Looking for some warm-and-fuzzies as the world or employment burns? This probably isn’t to episode for you, as we detail misery at ZipRecruiter and Indeed ... and a world shortage of condoms. It’s not all doom-and-gloom, however.
The end is truly nigh. We throw a little sunshine too.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
Chad: What this comes down to is Indeed is, it feels like to me, it really seems like they're putting the boot on the neck of many of their partners in a time of crisis.
SFX: That's it, man. Game over man. Game over.
Intro: 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: All righty then, from the lockdown headquarters of Indianapolis and Columbus, Indiana, 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment last week. How's your 2020 going? Welcome to The Chad and Cheese Podcast everybody, HR's most resilient weekly wrap up of news and opinion on all things employment or unemployment in this case maybe. I'm your co-host Joel pink slip Cheesman.
Chad: And I am Chad stay home Sowash.
Joel: And on this week's show, Zip gets serious. Walmart is checking your temperature and we're running out of condoms everybody. Only the hard hitting shit on our show. Stay tuned. We'll be right back after this brief message.
Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com, that's S-O-V-R-E-N.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: Before we get into the deep, dark shit, let me ask you a quick question.
Joel: Yeah, ask me.
Chad: What Netflix or Amazon show are you going to watch next?
Joel: Okay. I warned you before this show that I was probably going to go to a dark corner at some point. But I will say that a big winner in this whole period for me has been Tiger King of Netflix. And if you haven't watched it, just do it.
Chad: Oh God.
Joel: You'll feel so much better about your life and the world at large and you'll be entertained. Your mind will be off of all of this doom and gloom for the six hours or so that the show is on. I'll also ashamedly recommend Love is Blind, also on Netflix, which is a dating show, which are usually awful and this is awful as well. And in any given regular time and place it would probably be awful. But for this time and place it's pretty entertaining. I will say that I recently, there was a sale on CuriosityStream.
Chad: Okay.
Joel: Have you seen the channel? Okay.
Chad: I have seen it. I haven't tapped into it yet.
Joel: They had a coronavirus sale for $11 for the year, so I was like, "Fuck it." And it's all like BBC documentaries and some PBS shit.
Chad: So you are learning shit.
Joel: I'm learning shit which is also nice too. I would make that recommendation. If you have 11 bucks eating through your pocketbook, go download CuriosityStream on Roku or wherever and learn some shit. How about you?
Chad: You see what he did there, right. He was talking about nothing but trash TV and he's like, "Oh, I better bring this to a good educational point."
Joel: Well, it's the only thing that pull me out of the abyss is like a good documentary on Stalin. That's the only thing that gets me feeling good about things again.
Chad: We just finished season three of Goliath on Amazon and tonight we will probably start Ozark and that's the third season, been waiting for this. And I can't put it off any longer because I'm starting to see things pop up in my Twitter feed and my Facebook and I just I can't handle the possibility of spoiler. We're going to start that tonight.
Joel: Yeah. Ozark, we're about three or four episodes in, definitely recommend that. Goliath, is that the Billy Bob Thornton show?
Chad: Yeah, it is.
Joel: Okay. What season is that on now?
Chad: It's on three. And this was like the most LSD trip written series I've seen for a while. It was kind of hard for a minute to try to get into, but at least this season was, the past couple of seasons were pretty good. But it finished off pretty strong. And from my understanding, I thought this would be the last season but it seems, as Julie tells me, that there's a fourth season coming.
Joel: By the way, a moment of silence for Schitt's Creek, which I know we both love immensely
Chad: Love that show.
Joel: ... being done. Just do the human race a service and do more shows just to help us all feel better.
Chad: Oh yeah. And Julie and the kids I swear watch, they've watched Schitt's Creek through about four times.
Joel: Yeah. I will say too that the governor Cuomo updates are interesting. Equally bad would be the Trump campaign speech slash updates on the end of the world.
Chad: Yeah. What they should do is do more of the Cuomo stuff and just cut the Trump stuff altogether. Now when Fauci comes on, they should like zoom in in Birx, is it Birx or Brix? When she comes on, okay, go ahead and let's listen to them. But whenever Trump's on the mic, just shut his shit off.
Joel: Which actually, apparently CNN has done.
