Holy Hell! Halloween must be close, because companies are losing their minds and scaring the shit out of us.
On this week's show,
- Blinders on their cubical jockeys -- 1984 meets Mr. Ed
- while HireVisor joins the Dead Pool
The boys also give their takeaways from spending a full day with iCIMS. Enjoy, and checkout sponsors JobAdX, Sovren and Canvas ... they've only got treats for ya'!
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
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: Back from Jersey, it's the born to run episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast, HR's most dangerous. I'm Joel Cheesman.
Chad: And I'm Chad Sowash.
Joel: On this week's show, we give takeaways from the iCIMS Influence Conference. LinkedIn has a blacklist, and scary ass clowns are invading a donut shop near you. We must be getting close to Halloween. Some weird shit is going down.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: Stay tuned. We'll be right back after this word from Canvas.
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Joel: All right. Let's get to the shout outs, man. We got a fairly limited list this week, so our listeners who hate shout outs will enjoy that.
Chad: Our listeners love shout outs. Shut up, man. So right out of the gate, big thanks to old friends, Susan Vitale, Colin, Adam, Andrew, and the rest of the iCIMS crew who brought us out to their new digs in Jersey. I mean, I remember when they were a little applicant tracking system thingie, right? And they got up and running and we were working on source coding back in like, I don't know, 2004 or maybe even before that. But anyway, watching these guys grow from that small place in Hzslet, right? To this huge, amazing, fricking, what'd they call it? Like mega-hub or some shit like that? At Bell Labs. That was amazing. That was amazing.
Joel: Yeah, I gotta agree. Watching these guys grow, and there aren't a ton of success stories like this. Limited funds that they've taken, I think they've only recently taken some decent amount of money, but yeah. Watching them grow from nothing to what they are today has been great, and additionally, a lot of the players and people that have been there for quite a while are still there. Susan, I know she's been there for 13 year, and shout out to her. She's expecting a little Susan in the next month, right? November?
Chad: Yeah, on Thanksgiving, so that'll be a nice little busy time. Hopefully all family will be around and it'll just be wonderful. And she'll be able to drink wine at that point, which is awesome, because I know she misses that.
Joel: Did you just call her a wino? I think you did.
Chad: No, I'm not a wino. I like wine.
Joel: Shout out to HIREconf, the HiringSolved event November 7th and 8th in New York. Chad and I will be there raising hell. If you're in town, come by. If you're going to the event, make sure you say hi.
Chad: HIREconf. Can I just say, sounds like Mein Kampf. Christian Malpeli-
Joel: So now you're calling HiringSolved Nazis, and you're calling Susan Vitale a wino.
Chad: I said it sounds like it! Christian, shout out over at jobboard.io/ZipRecruiter. I thought it was funny-
Joel: I think it's pronounced job boardio.
Chad: No. I think it was funny he spelled it out in the email for you so that you could actually say I-O. So jobboard.io.
Joel: Yeah. Christian, hats off for the sense of humor. That was nice, and thanks for listening.
Chad: Yeah, totally appreciate that. Yeah, thanks for dinner and drinks while you're in Indy. The funny thing is, I see Matt Plumber probably twice as much as I've ever seen Christian, and the guy's never taken me out for drinks, dinner, or anything like that. So Matt, you know. Candlelit dinner-
Joel: Candlelit dinner.
Chad: Maybe some cereal money. Maybe some cereal money. I don't know. I don't know.
Joel: Yeah. I'm sorry I couldn't make dinner, I have a young child, and getting out for those wild nights doesn't happen as much as I'd like, so maybe next time I can enjoy a dinner with you and Christian, wherever that may be. Shout out to Dinah, or Dina. I think Dinah Robaski from TMP-
Chad: Oh, from TMP.
Joel: Yeah, Grasso turned her onto the show. She's been a big fan, so Dinah. Shout out to you.
Chad: No, Dina, she is like the super fan at TMP. She is.
Joel: Nice.
Chad: So no, this is, Dina isn't just kind of like a listener. She like gathers people at TMP to listen to the show. I think they actually might have a listening kind of a thing going on, which is really cool.
Joel: That's cool, yeah. She's, I think her comment was thanks for being the smartest thing in my ears or my car radio, whatever it was. However she listens, she's very complimentary, so Dina, we appreciate it, and we'll keep talking if you keep listening.
Chad: Off of that one, I'm just gonna go the other way. So shout out to Josh Akers. Josh pointed out that I wasn't smart enough to be sitting next to Kyle Lagunas during the iCIMS Influence Meeting, which he was probably right, but my response Josh, very simply, fuck you. Yeah, now. He's probably right, but don't call me out for that shit, asshole.
