Chad is back this week following a week of British hospitality and has some things to add to last week's discussion around Indeed and Appcast. Then it's on to Google's Gemini, they're answer to taking AI up a notch, including multimodal intelligence. That's text, images, audio, video and even code, if you didn't know. What else? Well, LinkedIn's campaign to kill fake accounts and the companies that create them is in high gear, as legal cases are closing, and fines are coming. Plus, Facebook fraudster Barbara Furlow-Smiles, a former global diversity executive at Facebook, comes into view and might explain why the social network's diversity strategy has seemed so out of whack lately. And because we love you, dear listener, so much, we drop some breaking news out of iCIMS to close the show, along with some commentary (of course). Enjoy, and be sure to check us out on YouTube, where we're publishing some really cool content, including the weekly podcast.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snack. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast.
Joel: Oh. Yeah. Like the Jelly of the Month Club. We're the gift that keeps on giving the whole year. What's up, kids? You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Impeachment Cheesman.
Chad: This is Chad. What day is it?
Joel: Sowash. And on this episode, Appcast strikes back, LinkedIn fights on and Gemini. It's not just the astrological sign of your favorite podcasters. Let's do this. What's up, Chad?
Chad: I was trying to figure out what day it is. Spent a week in London and we were stacked. London in December is London in December. I'm just, get that out there. Cold, rainy...
Joel: Kinda like London in August.
Chad: Oh, Jesus. Yeah. But cold but full of warm pubs, which is fucking amazing. And great people we know, the holiday lights throughout London were just fricking beautiful. And thanks to Peter Weddle and Steven O'Donnell and Bill Fanning for having Julie and I out to the event. We had some great Indian food the first night with Fanning and Stubbsy. Then we went to lunch with Alex Fourlus, who bestowed a couple of bottles of Greek wine upon us. Sushi with our friend, Mikel from Sonic Jobs. Dinner with Sir Richard and Lady Beverly Collins at a pretty swanky Instagram ready Italian restaurant.
Joel: Oh yeah. It was Swanky. [laughter]
Chad: A night of drinking, Squid Games, dinner and more drinking with Gem, Thomas and Rob from, the guys from Talent Nexus. And a really cool last night out with Sam and the Real Links Board of Advisors at the Groucho Club in Soho. Last but never least, Alex Tchaikovsky brought me some Oktoberfest German beer right from Germany. And I also got a bottle of 12 year reserve single malt Bushmills from our friend.
Joel: Okay.
Chad: Michael Blakely. So delicious. So delicious.
Joel: So I'm surprised you don't know what day it is with all the alcohol and food that you consumed last week.
Chad: I'm sorry.
Joel: Squid Games. You're gonna have, I know Squid Game the show.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: What do you mean you had, you did Squid games?
Chad: So they, they've got this immersive game where you literally go into a box. It's a room, but it's a box. You put on these little visors and they've got like these little nodes on them and you play the game on the wall and...
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: Like green lights. There are just a bunch of different games that you can play. And then you score, you score as a team against other teams, but then you also score against each other. So it was fun. And whenever we go to London, I have to say one of the most fun times we have all the time is with the guys from Talent Nexus 'cause they always take us out to play games.
Joel: Sure.
Chad: Drink, eat, and then drink again.
Joel: Yeah. So was this like a Netflix sanctioned...
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Thing... Sponsored or powered by Netflix.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Squid Game. And you went in a thing and it was, had Squid Games branding on it and everything.
Chad: Yep.
Joel: Oh, shit. That's kinda cool.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: It was really cool. An extension. I like it. I like it. And there was a bar there?
Chad: Yeah, as a matter of fact.
Joel: You could drink and play Green Light?
Chad: It's funny because between games, right on the wall, it asks you if you want more alcohol, and then you just go up and you touch the wall and what you want. Right? And I want two IPAs and I want a fizzy drink for Thomas or something like that. And then you put order and two minutes later they come in, they put them down in the little drink holders and you go back to playing the game.
SFX: Alright, alright, alright.
Chad: Genius.
Joel: I'm not hating on that. Not hating on that.
SFX: Shout out.
Joel: At all. At all. Let's get to some shout outs.
Chad: Let's do it.
Joel: Shall we? I know you've, you gave a whole bunch in your little explanation of last week's activities. But my first shout out goes out to Checkr. You think Checkr is a background check company? Well, think again, Chad. They've expanded the platform with the launch of Checkr Pay and Checkr Onboard addressing the needs of growing flexible and mobile First Workforce. This stuff reeks of desperation to me.
[laughter]
Joel: We look at Handshake going after LinkedIn. Last week we talked about Remote taking on Upwork and Fiverr. This kind of dilution of the brand and the services, almost never works out very well. It confuses the consumer. It divides the workforce. It creates confusion. Checkr says background check. It's a great brand. Checkr does not say onboarding solution. They're fucking up. This is what happens when you take too much money when your valuation is too high, you start doing crazy stuff like this. And I think Checkr is going to regret it. However, shout out to them, for doing something, I guess.
