Heading out of January, the boys are already covering a wide variety of topics, which is nice for what's normally a slow news period.
Partnerships are the name of the game in the new recruiting ecosystem, with news from Smashfly and Recruitology hitting the wire this week.
What else? Glad you asked.
- Strive Talent cleans up in a round of funding, but will sale pros care?
- Best diversity employers are announced. Chad may or may not be impressed.
- What's old is new again as newspaper catch their second wind.
- Infamous dumpster dweller Purple Squirrel has some company. Oy!
And much more, as always. Shout-outs are particularly amusing. Enjoy, and visit our sponsor for free demos! Ratedly, America's Job Exchange, Sovren and Catch 22 Consulting rock our world.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Announcer: 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.
Joel: Guess who's back, back again. Welcome to the "Chad & Cheese Show," HR's most dangerous podcast. I'm Cheese.
Chad: I'm Chad.
Joel: On this week's stimulating episode, Purple Squirrel gets some competition. Oh no. Newspapers are hip again.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: SmashFly gets in bed with Olivia. We'll try to keep it PG 13, but no promises. Stay tuned. We have free demos and W's all up in your face.
Announcer: Google, Lever, Entelo, Monster, Jibe. What do these companies and hundreds of others have in common? They all use Sovren Technology. Some use our software to help people find the perfect job, while others use our technology to help companies find the perfect candidate. Sovren has been the global leader in recruitment intelligent software since 1996, and we can help improve your hiring process too. We'd love to help you make a perfect match. Visit Sovren.com S-O-V-R-E-N.com for a free demo.
Joel: Free demo baby.
Chad: They run the AI world. They can say "free demo" whenever they want Kelly Robinson.
Joel: Oh, now you're getting, oh, hold on. You were all about team Kelly.
Chad: I love Kelly.
Joel: Now you've turned on him. Nice, okay.
Chad: It's been a busy couple of weeks podcasting.
Joel: I'm tired.
Chad: Last Friday, the Indeed is sneaky as Hell podcast is all over the place, the Honeit "Firing Squad," Nick Livingston, that one we just dropped this last Wednesday. Then we found ourselves in downtown Indy, pre-gaming at Chatham Tap, and for all of our new listeners, pre-gaming means we're drinking beer in preparation for the exclusive pod that's going to drop next week. We were actually on site and interviewed with the CEO of Canvas. Aman Brar. Yeah, I can't get Canvas right because his URL screws me up so much.
Joel: Aman Brar yes, oh, he's going to love that. Man, what a great time we have with those guys. You know what I loved about our visit there most, besides they have lovely people working there?
Chad: What's that?
Joel: Is it looks like a startup.
Chad: Oh, it does.
Joel: You go in, it's just sweaty, smelly, haven't left the office for who knows how long. They're eating crappy food. I think you even mentioned in the beginning like, "Oh, this feels like Indeed in the early days," and that's kind of what it felt like. To me ...
Chad: The lotion and the tissues on the desk.
Joel: Yeah, all right. Hey, I didn't bring that up, I didn't bring it up, but yes, yes. There was ... Oh, I'm not even going to go there. Let's just say, yes, it is a gritty feel when you go into the Canvas headquarters here in downtown Indianapolis.
Joel: Do we want to give a shout out to Kelly at Flip the Bean or whatever they're called?
Chad: Oh yeah, he's already sold that off. He's doing his own thing like playing golf right now, but-
Joel: Jeez.
Chad: Yeah, we definitely want to give Kelly Robinson a big shout out for his snarky reply to the free demo, right?
Joel: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, CareerBuilder gives you a little bit of money and you get all cocky. Is he a New Zealander or an Aussie?
Chad: What?
Joel: Aussie or a Kiwi? I can't remember.
Chad: No. No, no, no, no. He's from the UK, man.
Joel: Oh, well no wonder he's got a ... Okay, well, that explains a lot, that explains a lot. All right. Hi Kelly, if you're listening. Free demos for everybody.