Chad: Smart.
Joel: They don't show the stump speech, they just go to the Q&A. Did you see Trump the other day bragging about being number one on Facebook, whatever that means. He's just so into himself.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: Anyway, talking about Trump is going to get me pissed off.
Chad: Well, let's go to somebody who hates Trump just as much as you, maybe even more. Steven Rothberg tweeted us and here's his tweet. He said, "Just voted for the new #ChadCheese t-shirt design. I'm hoping this won't be the last vote I'm able to cast before the end of the year. #Covid-19. #Goodbye democracy." I'm hoping that we figure this whole voting thing out, that hopefully we can vote.
Joel: I've actually looked this up because I was curious. The Democratic National Convention has been postponed.
Chad: Yeah, in August.
Joel: That'll be interesting. The whole Bernie, that'll be interesting.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Apparently a vote for president cannot go past I think January 20th, which is typically when the ceremony is that, that brings in a new president. From what I understand, and I'm not a constitutionalist, but I think there can be postponements in an election, although I think there's also never been a time in our nation that we have done that, but it is possible. But hell or high water, we'll have a new president or the same president or some vote deciding either of those things by January 20th of 2021.
Chad: Let's get that done and let's pivot again back out of the darkness, pivoting to
Joel: Oh, I'm just starting on the darkness man.
Chad: ... to the t-shirt. The t-shirt without the ability for us to get the hell out of the house, obviously we can't get to events. But we're looking to find some really fun ways to get our listeners the new 2020 Chad and Cheese t-shirts. And the good people at Emissary.ai are going to help us figure that shit out. Because we can't stop the Chad and Cheese train just because we can't get out of the damn house.
Joel: If nothing else, we're going to defer funds from shakers travel budget to build drones to deliver tshirts to everyone around the country I think.
Chad: If we built drones that were like Joe Juniors like head, and they delivered, that would be it. I think he would get behind that too.
Joel: I mean, come on, hokey-pokey Jersey drones flying around the country. I'm into it, I'm digging it.
Chad: Next shout-out goes to Quincy Valencia, the queen of chatbots.
Joel: The queen.
Chad: She messaged me earlier this week just so that she could say, "Ha ha, I told you so. I got a prediction right." And I'm like, "What the fuck are you talking about?" And this is it. She predicted that robots will continue to encroach on recruiter and coordinator spaces forcing companies to start radically redesigning how they do talent acquisition. And I said, "Are you kidding me? You're saying that you actually predicted COVID?" She said, well, no, she didn't predict that, but it did happen, so she wins.
Joel: Nice.
Chad: Anything for a win, Quincy, anything for a win.
Joel: Nice. Can I spend my shout-out time getting on the therapist couch?
Chad: Go ahead.
Joel: Okay.
Chad: Tell me what you think.
Joel: All right. You and I have been through a few of these recession things, and so I was trying to find some solace in surviving 2008 which was as bad as I thought it could be, literally. End of capitalism, right? They were talking about that. End of the banking system, et cetera. But the thing that saved our industry back then was healthcare and probably certain geographical locations that weren't really stupid with the whole real estate thing. Knowing job boards back then and sites and companies or industry, there's no doubt there was a bloodbath, no question whatsoever. The shining light was healthcare, right? Baby boomers are aging, healthcare is still hiring, healthcare is still strong. And there were certain ... the whole service industry didn't shut down. People still went to restaurants, people still did things.
Joel: When I say like going to a dark corner, the solace in this thing is, oh, it's going to be over in a month and then a month becomes two months and two months becomes three months and then three months becomes, okay, this thing isn't going to be done until we get a vaccine for it. And it's going to keep popping up and it's going to continue to be a thing. There's going to be a blood bath. There's so much uncertainty around, when is this thing going to end? What's the solution? What's going to happen? For me, I've had a really hard time sort of calibrating myself to what the future looks like, and I don't even know this show. What should the show ... We're historically a fun show, we're a couple of meatheads and then part of me is like, that's probably the least thing that people need right now. Or maybe it is what people need right now.