Chad: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it's smart because they're going down funnel, whether they can do it successfully or not. That's, we will see. But they definitely have to open up the total addressable market with the money that they took. So they have to do something. The question is, were these the right, the right things to do. Background check into onboarding. Man, there's a good synergy there. The thing is they've gotta go down.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: They've gotta go down funnel. That was one of the things that we talked about where LinkedIn is really, they're really stuck, is there at the top of the funnel. And if they come down the funnel, then they have more data. They have, more of an ecosystem. Right now. The ecosystem is just on the top of the funnel. So I don't know. We'll see what they can do. It's, I kinda like those guys. I'm not a big background check guy, but I kinda like those guys.
Joel: Yeah. It's a shitty business. So you kind of gotta start doing new stuff, I guess. If you want to support your, what is it, $6 billion valuation or whatever the hell it is.
Chad: I don't know. I don't know.
Joel: It's crazy. It's crazy. Chad, anyone? It's crazy.
SFX: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!
Chad: I've got a Mary Fix Miss. This is from our factory fix guys. We'll talk about fantasy football later, but...
Joel: Oh shit.
Chad: Big, big shout out to the Cumberland Hotel in London right by Marble Arch where Julie and I stayed. Shout out because they played NFL football every Sunday, which coincidentally also came during their drag show brunch, which was amazing. We had football going on and drag over there. It was like a melding of the communities. Did they actually meet? It doesn't matter. They were together. It was pretty cool.
Joel: That escalated quickly. Okay. Moving on.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: Shout out to Doritos.
Chad: Oh, no.
Joel: Who doesn't love Doritos? What's your favorite flavor of Doritos?
Chad: I love Cool Ranch. I'm big Cool Ranch Dorito guy.
Joel: Cool Ranch. Cool Ranch. You gotta, you can't lose with cool ranch.
Chad: No.
Joel: For sure. The sweet chili is really solid as well. Anyway, can I interest you in a nacho cheddar Doritos
flavored liquor drink?
Chad: God, no. Oh, that sounds horrible.
Joel: Think Cheddar cheese. Vodka.
Chad: That thing sounds horrible.
Joel: Okay.
Chad: Oh my God.
Joel: So, so...
Chad: I'm about ready to throw up right now.
Joel: Doritos PepsiCo is partnered with Empirical, who's a big, booze, booze, booze maker. And they have fused nacho cheese Dorito flavor.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: With vodka.
Chad: Wow. Wow.
Joel: The reviews of people who have had it is that it's good. Now PepsiCo needs to get in bed with Taco Bell and get this nacho Doritos drink with some Taco Bell.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: And your boy here is in Nirvana. Okay. I don't know about the hangover, beer shits the next morning. But for the night, that sounds like a pretty good time to me. Shout out to...
Chad: Oh yeah.
Joel: Doritos Liqueur coming in January at the low low price, Chad, of $65 a bottle. So skip the Old Forester, skip the Bib and Tucker, skip. Yeah.
Chad: No.
Joel: Go to the Doritos $65 aisle for that one.
Chad: I will not.
Joel: For that one.
Chad: That sounds like a very high price tag to puke my guts out.
Joel: It's very expensive.
Chad: Oh, that's crazy.
Joel: Especially for vodka.
Chad: That's crazy. So I'm gonna shout out to infrastructure. Shout out to high speed rail. And it's about time in the US, announced Friday the largest federal investment in passenger trains in decades with 8.2 billion in new funding for high speed rail and other projects nationwide. Infrastructure, baby. And it's about fucking time. Joel, have you ever been on high speed rail?
Joel: Yeah. It's called European transportation.
Chad: There it is. Yes. Yes, you have more space. There's no TSA, no long lines. It's just a better experience than flying when you're not crossing an ocean. Europe is bigger than the US. China is bigger than the US. Guess what? They both have high speed fucking rail. It's about time. So big shout out to the US and high speed rail.
Joel: Yeah. I hope this works. We've talked about Europe, it's like half the size and twice the population. So rail makes a ton of sense. Everything is close by, ton of people. And...
Chad: Landmass wise, it's bigger than the US.
Joel: I thought it was half the size, but twice the population.
Chad: Nope. Landmass wise. Europe, European, Europe.
Joel: We need Adam Gordon to chime in on this. Adam Gordon. Chime in on this.
Chad: It's fairly simple. You can just go to Google and do a search on landmass.
Joel: What's Google again? Anyway, so we're in Indianapolis.
Chad: ChatGPT.
Joel: There should be a Chicago Indie, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, regional makes a ton of sense. Both of those, all those cities would benefit greatly if there was like a...
Chad: Oh yeah.
Joel: High speed train that took you to downtown. The center of downtown of all those places. But Americans love their cars, so we'll, see what happens.
Chad: Well. We love the cars 'cause we've been forced to use cars. We in Indianapolis have been trying to get fucking light rail forever. And the Koch brothers have been down on that shit. They've been spending money against it so that we keep buying oil.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: So this a lot.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: It doesn't have to do with us loving cars, it has to do with what we have available to us.
Joel: Yeah. Car and oil had better lobbyists than the railroads did back in the day. But yeah.
Chad: Very much.
Joel: Yeah. The high-speed train is sexy. I'd like to see it.
