Dr. Tana Session: You know what they say? Black don't crack. Joel Cheesman: I'm not gonna say it. Dr. Tana Session: I'll say it. Black does not crack but no we are not... Apart of that I felt was this next generation of the workforce speaking truth to power and they used their vote to do so. They were angry, they were upset, they were appalled, they questioned why this was never a codified law. And so they used their vote to make certain that the right people got in office that would protect their rights. And that was for men and women within those groups. Chad Sowash: Yeah, yeah. So Joel had a quote, I'm gonna go ahead and use a quote too. Joel Cheesman: Oh boy. Chad Sowash: This is one Joel's gonna love because even the monster himself, Milton Friedman wrote in 1970 an article where he acknowledges that quote, "It may well be in the long term interest of a corporation to devote resources to providing amenities to the community or to improving its government. That may make it easier to attract desirable employees." Now even the ultra monster capitalist Milton Friedman, understood. Dr. Tana Session: I know. Chad Sowash: That if you don't take care of your people and your community, that profits won't... 'Cause Milton Friedman didn't give two shits about anything but profits, right? Dr. Tana Session: Right. Chad Sowash: So if he's talking about this. Dr. Tana Session: The people. Chad Sowash: And he's talking about profits. Exactly. Why aren't more "capitalist organizations" actually focused on taking care of the people because they know it's going to lead to more profits. Dr. Tana Session: I mean, that's the question of all time and especially me being in HR for as long as I have been, that was always one of the arguments I had sitting across the table from the C-suite executive, especially CFOs and CEOs. Helping them understand the importance of taking care of their people. Because if you don't take care of your people, they're not gonna take care of your customers or clients, and you won't receive the profit. And so your investors are gonna be upset, your shareholders, your board, it... Again, ripple effect. So helping them understand that and giving it to them in data and metrics that they can wrap their heads around because that's what they pay attention to is the dollars and the percentages. So that they understand that ultimately this is driven by the people that work here. Dr. Tana Session: And yes, there's some that feel like people are replaceable. You should be thankful you have a job, like all of those things I've heard over the years, and still to this day, people still say... Say in and feeling, but it costs money to lose employees. It costs money to hire employees. So helping them understand, and this is where HR can really have that influence and that seat at the table, is to break that down for them in a way that helps them understand that if we don't provide the right benefits that are equitable to all employees, and this is the workforce that we're dealing with here, ultimately these individuals are going to leave because they'll find someone who will provide those benefits. And they... We'll have to start this whole process over again. So there's gonna be production, downtime, quality downtime, customers and clients are gonna be negatively impacted and ultimately we're not gonna see the numbers we're looking for. Chad Sowash: Yeah, yeah. Well, what we've seen where... Amazon's actually done research where they are burning through. Dr. Tana Session: Oh yeah. Chad Sowash: The workforce in some of the areas where they have locations. Now let's get it to women in the workforce now, we've had problems getting women back into the workforce after the pandemic. Do you feel like some companies are using pro-Roe stances to lure female talent back into those open roles? Or maybe they should do more of that? Dr. Tana Session: If they're smart, they could use that as one of their tools to put that out there and say, Hey, A it's awareness B we care and C, we're gonna do what we can to protect you as an employee and protect your HIPAA rights as well. So that way we're not all up in your business but yeah, during the pandemic we lost over two million women out of the workforce. Many of them were frontline employees. And part of the attraction now is how do we get them back in? How do we make it a place that is desirable that's flexible, that meets their needs as caregivers? Like all of those factors and part of being a caregiver is caring for themselves. And if they don't have the benefits that they need in order to do that so that they can make the right decisions for themselves and their families, then that's a negative for the company, so I think they have to think about the full life cycle of their female employees. And we can't leave out trans women as well, because they are also impacted by this as well as trans men. Chad Sowash: So are enough companies taking a stand? I would say no. But if there was a wave, what do you think that could perspectively do to the actual talent coming back to work? Do you think that would actually spur females back to work? We saw the women's march. It was like when something happens that has impact there's a reaction. We saw from the not red wave there was impact. Dr. Tana Session: True. Chad Sowash: Do you think that companies actually in waive coming to support women would actually get them back into the workforce? 'Cause to be quite frank, that's incredibly important for our economy. Dr. Tana Session: Yeah, yeah, it absolutely is because women tend to spend more of their income back into the communities than men through taking care of their households. So I think yes. Now are enough companies doing it, probably not. I also don't think that should be the only banner that they wave. Again, I think they need to think about the full life cycle and flexibility is another piece of that. So what women realized during the pandemic from 2022 up till now, is that not having to come into the office five days a week has also been an area that's important to them and has helped them to be viable, contributing members of the workforce. And companies that are adamant about people being back in the office five days a week I think are missing the mark there. In particular with these women who have caregiving responsibilities, they've proven that they could be just as a productive, if not more, and in many cases more, and put in more work hours without being paid for them as a result of having that flexibility. Joel Cheesman: Alright, doctor, I gave you reason for optimism in my last question. I'm gonna give you reason for pessimism in this question. Go woke, go broke is a popular saying on the right, the conservative sector. With certain movies, shows, etcetera, that are left-leaning, failing, or doing poorly, either at the box office or in sales. You've had Bob Iger who recently took back control of Disney saying he's gonna turn the temperature down a little bit on the culture issues. For companies that are looking at that and saying, "Oh, we don't want to get into that, that's a little scary, we don't want to take that step." What would you tell them to help embolden them around this issue of abortion rights? Dr. Tana Session: Well, first I would say they need to understand that woke has been weaponized by the right. And so what I mean by that is when we refer to woke, we being Black people, Brown people, people who are interested in true diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. What we mean is that we are aware that there are certain systemic institutional barriers to success for certain groups in society, mostly marginalized groups. And so what we're saying is by recognizing that these are the changes that need to occur. They don't have to happen right now, but they need to at least be under consideration with some sort of action behind it so it's not performative. Dr. Tana Session: And when I think about that, and I think about the weaponization of woke. I think companies are leaning into fear versus understanding. So people fear what they don't understand. Right? And so without having real qualitative and quantitative conversations with their employees, their investors, the communities in which they serve, to understand what particular barriers they as a company have in place. Whether it's through policy and procedure, through how they recruit, who they recruit, how they pay, who they pay, who they promote, all of these different factors that come into play. And if they don't have a true place of psychological safety for all employees, then have that conversation and not be afraid of leaning into where they can improve. Dr. Tana Session: And so some companies have done a very good job at that over the last two and a half years, and again, I'm still somewhat cautiously optimistic they're gonna continue to do so. I think what's going to drive the behavior of these organizations are Gen Y and Gen Z especially the younger Gen Y and now Gen Z because they have zero tolerance for inequity. They have zero tolerance for any type of bias, racism, discrimination, and again, they're not afraid to speak truth to power, whereas my generation we kind of went along to get along. I'm Gen X. Joel Cheesman: Digging a little bit into that, on the CEO level, and I found it really interesting. Logan Green, who is the CEO of Lyft, ride-sharing service which most of our listeners I'm sure know, received a letter from Texas legislators after he tweeted that the company would cover costs for employees who had to travel more than 100 miles for an abortion saying it would... The Legislators said it was a violation of a 1925 statute that prohibits facilitating abortions. What advice would you give CEOs in taking stances like this, what would you have advised him to reply to the state and this law? Dr. Tana Session: Yeah, that's a challenging question because I'm not familiar with that statute, so I would wanna read it and see what's in there. By the way I'm in law school, it's my first semester... Well, second semester now. So there's that. But I would wanna see what the statute says before I advise them. But just taking it at a surface, I would challenge them with proving how the statute negatively impacts the employees there, and that may be the challenge that the legislators... Of course they will try to debate and go point by point by the different elements of that statute to say we're out of compliance as a company to offer this to staff. And then also referring back to the federal law that they put in place as kind of a band-aid until this goes to court to say you can't stop an employee from crossing state lines under any condition. Joel Cheesman: I assume you would agree FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt is going to be a weapon by the states to scare CEOs into this action. At what point do the lawyers get involved? Dr. Tana Session: I think they should get involved immediately. Chad Sowash: I can guarantee you they are. Dr. Tana Session: I'm sure, I would hope so. Joel Cheesman: Which companies don't wanna go there, right? If they don't have to. But that seems like a certainty as we move on with this. Dr. Tana Session: Yeah. Yeah. I think much like talking to their healthcare providers, they should also be talking to an employment lawyer. And remember this is all fluid, because it's still new, the laws haven't caught up with what's happening. Chad Sowash: Yes. Dr. Tana Session: We're waiting for certain cases to come out to mandate how the law will be applied, so I'm sure the courts are flooded with these types of things right now. And as well as attorneys, they're going through all the books trying to find statutes or certain cases that they could use to either refute or confirm what is being said by a legislators. So I think it's because it's so fluid is to me, especially being in law school, is somewhat exciting, but it is also frustrating. Chad Sowash: I have to applaud your cautious optimism because I am definitely a cautious pessimist with regard to this. And the reason being is, as we take a look at this situation, which is horrible, taking away women's rights is ridiculous. But if you take a look at corporate America, we have huge wage inequity. We haven't been transparent, we've been horrible with DEIB, we spend billions of dollars every year for no outcomes and really no bumping of the needle whatsoever. So I guess since there is some optimism behind you, why do you think and why are you optimistic that these slow profiteering organizations even give two shits what happens to their employees in the first place? Dr. Tana Session: Well, I think the proof's in the pudding. So when I think about certain... Like I have sometimes clients will say, "Well, what companies are getting the right?" I think there's companies that's on the right track, no one's checked the box yet, right? Chad Sowash: Yeah. Dr. Tana Session: And it's ever-evolving, ever-changing. So we'll never get to a point where we say, "Oh, we've completed diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging." It's always going to be here. So just wrapping their heads around that, that this is part of your strategy is not going anywhere. Just like your financial strategy, your people strategy, you have to have a DEIB strategy. And then the part that I think keeps me somewhat optimistic is because there are companies that understand that there is an impact. Now, can you say dollar for dollar return on investment? Perhaps, perhaps not depending on the industry, depending on how you are tracking these metrics. I tell people always look at again, your recruiting and where you're hiring from, look at who stays with the company, look at who's being promoted and why they're being promoted. Dr. Tana Session: Yes, pay equity is important as well, that's one of the first things to look at. And I like the fact that a lot of states now are saying you have to be transparent like New York and California 'cause I think that's gonna help. It's gonna take time, and that's the thing I tell my clients, this is a journey. It's not a sprint, it's truly a marathon. So you have to be in it for the long run, and you have to be happy with the low-hanging wins. And you have to know that there are gonna be certain things that'll have a much longer runway. And those things, as long as you're paying attention to them, you'll start seeing some traction. You'll start seeing some success, but also the important part of it is communicating back out to the employees where you are, what successes you've had, talk about your journey. Talk about where you started and then where you are now. I think that's a huge piece of the story as well to tell. Chad Sowash: So pay transparency, at least salary transparency, making sure that the salary's transparent on the job, or hopefully we'll get to pay transparency for the actual... The entire population. But that seems to have a big wave right now, and it's front and center, there's actually this legislation that's hitting the books. We've had Oregon that was already there, we've got California and New York, and we've got little New York City. We've got little New Jersey here and there so it's starting to pop up all over the place. Do you think that this could actually help the wave of these other employee-focused initiatives that we really need to focus on where it catches the wave as opposed to being their own singular waves. Dr. Tana Session: I hope so. What I usually do is I look to see what... I'm from New York originally. So I look to see what New York is doing and California because they're opposite ends of the country, and they tend to follow each other. So, you know, New York kind of put it out there first and California went into effect this month. And so I think what will happen is as companies, again, are in this tight labour market and they're starting to either lose employees or possible recruits, they'll understand that this is something that the people are asking for. Again, Gen Y and Gen Z, I applaud them because they're the ones that are asking those hard questions. And I have clients that tell me all the time, like, "Oh, they're asking me questions I've never been asked before." Because they are aware, they do their research, they know again, what's fair and equitable, and they wanna make certain that they don't make the mistakes of the generations prior to them. And that includes starting with pay. Straight outta college they're asking these questions. So I would hope that the way will... Again, it'll be a slow process and there'll be some states that just will never come along. But within those states, I think there will be companies that will. Chad Sowash: Okay, so that being said, you have a company like Netflix who actually just put out the pay range of $60,000 to $385,000 for a position. So they're playing games. Dr. Tana Session: Yeah. Chad Sowash: But that I think demonstrates that corporate America, you know, they're gonna do everything they can to fight these regulations. So once again, cautious optimism. Do you think the government enforcement will beat that back? Or do you feel like, it is just a... Again, this is just the start of a very long journey? Dr. Tana Session: I think it's the start of a very long journey. I think a lot of these companies are doing what they have to do to be in compliance, and yes, they're giving these very broad ranges. I did peek through my email and saw some of these stories come out while I was away. But I think as lawsuits start to happen, they'll have to change that very quickly. So what will happen is, what I see is a potential employee not getting a job or being offered a salary that they feel is within the range. And they're gonna talk to someone who's in that same job doing the same duties, same or very similar background, and they're gonna find out they were underpaid. Right? Lawsuit. And so even though they were compliant and they posted the range, now they have to justify why I wasn't paid the same amount as my peer who's doing the exact same job, same background, similar background and education experience and qualifications. I think that's what's gonna really help push the needle in terms of making those ranges more realistic and fair and equitable to potential employees and current employees. Joel Cheesman: Coming back to the abortion issue again, real quick. We talked about lawsuits. I wanna talk about lobbying. And to me, I get the sense in my experience that companies just want shit to go away. They wanna put head in the sand, like, let's just let this play out. And to me it feels like a federal law would just solve this whole issue. They could just say the feds, this is a federal law. Dr. Tana Session: Yap. Joel Cheesman: Like our hands are washed of this. Do you see any signs of lobbying by either the commercial interests or agencies in DC like pushing some sort of a law, whether it's a right-leaning or left-leaning, it feels like a federal law would clear everybody of wrongdoing and that they should be pushing that. Are you seeing any evidence of that? Or would you recommend that to companies? Dr. Tana Session: I'm not seeing a whole lot of evidence of that, but granted, I've been on sabbatical for two months. I try not to pay too much attention to politics here in the states. Chad Sowash: Good for you. [laughter] Dr. Tana Session: I didn't wanna ruin my vacation. Chad Sowash: Yes. Dr. Tana Session: But I think what will happen again is as these employees start to push their employers, it's going to again, for lack of a better word, be a ripple effect where the employers are saying, "Help us. We're trying to solve this problem. We don't know what to do. We need some guidance from federal government. Help us solve this problem in a way that's fair and equitable to our employees. That doesn't put us out of alignment with our competitors and that we don't have to worry about anymore." Right? Because we can point the finger at it's not us, it's them. So I am hopeful, and again, they are still looking at codifying this and you know, it's just a matter of time, hopefully before it gets back on the books and makes its way through the court system. But I do know that it's out there. Right? They're still trying to get it done. Will it happen in my lifetime? I hope so. Again, I think we have younger people working in government as well, and they're speaking to the people that they work for. They're more senior politicians and hopefully pushing the agenda, pushing the conversation and letting them know how important this is. 'Cause what I don't want them to do is get distracted by all the other stuff that's going on. And just forget all about Roe v Wade. And it's like, oh... You know, it's kind of what happened this time. It's like, how could you have not had this as an important topic to codify this years ago? Chad Sowash: Yeah. Dr. Tana Session: Like, why'd you waiting until now? Like the Republicans played the long game on this and they won. Chad Sowash: Yes. Dr. Tana Session: Right? Starting with the Supreme Court justices that they got in place. And that agenda behind them is saying, "This is important to us. We need to get this passed as soon as we can." And they did it. We did not play the long game. We took our eye off the ball. We being, I'm gonna say Democrats, even though I'm an independent. So that's what I think happened. Now I'm hoping that we don't lose sight of that anymore. Joel Cheesman: So I'm gonna let you out on this. I'm gonna ask you to take your rose colored glasses off and not what you hope happens, but in five years, where is this issue gonna be? Dr. Tana Session: Are you familiar with the Handmaid's Tale? Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: Yes. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Is that where we're going? Dr. Tana Session: That's where we're heading. In my heart of hearts, in my heart of hearts, seriously, like I tell my friends, I tell my clients, I'm like, "Are you familiar with Handmaid's Tale?" Like, that's where we're going. Like, just wrap your heads around that because it's happening, it's happening again because the long game is being played and this is where it's heading. Joel Cheesman: Wow. Bring us back, Chad. Bring us back up to end this thing. Chad Sowash: Doctor, I can't... We're gonna finish up on that one because that to me will settle in to all of our listeners and make them think. Dr. Tana M. Sessions, thank you so much for coming on the show. We appreciate it. Especially just coming right back from your sabbatical, you get thrown to the wolves, the Chad and Cheese wolves. If more people wanna find out more about you, and I know you do speaking, consulting, those types of things, where can they connect with you? Dr. Tana Session: Sure. The best place will be my website, tanamsession.com. I'm also very, very active on LinkedIn, so a lot of people find me there. So Dr. Tana M. Session at LinkedIn and on Instagram and Facebook. I'm no longer on Twitter, so those are the places. But first foremost website, there's a Contact Me site there. My team takes very good care of people who put in submission requests, and then again on LinkedIn as well. Joel Cheesman: Chad, I'm gonna do my best to get myself off the ledge after her last comments. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Dr. Tana, thanks for joining us. Chad, that's another one in the books. 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 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 in 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 stand. 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.

