The Olympics are over, but Chad & Cheese’s quest for the European gold medal for podcasting is just beginning. This week, Lieven gets all fired up about Adecco buying up a company in his own backyard in Belgium.
Author Katrina Collier joins the crew to talk about Indeed’s recent move to CPAS over CPC and the overall issues of assclowns crawling the web for job content to rip off job seekers and legit businesses. Rounding out the show is a hailstorm of commentary on the recent move of Cornerstone OnDemand going private.
Word of 2021 in the Old Country? Douchebaggery.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
Europe INTRO (5s):
Some podcasts, do it for the fun. Some do it for the fame, Chad and Cheese they do it for global effin domination. That's why bringing America to its knees was just the beginning. Now they have their eyes set on conquering Europe and they've drafted industry veteran Lieven Van Nieuwenhuyze of Belgium to help them navigate the old country and bring HR's most dangerous podcast across the pond to trash-talk like never before. Not safe for work in any language. The Chad and Cheese podcast does Europe.
Joel (39s):
Oh yeah. Greece is burning scientists. Now say a doomsday variant of COVID may be on the way, and Sweden lost a Canada in women's football. Do they even play soccer in Canada? Let's forget all that and get numb everybody you're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast does Europe. I'm your cohost Joel Ich Liebe Angela Cheesman.
Chad (1m 1s):
And I'm Chad "is that golden. Hello?" Sowash.
Lieven (1m 5s):
And I'm just Lieven Van Nieuwenhuyze.
Joel (1m 7s):
On this episode, Cornerstone, wants a little privacy, why recruitment has a crawling problem and Adecco makes Lieven want to declare war on Switzerland. Don't worry. It'll make sense. In about 30 minutes.
SFX (1m 22s):
Europe has a bunch of countries in it.
Joel (1m 24s):
Who's our mystery guest?
Chad (1m 26s):
Who's the mystery guest?
Joel (1m 28s):
Mystery. Oh, shit Peepers! Chad's been waiting for that to be put on the show.
Katrina (1m 38s):
To be fair when I am your mystery guest that's pretty spot on.
Joel (1m 42s):
She. Oh, wow. She's a dog. No, I'm not going to say that. Honestly, living in London, she shares a birthday with Chad and she's the author of the robot proof recruiter is if you haven't guessed it already, Katrina Collier!
Katrina (1m 58s):
Hello? Hello.
Lieven (2m 0s):
Hi Katrina!
Katrina (2m 1s):
Hi.
Joel (2m 2s):
So is everyone enjoying the Olympics now that it's over?
Lieven (2m 5s):
Yeah.
Joel (2m 6s):
Did anyone watch?
Katrina (2m 8s):
No.
Chad (2m 8s):
Yes! Yes, I said I wasn't going to and I found myself watching. And also did you watch the Snoop Dogg and Kevin Hart like vignette?
Katrina (2m 18s):
We couldn't see that in Europe. It was, it was banned from your, I find I'm a bit conflicted though. Cause you know, I'm Australian, but I live in England, so I'm not like, oh, do I go for Australia or Britain? So I just tend to not watch.
Chad (2m 29s):
You can go for both! why can't you go for both? Unless they're playing each other then. I mean, you know, whoever wins you're a winner!
Joel (2m 36s):
Have to pick a side.
Chad (2m 37s):
Yeah.
Joel (2m 37s):
So some stats of the U S which is why I brought this up. So 60% of US adults said they hadn't watched much or any of this summer's games, just 34% of baby boomers say they've been watching which means if old people aren't watching holy hell and we politicize everything in our country, which means 55% of Republicans have said, they're watching less of this year's with about one in four citing contempt for athletes or politics. It sounds like Europe's not watching, but maybe for different reasons.
Katrina (3m 8s):
Why aren't we watching? I say it was the pandemic. It just, oh, look, there's an Olympics. Where'd that come from? And then there was no audience and there was no atmosphere. And maybe that's why.
Chad (3m 18s):
Here in the U S there's generally like a station you can watch. And it's like Olympics 24 7, but it seems like it was like skipping and jumping all over the different channels and peacock had content, which is pretty much where I got all my stuff, I could stream wherever I wanted. But it's like, you didn't know where to watch it. Could you actually nail down a place in Europe to watch it?
Katrina (3m 41s):
Yeah, the British Broadcasting Commission, the BBC. Of course.
Chad (3m 44s):
Okay. BBC does all the good shit, right?
Katrina (3m 47s):
Yeah. Except it kind of ruined my lunch. Cause I like to watch the end of Bargain Hunter and they moved that to BBC too. And I had to remember that it's quite a drama.
