Halloween’s hangover has the boys ranting about some trends that just won’t die: ‘Tinder for Jobs’ and video resumes. Startups Workey and O’Hire go keep going back to the future and treading where past companies have failed, and it’s got the boys fired up.
Aside from the lunacy of dating apps as employment apps and 2-minute-long video resumes, more money keeps funneling into talent acquisition technology, as another companies gets more funding. Oh, then robots keep scaring the hell out of us, especially when they give interviews with the press and given citizenship in Saudi Arabia. Have fun while your earthly dominance lasts, humans.
Go throw money at our sponsors. They rule! America’s Job Exchange, Sovren and Ratedly are the bee’s knees, yo!
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
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: Mwah ha ha ha. What up peeps? Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your resident badass cohost, Joel Cheesman.
Chad: And I'm Chad Sowash, and I can't stop laughing.
Joel: On this week's show, Tinder keeps swiping it's way into employment, bots are still raising truckloads of cash, and Sophia scares the absolute bejeezus out of Chad and me.
Chad: Everybody.
Joel: Stay tuned kiddies.
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Joel: Sovern. Did you survive Halloween?
Chad: Oh, yeah. Not a problem, it was cold as hell, but other than that, it was good. How about you? I saw you had Axe all dressed up like a moose.
Joel: Dude, we ran the gamut of just crazy costumes. The seven month old was in a Canadian moose outfit, compliments of my Canadian wife, and Stella was Dorothy, and Cole, my 11 year old meathead son was this crazy body suit of a clown. I can't even explain it.
Chad: That was scary.
Joel: It was nuts. Of course, he couldn't see, and he fell and ripped his outfit, and it was pretty bad. Halloween's great. It's a great time. The leaves are changing here in the Midwest, and it's cooling weather. We got Thanksgiving coming up which is great. Football season's heating up. We got the World Series going to game seven. Christmas is around the corner. It's a good time.
Chad: You forgot the Ohio State Buckeyes win, cause that, overall, should be put up on a pedestal.
Joel: I thought we were making this an abbreviated show. It was a good one. Go Buckeyes, and the committee screwed us by putting us at number six or seven.
Chad: So far.
Joel: Shout outs.
Chad: Shout outs. One big shout out from me, to Dave Phoebus. He's in Talent Acquisition. He sent me a LinkedIn message on Sunday, and this is what it said. "Dude, I'm sitting in Starbucks, laughing out loud, listening to your podcast. Recruiting is marketing, is my rallying cry." He sent me this link to this video, which is awesome. You can check it out, just search recruiting is marketing on YouTube. It's an explainer video, and it hits many of the points that you and I talk about, it seems endlessly, on this pod. Thanks Dave, and keep listening man, because recruiting is marketing. Continue to use that as your rally cry, man.
Joel: It'll have to...what's the word I'm looking for? Anyway, so I've been watching David Pumpkin's rehash videos on SNL on YouTube. I've been on YouTube a lot. I'll go check out recruiting is marketing, is that it?
Chad: Recruiting is marketing.
Joel: It's probably like, eight Chris Russell videos in there too.
Chad: Probably underneath, yeah.
Joel: I have one shout out, I guess. When we ask people to leave questions and comments through our really creative hashtag chadcheese on Twitter, no one says anything, except the Job Board Doctor. I'm gonna use a little reverse psychology this week, and say don't leave any comments or questions for us on Twitter with the hashtag chadandcheese, okay? Don't do it. It makes us mad. Chad loses sleep, I overeat. Just don't do it, okay? Maybe that'll change the tide and actually get some engagement with our listeners. Jesus.
Chad: I don't know what it is. People like to reach out to us behind closed doors, like in email, or through the website, or through LinkedIn. It's like, nobody can see my shit, is what it is, so it's kind of fun.
Joel: Nobody wants to be called out like your buddy from Adweek. Maybe they're all on Tinder for jobs, cause that's apparently a thing.
Chad: Oh, you mean Workey?
Joel: Yeah, let's get to our first story.
Chad: TechCrunch.
Joel: Workey. Let's spell it right. W-o-r-k-e-y.
Chad: Work, e, y.
Joel: Workey, Workey.
Chad: From the TechCrunch article, and you said it before we were prepping for this. You said, "why does TechCrunch actually write about this shit?" It's a good question because, Workey says -
Joel: If you're launching something, send it to TechCrunch and just make sure Tinder for jobs is in the title, and they'll write about it.
Chad: It has taken the place of eHarmony for jobs in the garbage pile of technology that's out there, right?
Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chad: So, Workey is actually a chat box that goes through a series of questions that asks you about your current job, blah blah blah, and then it uses AI, which I think is bullshit, too, because AI... I just don't think people understand the definition of AI, but anyway. The whole premise behind this thing is 85 percent of people that are out there are open to new jobs. 85 percent of people who have jobs are open to new jobs. But only twelve percent of them are searching for new jobs.
Chad: Workey believes that if you download this app, you can Tinder your way, you can swipe your way to a better life. I don't get it, cause I don't know how in the hell you're going to get people to download this damn app.
Joel: First of all, the news release has Generation Z in it. I'm just still pissed at the millennials to even start thinking about how Generation Z is gonna get jobs. Second thing is, we've done this, kind of. Jobr, creatively spelled was basically Tinder for jobs. You would look at a picture of a building, where the job was, they'd pull some random picture of a building. It would have the job, which initially, they hoped that recruiters would actually post jobs on Jobr, which so few did that they said, "Let's go get Indeed's API, and we'll pull the jobs in." Everything was not relevant at all, for the most part. Location was, but you'd just swipe through random jobs, and there was no context to it at all.
Joel: Monster, being the idiots that they are, over paid for Jobr, apparently $12 million, or something like that. So, now, Tinder for jobs is back. Actually, it never went away. It's still failing, and my guess is, these guys are the next iteration of a failing app that claims that it's Tinder for recruitment.
Chad: Here's the fun part. It says, "The Workey generates..." Just saying Workey, I'm mean, give me a fucking break. Workey generates revenue by charging per successful candidate. I don't even know what that means. Per successful candidate. Is that an application? Is that a hire? What the... is a successful candidate?
Joel: Look, to make these things work, you need job seekers, and you need content. If you're taking the content from Indeed or ZipRecruiter, or wherever, making that stuff relevant for a mobile experience just doesn't work. Then you need the people to use it, but there's not enough native jobs. You're just pulling in this API stuff. It... just stop. Let's move on man, I'm over it. It gets worse. This is the rant podcast, apparently.
Joel: We have a new app, O'Hire. I want you guys who are listening to envision an internet brand with an apostrophe in it.
Chad: O'Charley, or O'Brien.
Joel: Or, O'Hare airport, which, by the way if you type in O'Hire in Google, it gives you 20 related 20 related searches to O'Hare airport, but that's beside the fact. O'Hire, let's stay on the name for a little bit. How many internet companies do you know with an apostrophe and, guess what their url is? I'll give you two guesses.
Chad: I think it's O dash hire, isn't it?
Joel: It's O dash, or O hyphen technically. If you type in Ohire without the hyphen. It takes you to a page that says, "This domain is for sale." They didn't even have the wearwithal to go buy the domain, which by the way, Ohire is probably not that expensive to buy. Ohire is wrong, you have to have the hyphen. Thank God they didn't make it O hyphen hire dot IO something, because that's really hot right now.
Joel: The idea of this thing is video resumes. Can we stop reinventing the resume for two days? Because, it's fine as it is. This site will let you post a video resume of up to two minutes long. When a recruiter looks at a paper resume, or something online. How long does it take them to decide whether it's worth moving forward or not?
Chad: Preliminary scan's gonna be seconds.
Joel: Seconds, like under five. A good recruiter, like, one, two, nope, one, two, okay. This company thinks that recruiters are gonna watch two minute videos, when they're used to scanning resumes in seconds to decide whether to move on or not. That's a major hurdle to this, and it's just not gonna work.
Joel: The website itself shows people playing guitar. Playing guitar, dancing, painting, from a job... It's a bad dating app if it's a dating app.
Chad: It's a dating app.
Joel: It's the worst ever. I'm gonna hit on chicks saying I'm a recruiter wanting to "hire them." O apostrophe God. I don't wanna waste too much time on this, but recruiters aren't gonna surf these things. There's some level of search, where you have tags, and what not, but job seekers aren't gonna make a Hollywood presentation for this site that no one uses.
Chad: Here's the most important piece. Companies are not gonna pay for this shit. Here's why, they can't. Companies are doing everything they can right now to fight bias, and also prove that they're trying to fight bias. That's why companies have adopted things that they... they call it blind recruiting. Here's an article, just an excerpt from an article from Fast Company from back in March. "Blind recruitment is the practice of removing personally identifiable information from the resumes, applicant, etc. So the name, gender, age, education, so on and so forth. The big question is, why is this necessary? These are the types of things that companies, like O'Hire needs to understand before the come out with shit like this.
