Thanksgiving is over, and business is business, so the boys are back in the saddle and breaking down the recruiting industry's hottest news...
- LinkedIn shuts down email downloads and taking launches Snapchat wannabe
- Amazon gets your learn-on while they tiptoe into the job board game
- and we've got jive turkeys galore!
Enjoy and kick the tryptophan hangover with sponsors Sovren, JobAdX and Canvas.
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: It's a post-Thanksgiving, fat-pants-wearing, detox episode of The Chad and Cheese Podcast, HR's most dangerous and most glutinous. I'm Joel Cheesman.
Chad: And I'm Chad no-tryptophan Sowash.
Joel: On this week's episode, Amazon gets into the job board game. Linked takes on Snapchat. And it ain't cool being no jive turkey on Thanksgiving. Stay tuned, we'll be right back after this message from Canvas and go Bucks.
Announcer: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text-based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center while Canvas bot is at your side adding automation to your workplace. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser-focused on recruiter success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io get ready to text at the speed of talent.
Chad: Text at the speed of talent.
Joel: Happy post Thanksgiving, black Friday, week of the plague in my house, welcome back.
Chad: Cyber Monday.
Joel: Cyber Monday, yes. Any deals in your cross hairs for today?
Chad: Eh. Not yet. I'll check it out. I'm not really the shopper in this whole group, but I think I'm probably an online-shopper more than anything else. Human beings just piss me off.
Joel: Okay. Yeah, thanks for warming things up there Sowash. I was getting all warm and fuzzy with the Thanksgiving and you pull out the, "I hate human beings."
Chad: Happy holidays.
Joel: Happy holidays.
Chad: Stupid human beings.
Joel: You have to love Christmas though, right?
Chad: I'm one of those individuals when you shop you know exactly what you're going to go after. And you go in, I'm on a mission, I know what my objective is. I knock that out, I'm in, I'm out, I'm back home, not waiting in lines, not looking through the sale rack, not doing all that happy shit. So I know what I'm good at and shopping's not that.
Joel: Fair enough. Fair enough. I don't know what you meant by, "I'm not the shopper of the group." Like my reputation is being some shopaholic?
Chad: I think you're the shopper.
Joel: I have a 20-month-old dude. My venture is outside the house are pretty relegated to survival activities.
Chad: Which means if you have a chance to go shopping right now, you would take it in a heartbeat?
Joel: Yeah. On a personal note, last week was really rough on the
Cheesman household. We had stomach flu going around.
Chad: Plague.
Joel: We had vomit and we had all kinds of stuff going on. It was just a bad time. We were supposed to go to Canada for the holiday. That got canceled, so we had pork chops for dinner on Thanksgiving. We've pretty much guaranteed that our Christmas will be drama free and fantastic because we paid the price for Thanksgiving.
Chad: Yeah, if you set those expectations. Ah, okay. Let's just hope everything goes well.
Joel: Everything has to go well. It has to go well.
Chad: It has to go better than Thanksgiving.
Joel: Yes, the silver lining was I was able to watch the Ohio State Buckeyes just dismantle the mighty Michigan Wolverines formerly number four ranked in the country. So normally when we go to Canada it's a big thing to like, you know the family's here, don't watch the game, like be cool and stuff. So the one silver lining was I did get to watch the Buckeyes just whoop some ass this weekend.
Chad: Yeah, well that's going to start out Shout outs with Penny Queller over at Monster. That team up north sucks Penny, again. Buckeyes baby.
Joel: Harbaugh dude, his life, I mean he's got to be in the NFL. He has to hate just being man handled by Urban Meyer every year. It's just sad. But yeah, that was good.
Joel: I'll shout out to Sarah Holden, our buddy up in, we're speaking of Canada. Sarah Holden works for Neuvoo or however we pronounce it. And recently got a master's in arts, I think. I'm not sure how the Canada collegiate system works, but yeah looks like she got a master's degree and posted that online. Sarah, good for you man. Keep on keeping on.
Chad: Master's in bad-assery. I like to keep with my football theme and thank God the Eagles beat the Giants last night because poor Ed from Philly is about to have an aneurysm.
Joel: Well, I've got Carson Wentz on one of my fantasy squads and he's had some pretty bad crappy weeks back-to-back. So good on Philly. They're not going to make the play-offs and Carson Wentz is sucking, but yeah good for you. You beat the Giants. Way to go.
Joel: My Browns went down to Cincinnati this weekend and totally just ripped up, It's the Bengals, but the Bengals have owned them for the last 20 years. So, it was kind of refreshing. And my wife noted that I'm warming up a little bit to Mr. Baker Mayfield.