Chad (3m 55s):
And Lieven you just didn't give a shit. Did ya?
Lieven (3m 59s):
I forgot about it. I was busy working, working, working.
Joel (4m 2s):
What would be like Belgium's this stronghold in the Olympics? What's it like?
Lieven (4m 8s):
We had to treat gold medals. You know.
Joel (4m 10s):
In what?
Lieven (4m 11s):
Yeah, I forgot. Yeah.
Joel (4m 16s):
I'm pretty sure it was three, but the one for some gymnast, I think. One for, oh whatever, I don't know. Case in point. Nobody watches the Olympics anymore. That's sad.
Katrina (4m 29s):
I do have to say that Great Britain actually had an exceptional games, with 22 gold medals, 21, silver and 22 bronze. Thank you, Google.
Joel (4m 37s):
US kicked everyone's ass and no one watched.
Katrina (4m 40s):
Yeah, hang on. There are 60 million of us and there's like 300 and something million of you lot. So to be fair, we did quite well. You've only got 39 goals considering how many people you have. It's like kind of lame.
Joel (4m 51s):
You're such a Brit you've left. You've left Australia.
Katrina (4m 55s):
Australia's got 17 and there's only probably 25 million of us.
Chad (4m 59s):
Yeah Joel forgets that you take a look at Europe, right? And it's got a bunch of countries in it. So just for, just for four countries, Great Britain, Germany, Netherlands, and France had 171 total medals and 52 gold. So that was four of those pretty much European states, right where we had 113 and 39. So as Joel being the chest thumping American that he always is, we actually got our ass handed to us.
Joel (5m 30s):
Yeah. Well, if we're talking with that math, then Jamaica kicked everyone's ass.
Katrina (5m 35s):
That's fine. I'm happy with that.
Chad (5m 36s):
That's the stupidest fucking comment I ever heard.
Katrina (5m 42s):
I see when you look at it, then China had a really shocking games. Didn't they? 38 gold against 1 billion people.
Chad (5m 48s):
Yeah, they suck.
Katrina (5m 49s):
Yeah. Anyway, moving on.
Joel (5m 53s):
Yeah. Go Jamaica. Let's move on. We've spent five minutes on the Olympics. Let's keep going.
Chad (5m 57s):
Thanks to Rica Coppens. Is that how you say it? Lieven Coppens?
Lieven (6m 2s):
Oh, you can't say it like that.
Chad (6m 4s):
I can't, I can't. Thanks Rica for joining us last week on the show. We appreciate you providing some, some in-depth understanding of MNA in Europe, funding, all that other fun stuff. While we sat back and took notes.
Joel (6m 21s):
Yeah. Her English is better than ours, by the way.
Chad (6m 24s):
That's not saying much.
Lieven (6m 27s):
Her English is so much better than mine, right? It shouldn't be. There's no reason why it should be better than mine, but it is. That's probably why she is CEO. And I'm only CDO.
Joel (6m 38s):
Bingo, baby.
Chad (6m 39s):
There it is.
Joel (6m 40s):
I'm going to give a shout out to French president Emmanuel Macron.
Chad (6m 44s):
MACRON.
Joel (6m 45s):
For his vaccine mandates, baby people in France now need to show a health pass.
Chad (6m 50s):
Fuck yes.
Joel (6m 51s):
To enjoy usually routine activities such as sipping a coffee in a cafe or traveling on an inner city train. Obviously there's a lot of pushback on this from the French folks, but I'm all for it. Shout out to Macron.
Katrina (7m 5s):
Question, you can have you two jabs and two weeks after you've had your two jabs, you're 60% protected against the Delta variants. So why are they forcing it on everyone?
Joel (7m 14s):
You get a real fucking vaccine in Europe. That would help. Stop the AstraZeneca garbage. Get some Pfizer.
Katrina (7m 22s):
It's still the same. My lovely.
Chad (7m 24s):
No it's not.
Joel (7m 26s):
No, It's not. America's the home of the best vaccines that we're not taking.
Chad (7m 30s):
That's a good point.
Joel (7m 31s):
I don't worry about taking
Chad (7m 34s):
God. That's funny, but it's fucking not funny.
Joel (7m 36s):
It's a shame.
Chad (7m 37s):
Yes, it is a shame. No. So the mandates from a country standpoint is something that the US won't do. We'll force or we'll try to leverage companies to do it, to mandate for employees. What do you think is going to happen in Europe with the other countries? Do you think they'll they'll follow or they'll just kind of?
Lieven (7m 59s):
No.
Katrina (7m 59s):
No. no. Or the 44 countries in Europe, they're all culturally really, really different. Yeah.