Joel: I'm having a hard time figuring this out. And at almost 50 years old, I shouldn't be just trying to figure this shit out. That's been really tough for me going forward. Obviously money's going to dry up. People aren't going to post jobs. This thing is going to go deep. I don't know how long it's going to go. I'm sure I speak for a lot of people that say this is a really confusing time. There's no end in sight what's going to happen. April 1st just passed us by, rent's not going to be paid. Mortgages aren't going to be paid. $2,000, $1,000, whatever it is a month, only go so far for most people. I'm scared for the industry for the uncertainty. I'm scared for sort of the global impact of what's going on and what we're seeing.
Joel: I mean, they're talking about 100,000 to 240,000 deaths as we record this podcast. I don't think we're at 10,000. What happens to the morale of the world when we hit a million deaths and 10, 20 million infected. It's just a scary time. And in all of this, we're all stuck at home with our families. I love my family, but I've got a three year old who needs care and feeding pretty much all the time. That's a challenge. We have roles as people where we're part parent, we're part lover, part husband or wife, part worker. And when you put all those things in one pot and say, "Okay, figure it out in this X by X foot space." That adds extra stress. It's just, this is good for me because it's a nice venting period.
Joel: I'm not looking for answers but maybe I'm feeling similarly to how other people are. And I know we're going to talk about stories of feel good coronavirus stuff and companies stepping up and that's all great. But we're also going to talk about companies laying off people and shuttering businesses. And I just like you are getting more and more word everyday about layoffs at companies and shutting down and people I trust and respect that have been through this are really negative about the future. I just wanted to let that out and I feel a little bit better if nothing else that I did. So shout-out to my feelings everybody.
Chad: Shout-out to Joel's feelings. Yeah. I mean this show was nothing more when we started this, two guys at a conference at a bar, what would they be saying? Whether they're at the bar or not, right. And this is what people are saying, they're talking about. And I agree, as long as we have leaders, whether they're state leaders or national leaders who don't understand that we have to lock this shit down as soon as humanly fucking possible so that we can start to contain it, identify who needs help, get them that help and then snuff it out. That's what we need to understand, right.
Chad: And the thing that really blows my mind is this is what the military was fucking made for. This is why we don't have them in Corps of engineers. I mean really at full speed, the healthcare infrastructure of the military, those types of things. Yeah, I think, and I hope that we'll actually start to make those decisions as we have. The governor of Georgia yesterday, he just yesterday found out that people can pass this when they're asymptomatic. No shit asshole, we've known that for months. We just have to come out from under the fucking rock, be humans and care about more than just ourselves. You talked about the narcissist in chief. That's one of the things that we have to get away from. We have to focus more on community. And that being said, let me try to throw some good stuff at you.
Joel: Sure.
Chad: Little companies like Bauer Hockey that produce hockey equipment, hence their name. They repurposed their facilities and started repurposing protective face shields for medical professionals. We saw the organization who actually does baseball jerseys recalibrate it, and they're doing masks and they're doing protective gear. In most healthcare facilities around the nation, our local hospital here in Columbus, Indiana, they needed healthcare gear. They actually reached out to the community and asked for people to make masks for them and the people they assembled. And they got all the information, the types, the masks, the materials, how they're supposed to be constructed, all that stuff. And the community came together and my wife, she's not doing it now, but I can generally hear the sewing machine going.
Chad: They've made over 2300 masks delivered to the hospital, the local healthcare community, including assisted living facilities around the area. I think from our standpoint, we as community, we have to quit thinking about self and we need to think about what we can do for other people. And right now let's stay the fuck home. And what else can we do on top of that that doesn't put anybody else in jeopardy. Starbucks extended pay for all workers through, whether they come to work or not, through May 3rd. The Chipotle interview that we just did, they amped up their salary by 10%. They're doing all these things.
Chad: I mean, I think the biggest issue that we have right now is we don't have one solid voice at the national level actually guiding what the fuck should be happening. But still, even though that's not one voice, we're still seeing all these different leaders from different states, some states, from some companies actually taking this, pretty much the tiger by the damn tail. Like Elon Musk who said, "Hey, look, we've got this thing ramped up. We're not going to charge you and we'll send these to you." That is the spirit that we need to continue and actually beat this fucking thing.
Joel: Do you think we'll live in a world coming out of this where we wear masks in the US?
