It's all about technology, partnerships, shortages and MONEY in this week's episode of Chad and Cheese Podcast! What to expect?
- Text Recruiting WAR!!! (okay maybe not war)
- Jobvite meets Canvas maybe shades of iCims and TextRecruit?
and acquisitions by Ultimate Software and Slack, and, of course, what episode would be complete without CareerBuilder's continuous fall into the abyss.
Enjoy, and visit our sponsors America's Job Exchange, Sovren and JobAdX.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
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, brash opinion, and loads of snark, buckle up, boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast.
Joel: Hiddie-ho, boys and girls. Welcome to another episode of the Chad and
Cheese Podcast. I'm Joel Cheesman.
Chad: Is it football season yet?
Joel: 52 days, Chad.
Joel: On this week's show, the text recruiter wars are warming up.
Chad: Oh yeah.
Joel: There's a whole new batch of acquisitions and Chad wants to talk about shortage. I can only wonder what that's all about. It's another show full of NSFW goodness, but first a word from JobAdX.
Chad: You're going to find out.
JobAdX: How many times has someone said to you, "We're the Uber of ..." or, "It's the PayPal of ..." Maybe they're the Facebook of. In many, many cases, these comparisons fall short of being close to reality or even a useful illustration of what organizations actually do. In the case of JobAdX, our example is so accurate, so spot on that it's synonymous with our work. JobAdX is Google Ad Sense for jobs. That means we're an efficient, consistent and smarter ad unit for job related advertising. As the best ad tool in the industry, JobAdX offers recruitment marketing agencies, RPOs, and staffing firms real time dynamic bidding and delivery for client postings through the industry's first truly responsive tool. All this is done with the flexibility of JobAdX's cost per impression, click, or application, we offer unique budget conservation options to effectively eliminate spending waste. We're not set in regret.
JobAdX: For direct clients, JobAdX delivers superior candidates with the best of programmatic efficiency and premium page ad positioning. We also provide publishers and job boards, higher rev shed than other partners through our smarter programmatic platform. In many cases, 30%-40% greater and more for our scalable model.
JobAdX: To partner with us, you can visit or search JobAdX.com or email us at joinus@jobadx.com to get estimates or begin working together.
JobAdX: JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for your needs.
JobAdX: Oh, and you've been wondering why the British accent? JobAdX is just launched in the UK too.
Joel: Is baseball season not doing it for you, Chad?
Chad: It never does. It's boring as shit. My god.
Joel: The problem is we don't get any games on any regular basis in Indianapolis. Like when I lived in Cleveland, all the games were on. You were into it. You could go to games. It was like, "Oh, the Yankees are in town. The Sox are in town." But there's none of that here. I totally understand why no one cares about baseball in this town.
Chad: Yeah. Yeah. So football season, come on, baby. It's about time. I need to watch some Buckeyes.
Joel: The Talking Heads are predicting Browns to be most improved team, which is pretty much going to be the death mail and guarantees their second 0-6 season.
Chad: Dude, how are they going to get any worse? I mean, seriously. I don't know
that they can go any deeper into the well.
Joel: You know we're talking about Cleveland, right?
Chad: God. It's ridiculous.
Joel: So JobAdX, our first shout out, for me anyway. I'm headed down to Job Gate this coming week in Nashville. If you're there, say hi. But I know for sure JobAdX will be there. So I think they're actually presenting on the startup stage or something. So be sure to say hi to them and then write them a check while you're down there if you're attending.
Chad: Big fat check. I won't be in Nashville. I'm going to be up in Indianapolis watching Foo Fighters. So I'll be getting my music on.
Chad: First shout out goes to Nancy from Philly who broke radio silence.
Joel: Yes, Nancy's back.
Chad: Stuck here head out on Twitter to say hi. Also to Steven Rothburg who right now is probably trolling Allyo on Twitter. He heard the firing squad that we had with Alio and he had a ton of questions. So he's probably out there trolling right now.
Joel: I heard Steve was on a corner somewhere arguing about the validity of Paired and Snag's new job seeker on demand platform for restaurants. We'll see about that.
