Roberto Angulo, CEO of After College and Recruitology join the HR's Most Dangerous pod to talk about the survival of newspaper, Facebook's possible strategy for jobs, and how the hell does SMB embrace programmatic?
Only the biggest questions tackled on this Sovren Exclusive.
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Intro: Hide your kids, Lock the doors, you are 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: There it is. Aw yeah, dude I love that we have so many smart people come on the show and talk to us.
Chad: We need to dude. We really do. It bounces out the stupid .
Joel: For sure. Welcome everybody. I am Joel Cheesman of The Chad and Cheese Podcast. HR is most dangerous. Joined here with-
Chad: Chad Sowash. Here we go.
Joel: Chad Sowash, and lucky enough to snag Roberto Angulo.
Chad: Roberto.
Joel: Roberto Angulo, CEO and founder of Recruitology and Aftercollege. Is that how we should introduce you?
Roberto: That works and-
Joel: You like that?
Roberto: I like it.
Joel: What are we missing? What should we add to then?
Roberto: Co-founder of after college and CEO and co-founder of Recruitology it is. I'm also an author, author of Getting Your First Job For Dummies, one of the Wiley books that I wrote about a year and a half ago.
Joel: Really, When did that come out?
Roberto: That came out last... Actually late 2018.
Joel: Nice.
Chad: Well for dummies. So you came on the right show. Wow, It's awesome.
Roberto: Now the Wiley, because of after comes, "Hey, do you want to write a book?" And I'm like, "Not really. I don't have time to read books, let alone write one." And they said, "Oh, we'll help you." So I actually had a lot of fun writing it, and in the process figured out-
Joel: I originally, I met you, I want to say I met you in '06 when you were at After College. When did you start that company?
Roberto: I started After College and in 2000 a few years after I graduated from college.
Joel: Wow.
Roberto: Started it out of a personal need of not knowing what I wanted to do with my education.
Joel: And it's still going strong. Right?
Roberto: It's still going strong. It's one of the top sites with college students behind the indeed the mother of all job sites. So, everyone says indeed as their go to, and then followed by LinkedIn and then it's the Career Center and then it's After College based on some research we did. So, it's pretty cool.
Joel: So after college, I mean it's been out... It's been around for how long again? How many years? When did it start?
Roberto: Started in 2000. So it's been 20 years now.
Joel: There are people using the site. They weren't even born when you started it.
Chad: Holy crap. So I mean it's been around 20 years for goodness sakes-
Joel: Yeah. That's the scary thing. I mean I was like... It gives a really good with math, by the way.
Chad: There you are.
Roberto: Yeah. I mean, I started it out of personal need and you know, I studied economics, didn't know what I wanted to do with my Econ degree. I knew I didn't want to do consulting, I didn't want to be a programmer, and all my friends were going through the same thing. So we created the site and over the years that evolved in the basic value prop, "Hey, if you don't know what to do, go to After College, type in your school and major and the site will make recommendations." If you know what you're looking for, you go to Indeed because that's where you're going to find all the jobs.
Joel: Nice.
Chad: So, why spend off into to Recruitology, you have this obviously this brand that is chugging along 20 years for goodness sakes. What was the Genesis? Why Recruitology?
Roberto: But yeah, great question. So, I mean after college actually it did help us get to the point where we launched Recruitology. So , we got to a point where we had all these employers posting on After College, but we also had this, a network of reseller partners, media companies, newspapers, Houston Chronicle, New York times. And they, they'll say, "Hey, we love that we can get access to these college students who after college, but we want the access to nurses, we want access to veterans, we want access to people with some experience."
Roberto: And then we just said, "Okay, what do we do here? They like working with us. We're a good company to work with. Very true to customer and user focused. So, we ended up partnering with a company at the time called Cross-post. And I don't know if you guys ever met Carl Bron, he started crossbows with John Fuji I think back in 2006. And there were an essence working with sites like indeed sip recruiter and a bunch of other niche sites. And so we partnered with them, so all this demand that we're getting from our channels, partners, a hundred media companies, we started sending them the jobs for all these other niches.
