In this episode of *The Chad and Cheese Podcast*, Tracey Parsons, CEO of Flockity, joins the hosts in HR's most irreverent, snark-filled exploration of the recruitment industry's latest fiascos. From absurd three-interview car wash applications to Amazon's unsustainable churn rate, Tracey calls out the recruitment sector's refusal to evolve and introduces Flockity’s mission to “give them the bird” (literally and figuratively). Expect rants, laughter, and brutal truths as they navigate the world of recruiting, HR, and why everyone’s loyalty might just be up for review.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Podcast Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors! You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast!
[music]
Joel: Let's do this. We are live from the SmartRecruiters booth at HR Tech in beautiful Las Vegas. Yes. And we are chatting with Tracey Parsons, longtime fan and friend of the show. She is CEO of Flockity. Welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast.
Chad: Give me the bird baby.
Tracey Parsons: Give you jobs the bird people.
Joel: Do you wanna tell the bird story real quick?
Tracey Parsons: That yesterday at Pitch Fest, I got swooped by a bird as I was closing.
Joel: Yeah, you got Hitchcocked by some birds.
Chad: You meant to do that.
Tracey Parsons: And then somebody literally asked me if I did that. I was like, I don't have a flock of trained birds following me around.
Joel: Like you have a bird seed on your head.
Chad: You know what? Maybe you should. Maybe you should.
Joel: Flockity birds on the head.
Tracey Parsons: I'm gonna tell my kid that it landed on my shoulder. [laughter]
Joel: Some of our listeners don't know who you are. Give them a quick elevator pitch.
Tracey Parsons: Yeah, so I've been doing recruitment marketing and employer brand work since the late 1900s.
[laughter]
Chad: Never say that again, please.
Tracey Parsons: No, it's fantastic.
Joel: It's better than back in the 20th century.
Tracey Parsons: Yeah, yeah, yeah, since the late 1900s. You know, working with a variety of the world's biggest brands throughout my 20-plus year career, helping them be better at recruitment marketing and employer brand, right? So helping them demystify a lot of the work that is obviously mysterious to people.
Chad: That's gotta be hard.
Tracey Parsons: It is. You can't see it on my forehead, but there is an enormous bruise there. It's huge.
Chad: Smacked all the time?
Joel: Quick. The YouTube viewers will only see this, but we have beers in front of us. Yes. And Chad put a coaster down.
Tracey Parsons: He did.
[laughter]
Joel: That personifies who Chad is.
Tracey Parsons: He mummed your ass right there.
Joel: That he was so bothered by that, it's not his table.
Chad: No 'Cause I care.
Joel: It's not his house.
Chad: It doesn't have to be my table.
Joel: 'Cause you care, you cares. I do, I care. You're so anal and you care so much.
Chad: No I do care.
Tracey Parsons: Do not leave a bottle ring on there.
Joel: I'll let you judge what that was.
Tracey Parsons: Yeah, don't do that.
Joel: But I had to mention that 'cause it was so Chad.
Tracey Parsons: Just slammed that right down. He's like... It' so Chad.
Chad: It was nice and smooth too.
Tracey Parsons: It was. I mean, it was elegant.
Chad: I try. I don't generally get the elegance. But...
Joel: I will mention, that he comes to my hotel room in the mornings and throws a quarter on my bed to make sure I made my bed tight enough.
Tracey Parsons: Really?
Chad: Well, make sure the corners are all right. Yeah, you gotta get those right. You gotta get the hospital corner.
Tracey Parsons: You know, you should make your bed every day.
Chad: No, that's the first thing you should do.
Tracey Parsons: That's the first thing you should do.
Joel: Anyway. Back to business. Sorry.
Chad: What we were talking about.
Tracey Parsons: So, yeah, Late 1900s, so this is something that I feel like, you know, a lot of the industry has been pushed forward, but I'm tired of how not forward it's going, right? Like there's, we've been talking about the same 10 things for the last 10 years. It doesn't make sense to me.
Chad: Are humans just dumb? I mean, this isn't rocket science, right?
Joel: Are we just creatures of habit?
