Back To the Future with Monster's Founder Jeff Taylor
- Chad Sowash
- 3 days ago
- 37 min read
This week on The Chad & Cheese Podcast, it’s nostalgia, disruption, and a little Monster in the bathroom. We sit down with Jeff Taylor—yes, that Jeff Taylor—the original founder of Monster.com, DJ of disruption, and proud towel-dryer. From breaking the help wanted section in the ’90s to building Boom Band in 2025, Jeff dishes on the dumpster fire that is the current job board scene (spoiler: he doesn’t pull punches). We get the real story behind Monster’s fall, how Indeed jacked the model, and why your résumé might as well be from 1907 (fox hunting, anyone?).
We talk AI airbrushing the talent market, recruiters ghosted by robots, and why Jeff almost bought a billboard just to prove a point. Oh, and Ray Dalio? Let's just say it started with a one-hour monologue and ended with 25,000 data points.
Buckle up. Jeff Taylor is back, bitches.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Joel (00:33.016)
This is the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Boys and girls, I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, Chad Sowash is in the house and do we have a treat for you. We welcome Jeff Taylor, serial entrepreneur, founder of Monster.com and current startup, boom band, and so many other things that I'm sure that we'll talk about. Jeff, welcome to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast.
Chad (00:39.294)
Sup.
Jeff Taylor (00:45.186)
Watch out!
Jeff Taylor (00:55.086)
Thanks Joel, thanks Chad. I've been kind of dreaming about this, I'll just be honest with you. As I was thinking about kind of re-entering and having some fun in the talent space, one of the first things I did was drop in and if I fast forward, getting out of the shower today and I said to my wife, I'm on with Chad and Cheese today, I don't know where we're going. And she said, why are you doing that? I said, because you have to like lean into the pain.
Chad (00:56.062)
Guess who's back.
Joel (01:24.408)
Question is, Jeff, are you an air dryer or are you a towel dryer?
Jeff Taylor (01:28.75)
I'm definitely a towel dryer. My shower is two minutes, like in and done. I don't spend, you know, I used to say you can change the world in a half an hour shower, but I don't take one, you know.
Joel (01:45.016)
All right, aside from aside from bathing techniques, Jeff, a lot of our listeners will know you very well. A lot will have no clue who you are. So give us sort of an elevator pitch encompassing all of that for everybody and we'll get we'll get down into business and the topics we want to discuss.
Jeff Taylor (02:02.616)
Holy shit. So I'm an entrepreneur. I'm an idea generator. It's kind of just the way my mind works. I'm a creative kind of brand marketer. So I'm all about naming and how do you amplify an idea? And I'm a CEO. So I'm not only like the idea generator, but I like to stick.
and, you know, kind of helicopter through, do software development design. I'm not a developer. I'm an over the shoulder designer and developer. And I'm a, I'm a culture builder. I love team success. I like to build the careers of people around me. And I like the talent space. It's just kind of been my life and I believe in it. I believe in the idea that someone
can be huge and I always try to figure out how to draw that out of people.
Chad (03:05.976)
And he's a DJ. He obviously always brings the energy. mean, that's one of the things that I mean, when you take a look at leaders, Jeff, we always talk about, I mean, startups on the show always. And the very number one thing for me is always the founder, because they have to be out there. They have to be bigger than life because you have to get because there's so much noise out there. is fucking crazy how much noise is out there right now. Now, when
You started Monster back in the day, right? Monster board back in the day. It was almost crickets from the standpoint of getting online, right? Because you were one of the first, right? Today you were jumping into an entirely different, different landscape. Now that's gotta be exciting and scary as fuck. Talk about that a little bit.
Jeff Taylor (03:45.058)
That's right. Yeah.
Joel (03:51.211)
matured.
Jeff Taylor (03:54.606)
Well, you know, I think what's interesting is I don't think that the fundamentals really change and so I think if you go to a playbook where you have an idea you're able to describe your idea enough so that people want to work with you on that idea. I'm doing that right now.
Chad (04:04.392)
Mm-hmm.
Chad (04:13.3)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Taylor (04:19.798)
And then you amplify that idea to include kind of customers. And so for me, the job seeker was always the customer. How do you catch that voice? Right. Half about a better job. It's half about a better life. I can go to, I have a monster bathroom. I want to just share that with you. Everything in my bathroom is monster. I didn't know where to put it. And so it's all in there. So you go in there and it's basically like the empowering message of monster.com.
And I'm sharing that with you. I haven't shared that with anybody else. Come on. I'm doing it. know, like, so, yeah, what, what here? Here it is right here. I, I, I, I, I am not, I am not kidding. I've never shown it to anybody. And, it's, you know, yeah, it's, so I think the,
Chad (04:47.856)
in the bathroom.
Joel (04:49.044)
I have a monster in my toilet, but that's a whole different podcast episode.
Joel (04:58.658)
For the listeners, he's walking us through his office.
Chad (05:01.003)
yeah, this is definitely going to be a short.
Joel (05:07.426)
Do you sleep with Trumpasaurus? Do you sleep with Trumpasaurus? Be honest.
Jeff Taylor (05:16.514)
The interesting thing if we kind of dig in a little bit is there was a huge problem in the marketplace in the early 90s and the help wanted section wasn't working. And I had 300 clients in the Boston area and a couple of my clients were basically saying, I owned an ad agency. We specialize in placing help wanted ads. The poor younger sister or brother to, you know, the fancy ad agencies in Boston. And
My clients were the biggest high tech companies that were emerging, big hospitals and big biotech companies. And they were all telling me the help wanted section is not working. And it's like, why? And it was like, it was getting too expensive. was very sectioned so that it wasn't, it was hard to get your employee brand out there. The shelf life was one day. There were so many problems with it. The main thing is they weren't finding talent.