Joel: I'm going to shout out to Vote Chad and Cheese. If you haven't gone and voted for your favorite vendors, podcasters, bloggers, etc., go to ChadCheese.com, click on the link, and give your boys some love, give us a vote.
Chad: Love the love. I'm going to give a big shout out to Talroo. I don't think that you've actually gotten the gear yet, have you?
Joel: I have. I have.
Chad: Oh, you did. Okay.
Joel: Yeah. News to you. As usual, the t-shirts too small for me. I need to lose some l's I guess. But the glass I can use and in addition to the Talroo logo, I got a big cheese and the back. I'm sure yours said Chad, right?
Chad: Yup. Yup. It looks like the laser etching on the glass or whatever kind of etching. But on one side as the Talroo logo, other side has Chad. This is going to be perfect to drink beer. So thanks to Sam and the team over there Talroo for some pretty cool swag.
Joel: Rumor has it that Thad himself, the CEO, does the insignia on every glass that customers get. So that's above and beyond for any CEO. Way to go, Thad.
Joel: I'm going to give a shout out to Joe Shaker Junior who we just finished up an interview with today on the agency business. Great interview. We've been trying to get Joe on for a long time. He finally acquiesced and we got him on. So, Joe, thanks for the time, buddy. We'll be publishing that soon, and we enjoyed it.
Chad: Yep. Should be next Wednesday and it will be a next exclusive, huh? Saw what I did there.
Chad: Shout out to Broadbean. So on last week's pod, we talked about Broadbean moving to the ghetto. Remember?
Joel: Rumors.
Chad: Yeah, rumors that Broadbean was moving to the ghetto. Well, luckily, we actually received confirmation. Broadbean is moving out of their current lush office in Newport Beach. Yeah. So their new digs might not be as great of a location but it has a gym, deli, putting green. I mean, I took a look at this place online. I mean, come on, guys. Broadbean, come on. Is this really the ghetto?
Joel: Maybe it's just ghetto by Newport Beach standards, but by everyone else, it's like moving on up George Jefferson style.
Chad: Oh, man. It's got your dry cleaners there, all that stuff. It definitely does not look like the ghetto, guys. A bunch of millennials work in there.
Joel: And speaking of George Jefferson, I'm going to give shout out to George Laroque. We found out that is not his porn name that we thought it might be. George Laroque, another exclusive for uncommon. We appreciate that. We talk about venture capital, the flow ... What'd you call it? The gusher of money that's going into the industry, and we sort of sorted that out and talked in length about what's going on with the money question in the HR tech industry.
Chad: Yeah, cash isn't flowing into our industry. It's freaking gushing.
Joel: If Facebook is correct, George has a birthday this coming week. So if that's true, George, Happy Birthday from the Chad and Cheese Podcast
Chad: Happy 80th Birthday, George. That's awesome. Great to here it, man.
Joel: We'll see you on next month's show.
Chad: Two more for me. Thanks to disability solutions for sponsoring the transcription, obviously, for the hard of hearing and the deaf. They still need to have a little Chad and Cheese in their lives. So there's the transcription.
Chad: And last but not least, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast because if you subscribe, you can catch late breaking news with our new podcast called The Shred. You can go to iTunes, Google Play, CastBox, wherever you get your podcast or you'd like to get your podcast. You can subscribe and you can get late breaking news.
Joel: The Shred about three or four episodes into it. The response has been warm and positive. These are two to five minute little bites of news that's going on with a little bit of opinion. But we usually do most of the opinion on this show. The only way you can get those is if you subscribe. So if you're not subscribed to the show, go to iTunes, Google Play, wherever you listen, and subscribe.
Joel: My last shout out ...
Chad: Get it.
Joel: Might be more of an RIP, but rumor has it that the Career Builder Empower
Conference, I guess, not even sure what this is. It's apparently a big deal. I'm sure clients come in and sort of a user meeting thing. Rumor has it it has been postponed this year. I don't know if that means canceled for good or what, but the dumpster fire continues to warm us nicely into the summer months. I'm expecting it to keep us toasty in fall and winter and the rest of next year. So Career Builder, keep dropping bombs so we can keep talking about it.
