A NEXXT EXCLUSIVE! One of the biggest treats from our time at TAtech in Ireland this month was the opportunity to see Hire with Google's Bogomil Balkansky, VP Cloud Recruiting Solutions, present.
A bigger treat was enjoying some Guinness and interviewing Bogomil at the social TAtech event from the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin.
Enjoy.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Intro: This, the Chad & Cheese Podcast, brought to you in partnership with TA Tech. TA Tech, the Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions. Visit TATech.org
Chad: Okay Joel, quick question?
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: What happens when your phone vibrates or your texting alert goes off?
Joel: Dude, I pretty much check it immediately. And I bet everyone listening is reaching to check their phones right now.
Chad: (Laughs) Yeah, I know. I call it our Pavlovian dog reflex to text messaging.
Joel: Yeah, that's probably why text messaging has a frickin' 97% open rate.
Chad: What?
Joel: ...and a crazy high candidate response rate within the first hour alone.
Chad: Which... are all great reasons why The Chad & Cheese Podcast love Text-to-Hire from Nexxt.
Joel: Love it.
Chad: Yep, that's right. Nexxt, with a double X, not the triple X.
Joel: Bow-chicka-bow-wow. So if you're in talent acquisition, you want true engagement and great ROI, that stands for Return on Investment, folks. And because this is The Chad & Cheese Podcast, you can try your first text-to-hire campaign for just 25% off.
Boom!
Chad: Wow! So how do you get this discount? You're asking yourself, right now.
Joel: Tell 'em, Chad.
Chad: It's very simple, you go to ChadCheese.com, and you click on the Nexxt logo in the sponsor area.
Joel: Easy.
Chad: No long URL to remember.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: Just go where you know. ChadCheese.com and Nexxt, with two X's.
Announcer: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, rash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad & Cheese Podcast.
Chad: Okay guys, we're back. Yes, we're at the Guinness Factory, is that what, it's the factory.
Joel: I'm totally sober. I promise.
Chad: He's full of shit. Anyway... we're here with podcast favorite, Bogomil.
Joel: He's actually not a podcast favorite, he's more like Sasquash of podcast.
Chad: (Laughs)
Joel: ... Giving him ... he's actually handcuffed to a pint of Guinness right now.
Bogomil: I think Bogomil is enough-
Chad: No? (laughs)
Bogomil: You can't hit people with both Bogomil and Balkansky.
Chad: See I like Balkansky.
Bogomil: Either one.
Joel: I agree, I agree. Our audience is not that sophisticated.
Chad: Yes. So five good minutes with Bogomil. You had a presentation. Very interesting from the standpoint of... talking about pretty much a ton of different aspects of recruitment technology. That it looks like Google is diving into very quickly, is that correct?
Bogomil: Well, we don't enter recruitment technology until April of last year. It's no secret by now, but we're fully in.
Chad: Yes?
Bogomil: And yes, I think Google as a company as AI first strategy... across all our products and product line. So, you'd think that also in recruiting, our efforts would be very much in the direction of leveraging AI in the new products and solutions that we're rolling out to market.
Chad: So you guys have had the... How long is the... jobs discovery API actually been out? Little over a year right?
Bogomil: It's not fully out. Right? So it's still in private beta.
Chad: But it was in... Okay. How long-
Bogomil: It was announced at the end of 2016-
Chad: Okay.
Bogomil: ... So it has been a little more than a year.
Chad: And soon... I hear-
Joel: Soon, possibly, maybe-
Chad: ...its coming-
Joel: ... you've heard a rumor
Chad: ... out of beta. Which is amazing for a Google product because... that's not even a year and a half. Right?
Bogomil: Yeah. No, it will graduate from Beta at some point soon. Yes.
Chad: At some point soon... which means it has been incredibly successful.
Bogomil: So far the experience has been really really awesome. We are working with a whole bunch of career site providers and staffing agencies-
Chad: Yeah
Bogomil: ...and
Chad: Big names. Career builders, [Jibs 00:04:14], Zip.
Bogomil: And also powering a lot of big name company career sites.
Chad: Yeah. Johnson & Johnson.
Bogomil: Johnson & Johnson, FedEx, and some others that we haven't announced yet, but they're really like the Fortune 100 companies.
Chad: So on-
Bogomil: And the result that we're seeing on SDR are quite impressive. When we went into this whole thing and when we announced Job Discovery. We're pretty confident that we have a good product. However, we didn't really have a good benchmark of what the real impact would be. In some sense, we didn't know exactly what to expect.
Chad: Yeah.
Bogomil: And we have been pleasantly surprised with the kind of results past customers are achieving. Like Johnson & Johnson has been very public with their 41% increase in qualified candidates for hard to refer jobs. Right?
Chad: Yeah that's big.