Chad: Yeah, free demos all around. Ed, our man from Philly, loved the "Firing Squad" and I quote, also in another tweet, "I'm all fired up after the Eagles win," big Eagles fan, go figure. He couldn't get any sleep, so he's cleaning up the kitchen. He was listening to the "Chad & Cheese" podcast and he said, "Chad was on fire like the Eagles' D." Ed is officially I think, a candidate for team Chad. That's right.
Joel: That's a nice tease there. I don't know if we're going to get to that on this show or not.
Chad: No, not yet, yeah.
Joel: Taking us from Philly, let's go to Toronto, LinkedIn headquarters, not headquarters but maybe it's their Canadian headquarters, I don't know. They love the show. I can't believe how much love we get from LinkedIn.
Chad: All of the Canadians-
Joel: Like it's fantastic.
Chad: Especially the Toronto, the Toronto office. Yeah, there's big love coming to the "Chad & Cheese Show." From my understanding, we drop this bad boy today, they will download it, and they'll all be listening to it on their Monday morning meeting.
Joel: Good god, this will be the demise of LinkedIn, for sure.
Chad: I love it, it's awesome.
Joel: Good god, good god. Let's remind people that we'll be in Dublin in two months.
Chad: That's right.
Joel: A month and a half.
Chad: Yeah, March 13th and 14th, the "Chad & Cheese" podcast are flying to Dublin for TA Tech Europe, that's TATechEurope.io. Is everything going io these days? I don't understand it.
Joel: "Io, io it's off to work we go." We do have the Canvas CEO of the business on his domain, it's kind of funny there at the beginning, so make sure you do tune into that.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Have we gotten anything on the tweeter, tweeter sphere?
Chad: Oh yeah. Yeah, we've got Nancy from Philly. Philly loves us. Not happy that the pod usually drops on Saturday or Sunday because she's itching for it and she has to wait until Monday to listen to it. Don't worry Nancy. You have our permission to wait a couple of days to actually listen to the pod on Monday.
Joel: You got to blame that on like cabin fever here in the winter. Like no one is waiting for our show to drop minus Kelly or whoever that was, so yeah, that's awesome.
Chad: Recruitics is giving us some love after the Indeed pod cast last week, loved that. Thanks to George LaRoque - LA-ROCK. Is it Larock or LaRoque? I'm going to say La-ROCK. Because, I mean, it would be Larock if it was my name, that's it. Pronunciation George Larock, that's what I would do. What?
Joel: I think it is Larock but Laroch or something, it's got to be some fancy French spelling or saying. Way beyond my public school intelligence.
Chad: No, he gets intel to us all the time and we really appreciate a lot of the research that he does.
Joel: He has a great Facebook group.
Chad: Oh yeah.
Joel: Or whatever that, if you're not following, you should, it's Talent Tech place, I think.
Chad: Yeah. He puts a lot of really good intel out there. I think the last shout out, yeah, I think, so goes to Nexxt. Woo!
Joel: Got my schwag finally.
Chad: Yeah, got my big box of schwag.
Joel: Sounds a little bit like Julie and your dogs, so I don't know what you've been doing with the stuff while it's been at your house.
Chad: No comment. They just put out an infographic on "What Will the Job Market Look Like in 2018?" You can find it by looking at, probably at my LinkedIn post, your LinkedIn post, Twitter feeds or you can go to ChadCheese.com homepage for this week and this week only. Click on the banner and some really good intel and a really cool infographic. These guys, I mean, when they do infographics, they don't screw around. They do the shit right.
Joel: True that, true that. You ready to get to the show?
Chad: Yeah, let's do it.
Joel: All right. SmashFly partners with Paradox.ai, I believe, not io.
Chad: Slash Olivia.
Joel: Yes, which is chatbotting at its best. You actually reached out to SmashFly and had a conversation. How did that go?