Chad (06:08.211)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Taylor (06:13.748)
And so if I just fast forward to today, there's a whole set of problems right now. And so I did like a post that was like, you know, rest in peace to the traditional help wanted section. And I listed out like all the things that went wrong that created the opportunity to start monster.com the same set.
Joel (06:17.208)
Sounds familiar.
Jeff Taylor (06:37.218)
But with different words are happening right now and I'm about to do a post. It's like rest in peace to the job boards. It's not working. And you could argue that it's not just the job boards, but the systems and process that we have right now is about to get kind of jumped the curve on, jumped the shark. And it's been happening like I was describing, kind of like a frog in the boiling water, you know, like it just.
it would just kind of bounce in the road and it's getting hotter and hotter. I don't know why it hasn't changed and that was the beauty of dropping back in after taking little break.
Chad (07:16.788)
So it's interesting because what pretty much killed Monster and Crew Builder was Indeed. Indeed was the Google for jobs. It was a job search engine, right? And what we've noticed and what we actually talked about on this week's show is how they have actually walked back into a job board model. they're back in, literally, Jeff, they're in your fucking model. What you built back in the mid-90s.
they are doing today. So it is, I mean, it's amazing how we take a look at these technologies. We've got this great technology. It's incredibly fluid. It's helping. It's getting job seekers to companies and to jobs faster. And then you start walking that back and you start to put barriers in front of the job seeker. Number one, why do you think that is? Obviously revenue, but why do you think that is? And why do you think CEOs think that's a good idea? And number two,
Jeff Taylor (07:46.242)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chad (08:14.472)
I mean, Monster and Cruebill are still around. They're one together, obviously, but they still exist. How long do you think it's gonna take for the job boards really to have to evolve into something entirely different?
Jeff Taylor (08:29.164)
Well, I think the first thing is it's it's really difficult to do. You know, when you when you rely on a system for your profits, actually really for your revenue, you know, the profits may be fleeting, but your revenue, which is kind of, you know, paying for your teams and all of your expenses. And and I think this is that frog in the boiling water thing that over the course of the last 20 years, this this monster buyer seller model, which was
kind of a mirror from the newspaper with a post and pray model. There was no pray when we started, it was just post, right? And that model is so beautiful, whether you charge $10 or $200, whether you charge for a month or whether you charge for a day, that model's great. While I was running Monster, there's some stuff you don't know, but while I was running Monster, we never worked with Indeed. And because I always had this
Indeed, we had like 10,000 jobs, 20,000 jobs. We had a million jobs. And the Indeed teams were coming to us and saying, look, we can extend the reach of your postings. And so there was like this groundswell inside Monster. I'm like, no. And so I had a, there was a little side conversation that happened between Reed and I with the idea that we'd put LinkedIn and Monster together.
and I took it to my board and my board turned it down. So I resigned and that's why I left Monster, just so you guys are aware. And that was in 2003. I didn't have a temper tantrum. I gave him 18 months notice, but almost without fanfare, I left. And within a couple of months, they did the deal with Indeed. And so I don't have an exact press release path.
Chad (10:07.892)
Really?
Jeff Taylor (10:24.856)
But they started saying, the soon as they added the million Monster jobs and they had 30,000, they said, we're bigger than Monster. And that was the beginning of Indeed's ability to grow. They were already growing. The aggregator model was a fine model, but the Monster model was better. We actually had the direct line into thousands and thousands of daily jobs because we had direct relationship with the companies.
Chad (10:31.956)
Mm-hmm.
Joel (10:35.746)
Hmm.
Jeff Taylor (10:54.484)
Even today, if you have direct relationships, you know those are real jobs. When you're an aggregator, you're starting to pick up jobs from lots of different places. You can look at one of the posts on my LinkedIn where I say like, where did the job posting go? Like why are there so many ghost jobs? And the main thing is you lose control of the job. So the jobs gets posted.
at a recruiter website, somebody scrapes the recruiter website and posts it at another website, and six months later, you're still getting a site that's posting a job as new, but it's six months old. And so what we're seeing is that process started and started to break down as soon as you basically had aggregators. And the thing that I understand that Indeed recently did is basically back off on that network, backed off on those free jobs.
Chad (11:21.108)
Mm-hmm.
Joel (11:46.402)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Taylor (11:46.606)
And I think they're saying LinkedIn has a model, I don't know, $92, $94 a day. Let's go to a daily model. We can't really do a CPA model where you're counting applications because there's so many fucking applications that that that model basically and no, and that model basically got overwhelmed. So you got to go back. so, so I actually like indeed, I like what the way they've approached things.
Chad (12:02.972)
Yeah, and they're not qualified.
Jeff Taylor (12:16.61)
The site's tight and it's good and I like the way they're innovating around their delivery. But this move alone, Joe, you said it, it basically brought them right back into parallel with the other job boards. I think it's a terrible move in the middle of what a terrible moment. And I think it's bad.
Joel (12:36.034)
Jeff, I can't let, I can't let you get away with saying that the LinkedIn deal was what broke the camel's back, if you will. let it go like left to say a little bit more about that. And you guys ended up buying tickle. Were you a tickle fan or was a tick was the tickle move like, well, we lost it on LinkedIn. Let's try to make up for it. then, and why not build your own network at monster? Because you had the numbers and the traffic. Like, tell me, tell me more about that LinkedIn deal. Period.
Chad (12:56.244)
Well, they did. had Monster Networking was there.
Jeff Taylor (12:58.19)
So, so, so I, I don't know. So, so Reed and I met, it was very early. They were losing a lot of money. We, we had a napkin deal basically to say like, you know, let's, let's see if we can put something together. I took it to my board and my board said no. And that was my singular decision where I decided that if my board knew better how to run Monster than me, that then they should go and do it.