Joel: That's not the same as Mr Fuji, the wrestling icon, is it?
Roberto: Yeah, I don't, maybe, I don't think so, unless think so unless John hasn't told us about his side job. But, so, we ended up partnering with Cross-post for good. I want to say six years and then we ended up buying Cross-post in 2012, and then we spun out the partnership side of After College with Cross-post. And then we created the brand Recruitology, and we just followed the business.
Roberto: After College is really good business, but it's niche. It's a niche, right? The biggest it's going to get is constrained by how big the market is. I think the college recruiting market is maybe a hundred for a hundred million in dollars a year, in terms of how much companies spend to advertise their college level jobs. But by just the recruiting market in terms of advertising, just sourcing and getting people on board. That's 8 billion a year.
Roberto: So, we looked at that start and we said, "Okay, college is great, let's keep running after college, but let's go after the bigger opportunity and let's leverage the fact that we have these media partners that are willing to work with us to do it." So we bought Cross-post, and we took the bet, we rebranded and for years we've gone from about a hundred media partners to close to 400 now and growing. And the cool thing is through these 400 media partners, we're serving 50,000 small, medium businesses every year, new ones, and then growing. So, there's something there, right? and it's just a bigger niche.
Joel: So.
Roberto: Not a niche I mean.
Joel: You mentioned newspapers and not a week goes by before, without hearing how the newspapers are dead, and that media platform is on life support. Listeners and long-timers will know that CareerBuilder got out of that, those partnerships long time ago, Monster as well, had a ton of newspaper partnerships and have gotten out of it. So from your perspective and dealing with the media companies, what is your state of the union of newspapers and the business?
Roberto: Newspapers are definitely struggling, right? So, revenues keep going down and it's mainly their print advertising. I mean those print ads, display ads are a big chunk of money and companies are fast moving away from doing print advertising to online. And in online is all Google and Facebook. I mean they own what 85% of the market for online advertising. So it's a lot. But here's the thing, I don't think the papers are going to go away. And we're calling them media companies cause they're not, I mean most of them are, are you doing print paper? But they're all doing digital in New York Times is the best example, right? They're New York Times.com and Y times.com and they basically are killing it in terms of digital subscribers. So a lot of these media companies are moving, they realize that advertising is there, but they're growing their digital subscriber base because they have good content there.
Roberto: Most of them are still the trusted source of local news and information. And I say most because again, you've got big players like New York Times. That's, you don't have to be in New York to read the New York Times. People worldwide read the New York times.
Joel: Right?
Roberto: If the you're in Seattle you're going to read the Seattle Times, you're in San Francisco, you go to SF gate.com so I think these brands and these media businesses will remain, it's just their business is shifting. So revenue from advertising is shrinking, but they're, I think they're doing a good job at growing the subscriber base, and converting them from print subscribers to digital subscribers. As long as they keep their content fresh and they provide content you don't find anywhere else, I think they're going to be okay.
Chad: Well, it's interesting some of them, not all of them are actually switching over to almost like a podcast model where they have the writing, and then they'll have somebody voice. The actual article itself. So it's more portable and you don't have to sit. And actually read, you can listen to. So you see it where it's starting to go into these different mediums, which is really cool.
Chad: But I actually just learned today, and I don't know if Joel knows this yet, but Facebook is starting to scrape jobs from corporate career sites. So what we've seen or what we used to see from the Indeeds of the world, and obviously Monsters, or whoever it was, were scraping jobs to be able to have more content. We're starting to see that from Facebook. I just got the 411 from a recruitment advertising agency today. That they're seeing a huge uptick with their clients jobs and it's coming from Facebook and they didn't give them a feed. So as we're having this discussion and newspapers are trying to fight back, how do they fight against this?