Joel: Did we really just bring out Josh Akers on this show?
Chad: I know. I know.
Joel: Oh, we love you Josh. That's it for me from shout outs. What else you got?
Chad: I've got Terry Baker, quick shout out. Thanks for the Amazon AWS intel. The learning center, trying to get pipeline talent. The big thing though is are they focusing on females in that program? Because we were talking about Amazon's AI, which was kicking females to the curb. So what is Amazon actually doing? Yeah, they've got a learning center. That's cool. What are they doing to actually funnel females into those programs since they are light in that area?
Chad: Thanks to Next, Uncommon, and Canvas for my traveling gear.
Joel: By the way, iCIMS having Yeti giveaways-
Chad: Oh dude, that was awesome.
Joel: Is genius. And I'm using mine right now. If you don't know Yeti, you should. It's cooler system, koozies. They have a whole line of stuff to keep stuff cold or hot, and the fact that iCIMS has them as giveaways was pretty stellar. So shout out.
Chad: Are they sponsoring the show now? Because I'd really like the Yeti-sponsored show.
Joel: Well, maybe. We'll see. We'll see. They talked about writing us a blank check to buy the show so maybe that'll happen.
Chad: Oh. I like that. So last, last but not least, grand champion edition of Death Match dropped this week. Aman Brar and Canvas, and I'm gonna put all the different Death Match contestants tagged in a group, so if you go to podcast on chadcheese.com, look in the right rail, click on Death Match, you can hear them all.
Joel: We are the champions. Way to go, Canvas.
Chad: Good job, guys.
Joel: Death Match, take a listen. You'll see why they were the winners. Let's get to
the show.
Chad: I see that.
Joel: I haven't done the boxing (SFX). There we go.
Chad: There we go.
Joel: All right. iCIMS. Let's talk about takeaways from the show, what we learned, what we didn't. What you got?
Chad: Yeah, so first right out of the gate, class. Sheer class. It was a great experience bringing us in to talk to us about really history, roadmap, and vision, right? Vision and roadmap. So I mean, that was really a cool time, having the executive team there and really answering direct questions, right out of the gate.
Joel: And I'll add courage to the class. So apparently some our analyst, blogger, media friends alluded to the fact that Chad and I don't get quite as many invites because we're a little bit dangerous. We're a little bit critical. We're a little bit, they don't like us kind of thing-
Chad: They're afraid.
Joel: And the fact that iCIMS had some courage to bring us on was really good. So I'll add courage to the class.
Chad: Yeah, if you want real analysis or at least our thoughts and opinions, then we're gonna give them to you. And if you don't, then yeah. Definitely don't ask us to come.
Joel: Exactly, exactly. If you want people to just blow sunshine up your ass, don't invite the Chad and Cheese Show.
Chad: That's just not gonna happen.
Joel: Yeah, not gonna happen.
Chad: Okay, so one of the biggest things that I loved hearing is that iCIMS is going to own the primary source of jobs, because Google apparently applied more value to sites like the Indeeds of the world, who were jamming jobs down Google's throat as fast as they could get them, and they were pounding the iCIMS site like every five minutes. I mean, just killing all these different company sites to be able to get new content faster, where iCIMS would send them out probably maybe once every 12 hours, 24 hours or what have you.
Joel: It was daily, actually, is what Colin Day, the CEO, mentioned, that they were doing it daily whereas the Indeeds were doing like every five minutes.
Chad: Every, just pounding their servers. So I think it was cool that Colin and team are starting to figure out that from a Google for jobs standpoint, what is actually going to help them be seen in Google's eyes as the primary source. Colin said something about actually becoming the fast lane to jobs, which means when they get jobs, they're gonna be pumped into Google, and everybody else is going to be the slow lane. So the Indeeds of the world and those different companies, they're not going to be pounding the shit out of iCIMS servers like they used to. They're probably going to be ratcheted down to a few times a day or something of that nature. So that'll be interesting.
Joel: Yeah, I think two things from that. iCIMS is clearly all in on Google. The CEO Colin Day mentioned that this was, Google getting into the game was the biggest thing he's seen in 20 years. In his experience, he believes or he quoted 80% of new candidate traffic came in via Google. Some people will argue that, but even if it's 20%, it's still a pretty significant number of incoming traffic. And secondly, that the middlemen are in trouble. iCIMS recognizes that they are the source of jobs, but they've been relegated because of job boards in the past who have outranked them in searches for the old, traditional searches as the main, original source for job postings, and that just isn't the case. And he, iCIMS, and I'm sure many ATSs are realizing that they are the main source. They should be the one that gets credit for that source in Google. Colin mentioned slowing down the lanes for job boards. He wasn't specific about how much, but certainly the days of five minute scraping of ATSs is gonna be a thing of the past, at least for iCIMS.