And so I basically step back. I'll answer the question about Tickle. coming out of 9-11, we were profitable and a very strong company. so in 2001 and 2002, I don't know, if I go back a little further, there was an Amazon.bomb article that was in Barron's that basically kind of blew up most of what it wasn't even called HR Tech yet, but most of the companies that were
kind of trying to fake it till you make it, were actually had no money, no revenue model, you we're just kind of flailing out there. All those companies started washing out and Monster was profitable and a really good quality company, like the number 11 or 12 or 13 website in any given month. And it was clear that we needed to press the accelerator.
take advantage of what we were doing. We downsized a little bit because we had like six months of no business. It was after 9-11. And honestly, I was starting to lose my leadership control of the company because there was this perception that you needed a fixer to come in, lay off lots of people. And that wasn't my reflection of the way we should do it because we were healthy. And so,
Chad (14:45.539)
you wanted to build too. You were about building.
Jeff Taylor (14:48.352)
Yeah, and so I was building the talent market and Monster Networking and honestly, they weren't working. They weren't working well enough. And that's why I approached Reed. And, you know, I think that there's a bit of revisionist history here because...
You know, I bring my wife into it. She's she's like, you know, you probably would have fucked it up. I think it's fine. And that might be true because I would have rebranded it because of the hubris that I had, you know, about the strength of a brand in the market. And but I think it was an interesting time. And the purchase of Tickle was we purchased military dot com. We purchased Tickle. And there were a handful of companies that had traffic or had engagement.
had page views and coming out of 9-11, it was really important to have all of your metrics be strong and Tickle had an assessment that was like, what dog are you like? And I had a crazy amount of followers that were just doing this silly assessment. And we overpaid for the company because we were starting to build the asset base and the value base of.
our offering and making sure coming out of the pandemic that people knew that we were strong. And so, you know, that we were filling in corners to continue to grow as quickly as we grew up from there. The other thing.
Chad (16:16.446)
So yeah, real quick, Jeff, I got to say that Monster Networking, Chief Monster, Blue Collar, I mean, there were so many great ideas that it felt like they were just early. They're just too early. And if they could have hung on a little bit longer and actually given more love and affection to, but everything went back to Core Monster. Everything went back to Core Monster.
Jeff Taylor (16:36.077)
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Taylor (16:44.014)
So there's a theme here, right? It's like the same thing we were talking about about why the job boards aren't changing their models. It was also true at that point. We were public. We had a quarterly number to hit. You're kind of all of sudden you're beholden to the man to make sure you're advancing on the goal. so these explorations
Chad (16:53.396)
Mm-hmm.
Joel (16:59.276)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Taylor (17:12.534)
I hesitate to say experience because they were way better than experiments. But this was all me trying to position to be a broader solution for recruiting. And what's classically hard for company is to have even a second offering for revenue. So we had our job posting revenue was about 65 percent. We had our resume database that was about 30 percent. We should talk about that, by the way.
And then all of our other activities were like 8 % of revenue. And so it was my job as the leader of Monster to experiment to basically like push in and pull out, push in and pull out, trying to build what I would say is that portfolio, which Monster had the potential to be. And so me leaving, you know, I was a public CEO for 31 quarters and I
At some point, Monster had 70 % market share and we were a hot brand. That is hard to sustain, right? And that was going to be hard for me to sustain. So I had a reflection that if I really care about my brand, I should be willing to let it go. And that was always my job.
through all the years was as soon as I got something down to hire somebody into that and then move on to the next thing, give up the thing that I was loving. And, you know, you would always say hire into your weaknesses. And I did that and I did it so much that I actually developed this theory that you have to hire into your strengths because I was a good product developer and I was a good marketer. And so I never developed, I thought, really good strength in those areas of my strength.
And then all of a sudden I'm 5,000 employees and I've kind of played a lot of my marketing stuff out and built the attitude of our brand, but I needed more people. so, you know, hiring Pete Blacklow and these other leaders in the marketing area and making sure that like, uh, D and the product team.
Jeff Taylor (19:24.94)
were felt like they could bring their ideas to the table. So was giving those jobs away. And even the leadership of the company, I was actually willing to give away if I felt that it would be good for the brand. And so that's that's kind of what happened.
Joel (19:33.656)
Mm-hmm.
Joel (19:37.91)
When you look at what Monsters become, mean, I'm sure seeing Career Builder plus Monster in some ways makes you want to throw up in your mouth a little bit. But when you look at that, how do you feel looking back? Is it a melancholy? it, I had fun while I was there. Like don't cry that it's over.
Chad (19:46.246)
A lot, a lot.
Jeff Taylor (19:52.214)
Yeah, it's, yeah. You know, I took you into my Monster bathroom. I'm proud of it. And it's defining for me. It's interesting how the brand and the creation of that brand is defining for me. when people, it is funny. I go in to get my haircut and someone will say like, he found a Monster.com and there's these confused looks around the room. No one knows the Monster.com.
Chad (20:18.068)
Yeah. What?
Joel (20:18.872)
The energy drink.
Jeff Taylor (20:20.622)
And so yeah, they'll save the energy drink or whatever. And that's okay. I think that's the beauty of a brand having a cycle and that's fine. I have to do it because it's, I say it on my fundraising calls. It's like, okay, you put Career Builder, which was the answer that the newspapers really tried to put together to fight against Monster.