Roberto: Actually, no, they go with the flow, I think. So here's the thing, Facebook is a couple of blocks away from us here in San Francisco. And we were one of the early partners of their Facebook for jobs program, but they're really making an effort to be a player in the job space. Facebook is. And from what I understand, they've done a good job at getting sort of the big companies jobs on their platform. So I know of jobs from companies that are going on their company page on Facebook and they're also going into the marketplace. The one thing that I know Facebook really wants to get more of, there are these SMB jobs. Jobs from these small companies, Mom and pops, City Governments. These employers that are what I call the last mile, these last mile employers that are really hard to reach.
Joel: Yeah.
Roberto: Somehow websites and Facebook will find them eventually, but they're not getting all those jobs. They're getting the jobs from like the Enterprise Rent A Car, and they're getting jobs from like the Geico's of the world, right? But the majority of these jobs are small companies and papers are actually well positioned, because they're the ones that are the local source of trusted news. So the small Mom and pops actually still go to them to advertise. So I think papers and media companies have this leg up, where they have access to these small employers that companies like Facebook and Google want to reach.
Joel: But you could also argue that most small businesses have a Facebook page. I mean, I know a lot of small businesses that have a Facebook presence but don't have their own website. So how do you think that jive with the SMBs? I mean my guess is Facebook will probably be free. We can boost your jobs or whatever. Whereas you know, the model that you're in has a cost. Like do you think that's a major threat to what the newspapers are doing? If Facebook does kind of carry on that model and really promote it, which I guess they'd been, they'd been giving that option to small businesses for a long time. I think you could just argue that the small businesses haven't quite embraced it yet.
Roberto: So we're in the middle of it. I think at Facebook... Like you're right, most small businesses have a Facebook page, like the quarter pizza shop is going to have a Facebook page. The thing though is typically it's an owner that's maintained them the Facebook page, they're ordering the supplies, they're dealing with payroll and all this stuff. So, what we found is that these small business owners are not initially posting the jobs on Facebook, right? They build the page. Maybe they have somebody outside maintaining it, but they're not necessarily using Facebook to post their jobs. Now eventually they may, and I think Facebook is in a good spot because there was no friction there anymore. But there's two things, right? Getting the employer to actually post a job and then also Facebook is not the only place where we're getting to find people.
Roberto: I mean there's still sites like Craigslist that are being used by people to buy things, and there's people that are going to find jobs on Craigslist though, now people are looking at Indeed, they're looking at Google. So I think the media company isn't a good spot, at least from our perspective. And that's what we partner with them because they're, they have access to all these employers that are already going to them and what we're helping them, do say, "Hey, we're a one stop shop for you guys, we'll help you get on Facebook, Craigslist and all these other sites like CareerBuilder, even Indeed, ZipRecruiter.
Joel: Who?
Roberto: Indeed.
Joel: Career who?
Roberto: CareerBuilder. yeah.
Joel: Exactly.
Roberto: Well, they're still there, right? They're still a great brand. It's just that they're just one of many brands now, but there is still a job secret brand that's on pace and plumper
Joel: I guess.
Chad: And I think it's funny Indeed had the whole job spotter thing where they had an app, and people could go take pictures of help wanted signs.
Joel: They still have it as far as I know.
Chad: Yeah. And it goes, obviously I think you get a reward or some shit like that. But I mean they've been trying for years to get those types of jobs where... As Joel just said, I mean there are a lot of Mom and pops shops, that are close to me. They have Facebook pages and they don't have websites. That is their website. That's where they engage in. That is where they will post their jobs, right? It's just, it's inevitable I think.
Roberto: Yeah, they'll post it there. I think ZipRecruiter is also doing a good job by sending these postcards out, right? Saying, "Hey, get free jobs". Thing is the employers getting bombarded by all these different companies, right? Facebook is one of them. ZipRecruiter is another and even if it's free, I mean it's not free, right? You still got to spend time posting and then you've got to figure out where you're going to get the best response. So, I think the problems for the employer is still the same. Where do I post? Where do I spend my time posting?