Chad: Cost cutting at it's best.
Joel: You ready to get to the show?
Chad: Let's do this.
Joel: All right. You want to talk about shortage, and I'll let you talk about your shortage issues.
Chad: Yeah. The shortage issue, I'm not having shortage issues. The country is having shortage issues. Mainly, first of all, we're going to talk about IT in Google. So Google has announced that they're collaborating with a bunch of different colleges, but this article talked about North Texas Community College to bring its professional certificate course to students in an attempt to develop more qualified IT labor pools.
Chad: So Google, I mean, they actually started this in the Silicon Valley where they were pulling people into the GooglePlex and doing these classes to be able to create this talent, which is one of the things that we've talked about. This is more organic and it makes a helluva lot more since. Now it's been announced about 25 community colleges across the country will be providing eight month courses that are these Google courses, which is freaking awesome and I don't know why this isn't just a staple in all of these IT companies recruiting and pipelining. It makes no damn sense why they're not doing it.
Joel: There's a great scene in the movie The Untouchables, which I know you've seen and probably most of our listeners have, where Sean Connery takes Kevin Cosner to the police training facility and says, "If you want to make sure your apple is fresh, don't get it from the barrel, get it from the tree." There's a lot of insight to that in terms of business where these companies are saying, "Look, a lot of the colleges aren't churning out people with the skills that we need," and granted, the skillsets that people need are changing so quickly that it's hard for colleges to keep up. So hey, why don't we just grow our own apples, so the speak, create our own funnel of talent, create our own brand loyalty, and improve our employment brand before these people are even in the job market. I think it's a tremendous strategy. I suspect that you'll see this go form the tech sector and people like Google to healthcare industries, growing your own nurses, helping grow just about anything accountants, engineering.
Joel: I also think it's interesting we didn't talk about this last week, but there's a new story about colleges that were basically investing in students, or allowing people to pay for college based on your salary when you graduate of getting a certain percentage, I think 5% of your annual salaries. So you're bypassing payment and the colleges are funding it. They're turning their students into investments, which I think is also an interesting and creative way to get more people into college.
Joel: So I love this out of the box companies paying for it, colleges getting creative. I think I'm a big fan of it, and I hope it takes off in a mass scale.
Chad: Oh yeah. Well, just here locally, so I was talking to local heating and air conditioning, what they've gone through when they've acquired and become these big, massive HVAC companies. And I talked to one of the techs, I asked him, I was like, "Dude, so how did you get to become a tech," and he said, "Hey, they put me through school. I'm on a three year contract." We've talked about this on the show. "I'm on a three year contract. I have to stay with this company for three years, but to be quite frank, the benefits and how they treat me, I don't know why I'd want to leave." So even heating and air, I mean, so smart because it's so hard to find skill trades, IT, I mean, it doesn't matte.r the labor market is short. Period. So if you're not growing your on, you're screwed.
Joel: I think I'm interested in this. The local high school nearby, the workshop school is sponsored by O'Reilly. You go by the school, there's a big O'Reily Auto Parts and they're teaching teenagers how to fix cars and bringing them right into the workforce directly from high school in a trade that's going to make them money. So I think that's great as well.
Chad: Yeah. So ...
Joel: ... from high school and a trade that is going to make them money. I think that's great as well.
Chad: Yeah. Next story is pilots. As I said, we have a shortage everywhere, and it looks like also on the side of airlines. We're traveling more as human beings, and we're not doing it in cars as much or trains or automobiles. Cost of flying is lower, and there's a huge need for pilots.
Joel: Yeah. I mean, Millennials aren't buying homes. They're just traveling the world like Kung Fu Grasshopper. Yeah. The news that came out was that Delta expects to hire 8,000 pilots over the next decade, and they're actually giving conditional job offers to college students. So, they're going to the tree as well as opposed to waiting for them to come out. American Airlines has started offering loans to students as well.
Chad: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And they've got a academy as well.
Joel: Oh, do they?
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Some experts from the article wonder if automation can ease some of the burden. They're kind of skeptical that that could happen, but I think at some point, automation is going to catch up and we'll have ... Of course, with regulations you have to have two pilots, right?