Chad (20:45.736)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Taylor (20:46.926)
while I was in my process of building Boom Band, the two of them decided to merge. And I'm like, that is glorious. Like, that's just so beautiful. And so I'm thinking about it, and somebody said it's like two dumpster fires make a bigger dumpster fire. And I'm sorry, like, I can't say that about the product that I found. So I said, two Lukewarm glasses of water, it's very difficult to make a hot glass of water. And I think that's classic. And then they spent a bunch of money
Chad (21:02.132)
That was us,
Jeff Taylor (21:16.788)
to brand this company and the new name is Monster Builder. I was like, thank God. Okay, this is so beautiful because I'm going to build a new company in this space. so I am connected to care about not just Monster Employees that worked with me, but Monster Employees that still work there.
And I don't want to speak badly. I'm really just for a moment kind of saying like, this is what's happening with our industry right now is indeed is like reeling back into $32, $34 job postings daily, kind of following a LinkedIn model that seems so beautiful and makes $16.5 billion a year in revenue. Like, holy shit, that is the 800 pound gorilla. that's not what Indeed was good at. keep doing what you're good at is what I would say.
For Monster and Career Builder, like, no, no, no, no. If you're gonna reinvent this thing and you're gonna spend money on branding, don't come out with Monster Builder. Like, I'm sorry, it's not good enough. It's not gonna work.
Chad (22:23.86)
They're just looking to sell it. It's Apollo, Jeff. They don't want to make anything. They literally just want to put a new shade of lipstick on this pig and they want to sell it off as parts. That's all they want to do, my friend. I'm sorry.
Joel (22:36.524)
Just wait till it's zip monster builder.
Jeff Taylor (22:40.43)
I had a dream a few weeks ago that I went to Apollo and said, whatever you're going to spend on that, put it in a boom band and let's actually go reinvent this thing. And so I had a moment and I reached out to everybody I knew and said, introduce me to Apollo. And it is like fucking crickets. And I like, I don't understand. Other than I'm from the Jurassic period. Of course, I don't know anything about this and you guys are better at this. But I'm coming to play.
Joel (23:10.392)
So speaking of Jurassic, Jeff, I'm about, let's talk about eons for a second. You come out of success, probably more success than you imagine with Monster. mentioned top 10 website of traffic, 70 % market share. You leave and then launch eons. This is sort of when MySpace was just a thing. Facebook wasn't, maybe had been a college site. And I think it's, yeah, I think it's fair to say it.
Jeff Taylor (23:32.556)
Yeah, actually Facebook was a thing. Facebook was in colleges. Yeah, go with your answer.
Joel (23:39.264)
Obviously it didn't work out the way that you wanted it to. I'm curious, having something really successful as an entrepreneur and then sort of, guess, failing, what did you take away from that? Did it affect what you did after Eons? What was the recipe that you missed?
Jeff Taylor (23:41.55)
I'm fed.
Jeff Taylor (23:55.714)
Yeah, so I could probably sum it up in saying I got my ass kicked by Facebook. So I built, right, when I was coming out of Monster, the average age of a user when I started Monster was like 34, 35, like it was an older group. And so that group basically grew up with me. And I decided that I would take a niche that I felt was
Joel (24:03.778)
You're not the only one.
Jeff Taylor (24:24.458)
underserved, AARP feels a little like our job board industry. And I was like, you know what, I think I could probably take obituaries out of the newspaper and migrate those the way I had done jobs. And let me anchor telling a story about your life to the idea of telling a story while you're alive. And that's where Eons was born. And Eons grew to a million monthly, was a pretty
Chad (24:28.531)
Yeah.
Jeff Taylor (24:53.614)
cool thing. have a story about a longevity calculator I'll share in a second, but the reality was I got to a million, Facebook went from college to high school, and then high schoolers taught their parents how to use Facebook and in a moment, like a flash, it was like one of those things that the police officers throw into a house, it was like we didn't grow anymore.
Like all of a sudden it's like, you know, where is everybody? Everyone went to Facebook. And so I would sum up that era as I got my butt kicked by Facebook. And what was cool about it was, I was too early. I have it right in my LinkedIn profile. If you read my overview, I say like, I'm always early, but what other way is there? Like if you want to have ideas,
in a space you're going to be early or else they're not, they're copycat ideas, right? And, and so I think I've hit it at different points. Monster, you, you said it's in terms of the success from Monster. mean, it's like, holy cow. I remember negotiating to, get a million dollars if we went public, right? Like I, like, I wasn't thinking.
like billionaires of the internet. It was a different time. There weren't any internet millionaires at the beginning of the monster process. And I started, there were only 200 websites. So I could have bought the URLs, Coca-Cola and Nike. It was that early. And so to go from...
early, early to the innovator, you know, crossing the chasm to, you know, kind of get those early adopters to get the massive middle, stay as the leader. It was amazing, right? Something I never could have expected. And I was just old enough, I think, to appreciate it and just, just not humble enough to realize I couldn't just automatically do it again. And so there's the story in a nutshell. Yeah.
Joel (26:59.341)
Yeah.
Chad (26:59.512)
Yeah.
And if you would have turned it into a dating site, it would have blown up. That's the thing.
Joel (27:06.966)
I'm surprised Google wasn't nervous with your cranky search engine. That's what I remember. Rank was in all caps and had a little sea cranky.
Jeff Taylor (27:13.528)
So these are all fun. I had a dating part of Eons, which was called Meetcha, know, nice to meetcha. I had a reference point for Cranky. But the tributes piece of it went on and sold to Legacy. And the exit was like a bunt.
Chad (27:24.296)
just too much at once?
Jeff Taylor (27:42.638)
where Monster was a home run. so I think it makes, it builds my character. know, like I think these are important things. There's so many books about fail better and struggle well and all that stuff. And I think that I've always embraced that. And so I think it was good. And then, I don't know if you're gonna bridge this, but then I went to work for Ray Dalio. And...
Chad (27:42.824)
Yeah. Yeah.
Joel (28:05.4)
Yeah, I was gonna ask about that. Because your personality's mesh.