Chad: I think this will give us a better idea of preparedness and that we weren't prepared and we aren't prepared if this actually had a higher death rate than what it does now. Hopefully it'll put us in a much more prepared footing than it was prior.
Joel: Yeah. I think if you're looking at some silver linings of this, I think at some point we have to realize that more resources slash money probably needs to go to things like the CDC and a global organization that can pinpoint when these things start flaring up much better than they do now. I was listening to a podcast the other day about the Spanish flu. I mean, Spanish flu just in America killed more people than all the wars of the 20th century.
Chad: This is not something that is unprecedented.
Joel: Yeah. In a world where we're more connected than ever, spending money and resources to fight these things and nip them in the bud is probably going to be a silver lining from this. The other thing is just the way the environment has benefited from human being shutting down. And there's plenty of stories about limitations on pollution, people are burning carbon fossil fuels, et cetera. And that's not my lane necessarily, but at some point there's going to be some value into saying, look what happened when we shut down the burning of fossil fuels. And having an urgency around clean energy and figuring out that part of the equation.
Joel: The other thing lightheartedly a little bit is millennials will have had their first real struggle in the professional world. Most people 12 years back have only had really bright, lovely rainbow times. And this will finally be a little bit of struggle. And if you believe that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger then we'll be stronger out of this generationally.
Chad: We're already in the topic, so screw it. As we're talking about 6.6 million
Joel: Should we take a break real quick?
Chad: No. You just keep it rolling for a second. So 6.6 million, and then we're seeing individuals who are trying to file for unemployment going to websites that crash. There's a story out of Florida, the Florida unemployment website crashed. The phone lines were clogged up. I can understand not having enough people to answer the phone, that's really hard to scale. But how can you have technology today that can't scale? We have cloud. We have all the different load balancing. I mean, there's just so much to be able to say as a state that we're going to take your taxpayer money and we're going to put it into this horse and buggy. This is not acceptable.
Chad: But I also agree with what you'd said before. This is helping us to understand we need to do shit, but we're not prepared. The state of Florida in this case, not prepared to take care of their people. The governor, that is your job, taking care of your people. Again, I think it's one of those things, along with companies like Walmart who are now starting to do temperature checks at the door before employees come in and we just saw, just came down on the wire, Amazon's starting to do the same thing because they got kicked in the ass. 10 of their locations had COVID employees working. It seemed like on a daily basis.
Joel: Sure. America has a long proud tradition of being unprepared for shit. Pearl Harbor, no one thought the Japanese would actually have the cojones or the wherewithal to come on our turf and bomb us and
Chad: Guess what?
Joel: It was that emergency that said, "Holy shit, we're not prepared for war." Even though most of the world had been in a conflict for two to three years before Pearl Harbor even happened.
Chad: And they were still in conflict.
Joel: Everyone knew a pandemic was eventually going to happen. And I'm sure somebody thought, well, Jesus, what if millions of people a week file for unemployment? Can our state systems handle that? Well, no, they can't. Let's get states on Amazon web services so they can scale up traffic and get them on Cisco servers and whatever else, because they're probably on some dudes basement somewhere that built the site in 1998.
Chad: What we are seeing though is we're seeing companies like the San Antonio based Xenex who makes the full spectrum UV germ-zapping robot. Have you seen this? It's like a Roomba, but it's for hospitals. And they go into a room after surgery or after there's been an infected individual that was in there and they've been moved, and they send the disinfecting UV Roomba in there. I think this is fucking, this is brilliant. Obviously the demand for these have gone through the roof. But why wouldn't you as like an Amazon or a Walmart or all of these different places that people are still having to go because they still have daily needs, shit, they should be buying these things up by the boatload.
Joel: Yeah. I mean you look at the industries that are going to be doing these things immediately are things like airline and any kind of travel service like Carnival Cruise Lines and things like that. I fully expect when I take a flight that they're either spraying down the cabin with disinfectant or there's some sort of robot ultraviolet light thing going through the cabin. I fully expect all those things to happen and that's where the immediate need is going to be. And hopefully that trickles into things like restaurants and schools and places of business as a result.
Chad: Before we talk about JobAdX, I hope we learn that when we are at record profit times, we have a rainy day fund and we actually take care of our employees. My mini rant is over.
Joel: We'll be right back after a word from JobAdX.