Chad: Why is it necessary? The National Bureau of Economic Research actually shows people with ethnic names needed to send out fifty percent more resumes before they get a call back from job hunters, unless you have a white sounding name. Actually white in air quotes. White sounding name.
Joel: Chad.
Chad: It's bad enough, yeah, no shit right? It's bad enough -
Joel: Joel.
Chad: When we can't even see a person, whether they're dancing, or any of that stuff. Then we can see them, then the unconscious bias goes through the roof. So, guys, this is definitely going on the hot, steaming pile of garbage.
Joel: Yep, it's been a while. This one is a passionate chuck on the steaming, hot pile of garbage.
Chad: If you're a company, and you're actually looking at this, and you're saying, "Wow, this is actually pretty cool." This is the reason, I'm sure you can probably see what's happening here. This is the reason why you need to have companies who know what the hell they're doing, to be able to shepherd you down the right path before you screw yourself and your company out of hundreds of millions of federal contract dollars. That's why you have companies like one of our sponsors. America's Job Exchange.
Joel: We love our sponsors.
Chad: Hell yeah, we love our sponsors. America's Job Exchange is focused on diversity recruiting, and to be able to try to get you past these roadblocks. Because, they are a sponsor of Chad and Cheese, you can go to americasjobexchange.com/cheese. We have discounts that are waiting for you. We talked about it last week, we talked about it the week before. This is an area where most companies just don't get it, and they don't have experts in house to really get help whatsoever. That's why you need to align yourself with a company like America's Job Exchange. Americasjobexchange.com/cheese. Everything's better with a little bit of cheese.
Joel: Boom, that's what I'm talking about. Everything's better with a little bit of guitar in your resume. Let's put a fork in that one cause it's over. All right, from Tinder to Chat bots. Tell us about Spoke.
Chad: Is it Spoke, or is it AskSpoke, because the URL is askspoke.com. Again, this is a marketing thing that I just don't think companies get right.
Joel: This is very hot now. You can name your company a really cool name, and you don't need to be Spoke.com. You can be getspoke, or askspoke, or gospoke. It's askscope.com.
Chad: Askspoke.com... I don't know if it's really that cool, but still. Askspoke.com -
Joel: I gotta interrupt man. When you said Askspoke, I thought it was Ass spoke, and I'm thinking about the scene from Ace Ventura, when he bends over, and the butt cheeks, and he's like "Excuse me, do you have a breath mint?" Okay, go on. Askspoke.
Chad: Askspoke, I will enunciate better. My apologies. They have a series... A, they landed series A of eight million, they got a series B of funding - no it was a series A of eight, series B of 20, so they've gotten 28 million thus far.
Joel: I don't read these stories, obviously.
Chad: I know, but it seems pretty interesting, because the premise is very simple. Once you get on-boarded into an organization, you have a shitload of questions. Even if you've been in the organization for a while, you wanna ask about your 401k or -
Joel: May I ask you a question?
Chad: Yeah, ask a question internally.
Joel: May I ask you a question.
Chad: What these guys have put in place with Askspoke, is that they have a chat bot, and you can ask, you are an employee, you can ask the company chat bot a question, and it'll pull back answers for you. More than likely it'll direct you to what you have to do, steps, and all that other fun stuff. It's really just a chat bot, so it's not -
J
oel: It's kind of like an intranet chat bot. When I join the company, I can go there, and say, "where's the bathroom," and the chat bot will direct me to the bathroom, basically.
Chad: Possibly. I don't know that it knows geography on where you're actually at, unless you have microchip in your head, or in your thumb, or wherever the hell they're putting those things now. I think it's a very simple, very smart way to use chat technology. I don't think it's really AI as much, but it looks like 20 -
Joel: How many coworkers are Browns fans? Does not compute.
Chad: Zero. Then automatically, you get an email having to go to your manager's office because you're about ready to get fired.
Joel: Seriously, do you like this idea?
Chad: I do, I think it's easy, it's smart, and you're using technology. I think it's very easily used where you take all these goddamn FAQs, instead of making somebody scroll through the shit, they just ask, and the chat bot comes back at you.
Joel: I'm sorry, is a search box on the FAQ page too much to ask?
Chad: Sometimes, because, again, interaction. It's about engagement, right? I know old guys like you don't know about that stuff, but it's okay.
Joel: I'm a day younger than you. Don't you forget it.
Joel: Chad, employment branding has been in the news lately.
Chad: You don't say.
Joel: I do say. Your buddy Tim Sackett wrote an article recently. What did that thing say?