Joel: They want to be the original source for those jobs on Google, and I think they're working very closely with Google to get, what data do we need? What's the schema that you want? I mean, they're all in on Google and they're all in on taking it out on the middleman that have sort of ravaged their servers for a decade.
Chad: Yeah. Well, they are the original source. I mean, that's the thing. Now, you have to learn from Google why you're not showing up as the most trusted source, because you are the most trusted source. You are the point of origination. So they're figuring that shit out, and I have to commend them for that and being able to go to the next point of middlemen. I mean, taking a look at some of the recruitment marketing types of layers that are between the job boards and the applicant tracking system and really just kind of like the user experience systems that are out there. They're gonna take them on as well.
Joel: Yeah, so historically, for those that don't know, typically the ATSs have been just the job search component. There hasn't been a lot of design thought with some of these sites. Usually the company itself will create some branding pages. Hey, what's it like to work here? Check out this video. And then there'd be sort of this ugly button at the bottom of the page that says, search jobs now, which would take you to the ATS.
Joel: Companies like Jibe, The Muse feed on people that have come along, and historically, they provided mobile design first. They offered SEO first, and then eventually, the ATSs of the world had nice URLs for search engines. They got the jobs into Google and other search engines. So those companies went away. The companies that did mobile only, well, eventually the ATSs learned how to go responsive, and then those companies went away.
Joel: So the idea is that, okay, these middlemen that are using design, letting companies, or design pages that are mobile, put on videos, et cetera, that they're in trouble as well. In 2019, iCIMS announced that they are going to launch a product called Attract that is essentially a set of templates. Companies can pick those templates. They can customize those however they want, and it will integrate seamlessly with the job search component.
Joel: So arguably, the days of those middlemen that are designing sites and doing branding experiences could be coming to an end, because at least iCIMS is figuring out how to put in design in their product.
Chad: Yeah. See, that's not gonna happen. That's not gonna happen. The people that are actually designing the sites, and they're launching and they're doing all that. That's not going to happen, because employers will not do that on site. They won't. So they're going to have to have an agency do that. What this will do though is you take a look at a lot of those platforms that are out there, those content management platforms, those RMPs, CRMs, what have you. iCIMS is building all of that on the front end of their applicant tracking system. So they're building that UX piece with the CRM included and also the RMP pieces.
Chad: So from the cosmetic piece, you can have your agency still do all that cool stuff that you want them to do. Unlimited pages, go crazy with your footprint, yada, yada, yada. But when it comes down to offering a platform, iCIMS is gonna start doing that. So all of the platforms that are out there today who only do that, this is a warning signal.
Joel: Yep. And we got the idea that the design will happen in a Wix or Weebly type fashion as opposed to the company designing the HTML and doing that on their own, which will inevitably be a cost savings to the company, because the design stuff, the HTML becomes expensive when agencies do that for them.
Chad: It's not just that piece. It's also being able to easily get the candidate from one platform to the next. So right now, if you're using some of these content management types of systems and you want to be able to ask for information and maybe even a resume or something like that, getting that resume into the applicant tracking system for most of the applicant tracking systems is a bitch. Now, if you have an integrated system that is built on the same platform, that all runs nice and smooth.
Joel: I agree. Another takeaway that I had was, I don't know if you could put it into maybe mobile/messaging/automation. These are three trends that are very hot with iCIMS, and I assume that they are with many of the other applicant tracking systems and competitors out there. So for those who don't know, iCIMS acquired TextRecruit in January of this year. TextRecruit we've talked about a lot, sort of messaging, mobile messaging, for candidates and recruiters. They're building out a whole suite of products where internal communications happens, automation, you know, one to many communications happen within a company. Erik Kostelnik who is founder and CEO of TextRecruit spoke, which I found really interesting. One of the things that he said was, "There should not be a human interaction until the interview.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: So, where his head is, is a full sort of suite of automated messaging, chat bot
if you will, of pre-screening, interviewing, applying-
Chad: Scheduling.
Joel: Automatically. And then until there's an actual interview there's no human interaction. So, to me that's where iCIMS head is and that's where I think a lot of other companies are going. But they really highlighted that in the event and I think that's something that I'm gonna pay attention to as we move forward.
