The boys are back after a July 4th break and there's a lot to cover.
- Listener comments spark discussion - Thanks!
- Beware Google prepares to plant it's colors on UK soil
- Google Duplex -- Again??
- Careerbuilder keeps the home fires burning - not in a good way
- What the Hell is Apollo doing?
- Broadbean moves to "The Ghetto"
Enjoy, and give our sponsors a big hug. America's Job Exchange, JobAdX and Sovren love the warm-and-fuzzy.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Announcer: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous broadcast. 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: Yo yo yo, it's your favorite podcast. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese show, HR's most dangerous. I'm Joel Cheesman.
Chad: Sowash, Chad Sowash.
Joel: You're still Chad, aren't you? On this week's show, Google says, "Good Day, Gov'na!" Shaker shakes things up. You see what I did there? And the dumpster fire rages on at Career Builder.
Chad: Jesus.
Joel: Yes, it's actually getting worse. Grab some marshmallows, we're making s'mores, right after this word from Sovren.
Sovren: Sovren AI Matching is the most sophisticated matching engine on the market because it acts just like a human. You decide exactly how our AI matching engine thinks about each individual transaction. It will find, rank, and sort the best matches according to your criteria. Not only does it deliver the best matches, it tells you how and why it produced them and offers tips to improve the results. Our engine thinks like you so you don't have to learn how to think like the engine. To learn more about Sovren AI matching, visit sovereign.com. That's sovren.com.
Chad: So smart.
Joel: How was your 4th of July?
Chad: It was amazing.
Joel: Yeah, we took a little break.
Chad: Yeah, now, I took a break myself. Being pretty much on the road for a month solid, I binge watched with my lovely wife Julie, Luke Cage. And that's exactly what I was looking for.
Joel: It was sort of bleepin' hot where we were for the 4th. So I pretty much stayed in. Now, the benefit that I get is being married to a Canadian, I get to celebrate Canada Day. Which I didn't even know existed before I married a Canadian.
Chad: Who would?
Joel: But it's kind of a fun little, Let's drink beer and we go up to her sister's in London, Ontario. We have a good ol' time. So, I had a nice little end to end, two country birthday celebration last week but I am ready to get back on the horse and do some podcasting.
Chad: Damn straight, its about time.
Joel: Shout outs!
Chad: Shout out!
Chad: Okay, first shout out. Shout out to The Shred.
Joel: The Shred.
Chad: What the hell is The Shred? It's a new breaking new segment from your favorite podcasters, The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Here's the thing about The Shred, you've got to subscribe because here is why guys, We're not going to put all of this breaking news on the website. Reason being is, it happens all the damn time. So, if you subscribe using iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, whatever it is that you use for your podcasts, it will automatically notify you. And guess what? You will be apart of the breaking news. So, go check out The Shred on the website, you can subscribe and you are off and running with breaking news.
Joel: Look, we know a lot of these addicts out there, They can't wait until Friday for the skinny. They gotta have it immediately. Which is why we did The Shred. These little bite size snippets of news. So, you need to subscribe in order to get it but we think it will be really really cool. I'd say this first week with the Career Builder news which we will talk about and the Google news that you broke will be, we will make well worth your while to push subscribe on your latest podcast solution.
Chad: Yeah, numbers are already sky rocketing by the way and we haven't even talked about it yet.
Joel: It's the bomb! Speaking of, With all of these new listeners, lets make sure that we remind them to vote Chad and Cheese on the upcoming TA Tech nominations for Best of Everything in Recruiting. That's right! If you get up to chadcheese.com, there is a big ole' image that Chad made, it says 'Vote Chad and Cheese' or something. Just chick that, find us on the ballot and click the radio button.
Chad: Vote it up. Vote it up. chadcheese.com. So, Angelo over at RoboRecruiter was listening and he loved the Down Goes Slack podcast. He called it 'juicy'. I don't know if we've ever been called juicy before.
Joel: Juicy, I've had my booty called juicy before but never a podcast.
Chad: What I was thinking is that I could actually go out and get you some of those Juicy Couture sweatpants that say 'juicy' across the back and you can wear those to all our live events moving forward. Thank you, Angelo!