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: That's kind of the rule. I don't see that changing anytime soon. I don't see people getting on planes that are automated anytime soon. Although, you could argue that almost every plane is automated. The people just kind of sit there, and if something goes wrong, they pull a Denzel Washington and flip the plane upside down and land it or whatever. But, yeah, pilot issues, man. If you have kids that like to fly, man, put them in pilot school.
Chad: Yeah. In the '80s, pretty much two-thirds of all pilots were ex-military. Problem is the military is having issues right now, and they're predicting shortages with pilots. Not to mention we're moving toward drones on the military side of the house. If the airline industry was really just being fed by the military, the military is having shortages and we know that it's already hard to get people in the military as it is. If you're using that as your sole feeder system or one of your biggest feeder systems, you're going to have an issue.
Chad: Yeah. American Airlines actually announced that they have a Cadet Academy, with the intent of really training and recruiting the next generation of pilots. As we're seeing it with Google, as we're seeing it with local HVAC and then now with pilots, this is a trend, and if you're not getting into this trend, then you're going to be the one that is going to have to fully automate because there are going to be no human beings to do your damn job.
Joel: Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way. Right, sergeant?
Chad: No shit.
Joel: All right, man, let's take a quick break. Let's hear from our favorite, I don't know, compliance providers. That's your lane, but let's hear from AJE and we'll talk about texting, of all things.
Chad: AJE!
AJE: America's Job Exchange is celebrating our 10th year as an industry leader in diversity recruitment and OFCCP compliance. We've been helping our thousand-plus customers comply with OFCCP regulations that directly support positive and effective diversity recruitment designed to attract and convert veterans, individuals with disabilities, women, and minorities and empower employers to pursue and track active outreach with their local community-based organizations. Want to learn more? Call us at 866-926-6284, or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com.
Joel: Text wars, nothing but text wars.
Chad: There's so much business out there on the texting side of the house because nobody's fricking ... They're not adopting it. I just think this is totally just Blue Ocean for any of these companies and for Canvas and Jobvite in this case. This feels like shade of iCIMS and TextRecruit, but still, who else is doing this?
Joel: Yeah. So for those that don't know or don't remember, iCIMS acquired TextRecruit earlier this year.
Chad: Geez
Joel: They had actually partnered in a similar fashion in 2015 with TextRecruit. It almost looks like Jobvite is taking a page out of the blueprint of what iCIMS did. So, announced this week, Jobvite is launching Jobvite Text powered by Canvas, which will be their own tech solution. Now I wrote a post on ERE, and you know that we disagree on whether or not iCIMS will close shop and just make TextRecruit an iCIMS product. I don't know if you've changed on that. Probably not. But I believe that Jobvite looked at TextRecruit tapping into its data via API, got a little nervous, and decided getting in bed with Canvas was probably a good idea, a good insurance policy.
Joel: I wrote about my opinion on that. And on the article on ERE, we had Eric from TextRecruit leave a comment, which I thought that I would read-
Chad: Go ahead.
Joel: ... real quick. "Hey, Joel, it's great to see the category continue to grow. I'm a big fan of Dan, who's the CEO of Jobvite. I wanted to know, we still love all our Jobvite prospects and customers and are completely agnostic when it comes to HCM, ATS, or CRM that we work with. I believe that choices are important for all customers, and there is zero incentives for iCIMS to have us work only with their CRM ATS. We are seeing some of our large TextRecruit enterprise clients using diversified tech stacks that include Aperture, LinkedIn, iCIMS, and Workday. We will continue to build candidate and employee engagement solutions that cross over the entire stack. ATSs are not building their own email or phone systems. They won't be building their own text automation system." Yeah, because they bought you.
Chad: Yeah, but think about it. What I led off with is the opportunity is huge out there. Right now, there is no reason to be able to lock down TextRecruit, iCIMS locking down TextRecruit, or even Jobvite. If they do end up buying Canvas, there's no reason to have any exclusivity out there because there's so much opportunity to gain more revenue. at least right now. Maybe not five years from now, but right now there is so much opportunity for revenue in this space, it would be dumb to actually lock them down from an exclusivity standpoint.