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Chad: Into the big news man.
Joel: Yeah. Real quick, I was talking to our friends at JobAdX today and they were talking about no surprise record numbers of job seekers coming onto the network in a record number for them of new publishers signing up to hopefully profit from the clicks that come from the network. So no surprise there, but to get some confirmation from them, more job seekers and more job sites or sites in general looking to make money hopefully as times get tough.
Chad: Well, and that's interesting because we were lucky enough to get a video and we have the audio that we put out earlier this week of Ian, the CEO of ZipRecruiter. And he actually said job seeker traffic is down 25%. Their new employer sign ups are down 80%. I would assume for the most part, those are SMB employer sign ups. Existing customer churn, 60%. So 60% of their current customers are churning and they're likely to miss 2020 revenue goals by over $150 million. Those were really the reasons why ZipRecruiter was furloughing 40% of their workforce.
Joel: And what was the timeline that he gave, that Ian gave in regards to if this goes on this much longer, we will cease to be in business anymore.
Chad: Yeah. He said if they don't take steps now, ZipRecruiter could be insolvent by the end of the year. And I quote, "We must cut costs to survive." I mean, quick question for you. Do you think this was 100% COVID driven?
Joel: Our Industry, mostly services are large contingent of customers, like categories, areas, et cetera. There was definitely a sense that we were a little bit frothy in the economy and that there was probably going to be at some point calling of the herd, right? There's going to be a little bit of pruning of the hedges, where companies started cutting back. Maybe they used, I don't know, slow growth in China to say we need to cut costs and people or there was something that happened. I think there was an element of that going to happen anyway. I think the coronavirus put that thing on steroids.
Joel: And I think while a lot of companies probably used the coronavirus a little bit as an excuse to get rid of people, I don't think that they would have expected to lay off as many people as they had. Again, with the financial crisis, you kind of knew like, okay, we need to readjust and focus more on healthcare or focus more on taxes or focus more on whatever. But with coronavirus, you can't just make a business out of job postings for Grubhub delivery people. That's really hard to do. I think it's 95% coronavirus in my opinion and maybe 5%, hey, this is just, we were too frothy and we needed to cut a little bit anyway.
Chad: Yeah. I mean, from my standpoint, I look at the business model in the outbound sales reps selling $300 job postings or $400, whatever they were, while Zip spends a shitload of cash on XM and podcasts didn't make sense, right?
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: That's just not scalable and it doesn't promote great margins. I remember back in the Monster days in 99 and 2000, when we were printing money and sales reps were hand posting jobs because our ECOM was pretty much non-existent. That wasn't scalable in itself, but wasn't really addressed because there was so much money coming in until after the dot-com bubble burst. I'm feeling shades of this here where it's like, there is a problem, but man, we're just killing it and you're right, it's so frothy, we know there's a problem and then a bubble burst and it's like, shit, now we have to make huge changes into our process and our infrastructure and all those things and cut a bunch of heads to make this happen.
Joel: I think you have talked about in length about sort of monsters need to continually feed the job seeker beast, right?
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: And we've been in this environment so long of Indeed has to advertise, Ziprecruiter has to advertise, all these job sites. They have companies that want to hire, companies that want to give them money, but they have to keep feeding that job seeker beast. And overnight they've gone from way more job seekers than they know what to do with. Even though ZipRecruiter said they're down job seekers, I expect that to change. And you have at the same time job postings going to almost zero. How do you adapt to that environment? It's not easy, but like you said, you sure as hell stop podcast advertising on Serial for job seekers traffic.
Chad: Yeah. My big question is, who's next? Will Randstad stay in the game or will they finally put Monster down or maybe sell it. I don't know who in the hell would buy it, but I mean, if this is the time to buy Monster data, I would think that this is the time to do it. CareerBuilder in itself, I wonder if that's just going to fade away into nothingness.
Joel: Yeah. I think I've said on the show a few times that ZipRecruiter and Indeed have the most to lose in a downturn, for a little bit different reasons. And I was talking to somebody that I respect in the industry and they were surprised that Indeed, although we will talk about them after this, that they haven't done their big announcement. They're going to lay off people. I don't know how big it's going to be, but it's going to impact them. It's going to be a cultural shakeup because again, these are people that have not seen anything but good times at Indeed. And the Google thing was a pain in the ass enough and now throw this at Indeed. It's going to be really tough for them. Same with Monster in the general sites, any staffing organization is going to be really hard pressed to find prosperity, and this is probably just going to speed up that whole process for a lot of companies.