Joel: Those would look great with my yoga pants by the way. Wow, the show can only go down from here. Shout out to Ally O, our latest Firing Squad victim. If you have not listened to the latest Firing Squad, check that out. It was a great interview. I won't tell the audience how we voted, but it was favorable for the most part.
Chad: Yeah, Ally O, literally are looking to replace recruiters with their technology, their AI, their machine there, whatever the hell you want to call it. I really don't care, it's a platform and I mean they are up front about it. So, yeah it's pretty cool.
Joel: Yeah, I think one of the quotes was, "We have companies that are using us, we are their recruiter."
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Period. Right? Did I remember that quote correctly? Yeah so, if you are worried about the future of your job as a recruiter, you might want to go check out the interview with Ally O.
Chad: And last but least from my side of the house, Joanne De La Rosa, She is and avid listener. She's not even in our space. She's not even in the recruiting space, which is funny because we are hearing more stories of people who aren't even in recruiting and they listen to out podcast.
Joel: What's wrong with you people?
Chad: I love 'em. I love 'em. We are obviously one of the only pods that she listens to. But here's the thing, Joanne, she is suffering with some medical issues right now and she is recovering. We thought that we would give you a big, get well shout out from Chad and Cheese. Thanks for listening but again the feedback that we receive the engagement that we get from our listeners is huge. Which is very important to us but it is very important that you get well soon, Joanne.
Joel: The feedback is our oxygen and a quick note to say hey. If you haven't reviewed us on iTunes, Google Play, wherever you listen please take a few seconds to give us some feedback, we would really appreciate it.
Joel: My final shout out for the week goes to Judge.com.
Chad: Woo Hoo!
Joel: I'm book ending with The Shred at the beginning. Judge is our exclusive Shred sponsor. I'd never even heard of them until we did the podcast because one of our most fanatical listeners, husband works for them and they became a sponsor. So, Judge, big shout out. Thanks for supporting us. We love you. That's judge.com.
Chad: That's a hell of a URL. I mean who gets that domain. They have been around
longer than you and I have. So, they are not a new group right?
Joel: 1958, I think that they have been around. Almost as long as Shaker. Which is a great segway. I know that we want to talk about The Cheap Seats first but yeah, talking about old organizations, Judge is one of them.
Chad: Yeah, no shit. So, we are going to set up The Cheap Seats. Why don't you go ahead and set up The Cheap Seats.
Joel: You want me to, it's your idea.
Chad: I know but you know.
Joel: Okay so, we have great listeners and they all have opinions. Many of them like to share their opinions with us.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: And have conversations outside of the podcast. And in some cases, we believe like, "Hey this is kinda worthy of more publicity, more exposure." So we thought lets have a little segment called The Cheap Seats. Where we sort of discuss and elaborate on topics that we discuss in private in some cases with our listeners.
Chad: Yeas, Yeah. So, Danielle Kluge over at Pontoon, sent us a message, she said that she listened to the Down Goes Slap podcast and she agrees that with more of the simplified positions. We are talking about AI and machine learning and what not. That CDL drivers and warehouse workers can be taken over by AI. Although, she does think that for niche positions, it's going to be a hell of a lot more difficult. So, your thoughts on that Joel?
Joel: Define a niche position for me and the audience.
Chad: Yeah, a niche position being, lets say for instance, a rocket scientist. That would be a hell of a niche position.
Joel: Brain surgeon.
Chad: Yeah, yeah. So anything that is not just you have to have a pulse, to be able to work here kind of thing. So, they are more than just the simplified jobs.
Joel: I would side on agreeing with that. I think that when you have high turn over, a lot of churn organizations, lower educated folks. We are talking restaurants, hourly, seasonal stuff, I think AI and automation makes perfect sense for that. I think that you as well love the platforms, the Uber type platforms for those folks, where they can turn on themselves and match them with an opportunity for the day to go do that that day.
Joel: When we are looking at people who hello, have jobs like scientists, surgeons, doctors, nurses, that becomes much more challenging. Those are the recruiters that have relationships locally, that go to meet up, that go to colleges and build relationships with these folks in order to get into where they live at work and what they do locally and socially. So, I totally agree that automation with start with the lowest common denominator. I would be a little careful to say a 100 years from now, is it not going to penetrate into higher level folks. You and I won't be around probably, we might just be two talking heads in a fish bowl. But I think in the short term, yes. I think that we are a long way from attracting and retaining and recruiting high level folks through automation and AI.