Chad (8m 6s):
Well, I didn't mean all of them. Did you think some, do you think some of them will?
Joel (8m 9s):
Germany will.
Katrina (8m 10s):
Britain wont because the French did.
Lieven (8m 14s):
We're not English oh, sorry you're not European anymore. You left us.
Katrina (8m 18s):
Excuse me, I'm still in Europe. I'm just, unfortunately heartbreakingly, not part of the EU and believe me, I feel devalued as a divorced woman with an Australian and a British passport. I have been devalued down to six countries. From a ridiculous number. I'm doing nothing personally, personally. So let's not talk about Brexit.
Joel (8m 38s):
Which ones will?
Lieven (8m 40s):
The civilized will, I guess.
Joel (8m 43s):
So Germany, the Scandinavian country.
Lieven (8m 46s):
Yes, of course.
Joel (8m 48s):
Netherlands. Belgium.
Chad (8m 49s):
Belgium.
Lieven (8m 50s):
Sure. Yeah.
Katrina (8m 51s):
Where does it stop though? I'm just playing devil's advocate, by the way? I had double jabs and I still wear a mask.
Joel (8m 57s):
Stop's with America and the UK.
Katrina (8m 59s):
Where does it stop? If you're going to mandate the vaccine for say work, where does it stop? Oh, you got to have your yellow fever. You've got to have your dengue fever. What else? Like what else?
Chad (9m 7s):
It depends on what you're susceptible to and where you're at. We don't have malaria here in the US. Right? So we don't have to get our malaria shots. Although, when I went to Central America, I had to get a fucking malaria shot. So here's the thing that I think is important that we need to all understand as human beings. This isn't about your fucking freedom. This is about the safety of others, right? This has nothing to do with you and your goddamn freedom. So quit being an asshole. Take the goddamn jabs, right?
Katrina (9m 34s):
Yellow fever is painful. The actual jab. No?
Joel (9m 37s):
And by the way, I don't think we're talking. We're not talking. We're not talking about like, I don't think they're talking about forced shots. They're saying, if you don't have this, you can't sip your wine at a cafe and smoke your cigarettes. So they're basically making it like, if you can't do that in France, what's the point of living. So they're basically just saying like, you can't do that anymore, but they're not saying, Hey, the shot police are coming through your town tomorrow and be out to get a shot. So I'm not sure it's the same as mandating it. It's just saying you can't do these things you enjoy.
Katrina (10m 11s):
That's super clever.
Lieven (10m 12s):
Citizens in France are just going to strike.
Katrina (10m 14s):
Yeah.
Lieven (10m 15s):
Now you need a vaccine passports if you want to strike and then they'll get a passport to strike.
Chad (10m 23s):
There you go. There you go. There you go. Oh, shout out to Golden Hellos employers are offering sign on fees of up to 10,000 pounds to attempt what they call "gold dust applicants" as more than 1.1 million jobs in the UK remain unfilled. The hefty fees emerged after a survey by job search engine and beer dropped sponsor AdZuna found almost 5,000 vacancies across the UK. Currently offering sign on bonuses for in demand roles, such as care workers, chefs, and nursery staff.
Katrina (11m 6s):
Yeah.
Joel (11m 7s):
Shout out to Germany has finally gotten a foothold in England. You guys knew this, but not, not with Stookas and Messer Schmitz, but with food delivery company Delivery Hero acquiring a 5% stake in the UK based Deliveroo when the US are more familiar with names like Grub Hub and Door Dash, but the European market is a hotbed for food delivery, which means the Germans are looking to take over. Any thoughts from the.....?
Katrina (11m 35s):
Can I give a little story that relates to the two things you just said? So one of the things you said, one of the skills in short supply is chefs just said that Golden Hello, 5,000, 10,000, whatever. Why does that remind me of some weird thing you do with paper? Anyway, I got an Uber driver who used to manage a restaurant who went, Ugh, I've had this great time during the whole furlough thing. I've realized, I didn't know who my child was. I'm not working in the restaurant anymore, but he goes, I know six chefs who now drive Uber Eats Deliveroo and all of those and earn twice the money that they used to. So they're not going back. So maybe we should just pay people properly?
Joel (12m 14s):
Twice, twice as much as they aren't as a chef.
Katrina (12m 17s):
Yup, just doing deliveries, mind you, it should be very few people are eating in restaurants. They will get deliveries, but you kind of going, there was already a shortage of chefs before the pandemic went down. So maybe we should pay people properly. And I know that's close to Chad's heart.
Joel (12m 32s):
Yeah. That's a topic near and dear to Chad's heart. Let's get to topics. All right, we're going to rehash Indeed moving off it's cost per click model and moving toward a cost per apply start model, which we're calling CPASS whether they like it or not. We've talked about it on the show, Chad, anything to add? I know we want to get the Europeans opinion on Indeed's move.