Joel: I agree that there's no reason for Eric or iCIMS to want to stop the growth, whether it's revenue or growth of the product, amongst people that use those services.
Chad: Correct.
Joel: But I think you can probably agree why Dan Finnigan at Jobvite would be a little nervous that iCIMS owns that property and that maybe he wants to hedge his bets and get in bed with a competitor in case something does go wrong. Do you at least agree that most ATSs should be a little bit weary of TextRecruit having access to so much data of your ATS?
Chad: Well, first off, if I go to iCIMS and I tell iCIMS that I want to use Canvas, they're not going to tell me No.
Joel: Yeah, I agree.
Chad: They're not going to tell me No. So, that just totally defeats the entire argument whatsoever. If I go to Dan Finnigan, Dan Finnigan's not going to tell me that I can't use TextRecruit. There could be some great advantages, there is no question, to be able to integrate with specific vendors, but there's no way in hell either one of those CEOs are going to cut off cash.
Joel: Are you agreeing that Dan should be nervous or not?
Chad: I think they should all be nervous. If they don't-
Joel: I agree with that.
Chad: ... if they don't have a text partner, which is one of the reasons why I think Jobvite was incredibly smart in getting into this. It made just so much sense.
Joel: We agree on that.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: I agree that Eric wants this thing to grow as much as possible. I agree that Aman at Canvas wants it to grow as much as possible. I'm sure Euan at Emissary wants it to grow as much as possible.
Chad: Oh, yeah.
Joel: But if you're an ATS and iCIMS owns this property and it's integrated into your system, you should be a little bit Trojan horse worried. Even if nothing happens, it's in your favor to at least be cautious about it. And I also think that neither one of us would be shocked if we get a headline that says, "Jobvite acquires Canvas" six months from now. Right?
Chad: Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised about that at all. As a matter of fact, I'd be looking to that for that to happen. But we've got to remember, we talk about getting data. Right? It's not like they're getting the fucking launch codes for God's sakes. It's not that big of a deal from a data standpoint. We want to be able to think that this is a Russian hacking-type of scheme. It's not that. It's not that big of a deal.
Joel: We can investigate further as to what exactly data they're getting access to.
Chad: Yeah, yeah. Oh, I guarantee it's not Social Security numbers, blood type, or anything.
Joel: No. I agree it's not either.
Chad: So, none of it matters.
Joel: If it's traffic numbers, if it's page views, if it's user calls, which even that simple kind of data, or just even knowing what clients that ATS has. Yeah, I wouldn't put it ... I don't know. I just think that you should be cautious as an ATS owner if ATSs start buying up these tech solutions and they start super integrating with your stuff, whether it's from, "Oh, they could cut it off tomorrow or they could be getting intel on my stuff." I would be cautious about it.
Chad: I think anybody who is at a tech startup right now, could be chatbot texting, whatever it is, messaging, period. We'll just call it that. You are in a wonderful position. No question.
Joel: Yes. Yes. If you need an idea for a business to start, this might be a good one to like, because there are a lot more ATSs than there are text messaging solutions for recruitment?
Chad: Yeah. Well, that being said, TextRecruit launched a new, I guess you could say kind of a feature to their platform called TextTalent-
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: ... which is pretty freaking cool.
Joel: It's really cool. As I read it, basically it's sort of sourcing meets text recruiting.
Chad: Yeah. Yeah. When you're creating a actual TextRecruit campaign against a requisition, you can search third-party resume databases. So, you can start pulling candidates in from third-party resume databases. Your reach continues to grow past your applicant tracking systems database. So, yeah, no. I think that is pretty fricking cool.
Joel: Very cool. And they've also ... I think we mentioned this a little bit back, that TextRecruit launched drip campaigns, so they are more and more becoming a marketing platform than just a texting communication platform.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: So, knowing Eric as we do, that doesn't surprise us and knowing iCIMS like we do, that doesn't surprise us. I think that's really, really cool, that TextRecruit is really pushing the envelope, because they are ahead of the competition right now and I think will continue to be in the near future. So, kudos for the solutions they're churning out.