SUBSCRIBE and LISTEN ChatGPT. Deep fakes. Avatars. Google's Bard. In case you haven't noticed, artificial intelligence is changing the game. That's why we have Ryan Steelberg, Veritone's CEO and President, back on the show to check-in on the state of AI and how it impacts employment, as well as everything from communications to advertising and marketing. Veritone, who recently acquired PandoLogic, as well as Pando's Wade & Wendy, a conversational AI solutions, also powers Chad & Cheese in French, Spanish, German and Portuguese. ¡Bueno! 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 your favorite Degenerates, aka the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, the Jennifer to my Ben Chad is in the house, and we are happy to welcome back [laughter] Ryan Steelberg to the show, everybody. Ryan Steelberg: Thanks guys. Joel: CEO and president... Chad: There he is. Joel: At Veritone. Ryan Steelberg: Am I number 1000 who's been on this show twice, or where do, where do I rank? I mean how do I come back, like, and break SNL type of records here? [laughter] Chad: We haven't had that many repeat visitors, to be quite frank. Joel: I've been on Xanax trying to manage my depression of being on a thousand shows, so I don't really remember exactly where we are at this point. Sorry. Chad: Just, just to be fair, he's been taking Xanax pretty much as long as Xanax has been around. So, yeah. Today, Ryan, we brought you back because, well, first and foremost, we gotta thank you for this. Play it Cheeseman. [foreign language] Joel: The world thanks you for this. Ryan Steelberg: Can't make German sound good. Chad: This is all your fault. Speaker 1: In Portuguese. [foreign language] Joel: Oh God. [laughter] Chad: This is all your fault, Ryan. We are now in five languages. People can barely understand us in English. Joel: So scary. So scary. Chad: Thanks to Veritone. Ryan Steelberg: Offensive in multiple languages. [laughter] Chad: So that's one application we'll talk about. We'll talk about practical applications later, but John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence, AI, back in the '50s. But the promise and the practical application of AI really hasn't been demonstrated. I don't think really been incredibly powerful until here recently. I mean, we did see IBM with Deep Blue beat, you know, chess Grand Master, Gary Kasparov in '97, then Watson beat two jeopardy champs in 2011. Joel: How dare you not mention Chat GPT in the first three minutes of this podcast. Chad: We're getting there. We are getting there. Ryan Steelberg: Yeah. That's like ubiquitous now, right? I mean, that's, like I say, throwing a pebble in the Pacific Ocean, you're gonna hit somebody that's doing something with Chat GPT. Joel: Are you surprised by that? Ryan Steelberg: Yeah well, the speed of how it came out is incredible. And what you're kind of seeing is, as an ex Googler, they've had a lot of this tech for years, right? So, you know, Lambda is their large language model platform. Joel: They just didn't learn how to demo it apparently. Ryan Steelberg: Well, well, well, they have another problem. They gotta make money, right? And so, so they, you know, so they, when they're sitting on it, this reminds me when the world transitioned from primarily desktop, right? Usage on the web to mobile. Google and these ad titans are like, oh my God, all of our ad screen, real space just disappeared. And how are we gonna make up the difference of billions of dollars if I can't serve, you know, display banner ads everywhere. When you go from, and we're talking about obviously conversational AI and Chat GPT here is when you go from a search result page, right? Where it's very structured and Google has perfected ironically, using AI to observe which ads to you when you're getting a search results, trying to yield, get as much ad dollars from a conversational search result is challenging. Ryan Steelberg: Candidly, it's like doing, you guys doing a native integration on one of your podcasts, right? In terms of like a sponsorship. So I think that more than anything is Google has had the capabilities, mind you, arguably with better technology than Chat GPT and open AI with better ironically guardrails. But they can't release something that's potentially gonna undercut their business model. That's why their stock dropped a hundred billion as you guys saw. And it wasn't, it wasn't that they answered a question wrong, it was, oh my lord, [laughter], where the hell are they gonna make money? [laughter] Chad: Yes, exactly. Okay, so back to the question. Back in those days, that was kind of, that was the novelty, you know, oh, look, Jeopardy champions are getting beaten, Gary Kasparov, blah, blah, blah. What's the huge difference between the AI of then other than, I mean, obviously processors versus today, and it seems like the promise, I guess you can say, "The promise of AI," is starting to actually come to fruition. Ryan Steelberg: It's the beautiful mind in the past that always had many of the answers, but they couldn't communicate them effectively, like humans like to communicate. So, you know, the calculator, right? I mean, again, we've had some power in our pockets now for years, right? And a lot of crazy similarities of what when Chat GPT and large language models were rolled out, schools are freaking out. Like, oh my God, it's banned. Can't use Chat GPT for school use. [laughter] As we all know, calculators, right? You know, depending on what class you're in, you're finally in advance. I guess they think you're smart enough that you can use, right? In an advanced geometric or an advanced calculator in the future. That's where we're, so I think where we're seeing here is you, just a slow progression. Ryan Steelberg: And if we, we think AI technology is slowly trying to replicate and augment the human mind, right? And the number of synapse points, et cetera, et cetera. You're just, all these things absolutely are AI. They're just now getting smarter. They're getting more powerful. And it's kind of like that, again... Joel: More dangerous. Ryan Steelberg: Or dangerous. It's, but I, when I'm saying like that, it's the brilliant kid that can't speak, right? You have to, you have to ask him a specific question, and if you ask him in the right format he'll give you a brilliant answer. Now what you're seeing, because they have so much training data, and they now have the successful technology at scale to put conversation around it. Now, when I ask a question and saying, "Hey, can you make me a compilation song or write me a song that blends the style of Eminem and Katie Perry together, and I want it to be very explicit, right? Ryan Steelberg: What I just did that prompt, that prompt that you could have gotten a search result from a multiple different sources, but now they can present it to you. Literally, you have to wait. You only have to wait a couple seconds and something comes out at you that is so good that David Guetta is putting it on his stage these days. [laughter] Yeah. So I think that's the difference, is the, the brain power has been there as we're moving, I'd say higher functioning cognitive processing is there. But now the presentation, the ability to communicate very human-like in terms of conversational format in speed, so right for immediate gratification is what everybody is seeing as a quantum leap now in AI. Chad: But that's the thing though. It's the immediate gratification. We've had so many awesome technologies that have been behind the wall and nobody's had access to them. So what really Chat GPT has done is it has exposed the power of technology that many of these companies already have, and they've had for years, but they've finally, they finally let out the, the genie out of the bottle. So the big question is, how many other companies other than Bard, let's say for instance, they start to publicly display just how much power they have behind the wall. Ryan Steelberg: You know, this is really gonna show the big boys digital divide, right? How expensive it is to run and train these large language models. You're not gonna see a ton of large language models come out. You're gonna see hundreds and millions of, I'll call domain specific language models, right? So, I'd say it's the world we live in in chatbots today, when you go and have a horrible experience trying to find out what your bank account balance is, right? Through a chat. That's a very specific, domain specific language model. Building and training a large language model is incredibly expensive. And again, for it to be really effective, there's only gonna be a handful of large enterprises, ironically, those who dominate in cloud and AI historically like the big fangs, right? Ryan Steelberg: The Facebooks, the Alphabets, the Microsofts, it's the big boys. NVIDIA has the chips, but NVIDIA's, you know, but NVIDIA's not running the cloud-based architecture as well? So I don't think you're gonna see millions of companies, you're gonna see the blending of this, right? Meaning because they're being, because of what Chat GPT and Open AI did is open it up to your point, it's almost gonna force the other big boys and players to open up their kimonos. Chad: Yes. Ryan Steelberg: And which thank God, because now as companies and others, let them go fight it out, [laughter] and now we get to actually use these things for whatever crazy purposes we want to use them, and it's not gonna be locked up and just kept behind these walled gardens. Joel: Does this get commoditized? I've heard that recently that there's a risk that this whole thing just becomes ubiquitous and free. Ryan Steelberg: Which would be great, [laughter], because I, it's the blend of the large language models with the domain specific models. It's the orchestration of those two things, which really makes it powerful. So for example, if I'm having an HR discussion with a fully programmatic AI experience with, and I'm trying to evaluate somebody who wants to join our company, you can do it right now, we have it, Wade and Wendy, right? Panda Logic Company we own does that very effectively. But in the context of the conversation, if you wanna get to know the person and ask 'em, Hey, tell me about, you know, what's the recent sporting events? What kind of sports are you interested in your local market, right? The bot just sits there and doesn't know what to do. Ryan Steelberg: Now you can orchestrate a large language model, right? In coordination with these hyper trained domain specific models, and you can have a real conversation. You can really learn a lot more about Chad and Joel about what makes them tick, what they like and they don't like in context of the real world. So I think it's gonna be the blending of the commodity. And again I don't wanna minimize the power, the brilliance of what these guys are putting in the market, but I do think that everybody's gonna be able to tap into the large language models. It's gonna be how you use it and how you differentiate it to make it work for your business. Chad: So what you're saying is we have companies that are out there right now that are domain specific, and they are tight on what they know, the application process, the interview process, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right? They know their shit and they've got tons of data, decades of data, right? But then could you play that almost in series with a large data model so that it would like, it would automatically know, oh, wait a minute, this isn't a part of the specific domain, so I have to go out to large domain, is that what you're saying? So that the actual chatbots can have different training models that they would actually be working off of? Ryan Steelberg: Exactly. And they're calling it the... You know, see some terms about chained language models in orchestrated language models, and that, and they're doing that now in context, in the same conversation. That's what's so dynamic now, right? And that, of course, you can choose to go one path Chat GPT, right? Public large language model, or you can go domain specific like HR Panel. Now you're gonna blend it in the same conversation, which by the way, is like having a conversation with a human, right? So if you're talking to your surgeon, right, your surgeon can go very, very deep domain specific, let's say about spinal surgery. But that same surgeon can, you can have a conversation depending on, well how charismatic he is, and you could break the conversation but, you know, and have a conversation about sports, right? So again, I think you're gonna, it's, that's where I think the differentiating value is gonna be for a lot of companies and people who are applying these technologies, is how do you blend these different AI solutions in a congruent, seamless experience that is gonna be the magic. Joel: Pivoting to sort of our space a little bit. Ryan, we've heard about scams on job seekers for a long time. From my perspective, this technology and deep fakes and sounding like the CEO, right? As a robot, where does this thing go in terms of scams on job seekers? How dark is it gonna get? Ryan Steelberg: I mean, it's gonna be messy, right? I think the, it's gonna, there's gonna be a lot of time and inefficiencies trying to, both sides of the equation to figure out, okay, geez, I feel like I'm being recruited I'm gonna spend time. Am I supposed to actually show up for a live video interview, or am I gonna show up and find out that there's nobody there? Or inversely you're seeing a lot of now bots applying for jobs, right? They're just flooding the systems on the other side and they're, and they're actually able to answer questions. So I think it's gonna take time for all of us. I mean, we're in this business for us to try to make it more efficient. You know, the... And so I think in immediate short term is you're gonna have to see, it's gonna help create, it's gonna help expedite a lot of the process. Ryan Steelberg: But I think you're gonna see a bottleneck where actually human to human interaction, at some point, it's gonna have to become back into context here just to validate the truth behind the situation. 'Cause again, some CEOs are open, they're not trying to hide it. They want use their fake voice or their synthetic digital twin to... Because they feel that's part of the experience if you're applying for Tesla and they wanna use their voice versus other groups who are using it as a spoof. So again I don't think there's a perfect solution to verify the integrity of the human in the short term, and that's gonna work itself out over time. Joel: So you mentioned in one of your interviews, like, if someone asks you for money, like that should be a red flag, right? That that's something that everyone should look out for. In our business it's, if they ask you for a social security number, if they ask you for, you know, intimate information or bank account information, what should job seekers be looking for to keep them safe? Ryan Steelberg: Yeah, I mean, any PII information to that level is a big no-no, you know, personal identifiable information, your address. I mean, any, you know, forget just spoofing, I mean just self-preservation and protecting yourself is imperative. The challenge for us is, people who are older are more skeptical, right? It's the generation below us that's terrifying. I mean, they've been willing to compromise their personal information to get a little bit higher scale in this, in their snap social circles. And that's what's really scary is again, the younger generation, again definitively have actively, and in many cases are aware that they're giving up their personal information to experience a social dynamic. So I think where there... And that's one good news, the good news about what you just said is we can identify a lot of those things. Ryan Steelberg: It's, it's, it's great. It's like creating an index of certain things that should not be disclosed. There's redaction based software that's been around for a long time. That also is getting very good and sophisticated. So our ability to identify what is a phone number, what is a social, potential social security number. We can be overly conservative on a lot of these things. Are there gonna be gaps and holes and loopholes? Of course. But again our big thing is, somebody's really interested, very rarely are they gonna ask you for any personal identifiable information outside of stuff that, you know, just common sense of, you know, I mean, are they gonna ask you what your GPA was at UCLA? Who knows? But again, I think rule of thumb is don't share any personal information they really want. If they're, if you're gonna get to that next level, somebody will call you back and they'll re-engage you. Chad: So tell us about some of the biggest challenges Veritone is solving for customers today with AI, with these voice models with chatbots. What are you doing to help companies and why? Why is it a problem? Ryan Steelberg: Well, it start, well, we talked earlier about like how AI's progressed. So let's talk about, I'll put it in context of one big media customer, so CBS News. So CBS News is a big customer of ours, and what we do, it starts with us ingesting all of their content. So they have tons and tons of programming, they have their legacy archive, the Apollo moon landing footage, right? 'Cause that goes back decades. So number one is we help ingest and organize all their content, and we use AI models. And so instead of humans having to look through and listen to all that content, we have AI models that sift through it and identify when Walter Cronkite's speaking, right? When there's a spaceship on, you know, and the lunar module capsules on screen, the AI does that. Ryan Steelberg: So it's organizing it. What you're seeing now is that when they say, okay, geez, can we remaster something, like this footage is cool but we can't really hear Walter Cronkite's voice. Can we remaster his voice? But we wanna keep the authenticity of the grainy video. But again we can't hear half the things he's saying. Now, you know, again, with approval and permissions you can do that. So you can start to now go from not just indexing. And I'd say like, that's kind of like the version A one of cognitive services that now it's extension. It's, we can actually create new derivatives of the content, synthetic voice is one of them, obviously we can clone Walter Cronkites's voice and we can, and we can turn that into a potentially with approval, original new programming, a whole new series, right? Ryan Steelberg: Narrated by Walter Cronkite if that's the goal. So I think what you're seeing now is companies, by the way, it's a daunting task. You know, Moore's Law, the joke is Moore's Law, which was obviously the ever increasing speed of technology innovation is obsolete. It's growing so much faster than the Moore's Law is predicted. Well, companies are sitting around like, wait a minute. I thought guys were trying to figure out like the Metaverse and NFTs, like what happened? Like that was, that was last month, right? And now we have Chat GPT. So for us, with our customers, we're, we are now almost like a wilderness guide. Like, with all these new technologies, it's impossible for a lot of our customers to keep up on all these different things and that's really where we are. Ryan Steelberg: There's so many different AI models coming onto it. And our core offering is called AI Wear, right? Which is our sort of baseline operating system. So we look at a large language model, just like any other model, right? If you, instead of running for face detection, and if you want to incorporate a chat AI solution that includes a domain-specific model and a large language model it's a common infrastructure stack. And that's the big thing is for our customers, whether it's an iHeart or a CBS News, if they're looking to do something new with all these new technologies come in the market, we're the well one stop shop. And that's, and so we're like the trusted AI partner, tech partner for a lot of these companies. And some of these ideas they're coming out with are crazy. You know, they're really original new ideas and interactive cartoons that are gonna take it to a whole new level. I mean, what we're doing with Cameo and a lot of the, bring interactivity to animated characters, I mean, you're gonna start to see some really next generation stuff here in months, not years. Chad: Wow. Joel: Quick example of what you're doing with Cameo, and some people may not know what cameo is. Ryan Steelberg: Cameo.com, they're, they've been around for a while. They're, they have like 55,000 celebrities and brands on there that if you want to have Chad and Joel like, call you and sing you happy birthday, you can go to Cameo and you can pay to have usually somebody famous, right. Do a custom call out to you. And not that you guys are not superstars, but [laughter], but to get Tom Hanks to do it, you know, they don't necessarily want to voice everything. So we partner with Cameo and we started initially with children characters like the big brands, Blippy and, yeah. Joel: Blippy. Ryan Steelberg: Blippy and, geez, JJ and Moon Bug, that whole phenomena, Coco Melon, that whole phenomena that now we launched this right before Christmas. That kid, that parents can come in and have a personalized Graham from these characters call their, you know, speak to their kids, sing 'em happy birthday, wish them Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, whatnot. And that's kind of took off. And now kinda what we're teasing about here a little bit on the show is making those fully interactive experiences. So it's not just one way, it's these children are gonna be able to interact back with these characters in real time. Chad: So Veritone owns Wade and Wendy, a chat bot for our industry. So will Wade and Wendy have their own voices sometime soon? Ryan Steelberg: Yes, they will. [laughter] Wade and Wendy, we've kind of gone away from the branding of Wade and Wendy. It's just it's more of I think the... It's made available in the commercial sense now through Pando Select. But yes, I think you're gonna have personas, right, that companies are gonna use, and we're in the middle of making brand new personas for companies today. That's gonna be their ambassador, right? And it's not just a clone of the CEO's voice. They're coming up with a unique new digital twin, digital version. Joel: I think they're getting away from Wade and Wendy, because when I go to Wendy's for that double stack, I want actual Wendy's voice in that drive-through. [laughter] That's, no, you're gonna sell that to Wendy's, aren't you? I know what's going on. Ryan Steelberg: Or Ben Affleck, right? He'll serve your Dunking Donuts, I guess. [laughter] That was pretty awesome in the Super Bowl. [laughter] Chad: Yes, it was. Joel: Chad and I will live forever. I love that. I love that. Chad: Ah, yes, yes, yes, yes. Which, yeah, which means, you know since our voices are already cloned everybody out there in HR land, they're available. Ryan Steelberg: You know what? I'll leave you this morbid to point. So right now, today, it's gonna change fast. The laws, because of what we're talking about, digital twins, copyright and IP laws are changing, but for you to protect your voice and your name and likeness, you need to die in California. Joel: That escalated quickly. [laughter] Chad: What? Ryan Steelberg: Yeah. [laughter] Joel: That is dark. Ryan Steelberg: It's dark, right? And then not only do you, and so after you die in California, do you then have to register or have your estate or power of attorney register those attributes, right? So it becomes protected by statutory law and not subject to argument in common law. And in California, California is obviously because of Hollywood, and this the, yes, let's say it is way ahead of the curve on that. But just the joke is that, again, if you're getting near the end capture it, make sure you create your digital twin. And you gotta make sure you get your death certificate in California so you can get your [laughter], posthumous, like protection of your IP. Joel: I'm sure Progressive state, like Indiana's right behind California. No problem. No problem. [laughter] Chad: Ryan Steelberg, everybody. Ryan, thanks so much. Thanks so much for coming back on the show. If somebody wants to find out more about Veritone or Panda Logic or the myriad of companies you guys actually own, where would you send them? Ryan Steelberg: Just go to veritone.com. I mean, it's the best way, you know, it's our corporate site. It can navigate you everywhere and what you're gonna see over the next month is HR and HR Tech is a, is a huge focus of ours. You're gonna see us investing even in more in that market. Chad: Say more. Say more. Ryan Steelberg: Yeah. It's one of our most ubiquitous markets. We have, you mentioned, we do a lot of different things that it's gonna be a tight, crazy labor market here for the foreseeable future. And the last time I checked every single business is not gonna be completely automated with AI here shortly. And everybody's looking to hire employees at some point over the course of their... And so it's one of our most ubiquitous offerings and Panda's just the start. And we're really excited about investing more into that space. Chad: Excellent. Joel: And we are excited to talk about it, whether it's really us or some robots. And Chad, another one is in the books. We out. Chad: We out. Ryan Steelberg: Thank you guys. Speaker 5: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two 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.

SUBSCRIBE and LISTEN Has Indeed finally gone too far? We dig into the latest from the Indeed / Glassdoor cartel. Their new pricing model is giving customers fits, stickin' it to small- and medium-sized businesses, and in some cases, making taxpayers foot the bill for their evil deeds. Then it’s time for a little Who’d Ya' Rather with Magic.dev and Kanarys. Jumping into Upwork's new full-time offering and a trip back in time where child labor is all the rage in Minnesota and Iowa follow what’s already a bangin' episode. Want more? We dissect bounced checks, unhappy customers, and ruined Thailand vacations, compliments of Starbucks. 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 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: Oooh, yeah. UFOs, Russian offenses, toxic clouds, killer earthquakes, Chinese sanctions and Raquel Welch is dead. So how is your week going? Hi, kids. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host, Joel "Fantastic Voyage" Cheesman. Chad: This is Chad "What's my name" Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show: Indeed commits highway robbery, Upwork goes full monty, and Who'd You Rather. Let's do this. Chad: So why do referees always have to kill amazing games? That was an amazing, amazing fucking Super Bowl and then in the last two minutes a ref steps in and fucks the whole thing. That could have been just an... I still think the Kansas City Chiefs would have won, so I don't think they changed the outcome, but they changed the whole feel of the game. It was fucking crazy. Joel: And what a boring last four minutes, so anti-climactic. Let's run the clock out, kick a field goal. Chad: Well, the ref allowed that shit to happen. Joel: Yeah, I know. Chad: Fuck! Joel: I know. What are you gonna do? Yeah, you should let them play it out in the last few minutes. Chad: At least. Yeah. And especially when it's that close. But yeah, that was fucking sick. What did you love about the Super Bowl? Joel: Mostly the snacks my wife made for the game, which included the jalapeno poppers. Chad: Oooh, that's nice. Joel: The wings. Chad: That's nice. Joel: The Philly cheesesteaks. Chad: Mmm. Oh, damn. Joel: And the Kansas City barbecue. So we went like full bore, both sides were represented. It was nice. But it was a great game. I thought Philly was gonna... I thought it was gonna be a blowout. I thought Mahomes was gonna be hurt. But again, you don't go against the GOAT. Whoever has the better quarterback tends to win these games and it happened again on Sunday. The ads, meh. The half-time show, meh. Chad: I loved the half-time show. I love Rihanna, first off, and then all the shit that they were doing. She was pregnant, she looked great, she's got amazing fucking songs. And then the American sign language interpreter that they had, that was like the cherry on top. Everything seemed like it was just perfect. It wasn't as good as Prince, don't get me wrong. I really, really enjoyed the halftime show. Joel: Yeah, I gotta go back to Prince, man. Prince ruined it from here on out. No one... Chad: Love that guy. Joel: Ever since Purple Rain in the rain in high heels, stand alone on stage, everything else is just sort of sophomoric to me. Unless Oasis gets back together and plays the half-time show, which I know isn't gonna happen. Chad: God! Let's hope not. I cannot stand 15 minutes of whining. Joel: Speaking of Dave Grohl, Dave Grohl and Canada, my co-host and my wife represented in one ad. That was fun. [laughter] Chad: Yeah, that was pretty nice. Joel: By the way, I got my physical, my annual physical, this week and my liver got a A-plus which means another year of debauchery for me, my friend. My liver is still holding fort. Chad: Apparently, I'm not doing my job. I'm sorry. Apologies. Joel: Our sponsors need to try a lot harder. Our fans need to send us more shit. Chad: More Bourbon, kids. Okay, so your favorite ad. Let's just get that out of the way. What was your favorite ad? Joel: Favorite ad has probably got to go to the Farmer's Dog, aging hounds. You gotta have that one that makes you cry. I remember the Audi ad with the father-daughter. That one's similar. Yeah, this one got me choked up. Farmer's Dog. You? Chad: This was not a great season for ads, let's just put it that way. The Workday ad was actually pretty good but I liked the PopCorners. I'd never heard of PopCorners before, now I know it. And the whole Breaking Bad, "Give me seven flavors." Joel: Tuco. Chad: Yeah, it was funny. It was funny. But it wasn't great. It wasn't great. Joel: Yeah, the two ads that would make me buy something because of the ad would be the PopCorners and the Farmer's. The Farmer's Dog, unfortunately, we feed our dog insects because that's what my wife does for a living. So I wouldn't be able to buy the Farmer's Dog unless they start offering insects as an option, which probably isn't going to happen. I would say that as an overall theme of the ads, I think as Gen X-ers our time has come. For years growing up, it was like they're targeting boomers, boomers have all the money, boomers are... Boomer, boomer, boomer. This year was finally Gen X. Clueless, Matt & Ben, Ben Stiller, Steve Martin, the Rock Star has sort of bled into Gen X. So I feel like, from that perspective, we're finally the target market for advertisers. Even the Pepsi. You remember you and I growing up... Chad: That doesn't make me happy. Joel: Pepsi was the choice of a new generation. It was Cindy Crawford, Shaq was doing ads. And now it's a grey-haired Ben Stiller and an even grayer-haired Steve Martin that's pitching me Pepsi. That's how far Pepsi has fallen since the '80s and '90s. But I digress. Chad: And to bring the party down, I can't believe somebody bought an anti-Tesla ad, the anti-auto pilot driving. I mean, spent like $7 million on just trying to tank the Tesla stock. I mean, Elon can do that without anybody's help, so. It was weird. It was really weird. Joel: Yeah. Elon has not needed any help to tank the Tesla stock this year. Alright. Well, for those that listen, the recruitment marketing show, we'll get into more detail about ads and dive into more subject matter of the advertising in the Super Bowl. But that was a nice little 30,000-foot level of what Chad and I thought of the Super Bowl and the ads. Chad: Shout-outs. Let's do some shout-outs. Joel: Shout-outs. Chad: I'm gonna hit some. First off, really quick, thank you iCIMS, Workhuman and Next for the swag. Really appreciate the swag. Joel: ICIMS is just showing off. Chad: We'll actually have clothes on their backs for the next year, so we really appreciate that. But yeah, no, iCIMS, they upped their swag game, I have to say. Joel: Yeah, they brought the Yeti back, they ditched... What was it? The Coleman, the Colemanist? Chad: It was the Coleman, yeah. Joel: Yeah, they did. Back to the Yeti, like the Herschel backpack, yeah, iCIMS is just showing off at this point. Chad: Well, Workhuman did send a nice little package in a Bluetooth speaker, which you've gotta love the goods. [chuckle] It was good stuff, good stuff. And I am wearing my Tie-Dye, my Tie-Dye Next shirts. So love all around. Love all around. Joel: Yeah, love all around. My wife just can't not comment about how much NASCAR [laughter] I look like every day with vendor logos. Alright, my shout-out goes to G2's best HR products of 2023. Chad: Oh. Joel: Popular product review site, G2, has just published its best stuff for 2023, and here's where some of our most talked about companies in HR landed. Number four was BambooHR, number eight was Hireology, number 10, Personio, our friends in Germany, focused on Europe; number 16, their competitor, Hibob; number 18, Deel; 23, Greenhouse; 24, Sense and number 26, Remote. Everyone else was pretty much a boring payroll something rather. If you wanna check out the rest, of the list, head out to G2, that's G and the number 2, dot com for the full list of 50 as well as other software providers in every category that you can imagine. Chad: It's interesting 'cause there's so many fucking platforms that are out there right now. I mean, point solutions, etcetera, etcetera. I don't know how they keep all that shit straight to try to actually rank them, not to mention they're all over the place in the different segments, right? Pay, you've got applicant tracking, you have EOR. Anyway, anyway, it's... Joel: Let's be honest, all these best of lists are just clickbait and things for podcasters to talk about. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And it works, 'cause we're talking about it. Chad: There you go. Merry Christmas. My next shout-out goes to Mona Sloane over at NYU for inviting us to participate... Joel: Mona? Chad: Yeah, [chuckle] to participate in NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge, and their Co-opting AI's recruiting panel scheduled for next Wednesday, that's popping up pretty quick, February 22nd. So look for that, it's Co-opting AI's recruiting panel and sitting on it. Joel: We're everywhere, man. We're everywhere. We're gonna make... People are gonna get sick of us. [laughter] Well, I guess if they haven't done it by now, I guess maybe they're not. Chad: Too late. Joel: Yeah, it's too late. Alright, I gotta shout-out to our friends at Recruit Holdings. [music] Joel: Chad, try as we might to inflict pain and suffering on the 800-pound gorilla, things seem to be okay at our favorite cartel. Recruit Holdings says the number of job postings on Indeed.com was close to its year earlier level of Q3F fiscal year 2023, while job seeker activity on recruitment marketplace, an employer review site, Glassdoor, expanded year-over-year the revenue from their HR technology segment, which includes Indeed and Glassdoor, increased over 24% year-over-year to 2.1 billion USD. Apparently, all you suckers out there listening are still writing blank checks to the Death Star. [music] Chad: Oh yes, it's not gonna be us that brings them down, they're gonna bring themselves down if it ever happens. Shout-out to Ryan Steelberg, the CEO of Veritone, for coming on the show this week to break down what is actually happening in the world of AI. The guy lives it 24/7. We talked about large models like ChatGPT, more powerful domain-specific models and orchestrated models. So a lot of these things, we dug into. Everybody's talking about ChatGPT and trying to create the next recruiting platform from it, which is, I think, the stupidest fucking thing in the world. But Ryan jumps into it to actually talk through all these different things. And not to mention, we're also talking about the company that gives you The Chad and Cheese foreign language podcast. Yes, their tech is what actually cloned our voices and turned them into The Chad and Cheese German, Spanish, Portuguese and French podcasts. That's how fucking cool they are. SFX: Shall we play a game? Joel: Moving from one Death Star to another, shout-out to Adam Karpiak. Adam saw the Workday ad on the Super Bowl, just as we did, and commented. Adam describes himself on LinkedIn as an opinionated recruiter. He shared the following on LinkedIn, "If Workday can afford Super Bowl commercials, they can afford to fix their online applications." Amen, said a whole lot of commentators or commenters on that post. Of course, this made me think about your prediction, Chad, that Workday was getting a little bit cozy with our friends at Paradox, and what better way to fix your applications than to acquire Paradox. Chad: That would just be the start. I can't imagine. Alright, events. You're ready for events? [music] Joel: Events. Where are we going, Chad? Chad: Alright. First and foremost, travels sponsored by Shaker Recruitment Marketing. That's right. You can go to shaker.com. And if you need some recruitment marketing needs, you might wanna check them out. We're gonna be at UNLEASH the 25th through the 27th of April in Lost Wages. That's right, kids, Las Vegas. This year, it's gonna be at the cas... Not the casino. Joel: In GM, right? Chad: No, it's gonna be at the CAESARS FORUM. Joel: Oh, CAESARS. Chad: CAESARS FORUM. Then we find ourselves in Coronado Bay at iCIMS INSPIRE in May. Then we go ahead and find ourselves on a plane to Knebworth Park for RecFest in London, which you cannot miss people. And let me go ahead and close the loop here the RecFest super duper early bird 50% off discount is still going on for Nashville... [applause] Chad: Which is happening in September. This is an amazing opportunity for you guys to actually get all your TA teams together, and this is a great for an all-hands day. Enjoy, learn, drink, eat, be merry at RecFest. Just go to chadcheese.com, click on Events in the upper right hand corner, register for all of them. We've got a long list of events we're gonna be at. Joel: You keep your own hands away from me Chad at these events, that's what I'm saying. Chad: Damn it. Joel: You think there'll be some alcohol and maybe a few Chad Cheese T-shirts at these events? Chad: There will be plenty, and they will be free. Joel: Probably plenty. And they will be free. So if you haven't gotten your Chad & Cheese T-shirt or gotten free booze from us, you gotta hit up chadcheese.com, hit the free link and we have a new round of winners from this month Chad, Carlos Fernandez has won whiskey from us... Chad: Nice. Joel: Sponsored by Textkernel, Madison Richard got beer from Aspen Tech Labs. Chad: Love it. Joel: Our birthday, Rum with Plumb for the month goes to Andrew Mall of beautiful Cleveland, Ohio, and pretty much everyone gets T-shirts that's powered by our friends at JobGet, but you gotta play if you wanna win. Head out to chadcheese.com and sign up today. Chad: Amen. [music] Chad: Topics! Layoffs. Joel: That's right, as we've been doing past few weeks... Chad: Layoffs. Joel: Let's talk about some layoffs in our space, alright, we got Hacker Earth, which I've never heard of, but apparently it's in our space, 8% haircut, GitHub owned by Microsoft; a 10% cut, Nomad Health, which we've talked quite favorably is cutting 17% of its HQ, which the underscore of HQ means not the actual people doing the health care work at Nomad Health. Chad: Yes. Joel: And LinkedIn has reportedly laid off a large number of its global recruitment team, the company has not disclosed the number of employees affected however, but if you know, if you're out there and you know, please hit us up at chadcheese.com, and let us know how deep the cut went at LinkedIn. And also our friends at hireEZ are rumored to have had a haircut. I reached out to our friend, Shannon Pritchett, and she was quick to reply with, "We made the decision to restructure staff, which has reduced our current overall head count in an effort to maximize efficiency and put hireEZ in the strongest possible position for customers. Our goal for the restructure is to invest in providing the best customer experience. For those that were impacted, we are committed to taking care of them as best we can throughout the transition." So from our PR 101 class, that is the response from our friends at hireEZ. [chuckle] Chad: It's interesting 'cause GitHub and LinkedIn, both Microsoft companies make this happen, and GitHub actually said that they're actually moving to fully remote to cut office space. So I think that's interesting that they probably could have cut more heads, but they're going to look at saving money on office space, so it's like you're starting to see some molding of I think just different cultures. Joel: That's right, you can keep the ping pong table and the coffee machine, save a few jobs while you're at it and ditch some of that real estate. Chad: It's a good idea. Joel: Let's talk about Indeed in the news. Seasoned recruiter Angela Holbrook of Boise Idaho took to LinkedIn recently to express her disdain for Indeed's new pricing model. Quote, "I really dislike their pay per application platform. It's terrible and takes advantage of businesses that don't know better. Here's an example of a client where I was added to their Indeed account. $3500 was wasted on fruitless applications. I could have advertised both jobs for under $250." In case you missed that, that's 3500 versus 250 and fill the positions. "Hiring managers were allowed free rein in Indeed to post jobs and not reviewing resumes in a timely manner and getting charged for applications whether they were qualified or not, highway robbery," she says. It goes on, but you get the idea, obviously this sparked a flood of disgruntled comments. If only everyone just listened to our podcast Chad and we could stay away from all this nonsense. Unfortunately, it's an issue. Your thoughts? Chad: Yeah, so in that post, she actually showed the two jobs that she was talking about, and one showed 24 applications at a cost of $132, which is $43 per application. Remember last week we were talking about the pissed off Kinnock who was paying $15 per application, $43 per application. Then the second example was 41 applications at a cost of about $2500, which was $61 per application. So here's what we're saying, huge failings on the Indeed side of the house. First and foremost, Indeed is forcing candidates to register to indeed, that's number one. Registration makes the apply process easier. Okay, so you've got that whole one-click application touch. An easier process, it doesn't mean you're gonna get qualified applicants, just more that are going to apply. Then you're tasking the hiring company with declining unqualified candidates. Your platform is supposed to be bringing me qualified candidates, but yet now I have to spend more time to kick these candidates to the curb so I don't have to pay for them. So Indeed is getting paid per applicant, so making the app apply process easier, drives their revenue and also the work the clients have to do. So what they're looking to do here fairly simply is companies are just not going to do the work... Joel: Yeah. Chad: And they're going to pay for all of these unqualified individuals, period. That's all that's gonna happen. And then there was a nugget from the Job Board Doctor I wanna throw out to you real quick, quote, "Indeed has paused its entire trusted media network," no explanation, no definite restart date. And then I reached out to one of my other contacts, and they said that trusted media network partners have also received a reduction in budget by Indeed. So first off, we're seeing this huge change and people are going wild and getting pissed off about it, then we're starting to see a shut down, pause and/or reduction in the spend to the trusted media network. What the fuck is going on here? Joel: Cats and dogs living together. That's what's going on here. It's funny, Jim Durbin, if we're name dropping, went through the terms of service and predicted that people would just get caught off-guard and have these huge bills. Sadly, it's the small businesses that are gonna get really kicked in the ass on this because they don't have dedicated people watching this every hour to see what's going on, and they end up waking up with thousands of dollars in advertising bills. Indeed was nice enough to come out of its ivory tower, and visit Linkedin and make a reply to to all the hubbub that was going on. They said, "We're making this change based on feedback we've received from our clients that they don't want to pay for clicks that never lead to an application. The goal is to help better connect employers with quality talent right away, increase your speed to hire, and most importantly, ensure you only pay for results in a rapidly changing job market." I'm not sure they even read the initial post by Angela. They just copied and paste this out of their PR handbook, but they did at least come down from the ivory tower to reply. Joel: Another example that Angela mentioning this in terms of small businesses, she said, quote, "As another example, I'm volunteering my time with the police department right now. The captain got ahead of himself and made a post and within one day had $900 worth of spending charges for applications that could not be used, which wastes not only our time reviewing, but applicant time and gets their hopes up in the process." Chad: And tax dollars. Joel: $900 in one day, that's terrifying, especially for a government agency funded by our tax dollars. Thanks a lot, Indeed. Because of you, we all lose. Well done. Well done. Chad: Bastards. Bastards. Joel: I feel like this won't be the last time we talk about people upset with Indeed's new pay model, but I could be wrong. In the meantime, let's play a little Who'd You Rather. That's right, Chad, you and I pick two companies. I read a small summary of the recent round of money that they've raised, talk about what they do, and then you or I chime in on whether we'd rather do one or the other, I'll let the audience figure out what Who'd You Rather actually means. So first up, we have Magic.dev. Joel: I guess it's just Magic, but it's Magic.dev. Anyway, they've raised 23 million in a Series A funding round led by Alphabet's CapitalG. The funding brings the total raised by the company to $28 million. Magic's product aims to operate like an AI pair programmer, able to communicate in natural language and collaborate on complex code changes. The company's co-founder and CEO, Eric Sternberger, said that the adoption of AI assistance in the workplace will be as impactful as the industrial revolution, whoa. Their tagline is, "Software that builds software," I kinda like that, by the way. Alright, next up, we have Kanarys. Dallas-based Kanarys has raised $5 million in a Series A round, this brings the total capital raised to $10.5 million. The company plans to use the funds to expand its technology platform and hire six new executives focused on DEIB engineering, finance, operations, product marketing and sales. Kanarys uses data to identify DEI blind spots in areas such as talent acquisition, retention, performance review and pay practices, enabling companies to take targeted, immediate action. So Chad, Magic.dev and Kanarys, who'd you rather? Chad: Kanarys is doing all that hiring, but the one person who's not there who was actually our show back in 2021, is Star Carter, who was co-founder and COO. She walked about three months ago. I don't have much hope for the DEIB space because there's billions of dollars that are being spent on training every year by companies just so that they can check a box, and none of it has to do with outcomes. So that's one of the reasons why I'm going with Magic.dev. Domain-specific AI is where the smart money and power is gonna go. I wanna see it go to DEIB where there's outcomes, but where it's gonna go is in domain-specific AI, this is what we talked to Ryan about. We can talk about the general big data set platforms like ChatGPT, but these more focused and specialized areas of AI is where the magic is gonna happen. See what I did there? See what I did there? [laughter] Joel: Dad joke alert. Alright, that one goes to Magic.dev. Alright, which wave am I surfing? After two years of gains, diversity, equity and inclusion programs nationwide, well, they appear to be stalling, Chad. In a recent survey from Glassdoor in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, access to DEI initiatives jumped from 29% in 2019 to 43% in 2021, but... But through the third quarter of 2022, that number has dipped to 41%, not an awful decline, but it's definitely not growth. I, like you, I'm fearful that all the DEI budgets that we saw spike in the wake of George Floyd are going to progressively go down and down as people just move on to other things. Replacing high-priced code monkeys, however, with an AI-powered programmer. Yeah, that sounds like a pretty huge wave to me that I'd like to get on. It may not be Magic.dev who ultimately wins the programmer for programmer war, but it's going to happen nonetheless. Frankly, I hope they both make it, I hope they both survive and thrive but for me, Magic.dev is a way smarter bet here, and for that reason, really for that reason alone, it is who I'd rather. Joel: And that is another episode of Who'd You Rather. Let's take a quick break. Listen to the ads, everybody, 'cause there is no show without the ads, and we'll be right back to talk about more invigorating topics. Chad: Invigorating. Really? [laughter] Joel: You like that? Doesn't my face say invigorating? Chad: Inspirational, yes. [laughter] Joel: Inspired topics about Upwork and child labor. Yeah, this is great. Alright, let's go to Upwork. Freelance marketplace, in case you didn't know. Upwork is launching full-time hiring for all of its customers, in a move that the company said is a quote "major expansion of its offerings." The company is enabling small and medium-sized businesses to use Upwork's compliance, payroll and contract management tools to hire highly skilled professionals for full-time work arrangements. The company is also upgrading its enterprise suite services to support large businesses identifying and taking on full-time workers through customized onboarding workflows and systems integrations. The move aims to provide clients with greater flexibility in choosing work arrangements and empower people on both sides of the work marketplace. Chad, your thoughts on Upwork moving away from freelance only to full-time. Chad: Well, if you take a look at Upwork stock price, you can see that the pandemic was extremely good for them, and now the world is somewhat back to normal and the stock has plummeted back to where it was pre-pandemic. Joel: Yes. Chad: So how exactly do you goose the stock? Well, you open up a total addressable market and set your sights on Indeed. Indeed starts pissing off clients with a bait and switch product, can Upwork step in and be the knight in shining armor? That's the question. Over 30% of Fortune 100 companies already use Upwork, so why not focus on wallet share with these companies for starters? Plus, Upwork's 2022 Future Workforce Report shows that 93% of hiring managers often and occasionally convert freelancers into full-time employee. So this is just a part of the normal process, and now they'll be able to make cash off of it. Joel: I love your Indeed take on that. That's interesting. When I first heard this, it sounded a little bit like Netflix putting ads in their service, I wasn't that hip to it. It felt like they have this brand of freelance work, and to kind of pivot away from that and I don't know, be a job board or a Remote or something platform, seemed like a stretch for me. But then, I remembered over 100,000 tech workers have lost their job in the last six months, and you know what, a lot of those tech workers, they wanna work full-time, but they don't really wanna work work at an office or for a particular company. They want a little bit more flexibility. So I think a lot of them are probably discovering Upwork if they didn't know about it before, and are probably realizing that, hey, there's full-time jobs or full-time gigs available where I know I'm gonna be employed month after month, project after project. That's a pretty appealing thing if I'm a tech worker. I think they'll still be able to provide services on the freelance side for people who make banner ads or voice-overs for Samuel L. Jackson impersonations. Joel: That'll still be something that they do, but I think that makes a lot of sense. How many companies adopt that on the small and medium size? That's left to be seen. I think a lot of companies will be able to hire one person in-house to manage these teams on Upwork without having the office space or a lot of the things that typically come with that. Now, one of the things that I didn't see at all in the announcements was healthcare benefits. So Upwork is still not providing healthcare benefits, and I still think that's gonna be something for people who want contract work or "full-time work," is it full-time if it's not healthcare benefits? I think that's gonna be something that's gonna be tough for Upwork to handle. To your point of stock price, I think it's up 3% since its announcement, not a huge bump, and it's certainly fallen a ton since the pandemic. I like the move, whether people adopt it, whether other companies follow suit... Like LinkedIn should be doing some of this shit. I'm really amazed LinkedIn doesn't get into this game of gigs. They kind of have been dabbling in it, kinda like the ATS business and stories and video, they just kind of get half pregnant on most of this stuff. Joel: I'm not real inspired by anything that they're doing, but Upwork, they've been a really good service, I use it for a lot of my stuff. Why not full-time work for people that don't wanna necessarily go through the interviewing process and everything that goes with working at a company full-time? I'm down. I'm down with it. Chad: Yeah. It's a try before you buy kind of scenario though too. You get a contractor in then you want them to come full-time, so we've seen this. We've seen this in the past, this could prospectively just goose more of that happening, and that's what companies like to do anyway. They love to be able to try because they feel like there's less risk versus reward. And again, I really think this is a play for just a bigger addressable market for Upwork. It makes good sense. I'm surprised that it took 'em so long to get here, but they were so fucking busy during the pandemic, I don't know that they could do anything other than just try to keep up with what was going on. Joel: Yeah, and not only the techies that have lost their job in the last six months, but a lot of people that have been driving Ubers or living on DoorDash have probably gotten a little tired of the whole rat race of driving for Uber or doing the gig economy thing. But they don't wanna go back to work full-time for someone. This is a nice bridge between kinda full-time work, but kinda gig work, and I think it'll appeal to a lot of people, so I'm interested to see where this thing goes. I'm excited, unlike our next story, which has me a lot less excited. Chad: Yeah, this should come with a disclaimer that make sure that... Take your belts and shoelaces and put them in the other room. Go ahead. [laughter] Joel: I never thought we'd talk about something like this on this show. Chad: I didn't either. Joel: But here we are. Here we are in 2023, not 1823. Okay. [laughter] Joel: As a tight labor market drives the need for more workers, some US states are looking to relax child labor laws to fill the gaps. Chad: Fuck! Joel: Proposed bills in Minnesota and Iowa would allow 14 year olds to work in industrial freezers and meat coolers, and 16 and 17 year olds to work in construction jobs respectively. Some argue that relaxing child labor laws fills a need, but opponents believe it's dangerous and subjecting young people to hazardous environments. Critics also argue that such jobs could stick it to the poor as they're less likely to employ middle or upper class children. Wow. Okay, Chad, your thoughts on the revival of child labor in America. Chad: So, we mentioned Iowa and Minnesota, but also Wisconsin had this all the way and got vetoed. Okay, so it's three states, and these are all Republican-led bills. The average meat packer salary is $30,000 a year, that's the median across the United States. In Iowa, where they're really trying to get these kids to pack meat, it's $25,000 a year. $25,000 a year. So I wonder why they can't find people to fill these jobs because nobody's gonna do the shitty work for $25,000 a year, let alone a kid. So let's dig into the economics a little bit further. Chad: This is from Reuters, Tyson Foods, Global Foods, JBS, National Beef Packing Company and Seaboard Corp, their financial statements showed a 120% collective jump in the gross profits since the pandemic, and a 500% increase in net income. These companies recently announced 1 billion in new dividends and stock buybacks on top of the more than 3 billion they paid to shareholders since the pandemic began. These are companies who are crying that they don't have people, but they're paying $25,000 a year. Now, they can't get somebody to actually go in for a $13 an hour job, and they're like, "Hey, let's see if the kids will do it," this is where we're at in the United States. In 1938, we put child protection in place. 1938, what the fuck is going on here? Joel: Not even in the midst of a war where so many men went to fight did we need child labor to make bullets and grenades. But in 2023... And by the way, kids aren't gonna choose to do these jobs, the parents in impoverished houses are gonna make their kids take these jobs... Chad: They have no choice. Joel: Because it's a $20,000 bump or however much it is for kids, I don't know, but that's who's going to be doing this. And it's incredibly sad. Look, the math on this is easy, and I've talked about this on past shows, a million die in this country from COVID, 10,000 baby boomers reach retirement age every day in this country, immigration went to zero pretty much for two years. There's no surprise that we need people to do these jobs. Joel: The answer is, the COVID people aren't gonna come back from the dead, the boomers aren't gonna un-retire to do these jobs. Immigration has to be embraced in this country, we're a country of immigrants. The good news is we're coming back to pre-COVID immigration numbers, but we need to 2x that to fill the jobs that we're saying should be done by children. And don't forget that labor is good or immigration is good for America, not just for these jobs, but half of the Fortune 500 founders are either immigrants themselves or they are children of immigrants. So immigrants aren't just packing your meat, they're also starting companies like Google and Tesla, okay. So immigration is something that America needs to embrace again and what a perfect way to do it than say, you want child labor or do you want more immigration, and I think a lot of people are gonna choose immigration in that equation. Chad: Well, Republican State Senator Rich Draheim, chief author of the Minnesota bill told Business Insider that hiring youth employees is valuable experience for the teenagers involved and that businesses often can't afford to pay employees more. Did you hear the stock buyback bullshit I just talked about? Okay, okay, okay, I can't make this shit up. Then the Senator said, good for Minnesota. And I quote, "Eliminating work opportunities for youth just because of their age will make it even harder for businesses to find reliable employees." I agree immigration is a part of the pie, but they have to pay people more, they have the money to pay people more, they need to pay people more. We need to focus on not building fucking walls, and if they put some of this money into, I don't know, automation, that might also help. There are opportunities here for this industry, which is industrialized, to say the least, to grow and move. But they're not going to because we have senators who are doing nothing but taking the grease from the lobby, it's fucking crazy. Joel: The grease from the lobby. Our labor laws are fine, kids, it's our immigration policies that need help. By the way, Chad, you know who's from Minnesota? Chad: Who? [laughter] Joel: We'll be right back. Oh Chad, I had Starbucks this morning. Chad: You did not. [laughter] Joel: Times are tough. Times are tough at Starbucks, Chad. Chad: Times are tough at Starbucks. Joel: A man in Oklahoma... Chad: Said nobody ever, yes. Joel: Was reportedly charged almost $5000 for a couple of cups of coffee at Starbucks due to a Venti-sized tipping error. After contesting the charge, the customer claims Starbucks sent him two reimbursement checks that allegedly... You ready for this? Bounced. Leading him to involve the Tulsa Police Department. He has since had to postpone his family's trip to Thailand due to the financial strain. All is not lost at Starbucks, however. They're not going out of business. A spokesperson for Starbucks stated that the company addressed the error and the customer cashed a reimbursement check on February 6th. However, it's still not a very good look, Chad. What are your thoughts on Starbucks' Venti-sized error? Chad: This is 1938? What are they doing sending checks? What the fuck is this? Why don't you just wire the goddamn money to my account? When's the last time you cashed a check? [laughter] Joel: I don't know, Chad. I'm gonna have to think about that and get back to you with that... Chad: What the fuck? Joel: Next week. By the way, we discussed Super Bowl ads earlier. What did you think of the Dunkin's ad with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez? Chad: Dunkin Donuts, you've got great donuts, you got great coffee. You don't need Ben Affleck. Now, Jen, JLo, that's okay. [laughter] Chad: My friend, the only thing better than big booty Latinas and bug fights, big booty Latinas and donuts. We out. Joel: 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 is no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could have used to buy nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. Let's save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful trainwreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Re-skilling and up-skilling was a common theme throughout 2022, and it shows no signs of slowing down as we head into 2023. Turns out, offering candidates and employees the opportunity to grow professionally is great for recruiting and retention. That's why we invited Natalie McCullough president and chief commercial officer at Guild on the podcast. A graduate of Stanford and Harvard Business School, as well being a Microsoft alum means she's a great person to talk to on the subject matter. Plus: Unicorn alert! Guild has raised over $643 million and has a $3.75 billion valuation. Companies like Walmart and Target rely on them to offer valuable continuing education solutions to their workforce. It's a must listen for anyone hiring essential workers. 