Chad (28:06.61)
way before we get to that, before we do that, before we do that, before we do that, we gotta do, we gotta do, we gotta do the TMP thing, right? Because obviously, you know, TMP had Monster and had, was, was obviously an advertising agency and then Monster flipped the script on them and became the, the, the over, I mean, I can see, because the ego, I can see the Jeff, we probably in Andy's office having this discussion, Hey, we should be,
the big dog here because the internet is where it's at. It was interesting being in the industry, watch that happen first and foremost, and then watching TMP, because I have very close relationships with TMP people, how they just, they were enraged because this little baby monster came over and they took the headline. Talk about that. How did that actually happen? That's what I want to
Jeff Taylor (29:04.91)
It's probably, it's probably, it's probably its own podcast. Yeah. I had an ad agency, which was just like TMP, right. But smaller in Boston. It was, was called Adion and it was ads that we did and an ion was a particle of energy. I've never really changed by the way. Right. And we, Andy McKelvey was, ran TMP, which was telephone marketing programs.
Chad (29:05.448)
Come on, you do know you were there.
Joel (29:05.783)
He got really the hushed tones say so much, don't they?
Chad (29:15.496)
Yeah. Right.
Jeff Taylor (29:32.61)
And Andy decided, he rolled up the YellowPage agencies and then he said, I'm going to roll up the recruitment agencies. So long before Michelle Abbey would have been upset with me for renaming the company Monster, was, you know, all of a sudden YellowPage has got a little bit usurped by rolling up these recruitment advertising agencies. Andy came to me and I was like, no way, our agency's hot. And I got this idea and I didn't even tell him.
And it's kind of like, can't tell you a lot about Boom Band today. And so he came back a year later, offered much more money, wanted Adion because we were a very good agency in Boston to be an anchor point for, I think he ended up buying some around 25 recruitment advertising agencies. And I could see that I had Monster in Boston.
And I had jobs in New England, but I wasn't very well covered in Chicago or Phoenix or Austin or San Francisco. And I could see some ability to extend the value of Monster by basically piggybacking onto this set. So I basically said, the only way I'll sell my agency is if you buy Monster. And Andy was like, I don't want it. And I was like, you don't understand.
And it's probably about the conversation. And I said, I need you to come spend a day with me. And I had a sun spark 20 monsters running, I don't know, 800 jobs a day. And the machine is creaking under pressure and we're starting to get articles written about us. And it was starting to take my investors in my ad agency are saying, you need to shut that down.
because it's taking you away from the agency, which was sending them a check every year. They were angel investors. And so I had like this, let's call it one of the perfect storms in my life where I went to the Boston Globe and said, do you want to buy half of Monster? I had four or five meetings with them. I met with the tailors, the senior people, and there was a lot of discussion about it. And they got back to me and they said, our great grandfathers would roll over in their graves.
Jeff Taylor (31:50.42)
If we if we actually did an investment and partnered with our most important section of the newspaper with a company called Monster. So I was like, OK, Andy, Andy was talking to me. The Boston Globe was talking to me. The Boston Globe said, no, my my angel investors are noisy. And I said, OK, fine. And so Andy said, I'll buy it, but I'm not really going to give you any money for it. And and I said, OK, I'm fine with that as long as I get the plan.
And so we created TMP interactive, Monster became the product. And it's been, you didn't go right to it, but one of the miss moments in my life is two years later, Mark Cuban, whatever, all became billionaires with things that were similar to mine. And I made my boss a billionaire, Andy McKelvey. I'm fine. Right? If you guys are worried about me, I'm fine. Right?
Chad (32:50.164)
Yeah. I've seen your bathroom. You're fine.
Jeff Taylor (32:50.7)
But what happened then over the next few years, so weird. It's like a bumper sticker. I've seen your bathroom. That's funny. It was like a bam bam moment where the tail like banged the body of the dog so hard that the tail became the dog. so what, probably even dating myself in that analogy, people are whoa.
was Bam Bam. But the idea that we became Monster Worldwide was for me one of the pinnacles where I basically said, okay, I think I can walk away from this. I've accomplished the goals that I plan to accomplish. And what's interesting, what's it called? Radiance or radiancy? Sorry. I don't
Joel (33:22.306)
Yeah.
Chad (33:38.578)
Raidency, Raidency.
Joel (33:39.958)
Raiden C.
Jeff Taylor (33:42.894)
pay as much attention to the employer branding companies, which we should talk about, by the way. There's a interesting concept where the TMP business got stronger in the short term because they had Monster. unlike
when Ron said buys Monster, now you have a staffing firm that owns Monster. In this case, it was a recruitment agency that had a distributed vehicle. So we became the back end of every job that won the newspaper also won a Monster. And that was the way we seeded the market. And in some ways, even though I gave up personal wealth in that moment, it actually was a pivotal moment in building the Monster brand.
Joel (34:25.9)
Ray Dalio discuss. So we go to eons, we're to get to boom band. You've done some like Ray Dalio is a very calculated sort of thoughtful low key guy. I can't imagine you guys wouldn't have more in common based on your, your demeanor. But so Ray Dalio, you kind of have a lost in the woods period. You're doing like Range Rover stuff you're doing. Yeah. Let's jump to boom band between eons and then.
Jeff Taylor (34:41.794)
Yeah, you know, you know it's funny.
Jeff Taylor (34:49.47)
No, let's get the order. So the order was, so Eons took a huge swing and did a little baby bunt. And then I was in a little period where I was there to support the person that bought Eons and Ray Dalio called. It was actually a recruiter that Ray had assigned. know, go find me five entrepreneurs that aren't finance people that
could come in and bring a different kind of spice to the Bridgewater scenario. And at that point, I was like, I don't know who Ray Dalio is. And so I had to go do some research on Ray Dalio. was like, wow, isn't that a twist? And so I went and interviewed Greg and David and Eileen that were the three, really the three senior leaders other than Ray.