Chad: Well, you have to. They've won four times as many games as they had last year. I mean you've got to look for some beacon of hope for goodness sakes.
Joel: Look, I like the kid's style. He's got some hootspa, he's accurate. I'm really concerned that it's going to snow and the wind's gonna blow on the lake. And it's going to be December and he's not going to be able to do it. So, we shall see.
Chad: We shall see. That being said, getting out of football and getting in to more shout-outs. Shout out to Steven in Faith Rothberg. They have a College Recruiting AI Bootcamp going on at the Googleplex. If you want to go, again it's about college recruiting, and they're talking about AI and how that obviously all fits into college recruiting. Just go to Google, go figure, and google College Recruiting AI Bootcamp. And it's free. So, if you're in that area, shit, you should be going anyway.
Joel: Yeah. By the way, did we bring up the LinkedIn faux pas by you when you though Faith was Louise and you commented as if it was Faith and it wasn't? Have we talked about that yet, because that was kind of a big boner, brain boner, by you.
Chad: That was hilarious. First off, I was on mobile, okay. So the pictures were much smaller and I could see it was a redhead. So, Faith's a redhead, Louise is a redhead. So, Louise, my bad. You know I love you, but yeah I actually tagged Faith in a comment on something that Louise had put out there. So, yeah, my bad. I had two great looking redheads.
Joel: It sounds you're saying all redheads look the same.
Chad: It was a very small picture and they were both redheads and I got confused.
Joel: I think you're in dangerous territory. I think you're... Although I think redheads is probably the only group of people that you can say that and they don't get offended. I could be wrong.
Chad: No.
Joel: Shout out for me. I wrote five things I'm thankful for, which you just got to write that post for every holiday. By the way I'm excited about year end shows and our prediction shows, which are always on the air, which we will do.
Joel: So, I had five things, I won't mention all of them, but in one my first shout out here I'm going to shout out to the arms race. The arms race has been very good for our business. They're good for podcasting and blogging. The moment Microsoft dropped 26 billion big ones on LinkedIn, it got Google's attention, it got Facebook's attention, it upped everyone's game on the Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Monster, Scale. It maybe brought in Amazon, which we'll talk about here in a second.
Joel: So, the arms race has been very good. I'm thankful that Microsoft wrote a check because it's made our industry and talking about it much more entertaining.
Chad: Yes. You are correct. Shout out to your favorite VR headsets.
Joel: Yes.
Chad: That's right baby. This holiday season everyone is looking for gifts and VR is now back in style. We're seeing these damn commercials all over the place but I did see a really cool immersion, first person movie. I watched the trailer. It's actually a Robert Rodriguez movie. It's called The Limit and it's got Norman Reedus from The Walking Dead and Michelle Rodriguez from a ton of halfway decent movies. But yeah dude, this looks really cool and we were talking about VR and how it could prospectively make it to mainstream and I watched this video and I'm like, "Ah dude, this trailer." I'm like, "Dude this is awesome." And then you get to the end of the trailer and they show the person with the thing on their face. I'm like, "Nah, fuck that. I'm not doing that."
Joel: Dude, I have to watch, Is this a commercial? Is this a trailer?
Chad: Yeah, it's a trailer. I'll send it to you.
Joel: All right. Are you actually coming around to VR now?
Chad: No, I think I just made it very clear. I'm not going to look like that idiot in that Geico commercial who is waving one way and pushing.
Joel: You mentioned the commercials, right. There is Oculus has a huge campaign here in the states. I don't know about the rest of the world. They have Jonah Hill, Leslie Jones from Saturday Night Live, the dude from Maroon 5. They have stars that have VR headsets, they're like at court side at the Lakers game or they're in the movie. So, Oculus is making a good faith effort to get VR mainstream. So what you're saying is that whole diatribe was sarcasm by you and you're totally not into VR?
Chad: Yes.
Joel: You're going to come around my friend, I'm telling you. I don't own one of these things but I'm closer now to buying one than I ever have.
Chad: Yeah. The immersion is so cool, but being immersed with that thing on your head, I just can't bring myself to do it. So that's where I'm at right now, but if you want to check this out, it's called The Limit. Just go to YouTube, look for The Limit. And again it's a Robert Rodriguez film, the guy who did Sin City, From Dusk till Dawn, Grindhouse, Machete, those guys. And yeah, it's a first person type of immersion film. It's pretty cool.
Joel: All right, cool. So obviously like everything online, it's going to take porn to take it over the line, so you know. I'm sure that we're going to start seeing not be personally, but I think the industry as a whole, the world will start seeing VR porn. And we'll see if this thing really has legs or not. I'm not sure legs is the right word, but anyway.