Chad: It went really well. I mean, the team over at SmashFly, they are awesome. They're always very open to have conversations. Sometimes they reach out and they want to talk, and that's really cool. Especially about what's going on with them, and so I reached out to them to say, "Hey, what's going on with this whole Olivia paradox play?" It actually turned out to be more that than. It turned out to be a HiringSolved, SmashFly, Olivia play.
Chad: As we started to have the conversation it really, to me, made a hell of a lot of sense because a lot of these smaller kind of niche players ... I mean, SmashFly to be quite frank, I mean you're taking a look at really having a cosmetic vehicle that's focused on user experience and being able to collect data.
Chad: Then you've got Olivia, which is AI versus like just a chatbot that can hep with that experience, so that's something that SmashFly doesn't do, so it made sense that they connect with Olivia and Paradox to be able to do that.
Chad: Then on the HiringSolved side of the house, I mean, SmashFly doesn't do that, Paradox doesn't do that. That's more on the sourcing side, so whether you're going, you're dumping into your applicant tracking system and trying to find qualified candidates for current open reqs or going out to the web right now.
Chad: I think this is actually a great response. Hopefully, what we'll see from some of these smaller players, to be able to start to arm up and wage war against the Facebooks, the Googles and the Microsofts.
Joel: They're talking about this being an integration, like ...
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Part of it goes out to find candidates, and then they engage with them through Olivia. Is that what they talked about?
Chad: That's all a part of it. Yeah, that's all a part of it. Again, these are fairly early partnerships so the integrations are definitely happening. Obviously, it's going to evolve as the partnership evolves. It seems like, at least from the outside looking in, that this is more than just a paper partnership, that they're looking to do some really amazing integrations.
Chad: They're still going to be separate companies, right? They can sell to companies just by themselves their specific product. When you're going in and up against some of these bigger platforms that really have more horsepower than you do, what are you going to do? Are you going to try to build it yourself and really throw a shit ton of resources at it? Or are you going to partner and build integrations so that you can go in and you can really, truly compete? I think that's a great idea.
Joel: We saw this too with remember Monster partnering with TextRecruit?
Chad: Yep.
Joel: Early this year, and thinking in the old days, Monster would just build this or go buy somebody for $50 million to integrate it. It seems like the strategy in '18 is partner.
Chad: Partner and acquire
Joel: Acquire, yeah. ISIM, TextRecruit, hint, hint. Yeah, buy some people, get your Monster on and buy people. Does it surprise you at all that someone like SmashFly who's gotten a little bit of money, I'm not exactly sure how much, but that they wouldn't attempt to build this themselves? Do you think this partnering is the better strategy?
Chad: It's a far better strategy because that money's only going to go so far, and they have core competencies, I mean they all do. Paradox does, SmashFly does and so does HiringSolved. They have core competencies. To be able to dump their cash into those core competencies is where they should stay to be able ensure that they can compete in the long-run with these bigger platforms.
Chad: Yeah, I agree. This is one of the ways that the smaller platforms will be able to gain more market share. They'll be more flexible and we'll see how it goes, but I'm pretty excited to see these types of partnerships.
Joel: Well, it seems like a trend that's taking off. We will keep our eye on it as always. Recruitology, I think I said it right that time.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: They're going back in time and making newspapers hip again, which is a weird trend, frankly, from my perspective. I mean, this was like, you and I remember the early "ots" where CareerBuilder, Monster, Hot Jobs, like it was all about the newspaper relationship.
Chad: Oh yeah.
Joel: With the demise of newspapers, that sort of subsided and Monster and CareerBuilder, they're all letting go of their newspaper relationships and people like RealMatch and Recruitology are embracing them, and even have sort of the ZipRecruiter Job Boardio thing, but let's get to the news a little bit.