Chad: We talked about it yesterday. We were talking about... there were many different aspects... not yesterday, but on the last pod, so if you didn't listen to the last pod, listen to that one, and then listen to this one again. It was focused on, really reviews, online reviews, and how Glassdoor reviews could perspectively, not just hurt your reputation on Glassdoor, but now Google is linked into those reviews. Guess what? They're starting to weight your company's reputation on those reviews. You could be getting, I keep saying this, firebombed by people on Glassdoor, and what is is, Kununu, is that the one?
Joel: It is Kununu, yes. Are you saying that if I had bad reviews at my companies, my jobs might not rank as highly, and vice versa?
Chad: Yeah. I'm saying that they might not rank as high, and also on other aspects of search, in actual Google search itself, you might not be coming up at all.
Joel: Geez. That means that monitoring your employer reviews are more important than ever.
Chad: Makes a hell of a lot of sense. Would you need a team of people to do that?
Joel: You would not. You have bots, which are popular on this show. You have a company called Ratedly, that will actually be like your Lifelock for employment branding. Ratedly goes out and monitors your reviews. Brings it back to you in an easy to read dashboard, as well as alerts you via email when those alerts, or those reviews come through. Guess how much it costs?
Chad: It's gotta be at least a thousand dollars a month.
Joel: I know, right? That's what you would think. It's only $147 per month. No contracts. Software is a service, you can cancel anytime. Glassdoor just sent out a press release a couple days ago saying, "35 percent of employers will increase their employer branding investment in the next year."
Chad: And they should.
Joel: Well, I, for one, recommend that they go to Ratedly as part of that investment.
Chad: Yes, and here's the thing. You don't want to have just one person on this thing. If I was a CEO of a brand, I would want to know what people are saying about us. You can have a bunch of different users. Obviously, it's $147 per person, which is still pretty cheap, and goes easy on that corporate credit card, but it only makes sense, especially again, how much Glassdoor and now, all these different review sites are actually starting to impact how job seekers are looking at possibly working at your company, or saying, "Go to hell, I'm not working for you."
Joel: It's huge, and there's a discount. If you use, go to Ratedly.com, and use the coupon code Cheddar, you'll get to try Ratedly for only one dollar, yes, only one dollar. If you hate it, just cancel it. If you love it, just pay $147 a month after that.
Chad: Sounds like a blast
Joel: Awesome. Robots are scaring us a little bit, Chad.
Chad: Dude, the whole Saudi Arabia, Sophia AI robot, just creepy, yeah. That could prospectively create nightmares.
Joel: Saudi Arabia granted citizenship, as I understand it, to the first synthetic human being slash robot in history. This thing gave interviews to the press. It looks pretty human. It sounds pretty human. It answers questions pretty correctly. We don't know if these questions were seeded, or if this thing really can understand, which I don't know why it couldn't. My Google donut at home knows what the hell I'm talking about. I'm guessing it does. This thing scares the bejeezus out of us.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: 20 years from now, this thing will look human, it'll sound it, it'll understand stuff.
Chad: I don't think it'll take 20 years.
Joel: We're done. It's end of days people, just enjoy the final, comfortable days of life, because Schwarzenegger's coming, and we're all done for. It won't be called Terminator, it'll be called Sophia.
Chad: When Sophia knocks at your door, it won't be as terrifying as Schwarzenegger. No bullshit, man, she was freaky as hell.
Joel: I wanna say she was one, she was the robot months back that said humans weren't worthy of living or worthy of existing. They have since updated her software, but, yeah, who knows. I don't know, from a work perspective, employment perspective, Sophia's gonna be behind every cash register, she's gonna sell you your pairs of shoes. I don't know, man. I wanna be hopeful and optimistic, but robots are getting smart. They look like us, they're smarter than us, they're gonna be faster. There are gonna be a bunch of six million dollar men and women, super speed.
Joel: There's gonna be some random country that has a stockpile of these Sophias, and they're gonna unleash them on the world, and be the world's superpower for the next thousand years.
Chad: Like El Machina.
Joel: If Hitler had an army of Sophias, ooh, S, Sophia, I don't know there's a connection there, maybe... Sophia, we'd all probably be speaking German today.
Chad: Yeah, we probably would. I'd ring the bell on that.
Joel: Yeah, let's ring the bell and get this thing over with. It's been a fun week. Look, with the holidays coming, the shows gonna be a little loosey goosey. The news is gonna be a little less impactful, little more fun. Hope you like it. We're gonna roll with it and see how it goes.
Chad: It's always fun. We're out.
Joel: It's always fun. We out.