Chad: Hey that's why we are feeding the machines right? I mean the machine learning piece of it. So yeah, you gotta start somewhere. So you start at the base. So, machine learning is training the machine to understand more complex problems. We have seen that. I mean we take a look at the IBM debater project that we just talked about a couple of weeks ago. I mean, we are debating, we are playing chess, we are doing all of these things. These are complex problems right? So, the niche positions, yeah they are going to start going after those niche positions as the machine learns. That's what it comes down to. So feeding the machine, those niche positions are also going to be taken by these algorithms. There is no question.
Joel: And let's not forget that advertising is going to get better. Right? If you have seen Minority Report, there is nothing saying in the future that a doctor, rocket scientist, will be known as a rocket scientist and as they go to the store to buy groceries and ad pops up about a job as a rocket scientist. Like, advertising will get more, will get smarter as well.
Chad: Yup, yup. So thank Danielle for your take on it. Love it. Keep it coming.
Joel: Thanks Danielle, good take.
Chad: Hot take. OK the next on is from Steven Rothberg, college recruiter. (Booing)
Joel: Steven knows us, he will appreciate that.
Chad: He loves it. So, Steven tweeted us. So this is out in the public.
Chad: Chad and Cheese, love the idea that all hourly workers will be hired through on demand gig apps. Like we have been talking about the Ubers and the Lyfts. But I don't see it. I get that a restraunt can hire a dish washer for a shift at the last minute but would you want your server to have almost no training?
Chad: So what do you think about that?
Joel: So, I think that the apps that we've talked about will, you know a lot of these services have badges or they tag people as pros for certain positions. So, I think what these apps are hoping to achieve is, okay if you are a server at Olive Garden, You can be a server at any Olive Garden in town. You could probably be a server at Chili's and probably be a server at Logan's Steakhouse or something right?
Chad: Yep.
Joel: So, this case, this person could have badge that says I could work at any Olive Garden, any Boca Di Beppo, whatever restaurants those are and then if I am the employer, I can say I only want my opportunity to show up for people who have badges for Olive Garden, or whatever the restaurant is and that can be a match up. I don't think that you can just have a random dude come in to Olive Garden and say okay what's the menu and what do we do, and train them. I don't think that's going to be the future but I do think you can have a badge system where people can automatically can fit into positions. Whether it's a server, a cook, anything.
Chad: Right and well, think of it and just now from a driver's stand point and Uber and Lyft. They've done a ton of the heavy lifting right? You can see who the person who is picking you up, the color of the car, but just think of that from the stand point of being able to see the person and their experience within this platform. Where else have they worked? What is their rating? Right? What is their show rate? Those types of things, I think, it makes it much easier to be able to really work within the gig economy itself. To be quite frank, I really think that this is a stop gap solution until automation takes those gigs away. We see McDonald's implementing kiosks, Chili's has a table side electronic menu that you can actually pay your bill through. Go to Kroger and most of the people are actually going through the self service lines. I mean, we are teaching ourselves to get away from actually using human beings and this is going to be another one of the areas where that happens.
Chad: One of the examples I used was, I've been in a lot of airports lately. You go up to the counter, and especially in these international airports, to be able to order food, there is an iPad that's there. You use the iPad to order your food, somebody brings you your food, that will probably change in the future. But where is the waiter, where is the waitress? They are gone.
Joel: I think that we are a ways away from that, maybe not in the fast food segment but the food service. I mean, the trend is that millennials apparently don't like to cook. They want to go out to eat where it's fast casual or whatever, right? So, you have more demand for these restaurants but there is less talent to sort of take care of these folks. How many times have you gone to a restaurant and there are just tables just sitting there and they tell you it's a thirty minute wait. And you are like there are like eight tables over there. Well, they don't have people to support that.
Joel: I think that the magic of the platform, lets back up. So, in Steven's world, I post a job on Craigslist or Zip Recruiter right? I get ten folks that are interesting, I talk to them. Three come in. One doesn't show up. The other one leaves after the first week and I get one person who stays on and I train them, I train everybody but that's huge headache. If I know that there is a conference in town or there's an event, or hey I know that I am going to be short staffed, to be able to win-win open up an app and there's eight people ready to work tonight.