Joel: This might be my last shout out. In my thankful five, I had the economy. You and I know that when the economy is good this industry is good, right. Money flows, people get hired, which means more readers and listeners and it just snowballs from there. But when the economy sucks, it's really not great. So this year has been an on fire economy which means that has been a good thing. Now I will say that there are little buds of depression that I think are sprouting starting with the stock market, which tends to be leading indicator with the world is ending. It's been a bad month for the stock market and I fear that the tariff wars, the gridlock in Washington, Russia's firing guns on Croatia or somebody. I'm a little bit worried about 2019 but we're talking about 2018 and I'm thankful for the fantastic economy that we have enjoyed in our business.
Joel: Let's talk about jive turkeys.
Chad: Jive turkeys.
Joel: Because trading places is my favorite line, "It ain't cool being no jive turkey so close to Thanksgiving." So E.R. Rita wrote a post. People love these kind of posts. My top three jive turkeys from 2018. I can mention them, you can comment or disagree whatever. So my first turkey for the year was Indeed. To me that obvious, they said no to Google, they block staffing companies that don't like your talent market. They bought weird companies like Resume.com, they went to Canada to apparently block ZipRecruiter's move to buy Workopolis. The Glassdoor thing is kind of confusing to me. They've been real defensive, they've been real reactionary. For their sake I hope they clear things up and become more proactive and positive in 2019, but for 2018 man they've been a big turkey.
Chad: Yeah, and sticking it to staffing firms and anything that you can call a talent network, two black marks right, on what they've done in 2018. And the thing that comes down to Indeed they just don't care. They're going to make the moves that they want to make and they're going to try to force other segments of the industry to do what they want them to do. And we're going to hate you for that.
Joel: It's immense hubris, they think they're on top and they arguably are. I mean it was also a huge year for revenues, for headcount, for real estate holdings, all that stuff trended very nicely for them this year. But we saw this with Monster. There was a hubris, we're at the top of the mountain. We're not coming down. And we're going to make the rules and you're going to follow them or get run over. And that's kind of their mentality this year.
Joel: I think Google has been a real wake up for them. And I think that they can't deny that that's been a huge hit on their business. But overall I think they feel pretty good about themselves.
Chad: I guarantee they do.
Joel: My second jive turkey that I had, which is pretty obvious, four-month report by AIM Group, who by the way if you're not at aimgroup.com looking at the news, everything, classifieds. They're probably the foremost reporting arm for international job board, everything classified. But anyway, they did a four month investigative report on a site called startjobs.net and their other side online resume something, online resume help, I don't know what it was. Anyway, they were using ZipRecruiter jobs which by the way you reached out and I don't know if you have any information on that. But they were using sort of ZipRecruiter backfill. Was it ZipRecruiter or Talroo.
Chad: Jobs2Careers.
Joel: Job-
Chad: Several streams of different organizations. Yeah, just content they were using.
Joel: It's not one backfill provider, but anyway they were using legitimate jobs to get people to submit really detailed information including mortgage debt information, including marital stuff. This goes back 10 years when Monster had interstitial ads of companies that were requesting social security numbers. So, this is nothing new. It's not going to stop, it's going to continue to go forward. People are going to get scammed, there is a sucker born every minute. But for 2018, StartJobs was the most visible biggest jive turkey on the scam category for me. So suck it StartJobs. Hopefully all the backfill providers will cut them off and they will be left with nada.
Chad: Yeah, well the web is always been a place for individuals who just will click on anything or share anything to get their shit stolen. And we've just got to be better as a community overall in how we utilize the web, what we share, privacy and understanding just because we're applying for a job doesn't mean that they get all of our details, all of our info. And I think we're going to see more regulation around that. We're going to see some regulation in California drop in 2020 that's actually stricter than GDPR in and around Europe. So, this is going to change, but we have to ourselves, we have to control and try to police our own industry. And this is where we got to call assholes like StartJobs.net out. And we have to put them on the front page and hopefully get them shut down if they don't change how they do business.
Joel: I think to me, they're not part of the industry, but they bring everyone down with them which is sort of the sad thing. One scammy job site brings down every job site from the most legitimate to the least legitimate or Nichey site out there. And it wasn't, once they got the information, the real problem was the barrage of marketing that the people who gave the information over sort of suffered after that. So there was constant emails. It was constant barrage of text messaging. We've talked about in the past as having some challenges in the future that we're using 10 digit numbers instead of short codes which have less regulation.