Chad (13m 1s):
Yeah. I actually reached out to a bunch of different contacts in Europe about this, because I know the US market, much different than the European market, especially when we're talking about CPC, performance-based advertising, that kind of stuff. And here's one of the quotes: quote, "focusing on hires is crazy in Europe because 1% of companies can actually do it. All you're essentially doing is moving the success factor into a realm, which is largely un-trackable and un-reportable" end quote. And so when we're, when we're looking at Europe again, I don't know what the impact is. I know what we're going to be seeing impact here in the US but what's the European impact?
Katrina (13m 44s):
Look like if I was to go with my gut instinct on that, I'd firstly, be thinking, do people actually apply for jobs? I guess that's because I tend to work in the space where people have skills that are in demand and don't. And secondly, do they then do it via Indeed. And thirdly, what about the candidate experience?
Joel (14m 2s):
Keep in mind they don't have to apply they just have to start the apply.
Katrina (14m 6s):
I thought you said that were left behind almost like I'm gonna say firewall, cause I'm so not technical, but behind they had to put in their details to get through the entry, isn't that like making it just like another hurdle?
Joel (14m 16s):
It's a little black boxish?
Chad (14m 18s):
Boxish.
Joel (14m 20s):
That's a little, it's a little confusion in the market. Katrina. We're trying to figure it out.
Chad (14m 24s):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, where a candidate has to at least go through the partial registration process on Indeed, before they can go get to the applicant tracking system to apply there. Right. So you have that hoop that you have to go through. Yeah. So, you know, that could be kind of like a wall that some individuals don't want to go through, especially if they haven't already registered with Indeed.
Katrina (14m 46s):
Exactly. It just sounds like another obstacle to hiring. Gosh, we love putting obstacles in the way of an applicant applying.
Joel (14m 52s):
Sounds like more money in Indeed's pocket to me.
Katrina (14m 55s):
As well.
Joel (14m 56s):
Less trackable option.
Lieven (14m 59s):
It's pretty, pretty intelligent, I think.
Katrina (15m 3s):
In what respect?
Lieven (15m 4s):
You have to apply on Indeed before we get to apply it on the hiring company site, so they get all the candidates. And if you don't finish your application at the hiring company sites, and they will be able to find something else for you.
Katrina (15m 17s):
You really think that's what Indeed is going to do?
Joel (15m 20s):
Oh yeah. And Indeed's going to make more money. That's less trackable. They're going to get away from the cost per click thing, which is programmatic, which is, is being commoditized, right? So they're getting away from the cost per click thing.
Katrina (15m 34s):
Which you can check. You said that on your other show, didn't you that you can check?
Joel (15m 38s):
Detecting fraud in that is easier than the apply thing. And to Lieven's point, they're going to get more data, more profiles in their database. So they really win. I mean, I agree. I agree with Lieven that this is pretty smart by them. It's also kind of douche-baggy, but you can be douchebag and smart at the same time, I guess. And Indeed has excelled in douchebaggery ever since Google for Jobs launched.
Katrina (16m 4s):
Since this is a European audience, what does douchebag mean?
Chad (16m 7s):
Wanker.
Joel (16m 8s):
There you go. Wanker.
Lieven (16m 9s):
Wanker is fun, so Douchebagging is fun also?
Joel (16m 17s):
And that's our show. Everybody.
Katrina (16m 20s):
That is so not what that means I've just Googled it.
Joel (16m 22s):
Shifting gears now
Lieven (16m 24s):
Totally word for me.
Katrina (16m 26s):
I know.
Lieven (16m 27s):
I'm learning
Joel (16m 28s):
Douchebaggery there you go. One for the Europeans and the ones who claim to speak English.
Katrina (16m 33s):
Why does it always have to do with female private parts. Anyway moving on?
Joel (16m 36s):
That's another show Katrina. We'll do that one after this episode as well. Let's go, let's get on to a, just crawling in general. Indeed seems like a nice segue about that. So an article from Two Talent on crawling the web caught our attention this week, author Jasper Spaanjart digs into the issue, accusing certain job sites, not necessarily all of doing behaving badly, including things such as holding job-seekers hostage, making them put input an email address to even view a job, for example. A second way is keeping a jobs online that have long been filled and three, actually changing the job text, making it more clickworthy.
Joel (17m 17s):
This kind of shit as long, been a pain in the ass of our industry and might be why so many people are rooting for Google for Jobs to save us. How do you guys think about crawling the web? Some of us are a little bit more bullish on it than others.