Chad: On Demand.
Joel: On Demand. They are in there and I know that they can do the job. That's a huge win-win, not only for the restaurant but for the worker because they work on their terms as opposed to the boss's terms.
Chad: Yup, and in a perfect world, that person would post their job on Collegerecruiter.com, right Steven?
Joel: Which lets be honest, Steven doesn't like that model because it's not his model.
Chad: Well not yet. Last person from the Cheap Seats is Johnathan Mills. He had some great questions in clarifying what's going on with Google for Jobs. We've been talking about this and we are going to talk more about it. From my stand point, I've actually talked to a ton of people around what Google for Jobs actually means. They get is confused with the actual API, the job discovery API, in higher and there is a lot of crossing of the streams when you have these conversations. So, my advise, not just to Johnathan but to everybody that's out there, is that you can listen to our show because we talk about it all of the time. We actually have contacts at Google and we try to definitely work hard to get this right, but do your research. Find out what is going on out there. Whether you are in town acquisition, you should definitely be doing your research or if you are a vendor who could prospectively be competing with this, you better know your shit guys. This is very important. So, just to be able to kind of take it laissez faire. You are not going to be able to do that. There are big names in this industry now and its time to bone up and get ready.
Joel: Yeah, you know, Google is historically really bad at this whole branding thing. They have always been sort of a branded house as opposed to a house of brands. Which has it's own benefits. I mean, YouTube was kept YouTube. Do you remember Google Video? I do, right? But YouTube is a brand and people in the brain, branded is really nice. So, like I agree that this is your life, this is your profession. You should know the difference between Google, Google for Jobs, the Cloud API and Google Hire. But at the same time Google could do a better job instead of just tagging on these words behind Google to help people understand. Now they got to worry about Google Calendar, Google Chrome, Google is everywhere and it's hard for consumers to keep everything in line.
Chad: Big props to Johnathan because in most cases you just kind of take the information that's coming to you and just go on and reverberate that shit, right? He was actually looking for it. He was researching and he wanted an opinion on what's going on. So, big ups to Johnathan and thanks for reaching out to us. Thanks for all of our Cheap Seats listeners. We might do this again, who knows.
Joel: Yeah. Let us know, if you hate the Cheap Seats, if there's a topic that you want to discuss on Cheap Seats reach out to one of us or go to ChadCheese.com but let's take a quick break. Right? And then we are gonna come back and talk about a recent acquisition.
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Joel: You know Job Gate, coming up for our listeners that are going. I am pretty sure that JobAdX is going to be there, so if you are interested, find Isabelle or Tim or whoever and learn more.
Chad: Oh yeah. And I believe that they are also up for one of the innovator awards. So again, when you go to Chadcheese.com and you click on the vote, they will be up for one of those awards too. So, vote for JobAdX.
Joel: Do that thing. Because if they are successful, we keep getting paid, that's what I am talking about.
Chad: Amen Brother.
Joel: Yep. Shaker!
Chad: Acquiring the Arland Group? So, didn't see that coming did you?
Joel: We don't see a lot of agency on agency crime. In the industry, where they buy each other. It's usually private equity firms or they just downsize to the point where they are just skeleton crews. But yeah, this was a rare acquisition. Newspapers for sure have been probably the most demolished industry since the dawning of Craigslist and Job boards and everything that has happened. But agencies thrived as newspapers thrived. So, as the decline of newspapers has happened, agencies have gone through an incredible evolution of going from getting 15% on a $5,000 display ad, and just basically picking up the phone to actually having sales staffs that are consultants and have to know a lot of different technologies and job boards. To me, we are at this time in the agency business where there is going to be some consolidation. There is going to be some smaller firms merge into bigger firms. And this is just this sort of happening.
Joel: Shaker has been around for a long time. I think they are third generation now. It really is family owned business. You talk to a lot of people there and their name is Shaker. The people that have been there for a long time. So, its nice to see them consolidate some other brands that have a lot of consistencies with theirs. I know Arland Group, it's like a ten person shop but they are really in line with what Shakers culture is. So, it was a perfect fit. What are you thoughts?