Joel: By the way, this funny side story, I get a text this week and it says, "Hi, I'm your text door neighbor. How are you?" And I'm thinking what in the hell is this? So I play along I want to see if it's a bot, I want to see what happen. I say, "Who is this?" And they say, "It's your text door neighbor. Look at the phone number." So my phone number last four digits are 1578 this number was 1579. So apparently there's this new thing now where people are texting one number higher than them and claiming to be their text door neighbor and trying to have a conversation or get to know these people. I quickly like shut it off said, "Leave me alone." But this is, it's kind of weird, right? And it wasn't a bot, it was an actual person. So if you get someone that says, "Hey, I'm your text door neighbor." Take my story for what it's worth.
Chad: What the fuck are they, don't these people have lives?
Joel: They don't. It was probably a 15 year old teenager just hanging. But that was weird anyway. Anyway, all right, back to the jive turkeys because I've got leftovers to eat for lunch. Anyway my last jive Turkey, I think it was obvious as well CareerBuilder. CareerBuilder in '18 was just podcasting gold. I mean, whether it was like laying off people, people leaving, people mad, postponed or canceled sales trips, letting Matt Ferguson go after 14 years as CEO, execs leaving by the handfuls putting a CFO in charge of a tech company and claiming we're going to innovate. It was just a bad jive turkey of a year for CareerBuilder, but it was an obvious choice for me.
Chad: Yeah, well all I have to say is El Chapo thank you for El Trappo. That was fucking hilarious because it was the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And thank you also CareerBuilder for Pokemon for jobs. That is still funny and we will continue to make fun of you as long as we can think about that, so yeah. Thanks so much CareerBuilder, El Chapo, Pokemon for jobs, that is podcasting gold.
Joel: Yes, I can't wait til you make fun of their Oculus VR job search technology coming to hr tech in 2019.
Chad: Yeah, it's coming.
Joel: All right, any more jive turkeys that you have to add to my list of three.
Chad: No, I want to get on to Amazon man.
Joel: All right, what did Amazon do this week?
Chad: Wooo Amazon's doing some cool shit. This all comes together in being able to finally get an entry into the jobs market. So much like we saw LinkedIn bought Lynda from an educational standpoint. Amazon has this AWS courses that they've put together and it's pretty fucking cool in what they're doing. I mean there are 30 hours of training that they've actually pulled together with audacity and for professional areas called cloud architect, software developer, operations support, engineer and analytics in big data scientists or specialists. This is what they need, right? So Amazon is actually trying to pull people into providing free education. You've heard this free education because they know that these types of individuals first are in short supply, number one.
Chad: Number two, they need to get them into positions quickly. So get them educated up and then well wait a minute, what if we create too many of these individuals, will get some other companies involved too like Salesforce, like that was it Cloud Next and Splunk and there is some other companies that need these same types of individuals. But Amazon is actually making this happen on the AWS side of the house. This is something that you and I have been talking about for a while. I don't believe that individuals should be paying for education to be quite frank because they're going to be the tools that actually make money for these companies and AWS sees this, not to mention finally if you're a company that are looking for these types of individuals, you can post jobs for free.
Joel: What? Free Job Board Amazon?
Chad: Free.
Joel: Yes, total agreement. And I'll add that by the way while you're educating these people they're probably buying Amazon products and services. They are probably be becoming loyal to the brand of Amazon. They probably would really love to work for Amazon and by proving that they're really competent in these skills, could potentially land a job at Amazon which really cares deeply about cloud services and whatnot. I've been calling and I will probably just predict it for next year because I did this year and I feel like it's going to happen, Amazon needs to buy Slack, they need to bring this sort of educational thing into the workplace and put in the AWS infrastructure within companies and build an enterprise arm which could flow through this Slack interface and platform. So I know you've heard that before you laugh at me, maybe this is a step into convincing you that AWS is slowly getting into the enterprise workforce game and that they will be a force to be reckoned with along with Facebook, Google and LinkedIn and Microsoft for 2019.
Chad: Yeah, I know, I think we all knew that Amazon was going to get into it. We just didn't know how. I think Slack could be a good delivery system. I'm not sure that they'll do it. I mean I think that they have infrastructure to be able to build something themselves, but they could, I mean there's no question. Here's the cool part and you said this earlier. Amazon approaches a lot of these new product areas and pricing competitively or just making it free, right? And the way that this is actually bringing new users to their doorstep. So there's a sizable revenue opportunity and being able to provide not just something for the masses, right? To be able to provide qualified talent for positions they need filled asap, but it also wants ... We've been talking about this, they also see customers and that's the biggest issue that talent acquisition has I think over the years is they don't see candidates as customers and they don't understand that a negative impact with that brand, with your brand means that individual could prospectively never spend money with you, right?
Chad: And that's a bad thing. Millions of dollars, so even more could be lost. So I think this is incredibly smart on many different levels and I'm most impressed and happy to see a company actually step out and say, "Look, we're going to provide free education to these individuals to get them into obviously our positions or Salesforce positions." Right. And who else do you think is going to embrace that? That's my question because this is genius.