Bogomil: And so emphasis and key word is qualified. So honestly the last thing anybody wants is another pile of candidates that are not qualified so that your recruiters have to spend more time to shift through more resumes-
Chad: Well, that being said... resumes-
Bogomil: Yes.
Chad: ...people... being able to turn an API or turn your machine running onto the people problem right now. How soon can we expect a people API in actual launch?
Bogomil: Well, take them one at a time. We are... first focused on graduating the jobs API or the job... they call...job discovery services-
Chad: You're so excited about it though!
Bogomil: ...to get it in the hands of everybody. And that's what the chief focus is on.
Joel: So you're not running for president?
Bogomil: I am not running for president. Don't [inaudible 00:05:46].
Joel: Yeah. Yeah-
Bogomil: ...for president.
Joel: A few years ago I wrote a very nice post about how good Google's homemade ATS was. And I'm assuming that a lot of the elements of the homemade Google.com job seeker experience has translated to some of your Google Hire technologies and development. When will see and will we see Google Hire replace the Google.com, sort of, homemade ATS? If ever...
Bogomil: Yeah. So the quotes are different. Hire is a separate and different product from the Google internal past Google ATS.
Joel: Yeah.
Bogomil: And the reason for that is, we're targeting Hire at existing G Suite customers all in the US for the time being. And obviously, the typical G Suite customer is a much smaller company than Google, which is one of the largest companies out there. And the requirements of our G Suite audience are quite different from the requirements of Google. Google has one of the most unusual and [inaudible]. For example, hiring managers at Google won't make any hiring decisions. The hiring decisions are made by hiring committee, which consists of people who actually have never met the candidate live. And these are the kinds of requirements, quite obviously, that we haven't actually who haven't actually baked in Hire. And that's the major reason why Google is not using Hire yet. We're really focused on the G Suite for this.
Joel: You heard him say, "yet." Right?
Chad: Yeah. Yeah.
Joel: We got that.
Joel: What's next? Can you give a preview? Obviously, you're talked a lot about the future, the matching stuff, the job seeker, the scheduling... what can you share with subscribers and listeners about what's next at Google Hire.
Bogomil: Yeah. We are still... I would say, the very beginning of our journey. Its fair to say that we're a big company, but we're the new kids on the block, until we create the technology, job discovery... still in beta. Hire still a version one product. So we have a lot of opportunities in front of ourselves to deliver great capabilities to our customers.
Bogomil: I can comment on kind of very specific things, but you can expect that a lot of the innovations that will come from us goes into the direction of... in two directions, I would say. One is to extricate people from a lot of the mundane, kind of tedious things that every recruiter and every job seeker has to go through. There's still too many processes and talent acquisition that are honestly, mind numbing, tedium people clicking endlessly page per, per page, per page. And our team is very focused on trying to reduce that tedium to be able to, A. focus the recruiters on what they should really be doing, which is... build relationships with candidates, like try to sell candidates at working for their company. And same thing with candidates that will continue making that process of looking for job and applying for a job a lot easier and more elegant.
Bogomil: So that's one aspect of what we're focused on, just making our process faster and more efficient. And the second thing that we will continue to be focused on is really... to continue improving our technologies in able to better match more people for jobs. If you think about how we as a company can have great impact on this two sided marketplace, is by enabling better matching and helping people find the best job that they're suited for, and helping companies build the greatest teams.
Chad: Right. Right. Which gives you an opportunity to start to break down their skills and their resume, and then match it... which leads to a people API.
Bogomil: Says Chad...
Joel: Bogomil, we thank you for your time. I for one, I cover this industry, it's exciting to see Google-
Chad: Very.
Joel: .... Facebook... some of the big players with a lot of resources and brainpower get behind this challenge of hiring. So we appreciate your time. Enjoy the party, and we'll have fun watching you in the future.
Bogomil: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
Chad: Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Before we go. Remember... when I asked you about the whole reflex and check your text messages thing?
Joel: Yeah, you know all about reflexes. And then I brilliantly tied it to text message's 97% open rate. Then I elegantly... elegantly, tied it to a better experience for your candidates.
Chad: (laughs)
Joel: Don't laugh Chad. I can be elegant. Can't I?
Chad: Whatever, man. I know it's redundant. You already heard about Text-To-Hire, but you're still not using Text-To-Hire from Nexxt.
Joel: What?
Chad: I know, man.
Joel: Come on, man. Since advertising takes repetition to soak in, I just thought I'd remind you again, this is all by Elegant Design. It's all about Text-To-Hire, and it's all about Nexxt and Elegant Design. So go to chadcheese.com. Click on the next logo, and get 25, yeah I said 25% off your first Text-To-Hire campaign.
Chad: Whooa!
Joel: Engage better. Use Text-To-Hire from Nexxt. Two X's.
Chad: Booyah!
Outro: Thanks to our Partners at TA Tech, the Association for Talent Acquisition
Solutions. Remember to visit tatech.org.