Chad: Its all about footprint at this point right? There is money to be made in the recruitment industry. I mean money is being thrown around left and right. So, not to mention that you have clients who have no clue how to spell programmatic, let alone how to go out and buy it. You've got employer brand. You've got all of these things that employers just suck at. I mean, they just really do. A lot of it has to do with they do not have the time to become good at it. They have other things that they need to do, so they need experts in this space. So, I think that it's great from the stand point of Shaker, really increasing footprint. You know they are in Chicago. The Arland Group is in St. Louis and just really starting to grow to be able to also get that Book of Business that the Arland Group had. You are talking about two leaders, Deb Andrychuk and Joe Shaker who I think really compliment each other well.
Joel: You know, the talent that these agencies have had. Hey have gone from sort of people who can pick up a phone or shmooze a client. You know a three martini lunch, lets be honest, it doesn't take a lot to call a newspaper and say, "I'm placing an ad, I am going to fax it over and run it." Right? To have a sales person or an account executive that understands programmatic and automation and chatbots and what job boards are still relevant, all of these Google products. That takes someone with a brain and the agencies with the most brains are going to win. So I think a lot of the moves by Shaker, who frankly has done a really good job of retaining the best talent at their company, the people who talk about these things, merging with the Arland Group to like ad to your sales force of more people who understand that language, is only going to make them stronger. So, I think that this was an acqui-hire if you will, as much as it was getting the clients that Arland Group has, etc. It probably wasn't a huge acquisition but it was a strategic and a really smart acquisition from a talent and customer stand point.
Chad: Yeah, I agree. I agree and you take a look at the TMPs of the world who really are differentiating themselves with tack, like Talentbrew. I think five years ago, ten years ago, that was a good move, but today? I don't think that it is sustainable. I think it's about the people because we have so much tech that's happening from a start up stand point. Hell, we were talking about Ally O earlier. How can TMP focus on all of these different areas, employer brand and programmatic and so on and so forth and still continue to be an "agency/tech company". I think that is incredibly hard and not sustainable, where a Shaker and Arland Group, they are smaller there is no question but there is just more focus there which makes it much nicer. The KRTs of the world who really focus on programmatics. So, I think that we are starting to see a shift.
Joel: Yeah, they have gone from like okay we are getting 15% of a display in the newspaper, now we are getting 15% of a $99 job posting. So, the evolutions says, "Okay, why don't we just make our own job board, why don't we make our own ATS, Why don't we make all of our own stuff and then we get 100% of the profit." You know the sort of wear with all to compete with the people who actually do that specifically. So, I think that they have learned, "Okay, we just need to be really really good at being consultants and helping our clients make the best decisions." And in the course of job postings sort of going away or becoming commoditized, the real value is in the technology that is being created today. Customers need to make sense of all the noise that's out there and agencies can fill hat void.
Chad: Yeah, and it's noisy as hell.
Joel: Speaking of noisy, if you watched the World Cup yesterday, England losing. Unfortunately for me. Chad's a frenchie, we won't get into that but the noise coming from the UK is a nice segway into Google for Jobs opening shop in England, in the UK.
Chad: In the UK.
Joel: No one is shocked right?
Chad: They shouldn't be. It's interesting, Patrick Walch over at AIA Worldwide, who was a sister company of TMP. He started to see pretty much the signs, the patterns of testing within the UK. Which is what he's seen in Canada, kind of duplicating the things that he has seen in Canada and in India when Google was actually launching there. So, we have been talking about Google for Jobs coming to the UK and it looks like it is on it's way.
Joel: Do you think that, the Uk is sort of a unique environment because its so staffing heavy as opposed to the US. Do you think that is why, because to me the UK that seems like a really natural progression. The fact that they went Canada, India and even South America in a few places. Do you think that was the reason that the UK was sort of slow, or just Google being Google?