Joel: Yeah. I mean, to me it becomes interesting when, let's be honest, I mean if you hear someone graduates from the University of Phoenix or Capella or one of these sort of online, New Hampshire, whatever. You sort of look at it and okay, is it a real degree, right? Is it really going to hold water with an employer like a Purdue degree would or Northwestern or a typical college, right. So I'll be really curious because I think Amazon holds a certain level of Gravitas with brand trust that if I go into an employer and I say, "Hey, I have a AWS or Amazon, I'm an Amazon certified cloud data store." Whatever that might be, does that hold as much weight as saying, "Hey, I have a computer science degree from Purdue." And I think the day that we get there is a very interesting day. But I think Amazon's going to hold a lot more clout than say the University of Phoenix.
Chad: Yeah. I think at the end of this, what we're going to see is the different types of certifications, that's one thing. But also you got to remember most of these universities are going if not fully online full offerings online because they understand that's where education is going. So to be able to have partnerships with the AT&Ts of the world or the Amazons of the world to provide and be that educational backbone or curriculum backbone, I think is important. So yeah, I think this is not the first step but we're still early into this. I think you will see some of those big brands from the university side be a part of these specific types of educational delivery systems.
Joel: Well, the times they are changing.
Chad: Thank God.
Joel: Let's hear a quick word from JobAdX and talked about talk about
Linkedin.
Announcer: As the best ad tool in the industry, JobAdX has been providing job board publishers, direct employers, agencies, RPOs and staffing firms, dynamic job bidding and real time ad delivery through our programmatic job advertising exchange. When we started, we described JobAdX as AdSense for jobs. Now, we offer much more with switchboard and live alert, completing our full suite of dynamic programmatic advertising tools with the best of consumer ad tech. Switchboard offers our dynamic technologies to all partner job board feed management. And live alert eliminates latency and expired job ads via email. For more information about any of our ads solutions, please reach out to us at join us at jobadx.com. That's join us at jobadx.com. JobAdX, the best ad tool, providing smarter programmatic for all your advertising needs.
Joel: There you go.
Chad: JobAdX, bring it.
Joel: Bringing it to the whole hard.
Chad: I don't know that I like that statement at all.
Joel: That was a little anyway.
Chad: It's bad.
Joel: If you had the stomach flu that I had, you might be in the same state of mind anyway, LinkedIn man, this is some good news. You want to start with the blocked emails or the Snapchat competitor?
Chad: Wherever you want to go with this because either way it's going to be interesting.
Joel: It's going to be interesting. Let's just start with emails and then we'll follow up with the humor of them launching a Snapchat competitor, okay. So, I want to say it was a year or two ago that there was word, the rumors were buzzing that LinkedIn was going to deny people the ability to download the contact information of their network.
Chad: Right.
Joel: I contacted LinkedIn about this, they emphatically said, "No, you can still do this." And it was true, they weren't blocking it or stopping that functionality but everyone kind of knew like at some point LinkedIn is not going to let you do this and we finally have word of what they're doing. So they're not all, they're not out now saying you can't download your contacts. However, everyone in their settings is defaulted to not letting people download their information and they have to go in and approve or opt in to have their data basically downloaded by their network, which let's be honest most people aren't going to do. So your network of a thousand people, if you wanted to download the information, you might get like two or three actual contacts who are willing and able to let you download their stuff.
Joel: A lot of people are mad about this. I understand in the recruiting space certainly in the sales and marketing, this was something that people did and do. But I'm not sure widespread a lot of people are going to care, a lot of people don't even know that they can download their contacts from LinkedIn.
Chad: Yeah, and once again we take a look at just Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, right. And being able to pull all that data from profiles, that's hard and that's very impactful to be able to tell that story. And I think LinkedIn are saying, "Hey look, this is the time right now to take a tougher stance on quote unquote privacy." And to really default to the strictest policy as quite the opposite of what we've seen from companies like Facebook over the years. I mean, when you start with a Facebook account used to be, I don't know if it still is, is that your account was wide open, public saw everything. You had to go into the settings, you had to change those. And it made it much easier for competitors to go in, scrape up data or you know the Analytica is in the world to come in and scrape up data and do whatever they're going to do with it.
Chad: I guess did LinkedIn's users know that their contact info was exposed and did they care? Is One of the questions. Is LinkedIn taking more of a protective stance for their users or is this really more of a defensive posture and they're using the news of the day to be able to do that.
Joel: That's a lot of questions there. I think most people don't know about being able to download their contacts. I think because we live in the recruiting world that's sort of common practice. And I think that LinkedIn initially made it possible because when your network was 300 people, it was all business contacts there will be only Jigsaw and some other competitors at the time that would allow you to extract your contacts, put them in act or put them in some like-
Chad: CRM.