Chad: Here's the big message. No matter Canvas, TextRecruit, Emissary, whatever the other options are, if you're leading talent acquisition and your recruiters don't have a formalized texting platform to engage candidates, get one now because you know your recruiters are already texting candidates. But if it's not saved in the centralized database and you could be audited, not to mention you can't use machine learning or AI against data that you don't have, so there are so many reasons why you need to have text. Not to mention, I don't know if we, we didn't say this, but 90% of SMS are actually read within the first three seconds. Email sucks, guys. Emails for shit compared to text. If you're not doing text, you're out, dude.
Joel: No, that we can agree on. I think the next argument will be text versus automation, chatbots, AI, et cetera.
Chad: See, I see chatbots and I see messaging as messaging, so I see texting becoming now part of that. These are just different channels that the chatbots get to be able to connect with you. So, whether it's on text, whether it's on Facebook Messenger, I see all that as an integrated solution very, very shortly.
Joel: I think ultimately, the text recruiting folks will start implementing AI and automation more than I do a chatbot integrating text messaging.
Chad: Right.
Joel: I think those will be a feature of text platforms as opposed to the other way around. Would you agree with that?
Chad: Yeah. It's a hard one, but I would say yeah. I think that it's just more of the focus and where they're already going. So, yeah, I would definitely agree. I think if you started out with texting and you started to move toward messaging, that, to me, is more exciting than trying to move from messaging and then backing up into text.
Joel: All right. You ready to take a quick break and then talk about acquisitions?
Chad: Oh, yeah.
Joel: All right, a word from Sovren, gang.
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Chad: We talk about AI machine learning, and you want some AI to actually power-
Chad: ... that text platform, you might want to call Sovren.
Joel: Dude, Sovren is a unknown beast in this industry like ... Yeah, everybody uses them. It's amazing. It's amazing. By the way, quick interjection before we talk about acquisition, so I was messaging back and forth with an Indeed employee.
Chad: Okay.
Joel: One of the ground troops, and frankly, you probably agree with this, talking to the ground troops is the best, because the front line and the people making the calls-
Chad: Oh, yeah.
Joel: Know so much more than the management and executives.
Joel: So anyway, I love talking to sales people; so what this sales person told me was, that the three other solutions aside from Indeed, the three that he hears more than any other are ZipRecruiter-
Chad: Yes.
Joel: Facebook.
Chad: Okay.
Joel: Which I thought was interesting.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: And LinkedIn. CareerBuilder never, Monster never, Dice never, Craigslist never, because I asked; so just a little tidbit from the front lines of the job posting battle ground. The three ... Of course Indeed is going to say it's talked about, but Indeed and then those other three says are really hot.
Joel: The biggest surprise to me was Facebook. I didn't expect Facebook to be on the minds of employers so much.
Chad: Yeah. I would think SMB side of the house, maybe that's who this sales person deals with, I don't know.
Joel: Yes.
Joel: Yes, it was SMB, I'll put that out there. Yeah, and he was like LinkedIn getting more into SMBs, I told him like, “Yeah, you know, you should be hearing more LinkedIn, a little bit as you go forward,” and he promised to keep me abreast if he hears more and more LinkedIn; but LinkedIn is still number three in SMBs.
Joel: So off to acquisitions.
Joel: Acquisitions, man. Ultimate Software dropped 300 mil on PeopleDoc.
Chad: PeopleDoc.
Joel: From your favorite country, France.
Chad: Yeah, well they did pretty well in that World Cup thingy.
Joel: They did pretty well. They were good. They're lucky they didn't play the three lions, but that's a talk for another day.
Chad: They didn't even show up for their freaking ... their last match.
Joel: No, no, no. There's too much ... There's beer at the pub, man. You don't want to play a nothing match; so anyway, the news, 300 million. Acquired PeopleDoc for 300 in cash and stock. It expected to close next quarter this year. Both make HR solutions.
Joel: Ultimate Software went public in '98, they've been around forever as we know. PeopleDoc, kind of they've raised somewhere around 30 million dollars up to this point; so yeah, it just seemed like similar solutions, to me just a little bit like Shaker buying the Arland Group, right?