Chad: I think that is some of it, but there is also a huge lawsuit against Google right now and the billions of dollars. When it comes to Google, it used to be froogle but anyway when they were starting to aggregate all of the different sites to be able to create a buyers site and that was infringing on business. That's what the UK was finding so they have that monopoly kind of bad word thing happening. So, I think that it made sense for Google to better understand a way or create and better way for users to experience and utilize other sites. So, like Google aggregates from the same job from Zip Recruiter, College Recruiter and the advertising agency and so on and so forth. The user can actually pick who to apply through. So there is that choice that is in there and it's not that monopoly kind of thing. So, we have watched the evolution happen through the actual user, the UI itself for Google for Jobs. I think that was one of the big pieces of it.
Joel: Sometimes having you on the show really pays off and I think that your comment about the GDPR stuff and the privacy and the lawsuits probably is the reason Google has waited to open up in the UK.
Chad: It's a lot of money.
Joel: It is a lot of money. So, yeah Google is going to be everywhere at some point. Unless, you know like China, where you can't get into but Google for Jobs will be everywhere. You don't have to worry about it, you better start thinking about it. Something else to start thinking about, voice assistance on a commercial level.
Chad: Duplex maybe?
Joel: Duplex. Dude, this thing is happening much faster than I imagined. I thought we were like three to five years from this, but a story came out last week that Duplex is starting to test commercial applications for call centers. So, yeah, you call a call center now and it's, "Hello, press number 1 for blah, blah, blah." So, Duplex is going to start acting like you are talking to a real person and it will feel much more organic. Also, it came out that Alexa, Amazon's Alexa is test commercial applications as well. So, Mr. Mrs. Recruiter, you know this might be coming sooner than you think. So, if you are too concerned about understanding Google for Hire from Google for Jobs, you might get run over at some point by this thing called Duplex while you are sitting around figuring out the difference between an ATS and a job search.
Chad: Yeah, well and this just goes back to earlier from the Cheap Seats, will AI be able to catch up? Here is a great example guys. I mean if you watch the Duplex demonstration, it is amazing and then think of all the other applications that you can plug into this. The thing that really gets me and I think that it is funny is all of these people saying, "Well it's a computer and they are talking to me on the phone, shouldn't they identify themselves as a machine?" Why? Seriously, what's the purpose?
Joel: By the way, I am going to flip this a little bit because stories of like job seeker robots and bots are coming out. Imagine a world employer where a job seeker can instruct Duplex to call 100 companies on their behalf in a day to try and set up interviews with that company and reference that persons resume to answer questions that you might have about that candidate. Like that could be a real thing. Everyone could start having to worry about phone calls coming into the HR department about jobs and that is something to think about. Right now, they don't they just get emails and digital stuff.
Chad: Machines will be talking with machines.
Joel: The phone might come back with machines.
Chad: Machines are going to be talking too. And That's what happened with Facebook, if you remember. One of the reasons why the big blow up happened with Facebook's AI is because Facebook was working on really their machines negotiating against themselves and to be able to do it more efficiently. So, as the Facebook system, the machine learning started to see that the English language was really inefficient, so it created it's own English language and it just morphed from there. So, I mean, we already have apps, machines that are already doing these things, these negotiations, these outreach pieces. It's already happening today guys. So, to think that it's not going to happen especially with the Duplex interface. Man, don't put your head in the sand.
Joel: Amen. Lets take a quick break.
Chad: Yeah, AJE.
Joel: Yeah, we will talk about CareerBuilder, one of our favorite topics. So, stay tuned and buckle up. Oh shit.
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Joel: Well, lets get to what everybody was waiting for, CareerBuilder. Holy cow, what a mess.
Chad: Crazy.
Joel: So, my first Shred was that we got some word that three folks, executive level folks had been a combination of fired and just left the Titanic I guess. Let's go through these real quick. Douglas H, VP of Sales apparently fired. Now he is unique because he was names in the recent sexual harassment lawsuit but our buddy Lori McInerney. We don't know if he was terminated because of the lawsuit or if there was some internal investigation but the word is that he is gone. Everything that I have heard about this guy from at least two or three folks is that he was just not a good dude. Like he was not a good person, I guess he could sell his ass off but most of the people that I talked to are pretty glad that he is gone. Michael Zellner is gone, another VP of Sales is gone. The word that I have gotten on him is he was the last ethical VP at the company. So, apparently its just Caligula now and Thunder dome at CareerBuilder. The last one that you knew, that you got wind of was Mark Landwer, President of Enterprise Field Sales. Do you know where he ended up?