Joel (35:20.216)
Huh. That's you.
Jeff Taylor (35:47.35)
were, I had good interviews with all of them. And my interview with Ray was an hour and eight minutes long. He talked for an hour, I talked for eight minutes, it's on tape. he did not like, yeah. He did not like me. And so I think David or Eileen went to him and said, you gotta hire this guy.
Joel (35:59.416)
There's no way that you didn't get any words in. wow, okay.
Jeff Taylor (36:14.606)
And so he said, okay, do like a try buy for six months and let's check it out. And so I accepted the try buy. was a good, was a North of Fair offer. know, like it was fair, the biggest hedge fund in the world. And I moved to Westport, Connecticut. And I showed up at work and one of the first things Ray said was like, why did you move here?
Joel (36:30.264)
worth your time.
Jeff Taylor (36:42.382)
And I was like, because I'm gonna work for you. And he's like, you're not gonna last six months. And I said, I'll work for 10 years and we'll see. so for the first like three months, it was horrible. I really struggled there because nobody cared that I had founded one of the biggest brands in the world. It's like Bridgewater is you start with your head cut off and you walk around like a newbie no matter what.
position you're in and you earn your way through the process. And just to fast forward, we have this thing called dots, which are basically feedback that you get in the moment on an iPad in every meeting. So I'd be saying like right now, Joel, it's like, you know, like go to the harder question. And I'd be like, like Chad, like we should probably have a separate conversation just about the monster experience. in
So we'd be giving feedback to each other and you'd be saying, okay, I don't think he's listening that well. I'm not sure he's answering the right question. And we'd be giving each other dots. I have 25,000 of those dots in my experience working there. And I gave out 22,000 dots. So I basically was a feeder of, I believed in the system. I'm telling you, it made me sharp. Like if I look at my peers where I am right now,
I think it gave me 10 years of ability to navigate levels and understand what's important and to be able to understand what people are like, which is a very important part of what I'm doing with Boom Band. And so that was like a 10 year MBA for me. And I did work there for almost exactly 10 years, incredible experience. The first three months, Ray beat
the crap out of me. And, you he brought me into a room with 30 people and he had asked me to do this assignment. Go taste the soup in these six different areas. And tasting the soup is like go into areas and like see what you think it's like. And if you would make suggestions, whatever. He's basically testing me to see what I'm like. And I did a couple of reports, gave them to Greg, who was, you know, kind of number two at that point. Greg said, these are terrible.
Jeff Taylor (39:01.654)
And then I did some more. said, okay, they're better. And then Ray calls me into a room with 36 people and basically says, why are you so terrible at tasting the soup? I said, Greg just said I'm mediocre. Like, Greg fights me. And so I had to do a, I did a reflection, which we would write almost every day inside the company. And I said, I'm fighting for mediocrity, right? That was the beginning of my Bridgewater experience. But by the end, I think I didn't.
Joel (39:27.672)
Cheers.
Jeff Taylor (39:30.938)
sell my soul, I was me. It was an incredible experience. The people that work out at Bridgewater are lifelong, incredible people. And so for me, it was a great stop in a building career.
Joel (39:46.378)
And why'd you leave? Was it to start another company or you just had
Jeff Taylor (39:49.73)
So, well, actually, we carved off principles. At one point, Ray said, you know, like, what do you want to do? You're doing a great job in the company. it was like, your book is in the corner. You you're messing around with that. And I said, I'll help, you know, project manage the books, the book principles.
Chad (39:50.557)
You the itch?
Jeff Taylor (40:10.886)
I worked as the project lead on that team and with a couple other incredible people and kind of got Ray over the finish line of getting that book out there, producing those videos that are about how you fall down and get back up. If you haven't watched it, it's a really good watch.
Joel (40:24.886)
Is that the Empire stuff or are these different videos?
Jeff Taylor (40:27.662)
Oh, well, so there's this a little bit earlier. So this is is is principles you this is how the economic machine works and some of the early videos. And so the spirit of that, for me, we ended up carving that company off in 2019 as a separate company called principles. And we were going to see if we could sell these tools into places like Salesforce and zoom and some of our early meetings. And then the pandemic hit and
Joel (40:30.904)
Okay, so the Empire is the new stuff, yeah.
Jeff Taylor (40:57.818)
feedback in year one of the pandemic was, I didn't know you had kids and what's your dog's name and are you okay? See you next year. That was the transparency and the radical feedback for year one of the pandemic. And that was when we were trying to build a business. And so I finally said, it's probably time, you know, in a theme that's very similar that you'll start to hear from me, it was probably time. And I...
I had built a couple of Land Rovers and I was like, you know what, this is so creative. I'm not a refiner and an advanced working for Ray. I'm completely envisioning these things. And so I created a little company called Rover Trophy during the pandemic, built about a hundred really cool Land Rovers. And then, I don't know, one of my buds called me and basically said, you gotta get back in the game. And I was like, I'm building these Rovers and
I was thinking about it and I basically, it's always danced, like there's been a couple of points where it's like, I should go buy Monster. you know, Monster has been doing that steady march down and I think the brand was still good. But I think that's not typically what I do. I've typically gone and done different things.
Joel (41:58.04)
It must have been dancing in your head. It must have sort of been there, right? And he...
Chad (42:09.96)
Mm-hmm, yeah. Or they pay you to take it.
Jeff Taylor (42:21.672)
And so this is actually a real coming around for me to come back into the business.
Chad (42:27.838)
So do we know what boom band is gonna be? That's the question because it seems like there's an idea, there's a concept, but it's a little nebulous at this point. Give us an idea.