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: Hide your kids, lock the doors! You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeman 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, kids? It's your favorite guilty pleasure, AKA The Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, the Watson to my Holmes, Chad. Chad: Hello! Joel: And today we are giddy, giddy to welcome Natalie McCullough, President and Chief Commercial Officer at Guild. Natalie, welcome to the show. Natalie McCullough: Hi, guys. It's great to be here. Chad: Great to have you. Dude, I am excited. We talked to Natalie in Vegas late last year at HR Tech. Joel: Were we sober? Chad: Yeah, I think that was the only time we were sober, to be quite frank, yeah. Joel: Was Natalie sober, is the better question? Natalie McCullough: I definitely was, we can be clear about that. [laughter] Chad: There are not a ton of companies that are out there that are actually solving huge problems. I mean, huge problems, and Guild is doing that. Natalie, Chief, what was that Joel, President? Joel: Commercial Officer. Chad: Well, tell us a little bit about you Natalie, give us a Twitter bio about you, not about Guild. We'll talk about Guild and all that other stuff, but who's the person? Natalie McCullough: Sure. Okay, great. Well, let's see. I live in the Bay Area, I have for a long time. I live in Marin County, just north of the city. I am what a former president referred to as a Marin hot-tubber, proudly so I guess. I have two teenage kids, and one of them is a freshman in the college, so that's pretty interesting for me, given what I do professionally with Guild. And just a long time... Oh, I wasn't supposed to talk about my career. Well, a long time operator, I'll say that. As a mother of two and a busy business person, I don't have that many hobbies left anymore. I'm gonna have to find them once my kids all go to school. But that's me in a nutshell. Chad: It's amazing when they're out of house, let me tell you. The empty nesting, when that happens, the hobbies that you can find, amazing. Joel: I don't wanna hear about this emptiness. Chad: Joel has a 5-year-old. Joel: Can we go back to this? Hot tub? What was that? Natalie McCullough: Don't you remember? I think it was one of the George Bushes was describing the Marin hot-tubbers. It was like a kin to the soccer moms. It was like they're Marin hot-tubbers, as a way to describe liberal people. Joel: Is this Bush one or two? Natalie McCullough: I don't remember. Chad: Doesn't matter. Joel: Okay. Natalie McCullough: One of them said it. [laughter] Joel: That's a new one for me. I'm sure it's a new one for our audience. Natalie McCullough: I might have dated myself with that reference, but I remember it. A lot of people remember it actually. Joel: That's right. We can talk about Mr. Microphone, if it'll make you feel younger. Well, thanks for being here. Let's get right into it, shall we? For our listeners that don't know, what does Guild do and how is the current state of the company? Natalie McCullough: Yeah, happy to talk about that. So Guild works with large employers to provide education, skilling and career mobility to their workforces. And the company was founded about eight years ago with this really single-minded vision and mission to create opportunity for America's workforce, particularly for the, call it 100 million or so Americans who don't have the skills or the education for the future of work, if you will. And we have built what we think of as a career opportunity platform that allows employers to fund critical education and skilling for their employees, and then also to connect that to mobility, to the jobs that are available to them as they invest in that education and skilling. Joel: And what's your current valuation? [chuckle] Chad: A lot. Natalie McCullough: Yeah. It's not actually a number that we focus on that much. We focus much more on the number of eligible employees that we have to serve, which is north of 5 million right now, and our position, really partnering with what we think are super innovative employers. So in the retail space, think of Walmart and Target and Macy's as critical partners, and in financial services, it's JP Morgan Chase and PNC and Discover and many others, and just great employers who have all embraced this vision of how do I create a culture of opportunity inside my company so that employees believe and see that I'm investing in them, not just what I give them today, but the path that I'm setting up for them in the future? Joel: I love talking to presidents. Okay, I'll answer the question. According to Crunchbase, your valuation is $3.75 billion. Chad: Ba, ba, ba, ba billion. Joel: Which gives me a chance to play my favorite soundbite. [music] Chad: It's been a minute since you've had a chance to actually do. Joel: It has, it has. Times are tough. Times are tough these days. Chad: So it's interesting, not many people would see a company like Walmart and see them in the super innovative silo. So what makes Walmart super innovative with regard to what you're actually doing with them? Natalie McCullough: If I'm not mistaken, Walmart is the world's largest employer, or at least the US's largest employer, private employer, I should say, and I think that they have a pretty amazing track record actually of being innovative in the realm of their relationship with their workforce. So they were very early on with Guild and in this movement to really upend the traditional approach to education. So the vast majority of employers in this country offer something called tuition reimbursement to their employees. It's about 70% of of larger employers, not SMBs. But anything sizeable, typically will have a tuition reimbursement program. But that's a benefit, if you will, that is mostly taken advantage of by white collar workers. Chad: People who can afford it. Natalie McCullough: People who can afford it, 'cause you gotta put money up front and hope and expect that you'll be reimbursed for it, and it oftentimes comes with really pretty bad policy around clawbacks, like, "Hey, if you leave us after a year, well, you owe us the money for that." Some organizations have even GPA requirements in order to get reimbursed. So there's a lot of risk associated with that, and in our opinion, a lot of inequity. So Walmart, and Disney was also a very early partner, really led the way with Guild in upending that paradigm and saying, "This is not the way that we should be creating this opportunity and this benefit. We need to do it in a much more equitable way, so that all employees can have access to it, particularly the ones that need it the most." Natalie McCullough: But since you asked about Walmart, Walmart stated publicly a year or so ago that they were gonna invest $1 billion in their Live Better University, which is their program with Guild, and that's a very sizable investment, if you think about it, for any company to make in the education of their front line. Chad: But when you are as big as Walmart is and you need, obviously, those individuals, we've seen that Amazon is actually burning through some of the workforce in some of the areas where they are doing business, but not for long. You see a company like Walmart, which has been around forever, for goodness sakes, actually focus on their people. Now, this is a turning, I guess you could say, of the socio-economic formula, where generally individuals who would work for Walmart, and I'm gonna generalize for a minute, would be the individuals who couldn't afford to actually pay upfront. So is this what many of these companies are realizing, that, "Hey, look, many of these entry level types of positions that I need to get them up through the ranks, they're not gonna be able to afford it, and if they can't afford it, we're never gonna get them where we need them to be." Are we starting to see that now? Natalie McCullough: Yeah, I think that that's a piece of the equation. So it is understanding that there is really an untapped reservoir of talent, if you will, in the front line that needs some investment in order to help, honestly, to keep it in place. So one of the core reasons why folks bring Guild into their company is around talent recruitment and talent retention. So even if you can't deliver on the mobility promise, simply offering folks this access to education and scaling keeps them around longer, which addresses your point that you made earlier about how Amazon is kind of burning through the labor force available to them in their work sites. But the tip of the iceberg thing that I was saying is we have this fundamental belief, or maybe I'll start there, which is that talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not. Natalie McCullough: So how do you start to address that challenge? One piece of it is taking away the financial burden. So no longer, in a program like what Guild offers, no longer does an employee have to front the money, which immediately makes it accessible to people of lesser means and lower incomes. The second big thing though is about, honestly, leveling the playing field around knowledge and understanding of, "Okay, great. My employer is paying for this, but what should I do? I don't know any data scientists in my day-to-day life, so when I see a data science certificate available to me, how do I know what that job is gonna be like? How do I know if I'm capable of doing that?" Natalie McCullough: So that's a really other very big component of the solution that we brought forward, is that we, first of all, we curate the learning programs, so they have proven track records of working for the working adult learner, which is a non-trivial thing. We've evaluated over 7500 potential partners, and we have somewhere between 100 and 200 today, and 2100 specific programs that we have put through a vetting process to say, "We believe that you will deliver great outcomes for the working adult learner." And then the other big piece is that we package a whole set of career mobility, career support, career coaching services and product to help that person who may not have really any situational understanding of where they are today and how to get from that position to something different. Natalie McCullough: So they need coaching, they need some assessment help around what's available, and they need, honestly, just some basic information and education about what these potential job pathways look like. Joel: Chad, I had one of those Boston Dynamics robots greet me the last time I went to a Walmart, so I don't know what you're talking about they're not innovative, 'cause that was real impressive to me. Natalie, you are a woman-owned business. How has that been an asset and a liability for you? Natalie McCullough: I can't imagine a way that it's been a liability. That's gonna take me a second to process. Joel: We've heard some women-owned business say raising money is tougher. Chad: Apparently, it's not for them. Have you seen the amount of money they've raised? [laughter] Joel: But maybe that hasn't been an issue with you guys, but that's been one. Natalie McCullough: Yeah, well, I think Rachel Romer, who is our CEO and Co-founder is really exceptional at setting forward the vision of what Guild is trying to do out in the world, and I think she's been really effective at getting access to capital as a function of that. So you'd have to ask her if being a woman made that harder, but certainly the results don't seem to bare that out for us. I do think that Guild specifically has an incredible advantage from a talent attraction perspective for a couple of reasons. One is a lot of women like the idea of coming to work at a company where there is very visible female leadership, and it's not just Rachel. Obviously, I'm a female leader. I have several peers on the leadership team in very important roles who are also women, more so than the average, certainly, tech company that's out there. But the other big advantage that we have is that we are so mission-driven. Natalie McCullough: So Guild is a public benefit corp, a B Corp, if you will, which means that our governance by laws allow us to put our financial objectives, our shareholder objectives, if you will, and our social impact on equal footing, which is a lot of companies talk about that, but actually putting that into your governance model empowers that in a different way. And I think, particularly with the younger generations, they're very clear that they want to put their energies into something that's gonna make the world a better place, and that gives us a huge advantage in building great teams. Joel: Recent headlines have been riddled with news of layoffs, particularly in our space as well, which Chad and I talk about on a weekly basis. Have you guys gone through many rounds of layoffs or are you planning on some, and if not, how have you been immune? What's your secret to being immune to the current state of the world? Natalie McCullough: Yeah, that's a great question. I don't think anybody is immune to the shifting macro-economic environment. It is undeniable that in times of uncertainty, people are slower to make decisions, so that impacts us just the way it impacts anybody else. That said, Guild is growing pretty rapidly, has been and is continuing to do so, and so our general headcount trajectory is upward. We are growing the company from a net headcount perspective. We definitely have taken the opportunity in the last year to make sure that we're investing appropriately in the right teams. Sometimes when folks grow really fast, and we did this too, like we over-invested in some areas and under-invested in others. We definitely took the opportunity in the last year very strategically and surgically to go through and make sure we were setting ourselves up for the long haul, but we haven't done what we heard from Google today or Microsoft, nothing across the board like that. Joel: Every day I hope I can lay off Chad, but I'm never... [laughter] The economics never work out. I don't know. Chad: You can't quit me. Joel: I know. I know. Chad: You work with very large organizations. How many companies are you currently working for? What does that actually represent from an employee base standpoint? And then also, you said proven track records. Tell me a little bit about the proven track record Guild has with some of those companies. Natalie McCullough: Sure. Our best scaling metric, I think, is the number of eligible employees that have access to Guild, which is north of 5 million today. We don't share our logo count right now, but that's across many, I'll just say many employers. I know that's not satisfying, and I'm sure you'll ask me another question to try and get at it. Chad: Come on. Come on. Natalie McCullough: But I think on the proven track record side, there's so many stats actually that I could throw at you on that. Chad: Throw 'em. Natalie McCullough: Okay. Well, maybe given the economic climate that we're in, one of the stat areas that I'm really into is the ROI stat, which is HR teams do not invest, cannot really invest in things right now that don't have a clear ROI, and we have done this analysis so many times with our existing employer partners about the return that they're getting, and the numbers always shake out in this 2-3x scenario using extremely conservative assumptions. So you guys probably know and your listeners do too, I think that finance loves to push HR on their assumptions around investments, etcetera. So we take a really conservative approach because we want to arm our HR partners to go into that room and into that meeting and have something that's bullet-proof. But the reality is that that's an extremely conservative measure. Natalie McCullough: I had one partner who I won't name, but we went through this process with them a couple of months ago, and they actually came back to us, and I think the answer that we came out with with them was like $2.60 or something like that for every dollar invested. And they came back and said, Well, interestingly, for another part of our business, we just quantified our replacement cost of replacing drivers, drivers is a big zone for them. And if we plug in the actual replacement cost for those drivers, your ROI is closer to $7.50. So that's the ROI I'm gonna take because that's just how hard it is for us as a business when our drivers quit to recruit and train and bring in new drivers. So I think that's a really powerful proven track record, which is when employers invest in Guild, they see massive returns from recruitment, retention and mobility. Chad: Okay. So we see in community colleges, in colleges nationwide that graduation rates aren't incredibly high. What are you seeing from graduation rates, or at least completion rates from the students that are going through the Guild programs or the Walmart programs, or what have you? Natalie McCullough: Yeah. So this one is a little bit complicated to unpack, but it comes in a couple of different forms. The first thing is that when I talked about how we curate our learning partners, we are picking a set of learning partners who have above average completion, graduation, persistence rates, and some of those metrics are pretty complicated. For an open access Bachelors for the average working adult learner, for example, you're talking about something that can take like six years if somebody's starting from zero credit. So these are complicated things to measure. But first of all, we sort of curate. First of, we don't allow folks into the marketplace who are not meeting or above the benchmark that exists for that category. Natalie McCullough: And then there's something that we call The Guild Effect, which is basically the combination of the employer funding the career and support coaching that they get through the Guild coaches and the access to all of the support actually takes those rates somewhere between 15 and 20 points higher on average. And so I can't give you as precise number because the other thing to be clear about is there are 18 categories of learning in the Guild catalog. One category of learning might be High School Equivalency or English language learning. Another category might be an advanced Master's degree, an MBA or something like that. But certs, everything in between, and for each of them, we have a precise quality benchmark and then we require our providers to be higher and then we require ourselves to go even higher than that. Joel: When you say catalog, are we talking like a Seers Catalog that you send to people? I'm kidding. Chad: Yellow Pages, yes. Joel: Curious about competitive landscape, Grow with Google, LinkedIn Learning, Coursera. When you're talking to prospects, I assume they ask that question, or what's the differentiator with all those other sort of services that are built around re-skilling and up-skilling? Natalie McCullough: Yeah, I think it's a really interesting time right now for HR leaders and L&D leaders because there is so much kind of convergence and also confusion around what is actually available out there. All those that you named, for example, I wouldn't consider competitors, per se. I think there are a lot of folks who are offering rich catalogs or sets of learning around short-form learning. I think there are a lot of folks who offer platforms to track compliance around learning. There's a whole set of folks who do tuition reimbursement, which is really kind of the category that Guild disrupted in the first place, but I don't wanna be teased about this. But we really think that we're doing something very different. Natalie McCullough: We are building what we call a career opportunity platform, which is really bringing together the education, the skilling and the career mobility into one place with a member-focused user experience designed to meet the member where they are, which is a big thing. Almost every platform that you just named has very little applicability for the frontline worker. Like really just more or less designed for you and me, not for somebody who has limited education and who works as like a check-in clerk in a retail environment. We wanna meet the you or me, that's actually pretty easy to do, and we wanna meet the frontline worker where they are, and then we wanna guide them through and support them through the whole process. Natalie McCullough: And then on the flip side, we want the employer to have deep, deep analytics, so that not only can they understand the return, like I was describing before, but they can also understand and enable mobility. So for example, at many, not all, but many of our employer partners actually have internal recruiting specialists who live and breathe off of a dashboard that we give them that shows them, "Here are the hundreds or thousands of people in your company who are near completion or have completed a program that you should be approaching for the jobs that you have to fill in your organization." So that really connecting the dots between, "Okay, you've invested in the L&D and the education. Now, how do you get those people into the next job?" Which actually has a whole other set of things that have to be addressed to make that happen. Joel: Relationship with the government, I assume it's a partner, but also a potential threat in terms of reimbursement and paying for certain programs. Is that a benefit? But also if free community college became a thing, would that overnight become a threat to your business? How do you think about the government in the business? Natalie McCullough: The government is an important stakeholder in anything that has to do with education, first and foremost, so we keep a close eye on those regulations, but we think of them, I guess, as an influence, something that we have to be aware of, but not necessarily a threat. I will say, personally, I don't think the odds of free community college everywhere are very good. Joel: I think you're right. Natalie McCullough: So I'm not that worried about that. But even if that did happen, as I said, community college or an associate's degree type thing is one of the 18 categories that we have of learning inside of Guild. So I don't really think that that would be massively disruptive to the core business and how people are thinking about it. But yeah, we pay attention and we care a lot about how policy holders, policy makers, I should say, are engaging in this space. We think it's a very positive trend that employers are funding advanced education and skilling, and we think the government could do more to support and encourage that. So for example, today, employers can invest $5250 a year in a given employee's education outside of the realms of skilling education required for their core job, and that does not have to be a tax benefit. Natalie McCullough: So a lot of employers, by default, set that number as the amount that they are going to cap in many ways of what they will invest. Many of our partners go higher than that, some go lower, but most people take the cue from the government. And that number was set like 20 years ago or something like that. It's literally not even been an inflation adjusted to allow and encourage employers to make the kind of investments that we need, which as like a US citizen staring down what's facing us from a workforce crisis perspective, I think that's unconscionable, honestly, and that's an area that we think government could and should do more with. Joel: Interesting. Chad: Let's talk about the skills gap, 'cause everybody is, and it seems to be getting wider and wider and wider. So are you working with employers and educational institutions to be able to bridge those gaps? Because in many cases, the catalog isn't available to be able to get people where they need to go. And we're talking about, let's say for instance, some of these individuals who are working in technology or some of the very innovative spaces where you're not just learning about what I need to know today, but I also need to be in front of tomorrow. And many of those companies know where they're going, but they're not working with obviously educational institutions to be able to create catalogs around that type of learning. Are you guys trying to be that bridge between the two? Talk a little bit about that. Natalie McCullough: Yeah, I think we're dead-focused on helping employers address that skills gap. Maybe I can bring that to life with an example. So Target is a partner. They've been live for maybe a year and three months, a year and a half, something like that, and they call their program Dream to Be, and it's a best-in-class program, all employees are eligible and the number of programs available is really broad for their employees. In addition, within that general approach, they created an emerging engineers program and we work with them to curate a specific learning provider that could help them take a frontline worker at a certain point in their education and become a programmer effectively. And so they just graduated their first class a few months ago of like 15 or 20, I think, of people who were working in warehouses or working in stores and now have jobs doing coding for them. And that's just one step. Natalie McCullough: So a big thing that we do with employers is we build out these career pathways of like, Okay, how do you take somebody from a very frontline entry-level job? What is the path to a gate, we call it a gateway job, then what is the path from the gateway job to the next job, and then what is the path from the next job to the "destination job"? And I think we are investing a ton right now in making sure that we have a skilling catalog that can take folks all the way through that journey. I would say we are stronger in the first couple of steps of that journey just because of our heritage of serving so many millions of frontline employees and honestly, that being really mission-aligned of how you make a better life for those people. But we have everything in there to take somebody who maybe already has a bachelor's degree, is an analyst or something like that and wants to be a data scientist. I mentioned that earlier, which is one of the major skills gaps. Chad: Is that pretty transparent though in the platform? I mean, as an employee, can I jump into it and I can see, here are the opportunities and the different pathways I can take to go to these different positions? Natalie McCullough: Yes, actually. So that's embedded in the platform. We have what's called a Career Discovery page. These are sometimes customized actually at the employer level. We work with a ton of healthcare partners, and in healthcare, there's a workforce crisis, as I'm sure you know, around nursing and other clinical staff. And so you can go into the platform, you can see, "Okay, today I'm a patient transporter. What would it look like to become a phlebotomist? And then how could I become a nursing associate, a registered nurse, a nurse practitioner?" There's a whole chain there in the clinical world and we actually paint it out for them. We have a bunch of tools. We're gonna launch a tool in a couple of months. I'm not gonna steal anybody's thunder, but we're gonna launch another piece of that equation pretty soon that will make that piece of it even more powerful. Chad: Okay. So you talked about a talent attraction before, which is incredibly important, and I think the best way we've ever seen this handled is with the military and ROTC, being able to actually go through those programs and whatnot. So how are companies actually maybe mimicking or doing the same types of things, or maybe even different to be able to draw in some very high potential types of individuals and put them on a path to leadership or what have you? Natalie McCullough: Yeah, I think this is an area where employers who are investing in Guild and programs like it could and should lean in much, much harder. Some employers really do it well. So for example, Chipotle, they're one of our partners and their campaign was, "Don't go to college to get a job, get a job to go to college," and that was a massive campaign for them. Chad: Yes. Chad: I like that. Natalie McCullough: And I would think about even the positive, less tangible benefits of that, think about the candidate pool that you attract with a campaign like that, I mean I think people who are hardworking, who are ambitious, who are like... That's a great talent pool that you're attracting with that. So it has all these ancillary benefits. And a hospital provider also shared recently at a quarterly business review, they started surveying new employees in the last year, how important the Guild program was in their decision to join 'cause the war for talent in nursing, et cetera is very, very competitive and the number was astounding. It was like 70% of all the people who had joined that company in the last year said that the education program was one of the top three reasons why they joined that company. And so that's an example of an employer who's doing a fantastic job of really trumpeting, "Hey, come here and we will invest in you." So I think that's the path forward, and I would agree with you that the GI programs were kind of like a trailblazer on that. Joel: Do you guys have a lobbying team? You mentioned the amount of funding that goes into it, it hasn't increased in 20 years. Are you guys lobbying Congress and Representatives to get that number up and more support? Natalie McCullough: I don't think we have an official lobbying team, or I wouldn't call it that exactly. We have a handful of people inside the company who pay a lot of attention to public policy and who spend time with policy makers to understand and influence. I guess that is effectively lobbying. Joel: But no one in DC that's hitting the pavement on a regular basis? Natalie McCullough: Yeah, we have people in DC who pay attention to what's happening for sure. [laughter] Joel: That sounds like an answer, non-answer to me. Natalie McCullough: We would be remiss if we didn't, I guess. But we're not paying any lobbying firms or anything like that. Joel: Okay, gotcha. Gotcha. What's the global footprint or opportunity for a company like Guild? Natalie McCullough: I think the footprint is relatively unlimited. So today, almost as a function of just opportunity cost, we have a threshold of minimum employer size. It used to be 10,000 employees. If you had 10,000 employees or more, we would talk to you about a partnership, and we are lowering that to 5,000 now 'cause we can scale up. We've been able to figure out some of the scale pieces a little bit. But I think the opportunity truly is endless. Like I said, there are 100 million workers in the country who need this type of benefit and I think our vision is that this becomes a standard across the industry, that this is what employers do for their employees. Joel: So when's the IPO? [laughter] Natalie McCullough: That is not something we're focused on, and I can't imagine that anybody answers that question for you. Joel: Here we go again. Here we go. Natalie McCullough: I don't know why you would keep asking that. Joel: We don't think about that. We're focused on the customer, Joel. Natalie McCullough, everybody. [applause] Chad: Hey, I wanna go ahead and I wanna quote one of the investors of Guild, Oprah Winfrey, "You get a Guild, you get a Guild, you get a Guild." Natalie, thanks for coming on the show. If somebody wants to find out more about you, maybe connect with you and/or find out more about Guild, where would you send them? Natalie McCullough: LinkedIn is a great place, I think, to find out more about us. We do a lot of promotion on LinkedIn. Chad: Excellent. Joel: Chad, it's been fun. It's Friday and it's happy hour. So another one is in the can. Chad: Amen. Joel: Thank you, Natalie. 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 in a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. Let's save some soap because you'll be back like an awful train wreck. You can't look away. And like Chad's favorite western, you can't quit them either. We out.