Tracey Parsons: Yes.
Chad: It's not rocket science.
Tracey Parsons: Maybe both. I think there's a distinct lack of will to change, and change is hard and scary. And when you have as many stakeholders in recruiting as we do. Yeah. It's hard to make somebody the hero, right? Because somebody's gonna feel like, well, no, I'm the hero, right? And the candidate is the hero. Without them, we don't hire anybody. Yeah.
Joel: Sounds like a customer. Candidates and customers. Should we start thinking of them that way?
Tracey Parsons: Exactly. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why we've launched into this research around voice of the candidate. Because we don't listen. Like you mentioned, right? Like, are we dumb? Are we creatures of habit? I think it's just that we don't listen. We're so interested in hearing...
Joel: Why?
Tracey Parsons: Why? Because if we did listen, we would hear how they really think about us and what we do.
Chad: Which means we could change for the better.
Tracey Parsons: Yes, I know.
Joel: I have a different opinion...
Tracey Parsons: I wanna hear that.
Joel: You tell me if I'm wrong. If everyone wanted to be with, you would eventually get in your head like, I'm hot shit.
Tracey Parsons: 100%.
Joel: And I can pick and choose and treat you like shit because you want to be on this side of the line. And I think employers are too high on their horse or whatever metaphor you wanna use. And we end up treating candidates like dirt because they need us more than we need them. Now that changes every now and then, but I think we treat them horribly. Customers where I give you money and I get paid a salary because you give me money and the more money I make, maybe I make more salary or commission, like there's an incentive there to be nice to people. The incentive to be nice to candidates isn't there. I don't know how we change that, but I think that's my theory as to why... That's insane. We're so bad to candidates.
Tracey Parsons: It's not, I don't disagree with the assertion, but what I would add is that that thought process is in a fucking unsustainable model.
Chad: Yes.
Tracey Parsons: That is an unsustainable model. I remember doing some research for a customer and I also run a consultancy. We have software products but in the consultancy people hire us to like, oh why can't we find talent in this market? I'm like 'cause you built a factory where there's no humans 'cause it was cheap and now you're like, Well crap, where do we find the humans? I was like, I don't know, 'cause you built a factory where there are no humans. Like you're gonna have to come up with something. So while I hear, I agree with what you're saying, they think they're hot shit. There were reports a couple years ago that Amazon's like, we've burned through entire markets of warehouse talent because we treat them like shit.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: Well that goes beyond candidate to the employee. We're just, we're not even at that point yet in the conversation.
Chad: That in itself though, that's the reputation that now Amazon has. So to get candidates, even if they hadn't worked for them before.
Joel: I would argue that Amazon treats the candidates better than they do with their employees and that's a real issue as well.
Chad: Oh, yeah.
Joel: I don't know if I have more respect for they treat us like dirt on the front end and dirt on the back end.
Chad: If it could just be consistent dirt.
Tracey Parsons: At least it's consistent I guess.
Chad: We need consistent dirt.
Joel: They think they're walking through the pearly gates. And they're going straight to hell when they walk in on their first day.
Tracey Parsons: Again, warehouse staff turns over, right? And so you... There's...
Joel: At least they're paid $22 an hour to be in hell.
Tracey Parsons: That's true.
Chad: Amazon Prime.
Joel: And Amazon Prime.
Tracey Parsons: And they got great benefits and a lot of TV ads.
Joel: Well, let me throw this out there because I think they're on the one yard line and they drop it. Case in point, my 18 year old son, who's interviewing... This is baseline stuff, right? He's interviewing from fast food to washing cars. Goes through the third interview, gets to the third interview.
Tracey Parsons: A third interview?
Joel: Yeah Yes. For car wash I'm thinking I'm like dude you got it like they want background check, they want all the thing...
Chad: Why three interviews. Three?
Joel: Yes, so... That's not even the bad part.
Tracey Parsons: I'm so sorry but... Wait I just need to go first get the fuck out of here with that okay so now proceed.