Joel: And it's probably fair to say Roberta, that if I'm in Seattle, right, you guys are a partner with Seattle Times. If you call a small business and say, "Hey, we're the Seattle Times." That's going to be a much easier conversation, than I'm with some job board you've never heard of before.
Roberto: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Seattle Times has that local street trend with the local market. So if you get something from the Seattle Times, you'll pay attention.
Joel: Yeah.
Roberto: Facebook is that way. Right. And Facebook's huge. But again, I think there's a way for them to coexist and to work with each other. Facebook to serve the audience, the job seeker audience. And somebody likes Seattle Times to be able to say, "Hey, I have these employers here at Facebook, help us get enough candidates for these employers."
Joel: And I don't see Facebook leveraging local on the street sales people to go into these businesses ever.
Roberto: They don't need to.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: Well that would be dumb. That's not sustainable at all. It doesn't make any sense. Why would they?
Joel: No, but you can argue whether it's going to work or not, longterm. I mean, Facebook jobs had been around a while.
Roberto: I think it's fairly simple. If you have a local page for your business, Facebook is going to use their own platform to advertise to you to get you to use it, to do their advertising. They don't need humans on the street to do it. They have the platform you're already using to try to get customers and you're their customer and they're going to try to get you into it.
Joel: Right?
Roberto: So therefore-
Joel: And they've been doing that for years now and we're still talking about Facebook is going to be a thing.
Roberto: Well that, but they haven't executed and that's what we're starting to see them slowly do. They've, done a shitty job of it thus far. But to be able to put feet on the street makes no sense.
Joel: Oh I agree with that. But the argument is can they really compete locally just by having an add on when you log into your Facebook page saying, "Hey, post jobs."
Roberto: I still think that's where the media companies have a very strong leg to stand on. And at least that's where we're betting, right then we can help these media companies serve that market. But I think, they own the rest of the market. Facebook owns the half, what is it 45 or so percent of the digital advertising market, and then Google and the other half roughly can huge.
Chad: Fucking huge.
Roberto: It is huge.
Chad: There's money there.
Roberto: So they put people on the street.
Chad: Yeah. So let's, let's pivot a little bit. We're talking about programmatic in 2019 there were a shit ton of programmatic acquisitions. One of my 2020 predictions was that we're finally going to see a core platform being an applicant tracking system or a big CRM. They actually go through acquisitions at that point, and we start seeing ATSs grabbing in those, those programmatic platforms to embed in their core system. What do you think about that? What do you hearing out there? Are we going to see Recruitology in somebody soon? Who knows?
Roberto: So, I mean definitely, I mean there's a lot of chatter in the space in terms of us going somewhere else. I mean I think we're here to stay for at least 2020. We send jobs ATSs, we integrate with some ATSs. But, and we actually build their own, in terms of an ATS buying a programmatic plate, it's hard to say. I mean it depends looking at who owns these ATSs, some of them are owned by private equity, and I think they're more looking for the private equity guys are looking for, what's a good business with a good enough gross margin. If it's making let's say more than 80% gross margin, what's the recurring revenue.
Roberto: So I think there are more looking at the numbers, as opposed to thinking about the market strategically. So I think those ATSs they're owned by PE. Are probably not going to make those moves. I think ATSs that want to be strategic and say, "Hey, we were offering all these different services and programmatic is some service that needs to be core." It could be, there's a lot of good applicant tracking systems out there. I mean we see them through the jobs that we're getting in. You know, there's ICMs, there's like a greenhouse, there's a lever and a few others.
Chad: Hundreds.
Joel: A lot of others.
Roberto: A lot of others. There's just a lot of them. Right. There's 88P. I guess the question is do they want to grow revenue? Do they want to just be more strategic and grit, get market share? It depends. I don't know yet. I mean I think ATSs, are serving this one gateway to all these other technology providers or service providers. I don't know if they're going to buy or partner. In our case, we've, started as a job distributor, put AI behind it and now we built an ATS, a were our messages, "Hey, we're more of an ATS and we'll give you access to all these best of breed tools that are provided by other companies."