Chad: Yeah it's all process. We're seeing it all over the place. I mean it's RPA. There's some AI in there in some cases but it's RPA. It's just all process automation and it just makes sense. Because if you can take those little tasks out of the sourcer and or recruiter's hands, cause they don't need to do it, they can focus on being brand ambassadors and really having that human to human contact.
Joel: I agree. I also took away that, if you're not supporting the enterprise, that life is gonna be really hard for you. And this is sort of underscored by the fact that Google has a lightweight ATS. LinkedIn launched their ATS very recently. Facebook, I assume, will have some sort of easy candidate management, apply you know with your LinkedIn or with your Facebook profile. And so the companies that are sort of servicing the small to mid-level ATS market, it's gonna be in trouble. And the sense of iCIMS is that, the Googles of the world are not gonna be you know looking to penetrate the enterprise market anytime soon because of the amount of complexity that goes into servicing the enterprise.
Chad: Yeah and I think ZipRecruiter's actually going at this in a different manner. Instead of buying a seat for a software, what you're doing is, you're actually just buying access to post jobs programmatically, and tap into their database when you need it, right? So it's not always there, you're not paying monthly fees unless you actually need it. You go out, you post a job, that's when the feed goes in place. You still have your seat there and available but it's not active unless you're actually using it.
Chad: So I think Zip is looking at this in an entirely different way than most of the other small, SMB types of applicant tracking systems that are out there. And again, Zip is doing shit right man. They're thinking about how small to medium sized business companies actually do work every single day and if they need an actual, an applicant tracking system every single day. They probably really don't. So yeah that's really cool and it'll be awesome to see Zip go from the SMB, don't know how long this is gonna take, to the enterprise. But yeah, there's some big names that are there and there's some different visions of what an applicant tracking system could and should be for the SMB market.
Joel: The last takeaway for me that I thought was interesting was the announcement of iCIMS Passport.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: The Passport products will, is essentially born out of the fact that job seekers would go to multiple career sites powered by iCIMS, and have to reapply for each one of those even though it's primarily most of the same profile because iCIMS is sort of powering each one of those for these companies. So the idea is that you'll have an iCIMS Passport which will be transferable between all the companies that use iCIMS. Which is interesting in and of itself but, more interestingly than that was how does Passport become almost a LinkedIn competitor, or something where companies can source profiles on LinkedIn Passport, among many, many companies. So I think how they do that will be interesting and I think they're still working through some of that. But the fact that they wanna have a cohesive passport for a job seeker to use amongst all iCIMS products, is a pretty interesting development, and I think we'll be watching that one really closely.
Chad: It's interesting because we've seen this throughout the years. AllianceQ did it. They had some big names, that were pooling resumes, right? It's all kind of like a, almost like a universal kind of resume which I think that's what Taleo called it at one time.
Joel Yeah.
Chad: JobFox did it. I mean these companies have done this before. The one thing that they did not have, GDPR. That shit dude, I mean that is going to scare the shit out of companies, not just overseas, but the compliance mechanisms that are going to start to gravitate this way to the United States, I mean yeah. Candidate data is candidate data. It's candidate rights type of thing which I think is really cool and that's the kind of messaging that we're hearing out of iCIMS. You know that's fair, and it just makes sense, right? So at the end of the day, there's a big hammer, compliance, that iCIMS can use today that JobFox, AllianceQ and Taleo could not.
Joel Yeah you know, one of the things that Colin said was that they wanted to be the moral compass for candidate experience. And I think that was a theme as well of like, you know, we've focused so much on the company and the employer, for the last ten, twenty years, now is the time where we really have to think about the candidate and their experience. And I think a lot of that's driven by regulation. He also mentioned, you know, the whole, Facebook, you know, disaster that they had with data and privacy. And so, so I think, yeah. Part of Passport is gonna be driven by the reality of GDPR and that the candidate has rights. That those should be adhered to.
Chad: We're moving into a much different, landscape than we were back in the Job Box days.
Joel: Agreed. Well let's take a quick break and we'll talk about Indeed and LinkedIn's blacklist.
Chad: Ha ha.
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Chad: You wanna take it to dinner. Oh yeah, and shout to our buddies at Sovren because if we're not there before then, but we're gonna be at TAtech in Austin in 2019. So start to get everything ready for a big Sovren TAtech fall event.
Joel: Yeah I think, yeah if Sovren wants to have a party and have Chad and Cheese there, you know, like I think we're game for that. Hint hint.
Chad: Yeah cause you know they're gonna bring the bourbon.