Joel: Recruitology, they partner with McClatchy, which is a popular newspaper in the States. They just partnered with another consortium of media companies, it's like 1,700 digital sites, 14 billion page views, blah, blah, blah.
Chad: Yeah, it's crazy.
Joel: It's about distribution, but to me, what's interesting is because Google for Jobs is indexing pretty much every job out there, pretty close, and people can search all those jobs but then they can decide which site they want to apply from. That's creating sort of a commodity around the job posting and the eyeballs, so the people who are going to Google continue to go Google.
Joel: How do you get people that aren't on Google? I think one way to do that is to partner with newspapers or media sites as well as like a job board platform that is setting up shop on association sites or college sites, et cetera.
Chad: Dude, I think you would be all over this because there are three words, content, content, content. That's what this ... I mean, and newspapers put out amazing content and with all the social sharing that's happening these days, I mean, that's where you're seeing a lot of people dump into these newspaper sites.
Chad: Now here's the key, and here's where they weren't able to pull it off with CareerBuilder and Monster over the years, is being able to effectively draw that user who's coming to read an article into jobs that are relevant to them, right? That's been the hard part.
Chad: If they have that figured out, and I believe they feel like they have that figured out, then that is a key play. Because when somebody's not looking for a job and they're looking for content or they seem some cool byline on Facebook and they click on it, the next thing you know, you have an article in your face and you have jobs that are specifically relevant, not just location-wise, but also skills, maybe title or whatever it might be.
Chad: I mean, dude, that brings so much more to the table, and it's really an offshoot of a strategy that is beyond Google, which I think is really cool.
Joel: Yeah, definitely true. I think that in the early days, a company would just set up shop on the jobs link on a newspaper site or TV, a local TV station. They would have their search box and a few banner ads and they'd rev share. We're moving into a world now of programmatic ad buying, keyword content, running the ads that people see, they're looking at people coming back to the site.
Chad: Retargeting.
Joel: For example, if you come once and see a job and you don't act on it, then you leave, you come back the next day, you won't see that ad because you weren't interested in it. The systems are learning more and more about your behavior, so it makes sense.
Joel: I think with the newspapers sort of trying to get in with Facebook on a revenue generating sort of trust relationship because of the fake news phenomenon, I think that there's going to be more value put on real news by Facebook and Twitter and others. Maybe they're striking at the right time where traditional media, trusted media's going to make a comeback, and these guys are in the right place at the right time.
Chad: Yeah, I agree. I agree 100 percent.
Joel: All right, well the next one is right in your lane. Somebody made some sort of list of the best diversity employers. Tell us about that.
Chad: Forbes, you might have heard of them before, they're a small organization.
Joel: I know, Steve.
Chad: They actually released their Best Employers for Diversity's list. Personally, I've never been a fan of these lists, mainly because not all companies provide a great amount of transparency and, or ability to prove they have sustainable programs. It's just a list that, it's like, "Oh yeah, we've hired x amount of, but I'm not going to show you what our actual workforce looks like."
Chad: There's a great example that they have in this article that Levy's parent company, Compass Group, and Levy was number two on the list. They released a diversity and inclusion report for 2016 that gave unusual levels of transparency into their workforce demographics, which was incredibly cool.
Chad: It showed that 43 percent of management level employees were women, 15 percent were African American, and 10 percent were Hispanic. This is a big lesson for companies to understand that you have to be transparent, you have to look at yourself in the mirror, and you have to know that you cannot do this alone. Levy, I guarantee you, and their parent company Compass, didn't do this alone.
Chad: That's why, one of the reasons why we talk about diversity so much around here because, obviously, I'm close to it working with veterans. My wife works with individuals with disabilities, and we've been on the diversity front for many years. That's why we've actually teamed with America's Job Exchange, they're a sponsor of the podcast.
Chad: You need professionals on your side, and America's Job Exchange, they do a ton of different things, where it's targeted job distribution, different programmatic types of outreach. They have actual local outreach with partners that are on the ground, who are focused on helping you find diverse candidates and those are the types of individuals that you really need to partner with.