Chad: But why get into the messy world of applicant tracking system? I mean, it's different for SMB, right? It really is.
Joel: Necessity.
Chad: But, it's so messy.
Roberto: I mean, we got into it against my own wishes. So you know what, when we launched their IDN, I mean I was talking to repeat them, I'm like, Hey, the last thing that we'll need this another ATS. I mean, there's so many good ones out there, but again, it's more of a market segment issue. We were seeing a lot of jobs coming in to Recruitology, and most of them had no ATS. They had an email address in the URL. Some of them even had faxes or address .
Chad: Faxes. What the hell is that?
Roberto: Exactly I mean less now, but email we get a lot of Emails. And I think a lot of these SMBs, they don't want to pay for an ATS. They don't want to spend even a hundred bucks a month because they might not have more than a couple of hires a year. Right? So we launched the ATS and we did it for free. In our case, if you buy a job through Recruitology, then you get the whole candidate sorting and ranking and organizing through us. So we launched it more just to provide an ancillary service. That's what we got into it.
Joel: Let me switch a little bit. So we've talked about SMBs, programmatic and all that good stuff. But so when we talk about programmatic and the app casts of the world, we're usually talking about pretty big enterprise entities. You guys have sort of tapped the SMB and programmatic. And I'm curious, you do have a lot of competition. How does SMB embrace programmatic when they probably don't even know what the hell it is, let alone maybe even know how to spell it?
Roberto: Yeah, that's a good question. So there is a lot of competition in the programmatic, there's lesser competition in the SMB space we're finding and that's what we're there, and we rolled out programmatic. And so you mentioned Seattle Times, right? That's a great partner of ours and a good example. So if you're an employer and you're posting a job on job dot Seattle Times.com, job's going to go on Seattle Times.com, but then behind the scenes it's going to go on sites like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Nouveau, or Talent.com now, Glassdoor, next and so on. About 36 different sites that accept jobs on a CPC basis. So what we're doing Recruitology behind the scenes. So just bidding automatically on these jobs and making sure that the employers budget is going to work to maximizing the number of candidates they're getting. So the employer doesn't even know this and they don't need to know.
Roberto: So, we've made it an invisible process for them where they're just posting on Seattle Times.com and they're getting some distribution to these top brand sites and they're going to get some applicants back and they'll say, "wow, wow. Actually I'm getting good candidates here." And it's programmatic behind the scenes, and we've just done it in a way that's invisible. I think when you start getting to the larger employers, it gets more competitive. So you take something like a click cast, right? I think they did a beautiful job at sort of quartering the ad agency market, and going after the big employers and getting these big budgets. Where it's competitive is with all the features you have to build, right? There you're selling HR and they're saying, "Well, I want something that'll turn the posting, or into this or into that to maximize the candidate flow.
Roberto: So then you're competing on features. So we're starting to see more bigger companies use our programmatic and saying, "I want to put a $10,000 budget a month here," But our technology is more bare bones focused on getting results and we haven't really gotten into the whole feature building where I think you're seeing, I think that's where you see more competition, bigger employers saying, I have so many options on me and I ask this company to build the world for me because I know they want my business.
Joel: Excellent.
Roberto: I think that's a different beast.
Joel: Yeah. Overall I would agree and I would also agree that we really appreciate you having on the show. Really appreciate you supporting this show.
Chad: Thanks Roberto.
Joel: And, for all of those who are out there, who want to know more about you, and also Recruitology maybe even after college, where should they go?
Roberto: So. I mean to know more about me, just go to LinkedIn and look me up. Roberto Angulo, I think I'm R Angulo on LinkedIn. And just go to recruitology.com learn more about what we do. And if you're an employer of recruitology.com/employers. If you're a college student, go to Aftercollege.com. If you just graduated, don't know what to do with your degree. Check out Aftercollege.com and type in your school and major in will automatically match you with relevant jobs.
Chad: Thanks man.
Joel: Thanks Roberto.
Roberto: Joel. Thank you guys.
Joel: We out.
Chad: We out.
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