Joel: Alright dude, you've got some news on Indeed cock blocking some folks. What's going on there?
Chad: Yeah it's funny. From the Recruitics camp, I don't know. I think this is all kind of like rumor out there, which is fine. But we've also seen this, right? So supposedly in January, all staffing companies are gonna get kicked off of Indeed. Now it's been happening slowly already. I mean I've already heard from many of my friends in the industry that they've been doing it for probably, over a year now. But I think it's really hard for a company like Indeed to give that money away, even though they're doing it. But yeah, that's the rumor, is guess what guys? Indeed's gonna be throwing a huge, and they've been doing this, a huge ton, massive, amount of cash back into the market. So all of those Indeed competitors, guess what guys? Indeed just did you a huge fucking favor.
Joel: Why do you think, I mean I get from a maybe user perspective, but Indeed is doing some weird stuff. You know they're not playing with Google, I mean they're at risk with ATS's being the primary source for jobs. They're losing more and more traffic, like they're turning their backs on money that staffing firms and others wanna spend with them. I have a hard time wrapping my head around what sort of the goal is of all this stuff.
Chad: So okay, so first off, right out of the gate, I mean when I was at Monster, I mean staffing was 75% of our revenues, right out of the gate. Just because staffing adopts things so much faster, if it makes sense. They adopt things so much faster than talent acquisition. Talent acquisition sits and waits and there's just a longer adoption cycle there.
Chad: So 75% of the revenue when I was with Monster. That revenue, period, is always going to be there. It's not like they're going to switch over, right? So that's revenue that they're automatically going to lose. Now long term, do they believe Indeed Prime, is going to take a 100% of the staffing market? I mean is that really what they think is gonna happen? Because that would be really the big play here, right? Oh we're going to become a staffing company, and we only want the candidates coming to us, not to you. So these are our candidates. We want them coming to us, not to you. But, to to be able to make that work, you need 100% of the market, really. Or maybe not 100%. Maybe, it's gotta be a large percentage though, right? So they're losing a shit ton of money, for what reason, I have no clue.
Joel: I don't hear a lot about Prime anyway. Do you think that Indeed is really focused on that product?
Chad: I have no fucking clue dude. I have no clue why they would do something like this. I mean, and what they're talking about right now, we keep hearing about search quality, right? It's all about search quality. Well, it's pretty fucking simple. If you tell a company, we're going to kick you off of Indeed unless you do X, Y, Z, then guess what's going to happen? They're going to do X, Y, Z, especially if they're a staffing company and they're seeing ROI out of your product. Because staffing companies again, they react much quicker than your talent acquisition, just your regular, you know, direct employer company. So yeah man. I mean from my standpoint, this makes no sense. But, again, just like we're seeing on the Google side of the house where they're not playing Google with Google for jobs, all these different company's competitors are actually seeing more traffic cause they're now getting a redistribution of old Indeed traffic. And now guess what? They're gonna get a redistribution of old Indeed money.
Joel: Now the company that owns them is primarily a staffing company.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: So maybe the staffing play's it. Like they wanna be the, I mean there's a ton of money in staffing.
Chad: How big are they in the U.S.?
Joel: Not.
Chad: That's what, I mean.
Joel: It looks big.
Chad: If you're looking to make a play, if they're looking to make a play, they would have to make a staffing play, right? And it just doesn't make any sense, whatsoever.
Joel: Yeah and at least like let them advertise.
Chad: Right.
Joel: I mean you can sort of, you know, you can algorithmically or visually, you know, give them lower exposure or less exposure. But damn, the just to shut the door, is pretty crazy.
Chad: So yeah. And this goes pretty much into other things that I'm hearing from more than one source, multiple sources actually, like half a dozen sources, of UX platforms, who are getting kicked off of Indeed as well. So, like we were talking about with iCIMS, if you have this platform that you're using as a CRM and your user experience platform, and you want to be able to post the jobs and have the candidates come to this platform, really cool landing pages and just all experience and content which is what you're paying for, they are gathering data, on that platform, which is exactly what you want, right? Maybe just little bits of data. Indeed is saying guess what guys? You're not allowed on our platform anymore either. How does that make any sense?
Joel: It's hard for to wrap my head around it and I've been around a while. So, if anyone else can help us figure this out, hit us up at chadcheese.com.
Chad: Yeah. Anybody who is collecting, job seeker data, anybody, and I mean staffing companies, that's what they do, right? I mean that's a part of what they do. These UX companies, these user experience or candidate experience companies, that's why clients pay them.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: But I have heard from several companies saying that they've either been, there's an indication that that is rolling out and going to happen or it has already happened.