Joel: Yeah, also CRM or sales tool that made sense. And a lot of salespeople and marketers probably did that. But now people have thousands in their network, a lot of them were done 10 years ago, I don't even know this person anymore. Yeah, I do think the privacy element of just making it harder for people to extract data from LinkedIn and making use select yeah, I do want my data to be extracted. It's probably a good move for them but I can definitely see why the recruiters would be ticked off by something like this.
Chad: Yeah. Well, I mean if you pay for seats, they're still shutting that
down. Is that the case too? Or is this just from the public standpoint?
Joel: As far as I know this is just like, okay, well, you and I are connected on LinkedIn. So previously I could go in and say I want to download all my contacts and I could get your information, which I could get on LinkedIn anyway in a CSV file and then I could create a spreadsheet with all my contacts and do whatever I wanted with that information. Basically you have to now opt in for me to be able to extract your contact information.
Chad: Okay. And that's even on pay versions too then, okay.
Joel: Yeah, I think this is just your individual network, yeah, not like on paid and I want to extract all this salespeople in Palo Alto or something.
Chad: So again, being able to say that this is kind of using the news of the day. It's very Indeed like, right? So Indeed tells companies how your job suck unless you pay me and then they don't suck anymore. It's kind of the same thing and this is what I'm hearing is that hey, we want to make sure that you have strict privacy for your contact information unless somebody over here pays for it and then we're just going to make it available.
Joel: No, I don't think you are going to pay your way into extracting your network. I think it's a network wide. People have to accept being able to be downloaded by someone in their network.
Chad: I have to do some research on that especially for recruiter seats because I think that would impact the actual ROI of paying for a recruiter seat in some cases. I mean it's not the entire reason but still, if I'm buying a recruiter seat, I want access to the data.
Joel: I also wonder if there are tools out there where you can put in multiple account information and maybe you regularly download all your contacts and it just sort of does that every month or every quarter or whatever just to make sure that you're getting all those contacts into some sort of database. I'm sure there are sales tools and stuff like that and products that will suffer from this new privacy feature. But I can't think of any off the top of my head and recruiting that would be negatively impacted by what LinkedIn just did.
Chad: Yeah. And I see this is a step, not the final step. What do you think?
Joel: Yeah, I mean the walled gardens are going up, whether you're Indeed or LinkedIn or Facebook. Facebook has made a lot of changes to protect its users and probably will make even more in the future. For example, their API used to be able to pull co-workers from your data and you can't do that anymore for APIs and stuff. So yeah, everyone's getting more private and more closed than open. Good thing, bad thing. Individual privacy I guess it's a great thing for businesses and innovation. It's arguably a bad thing. There'll be a balance there somewhere.
Chad: Yeah, that's the hard part, right? You've got all these innovative companies that are popping up all over the place who need data to provide a service that companies are asking for. Companies are asking for an opportunity to prospectively suck all this relevant data into a CRM or an RMP and now guess what, that could prospectively be gone by the wayside.
Joel: Yeah for sure. I mean it brings back memories of our interview with Sean from a HiringSolved and if you haven't listened to that interview and the live show from HiringSolved or HIREconf you should. They throw away 29 million profiles from Europe because dealing with GDPR and privacy, it was just too much of a hassle to deal with. And so I see that spreading to multiple vendors and people that provide services like that across the world. I mean I was talking to Doug Berg from Zap Info, their solution is if I want to extract someone's contact information that they have sent an email saying, "Hey, this company wants to extract your contact information, please click here to approve or not." I mean, I think that's going to greatly deter the number of contacts that you can grab if you have to ask permission from people before you actually do it.
Chad: Oh yeah, there's no question. And then how many people are just going to not even reply, just delete that email.
Joel: Oh, 98 plus percent probably.
Chad: Yeah. So that-
Joel: I know and really want to work for like, I'm definitely not going to let you just take my data.
Chad: Yeah. You have to do some really good email marketing at that point, a message marketing at that point and hopefully that company has a damn strong brand.
Joel: Yeah, I mean that's tough one. Anyway, so in the more odd LinkedIn news, email blocking was not surprising to anyone. More surprising was they launched a Snapchat competitor, something called Student Voices where basically the goal is to have students provide videos on their newsfeed that disappear after a certain time period. I don't know, I don't really have a comment on this other than what the hell were they thinking, students are not going to hang out on LinkedIn and do Snapchat shit. They're going to be on Snapchat to do Snapchat shit.