Joel (42:31.106)
Give it to us.
Jeff Taylor (42:34.99)
I do. I Yeah, and it is completely by design. Like I, you know, one of the things that I've been talking about, and I think we probably should spend some time and talk about this because there's a there's kind of a what I'm describing is like a meltdown in the industry right now. It's not working. It's literally not working. And I was I was describing it as like leaves up against the fence. And you have
Chad (42:56.628)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Taylor (43:05.006)
guest after guest after guest that is tweaking and doing middleware and reinventing this and putting AI on top of that. And these are all micro adjustments to something that fundamentally, when I started Monster, the biggest problem was there was not a big enough talent pool to service the companies and they needed a new way to do it.
And there was no tweaking of the help wanted section that was going to get that done. Some of the help wanted sections were 150 pages. Big, right? You know, like that just didn't work. Still one day publishing, whatever. Right. Now I think what's happening is cost of posting, has gone to like a day rate. If you add it up in a month, postings are as expensive as they've ever been. And you have every flavor of microsite and you have.
the application process, is broken. The ATS system, I think at some point it's just the machine settings in the ATS is can't keep up. You know, my airbrushing thing I've been talking about. don't know how much you've, you track me, but I can do it. I can do it right here. And this, you mostly do podcast, right? So I have a tangerine company says, this is an exciting job posting. I'm going to put it through AI and they make this.
Joel (44:24.78)
Yep. Uh-huh.
Jeff Taylor (44:30.67)
this much more sexy looking orange. And then they put it out in the marketplace and here's your candidate is like this orange cup. And the candidate's like, wow, I'm gonna put that job posting in my favorite transformer, my favorite LLM. And so now it's in there, put my resume in there too. And what comes out the bottom is like, okay, now here's my resume. It looks so beautiful. And then it comes back over and answers the job. And the ATS system is like,
Holy shit. I used to have five to 7 % of my applicants where I could identify the keywords and then I could help a recruiter who's not quite as good at human interactions anymore to move people forward in the system. And the reality now is you've got instead of two to 300 responses in three to four weeks, now you're getting 500 responses in three to five hours.
And now I said conservatively 30 % look like an orange, but I just saw somebody say half look like an orange. Okay. So the, so the ATS system is like, yes, there are 400 people that match your job posting. then the recruiter.
Joel (45:38.168)
Cheers.
Joel (45:44.524)
Yeah, close the posting. We don't need any more, right? And then.
Jeff Taylor (45:48.718)
We are 400 people that are at 92%. It's like, wow, this is awesome. And then you go to the first person. I just heard a story, fourth interview, and it's for a recruiter. And the person says, tell me what kinds of positions you've recruited for. And the person said, I've ever not actually been a recruiter before. Right. I've been in marketing and sales, but I've never recruited somebody. It's like they're at the fourth interview. so interview one, you know, I don't know, interview one is
Chad (46:17.332)
Well that's not a technology problem, that's a company problem.
Jeff Taylor (46:21.294)
Right, but what's happening is phase one, phase two, we're getting a bunch of AI tools that are taking care of the administrative and setting up your meeting. And then your first meeting, I just talked to an applicant yesterday. So I'm so excited. I got my first interview in two months and it's a robot. And she like was almost crying while she's answering the questions.
Joel (46:21.816)
But they're funneling through with tech, yeah.
Jeff Taylor (46:46.956)
because she thought she was gonna talk to Alan or whatever and it's basically mechanical questions being asked to her that then she's answering. She has three tries at it and she has one minute for each answer. And she said, I'm so, so frustrated. Like I don't know what to do. So anyway, I think this thing's melting down. And so I think it's a macro issue. So Boom Band is going to deal with.
Let's call it three of the macro problems. I think the resume, the definition of a resume, it's French, it means summary. That's an absolute disaster in using AI that can actually, it's both semantic and eugenic ways that it's going to find the neighborhood of the information in your resume. And if your resume is a summary, it doesn't work.
And so you're only matching the same way an applicant tracking system is matching by some keywords and by years of experience. And you need to do much more. So my first thinking is the resume's got to be different. And if I had a nickel for every time I went to every HR tech conference, there was many of these, I was a keynote speaker at, and I would walk the floors. And if I had a nickel for every time somebody say, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, come over here, I'm reinventing the resume. I'd say, good luck.
Right? Because I did a hundred million resumes with a form-based resume. So if you went to Amherst college, it was in the college line. It wasn't in the location line as Amherst or in your engineering experience as Amherst software. You knew where the stuff was in a form-based resume and all of the resume parsers. I did a big evaluation of all of those five years ago. I've always been in it a little Joel. and the best ones hit 83, 84%.
That's not good enough for a resume parser because that means you still have mistakes. And so the experience that I had is the resume is broken and it does need to be reinvented. And so I have an idea and my idea is to say, I think your resume needs to be 80 % current, 5 % historical and 15 % future. What are your goals and dreams? Including what companies you'd like to work for.
Jeff Taylor (49:13.87)
what jobs you would like to have, why you'd like to have those jobs, and what are my five-year goals in terms of what I'd like to do with my career. And I want to ingest all that so I start to get a little bit of a spirit of like the culture of this person. The other thing is when you have a LinkedIn resume, let's talk about LinkedIn for a minute. 1 % creators, 9 % engagers, 90 % lurkers. That's the industry standard.
Chad (49:39.636)
.
Jeff Taylor (49:40.942)
I think if anything, it might be higher lurkers on LinkedIn. There's there's there's and then of the 1 % of content creators, 10 % of those produce real content on a regular basis. So it's a very small number of content creators. You guys you guys know this, you know, the one 990 rule. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm sorry. I'm just just trying to like set up a picture, right? So this means 90 plus percent of the people that are on LinkedIn are using it like Instagram.