This week, the boys are all over the place. It's like Pulp Fiction were a podcast episode. CareerBuilder's all-white leadership team embraces its inner DEI, Who'd Ya' Rather with Dalia and Cleary. Entelo is turning into those deadly fungi from HBO's 'The Last of Us,' eating Silkroad Technologies from the inside out. Big fast-food chains are taking on California while speeding up that whole 'fewer employees / more robots' thing. Returnships are a new word we're all going to have to get used to and ARK's Cathie Wood believes Amazon could have more robots than employees by 2030. Is your head spinning just reading all that? Just wait till you have a 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. Joel Cheesman: Oh yeah, don't drive angry. Don't drive angry. Hi kids. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host, Joel 'Groundhog Day' Cheesman. Chad Sowash: And this is Chad 'The Last of Us' Sowash. Joel Cheesman: On this week's show, Who Would You Rather, Chipotle really is my life, and robots will outnumber humans at this employer very, very soon. Let's do this. Chad Sowash: Okay, listener, let me help you out here. Don't... Joel Cheesman: You say listener like there's only one of them. [laughter] Chad Sowash: It's very personal, very personal, but don't ever have a conversation with Joel Cheesman about a show you haven't caught up on yet, because he will do what he can to fuck up the show for you. Oh my God. So you asked me, Have you seen the last episode of The Last of Us. A really cool series. If you haven't seen it, it's on an HBO Max. It is awesome. And I said literally, "No, shut up. Don't tell me anything. I haven't seen it." And you totally ruined it. You couldn't help yourself. [noise] Chad Sowash: I didn't say a word to Joel, I didn't even tell her we had this conversation until after. Joel Cheesman: Chad, I was only looking out for the stability and health of your heart, because I know that you get really emotional about certain love stories and I don't wanna... Chad Sowash: Sometimes you gotta let it out. Joel Cheesman: Spoil it for our listener, the one listener out there. But I didn't want you to go into some sort of a melt down, so I wanted to give you enough that you'd sort of know what was gonna happen, but not so much that you didn't know everything. I did it for you. I did it for you, Chad. Chad Sowash: It's okay to let the emotions out organically. Joel Cheesman: It is okay. It is okay. And there's no football this weekend, so we can let it out. Although is the All-Pro game this weekend? Chad Sowash: You mean the flag football? Yeah. With the Manning brothers who are actually coaching. Joel Cheesman: God! What. Chad Sowash: That is legit smart though, because it was really just a flag football game in the first place. It was almost like a two hand tap. I mean, seriously. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, it was a scrimy, it was a party with the... I don't know. Flag football might be fun, I might tune in this year. I might tune in this year. Chad Sowash: Like it will be. The Puppy Bowl will be awesome during half time though. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: The Puppy Bowl is always awesome, as is the re-runs the whole week before it goes on. Alright, you wanna get to some shout-outs? Chad Sowash: Yep. Joel Cheesman: Let's do some shout out. Alright, so my first one goes to OfferUp. That's right, the number four site to sell your U-shit is getting a job board. OfferUp plans to OfferUp. Get it? OfferUp? Chad Sowash: It's too bad. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, that's... I'm sorry, listener, I'm sorry that I did that. Alright. Anyway... Chad Sowash: Sucker 1995, baby. Joel Cheesman: OfferUp plans to OfferUp web tools to post local jobs, give users the option to search listings through the app's feed or by your local area, and to apply directly for open positions via your phone. With over 20 million monthly users, no doubt, Indeed is shaking in their little booties right now. Shout out to OfferUp, who's launching a job board. Chad Sowash: If you go to the OfferUp HQ, they actually have a party line. Joel Cheesman: Are you gonna bring a Mr. Microphone joke? Are you setting the table for... Chad Sowash: No, no, no, I'm not, I'm not. That might happen later. Who knows. Okay. Shoutout to Carla Trotman, CEO of Electro Soft, a company outside of Philly that makes circuit boards who said... Joel Cheesman: Philly. [applause] Chad Sowash: Who said in a CBS news article that she wishes 45 people worked at Electro Soft instead of 30, but she can't find the people to fill the roles, costing the company about 5 million in top line revenue. I'll say it again kids, listen. Costing the company around 5 million in top line revenue. Did you hear that talent acquisition? You can equate open positions to revenue lost, and that is exactly what CEOs need to hear, and that is how you gain more budget. That's business 101 from your friends here at the Chad and Cheese podcast. [music] Joel Cheesman: This is good, this was a post that you had on LinkedIn, who she actually responded. Chad Sowash: She did, yeah. Joel Cheesman: And you guys had a little conversation. Chad Sowash: We did. Yeah. Joel Cheesman: That was nice. I love it when CEOs that we've never talked to, that aren't in our industry, just come out and engage with people. That was awesome. And speaking of Philly, Chad. Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: This shoutout goes to Recruit Philly. Chad Sowash: Oh, yeah! Joel Cheesman: Fly eagles fly, baby. By the way, every recruiter in Philly should be a member of this organization, if you're not already. Anyway, they featured us, that's you and me, Chad, this month in their newsletter saying, "With a new episode out almost every day, kill me, please, the Chad and Cheese podcast is a favorite of Recruit Philly. These two share a very, filtered and honest look at the hottest topics in the recruiting and HR space, and are often the first to break major industry news. This is a great podcast for anyone looking to stay current on workforce trends, emerging technology and startup updates." Shoutout to our good friends at Recruit Philly. [applause] Joel Cheesman: And hopefully we'll be able to make it out for another event. We were there post... Or pre-COVID. Post-COVID, it would be nice to go back out to Philly. Chad Sowash: It would be. It would be. And again, as Joel said, if you're in the Philly area and you're not a part of Recruit Philly, search it, get into it, it's a great community, they've got great events, all that other fun stuff, check them out. My next shoutout goes to Rich Wilson, CEO of Gigged.AI for the social love, where the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel Cheesman: For you. Chad Sowash: Where Rich declared his love for Chad, for obviously, for picking him in Gigged.AI on the Who Would You Rather. But here's the important part, Cheesman. Joel Cheesman: Yup, yup, yup. Chad Sowash: This also gets us like the engine rolling for us to come to Glasgow and pull together a scotch tasting tour with our friend Matt Olda. So message to Rich, let's make this tour of Scotland and your wonderful distilleries happen, let's do this, 2023. SFX: Welcome to all things Scottish. Our slogan is, "If it's not Scottish, it's crap!" Joel Cheesman: Just remember a certain other Scottish company that didn't appeal to me very much that cashed out, so don't feel too bad if I'm not on your train for anyone out there in Scotland building a start up. It's not the end of the world, trust me. Alright, I'm gonna do a little drum-roll for this one. It's just that exciting. Joel Cheesman: CareerBuilder. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: If you've never thought of CareerBuilder as a diversity recruitment strategy before, they sure hope you will now. In a recent email blast titled, Reach 18 million Black job seekers, CB touts a new partnership with iHeart radio's Black Information Network, saying, "We are on a mission to build wealth within the Black community by helping them build the career of their dreams." Maybe CareerBuilder could start by putting some Black people on their leadership team because right now there are zero. Come on, man. A very, very shameful shoutout to our friends at CareerBuilder. Chad Sowash: The social share of that article was just a white block. That's all it was. It was... Joel Cheesman: On the webpage? Chad Sowash: Even the socials... Yeah. I mean, when you shared that link socially in some of the... Like in Facebook, they just came out as a white block. It was like, go with the DEI white block. It was... Yeah, anyone. Joel Cheesman: Oh, yeah, the share image. Yeah. Yes, you're right. Chad Sowash: Yes. The social share. It just... Joel Cheesman: Dude, who... [laughter] Chad Sowash: They are so fucked up still at CareerBuilder. Alright. My last shout out goes to facial recognition. You're gonna love this one Joel. So MSG Entertainment, the company that owns Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall, well, they found a way to keep attorneys out of at least a part of our lives. Currently, any attorney that works for a firm that represents a client suing MSG Entertainment, they are now banned from their venues, and they're using facial recognition technology to identify them and keep them out of their venues. Now, we're talking about old white dudes who have a lot of money, who have season tickets to go to the garden. How long do you think this is gonna last? Speaker 1: That escalated quickly. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: How is this even legal? Chad Sowash: I don't know. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: You're segregating lawyers out of your venue. Chad Sowash: Oh my God. Joel Cheesman: Now, it's kind of a blessing 'cause watching the Knicks is a bit torturous. But there applies some good concerts at the garden, but yeah. I don't see how banning lawyers doesn't start a lawsuit within five minutes by the lawyers doing for this... Yeah, and that's some vindictive shit. If you have so much money and time on your hands that you need to create some facial rec to ban lawyers from your venue, damn, you got some issues, man. Chad Sowash: That's amazing. Joel Cheesman: Now, who doesn't have issues, Chad, are people that sign up for free shit on Chad and Cheese. You gotta go to chadcheese.com, click the free link. We're talking free shirts by our friends at JobGet, we're talking free beer from our friends at Aspen Tech Labs. Text Colonel is giving out two bottles of whiskey, each one of us selecting a single bottle. If it's your birthday this month, you might win rum from our friends at Plum, but you gotta play if you wanna win. Head out to chadcheese.com, click the free link. Chad Sowash: Quick shoutout to Lana, who's actually over at Aspen Tech Labs, she this week, now lives in The Algarve in Portugal, she's gonna be my neighbor. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Prince, chill out, man. Alright, and talking about birthdays in rum with Plum, let's give a shoutout to everyone who is celebrating another year around the sun. [applause] Joel Cheesman: Alright, we've got fans including Elizabeth Dunlop, Ivan the Irish recruiter, Stoyanavitch. Word is he's changing his last name to Mix Dayanavitch. Adam Bargen, Sarah Hanson, Amadu Bamia, Joe S.N Fell, Nick Fishman, Jess Von Bank, Andrew Rothman, Jason Lordson, Amanda Thompson Buffington, and another Irish favorite of ours, Dave Ralph, Happy Birthday everybody. Happy birthday, and there might be a bottle of rum coming your way. Stay tuned. Chad Sowash: And you might get that when we come to your town for events. First event on the list this year that... Yeah, this year is Vegas in April 26th and 27th at Caesars Forum for UNLEASH America. That's right, kids. UNLEASH America is coming to Vegas, but I have a different venue, we're going to Caesars Forum, pretty amazing. We checked it out last year, and April 26the and 27th, then we find ourself at RecFest in London, Knebworth Park Road, a little North of London. It's about a 20 to 30 minute train ride from London. It's fairly easy. But Knebworth Park all day the 6th of July. And then we have to mention this, it's gonna happen later this year, but we have a super, super duper early bird discount code for RecFest USA happening in Nashville in September. The discount code is ChadandCheese, all one word. It's fairly simple though, kids. You can go to chadcheese.com, click on events in the upper right-hand corner, and you can see the long list of the events that the Chad and Cheese will be this year. Register, get there and buy us a beer. Joel Cheesman: And teaser alert, we got some other events and cool shit that are in the works. So kids, hopefully we'll have some really cool announcements of some stuff that we will be doing later this year. Chad Sowash: Get ready. Chad Sowash: Topics! Joel Cheesman: Alright, time for our, what's now our weekly layoff update. SFX: Playoffs? Joel Cheesman: That's right. Workday is set to lay off 3% of its workforce, largely from tech and product units. Majority of cuts are due to global economic challenges, the company will offer severance, stock vesting, immigration support and optional medical benefits for six months. How nice of them? Hiring will continue throughout fiscal year 2024. And over at Unicorn, Oyster CEO, Tony James, shared a LinkedIn post that they have removed a number of roles across the company while adding new roles in strategic areas. To help those laid off, Oyster will waive their platform fees for six months for any of the Oyster alums a company out there hires, if you're interested in those Oyster employees, head over to Tony's LinkedIn for a spreadsheet of available candidates in their contact information, which means I just... Chad Sowash: A spreadsheet. Joel Cheesman: I just lose a lot of recruiters to go copy and paste a lot of candidate information. But, hey, it's out there. It's out there. Chad Sowash: I love how a tech company says, "Hey, we've created a spreadsheet that you can use," [laughter] and then Workday. Okay, this is funny and not funny. Okay, so I love how Workday says the quiet part out loud, it's not due to over-hiring, which means it's due to over-hiring. Here's a quote from CNBC, "For the period ending October 2022, Workday reported an increase of... " Listen to this, "$228 million in employee-related expenses, including share-based compensation, which the company said was largely due to head count growth, which led to the layoff." So when they say it's not due to over-hiring, it's due to over-hiring, and until boards keep their CEOs and C-Suite accountable for irresponsible hiring leading to mass firings, over 500 people fired. This is just gonna continue. Joel Cheesman: Chad, mind your business. The stock is up 3% since the announcement of layoffs, so... Chad Sowash: Fucking ridiculous, man. Joel Cheesman: Shut your pie hole, buddy. Shut your pie hole. Alright. Chad Sowash: God. Joel Cheesman: You're ready to play a little who'd you rather this week? Chad Sowash: I would. Yes. Joel Cheesman: Alright. You know how we play kids, we talk about two companies that recently got funded, we read a short summary, and Chad and I both decide who'd you rather? First up is Cleary, a startup co-founded by former Twitter employees, has raised 4.5 million in a seed funding round to revitalize the intranet. The company offers a full stack employee experience platform, combining communication recognition directory, search, Q&A, and integrates with HR and communication tools. Cleary's focus is to help HR teams scale culture and build personalized experiences for every employee. The investment will be used to build out the go-to-market teams and invest in personalized employee journey technology. That sounds pretty sexy. Joel Cheesman: Next up, we have Dalia, a recruitment marketing automation platform. They've completed a $5 million series, a funding round. Capital will be used to expand product suite and sales and marketing efforts. Dalia maximizes career site conversion rates and enables employers to capture job seekers and bring them back through emails/text alerts. Clients include Compass Group, Ryder, Valvoline and more. Chad Cleary, Dalia, who would you rather? Chad Sowash: Okay, it's story time. Are you ready? Joel Cheesman: I'm ready. Chad Sowash: So I have history with Dalia's CEO, Sam Fitzroy. [music] Chad Sowash: That's right, that's right. Back in 2009, Sam became the Alliances Director over at Indeed, and at the time, I was the number two guy over at direct employers association, where one of my tasks, and my team's tasks, was to build a job distribution network for the biggest companies in the world aka AT&T, Lockheed Martin, you get the drift. And we had an alliance with thousands of sites like Indeed, who actually built their job search content engines off the backs of our corporate job feeds. Chad Sowash: So in most of these job feeds, we had appended URLs to denote candidate source. So the ATS could see where the candidate was coming from all the way to hire, then we noticed that Indeed started stripping the source codes out of the URL, meaning the companies had no clue where the candidates were coming from. So back then, I dealt primarily with Sam's boss, who will remain nameless because he was... Because he was ball-less and he wouldn't actually take my call. So my call was directed to Sam who was the new kid in Alliances, and he took the brunt of my fury, and you can not fucking imagine how mad I was back then. Joel Cheesman: Jesus. Yeah, I could imagine. Chad Sowash: I don't think he got more than two words in during my berating of what was going on. But here's the funny part, Sam told me the story over drinks at a conference, and because I was in such a blind rage, I think I had actually blocked it out of my memory. And to be honest, I don't even know that I knew it was him on the other end of the line. So needless to say, through all of that, Sam and I have history and we have a bond, so I would rather, Dalia. Joel Cheesman: So we've kissed and made up. It's all good there, you don't remember anything. Chad Sowash: Oh yes. No. Sam is a great guy. Yeah. Joel Cheesman: So I'll do story time as well. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: So I remember Sam pitching this thing at a conference in Nashville that we attended, I think in 2019. His Indeed background to me was worth checking out just alone. I remember thinking, "Okay, yeah, marketing, have a pop-up when someone starts to leave the career side, capture the email address," pretty basic kind of top of funnel type stuff, like most things in our space, following marketing trends is generally a good strategy for a start-up. Joel Cheesman: So I gave it a thumbs up at the time. After his presentation, he knew of me, probably from Cheese head days, and then even the podcast and Indeed. And he mentioned you, which I remember now because you told that story, he was like, "How's Chad?" I'm like, "Geez, just call him." And he said, "I don't know if Chad likes me very much." And I was like, "What are you talking about?" So he told me his side of that story, it's good you guys have made up. But anyway, I never expected them to be a Series A startup, they've added some nice automated outreach features, and I expect this to be a nice acquisition target into '24 '25 probably. As far as Cleary goes, a Twitter background is hardly a selling point these days. Number one, Twitter kind of sucks right now, and number two, people that come in from Google and Twitter typically fuck up in the recruitment space. And frankly, I'd rather watch paint dry that talk about intranets. Chad Sowash: Intranet. Joel Cheesman: So for me, I'm gonna agree with you that Dalia is my who would you rather. Chad Sowash: Sam, you still owe me drinks, man. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Yeah, me too. Me too Sam, damn it. Alright, let's talk SilkRoad and Entelo. SilkRoad technology is integrating its candidate sourcing solution search with its applicant tracking system called recruiting, creating an end-to-end talent acquisition solution, the integration includes Entelo's candidate sourcing and recruitment marketing capabilities, enabling organizations to identify reach and convert skilled talent. The AI-driven platform will automatically match job openings with relevant candidates, create talent pools and engage with candidates. The result is increased recruiter productivity the company promises as well as accelerated time to fill and improve talent profile of the organization. Chad, your thoughts on SilkRoad Entelo. Chad Sowash: So we talked about this acquisition back in August last year when it happened, but I wanted to dig in a little bit deeper around an angle we really failed to cover, and that Robert's. So Entelo's CEO, who was then named SilkRoad's CEO back in August, and they are already announcing deep integrations with Entelo. So let's be clear, SilkRoad is a fucking dinosaur founded in 2003, and in my opinion, their tech has to be deep in technical debt that they are feeling on a daily basis. So my question to you is, Robert has a background in recruitment tech with Jobvite and Taleo. Joel Cheesman: Yep. Was it Taleo too? Chad Sowash: Yeah, he was supposedly one of the guys that helped through M and A of Taleo being acquired by Oracle. So he has a background, but does he have the chops to bring this dinosaur out of the HR tech Tar Pits? Joel Cheesman: I'll give you another name, Chad. Ron Teeter. Ron Teeter, male prostitute. SFX: You are spending the night with Fred Gavin, male prostitute. Joel Cheesman: No, I'm kidding. Before SilkRoad, Ron was CTO at Entelo. Before that, he was an engineer at Jobvite. He was there for eight years. He also has a mustache that would break lesser men, but that's a different story. So your question isn't just can Robert save the company, can Ron and Robert save the company? Because these guys are basically been put in charge, cap put... Chad Sowash: Tied at the hip baby. Joel Cheesman: Pilot, co-pilot of this plane. Chad Sowash: Flaming plane. Joel Cheesman: And the board has basically said, Entelo, it's your baby. You guys are in charge. It's no surprise that Entelo is sort of first integration product that they're launching. Chad Sowash: Oh, yeah. Of course. Joel Cheesman: I think it was October of last year that the acquisition completed. So we're six months into this, entelo.com is still live, by the way. Chad Sowash: It is, yeah. Joel Cheesman: I'm not sure why it doesn't redirect. But... Chad Sowash: I don't know. Joel Cheesman: It's hard to say goodbye for these guys, for Robert and Ron, it's hard, I'm sure. Look, SilkRoad, like you said, they've been around for 20 years. They raised $200 million, and this move in leadership feels like a big hail Mary to me, it'll be fun to watch if they can turn this Titanic around, but I'm not betting on it, if I'm a betting man. Chad Sowash: I think the hardest part for a lot of these older systems is that they are much like we talk about LinkedIn, and in LinkedIn isn't even as deep a system as an ATS like SilkRoad, they're more a HTM kind of a system. There are so many old pieces of tech that are just relics that are still there, which makes it incredibly hard, if not impossible, to be nimble to change and to be able to adapt and to be able to ensure that candidates have a great experience, recruiters have a great experience and that you actually have an innovative platform. The thing is, could an Entelo perspectively replace a part of that tech in its entirety? I would say possibly, that's still gonna be an entirely hard ask. But you've gotta remember it's an HTM, so there's a lot more than just recruiting that's happening in this thing, payroll, onboarding. A lot of, a lot of shit. Chad Sowash: So this is something that I think our listeners really have to understand, when we talk about tech, we're not just talking about 'cause we like it or we don't like it. This is because there are major issues that could prospectively happen in architecture, and in this case, having two guys who have been tied at the hip and to Jobvite, which I think is awesome. They obviously have a relationship. The question is, can this titanic be saved? Joel Cheesman: 200 million raised, 20-year-old company. Chad Sowash: Wow. Joel Cheesman: Major Hail Mary. Don't be surprised if some wacky shit goes down, don't be surprised if SilkRoad goes away and Entelo becomes the flagship and maybe they take some pieces of SilkRoad and bring it over that is selling. Maybe they scrap some of the shit that doesn't. I think some wacky shit's gonna go down in this marriage and it'll be fun to talk about, for sure. Chad Sowash: And SilkRoad's been around for 20 years, and I would say 75%, if not more of our industry, have never heard of them. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, right. Yeah, by the way, they're headquartered in Chicago, but everybody's in San Francisco. So I don't know what like... [laughter] Joel Cheesman: They're still in Chicago just for sentimental reasons. They're Bears fans, I have no idea. Chad Sowash: Maybe they'll buy CareerBuilder and [0:26:11.6] ____. [overlapping conversation] Joel Cheesman: Ditca. Ditca is board member, Ditca is a board member. Alright, let's take a quick break. Guys, listen to the ads because they're the reason we can have a show in the first place. Listen to our sponsors. Chad Sowash: Oh, they're good. Oh, yeah. Joel Cheesman: And we'll be right back. Chad Sowash: This should be called The Joel Cheesman Block. Joel Cheesman: Let's talk about food, Chad. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: That's right. Per the Wall Street journal this week, a story entitled, Americans are gobbling up take out food, restaurants bet that won't change. America's biggest chains are testing digital only restaurants and more drive-thrus gambling that heightened consumer demand for food to go will last well beyond the pandemic. Now, why might they be doing this Chad? Well, let's talk about McDonald's. McDonald's USA president Joe Erliger, criticized California lawmakers recently for passing a fast food law that Joe says would all but make it impossible to run small business restaurants in California. The law named the FAST Act, set to be voted on in November of '24, raises hourly restaurant wages to $22 an hour and is opposed by fast food chains including McDonald's, Chipotle and In and Out. Next up, let's talk about Chipotle. SFX: Oh my God. I love Chipotle. Chipotle is my life. Joel Cheesman: Mine too kid. Chipotle is hiring 15,000 restaurant workers ahead of peak season. Frankly, I call peak season at Chipotle January through December, but the company highlights just March to May. Listeners will know essential workers nationwide haven't faced major cuts despite unemployment hitting white collar workers hard. Chipotle is aiming to double its store footprint to 7,000 while offering benefits like free meals, tuition reimbursement, and a new chicken al pastor that's to die for. Okay, I added the chicken part. Chad, a lot of food news, what you got? Chad Sowash: Well, first off, the next step for fast food is actually having the machine chew the food for Americans so we don't have to do the work. Joel Cheesman: The Bertie robot. Yeah. Chad Sowash: We're getting so close to the WALL-E movie. And if you haven't seen it, it's a Pixar movie that came out in 2008. It's awesome, and it's eerie because it's getting so close to lives today. Anyways, then we talk about Joe Erliger, the President of McDonald's USA, who would love having robots do all the work, because in California, they're gonna raise the minimum wage to @22 an hour. As you had said, in 2024, and Joe says, it's gonna kill jobs, which is laughable because at no time in our history has a rise in wages killed jobs. But we could say that Joe's comp at $7.4 million a year is killing jobs. So if he could live on a measly $3 million a year, he could create 95 more jobs at the $22 an hour rate. And you see the problem here isn't raising minimum wage, it's the pure excess and greed, we've become accustomed to. So we've got old men like Joe earning millions and he's bitching and moaning because of $22 an hour, which let's be clear here kids, that's not even a livable wage in many parts, if not most of California. Again, as we dig further into the narrative on employees, jobs, I don't think the problem for him is paying that, I think it's actually trying to find people to work. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, so the coalition against the law submitted some data that they probably paid for, but this is from the UC Riverside School of Business, that said labor costs would inflate by 60% and food prices could balloon by 20% if minimum wages were set between 22 and $43. I'm not sure why the study went from 22 to 43, that seems a little broad to me. Chad Sowash: Imagine that. Joel Cheesman: No one's talking about $43 an hour for burger flippers as far as I know. Objectively, there are so many angles to this that's a juggling act. You have governments that obviously want more money in tax revenue from big companies like McDonald's and Chipotle, but they don't wanna put mom and pop out of business, so it's a little bit weird that this law impacts big restaurants and not like little restaurants, which I think is reeks of political interest to me. Joel Cheesman: Restaurants wanna stall as long as they can, so they can get bots to cook all the take-out food and then eventually flourish. So for them it's sort of a shot clock game of like, "Let's be in court as long as possible, let's draw this thing out as long as possible," the bridge to that, like we said at the beginning, was more take out, more drive-through, which means less employees, more automation and getting the consumer used to not seeing a person take their order or see a person or more and more people take their orders or serve their food. So that becomes a bridge. Consumers on that side, they don't necessarily wanna pay five bucks more for a burrito, and I see that point, that becomes a political thing. Chad Sowash: They wouldn't have to if Joe wasn't earning $7.4 million a year. Joel Cheesman: Well, the benefit is, do I go to more mom and pops because they're not paying the $22 that McDonald's is and does that help small businesses? You could argue that, "Yeah, it does. I can get a $5 cheaper burrito at Mom and Pop burritos. So that's they're juggling on that end, you have In and Out opening up shop in Red State, Tennessee, that's where they're going next. If I had to bet Florida. Chad Sowash: Right, Indiana. Yeah, Florida. Joel Cheesman: If I had to bet Florida, I don't know. Chad Sowash: Indiana is closer too. Joel Cheesman: I don't know if Indiana fits the brand of In and Out, but they might... Florida's next for sure. Chad Sowash: Tennessee. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Oh, we're way more like Midwestern than Nashville. Nashville's hip. Indiana is not hip. There's no hip, hipness going on. Chad Sowash: No, there's no hip in Indiana. Joel Cheesman: We're like the hippest thing in Indiana right now, frankly. So... Chad Sowash: I don't know if I would call Florida hip. Joel Cheesman: No one knows how this is all gonna shake out, how long this is gonna take, robot... It's just fun to watch. I know you love looking at it from the salary point and the money and the minimum wage, but there are so many layers to this onion that it's really fun to peel and talk about. Chad Sowash: It is. Well, and profits and CEO pay are at an all-time high, but yet we're talking about the wages of the people that are actually doing the work. Joel Cheesman: Oh, yeah. Chad Sowash: And then we take a look at the US, and this all goes into a grander motion of McDonald's expansion, and actually, like we're talking about Chipotle expansion. The US's number one export, it will be obesity. It's all there is to it. That's what fast food does, if it isn't already. Okay, and as I had said, when I'm in Portugal, it is so weird how it's different because I have to drive 25 minutes to get to fast food, because the Mom and Pops that you're talking about are flourishing. I have better options and better food at a quarter of the price in a small town with 25,000 people Tavira, than going to Indianapolis. I can get better food in a small town in Europe than I can in a big city here in the US, because the industrialized engine of fast food is fucking... It's not just killing from an obesity standpoint, it's killing from a flavor and choice standpoint. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. By the way, I think diabetics in terms of increase, China is like the number one country in terms of growth of diabetes because we are... We are doing a good job of exporting Yum Brands. Chad Sowash: 900 more. Joel Cheesman: And Taco Bell and the... Chad Sowash: 900 more McDonalds in China, I think it's next year, slated for next year. Joel Cheesman: And the CEO pay is getting ridiculous, like... Chad Sowash: Oh, it's crazy. Joel Cheesman: It's such a PR scam. Tim Cook at Apple is taking a cut, like everyone at Entelo is taking a cut. The problem is most of their compensation is wrapped up in stock. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Yes. Which is not taxable. Joel Cheesman: So it's a total PR game to say, "We're gonna cut our salary and sympathize with the working man and the front line workers." So yeah, it's so much PR politics and bullshit. It's crazy, it's crazy. Now, I'm hungry. Let's get on with the show. Okay, so returnships. Let's talk about what the hell that is. PepsiCo North America is expanding its returnship, not internship, returnship program, which is designed to help women who took time off for caregiving return to the workforce. The program provides professional development, mentor support and networking opportunities, and was successful with 80% of participants accepting full-time job offers upon completion. Joel Cheesman: The program will now include 12 to 15 positions in supply chain, sales and commercial fields, more than double the number of positions offered in 2022. This is in line with the trend of companies such as Amazon, IBM, Microsoft and Schneider Electric offering returnships to bring women back into the workforce, especially those affected by the pandemic. Chad, your take on returnships. Chad Sowash: So a few thoughts here. First, think about our whole gap in employment problem we have here in the US, and our traditional hiring behavior says, If you have a gap in employment, pretty much, there's gotta be something wrong with that person, if there's a gap. So we've created a false narrative for a huge cohort of people who chose a different path in life, and we automatically classify them as unemployable. Programs like these turn that logic around and they use it as an amplifier, and as you had said, they hired 80% of their returnships last year. Second, information from the Chamber of Commerce shows that a third of women are considering changing careers and these types of programs could offer women who are burnt out and left the workforce more opportunities. Chad Sowash: But here's the rub, data from DOL shows women's top two occupations are teaching and nursing, how in the hell do we operate without those people in those positions? We can't focus too heavily on returnships being a solution without really understanding why women left the workforce in the first place and how to fix why they left. I applaud Pepsi and the other companies for seeing this opportunity to fill their open roles, but we should... [applause] Chad Sowash: We've gotta be focused more more heavily on why they left in the first place, we're not doing that, we're not going to the root cause of the problem, all we're doing is looking for solutions. We've gotta fix the deep-seated problem before we actually go to solutions. I think, again, Pepsi and those other companies smart, but we've gotta do a better job and go deeper as we take a look at healthcare systems, teaching and many others where people are just, they're fleeing 'cause they're burnout. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, this is from Sharm. 1.1 million women left the labor force during the pandemic, accounting for 63% of all lost jobs, while women gained 188,000 jobs in January of '22, they are still short by more than 1.8 million jobs lost since February of 2020 at the heat of the pandemic. As a result returnships make perfect sense just from a math perspective, but if we look at the human toll, women sacrificed greatly during the pandemic and many, many families, single mothers, man, my heart goes out to single mothers for sure, but we saw women being burdened. I don't wanna say burden. But childcare was typically what most families had to decide on, of who was gonna go out and make the money and who wasn't, and women, I think if you think absence makes the heart grow fonder, if there's a silver lining to this, the workforce realized how much they need women, not just from a Math perspective, but just from the fact that they weren't there anymore. So returnships mathematically make perfect sense. But from a good business practice, it makes really good sense because we need women in the workforce, not just nursing and teaching, but everything. And applause again to Pepsi for doing that. More companies should. Returnships in '23. Let's make it happen. [applause] Joel Cheesman: Alright, Chad, let's talk Amazon, your favorite company outside of McDonald's. Chad Sowash: Oh, God. Here we go. Joel Cheesman: All right. The CEO of Ark Invest, Cathie Wood, a lot of our listeners will know who that is, has stated that she believes Amazon could have more robots than employees by 2030. That's right around the corner. Amazon already has over 500,000 robots in use and is adding about a thousand robots every day. Wood believes the robots will save Amazon money in the long run as the cost of robots decreases with every doubling in production. She is optimistic about the future of robots and artificial intelligence and sees potential for "super exponential growth" for companies that adopt disruptive technology like the one Amazon is embracing. Chad, robots, Amazon. I know you're in heaven. Go. Chad Sowash: Well, you know, Amazon has to go this route, we've been talking about it for years now. As soon as Jeff Bezos can go fully automated, he's going to do it, period, 'cause he hates paying people. Not to mention quote from this article, if you look at the cost declines which drive all of our models for every doubling in the number of robots produced, the cost declines are in 50% to 60% range, they're gonna save money, they don't have to worry about benefits, there's just so much they don't have to worry about. Then you take a look at all of these areas in the United States where Amazon is burning through the workforce, they can't find people to work there because they've already burnt through them, because they treat them like robots, they treat them like shit, they pay them like shit. So what this is going to start to lean to, and I think we will have more discussions about which we have in the past, but I think it's gonna be a subject pick that we hit more often, probably maybe even do a show on, who knows, is universal basic income, and how robots start taking over, especially some of these rural areas where Amazon has come in and then the robots take all the jobs. What's left for these people? Chad Sowash: What's left for these people, how does the government take care of these people? I hate to say interesting, it's gonna be sad in some cases, because America is not great in taking care of its people. Joel Cheesman: Well, you went in the left field on the UBI, I'm gonna go into right field with a spoiler alert of my own. And maybe it's because I've been fasting for two hours that [laughter] I've come up with this, but not only is Amazon going to have as close to zero workers as soon as possible, they're gonna help other companies do the same. Most of our listeners know what AWS is. Amazon's cloud server solutions, which basically powers every start-up and most websites in the world. It's a billion dollar plus business all by itself. Chad, get ready for ARS. Amazon soon to be launched robots for sale or lease business. ARS, of course, standing for Amazon Robotics Service. They're gonna sell the robots to all the other businesses, lease them to other companies and make a ton of money because they would have made the initiative to create robots at Amazon, and then they're gonna power robotics across all businesses. No doubt McDonald's Joe Erlinger has Jeff Bezos on speed dial just for that moment. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Going to acquire a Flippy. We out. Joel Cheesman: 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 was 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 question, you can't quit them either. We out.

We cover all the hot topics in this episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast Does Recruitment Marketing: Pay transparency, ChatGPT and the Indeed / Glassdoor cartel. RecrtuimentMarketing.com's Julie Calli joins us, as usual, and her rant on Indeed is a can't-miss for anyone in the business. Plus, how will employers react to the real trend of salary transparency and is "prompt engineering" the new Boolean search string for sourcing pros? 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 Sowash: 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. Workday will be a first time advertiser on this year's Super Bowl with an ad featuring Joan Jett and Ozzy Osbourne. Hi, kids! You're listening to The Chad and Cheese Podcast Does Recruitment Marketing. I'm your co-host, Joel Crazy Train Cheesman. Chad Sowash: This is Chad Bullion Is Back Baby Sowash. Julie Calli: This is Julie Pay Equity Calli. Joel Cheesman: And on this episode, 80% of the time, it works every time, Mort, ChatGPT goodness and everyone is getting fed up with the Indeed, Glassdoor Cartel. Let's do this. Hi everybody. Chad Sowash: Well, hello, it's the J to the Ulie, she's back. Joel Cheesman: The J to the Ulie. Julie Calli: Hello. Joel Cheesman: Is that how the kids are talking these days? They can't spell the whole thing out anymore, the J to the U, to the L to the I, to the E. It's just the J to the Ulie? Chad Sowash: Pretty much the prompt way, the shortcut to actually get to where you need to go. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Julie Calli: Well, thank you for singing to me Joel. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Right. You missed last week, was it a rapper on Fiverr, or something, a 37 year old rapper doing raps on ChatGPT that's making a ton of money or he's singing the rap. Chad Sowash: No, he's writing raps for Fiverr and making eight grand a month. Now, he might be doing it on ChatGPT, but that was not a part of the story. Joel Cheesman: I actually read something that you can ask GPT to write a rap about Donald Trump in the voice of Tupac, and it will actually do it for you which is amazing. Chad Sowash: [laughter] Yes. Well, it's good with poems, so it might be good at that. I don't know if it can Jay-Z style or Eminem style it, although I'd check it out, try it out. Joel Cheesman: If it can't do vanilla ice, then I don't want any part of it, is what I'm saying. [vocalization] Chad Sowash: Oh, wait a minute. No, that's clean. Julie Calli: That's kind of like Milli Vanilli, right? It's gonna... You just voice over it. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Girl you know it, girl you know it, girl you know it. Chad Sowash: It's true. [vocalization] Joel Cheesman: I love you. [laughter] Chad Sowash: We're singing for Julie this morning. Julie Calli: Yeah, I'm just gonna enjoy you guys singing. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Julie is mic'd up this week, which is good, she had some technical difficulties last time, we're glad she's back. Julie Calli: Glad to be back with better quality audio today. Chad Sowash: Well, that being said, let's jump into some shout-outs. Shall we? Joel Cheesman: Let's do some shout outs. Well, Chad, you know I like a good LinkedIn poll. Chad Sowash: You're always about the poll. Julie Calli: What are you doing step-bro? Joel Cheesman: So last week I asked on LinkedIn, will the US outlaw TikTok? I was expecting about 80, 20. 80% saying no, they won't outlaw it. It ran about 67% to 33. 67 said, no, they will not make TikTok illegal. Almost 400 votes on the poll. A few highlights. Jim, the Indeed whisperer Durban, who voted yes on TikTok being shut down, said, "It will be, I'll put a bottle of bourbon against a bottle of tequila that it happens before the end of 2024." Chad, you were quick to take him up on this bet, we'll see who gets the liquor in January of 2024. Number two, a well-known pundit, Matt Charney and friend of the show commented, "It should be shut down." And number three, Trent Cotton, VP of Talent and Culture at Hatch Works said, "I hope not. It's my escape from reality." Shoutout to my TikTok poll. Chad Sowash: Nobody spins a loss better than you do, maybe Trump does better than you do Joel, but yeah, two-thirds to one-third spanking what you thought was going to happen. Yeah, that's total bullshit. But yes. Jim Durban baby. Joel Cheesman: You're pretty cocky on this one Chad. I'm going to really rub it in your face if TikTok gets outlawed. Julie Calli: I mean, will they? Joel Cheesman: I'm gonna do a major victory lap. Chad Sowash: Not worry about it. Julie Calli: Will they, will they not? A great question. But should they? Chad Sowash: That's an entirely different question. Yeah. Joel Cheesman: Who's they? Who's they? The government? Julie Calli: The government deciding... Joel Cheesman: Why shouldn't they? TikTok is the most potent propaganda tool ever created. Julie Calli: Oh, so it's bad for you? Joel Cheesman: Yes, it's bad for you. Julie Calli: Like smoking and drinking. Joel Cheesman: Social media is bad for you. Julie Calli: Which all come with labels that say... Chad Sowash: Yes, exactly. Julie Calli: Consuming this product may be bad for you. I think they should put a warning label on it when you open the app that says consuming it may be bad for you. Chad Sowash: So quick question, does Facebook still exist? And they didn't ban Facebook, did they? Joel Cheesman: These are fine American companies, Chad. Chad Sowash: Oh yes. I would like to mention Cambridge Analytica and how they actually fucked with the US election, and yet it is still around. Joel Cheesman: The last time I checked, Facebook wasn't looking to invade Taiwan, maybe that's just me. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 'cause TikTok will make that happen. Julie Calli: I'll say it. I do not want the government deciding for me what technology I can and cannot use, I do not want that. As an American who believes in freedom, I want the freedom of choice to decide what's best for me and... Oh, and if it might be doing things that are not good for me, that's fine, let me know that and let me make that choice, but to just wipe it out and say Americans can't use it because it's... Okay, well, what are gonna be the consequence of that? What if other companies start to say that about American companies? Like Oh, Google, right? Oh, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, these are all American companies that other countries could turn around and say, "Hey, we have laws in our country that... " thanks to Snowden, "that let us know that anybody can access that information from the government and claim that it's for our protection." So that is a call out to all the countries that yes, the same thing that the American government is worried about from the Chinese government is also true here. So I don't wanna see other companies banning our tech companies, so we should not start that behavior by banning theirs. Let Americans have choice in a land of freedom. Chad Sowash: You take a look at companies who do get fined by this country versus Europe, and we have just a little piddly ass fines and then now we wanna talk about bans. You do have a point, we're banning books, we're actually telling people what they can do with their bodies in this country, so I don't know. Maybe we will be dumb enough to actually ban TikTok, but I don't think we will. There's too much money involved. Joel Cheesman: At a minimum, there will be some legislation around social media in general, maybe not TikTok. Chad Sowash: Let's hope so, please. Joel Cheesman: There's a generation of young people who feel worse about themselves about their country, about their families than there was in previous generations. And I think social media has a lot to do with that. Julie Calli: I will agree with that. I do think that there are some negative outcomes of social media that's having generational effect. How do we solve that? I don't think it's banning it. Joel Cheesman: Well, TikTok is an external threat, it's a little different. Chad Sowash: Nothing but fear mongering. Good God. Julie Calli: I feel like it's like foot loose, right? Like dancing is dangerous. Let's ban dancing. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Joel is John Lithgow in this point. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: The important point is they'll never... Chad Sowash: Young lady. Joel Cheesman: They'll never outlaw Taco Bell. Chad Sowash: Julie. Julie Calli: What? Chad Sowash: Shoutout. Joel Cheesman: Shoutout babies. She got... Julie Calli: [laughter] I was like what? Did what? Joel Cheesman: She got so wrapped up in TikTok. Julie Calli: Yeah, no, I'd like to give a shoutout to comprehensive IO. If you haven't gone there, take a look. Chad Sowash: Oh yeah. Julie Calli: Since California and New York have put in pay transparency laws, that's made it possible now to go and index all the jobs that are out there and pull in the compensation and then start to report on some of those things so that we can have an understanding. This was never possible before because companies never made that information public. But now that it is, it can be collected, aggregated and reported on. So I absolutely love what they've done and what they're providing for free. You go and take a look at it and you can see some of the major companies in those two states and what they're paying for those open roles today. Chad Sowash: Totally dig it. Once you go there, you can't go back, kids. My shoutout this week is to PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada, I think is how you pronounce it. Joel Cheesman: You said duty. Chad Sowash: For being a total dumb ass and quoting MLK while laying off 7% of her IT staff. Here's the quote, "I am reminded in moments like this, of something Martin Luther King said, that the ultimate measure of a leader is not where they stand in the moment of comfort and convenience, but where they stand in the times of challenge and controversy." Jennifer wrote at the end of an email replacing some of King's original words, and again, probably not the smartest thing to do when you're actually laying people off to talk about MLK and how MLK is really the foundation of why she feels confident in doing what she was doing. [laughter] Julie Calli: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: Is this the same woman that made her staff stay in Florida for the hurricane? Are they related in some way? Chad Sowash: No, no, they're probably friends though. Joel Cheesman: Geez, geez. [music] Chad Sowash: Topics. Joel Cheesman: Alright guys, this is from our friends at HR Dive, workers are demanding salary transparency and 80% of respondents, that's four out of five, in a recent survey, by resume lab, so they wouldn't apply for a job without salary range information included. 