Chad: On Indeed's publisher network, you received a message, "Dear Indeed partner, Indeed has recently paused all sponsored jobs API campaigns, where a cost per click payment structure was involved to drive traffic to jobs on indeed.com." What this comes down to is Indeed is, it feels like to me, it really seems like they're putting the boot on the neck of many of their partners in a time of crisis. Hey little guy, we know you've been sending traffic to us and we have been providing revenue to you. But from now on what we're going to do is we're just going to take that for free. Okay, little guy. Thanks so much.
Joel: As I look back over these periods of time where the world ended for us, and 2008, there were a lot of job sites that said, "Why do I need a sales staff when I can just flow traffic to our site, have Indeed backfill and just cash checks." And for a lot of companies and little guys and its job boards that worked really well. More or less until Google said, "This isn't really good." And then they had to adapt to that stuff. But they kept getting content and money from Indeed. And you would look on the service and say, "Why would indeed kill this traffic slash profit center of all these job boards and sites and whatever else that's using their content to create revenue?" But it's really a gangster move to basically rip out the heart
Chad: Trojan horse too.
Joel: Yeah. That have been relying on Indeed's money. And it's really kicking them whether they meant to do this or not. Timing wise, I mean it's just a total rip of the heart out of saying, okay, the economy's going in the shitter, now we're going to really put the knife into the heart and take away everything by taking out the content and the revenue that you were generating from Indeed.
Chad: It's like suffocating small and medium size job sites who at this point probably depended on that revenue. And I mean, my question is for all of those vendors that are out there and even companies who are watching this are now just learning about it. If you do business with Indeed, you know you're going to get fucked in some way, some form or fashion somehow. This is Indeed's game plan to a T, period. If you're going to bow to the altar, get ready for whatever you have to sacrifice, and it might be your actual business itself.
Joel: Used to be where vendors would, or companies would say, "Okay, are we going to use Indeed or are we going to use Simply Hired? Or maybe we're going to use Juju for our backfill." Well, Indeed got rid of Simply Hired, they bought them. Juju is basically focused on text recruiting, on the text recruiting business as far as I know. There's really no competition. There's nowhere else that someone can go for pay-per-click dollars. So yeah, and I also don't think that Google is going to turn around and launch it tomorrow. Linkedin's not going to launch something tomorrow for publishers. So yeah, it was a total gangster move. And part of me wants to applaud the move, but it is ruthless for sure.
Chad: This is the time when the newly launched talent.com and Adzuna and all those other networks. I mean, the JobAdXs of the world, the Recruitologys. I mean all of those, it's time for you to actually get in as the community, as we talked about earlier in the show, this is community time. You now have a bad guy. It's always been a bad guy. You've known there's been a bad guy. Now separate yourself from that asshole and start to create something in a bigger network.
Joel: Agreed, agreed. And all those companies should be out marketing whatever ad dollars they had earmarked for whatever conference and spend it on that.
Chad: Yes. Well, and then getting into the next Indeed story, Indeed shuts down Indeed Prime as we now know as Seen.
Joel: Seen.
Chad: Yeah. Seen. Which was just newly rebranded Indeed Prime. And I mean, Prime has been around since, what? 2015 or 16 or something like that.
Joel: Yeah. I think 2015 they rebranded it and I think September, September of 19. And you don't usually, have its own brand and take away Prime, if you're not serious. The move to shut it down, maybe that's just sort of the froth, maybe it's part of a bigger cut back at Indeed. Maybe the product just wasn't catching on. Or at least the brand wasn't catching on. But to me it's sort of an omen of things to come. I expect more things to come on the newswire of Indeed stuff down, in addition to lay offs, like the whole Android app where you photograph help wanted signs and send them to Indeed. I don't know why that still exists in a time like this. And some other business, they've thrown a lot of spaghetti at the wall since Google for Jobs came on the scene. And I expect a lot of that to be shuttered in the coronavirus tsunami.