Katrina (17m 32s):
For my non digital brain. Just to check this is where sites like LinkedIn go to a career site, scrape off the job and suddenly it appears on LinkedIn in a really shitty format. Yeah.
Joel (17m 41s):
Google is the best example. Google crawls, the web, you search Google and they give you results. So that's
Katrina (17m 46s):
But they didn't screw up the formatting, correct?
Chad (17m 49s):
Right.
Katrina (17m 49s):
But other sites, not LinkedIn, cause we know LinkedIn doesn't do this, holding people hostage. It's about the same, but that's scumbag back. Isn't it? Why is everyone got it in for these poor job seekers?
Joel (17m 59s):
Money.
Chad (17m 60s):
You must register in many cases just to be able to see the job, which is what we were just talking about with LinkedIn. And then Joel was talking about adding more info to the opening, which wasn't on the original posting itself, like salary. And that's something that Indeed and other and other sites do. And then keeping the jobs open when they're already closed. So you have all this clickbait that's out there, to be able to, again, draw more candidates in, which is again, I mean, this is running very parallel to how Indeed is doing business. Not saying that they're keeping jobs open, but they're really trying to get that candidate on their site so that you have to spend money over and over.
Katrina (18m 48s):
Yeah. So again, for the Europeans, Google for Jobs, the blue box at the top, which clears out search and duplications and I personally think is wonderful. Is that what we're talking about?
Lieven (18m 59s):
No, no, no.
Katrina (18m 60s):
Just explain what Google for jobs is just a full-stop because there'll be people here that don't have it in the country cause it's not never country.
Joel (19m 6s):
Okay, so I'm assuming Google in where you live, you can search restaurants and it will show you the actual reviews and so?
Katrina (19m 15s):
Yeah.
Joel (19m 15s):
Or travel information they'll give you flights. And so it's basically what's, what's referred to as a vertical search. So you're searching a certain vertical. Could be news news was their first one, it could be other things like that. So jobs is basically Google taking the actual job description and presenting it to users. Whereas before they would just present websites, IE job boards that had certain searches based on what you search Google for. So it's, Google's attempt to show job descriptions as opposed to just sites that have the job.
Katrina (19m 44s):
We've had that in the UK for ages, but not every country in Europe has it.
Lieven (19m 48s):
By now. I think we do. Belgium was one of the last countries and we launched it, I think two years ago in November, somewhere.
Katrina (19m 55s):
Cool.
Lieven (19m 56s):
I've always been a big fan of Google for Jobs and I still am. They could improve it, but they will be improving it. But I, to say something about the crawling purchase to explain, I'm going to tell a little story, how I got in touch with crawling 10 years ago. I was working for USD people, which is called RGF Staffing now. And we had a bunch of offices and suddenly I got some complaints about people saying those offices of yours are spreading vacancies, which don't exist. And I didn't get one or I got several of those complaints, why got on it and I called the office, what are you doing? But Lieven we're definitely not doing this. We've got plenty of work.
Lieven (20m 37s):
Why should we be, be spreading jobs, which don't exist? And I said, okay, this makes sense. So I looked for, and apparently 10, 12 years ago, it was not Indeed was Career Chats scraped our company sites without us knowing it. And suddenly those jobs went live and the moment we had a new job they saw it and they put it live. But the moment our job was filled, they didn't notice. And they just kept it there because they don't want the best database, they want the biggest database. The more data, the more traffic, the more money. So in the end I called it was Simply Hired.. No, it was Career Jet announced. I explained my problem. And he said, okay, no worries we will stop do a scraping.
Lieven (21m 20s):
But I said, no. I mean, I see we've got a few thousand visitors a day in those days. Can't you just notice when I've got a filled in vacancy? When I put it out of my database, can you can't you just remove it from yours? Sure we can. Okay, perfect. But then it will cost you 10 cent per click! Just to get it straight? So you'll make my life miserable until I pay. It's extortion. Oh, you can't see it like that. Yes, of course I see it like that. But in the end for only 10 cents per click, I was on top of Google, which was less expensive than Google ad-words. So we agreed. And that is the way they started to making money.
Chad (21m 58s):
Extortion and it worked.
Joel (22m 1s):
And that was how many years ago? 10 years ago?
Lieven (22m 3s):
10, 12 years, something like that.
Chad (22m 5s):
And now everybody's doing it.
Joel (22m 6s):
Yeah. And I mean, part of it too. So that was definitely a strategy that people use. But now I think it's gone downstream to where it's collecting the jobs, putting a really click baity description or title on the job, promoting it, you know, feeding it into Google for Jobs, which fortunately they're doing a better job or going to be doing a better job of filtering that out. But then before you can even see the job, we want your data, right? And then once they have your data, they can spam you with shit and sell stuff. I mean, some of them, you know, they prey on desperate people that are unemployed, who will give you information about their, how much they make, their address, maybe even social security number in some cases.