Joel: You got some talent, you got some customers, maybe you got some duplicitous technology that you can wrap in, or new technology, and so that's what that seemed like to me. Any takeaways for you?
Chad: Yeah, I think, no question being able to increase footprints internationally, makes a heck of a lot of sense; but also it sounded like, from what I've read, you know, I've never used PeopleDoc; but it sounded like PeopleDoc was really more focused on the employee e-engagement side of the house, which makes a hell of a lot of sense because we just talked about labor shortages, right?
Chad: The smartest thing for employers to do, for companies to do today, is to focus on retention; so being to have that outreach, have that smooth onboarding, to be able to continue to interact with your employees; so it sounded like this is more of an employee engagement, kind of UI and outreach-kind of scenario; which I thought was incredibly smart.
Joel: This is also interesting to me because in talking to Georges Laroque, in our upcoming podcast, he mentioned France as being the number two country in terms of venture capital. Did I hear that right? Or was the coffee a little strong for me that morning?
Chad: Yeah, coffee was a little strong. He said France was the fastest growing because they really focused on growing startups, so you know, this does make sense obviously.
Joel: Yeah, Macron, they have a new leader who's really pushing some commercial interests and startup engagement there, so yeah, I think it's great. Most of the French startups we're not big fans of, but hey, you know? You got to take some swings to get some hits, so hopefully we'll be seeing some more out of France that impresses us; but we're surely impressed by at least the money that Slack has raised, 790 million dollars.
Chad: That's a lot of cash.
Joel: We're freaking out when someone raises 50 million, and these guys are like just dwarfing all that.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: But, they made an acquisition for Missions. What do you know about them?
Chad: Slack is really a foundational-kind of a platform, right? And, if you want to do something different with Slack, you build on the foundation, and you do that with apps; so they're different, kind of like almost like a modular-kind of scenario. The interesting thing is 65% of Slack users, the actual companies, build their own apps; so that means the balance of those companies have to hope that there's something in the App Store that they can kind of plug in.
Chad: Missions is more of a workflow-kind of an app, that can be indigenous to Slack overall; so if you do have a company who is onboarding, which is actually what TechCrunch said, and I thought it was interesting, after talking about PeopleDoc for 300 million.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: Being able to have better employee engagement using Slack, which is a great way to engage employees, because they're on Slack all damn day, and using Missions to be able to do that, to be able to process a much better workflow; so I thought it was really cool.
Joel: You know, one of the great things about having an App Store is you find out which apps are the most popular, and then you go buy them.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: iCIMS buying TextRecruit probably had a little bit to do with iCIMS seeing the growth-
Chad: Oh, yeah.
Joel: Of TextRecruit users, we see this with Facebook apps, I think Apple ... Apple, one of their original apps was like sort of a tracking or statistics app that I think they acquired way back in the day, so it's a real benefit to have that, and this is just Slack saying, “You know, look, these are pieces that are incredibly popular. Why don't we roll these into our main offering and go native with it?”
Joel: And, to me, this was a smart move. There was no ... The financials weren't disclosed, which usually means it wasn't enough to really talk about, so this Missions team was probably a pretty small company, Slack found some money in the cushions, gave it to them and got the app suite, so I'm in favor of this move, for sure.
Chad: Oh, yeah, and there's nothing worse than getting into a platform, especially when you're new, and there's no easy-to-understand workflow. I mean, it just, it's, “Okay, what's my workflow? How do I do? Where do I go?,” and from this standpoint there's no question, from Slack's standpoint you can create your own workflows with Missions; and, again, it just makes a powerful platform that much more powerful.
Joel: I agree. Do you want to talk about Canada or not?
Chad: Oh, why not?
Joel: Why not? All right, so there's a lawsuit by a former CareerBuilder employee that I wrote about for ERE that should be published soon if you want to check that out, but, basically, sales guy in Toronto whose boss was demeaning to him, made sort of derogatory remarks, allegedly.
Joel: This is what the claim says, that he was sick. His boss said, “Oh, this seems to be a trend on Mondays,” kind-of thing. He had his commission structure changed, he had the ability to work at home sort of negated or lessened, according to the lawsuit. According to the lawsuit he went to HR, filed a complaint.