Chad: Yeah. I have a comment on the socials as we posted this out. "Indeed's AI periodically recommends me fry cook jobs in Akron. Never done that. Never lived there. Now, maybe that's about where my skill level is. Sure. I don't think so. But I think maybe they need to tinker with preexisting tech before they try to launch a bunch of new quote unquote products no one is really clamoring for." I agree to an extent. I thought this might be an opportunity for them to perspectively mobilize technology and be more efficient for staffing. My question to you, because you were the big predictor in this, do you think Indeed will go into staffing at all now?
Joel: Timing wise now, no. Staffing is ... I mean, I guess you could focus on certain niches like healthcare and that will still continue to grow. I just think, I've always thought Recruit Holdings, their parent company being a staffing company, that that was always part of the vision of what Indeed was going to be and maybe grander vision was that that's what it would be. It would drive job seeker traffic and then that would become staffing and they would ... and they've continually cut out all the middleman to their business. They've cut out staffing, now they're ... I think it's still on the roadmap.
Joel: I just think that an asteroid has hit the world and everyone is trying to figure out what we're going to do. For ZipRecruiter it's make really deep cuts in their staff and their business. I think Indeed's is coming, I don't know how deep or how long we're going to have to wait, but it is coming. To answer your question in a roundabout way is, yes, I still think they're going to have to get to staffing. By the way, I think Google for Jobs is going to come out of this probably bigger and more prominent than they are now through this whole tragedy of coronavirus. But I think that ultimately Indeed is going to have to come out of this and really think about what they are. And I think more and more it's going to be staffing.
Chad: Yeah. I don't agree. I think they're going to be more technology. And if they're smart, they'll focus on the text side while recruit does all of the staffing themselves. If they laser focus on technology instead of throwing all this fucking spaghetti at the wall, I think they have a really good chance of supporting staffing and TA.
Joel: Time will tell man.
Chad: Time will tell.
Joel: We got to get out of this disaster first.
Chad: What we can talk about on the other side of this break is the prospect of a disaster that I don't think anybody saw coming.
Joel: We'll be right back.
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Chad: Okay, for everybody, before we get into the story, I have to say this is a story from Reuters, okay. This is not some off-brand bullshit story.
Joel: Only the quality publishers are what we're reading throughout the week
Chad: Yes, exactly. Well, I wouldn't go that far.
Joel: By the way, is there a better clickbait than a title like condom shortage looms after coronavirus lockdown shuts world's top producer. Is there better clickbait than something like that?
Chad: No, there's not. And so Malaysia's Karex Bhd makes one in every five condoms globally. It has not produced a single condom from its three Malaysian factories for more than a week due to a lockdown imposed by the government to halt the spread of the virus. Now, not only are we having problems with milk and eggs and toilet paper, for God's sakes people we can't even have safe sex.
Joel: By the way, just talking about this spurred my just consciousness of like, apps like Tinder and whatever else have to be dead right now. Who's dating right now? Who's hooking up right now? Although I say that and I see footage from the beaches of Florida where everybody's having a good time. I guess shit is still happening. But ultimately people should not be meeting or hooking up or randomly dating right now or dating at all. I guess this is for the people that are monogamous and at home all day and have lost their jobs and all they want to do is have sex all day. So good for them, good for them. I hope this condom shortage gets fixed. But as a married guy, whatever.
Chad: I don't have a problem with it. The biggest concern as you read a little bit deeper is really more for the humanitarian programs in Africa, where safe sex is a matter of life or death when it comes to HIV and AIDS. As we'd think about it from our safe place, it does have bigger ramifications for some populations around the globe.
Joel: This is why I'm your friend because when I steer off into meatheadedness, you pull me back into AIDS in Africa, so I appreciate that. I appreciate that.
Chad: We are the world.
Joel: There's a big waiting list for divorce lawyers in China.
Chad: We are the children.
Joel: Because being cooped up with your spouse for months on end leads to bad things like divorce apparently.
Chad: Not me. It just leads to more of these protective masks [inaudible 00:42:29.05]. I've got to go downstairs and cut some more material.
Joel: Yeah. You and I know nothing about divorce, right?
Chad: Yeah. And we out.
Joel: And with that, stay safe everybody, wash those hands. We out.
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