Chad: If you're interested in diverse hiring and you looked at yourself in the mirror and said, "Hey look, I don't know how to do this. My team doesn't know how to do this. Well, visit the experts at America's Job Exchange. If you visit AmericasJobExchange.com/Cheese or go to ChadCheese.com and click on the America's Job Exchange logo, it'll take you to the landing page and you can start the conversation. You know you can't do it by yourself. Go out there and find people to help you. America's Job Exchange can help you do that.
Joel: Chad, I can't tell you how many times I've looked in the mirror and said, "I can't do this."
Chad: You mean, eat the rest of the steak? Or doing what?
Joel: The cheesecake was delicious.
Chad: The cheesecake was delicious. Julie was glad that I brought it home to her.
Joel: All right, let's get medieval on some people.
Chad: Oh yeah, please.
Joel: Our listeners, our long time listeners will know the name Purple Squirrel pretty well. I think it made my naughty list for the year. I'm pretty sure it's on our hot steaming pile of garbage.
Chad: Oh yes it is.
Joel: Of sites that we really don't like very much.
Chad: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joel: To my chagrin, they have a competitor now called The Lobby, which is almost as bad as Purple Squirrel, but it's pretty bad.
Chad: It has a dot io at the end. Loddy-dah io, so therefore it's got to be cool as shit, right?
Joel: "The Lobby Dot io." All right, what do you want to say about these guys? They got a little bit of money, like 120,000,
Chad: Yeah, yeah.
Joel: It's this whole connect with people at other companies.
Chad: It's a pay to play.
Joel: Money's exchanged for mentorship stuff.
Chad: It's a pay to play scenario, man. On the website they pitch it as, "Talk one-on-one with company insiders to help you land your dream job." The actual company vision is a little different from that, because The Lobby is an online marketplace where job candidates buy affordable, one-on-one calls with entry level employees at top companies. What the ... Really?
Chad: Entry level employees, that's exactly who I want to connect with. Yeah, and I want to pay to connect with those entry level employees. Why couldn't I just go to LinkedIn, find some entry level per-, hell, middle management. I don't care, and actually reach out to them there? I'm going to pay you to do that? Are you shitting me?
Joel: I have such disdain for these companies that like, I don't want to say prey-
Chad: They do.
Joel: ... on the unemployed and ... Okay, I'll say it. They prey on the unemployed and the new grad that isn't an engineer from Purdue or whatever to get their money.
Chad: Yes, yes.
Joel: I don't even want to spend anymore time on these idiots.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: The fact that they're a Y-Combinator company-
Chad: Yeah, no shit, right?
Joel: Pisses me off even more that there's some credibility in this stuff and somebody like Y-Combinator would give these idiots the time of day, so ...
Chad: Go after the companies who have the cash, not the job seekers who don't, so yeah, definitely add this to the pile of steaming garbage with Recruitsy, who I think we had on a couple weeks ago.
Joel: Oh. They're getting all the sound effects.
Chad: Woo! All right.
Joel: I need to sit down after that.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: All right. Strive Talent startup. Got some money, got some real money, I think in a seed round actually. $3.8 million. Tell us about them.
Chad: Yeah, so I like this, I really do. I don't know if it's going to work. It really depends on the execution but Strive Talent is the ... This is on their website, is the fastest and fairest, I don't know what the hell that means, way to get the sales jobs that applicants desire and deserve. You take an assessment, which is a cognitive personal skills assessment. You meet with companies, I would assume an interview, and then you quote, unquote, get the job, right?
Chad: As we know, sales jobs in the United States and across the globe, but mainly in the United States, so this is an area that really needs help, to be able to find competent salespeople, right? Thing is, they're just currently limited to like six markets right now so it's very, very small at this point.