Joel: Okay it's crew car wash in case anyone wants to know so he goes through three interviews as a car wash yes he's saying he's got it I'm like you've got it. They're doing background checks. He doesn't, they're like, you'll know by Monday. Monday comes, he doesn't hear. Tuesday comes, he doesn't hear.
Chad: Oh my God.
Joel: I'm like, okay, by end of day, Wednesday, Thursday morning, like you can call them and just check in on what's going on. He gets an email Wednesday morning after three interviews with the car wash that is just a thanks for playing, we're moving on, we chose another candidate. Not a call, not a thanks for playing, da da da. So his experience was... Oh, this is great. She's laughing at my jokes. She's telling her friends about us. And then they ghost him, basically, at the end. That's a shitty experience.
Tracey Parsons: That is a shitty experience. And I love when I see industry articles about, like, candidates are ghosting us now.
Chad: We taught them.
Tracey Parsons: They learned it from you, Dad.
Chad: We taught them.
Joel: [laughter] Yeah. 80s joke.
Tracey Parsons: They learned it from you, Dad. I learned it from you, Dad. Right, so, and then they get pissed at candidates who are using AI now. They learned it from you, dad. It's like you can't have it both ways.
Chad: No.
Tracey Parsons: This is why I come back to the fact that we have to start listening to how they feel about the experience. And we just pulled the data from H124. And when you isolate, this is what's fascinating to me, 'cause you can isolate the actual candidate conversation and filter out all of our bullshit, right? So the content that we are creating as an industry. And then that sentiment for job seekers in job search right now is 14. It's the lowest I've ever seen it.
Joel: What's the universe of that? Is it just all across the board? Is it certain kinds of jobs, like all across the board?
Tracey Parsons: It is all across the board. So anybody who is talking about on the public internet, looking for a job, searching for a job, I need a new job, all of those conversations are indexed in the tool that we use. And then we look at the sentiment and we kind of filter through. One of the funniest things was that if you isolate pay in the candidate conversation, that's 8% of the conversation, which is a little lower than I've seen it. It's usually 10% because when we were doing it before, it was a candidate's market, right? So they were more talking about pay, like pay me. But when you un-isolate it and get the whole industry take on the job search and the job search experience, it drops down to 3.5% 'cause we do not want them talking about pay. We do not want, we want them to think that this is a noble purpose to come to my place of employment.
Joel: We've got a great culture here.
Chad: That's how we grow profit margins. We don't pay our people shit. That's how it works.
Tracey Parsons: That's the whole thing.
Chad: Yes.
Tracey Parsons: Right? And we don't want them to talk about it. So we drown out that conversation. But it's something that really matters to them.
Chad: I've never gotten the whole idea of we have, through the application process, just the front end, we like it to be long because of the friction. We like the friction because if somebody makes it through, then they have the stick-to-it-iveness...
Tracey Parsons: That's such bullshit.
Chad: Is it bullshit or do they really believe that?
Tracey Parsons: Okay, A, both things can be true at the same time. They actually really believe that and it is bullshit. It is a bullshit thought process.
Chad: No, it is.
Tracey Parsons: And what I've been advocating for for probably a decade is that we have to figure out how to redistribute the friction in the candidate experience, right? Because right now we are overselling.
Joel: What's the incentive though?
Tracey Parsons: What's the incentive?
Joel: Again, I go back to they want me more than I want them. They're going to jump through hoops and hurdles and...
Tracey Parsons: They aren't.
Chad: But they've been proved that that's not how it works and you lose great...
Joel: Has it been proved?
Chad: Yeah, you lose great talent, which is one of the reasons why. And I'll go to the attrition side now, where again, Amazon, another wonderful Amazon story, where they, AWS, they had actually noted that they were losing $8 billion through attrition. Right? So now they care about oh, we gotta keep our fucking people, right? So they start to understand that, but yet they're still not making the changes they need to, right? They're doing all these warm and fuzzy things like giving them free Amazon Prime. Fuck you, right? I mean, I can pay for that.
Tracey Parsons: Right, I remember talking to an employer once and it was Tesla, right? And Tesla was like, man, we have a candidate quality problem.
Chad: I wonder why.