Joel (22m 47s):
So they're feeding off the desperation and it's really, the crawling issue has really gotten bad. And that's kinda why we thought it was worth talking about. And people are obviously blogging about it and talking about it.
Chad (22m 59s):
On a good light though we're hoping that the new Google for Jobs guidelines, where they will penalize organizations for this kind of Tom fuckery will stifle a lot of it. We're hoping that it depends on what the upside is. On the last show Lieven talked about getting a 19% rise in traffic, out of Google for Jobs. Hopefully others are seeing that and they're afraid to lose it. So on a happy hopeful note, hopefully Google for Jobs will fix this shit.
Joel (23m 29s):
Yeah. I don't think anyone of us disagree that search is a bad thing, right? There's a reason why Indeed succeeded because they put all the jobs in one place. The problem is like when you're successful, it breeds the douchebaggery of the web. And this is happening here though. That the thing is once, once we clear it in search, it'll just go over to social media somehow.
Lieven (23m 50s):
Scraping is here to stay. I mean, it's not only straight scraping of vacancies by job boards. It's also scraping our CVs by tech savvy recruiters.
Chad (23m 59s):
Yeah. And that's been happening forever too. Yes.
Joel (24m 3s):
Yeah. I actually just interject here. I was talking to somebody who knows sort of LinkedIn pretty well works for a sourcing company, sourcing business. And they're convinced that LinkedIn right now is sort of aware that they can't control companies or agents scraping profiles from LinkedIn. They can do as much as they can to stop it. But their strategy now is to scare the users of LinkedIn. So if they see that your account is sort of automated and doing stuff, they want to make you scared to use sourcing tools that are automated, they want to make you scared about losing your LinkedIn account.
Joel (24m 43s):
So that's sort of their strategy now and that's how they're going to tackle that issue.
Lieven (24m 47s):
Yeah. But those automated automation tools aren't stupid as well. So pretend to be human. So let's say I want to scrape all the profiles from LinkedIn, from engineers. I do a search, I get a list and then it'll open a profile for 15 seconds, then 23 seconds, then 47 seconds. So it's constantly changing. So LinkedIn has our time detecting is actually a robot.
Joel (25m 11s):
So like LinkedIn recently put in a limit to a hundred connection requests a week and they look at things like if you're automating a tool to like scrape to get mass amounts of URLs of profiles, like that's a trigger, they're getting better about detecting that. But yeah. I mean, people are going to try to be one step ahead of LinkedIn, but they're doing what, they used to want to like send a cease and desist letters and hope that all the companies that did it went away and they didn't. So now it's like, let's scare the hell out of people, individual users, a lot more recruiters that I know are getting warning, warning messages from LinkedIn.
Katrina (25m 46s):
Don't think the 100 LinkedIn connection request limit is a bad thing though. No, it's because there's so much spam on there. It's like, yes. And now you've only, you can only send like 20 a day, so.
Joel (25m 57s):
Right. Yeah. And LinkedIn, fortunately can do that. If we go back to crawling the web for jobs, like most employers, aren't going to detect crawlers and slap them around from taking content. So that's a much harder thing to do. If LinkedIn can police LinkedIn, because you're on LinkedIn, it's much more difficult
Lieven (26m 14s):
Yeah. But there's a whole high Q case in 2019 and 20, I believe?
Chad (26m 19s):
Still outstanding.
Lieven (26m 21s):
I think said something about the people owning their own data and LinkedIn has not got rights to block it to scrapers or something like that.
Katrina (26m 29s):
It's hard not to play devil's advocate on that because LinkedIn did the work to build up that database so much as we all use it to recruit far more to sell on or to market on that kind of a thing. I mean, I just feel we should be paying them something for that privilege.
Joel (26m 43s):
Definitely both sides. I think I see both sides as well, but I think legally LinkedIn is going to have a hard time putting people out of business who are, who are crawling and gathering information that's publicly accessible.
Katrina (26m 54s):
For sure.
Joel (26m 56s):
And the gist of LinkedIn is for you to promote yourself, right? Like no one, no one goes on LinkedIn, I don't think, just to be on LinkedIn.
SFX (27m 4s):
Europe has a bunch of countries in it.
Joel (27m 6s):
All right. More news out of Adecco, this one gets Lieven all fired up! News out of Switzerland. A deco is agreed to by, is it AKKA or Akka?
Lieven (27m 16s):
I'm not sure. I think, AKKA.