Chad: If this works, if this specific model works for sales, this could easily pivot into customer service as well. This model, I believe easily ... Customer service is also another one of those booming areas of the economy. You've got two perspective booming areas of the economy who need competent individuals. If they could pull this off right, they could perspectively make some cash, which is probably why they had $3.8 million in seed funding.
Joel: All right, I'm going to throw a little-
Chad: Go ahead.
Joel: A little cold water on this just a little bit, okay. I think what's interesting is they've sort of taken the idea of how developers love to sort of be on a computer and take tests against other developers, and take little brain teasers about code and leverage that instinct into companies that work, right? Like we know the ones that are out there, but the best salespeople, I mean, are they going to take a quiz?
Joel: Like your history is in sales. You've managed salespeople. To me, the best salespeople are like, "I don't need to take a test. Let me show you how much I made last year, or let me show you how much I made the company last year." Like do you really think salespeople are going to take quizzes?
Chad: Hey, this isn't really about those types of salespeople. They're about the individuals who are coming in ... See, the hardest part about finding new salespeople, let's say for instance, like entry level salespeople is the
Chad: characteristics that make a great salesperson, right? It's not a college degree, yes, you have to be well-spoken. It's not a college degree. It has to do with being respectful, tenacious, and being able to really focus on what the mission and the objective is, right? Really hone in on that, focus and understand that you have goals to hit.
Joel: It feels a little bit like an agency, doesn't it? Like a staffing firm, basically.
Chad: Yeah, yeah. It kind of does, but I mean this, I think from an entry level standpoint, will be the best. I agree 100 percent, if somebody's been in the business for a few years, they will have history to be able to demonstrate that they know how to do their shit, right? From an entry level standpoint, that's generally where you need most of your people, especially in this growth sector.
Joel: All right. All right, I'm open to it, I'm open to it. Let's get some salespeople hired. Chad, you know SmartRecruiters.
Chad: I've heard of those guys, yeah.
Joel: One word, SmartRecruiters. Not Smart, space, Recruiters.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: Like this is the ATS the company you know that's been around for a while. Anyway, they are launching a competition for Startup of the Year.
Chad: Oh.
Joel: Guess who's on the list?
Chad: Who?
Joel: Ratedly. Shockingly.
Chad: No, it's not. Stop it.
Joel: Ratedly. Yes, we've been nominated, I just want to put it out there as our ad. I won't talk about free demos or send people to www.Ratedly.com.
Chad: Yeah, don't do that.
Joel: There are some cool companies, if you go to Hire18, so it's H-I-R-E, the number 18.com, and you'll see a wide variety of startups that are there, you can nominate them, you can vote for them. I believe the voting will be closed sometime in mid-February. Then I think the winners will be announced at the annual show or whatever.
Joel: Anyway, it's an honor to be nominated. Obviously, that means nothing if you don't win but it's still nice to be out there. I'll also mention in my little Ratedly ad here for my company, we are going to be raising prices this weekend, so if you have been thinking about Ratedly and using it, we'll be increasing prices over the weekend and next week we'll also be launching analytics ...
Chad: There it is.
Joel: ... around our reviews, which we think are very cool as well as some cool little updates to our platform that we're excited about.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: If you're interested, Ratedly.com, and let's talk about football.
Chad: Next time, lead with the, "We're adding analytics" piece, lead with that. Everybody's like, "Oh yeah, analytics," which is the reason why we're raising our pries. Lead them into that. That's just a little sales tip for next time.
Joel: I need to go to Strive Talent and take their quizzes to become a better salesperson, obviously.
Chad: Yeah. Where do you want to start on this football thing? There's so much to talk about.
Joel: Well, you want to torch Tom Brady.
Chad: Oh yeah.
Joel: I want to make a Johnny Manziel joke, so I guess Tommy or Johnny, I guess.
Chad: Let's start ...
Joel: The goat or the goat?