Tracey Parsons: And I said, have you seen your website? And they're like, what do you mean? I'm like, everywhere on your website, it says you can come here and change the world. And I'm like, you know what, I would love to change the world. This shithole's a fixer-upper, right? I would like to see some things change. And I asked her, I dug in, I was like, what does that actually mean in practice? What does that look like? What does changing the world look like if you're a Tesla employee? She's like, well, I mean, it really means being on your A game at three in the morning if Elon calls you from the Gigafactory floor.
Joel: And was that really her answer... That wasn't her answer.
Tracey Parsons: That was her answer. And I was like...
Joel: 'cause the answer should be, we're making EVs to reduce planet climate change.
Tracey Parsons: And then I would have asked her a follow-up question again, what does that look like in the context of actually working there? And you have to spend a lot more time screening people out in that front end so you will not create disappointment. One of the things that we've done wrong since I've started doing this in the late 1900s is we continue to tell people that this is gonna be amazing. That's you know sunshine and roses and we're a family. Oh my god that's the biggest red flag.
Joel: Just look at these stock photos on our career page.
Tracey Parsons: Right, look at these stock photos. [laughter] Look at our diversity, like all of this, right? So there's nothing in there that's telling somebody that there's somebody that doesn't work for them here. And I told her, I was like, you don't have a quality problem, you have a branding problem. Like you're telling people things that is not real. Like, and while it is real, but you're not giving them a layer beneath that to say, wait a second, I don't think I'm gonna be on my A game at three o'clock in the morning.
Chad: Well, and here's the thing, we don't have to have friction, or a lot of friction. Right. And here's what I mean by that is we have the technology and the systems in place where we can screen them up front very easily.
Tracey Parsons: Yes.
Chad: Right? You can parse the data. You can ask them, hey, do you meet these requirements? Yes blah, blah, blah. And then off you go.
Tracey Parsons: Yes.
Chad: You don't have to wait for a human being to schedule you for an interview if you do, right? Nope. I mean, all these things, there's so much, and the funniest thing is, I remember back in the day with Union Pacific Railroad, they built their own goddamn applicant tracking system so that all of the candidates could see where they were in the process. Revolutionary.
Tracey Parsons: Right.
Chad: Revolutionary.
Joel: Was this the 1900s?
Chad: No, no it wasn't. It was early 2000s, early 2000s. But still...
Tracey Parsons: In the year 2000.
Chad: Fucking railroad.
Tracey Parsons: Yes.
Chad: Right?
Tracey Parsons: Yes.
Chad: And here we are in 2024.
Tracey Parsons: That is so far from that.
Chad: How many systems automatically just tell you where you're at and give you that nice little ping. Or if you're not qualified, I don't know, we might have the technology to go ahead and divert you to something that you are qualified for. And then you can apply it, I mean, if you want to. But again, the experience.
Tracey Parsons: And hear me out.
Chad: And that's just good business.
Tracey Parsons: If somebody is not qualified today, and you have their data and information, and you don't look at them two years from now, what are you doing?
Chad: Oh, don't get me started on that.
Tracey Parsons: What are you doing? I had this conversation with somebody this week.
Chad: Don't get me started on that.
Tracey Parsons: I'm gonna get you started on that, because I had a conversation this week. I've been advocating for an advertised last model, and I run an advertising company, okay? I do not believe that every job should be advertised.
Chad: No.
Tracey Parsons: I believe... And I don't understand why... Just hear me out a second.
Chad: They have to for compliance reasons, but yes.
Tracey Parsons: No, but hear me out. You open a requisition.
Chad: Yeah.
Tracey Parsons: You press a button to post it, okay? Instead of pressing a button to post it first, you could post it internally if that's your compliance, whatever compliance measure you have. But before you make this a public advertising moment, create a slate of people in-house that already fit this criteria, create a slate of people who applied two years ago.
Chad: In your applicant tracking system.
Tracey Parsons: In the system. Go source all of these channels that you have before you ever put that out on the public internet, on Indeed or LinkedIn or Flockity.
Chad: How long do you think a CMO would have their job if they created all these leads and then they just buried the leads?