Joel: Well speaking of blacklists, apparently LinkedIn has one too. There was blog post-
Chad: Holy shit.
Joel: By a Josef José Kadlec. I'm probably saying that incorrectly, but he had a blog post that's gotten a lot of attention. Of companies, mainly Chrome extensions-
Chad: Plugins.
Joel: That have been blacklisted, by LinkedIn. Some of these we know. SeekOut, he's been on the show before. TalentBin owned by Monster. A lot of sort of small players. Entelo's on the list as well.
Chad: Wow.
Joel: So this list came out, got a lot of attention. I decided to do a little bit of Q and A or questioning of folks. So, LinkedIn has an official statement that I'll read here. It's a little lengthy, not too lengthy, but I'll make it quick.
Joel: So quote, "Our members control the information that they make available to others on LinkedIn and they trust us to honor that control. To protect our members, we don't permit the use of any software including crawlers, bots, browsers, plugins, or browser extensions, that scrapes or copies member data or that automates activity on or alters the appearance of LinkedIn pages. These tools are prohibited by our user agreement and may violate the law. This means that any LinkedIn member or customer who uses a tool like this is also violating the user agreement." Which I think is pretty interesting to go after the LinkedIn members.
Chad: That's bullshit. That's bullshit.
Joel: Yeah so that was their quote. Yeah, I know you're not real happy about that.
Chad: These provide efficiencies for companies, period. That's what they do, that's why they're there. And LinkedIn is really just kind of like the HiQ side, right? HiQ's like wait a minute, they're going to, they're going to create a competing product to us, okay, totally get it you know. Fair is fair. Capitalism, all that other fun stuff. But guess what? Now it's more of like a monopoly. No we're kicking your ass out of our ecosystem, even though our customer and your customer paid for your product, to be able to do exactly what it's doing. We're telling you to get the hell out of our ecosystem.
Joel: So I did reach out to Darren Kaplan, at HiQ, because we haven't heard an update on their case for a while.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: His message to me was that it's been radio silence from the court, and he'll keep us posted. So that either, either LinkedIn's lawyers have that sucker wrapped up in paperwork, or something. But that thing has hit a road bump. I reached out to Anoop Gupta from SeekOut, who we've also interviewed. If you haven't listened to that, you should. He wrote, "Thanks for reaching out. I'm curious where you learn," which I shared the blog post. He said, "Here's our understanding. LinkedIn tries to detect a bunch of extensions that are installed. SeekOut is one of these. However, to the best of our knowledge, LinkedIn is unable to detect if SeekOut is installed, as we don't have any web accessible resources and we don't make any changes to the webpage. So all they," this is good. "All they can do is try to scare people," which is why my question, if you know anyone else who's been actually banned due to the use of an extension. So ...
Chad: Yeah, yeah. See I love that.
Joel: Yeah and Anoop's a really smart guy, way smarter than we are. So that comment was really interesting.
Chad: Oh god yeah.
Chad: Also .. He used to advise Bill Gates.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: Anoop used to advise Bill Gates guys. So that's pretty much, you know, and again I'm paraphrasing, Anoop saying, you know, screw you guys. We've got this shit covered.
Joel: True story. And then I reached out to Ninh Tran at Hiretual, who's a pretty colorful guy. His response was basically fake news, connect if you want more kind of thing. So at least from the vendor side, there's not a lot of fear. This is a lot of fear mongering by LinkedIn, but it is getting a lot of attention from the sourcing, recruiting world and we thought we'd mention it. So if you have any knowledge or experience of sort of banning on LinkedIn, particularly from a personal perspective, which apparently is happening, we'd love to know more about it.
Chad: And I'm wondering ... yeah. I mean, if they're going to be kicking off customers, and really putting them in LinkedIn jail more so than anything else. Or again, is this just a Halloween scare tactic to get everybody all excited and it's like, "Oh my God, I can't buy any of these Chrome extensions or plugins," or anything like to just really hurt their business while they're trying to build competitive products.
Joel: By the way, our buddy, Doug at ZAPinfo also chimed in on this saying that they had a "secret sauce," which tends to be Doug's thing, like he's got something that no one else does, but they have not seen any sort of retribution from LinkedIn at this point.
Chad: Good for you, Doug. Good for you, Anoop You guys keep fighting the good fight.
Joel: So, a little bit more on LinkedIn. We announced their ATS last week. We talked about it. You had an interesting question from ... I forget who it is, but actually quoted or asked, will LinkedIn be in the job distribution business? And we have some thoughts on that.