Joel (27m 18s):
Okay, we'll go with AKKA. AKKA Technologies in a deal worth 2 billion euros. For our American listeners that's about $2.4 billion. This is the biggest deal in the Swiss staffing companies, 25 year history. The acquisition of the Belgium based AKKA, Lievens backyard, by the way, will make Adecco, the world's largest provider of temporary staffing by revenue overtaking Dutch rival, RaunchDot. Adecco's all cash offer for 49 euros per share represents a premium of 115% to its share price. This one looks like an eye to the future where Adecco CEO, Alain Dehaze saying, quote, "almost all industries have to transform their products and to smart and connected products.
Joel (28m 2s):
All of them have to be re-engineering and reinvented" end quote. So leaving Adecco just wanted to really annoy the hell out of you, right?
Lieven (28m 11s):
Yeah. We just have to Rika to show being proud about our fifth acquisition and done just to annoy us. They launched a press release. They're going to buy a 2 billion company. It's a bit childish. Engineering consulting is a big business. I mean, it has high margins margins sustainable, and it's a good thing. They have a very nice geographic spread now to get a river, they're going to combine it with modus. So 50% in Europe, 30% in the Americas, 20% Japan, Australia, it's pretty well spread. So that's a good stuff, but they did pay a lot, I think. And I'm, I didn't do any due diligence of course, but I just read the newspaper.
Lieven (28m 53s):
They paid about twice the stock market value per share, with in the end the shares from Adecco going down with 17%. So the shareholders weren't very enthusiastic about it. So everyone agrees it's very expensive, but it's a very good business. So the future will show if it was a well spent 2 billion or not, but then again, they have 28 billion of revenue don't organize so they can spend a lot.
Chad (29m 22s):
This is a lot play though, right? I mean, this whole segment itself is going to do nothing but grow?
Lieven (29m 29s):
True. Yeah. It's a good investment, I think. But they did pay a lot so it will take many years before it will be.
Joel (29m 35s):
Yeah. So Lieven you don't have to say whether you guys were part of this or not, but at a 115% percent premium, it sounds like a lot of companies were vying for this deal. Was any, information from where you are in terms of what companies might've been trying to get in on this deal? Because it sounds like more than just Adecco is looking to get in.
Lieven (29m 55s):
Well, because HR is a 2 billion revenue company, and this is a 2 billion acquisition. So on this was out of our league, but I think only Randstad and Adecco are big enough to do something like that. Maybe Manpower? Kelly Surface? I'm not sure. I didn't know a thing about this. It was a total surprise for everyone. So I guess it was really under hush hush, but yeah, not many companies can afford to an acquisition like this.
Joel (30m 20s):
So no word that other companies were sort of dealing the price up higher?
Lieven (30m 25s):
I'm going to check with our MNA specialist, if he or something. Okay. I'll let you know next time. Sounds good. I didn't hear anything. No,
Chad (30m 33s):
Yeah, I can. I can only imagine that Randstad , I mean, there are only maybe a handful of organizations who could have even been in the conversation in the first place, but obviously somebody was because they paid a hell of a lot over asking, right?
Lieven (30m 52s):
I mean <inaudible>, it's an Italian name I think? And the founder of <inaudible> He's now going to be a special advisor to Akka so he'll still get a well-paid job, but I'm sure his friends would be calling him Rich Ricky. He was the founder of Akka so he'll be the one paying for the drinks next party.
Joel (31m 11s):
Yeah. I don't think there'll be a lot of starving people out of this deal.
Chad (31m 14s):
No.
Katrina (31m 15s):
Interesting move. I mean, I think from a company's perspective, as far as having one place, they can go to get staff sounds quite enticing with all the different employment laws across Europe, even though it's one of you, I think it could be quite interesting.
Joel (31m 30s):
Yeah. A lot of consolidation going on over in Europe, which leads us to our next story, Cornerstone on demand, which helps companies to recruit, train and manage their employees recently announced private equity firm Clearlake Capital Group LP would take the cloud computing and management software provider Private for about $3.8 billion. Cornerstone shareholders will get $57.50 per share in cash, a premium over 15%, much less than the 115 in our previous story to the stocks last close. The deal, which is expected to close in the second half of this year has an enterprise value of about $5.2 billion. Though it's headquartered in California, Cornerstone has a huge footprint all over the world and especially in Europe.
Chad (32m 16s):
I've got a comment from Bill Boorman on this one. So his quote is "where it's going is quite specific. Top of funnel activity and spend about 200 times that of a tech spend is shifting to deployment within the applicant tracking system and on a job by job basis. So more transactional than anything else. This includes services like Agency and RPO becoming the channel. They can secure about 20% of the revenues and the capture data builds better recommendation engines. So this to me is a data play, but also a recruitment marketing or at least Bill saying, this is a recruitment marketing, a top of funnel play, which Cornerstone really doesn't have right now.