Tracey Parsons: A day?
Chad: That's what they're doing.
Tracey Parsons: I know.
Chad: Hundreds of millions of... I know. Billions of dollars that are being spent every year to be able to throw shit in the applicant tracking system and never go back to it again and for the same damn job that they need to post again maybe a month later, guess what they do? They put it on fucking Indeed.
Tracey Parsons: And they already paid to attract the person that they hired. Yes. They've paid to attract that same person 67 different times. It is the biggest waste of money. It drives me fucking crazy. Yes.
Joel: But they're stale after a month. They're not fresh anymore. After a month.
Tracey Parsons: I don't get it. I've had a lot of I don't get it moments this week.
[laughter]
Tracey Parsons: Yeah, and why aren't they fresh?
Joel: I gotta restart it.
Tracey Parsons: And why aren't they fresh?
Chad: Oh my God.
Tracey Parsons: Because you've done nothing to reach out to them. You've done nothing to cultivate that relationship...
Chad: See, now you've got her started.
Tracey Parsons: Yeah, you've done nothing. You've done nothing. So the data sits there and they're like, oh, it's not fresh. Well, bitch, what did you do to freshen it?
Chad: Yeah, freshen that shit up.
Tracey Parsons: Freshen that lead. Zsuzsit.
Chad: And again, we have, I'm thinking the six million dollar man, we have the technology.
Joel: We keep going back to the 1900s. I don't know what's going on.
Tracey Parsons: We have the technology.
Chad: We can do this. We have the ability. But... And I see your friend Matt Lavery over at UPS there. The guy's been in this business for 27 years. And he's built systems that actually are doing what we're talking about. I mean, seriously. Apply, the job is posted. They have to for compliance reasons. But it goes to the database. It's the database. Goes internal, right? I mean, it's one of those things where don't fucking tell me it can't be done. People are doing it.
Tracey Parsons: Right, we just, again, there's this complacency sometimes in the industry that makes me wanna just run screaming through the hills.
Chad: Throw birds at people's heads.
[laughter]
Tracey Parsons: I mean, being a new bird launcher.
Chad: Oh yes.
Tracey Parsons: Right, there's no such thing as empty nesters. I'm just letting you know.
Chad: Give them the bird.
Joel: Upskilling is huge.
Tracey Parsons: Yes.
Joel: All the kids are talking about upskilling. Is that gonna save us?
Tracey Parsons: All the kids are talking about it.
[laughter]
Joel: Say more.
Tracey Parsons: I mean, is that gonna fix it? No. We have to fundamentally rethink how this whole shit works, right? And is re-skilling and up-skilling important? Hell yes, it's important. Like it's incredibly important.
Chad: Oh we don't even know what that means.
Tracey Parsons: We haven't defined it.
Chad: No.
Tracey Parsons: It is a buzzword and nobody can say oh, I can upskill, how do you know? And then we would probably say, we're gonna launch this upskilling program whether you want to or not, right? We're gonna upskill you. And we never ask the employees, we never listen to the candidates.
Chad: Well, we don't show them what it actually means.
Tracey Parsons: 100%
Chad: 'cause we're not transparent with regard to career path.
Tracey Parsons: 100%.
Chad: Being able to go up the current career path or even go laterally.
Tracey Parsons: 100% Or down, let's say you've got a situation where you're like, I need to work less because I have a parent I'm caring for, or a young child.
Chad: Or I'd just like to work.
Tracey Parsons: Right, I actually was in a cab last night. Okay. I love cab drivers, right? They're so much fun. I always chat up the cab drivers because they always have great stories.
Joel: Sure, they love it.
Tracey Parsons: So... The ones that I get do. [laughter] I don't know what you're doing.
Joel: Is this a tipping system like Uber that you're in?
Tracey Parsons: No, no.
Joel: Okay.
Tracey Parsons: But he was telling me a story. So this man was 78 years old. And he was ready to retire at COVID. And then COVID happened right before his retirement. Vegas shut down. They furloughed everybody. And Drivers here are required to have a 12 hour shift. I don't know about you guys, but I can't...