77% of respondents said it should be illegal to not include a salary in job postings. Pay transparency has benefits such as reducing recruiting costs and moving towards pay parity, but it also has drawbacks such as causing worker envy and causing employers to compress pay. Job postings for pilots at Netflix aside, Chad. Salary transparency seems to be trending with the masses, but are employers listening? Your thoughts. Julie Calli: So salary transparency is happening in a localized situation right now, some cities, some states, so not everybody has to disclose compensation currently, but there's gonna be so much pressure and we're gonna see more states emerge, so what's difficult is that there's different requirements in each locality, this needs to go at the national level. We need a level playing field across the board. It's almost impossible for employers to manage all the different laws within all of the states when you're a national hire employer. So we need some uniformity in order to do this job well, and to deliver on this well. So I do want to see this elevate to the national level so that we can create some consistency. Of course, people want compensation displayed, but it's more than just showing the compensation, we've seen those examples where it's like zero to two million in the comp range. Like, hmm, I'll take the two million, please. So how do we start to make sense of this to make it easier for both job seekers and employers to connect on this? Companies need to start instituting a pay philosophy of why do you pay what you do? Because you need to be able to answer that question. Julie Calli: If you have a candidate interviewing for a role and you show a range of between 50 and 100,000, of course, they want 100,000. That's what you showed. So you need to be able to say what is the difference between what we're gonna pay for 50 and what we're gonna pay 200. It could be tenor, it could be a skill and the level of experience, whatever it is, you need to have a reason why you pay what you did. Joel Cheesman: And what odds would you give the federal government at passing such laws? Julie Calli: Five years till they feel the pressure. Joel Cheesman: So you think it's a good chance that the feds will pass a law around this? Okay. Julie Calli: Yes, I do, because I think that a lot of the larger companies, the national employers are gonna continue to struggle with the management of people in different localities. I also am seeing a consequence come out of this. Alright, I'll bring this up. I believe that there's something happening now, because we don't have consistency across all of the states, we are starting to see what's called, what I'm calling location discrimination, and that... This is a bias against companies not wanting to hire people in certain states because they don't want to deal with the employment law in that state. California is probably the biggest one that suspect to this, because California is continuing to be so progressive ahead of all of the other states in how the PTO is managed, in how there's certain requirements for disclosure and because their bar is so much higher than the other states, employers are like, "God, if I hire people in California, then I have to run a whole different system. I have to manage my payroll differently. I have to manage my PTO differently, and I don't have enough time to run two different administration processes, so let's just not hire in California," which now means that if you live in California, that company is having a location bias against you because of your state law. That is happening. Joel Cheesman: So there could still be... And I'm not a legal professional, but just like with taxes, you have federal taxes and local taxes and the state taxes, you could still have a federal law, and then state laws and local laws that you still have to deal with. So federal law might solve the problem. But I still think you'd see states like California go above whatever the federal threshold was on what states state should do or the nation should do. Julie Calli: Right. And they're being progressive, and that's great that they want to bring all that value to the people within their state, but at the same time, if they're too progressive ahead of all of the others, then employers don't wanna hire from that state. And I can tell you there's probably a tremendous amount of people who've been laid off in the tech space that are in California right now, where employers would love to hire them, but they're not interested in bringing in California employment because they're going to have to then manage that administration that goes with that type of hire. Chad Sowash: It's interesting 'cause the story talked about worker envy, and worker envy is created because there's no parity, so these employers are actually creating this mess in the first place. If they just focused on equity and treating people fairly, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Next, we have a shortcut in how we can actually take the federal government to, like you said, five years, Julie. I agree, I think we can actually do it faster through government contractors. And if you are a government contractor, you have to abide by OFCCP, and in that case, if you're getting money, if you're a government contractor, you're actually receiving money from the government, and you have to abide by different laws. Well, this new law could be just for government contractors, and they could do that on the federal scale. What that would do is it would force every single state to actually do what's necessary for these huge employers, and then it would trickle down from there. So that's a shortcut to actually force it into play much faster and then get that done. It's interesting because the survey said 79% of respondents said omitting salary was likely due to employers not wanting current employees to know that they're under-paid. Chad Sowash: So let's be clear, this is the real problem here kids, this is the real problem for employers, getting systems aligned to show a salary range on a job is easy compared to bringing the pay of underpaid employees up to the level of fairness. So employers don't want you to know that you're getting screwed, but more so, they don't want to pay you fairly because that's gonna come out of their profits. So this is an issue that companies made themselves and now they're whining and crying about it. It's your fault, assholes. Fix it. Joel Cheesman: Show me a 10-foot wall and I'll show you an 11-foot ladder, is something my dad used to say. And I feel like my point of taxes is sort of pressure because most people pay their taxes as they're supposed to do. However, there a lot of people that try to get around paying taxes using loopholes. I think a lot of companies will abide by not even the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law of being transparent in what you pay people. However, I think there's a certain percentage of companies, they're gonna have an army of lawyers and try to figure out how do we sort of get around this. And Chad, we talked about this on a recent show, and I went and looked at some of the legal S, what the law says, some of the ambiguities in the law. Certainly at the beginning, there was questions around what does salary mean? Is that just your base salary? Is it compensation? Is it benefits, healthcare, etcetera. And what I found most recently, is the law says that you have to submit salary, but everything beyond that is voluntary. So if you say base salary is this, but you can also earn this, is that transparency or is that finding a loophole? Joel Cheesman: The problem is, if I'm a company competing for talent and I'm playing by the rules and saying what our salary is, and I've got other companies skewing or jumping through those loopholes and making me look like I under pay for the same job, then I become... I'm at a disadvantage to the company that isn't playing by the rules and that influences me to play their game in terms of being gray and ambiguity. I think you're gonna see companies create commission structures that they didn't have before to play in that gray area, you're gonna see revenue share or maybe benefits that they didn't have before to compensate for that. So to Julie's point, I think a lot of companies are gonna lobby Congress to say, "Look, we're losing to these people that are just sort of playing on the line. We need some federal regulation to sort of level the playing field." And until that happens I think there's just gonna be a lot of looking for loopholes, do we play by the rules or do we not? We're losing talent because it looks we're not paying enough. I think this is a big mess and I think we're just starting. Federal intervention is probably what's gonna have to happen eventually. Chad Sowash: The thing is though if you're pushing salary out there, the companies that are actually doing the right thing, they're pushing the salary out there and people are trying to play toward loopholes with commissions. The salary on the commission based job or bonus based job's gonna be lower. So they're going to post their sa... So they're going... They're gonna screw themselves So that makes no sense whatsoever. So when you start playing this game, yes, you can have commissions, you can have total comp but salary in itself what you're gonna take home every other week, every week, every month whatever it is that's gonna be higher. If you're playing the commission game your salary's gonna be lower. So you're gonna be fucking yourself. Makes no sense whatsoever. I do agree that there has to be a standard and we should be... And again, I think a shortcut is through government contractors. You push that through, the entire system changes, 'cause it has to because we have hundreds of thousands of companies within the US that are federal contractors today, that changes it overnight. Joel Cheesman: So it's intriguing that you said contractors. There was a story out this week that talked about how more and more companies that laid off people are now rehiring them as contract workers. Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: And that may partially be a symptom of I don't have to... With contractors I don't have to play by the rules of pay transparency. They're all sort of different based on what they think they're worth. So another way of companies getting around this is we'll just hire contractors. Chad Sowash: But the thing is there are definitely some nuances there, not to mention, you can scale down contractors much quicker than it's easier to than employees. Joel Cheesman: Oh they're a lot of really good reason to hire contractors not just the pay issue. But it's another reason why companies might be looking at contract work versus full-timers. Let's take a quick break and gee, ChatGPT, has any anyone ever heard of it? We'll talk about that. ChatGPT time everybody. Alright. An article entitled the Best Prompts for Using ChatGPT for Digital Marketing caught our attention this week, probably because you could easily replace marketing with recruiting. It summarizes how to use ChatGPT for different aspects of digital marketing including content marketing, email marketing, search marketing and social media marketing. The author explains that prompt engineering is a key skill for marketers to learn such as setting the context, defining the task and goal and explaining why the copy has been generated. Chad, are you a buy or sell on prompt engineering and how it relates to recruiting? Chad Sowash: I'm a short term buy and here's why, a week or so ago I saw a spreadsheet posted with the best prompts to use to start better ChatGPT conversations. These are shortcuts, this is really what it is. And really prompts are just the best way to get the information you want from ChatGPT quicker. So much like back in the day when keyword searching Google and resume databases, recruiters started creating Boolean strings, which is basically just a keyword string shortcut to help users get to the information they wanted faster. It's the exact same thing. So it's almost a rejuvenation of what we saw back in the day. So much like Google moved away from Boolean. As ChatGPT evolves and it's gonna evolve much faster I think the need for spreadsheets of prompts won't be necessary. So I think we're gonna see a need for these early on but tech is moving so much faster today that we were using Boolean strings for shit, 10 plus years. I don't think we're gonna need prompts for two years. Julie Calli: I agree with you, I think... I mean it's an incredible piece of technology that has so much potential but only as good as the user. [laughter] So how do you use it? A lot of people have been given it a go and beaten up on it and trying different things but if you don't know how to use it well to get a good output by what you put into it then it's not gonna help you. So I do think that there's some skilling that needs to happen for people to be able to use it well and I think this is great to help people see potential by using good prompts is only gonna lead to people adding more ideas around how they can prompt it to get better outcomes. So as we continue to use it, it'll get better and better, but yeah, we all need to teach each other how we're using it and having success so we can continue to compound on that innovation. But it's gonna become a skill, for sure. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. That's right. Joel Cheesman: So I loved you sharing that Chad and the graphic took me back man. You're right. This is back to the future shit. I'm gonna go really old school on you back to '05. And when I first met Shally Steckerl, his business card was literally a fold out... Chad Sowash: Yes. Yes. Joel Cheesman: Where it had Boolean string... Like popular Boolean strings, popular search engines like aren't... That aren't called Google. And the chart looked a lot what you shared in terms of these prompts. So for me, either short... I don't know, if it's 10 years maybe two years, five years but you're gonna see the rise of these experts on how to write prompts and engineer prompts. They're gonna be the the all stars of the conference of the future. They're gonna talk at all the conferences we attend. Chad Sowash: [laughter] Yes. Joel Cheesman: They're gonna give you the best prompts to find, write the best ads, write the best job descriptions yada, yada, yada. And they're gonna be the rock stars. Now, eventually, just like sourcing, you had seek out hire tool, hiring so... All these companies created technologies where the normal everyday recruiter could just plug it in, plug in whatever they wanted and the tech would figure it out. And eventually there will be startups around ChatGPT and how to just push a button and have this thing work and have it appeal to the masses. But I'm anxious to see this rise of the expert of prompts. In fact I actually went out to GoDaddy and searched Prompt Con, 'cause I'm like there's gonna be a conference like Source Con where people just get together and figure out how to write. So Prompt Con has been acquired so you can't get it So somebody... [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Somebody's thinking along those lines. But it's gonna be fun to watch this wild west of ChatGPT and how people are using it individually until the companies and startups figure out how to make it for the masses. Julie Calli: Yeah. Share, share, share your tips with others so that we can all learn and innovate on this together. Chad Sowash: I remember when Shally and Jim used to have Boolean string workshops. I mean they had workshops that recruiters would pay and companies would... Joel Cheesman: Companies. Chad Sowash: Pay, and they would bring them in and they had their own universities that had Boolean like whole catalogs for Boolean. But once again, we have to remember that was back in the olden days, let's just say that. And the way that ChatGPT... And I think just tech in itself is evolving so quickly, this is gonna be a very, very short window. Well, that was a long window that lasted, I don't think this window's gonna last very long. I think you might have two years to be able to get into your "Chat prompt" So if you if you want to to do speeches at SHRM or something of that nature, get into it now 'cause I don't think it's gonna be around for long. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, it'll be hot for a couple years I think. It'll be in demand. Some of the differences are I mean ChatGPT and OpenAI seem it's sort of built for APIs. It's sort of built for people to use it and build on top of it. And at least for the moment there's no other ChatGPT competitor now. Once Google releases their thing and maybe Amazon, or... There'll be people that go "Okay I'm an expert in OpenAI. I'm an expert in Google's AI." They're gonna... People are gonna come out and be experts and all this thing and they're gonna make a lot of money you said, companies will pay them to come in. People will attend webinars at a hundred bucks a pop. There's a lot of money to be made in this industry. Sell the picks and the shovels everybody, you'll make a a penny. Chad Sowash: Alright. Let's hurry up. Let's get to Indeed because I'm waiting to sit back and watch the fireworks. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Yeah. This is gonna be a big one. So we have a lot to talk about here on Indeed sucks. Our Indeed sucks round our block. So a TikTok user who applied to 80 jobs on Indeed received no response from any employer. A TikToker Katie Kepler shows a list of applications she submitted on the platform all of which got marked not selected by employer quote "Why, why?" She writes in the caption, "I have applied to 80 jobs and I have received zero reason for why I can't get hired anywhere." And on the other side of the coin employers are feeling they have little choice than to use the Indeed and Glassdoor cartel. Terry Kahler at SSM Health set on LinkedIn in response to one of my criticisms of Link Door by not highlighting Apple and Facebook as a top 100 employer. She said quote "As the main buyer of Glassdoor from my organization and the other job board who is owned by them." That's Indeed everybody in case you weren't paying attention. "I often get frustrated by this feeling that they want to take my credit card and swipe it all day long. And I really don't have the choice because they own the market. They have the data on job seeker behavior. They have our data and our competition's data because they are in control of these things. Ultimately they are also in control of me and my buying behavior." Joel Cheesman: Let's go to Julie your thoughts on the disappointing state of job search in 2023. Julie Calli: Well, first, I'd love to help Ms. Kepler understand the answer to her question. "Why, why, why? I applied to 80 jobs and I've gotten no response." Well, in that TikTok she made, she also put up a screenshot of some of the jobs that she applied to. Now, I've looked up Ms. Kepler she has about five years customer service experience. Her work experience as a staff reporter and working in a call center. The three jobs that she screenshotted were a paid media specialist that had over 640 applications to it. So a lot of people were applying to this job yet she has no indication that she has any experience in paid search, [chuckle] let alone to qualify as a specialist. The other job she applied to was a marketing manager had 205 applications to it. The other was director of brand development with only about 35 applications on it. So one, here you have a candidate who can just click on a button easy apply, apply apply, apply, apply. Now, how long did it take her to apply to those 80 jobs? Probably less than two hours. Okay. So she's not qualified for those jobs based on her profile. Chad Sowash: Probably less than two minutes. Julie Calli: Well she applied to 80 of them. So click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Chad Sowash: Yeah, yeah. Julie Calli: So here's this really fast ability to apply for jobs in which she does not appear to be qualified for. And now, so let's flip the coin. There's a recruiter on the other side who in just these three jobs that she screenshotted there are over 850 applications across these three jobs. So now, other side of this is that somebody has to review those for her to get the response that she's looking for. Someone needs to review them and then candidates want a response. So let's just say it takes about five minutes to read a resume and then craft a response to that. If each one of these applications she submitted took about five minutes of review, there was 80 of them That's over six hours of review time and response. So, six hours. Let's just say a recruiter makes about $30 an hour. That means all of her applications have costed over $200 in corporate investment for those to be reviewed and responded to. Now you take that by a million we have an unqualified candidate costing over 200 million being taxed against her hiring that we're doing. Julie Calli: This is where the problem lives is that candidates do want a response. They wanna know why they were not qualified. I think that they should get that. However that costs money. That costs a lot of money to be able to give those thoughtful responses. Every candidate should get at least an automated response that we reviewed your resume and you're not qualified. That should at least happen. But I'd also add some advice for Ms. Kepler. If you're going to be applying for roles in marketing take a look at what is publicly available on your profile. She has a heavy social media presence that's very public. And I as someone who is a leader in marketing, within 30 seconds of reviewing her public TikTok profiles can... I would just say out loud and very comfortably, I would mark you as unemployable because if you're working in brand, you need to pay attention to your personal brand and what information is publicly available out there on TikTok. So if you're wondering why employers haven't gotten back to you, take a look at your public profile. I do think in this case Ms. Kepler, there's lots of reasons why she probably is not getting a response. But I also wanna look at the other side of this and say Indeed it's charging on a paper application basis. Joel Cheesman: Yes. And they're making it easy. Julie Calli: Well, I just talked about the investment of time that it would take for a recruiter to even review that. Let's just say each application was $5. It costs $400 for all of those applications to happen. And that was billed to the employer for a candidate that did not match their job. So both sides are getting robbed in the experience here. This is where we need to find better solutions for this. Joel Cheesman: Indeed said that they were going to fix this whole fucked up scenario with easy apply. Obviously, that's not the case. So paper start to apply was supposed to be this new big thing that just made sense and it was going to fix this problem. Apparently that's not true. What you're saying is more... A lot of quick applies that turn into rage applies. Right? Julie Calli: Rage applies Yes [chuckle] Joel Cheesman: So as Indeed bullshits their way through and now they're talking about something from a you have to register to Indeed to apply. Now I don't know if anybody remembers this or not. But Julie you might remember this, back in the day, I think it might have been 2016, '17, '18 something that, it was a no-no to register to apply. Indeed said that that was bad practice. It was bad for job seekers. Well, wait a minute, they're doing it today and all that's doing is pushing toward this crazy quick apply rage apply that's happening. I mean they are the problem. Julie Calli: Yes. March 2017. Joel Cheesman: There it is. Julie Calli: Indeed made a decision that any registration prior to application on the employer site was not a good candidate and job seeker experience. And therefore that belief led to job boards and staffing companies who have a registration process when you land on their site to be removed from Indeed so that only direct employers could publish jobs. In doing that, they made a stance that we care about the candidate experience and we don't think that registration prior to application is a good experience. So that is why, and then they removed a significant amount of companies that depended on Indeed's traffic for their business. That was painful That was so painful. I cried that day with every single company that I worked with. So many people were infuriated to understand like why can Indeed have such power over my business and how am I supposed to carry on? And I'll tell you what, those businesses did. They found a way to carry on. They found a way to get traffic. They found a way to get candidates other ways than Indeed. But right now employers are are on Indeed. Julie Calli: And now Indeed go and take a look search for a job, it will say right there on your job that belongs to you [laughter] must register with Indeed before you can apply. So that means. Right. Let's talk about what that means. Your job has now become an advertisement for Indeed, for people, to come into who want to apply to your job, but they're gonna have to register with Indeed first. When they register with Indeed they now are gonna continue to receive job search alerts and notifications from other employers. Chad Sowash: It's monster.com. Julie Calli: Because of your job. Chad Sowash: It's monster.com in 1999. It's the same damn thing, other than they're charging more. Joel Cheesman: 'Cause I remember crying with Job Boards in 2010 when Indeed shut them off or made them algorithmically invisible. So many of them. Chad Sowash: Yes. And then we take a look at employers. Joel Cheesman: Yep. Chad Sowash: Employers made their own bed. They're doing this to themselves. They spend millions of dollars building resume databases. They have tons of silver medalists, bronze medalists, amazing, amazing, amazing talent in their databases that just atrophy and go away. But yet they bitch and they whine in the complaint how much they have to to pay for Indeed. Now I think Indeed's whole PPSA thing is total bullshit. I mean, it's do as I say not as I do scenario stuff. But in this case the employers aren't looking past their nose on this. They should know better. It's happened to Job Boards as Joel said. It's happened to staffing companies. What makes them think this isn't gonna happen to them? Julie Calli: Oh, yes. I totally agree with that. Look at the behavior, it repeats itself. Chad Sowash: Yes. Julie Calli: It did it to Job Boards, it did it to staffing, who's next? The direct employer. And the direct employer is at the mercy of what Indeed decides. Now that decision could be a shift that they wanna focus more on small business, mid-market or enterprise, whatever they decide, they're choosing to serve a market which may cause one of the employers that are in one of those different segments to get consequences from those choices. We've seen that behavior. But this is what I would say. This is the same advice you're gonna get from a financial advisor. Diversify your portfolio. Chad Sowash: Yes. Julie Calli: If you put all of your investment in one place you can't then cry when it's at risk. If you give Indeed and Glassdoor all of your budget and you are not looking to find alternatives, then you are at risk. You are at risk because whatever happens with Indeed is now part of your strategy. And you have to live with that and adapt that because you did not diversify your portfolio and you have not created a pipeline of other opportunity. You should never put a hundred percent into one source You should always be sampling other sources. Joel Cheesman: And what's unique is, I sympathize with Ms. Kahler, but there was a time where the local newspaper was all you had, really, to advertise a job. There were free papers, may be a radio spot but... Chad Sowash: Help one inside. Joel Cheesman: There were incredible limits to how you could market a job back in the day before the web. Now, you have programmatic, Google, social media. Like there are so many ways to market your company and your jobs. You should not have the mentality of, I am locked in with Indeed and Glassdoor. That's not the case. Talk to people professionals. There are options out there that we have today that we didn't have 30 years ago. And if you're crying about, "I can't go anywhere else, they just swipe my card," then you're you're being lazy frankly. And you need to educate yourself on what else you can do to market your company and your opportunities. Julie Calli: Or you're not investing in your recruitment marketing period. Recruitment marketing has a lot of different skills that live within it. It's got an analytical competency to be able to look at the data and understand where things are coming from, understand attribution logic, so you're appropriately giving assignment of source to the right place. And then, take that to performance marketing. The ability to control and manipulate what you're putting putting out there, to get better outcomes. It has the storytelling that's involved with employer branding. There's a lot of work to do in recruitment marketing. And if you are expecting all of that work to be done as part of somebody else's job. If your recruiter is responsible for doing all that work, if your HR generalist is responsible for doing that work, you're not investing in it properly. Put a person name behind it. Joel Cheesman: Is there a website I could go to to get a progressive cutting edge commentary on recruitment marketing? Julie Calli: You know, I'm all about empowering the people that do the work of recruitment marketing, because the industry is growing so fast. We are having such acceleration. People need to build skill in this area, so at recruitmentmarketing.com that's exactly what we're doing. We're trying to empower the people that have to do this work with the most relevant information to do the job. Chad Sowash: You're like leading the witness Cheesman. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: That's what we do on this show Chad. Recruitmentmarketing.com people, Chad, Julie another one in the can, we out. Chad Sowash: We out. Julie Calli: We out. Joel Cheesman: 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 and stand. 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.