Chad (49:59.476)
Kind of what we do kind of what we do
Jeff Taylor (50:12.424)
Or they have an old resume on LinkedIn. That's it. It's a commercial resume, 85 % historical, 15 % current. So for 90 % of the users, that's what they got. It's not good enough. And so what I want to do is fill up that experience, bring your whole self. And that's the first anchor point that I'm doing. The second thing is we have to get rid of job postings. There are
100 companies including Chris that was just on your show Who I'm amazed at he's he's amazing guy and he's built an amazing business and now he's gonna go make cheese which I think is funny and I think what's what's cool is he's been able to cycle so I can have a little fun with this is That all of these things are things to make the job posting better
to make it more efficient, to find the efficiencies, to place on a hundred job posting sites, we have to get rid of the job posting. The job posting has been around since you had an anvil and you're banging the shit out of a piece of metal and you put on a tree that I need an apprentice. It's been the same. It's just like the resume. A resume has been around. The first ones I found were from 1907. That's when the telephone was invented and that's when the automobile was invented.
A resume has been the same pretty much. I have a resume from 1907. I'm sorry, I'm excited. I'm really fucking excited right now. Like this is me.
Chad (51:44.692)
about a 1907 resume. I get some money out of that.
Joel (51:45.576)
So you're taking on LinkedIn, you're taking on Indeed, and any other 800-pound gorillas you want to take down?
Jeff Taylor (51:52.826)
No, I can't take on LinkedIn yet. But the idea is, you know, if I just take that resume, the only difference between a 1907 resume and one today is the person said they were happily married, which is typically not on resume today, and the person said they enjoy fox hunting. And you probably wouldn't say, you know, you could lose a vice presidential opportunity for killing an animal.
Joel (51:57.196)
Yet.
Jeff Taylor (52:17.452)
right? And so I think that there is a that resume has to change and the job posting needs to change. And my own view is that what you have is a requirement. You have signal. But what you don't want is a thousand people to apply. So what's happened from 1994 to now is there were no applicants and there was so much demand now, now because of the economy, because of
Doge because of everything going on. There's way too many applicants. And so now the system is, I don't want to put an announcement out there. A third of positions right now are where someone's not working out in the role. The only way you can fill that position is with a recruiter because it needs to be a confidential search. can't put that out in the marketplace. And so what I'm saying is if we were going to get rid of a job posting, that means we got to be more predictive about what that company wants and.
So I'm building that.
Joel (53:18.392)
these will be easy sales and the good news is Super Bowl 50 is 60 is really close. just produce another commercial, buy a blimp, get the blimp going, get the blimp back and you're on your way, right?
Jeff Taylor (53:25.774)
$8 million.
Chad (53:26.58)
So only like eight million.
Jeff Taylor (53:35.348)
So how do you do that again and not do a blimp? You know, one of the things I always had this idea of going up on a billboard and like a live person like me staying up on a billboard until I get, you know, 100,000 people to build their profiles on Boom Band. Like I never did that. I wanted to do that. I proposed that to the team. But I did crop circles. I did snow mazes.
Joel (53:45.004)
Now you're talkin'.
Jeff Taylor (54:04.846)
I did blimps in the sky. I set the world record water skiing behind a blimp. You can't buy a blimp ride, so it wasn't that much of a physical accomplishment, but it was fun. And so, yes, I've done those things. So what do I do with Boom Band? And so I'm excited about it. I think the industry is really ready for a change. My website's up. It's just a teaser site. just, it even...
Joel (54:30.826)
End quotes. Yeah.
Jeff Taylor (54:32.11)
It floats, it basically says, you know, come and get a backstage pass so can play together.
Joel (54:38.917)
When's the real launch date? Do you know yet?
Jeff Taylor (54:42.092)
I don't know yet, I'm building right now. My target is late fall.
Joel (54:48.152)
We will be watching, Jeff.
Chad (54:48.158)
Fair enough. You need some pilot, you need some pilot users and then some real data and then you know what the hell's going on. That's the thing. So you've got a great concept. Everybody thinks they have a great concept. And then there are like 27 pivots within those first six months, especially now, especially now with the market and how fast it's moving. So it'll be interesting to see how this actually comes out.
Joel (55:07.99)
And more importantly, Jeff Taylor is back, bitches. Jeff Taylor is back.
Chad (55:10.846)
There he is.
Jeff Taylor (55:15.83)
You know, I appreciate you guys. Like, I think you have a great role in the middle of this. you know, to tell the stories, I think this is a new kind of journalism in a way that I'm just, I'm proud of the work you're doing and thank you for having me on.
Joel (55:15.874)
Can't wait, Jeff.
Joel (55:24.162)
Say more.
Joel (55:33.152)
Does that mean you'll come back when Boom Band is rockin' and rollin'?
Chad (55:33.3)
Thanks for coming on,
Jeff Taylor (55:35.662)
Yeah, if you'll have me, I'll show you the boom band arena sometime late summer.
Chad (55:38.035)
Ready?
Joel (55:41.272)
Ugh.
Joel (55:45.89)
Sounds good, man. So for our listeners that want to connect with you or learn more about Boom Band, where do you send them?
Chad (55:45.94)
Okay, good stuff.
Jeff Taylor (55:53.819)
So, you know, this is crazy, but go to my LinkedIn just so we can start the conversation. And if you just put in Jeff Taylor and Boom Band, I think there's 17,000 Jeff Taylors on LinkedIn, which is great. And then go to boomband.com, sign up for Backstage Pass so we can play together over the next few months as, you know, be an early power user.
Joel (56:14.744)
Boom boom boom, Chad, that is another one in the can. We out.
Chad (56:16.02)
Good stuff, baby. Way out.