Chad: Required?
Tracey Parsons: That is their shift. It is a 12 hour shift, deal with it.
Chad: Did it go to Uber? I mean.
Tracey Parsons: I don't know. So the point of the story was, is that he and a bunch of his other peers who were just close to retirement. They said, you know what, what if we, when we start getting back opened up, if we had like a flex system, so like if I wanted to work five hours or only on Tuesdays or if I wanna do this, why couldn't I do that? And this group of cab drivers took it to HR. And do you know what HR said? Nah, we're not doing that.
Joel: So did they unionize and have a happy ending?
Tracey Parsons: No.
Joel: No. Okay, damn it.
Joel: But the happy ending was.
Chad: I'm always a fan of happy endings.
Tracey Parsons: They went HR and went to the CEO and presented, made their case to the CEO and the CEO went back to HR. He's like, yeah, we're totally doing this. And now he's like, I'm driving four hours today and that works for me.
Chad: See, and this is one of the fundamental problems that we have with HR today.
Tracey Parsons: Listening.
Chad: Is that we are not thinking about business and how we're actually impacting the bottom line in making people happy enough to come back to work, right? To be able to be flexible enough, not to mention how many more people would want to come drive, but they don't want to do 12 hours.
Tracey Parsons: I don't want anybody driving me in the 11th hour of their shift. I'm gonna be honest with you, I was like, dude, that sounds like the most unsafe thing. He's like, I am 78 years old. It is the most unsafe thing in the world.
Joel: I'm amazed with Uber that they even have to question this because the number of people could just be like, I'm gonna go drive when I wanna drive. Go pound salts.
Tracey Parsons: But they were loyal to this company. And that's the other thing.
Chad: That says something.
Tracey Parsons: We take advantage of people's loyalty.
Chad: Oh dude.
Tracey Parsons: So deeply.
Chad: We've been doing it for so long.
Tracey Parsons: Since way before the late 1900s.
Chad: And we're so good. Oh yeah, so good.
Joel: Younger generations aren't into that.
[laughter]
Tracey Parsons: Oh, they are not.
Joel: Only 78 year old people. They're not.
Tracey Parsons: They're not.
Chad: Which I love. I love.
Tracey Parsons: Same.
Chad: We were sold a bill of bullshit, right? And you know Rugged individualism and all that. And then, you know, my oldest, she is a fucking A player, right? She's not taking that shit. She, which most females do not do, she negotiates the shit out of everything, right? Why? Because we taught her, we got fucked.
Tracey Parsons: Yes.
Chad: You need to do this.
Tracey Parsons: I'm gonna tell you like personal story, but I am a... My grandfather was an immigrant from the Czech Republic. He worked in the coal mines in West Virginia. My dad, right?
Chad: That's rough.
Tracey Parsons: I know. My grandmother also worked in the mines for a period of time.
Chad: Oh, come on.
Tracey Parsons: I shit you not.
Joel: That's another Flockity kind of connection by the way.
Tracey Parsons: Right? And then my dad was a rubber worker at Goodyear for 30 years. And I get to do this.
Joel: So it's no surprise to me that in the green room you told us before we hit record that you look in the mirror and go rally bitch.
Tracey Parsons: You rally bitch.
Joel: Because you have generational rally bitches that are like doing jobs that would love to be in your shoes.
Tracey Parsons: Yes, and my mom, my dad passed away in '18, but my mom always reminds me, she's like, do you have any idea what your, your dad would shit himself if he saw you today. Like he would legitimately lose his shit. And he would tell, he would go up to tell people, he's like, my daughter is the CEO of a company, can you believe that? What does she do? I have no idea. [laughter]
Joel: Sounds important.
Chad: First and foremost, I just said she was a CEO. It doesn't matter what she does.
Tracey Parsons: Right, does it matter? But I think that seeing their trajectory and how they were treated and how their work makes me, that's what drives me to do what I do. Like I've said this a thousand times, the relationship between candidates and work and employees and work is 100% egalitarian. We need each other. They need us to do the work and make profits. We need them to provide lives for our families. Like this is a symbiosis that is never recognized or acknowledged and we absolutely shit on it all the time.