Chad: Yeah, yeah. Question from Ian Partington over in northwest England, that's because they love us across the pond.
Joel: They do.
Chad: He's a CEO of Simply Jobs Boards. Yeah, he just wanted to know really if that's going to be an issue, or is it going to be one of these closed up ecosystems? Are they going to be able to really do job distribution? That's a great question. I think TalentHub will primarily be an SMB play for starters, so unless LinkedIn applies like a zip like kind of programmatic play, I don't think that they're going to be performing any old fashioned type of job distribution. Right?
Joel: No?
Chad: No. I think they're just gonna ... they can get away with that with an SMB kind of a structure because the expectations are so much lower. Now, if they were doing this on the enterprise side, that's an entirely different discussion, but I think they can build up from an SMB and start perspectively doing programmatic if that's where they want to go, but right out of the gate, I don't think that they need to.
Joel: So you don't think they'll go to Monster and CareerBuilder and say, "Hey, for the low, low price of X, you can be an option for people who post jobs to cross post onto your site?"
Chad: I'd love to see that because at the end of the day, if they can get those candidates ... they probably already have them, but maybe they don't. But if they can get those candidates sucked into LinkedIn, that's just, again, that's another Trojan horse kind of scenario, but maybe they just ... again, it depends on whether they want to lock up their ecosystem or they want to open it up.
Joel: Well, history says they want to lock it up. I also think that Google For Jobs has maybe made it possible for them to say no play, right? Like, as long as our jobs are on LinkedIn, they're also on exclusively Bing at the moment. Right? And we're in bed with Google For Jobs, so screw job boards and job distribution. They're on LinkedIn, they're on Bing, and they're on Google. What else do you want? What else do you need?
Chad: Yeah. Just real quick, I just got a text from an industry insider who is at Staffing World, and they said that they, yes, did indeed announce that all staffing out of organic results by January.
Joel: Wow. Wow. Alrighty. Let's take a quick break and we'll talk about blinders and scary clowns.
Chad: Donuts.
Joel: How's that for a tease?
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Chad: Okay, so I ... another text that's hilarious because this does make sense. Indeed announced this during Staffing World, right, so pretty much you're going into the lion's den saying, "Hey all you motherfuckers, you're not gonna be able to use us. Yeah." Why are they even there? Why are they even there? I mean that makes no goddamn sense, other than prime, right. Fuck that.
Joel: Let's be honest. The amount of hubris that we see out of Indeed right now makes the hubris that was coming out of Monster and CareerBuilder at its height look like bush league kind of hubris. I mean, Indeed is really pushing the our shit don't stink button pretty heavily and man, the mighty have fallen, and as we're predicting, it will happen again. So yeah, enjoy it while it lasts, Indeed, because history says it might not.
Chad: Hide and watch, kids.
Joel: Let's go through some quick, I guess ... some money was ... some checks were written and at least one company is headed toward the dead pool. I'll start with ConveyIQ, formerly take the interview. Danielle Weinblatt, a friend of the show, listener, CEO, founder, Ty Abernathy was part founder of the original company is still involved in some degree, but anyway, she launched ConveyIQ, they went beyond sort of the video interviewing thing to the sort of end to end scheduling, interviewing.
Chad: Messaging.
Joel: Automation stuff, messaging. Yeah, they're trying to do all of it. That launched a little over a year ago I think and they've raised $5.5 million dollars to take the company to the next level, so congrats to them and we'll be watching.
Chad: Another RPA play. I mean, process automation that is incredibly smart. How can I get more out of my recruiters? Take the stupid shit off their plate. Let our platform do it. Yeah, I think it's pretty awesome.
Joel: You've got Timely, right?
Chad: Yeah, so Memory-
Joel: Did they get money or ...
Chad: Memory ... Yeah.
Joel: Okay.
Chad: Memory, a Norwegian company actually secured $5 million for Timely and Timely, it's an AI based time tracking system for the service industry, which I thought was pretty fucking awesome, and they currently are used by 4000 paying customers across 160 countries. That's pretty big. But here's the thing that caught my eye. I started reading into it. Now here's a quote, "The tool automatically tracks the active, native, and web apps on the user's computer, location, and traveling mobile calls and calendar events, and suggests time slots descriptions. It also learns." It learns a bunch of shit and it's tapped into pretty much everything that you do. I have a big no effing way that I would use this thing.