Joel: HR out of Chicago, I believe said, “Yeah, we'll look into it and let you know,” they didn't get back to the plaintiff. He told his boss he had filed a complaint with HR, shortly thereafter was fired, and so he's basically suing CareerBuilder in Canada, or CareerBuilder for wrongful termination and harassment.
Joel: Now, we talked about this a little bit before the show; if you're a salesperson in America, you're probably thinking, “Well, Jesus, I get shit all the time when I'm sick, or if I take lunch for five minutes longer. Like, why is that a big deal?,” or you know, “Hey, I get my commissions structure changed every six months, like why is that a big deal?,” or, “Hey, yeah, if they tell me I got to come in the office, I got to come in the office.”
Joel: However, if you're in Canada, there's this little thing called “Poisoned work environment” where you can't do stuff like say derogatory things like, “Oh, it seems like you're always sick on Monday,” or, “Oh, that's a trend, huh?”, so you got to be really nice in Canada, apparently; and people, employees, will sue you if you're not, which is what we're looking at here.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: I will also add that the limits on what you can get from these kind of lawsuits are really low relative to what Americans can get.
Chad: Got you.
Joel: The cap on this, I think, is 75,000 that you can get as a worker for this stuff. He's also asking for like back-pay, and some severance, and blah, blah, blah, but it totals about 150,000; which, if he's paying legal fees, he's probably going to get like 500 dollars from doing all this with lawyers; whereas the lawsuit by our buddy at Shiftgig, Lori McInerney, hopefully I said that right, is seven-figure area; so God bless America, sue everybody.
Chad: Yeah, not so much. I can understand if you're being treated differently than anybody else, and I mean, the derogatory remarks, they just ... Doesn't make any sense for that, I mean if you're in management you have to be a step above that; if somebody is off a lot on Mondays, well then, in the review you bring that up. I mean you actually show facts. “Here are the facts, this is what we've seen”.
Chad: Just being stupid and kind of throwing things out there, I mean, it happens, but it's one of those things where we have to be more disciplined and it shouldn't. Commission structures change all the damn time. Now, was his commission structure changed?
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: Verus everybody else's? I mean, that's a big question, and then also, the work-from-home segment, right? If you're being punished from working from home because you're not hitting goal, not because you're missing Mondays, because you're not hitting goal, that's not an issue. You need to hit goal.
Joel: Yeah, I don't think this is a frivolous lawsuit. I really feel like the plaintiff probably feels like, “I got crappy ... I got shit on at work”.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: I just think, for Americans, particularly people in sales, to hear this would be like, “Gee, that's just Tuesday”, I think that, that's maybe a little different, but I also would say that there seems to be a trend at CareerBuilder of like an old boy ... like untraditional culture that's different than other places, and as the world changes, it looks like CareerBuilder's having a hard time changing with that reality.
Chad: Well, I don't know. I mean, their President of Sales and two VPs of Sales are not there anymore. That to me signals some change.
Joel: Well, let's see if they bring on new ones, because we don't know if that's just a straight up, “chop this baby up and monetize, and sell”, or whatever, or if it's a literal like Monster, “Let's get rid of everybody of old, and let's bring in new people”.
Joel: I would agree with you if they start bringing in new SVPs and new Vice Presidents in Sales, but if they don't, then to me this is just a chop job to bring out as much profit as possible, and probably sell this sucker at some point.
Chad: Yeah, which we've seen they're doing pretty often.
Joel: Anyway, love the Canadian reference because my wife's Canadian, she'll appreciate that, other than that, I'm going to probably go to the porch and have a beer, in my new Talroo pint glass.
Chad: Yeah, I was going to say, just don't wear that Talroo half-shirt that you have now.
Joel: That's for the next bet I lose against you.
Chad: Oh, that'll be soon.
Chad: We out.
Joel: We out.
Tristen: Hi, I'm Tristen. Thanks for listening to my step dad, “The Chad” and his goofy friend “Cheese”. You've been listening to The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Make sure you subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss out on all the knowledge dropping that's happening up in here.
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