Joel: I gotta ask, headed '25, predictions, get your crystal ball out, what are we gonna be talking about?
Tracey Parsons: The same shit we've been talking about for the last 10 years!
[laughter]
Joel: Goddammit.
Chad: Have you not been listening? Jeez, man!
Joel: Can't you come out of the 1900s for at least a few sound bites?
Tracey Parsons: I'm gonna be honest with you, I'm gonna be honest with you, and this is personal, but I do think we are gonna be talking about how we change the distribution of jobs, how the current model of job distribution does not work because people don't trust those entities anymore and they actually trust people, which is why Flockity is doing such a remarkable thing because...
Joel: So say more about that. They don't trust the jobs.
Tracey Parsons: They don't trust the job works.
Joel: Because I click on the job, it takes me to another site and then I have to go to another site after that.
Tracey Parsons: Yes.
Chad: Click, click, click.
Joel: And now I gotta like take out the pop-up.
Chad: Register.
Joel: And register somewhere else. That's broken as hell.
Tracey Parsons: That's bullshit, right? The piece of feedback we get from our influencers and their community is it's like I... I don't go to Indeed, I don't go to LinkedIn, I don't use those tools because I don't believe those jobs are real and I don't ever hear anything from them, like it's just this black hole. But when they see somebody talking about the job like they're talking about, like I'm a nurse and this is what I do to be a good nurse and then the nurse is like I've got some jobs.
Joel: Flockity real quick, give us the elevator.
Tracey Parsons: Oh yeah, Flockity is influencer marketing for jobs so essentially companies send us their job feed, they buy a click bank because we're a pay per click model. Once we have their feed and their money, we release their jobs out to our influencer network, influencer goes and picks up a job, copies the short link, puts it on their public social profile, anybody that clicks on that job.
Joel: So it's not a nurse at their hospital.
Tracey Parsons: No, it's a random nurse.
Joel: It's a random nurse promoting the job.
Tracey Parsons: Yes.
Joel: But nurses are following them.
Tracey Parsons: Correct. Correct.
Joel: Okay. I'm glad I cleared that up.
Tracey Parsons: So people believe people and I think that we're gonna have to start to acknowledge that our current model is not trusted. Candidates do not enjoy anything that we're doing. They only participate 'cause they have to.
Joel: That's a paid model, right? I mean you're in the same... Someone's getting paid to promote a job.
Chad: It doesn't look the same.
Joel: Definitely the experience is different. But isn't that the same trap? You're only saying it's great to work here because...
Tracey Parsons: They don't say it's great to work there. Okay. So 'cause they don't work there, right? The content that they're creating is about being good at this job. And then every couple weeks or every week or every other day.
Joel: So why I love nursing versus why I love this company.
Tracey Parsons: Why I love nursing at XYZ company.
Joel: Got it.
Tracey Parsons: And then they very rarely mention the brands that we're working with because they don't want comments, 'cause they're not dumb, right? So they just will like every now and then make a video and say, hey, I've come across some great jobs I'd like to share with you, they're in my LinkedIn bio.
Chad: That's right, kids. You're gonna give your company the bird with Flockity. Tracey Parsons, CEO of Flockity.
Tracey Parsons: Thanks Chad.
Joel: That's their tagline, by the way. Give them the bird, Flockity.
Chad: Dad would be proud. He is proud.
Tracey Parsons: Dad would be so... John would be freaking out.
Chad: So if people wanna learn more about Flockity or even connect with you. Where would you send them?
Tracey Parsons: Flockity.com, F-L-O-C-K-I-T-Y.com.
Chad: I love it.
Tracey Parsons: And then you can always find me on LinkedIn. I am the Bringer of Sunshine.
Joel: Tracey, thanks for hanging out with us. Enjoy the rest of your time in Vegas.
Tracey Parsons: Thanks for having me.
Joel: Chad, that was fun. And... We out.
Chad: We out.
Podcast Outro: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with Chad, with 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. There's 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. It's so weird. We out!