Chad: We'll give Tom Brady his number one spot but I hate Tom Brady, always will. He is a product of Michigan, that team up north. Yeah, there's no way, I don't care how many Super Bowl rings he wins, never be the greatest in my book, but there's this great meme that's out from NFL Memes who's been putting them out. They're comparing Nick Foles to Tom Brady. Here's just a few of them, which are frickin' hilarious.
Chad: First off, "Nick Foles has only one career playoff loss. Tom Brady has nine." That's why Nick Foles is better. "Nick Foles starred in 'Napoleon Dynamite,' Tom Brady never in a movie." That's why Nick Foles is better.
Joel: If you're not a sports fan, you may tune off the show at this point.
Chad: "Nick Foles kills it on the field. He threw seven TD passes in one game, and Tom Brady only threw six." That's why Nick Foles is better.
Joel: I guess you're picking the Eagles next week.
Chad: Oh yeah. I got to stick with the Philly crew. Not to mention, I don't like Tom Brady so how in the hell can I vote for the Patriots?
Joel: We have fans in Bean Town too.
Chad: No, we do, we have a lot.
Joel: We have fans in Bean Town.
Chad: I love-
Joel: Which you just insulted. That's all right.
Chad: I love Boston. I said I hated Tom Brady. I didn't say I hated Boston, I love Boston. Got great beer, got stuff to do.
Joel: It's like telling Cleveland you hate LeBron.
Chad: Yeah, you can't do that. Anyway ...
Joel: Actually, quite a few of them hate LeBron. Remember, like Bernie Kosar or something. Yeah, I have nothing on the Tom Brady thing. We'll make predictions I'm sure next week, but I do ... I do have to say that I feel bad for the Minnesotans, the Vikings fans, that you would have had a home game in the Super Bowl, and you totally just whiffed, you totally air balled that game-
Chad: Dude.
Joel: That sucks. Anyway, XFL, here's one for the old people-
Chad: It's back.
Joel: ... who remember XFL for the like three weeks it was on. God, tell people what that was if they don't remember.
Chad: The XFL is actually a football league that is funded, and I guess the presidency, oh president, is Vince McMahon from the WWE, WWF, whatever the hell, World Wrestling fake entertainment kind of organization that's out there.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: He wanted to do football and he tried a season to do football, but there were just so many gimmicks. It was corny as hell. One thing I did like was, He Hate Me, because he was a hell of a runner.
Joel: Didn't He Hate Me get into the NFL for a while actually?
Chad: Yeah, he did, he did. Like for a season I think, maybe two, maybe two seasons.
Joel: Here's the one thing I liked about the XFL. If you remember this, to start the game, they didn't kick it off. They put the ball in the center of the field and they had two guys at the end zone. They started at the same time, and the one who got the ball was the team that got the ball first. You remember that?
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: That was actually pretty entertaining. It's way more entertaining than the NFL today, which basically every kickoff is at the 20, whatever it is. Like that's boring as ... I understand it's safety but like the XFL had something right with the way they started games.
Joel: I will also say that for Johnny Manziel fans, I'm not one of them, XFL may just be his reentry into the American zeitgeist, which is slightly just scary but also a little bit interesting at least. They need to take all the has-beens, which would be like half the ex-Browns quarterbacks from the last 10 years, put them on a field and see what happens. XFL, I'm going to ... If this were "Firing Squad," I would shoot it down because it has no chance.
Chad: It's football, man. If I get more football in my year, I am happy. Hell, I'll even watch Canadian football.
Joel: You and I are old enough to remember the USFL.
Chad: Oh yeah.
Joel: Which didn't work out either.
Chad: No, it didn't, it didn't. I mean the NFL crushed them, but anyway ...
Joel: We out.
Chad: We out.
Speaker 1: This has been the "Chad & Cheese" podcast. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes or Google so you don't miss a single show, and be sure to check out our sponsors because they make this all possible. For more, visit ChadCheese.com. Oh, and you're welcome.