Video. All the kids are doin' it. But how about employers? Start-up JobPixel is pretty confident TikTok-style video is the future of recruiting. That's why Omar Khateeb CEO & founder at JobPixel decided to come on Firing Squad to pitch his company. Video may be the future, but is JobPixel the company that's going to bring it to the masses? Gotta listen to find out. 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 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 taken into a whole other level. Joel: Oh yeah. What's up everybody? It's your favorite Guilty pleasure back with the Firing Squad. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman, joined as always. Chad: Hello. Joel: The Woodstock to my Snoopy on the Chad and Cheese podcast. Chad. Chad: I love Woodstock. Joel: He doesn't fly a doghouse and fight the Huns. That's the only difference. [laughter] Chad: Those are all dreams by the way. Joel: Guys bear with us. It's our first show for the new year. But we are happy to welcome Omar Khateeb, CEO and founder at JobPixel. Omar, welcome to the podcast. Omar Khateeb: Hello. Hello. I'm so excited to be here. Joel: We are excited to have you. Well, before we get into all the business of your company and asking you tough questions, give us a little Twitter bio. Who is Omar? Omar Khateeb: So I came to the US around, nine years ago, went to school at UC Davis, and then really got into the tech scene after I started doing some events at Davis, for a big social media company. I was really in love with tech, helped a couple of people start a startup, and then joined a cybersecurity company in San Francisco. Then I saw a huge problem in the hiring space that needed to be solved. And then I started working on my current company, JobPixel with my co-founder, Anthony, which I'll tell you a little bit more about him later. Currently living in the Bay Area still, I moved out of San Francisco into the burbs. Life is great. I have a yard finally, not like San Francisco, and I have a baby on the way with my partner. Chad: What? Baby on board. Joel: Hold on. You started a company, got married and you're having a baby. Pretty much the apocalypse of any young man out there. So for that alone, I will applaud you. But for Firing Squad, Chad, tell Omar what he's won today. Chad: Well, welcome to Firing Squad Omar. It's actually our first Firing Squad of the new year. So you're a lucky bastard. Joel: But based on the waiting list, you might not air this until September of 2024. Chad: No wait, no. It's gonna come out pretty quick. So get ready because at the sound of the bell, you're gonna have two minutes to pitch JobPixel. At the end of those two minutes, we're gonna hit you up with about 20 minutes of Q and A. Make sure to be concise or you're gonna hear the crickets, and that means tighten your shit up. At the end of Q and A, you're gonna receive either a big applause. [applause] Chad: Crack the champagne, throw some confetti, and enjoy the fireworks because this one is a winner baby. Golf clap. It's a great idea, but let's back off the champagne and go with some sparkling apple juice, because you're gonna need all the focus and resources you got to make this bad boy work. Or the Firing Squad. Joel: Ouch. Chad: Go ahead, put this idea to bed before 9:00 AM because it's definitely not gonna see the new year. That's Firing Squad. Are you ready, Omar? Omar Khateeb: Yes, I am. Joel: Let's hope he's not wearing a onesie, sucking his thumb in the corner at the end of this. All right, Omar, your two minutes starts right now. Omar Khateeb: JobPixel is a video platform that allows you to collect and add authentic TikTok style interactive video content into your hiring process. From Active Jobs, passive sourcing and career page, all the way to onboarding and beyond. That's JobPixel. Joel: And where can we find out more? Omar Khateeb: Jobpixel.com. We bought the dot com domain kids. Joel: And the record for shortest pitch on record of the four or five years since we've been doing this goes to Omar. All right, Chad, you know where we're starting. We're starting with the name and he's got the dot com. But where'd you come up with JobPixel? I know that when I think of Pixel, I think of a tracking mechanism that gives me some analytics. My guess is your thinking around Pixel is different, but I could be wrong. How'd you come up with the name? What was the thinking behind it? Omar Khateeb: Absolutely. So, my co-founder actually came up with it and the whole idea is an image is made out of pixels and a video is made out of images. So basically a JobPixel is a full image of a job. And my co-founder comes from a background in recruiting. I'm actually the baby in recruiting. I just came into this industry around three years ago, had no fucking idea what's going on. But my co-founder was the VP of engineering at a company called bright.com, that sold to LinkedIn in 2014, and he built the majority of the talent, tools that LinkedIn has today. And that's kind of where the job idea came from, or JobPixel's name came from. Joel: Got it. Pixel images. And nobody likes a pixelated image like I do, Chad. So I can get on board with that name. All right. You were founded in 2020. As far as I can tell, you've taken an undisclosed seed round, which you're happy to tell us what that amount was on this show, if you'd like to. What are the plans to raise money? Is more money coming? Are we looking at Series A soon? Are you guys bootstrapping this bad boy, what's up with the money? Omar Khateeb: So we raised around 2.4 million over two rounds of funding. We just received a little bit of extra funding from some strategic investors in our industry, because we understand how important it is to bring people in the HR tech space. Does that answer the question? And in terms of funding, we are growing very fast right now, and hopefully by middle to end of this year, we'll start looking at our Series A. Joel: Well done. Chad: TikTok is big. Joel: And you don't stop. Chad: And obviously, you fit that into your very TikTok pitch. So tell me a little bit of how JobPixel can actually help companies utilize video and leverage TikTok. 'Cause everybody's talking about it, nobody knows how to use it. How are they going to use JobPixel to leverage TikTok? Omar Khateeb: So we did two things. The first problem we solved is collecting the content. So we built a platform that allows you to collect videos from anyone, via text messages or emails. So it's a simple link. The VP of HR, VP of TA sends it to their employees or recruiters, recruiters respond back with a video saying, this is why I love working at Chad and Cheese Inc essentially and submit that videos. Then that content can be downloaded and submitted directly into TikTok, or we have something called the widget where we allow you to embed that content directly onto your website. So think of us like TikTok for your website, essentially. Chad: So how's that actually managed? The content is pulled into your system. Are there super users who choose? Do they edit the content? Is the content already edited? What's the whole process to be able to get the content to TikTok and or the website? Omar Khateeb: Absolutely. So, we're big believers in doing the things that don't scale in the early days. So currently right now we're helping our customers, edit those videos by adding really nice branding and music to those videos and then allowing them to simply download them through the dashboard that JobPixel manages, and then be able to upload them on their own. And right now, our entire roadmap for 2023 is actually creating video editing capabilities into JobPixel itself. Joel: You mentioned jobs at Chad and Cheese, and I can tell you, Omar, if you look at our Glassdoor reviews, nobody is going to be applying to Chad and Cheese Podcast. [laughter] Omar Khateeb: You should use JobPixel. Joel: Obviously, TikTok gives you some amazing tools to edit your content, as does reels or YouTube short stories. Why would I use JobPixel versus just going right natively to TikTok or another solution to record my videos? Omar Khateeb: Because they're not business apps, right? You need a platform that allows you to collect, curate and publish that content with approval processes, making sure that they follow specific guidelines. Many times we work with a customer and talent acquisition and marketing comes in and says, "Hold up. This is the wrong brand guidelines. This is not following blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." So we see that all the time. So building that into the platform is really important and making sure you follow through and having different people have admin access to JobPixel is very important to make sure that you build authentic content, but still follows the brand guidelines for a specific brand. Joel: Is the expectation that someone is going to post a professional video, but it's just gonna be formatted to the way we digest to consume video today. The goal is not to make fun karaoke employee videos, or is the platform open to whatever kind of content you want to create? And if there is karaoke, can I put in the music in your platform as I'm singing Jeremy by Pearl Jam? Omar Khateeb: So the music is coming very soon. We're adding that as a part of our roadmap. But in terms of content, companies can do anything. We've seen some of our customers do celebrations of what they're thankful for, for Thanksgiving to what they're doing at their Christmas parties to what it looks like to fix a caterpillar machine, as a technician for one of our customer's favorite CAT. So we see everything. Our platform doesn't limit you, so we give the control to the company to be able to decide what type of content they pick. We have brands that go all crazy and do crazy stuff, and we have brands that just continue following the brand guidelines, which I'm sure you guys know [laughter] those types of brands that just completely follow everything. So we allow them to do whatever they want through the platform itself. Joel: Talk about the analytics on the platform. What kind of data are you giving the companies that are using your service? Omar Khateeb: Yeah, we allow them to see how many people viewed their videos. And we are actually one of the only platforms doing what we do that has interactive video. So our videos don't only show video, but it actually have buttons on them. So the recruiter can put book a time button on the videos, they can put an apply now button, a record video now button directly on our jobs. So every single click of those is actually trackable. So we can directly show the customer an ROI for how many times their video was viewed, how many times the candidate actually clicked the apply now to take them directly to a career site and so on. So we offer all those analytics and a lot more. And we have a big project coming up very soon to actually dig a little deeper into analytics. I'm sure you guys know without integrations, sometimes it's an issue because the customer doesn't know what's happening in the ATS. So the customers that do have good tracking, we tend to show ROI really fast. But with the customers that don't, we'd have to dig a little bit deeper and crawl our way into their ATS to find the analytics on their site. Chad: Pain in the ass. Let me clarify real quick. So let's say for instance, I'm looking for a very high volume type of retail position and I can actually have a video that says, "Apply now." Or, "Schedule an interview." Either way, you can take down any type of process that you want to, is that correct? Just directly from the video? Omar Khateeb: Yes, correct. Directly from the video. Chad: So who's your customer? Who are you actually selling to? Are you selling to employment brand people? Are you selling to TA VPs? Who's your target? Who's the person that you need to zone in on to actually get this sold? Omar Khateeb: TA directors, TA senior directors and TA VPs. And in some companies in the Midwest, the VPs of HR tend to do a lot of talent acquisition. So those are the customers that we tend to go after. We are excited obviously when a company has recruitment marketing teams that are ready to go because they tend to onboard faster and so on. But that's kind of typically our customer. Yeah. And our top clients are in communications, manufacturing and healthcare. Chad: So let's talk about partnerships. We were just talking about integrations, it's always a bitch. Workday sucks. We all know, right? So as a point solution, but one that's pretty important in being able to get messaging out and being able to allow TikTok and those types of things to actually work for a company. Who are you partnering with to be able to get through those integrations, not to mention also partnering with from a sales standpoint? Omar Khateeb: Absolutely. So our first partner was GR8, which is an amazing applicant tracking system and CRM. They took a bet on us and helped us. And we actually went to Las Vegas to HR tech with them. We have a full integration with them and a bunch their customers are actually using our product, which is super exciting. Talbots, the women's clothing store is actually, the most well known one. If you go to their website right now, you'll see our... Joel: That's a Chad favorite, Talbots. [laughter] Omar Khateeb: And then the one that we're gonna be announcing very soon is SmartRecruiters. We're gonna become SmartRecruiters official video provider to all their clients. And we will actually be talking about our reseller agreement with them by end of February. Chad: Okay, well that's a pretty damn good start. So that being said, how many clients do you currently have in the portfolio? Omar Khateeb: We have around 22 clients and we charge our clients anywhere between one to $5,000 a month. So we're a little bit over a quarter million dollars in revenue. Chad: Okay. So this is more of an MRR business model versus ARR? Omar Khateeb: We're an MRR business model. There's a couple of reasons behind that. But we'll dig a little deeper. Joel: Or we won't. It's up to us. [laughter] Chad wanted to know about customers. I wanna know about competitors. We've had VideoMyJob on the show, VIRVO, Enboarder, you have an onboarding product and video, and we haven't even sort of scratched the service on automated AI, deep fake type stuff. So talk about the competitive landscape. What's your differentiator? Omar Khateeb: Yeah, so there are a few competitors in this space. And I'm a huge believer that in HR tech, if you wanna break into the industry, you have to meet the industry and know the industry really well and actually build a lot of relationship in that. So our number one focus and our biggest differentiator is everybody knows us in the industry now in terms of our relationships with our partners and so on. So first mover advantage matters a lot in HR tech. If you partner with SmartRecruiters for example, first before anyone else, you tend to get their customers first. So that has been a big part of our strategy. The next thing is, we are the only company right now that is doing interactive content outside of all the other competitors. There's a lot of competitors doing videos itself, adding them into jobs and so on. Omar Khateeb: But ours is fully interactive and we allow you to use it for passive, for active jobs. We can even send our content via text messages and emails directly through our platform. And we know that we're the only one doing that. The one that I was really amazed by and I absolutely amazed by the founder was Altru. Alykhan is an incredible founder and he was able to exit that company to iCIMS. My opinion of that business, I think they sold too early. They had a lot of amazing opportunities to continue scaling that business. And they did not do any interactive content. But the success of Altru and how amazing that they did things inspired us to continue building on this. To be clear, when we started JobPixel, we did not start with this specific idea. We actually started with another idea, but Chad told us it was a really, really fucking bad idea. [laughter] And we noticed it and we kind of pivoted into this. And ever since then, things have been going to up and up. Joel: Thankfully, I don't listen to every time Chad tells me something is a bad idea, [laughter] otherwise I would end up doing nothing. Chad: You wouldn't remember anyway. Joel: Yeah. That's true. Don't wake me up. Anyway, one competitor that you did mention, I just want your feedback on this. LinkedIn launched stories a while back. They have since canceled it. Their live video, it's sort of sputtering I guess at best. Why can't LinkedIn get it right and is there enough incentive or big enough business for them to get it right? In other words, LinkedIn shutting down stories to me is like, why is JobPixel gonna work if LinkedIn couldn't make stories work? Omar Khateeb: So intent is a big thing, right? You come to LinkedIn to do specific things, browse jobs and so on. The stories feature didn't work. One, LinkedIn's a slow platform. It's a great platform, but it's slow. And I'm still a huge believer that LinkedIn is still around. It's just because it's so big that you can't really drop it down. It's the 10,000 pound gorilla that we all know and love or don't love. So the reason that it didn't work is because the intent or the type of user that goes to their platform doesn't look for that. What we're offering is we're allowing companies to add that content to their website. So you automatically see analytics for that website improve. I think that LinkedIn doing that is not gonna really matter. What we're doing here is trying our best to help that individual company improve their analytics. Not the entire platform with like 800, 900 million users improve their analytics. 'Cause LinkedIn doesn't really need that. I don't have a lot of insight into why things did not work out, but that would be my gut. Chad: My gut would be LinkedIn sucks at new stuff. 60% of the time, it works every time. So the market's not amazing right now. So timing kind of sucks. Coming out of the pandemic, everything was kicking ass and taking names. Money was being spent all over the place. What are you guys doing right now to ensure that you have a stable model going through 2023, 2024? Omar Khateeb: One, no stupid spending. I think a lot of companies spend money in stupid shit. We're not gonna do that. Two, limiting the size of the team. We're 12 people right now. We're only gonna be adding a couple more people soon. And then three, leveraging our partnerships to help us basically generate as much profitable growth as possible, and bring customers in. Chad: What do you categorize as stupid spending? Omar Khateeb: Get drunk in Vegas and pay for everything. [laughter] That's a lot of companies went all overboard with that. Paying tens of thousands of dollars on events and things like that. And I think finding out where you get the most ROI and spending your money wisely is really important. Work trips, company swag, all that kind of stuff doesn't really add anything to your bottom line. Chad: Real quick. So what you're saying is two big booths at HR Tech is not what you're going for? [laughter] Omar Khateeb: Nope. Never. No Ferrari, what is it called? Joel: No Eightfold. No eightfold for you. No compensating for booth space. Chad: Overcompensation, yes. Ferrari Compensation. [laughter] Joel: Let's talk about your marketing and you mentioned not spending on stupid stuff, and having a lean team. However, there are some signs that you're letting your marketing lag. For example on your site, you have a blog. Your last blog post was roughly a year ago, February of 2022. You seem to have abandoned that. Other social platforms you have content, but it doesn't look like there's a real concerted effort. And being a video company, it seems like you guys should have a really kick ass sort of social media presence. So talk about the marketing and why the lack of content that you guys are churning out. Omar Khateeb: So a couple of things. We've tried content in the past, and software as a service, just SaaS in general, marketing doesn't really work as much, as much as outbound sales or partnerships that help you with lead gen. So doing a lot of content on TikTok and things like that doesn't really help you because that's not the target buyer that you do. But with that being said, I think content is really important for brands. So actually one of our next key hires is gonna be a really strong content person that will help us with blogs and so on. But if you go to my own personal LinkedIn profile, Joel, you'll actually see me making a lot of videos about a lot of different random crap. So I do my best to try to make content on I guess the Omar brand and help that kind of feed into JobPixel. But we are going to be investing into that this year, but we just have not seen the ROI. But now as we continue building our brand, I think it's gonna become more and more important as time goes. Joel: Okay. Let's talk about sort of global growth. Obviously video really transcends any sort of language or location. What does your global current footprint look like and what's global growth look like for you? Omar Khateeb: Yeah, so we have a few clients actually that are international. TELUS International is one of them. And we're in, south America, Guatemala, El Salvador, and a lot of parts of Latin America. We launched in India and Europe with them. The nice thing about a video platform is, internationalization is not as important because in the videos they can speak whatever language they want. So we have some videos in German, we have some videos in French. It's actually really nice to see. So we've expanded, but right now we are trying to add more support. I think we support 16 countries at this point from a text messaging standpoint and so on. But we're continuing to grow as that time goes. But it's really client-based more than us trying to go internationally. We don't have much money to go international and go crazy. So we're counting on our clients to help us get into those different parts of the world. Joel: How much of a challenge is it to get people on video? Is it normal now? Like, "Oh, no problem, I'll record a video." Or is like, "No way I'm getting on recorded and being on the internet." Is that a hurdle for the business or no? Omar Khateeb: It's a part of your execution strategy, right? If you don't build a strategy for helping your customers record great content, you're not gonna get great content. So a big thing that we focus on during our onboarding process after we get a new customer on is setting up different calls with them that are reoccurring to help them collect the best content possible. And then we just recently added a teleprompter feature into JobPixel, and we saw our usage of our platform go up. Because most people actually get nervous of what they say on video. So if you help them type it out and it goes through, it'll make their lives a lot easier. Plus, our product works on any device in terms of like submitting video. Your phone, your computer, all that. So if you wanna put your duck face filter on from TikTok and upload it on JobPixel, you're more than welcome to. Joel: You can do that. Okay. So you're literally having conversations with hiring managers about best video practices. Are you shipping out light rings to people? Does it get that involved? Omar Khateeb: No, not at all. We worked with a really great content creator. Her name is Gigi. And we have five videos inside our platform that are basically pre-installed in every account. You'll be able to play them and they'll show you how to get the best lighting, how to get the best audio, and so on and so forth. So we made sure we cover that. And in our training, we actually send everybody an email that basically outlines how to make great content on JobPixel. Joel: So I was gonna actually say this was a threat to your business that people would have sort of digitized CEO videos or filtered videos, but it sounds like they can do that outside of your platform. You may build that at some point, but they can just load it up as a JobPixel video, no problem. Omar Khateeb: Yes, exactly. The two values as I mentioned earlier, is one, collecting the content, but if you already have content collected, JobPixel will allow you utilize it more by turning it into actionable content that you can use anyways. Joel: Chad, this sounds really fucking expensive. Chad: I think we heard about some of the numbers that it actually cost. It was 1000 to 5,000 a month. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Joel: Per user? Per company? Yeah. Chad: Yeah. Per user seats? How does that actually work? Omar Khateeb: So we charge our customers anywhere between $1000 to $5,000 a month, depending on the size of the organization, which we basically say how many potential creators they have, their editing needs and their integration requirements. That's how we really kind of cover it. Typically, if you look at it, it comes down to like a dollar a user per month, for the most part. But typically, that's kind of how we charge. We are continuing to expand our pricing as we do more integrations. We have some really nice announcements coming up soon, with big platforms. So obviously as those things get more complicated, our pricing is going up. Joel: Anything you want to give the Chad and Cheese listeners a sneak peek of? Omar Khateeb: Not yet. [laughter] Chad: What a tease, that Omar. Joel: What a tease. What a tease. Omar Khateeb: A little tickle. Joel: That's the bell, Chad. Chad: There it is. Joel: We all know what that means. It means it's firing time. Chad: Yes. Joel: Chad, you have a little disclaimer on this one. Why don't you go ahead and lay that out. Chad: Yeah, I'm gonna lay this one all on you because I have a conflict of interest because I am an advisor, as Omar actually let the cat out of the bag a little bit earlier. Omar Khateeb: We got drunk together a few times. [laughter] Chad: I'm an advisor to JobPixel. I'm biased, so go figure. I'm gonna give a big applause. Joel: Appreciate that, you're gonna curb straight it and give it a big applause. [applause] Joel: But I am curious, and the listeners might be as well, the overall macro theme of recruitment and video. Where are you on that in macro terms? Chad: So, I wanna split this up because there are the old versions of video and there are the new versions of video. The ones that were built before TikTok, pre-TikTok, that are hard to use. The technical debt that they have, their systems, their infrastructure, they're just not up to date. Right? So a lot of these newer, and again, most of these newer startups, much like JobPixel, are learning from those older organizations on how to do things and how not to do things. But that being said, I think that if you're an older video platform and you haven't advanced into the TikTok society of today, then you don't have a chance in hell. All the other ones that have adapted and have evolved, I think you have a great opportunity. And I think there's just a huge market validation with Altru being scarfed up by iCIMS for 60 million, which was the word on the street. So I think there's great opportunity, and I'm very, very bullish on video. [applause] Joel: Well, that puts the ball squarely in my court as to what I think about JobPixel. I hate video much like I hate looking in the mirror every morning and seeing more gray hairs and more wrinkles, which reminds me more and more about how out of touch I am with the mediums out there, which is why we do a podcast for the most part. Now, people may enjoy watching us, but I don't enjoy watching myself. That's a whole other therapy session that I'll be going into later. But I'm not too old to appreciate that video is where the world is going. TikTok is sucking the oxygen out of everything. It's forcing Facebook to reevaluate its business. It's forcing YouTube to reevaluate how it presents video and content. And it's just a natural progression. Chad mentioned old video versus new. I think the days of like professionally created scripted 4k professional videos, there's a space for it. Joel: But I think where the world is going is this kind of short form, fun, transparent, organic content. I love the fact that you guys allow videos created on TikTok to be transferred over to your platform. The opportunity to take AI generated content and video. Multiple languages into your platform. I think that flexibility is gonna pay dividends down the road. The fact that you are interactive, it's not just, hey, consume it, you can actually engage with it, I think is gonna be a big differentiator for you going forward. I think that I wouldn't be shocked if before the series A comes down, some people come around and ask about acquisition or what would it take to get a deal done. Chad: After they hear you on Firing Squad. Joel: Yeah, obviously after this you're gonna need a new server for all the traffic that's gonna come in to the site. But yeah, for me it's like I'm an old guy, this isn't my thing, but I appreciate that there's a whole new generation of millennials and Gen X and Z. Sorry, I'm Gen X, I get the letters mixed up, which proves that I am aging and my brain is dying, but it's not dying so much that I can't give JobPixel... [applause] Omar Khateeb: Thank you. Joel: A rousing applause, which is technically, I guess a double applause. Although Chad's comes with an asterisk. Congratulations. It's gonna be fun watching your growth. Let us know when that series A comes down. We'll be happy to talk about it or the acquisition that comes before it. How do you feel about being on and surviving the Firing Squad? Omar Khateeb: Shaking right now. But honestly, I'm really happy to be here. Thank you so much for the round of applause. You both know I'm probably the biggest Chad and Cheese fan. Listen to every episode and seeing you guys rip through people in the past, I was very afraid that I was like, "Oh, I'm gonna walk in here and I'm gonna get shredded into pieces." But thankfully, a lot of what we have today and the growth we have today is we've learned a lot from you guys. Just listening to your podcast and all of the advice that you've done. Joel: You've already got the applause, Omar. You don't have to... Yeah. Omar Khateeb: But I have to give credit when credit is due. You've helped this industry and a lot of the founders in the space understand that HR Tech is the graveyard of a lot of startups because they just refuse to learn. And I think this podcast is really important. So thank you so much for helping us. Joel: He's shaken, but he's not stirred Chad. Omar, for our listeners who want to know more about you, more or less the company, where do you send them? Omar Khateeb: I am available on LinkedIn, O-M-A-R-K-H-A-T-E-E-B. So Omar Khateeb, you'll find me on LinkedIn, always making a lot of annoying videos, so you'll find me there. CEO JobPixel. I don't really use other platforms for the most part, so just reach out to me on LinkedIn and happy to chat. Joel: And for more about JobPixel, they would go to? Omar Khateeb: Jobpixel.com. Joel: Clever clever girl. 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.