Chad: I don't.
Joel: Okay, and from what we know, he was just getting the hell out of Dodge.
Chad: And Dude, I am telling you right now. People are scared at CareerBuilder, and this is just my personal experience. I have contacts at CareerBuilder who won't connect with me unless it's in person. I feel like I am apart of spy games or something.
Joel: What do you mean, like you are meeting people in garages? Like cover of darkness before they will talk to you?
Chad: You know, it's in person, wherever that might be but it's got to be in person, it can't be something that I guess is traceable, I don't know dude. But there is paranoia that is going on around that place that I am not sure that can be duplicated.
Joel: Are you surprised?
Chad: No. Shit I am not surprised.
Joel: I'd be horrified to go into that place to work everyday.
Chad: Well, you have heard a little about Apollo and Broadbean, tell me about that.
Joel: Yeah, so, whenever this stuff happens at CareerBuilder, inevitably more people come out of the woodwork and go, "Yeah, did you know about A, B and C." The harassment lawsuit, apparently there is another sexual harassment lawsuit that is brewing out of Canada that was in response to the Chicago, Laurie's lawsuit. That has not come to fruition yet. That may happen. So, that's happening apparently but we got word after The Shred update that Apollo is closing the Broadbean Newport Beach office. Which you have actually been to right?
Chad: No, I haven't but I have seen pictures and from my understanding, it's an awesome office.
Joel: I mean, Newport Beach is awesome as itself. Anyway, they are apparently moving to a "ghetto place right next to the John Wayne Airport." I have flown into the John Wayne Airport which was pretty nice. The luggage place is outside, which is nice but yeah I don't know if the area around is that good. So if it is bad Broadbean employees are. I'm sure really happy to leave Newport Beach to go to a ghetto outside of John Wayne Airport. So, that's happening as well as, word is that there is large CareerBuilder telasales operation out of Chicago. It's being shuttered and reestablished in the Philippines.
Chad: You gotta be shittin' me. Wow, if they wait about six months, they could do it with Duplex.
Joel: Wow, that's a whole other topic telasales and the job space getting shuttered for Dulplex. But yes, my question is are they going, like okay, either all these executives are dirtbags and scum and Apollo is being smart and getting rid of everyone who is a cancer and they are eventually going to bring on rockstars who turn this thing around or they are just cutting everything and creating super efficiencies and they are just going to milk this cash cow until it dies. I don't know what they are doing, what are your thoughts?
Chad: It's basic acquisition 101 right? You go in, you assess which is what they did for a few months. And then you start looking for costs that you can get rid of. You got to look at your margins. You got to look at that cost that you can get rid of. Now I do not know either one of these guys, they could be stellar, they could not be stellar. I have no clue at all but if you take a look at the high side of the salary spectrum, I am sure that they are on the high side of the salary spectrum. So, being able to perspectively get rid of some of these VPs, that's cost, that's overhead and then you take a look at this other piece where they over telasales? I don't know, but these are all cost measures. Plus, hell, If you was actually named in the lawsuit, not saying that he was actually terminated because of the lawsuit, but that's a lot of noise and there is a lot of shit going on. So, I mean anybody who is there today at CareerBuilder, dude I am sorry that all of this noise is happening. Hopefully, you can gain some focus or a new position somewhere else.
Joel: So, Randstad buys Monster. They get rid of everyone on executive level, but then they bring in a whole new team. It changes the culture, the direction and try to revive a dying monster. Pun intended. So, CareerBuilder feels like an absolute Gordon Gecko style, rip it up, sell the pieces, monetize as much as you can and then at some point sell the whole thing down the road. Like that's what this feels like because I haven't seen any indication besides a new COO who is from Apollo, that they are interested in turning this thing around. It's like a total chop shop at this point.
Chad: If you had seen this over the next three years as they ramp up to try to get acquired by somebody else who knows. That would make more sense. It's like it's they are really trying to flip this thing quick and the waves that come out of this, I don't think that they are doing anybody any good.
Joel: They are doing us some good because we have a lot of stuff to talk about every week. So, from our stand point, keep burning shit CareerBuilder because it's fun to talk about.
Chad: Fill the dumpster and keep it on fire.
Joel: Are we out?
Chad: We out.
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