Chad (33m 4s):
And with all that data pushing into Cornerstone, which they obviously house, they will be able to grind on that much better than, than anybody else out there. My, my big question is what does Cornerstone really do well?
Joel (33m 20s):
So I think what they do well is...
Lieven (33m 22s):
Getting capital.
Chad (33m 25s):
That's part of it. Yes.
Joel (33m 29s):
So I think the upscaling training part of it is important, part of important piece of this news. I mean, my take initially was how many companies that go private is it a good story? Like how many companies that have either PE or someone comes in, we talk about obviously Monster and CareerBuilder is examples of private funds coming in. But I think that these guys going private is a positive because I think it'll give them more flexibility to be out of the public markets. To grow and invest in R and D as well as go potentially on an acquisition spree. I think Josh Berson was really bullish on this news and here's his quote from his blog posts was quote, "Companies are heavily investing in recruiting tools, employee experience tools, and all kinds of upskilling, training, and organizational development solutions.
Joel (34m 19s):
And the delayed end of the Pandemic" thanks Delta, "is making the market hotter than ever" So to me, this is sort of pandemic driven, part money going into training and engagement with employees, which makes the cost, what it was for Cornerstone.
Chad (34m 38s):
How much do you think Josh Bersin has paid to be a Muppet for Cornerstone?
Lieven (34m 42s):
He used to be Deloitte.. So a lot I'd say I think.
Joel (34m 45s):
Not see a disclosure statement on the blog post. So?
Chad (34m 49s):
Yeah. So again, what, what Bill was talking about was something that Cornerstone doesn't do well today. And they do LMS well, them and Saba, Saba are the ones and they bought Saba, are the ones who really did LMS well. They jumped into content, recruiting, talent management, and just a bunch of different areas to create this massive quote unquote "ecosystem," which to be quite Frank. I think it was more of a play for a total addressable market when you're looking for these types of moves because they didn't do any of that shit well. There aren't many players that do. So in Cornerstone's defense, everybody says they do it. Most people don't do it well.
Chad (35m 30s):
The big question is, will they be able to take this new flexibility and start to really focus on these areas and do it, well?
Joel (35m 37s):
Chad, do you think it's more of a old school, private equity play, where they're going to chop the thing up and bleed it, bleed it to death.
Chad (35m 45s):
I would have, the problem is, or the opportunity is look at the market. This is the time right now, where you can sell the shit out of these types of products, whether they're great or not because the job market is so fucking flush, right? So companies are like, I need the new newest. I need the best I need the greatest. Well, if you already have an installed group of people who are paying you and all you want to do is increase wallet share, this is what you do. So I would have normally said, yeah, they're just going to chop this bitch up. But not now.
Joel (36m 19s):
I mean, look, successful public companies don't generally go private. They go private because they're not that great and saying, they need to get off the public markets and retool and regroup. So yeah, I'm open to that. But normally I would have, my knee jerk was like, this is a bad thing for Cornerstone, they're going to be sucked dry.
Lieven (36m 39s):
I don't agree. I think they're doing pretty well. And I think some private equity company has done its homework. They are undervalued and we're going to buy them off and we're going to make more out of them. You're going to keep them for five years. Some we're going to sell them afterwards.
Joel (36m 54s):
Well, I definitely think by most accounts, Cornerstone is the largest or definitely one of the largest sort of learning tech companies out there. So if learning, if that is a hot sector in there, one of the biggest that usually is a good sign.
Chad (37m 7s):
But again, this is about a wallet share conversation. This is about expansion into those other areas to be able to, to hit that total addressable market. And what Bill was talking about is I think, outside of what they do today,
Joel (37m 21s):
It'll be interesting. Let's thank Katrina for joining us on our show.
Katrina (37m 28s):
Thank you! Always fun.
Joel (37m 31s):
Yeah. I said that one. Didn't I, oh, I'm such an, I'm such an asshole.
Chad (37m 35s):
What a Dick.
Katrina (37m 37s):
Yeah.
Joel (37m 37s):
Well, you'll come back on the show though, right?
Katrina (37m 43s):
IDK. Okay.
Joel (37m 43s):
Lieven as always, it's been fun, boys and girls, another European show in the books.
Joel and Chad (37m 50s):
We out.
Katrina (37m 51s):
Thanks Kids.
Outro (38m 37s):
Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with Chad, the Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of Shout Outs of people, you don't even know and yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese, not one cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.
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