Chad: Yeah. So, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think so the content was going to be available for a certain duration within the actual stream, but it was saved on the actual individual's profile. So it's like they didn't lose it but it was going to be lost within the stream itself. Is that the way it was going to work?
Joel: Yeah. I'll give you the quick summary here. So LinkedIn begins testing Student Voices, what they're calling it. It's a stories like feature which you're seeing either on Snapchat or Instagram or Facebook. Facebook you're saying stories all the time. This is targeted at college students, so it lets users post short videos which are added to their school's campus playlist. The videos disappear from the playlist after a week but remain on the uploaders profile.
Chad: I got nothing man. It seems like a lot of development time and I understand what I mean, It makes perfect sense what they're trying to do, they're trying to attract a demographic that they perspectively right now are not attracting or they could perspectively lose. So yeah, it's hard. I mean, we're going to talk about Facebook and how certain demographics aren't using Facebook and others are. How from a LinkedIn standpoint does that work? Do you turn into a Snapchat or does that really devalue the overall professional platform itself? I mean, I guess they're taking the gamble that it's not devaluing at all or we're not getting these kids possibly.
Joel: We actually have some live footage from the Student Voices platform. All right, where there is no crickets is our sponsor Sovren. Let's hear a quick word from them and talk about the end of Facebook.
Chad: What?
Sovren: Sovren is known for providing the world's best and most accurate parsing products. And now, based on that technology come Sovren's artificial intelligence matching and scoring software, in fractions of a second receive match results that provide candidate score by fit to job and just as importantly, the jobs fit to the candidate, make faster and better placements. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com. That's sovren.com We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human you'll want to take it to dinner.
Chad: I do want to take it to dinner. I just don't know where we would go. That's exactly what I'm getting.
Joel: Facebook has been under fire this year. We don't have to rehash everything, but there's been a lot of talk about people are going to leave Facebook in droves. I've basically said, "That's total garbage, people will stick around, they don't care yada yada." Well, apparently people do. Pew reports this past week that 44 percent of Facebook users in their twenties have deleted the App from their phones. You shared a story from Gizmodo that said one in four Americans really have deleted Facebook's App from their phone.
Chad: Yeah. Obviously it's taking a toll. I think what we're seeing now in our streams on Facebook is much different than what we're seeing on LinkedIn or maybe Twitter from one side to the other. And for some reason some people felt safe at Facebook and having conversations with friends and whatnot. And then the next thing you know, all this trash has been shared. And then after the election and all that other fun stuff, there's no trust in some cases. It also said that 42 percent of the people who were in this survey had taken several week breaks from Facebook. So it wasn't just people deleting, it's also people who are like, "You know what, I'm taking a break from Facebook, I'm going to take the month off." And I've heard people say that, "I have took the month off of from Facebook and that doesn't bode well for Facebook because once you're away from it and you've kind of break those chains, you really don't feel you need to be there anymore. It gives you that nice little bread crumb to just delete the damn thing or just stop using it entirely.
Joel: Yeah. I'm torn by the whole thing. I mean, so there's stuff coming out that kids that are on social media or more depressed and suicidal than those who aren't. And there's stuff coming out, I think it was the CEO of a Salesforce who said that social media is the cigarettes of our time, right. So there is huge under fire the stuff. But then I think I don't feel more depressed because of social media. I feel like it brings me closer to my family and people I like generally than it's a bad thing for me. And then I also think like, Is this generational. Right like, so my generation will be like the Facebook people. Like will age, will be 80 years old still on Facebook sharing stuff and like people in their twenties, Facebook is for old people like us. So they're going to have their thing, which I guess is going to be Snapchat.
Joel: Now, Instagram is also their thing and we've talked about that. But Instagram is owned by Facebook, so most of these kids don't even know they're on Facebook technically because, Oh, I'm on Instagram not Facebook. And then the next generation coming up like my kids, they won't be on Facebook or Snapchat, they'll be on something else. There'll be on their VR headsets or they'll be doing whatever. I just think generationally that things are going to like come and go and as a business that's really risky because, yeah, we're good until these guys get old and we're not cool anymore. I think that LinkedIn has a unique sort of brand in that their brand is the professional network, so if you're 20 looking for a job, you better be on LinkedIn because those are the people who are going to give you your jobs and your promotions and introduce you to people. So I think to me Linkedin is in the catbird seat of social networking for longterm success because of their brand of it's work, it's professionalism. It's how you make connections in the business world. It's not where you share cat videos and a holiday pictures from family.