Joel: Interesting. Another funding that we didn't I think cover in the pre-show meeting was JobUFO, one of the more interesting URLs or brands out there. They raised two million Euros, which I think is three something million dollars. Anyway, so they raised money. They're out of Germany. They're a sort of video interviewing place, so they received some money, good for them.
Chad: JobUFO, a video interviewing thing. Okay. Those don't match up.
Joel: Maybe it's pronounced Job-uff-oh.
Chad: Either way.
Joel: By the way, it's funny when you ... so when you translate your site to other languages, but have video that is not translated, it's very interesting. If you go to the site from the US, it's in English, but the video's in German, so it could be a little confusing for consumers, I think. Something to think about in marketing is hey, if you're gonna translate your site, have a video version of that language that you're translating to.
Chad: Yeah, especially if you're trying to penetrate more markets than just the German market might make sense.
Joel: Yeah. As pleasant as the German language is, no one knows what the hell the girl's saying that's getting a job. Anyway, if that's it for the money, we've got a death pool, a dead pool recipient, which is a little bit close to home.
Chad: It's bittersweet.
Joel: Yeah, bittersweet. This was a firing squad company that faced the squad. They were shut down. So we knew the future before it happened and Hirevisor, who faced the squad and was shot down, is now announcing that they're going bye bye.
Chad: Yeah. Back in June, they jumped on the firing squad and we had an open, honest discussion with Patrick and yeah, I mean, that's one of the things about ... what I love about being able to interact with the CEOs who really have backbone and they want to hear, really from both barrels, whether we believe they're gonna make it or they're not and we told ... we both hit Patrick with the guns and ... not saying that ... We didn't send him spiraling into this, guys, so don't blame this shit on us.
Joel: Don't blame it on us. By the way, my man is smart. Worked at LinkedIn, he's got an Ivy League education, he's gonna be fine. I think one of the things that we said was, "Dude. There's great things in your future, but this is not it." So, we expect to see him again, maybe not in the employment industry, but we will see him again launch something that is successful.
Chad: We talked about blinders?
Joel: Blinders and scary clowns, yeah. You talk about blinders and I'll talk about scary clowns.
Chad: Okay, so it's interesting because there's a company that is providing a new product called Wear Space, and what it is is it's really blinders. You know the blinders that you've seen on horses?
Joel: Oh yeah.
Chad: It's like those blinders but yet it has ... it also has like Bose or something like that, like ear phones, in them as well, so it's from a peripheral standpoint, you're totally cut off and you're focused on whatever you're looking at and you can put whatever kind of white noise or listen to whatever you want to listen to, but yeah, it looks hilarious. We're gonna ... I'm gonna post a video everywhere, LinkedIn, Twitter, what have you, because it is so freaking hilarious.
Joel: It's incredibly dystopian. Like imagine a ... you know, an open work area with desks and people developing and whatever and all of them have blinders on their heads. I mean it's scary. Now I will say that I've been to plenty of companies with developers who all have headphones in and all just stare at the screen all day, so in many ways they're already blinded and deaf to what's going on around them anyway. The blinders I guess would just support and industrialize the whole don't look around and don't listen to anything, just focus on the screen and just code.
Chad: Yeah, it's total 1984 shit. It really looks like it.
Joel: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Scary clowns. It's October. This is fantastic. There's a donut shop in Missouri that you can hire scary-ass clowns to deliver donuts to the office. And they have a Facebook page with videos and the videos of this shit is hilarious. Like the clown will have a balloon and it will stand outside the window of the office, like if it's an executive in an office, the clown will sit outside with a balloon and scare.
Chad: Oh that's awesome.
Joel: It's just hilarious. Yeah, more companies should embrace this kind of insanity, because it's really funny and people like us talk about it. But anyway, if you live in the Missouri area, we'll put the name of the company on the site. Hire these guys, videotape it.
Chad: Yes, please.
Joel: Send it to us, and have fun with scary clowns delivering donuts.
Chad: It'd be funny as hell if they actually sent the recipient, like they call them on their mobile phone, and they had the recording of the little kid saying, "You'll float too."
Joel: Dude, it's good stuff. And you could branch out into all kinds of scary shit delivering stuff.
Chad: God yeah, that's good shit.
Joel: But anyway.
Chad: Yeah. Okay.
Joel: With that, man, Halloween's coming. We out.
Chad: We out.
Stella: Hi. This is Stella Cheesman. Thanks for listening to the Cheese and Chad podcast, or at least that's what I call it. Anyway, make sure you subscribe on iTunes, that silly Android phone thingy, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Be sure to give buckets of money to our sponsors, otherwise I may be forced to take that coal mining job I saw on Monster.com. We out.