Chad: Yeah, so also 12 percent of users over the age of 65 reported deleting their accounts. So 44 percent are in their twenties and only 12 percent over the age of 65. So yeah, what you're saying is I think true. It's something that you get into a routine, not to mention it makes it easier for grandma and grandpa to be able to share pictures and to see pictures of the kids of the swim meets or whatever it is, but there's going to have to be some type of an evolution. And we've seen Facebook really push their stories hard, right. Because they want to try to evolve and to start to capture or maybe keep in some cases those lower demographics. But it's going to be hard and I mean the new stories that we've seen over the last couple of weeks where we saw, they knew what was going on, they knew that the information was being leveraged. I mean that doesn't help either. So you've got all of this non trust going on and it's like, you know what, screw it. I'm just going to stay on Twitter. Kids are just going to stay on Snapchat or what have you.
Joel: Yeah. And also it justifies Facebook getting more into work because a lot of these age, these generational divides, if it's just for fun, it is going to hurt them. If they become more of a utility for work, I think that pulls younger people in just by necessity similar to what Facebook is doing.
Chad: They'd better evolve quickly because right now more of a marketplace for SMB jobs, that's just not going to cut it, that's not going to cut it. So they're going to have to evolve into something much different on the work side than what they are today. And breaking away with that a URL work, the workplace URL versus the Facebook URL could be helpful but I guess we'll have to see. They're going to have to evolve quickly maybe even who knows, make a dramatic change in that segment because if it looks like Facebook, it feels like Facebook, it's still fucking Facebook.
Joel: It's still fucking Facebook. Do you want to do the money run down or you want to send people to the shred?
Chad: We definitely want to send people to the shred. You got to go to the shred because guess what, last week we talked about Wanalou or Wonolo, sorry. They need to use that $32,000,000 to change their fucking name because it's horrible. Wanalou and Workable got big cash last week. That's on the shred, a rundown of that. And we'll do a shred this week on ZenJob who received a huge amount of cash.
Joel: In border as well. Who we haven't, we don't talk about onboarding very often but I interviewed these guys a couple of years ago and they bring sort of a really cool automated solution to onboarding. So maybe we should talk about them at some point in the future, but yeah, we are not to spend too much time on the weekly show with just who got money, unless it's a big deal. We do that on the shred, which you should be subscribed to for the show. So I'll say we jump right to the scariest hell robot that's being developed for recruiting.
Chad: Furhat robotics plus TNG group which is a recruiting firm, are creating this scary most looking robot that I guess will just sit on the table and when people walk in it will interview you. That's what I got from the video.
Joel: Yeah, I mean we talk, so we've talked about automation and chat bots and bots and things like that, but that's pretty much been relegated to software. That's pretty much been either you type your chat with something that chats back with you via text. Maybe audio at some point will be prevalent, but yeah, these folks over in Europe, you can learn more about it, I think tng.se are developing essentially a bus. It's like a mannequin looking thing. It has no hair. It's sort of like if you watch, if you've seen I Robot with Will Smith, that's what it reminded me of. Those sort of slick looking, the mouth is digital, the mouth isn't manually moved or the mouth doesn't move. The face is like a mannequin and then it's digitally moving its mouth and its facial features. So I guess you go to a retail environment and just sit down with this thing and it would ask you questions, really creepy shit, but yeah, this is coming. This is happening.
Chad: Supposedly the world's first unbiased recruiter robot. Yeah, I mean this just gets creepier and creepier every single day.
Joel: Yeah, guys you got to see this video. It's so scary yet sort of fascinating at the same time. We'll put a link to it at chadcheese.com yeah, crazy stuff man. Podcasting is getting fun because the world's going crazy.
Chad: The world is going nuts and I can't wait this week we're going to talk to Peter over at TAtech. Peter Weddle about Circa 2118 to find out exactly what's going to happen in the next hundred years.
Joel: I don't know if I want to have that interview because I'll be sad. Die soon anyway, so to hell with it.
Chad: Yeah I know, I'm living til a hundred.
Joel: What's up with the environmental report that says by 2040 we're toast and we're just shoveling that thing under the bed. We're just going to ignore it anyway.
Chad: You know you're going to believe in what you want to believe in and if you believe that a bunch of scientists got together because they felt it was in their best interest to say that global warming was happening, then you're in an interesting type of boat.
Joel: Nice, yeah, boat. Good word. Yeah, well, when my house here in Indiana becomes a beach front property. I will be a believer for sure.
Chad: Yeah, I don't think you're going to have to worry about it. I think the beaches of Miami and those types of areas will probably have to worry about it.
Joel: I would agree, Venice.
Chad: Venice, already has-
Joel: People are walking around in water, it's crazy. All right dude, I can't take it anymore. We out.
Chad: We out.
Stella: Hi, this is Sarah 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 on your android phone thingie or wherever you listen to podcast. And be sure to give buckets of money to our sponsors otherwise I may be forced to take that home writing job I saw on monster.com
Stella: We out.