SFX: Ay papi.
[laughter]
Joel: I'd like to see it at least in my, I wanna get to Chicago easier and faster and cheaper.
Chad: Exactly. You know what's even better than fast rail? Free stuff. T-shirts from JobGet. Beer, Aspen Tech Labs. God, I love those guys. Whiskey, I don't know if you've seen Textkernel's new logo. Have you seen it? Go to textkernel.com. New logo, new brand. Pretty amazing. And if it's your birthday kid, if it's your birthday, Hey listener. Rum with Plum.
SFX: [laughter]
Joel: Oh shit.
SFX: Can you feel the tension in the air right now? I know I can. I can feel it all the way down to my plums.
Joel: So before we get to this week's, your wife celebrated a birthday last week.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: Do you wanna say anything nice about her or what you guys did?
Chad: Oh, did I not go through the long laundry list of what we did in London? Not to mention.
Joel: Oh, so you wrapped that into her birthday?
Chad: Yes. Not to mention she came back with three more pairs of Vejas. So she has three sets of Vejas for
Europe and three sets of Vejas for the US.
Joel: Do all Vejas have the V and the, on the sneaker or do they like.
Chad: I think so.
Joel: Have like boots and...
Chad: I'm not a Veja expert, although I know all of hers have the V's.
Joel: Yeah. Got it, got it. All right, well, let's get to this week's birthdays.
Chad: Okay.
Joel: Some fans are celebrating another trip around the sun that includes Jack Mahoney, Lars Coos, Allison Paget, Fozzie Imtiaz, Alex Micklin, Phil Larkins, Christina Lowry, Aaron Stevens, Rathin Sinha, Max Armbruster.
Chad: There he is.
Joel: Your boy? Jonathan Duarte. And a very special birthday by my father, Will.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: Cheesman is celebrating.
SFX: Happy birthday.
Joel: Number 84 on planet Earth. Happy birthday everybody. Happy birthday.
Chad: Happy birthday.
Joel: Before you ask. He loves Popcorn. So we're getting him every imagine... Maybe, maybe Doritos flavored liquor, popcorn. I don't know. We're gonna get all the kind of popcorn that my dad can eat with the seven remaining teeth that are still his original teeth.
Chad: Get all the popcorn. If you have to, put it in the blunder, just make sure he gets the popcorn. Okay?
Joel: Toothpicks for days.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: Getting those kernels out. Good lord.
Joel: Oh my God. So events, kids. Travel powered by Shaker Recruitment marketing. We already have eight conferences planned for 2024. The very first is the event in San Diego. That's right. TA week where we're going to be hanging out with koalas. Yeah. No shit. Koalas at the zoo. We're going to the zoo. Why? Because we are hanging with the guys and girls and crew from Qualifi. That's the one that starts with the Q ends with the I. Qualifi. If you wanna check it out, go to chadcheese.com/events. We're really stoked. Evan White has been, he's been in high fucking gear putting together events and doing some really, really cool work. So I'm excited to work with him this year.
Joel: Yeah. Evan is out of control.
[vocalization]
Chad: [laughter]
Joel: I have a Canadian update on one of my travels. So our friends at HiringBranch were at HR Tech this past
year.
Chad: Nice.
Joel: We did the high roller with them at Unleash earlier in the year. And I was talking to him about living in Montreal. Everyone listens regularly knows my wife is Canadian. I have Canadian in-Laws.
Chad: Yep.
Joel: And my father-in-law's a big Montreal Canadiens fan. So I was asking if he went to games, was it hard to get tickets? He is like, well, I share season tickets with a few other guys, blah, blah, blah. Long story short, the wife and I are gonna drop the kid off in London, Ontario, take a train. We talked about trains. Take a nice little train ride all the way to Montreal. We're gonna have dinner, I think, with some of his team, the night before. And then the night of, go to the game, we're gonna get to see the Oilers. Connor McDavid arguably the best hockey player in the world. So I'm pumped for that. But that's my travel. It's sorta business, sorta not.
Chad: I love it.
Joel: You're not involved. You don't have to be, but yeah, HiringBranch. Thank you. We'll see you. We'll see
you in a few weeks. For sure.
Chad: Beautiful.
Joel: For sure.
Chad: Are you just trying not to talk about fantasy football and your ass whipping last week? I'm just, I'm not sure.
[laughter]
Joel: All right. So I've split with you. Okay. I split with you.
[music]
Joel: Well, all right. Let's, okay.
Chad: Well, your record wouldn't show that. So.
Joel: That's, oh, all right. Okay, everybody. Fantasy football is winding down. Chad, like me is not in the
playoffs at this point.
Chad: I'm five again. Last year I was number five. Fuck.
Joel: Praying. Yeah. Praying he does not make the playoffs because he will be really hard to live with if he does. Here's your leaderboard. For the, I think final week of the regular season. This has been sponsored by our friends at FactoryFix. Can't thank them enough for supporting our unhealthy addictions, like fantasy football. And Chad is showing, his FactoryFix sweater Christmas sweater.
Chad: On our YouTube. Yeah.
Joel: If you're not watching us on YouTube...
Chad: This is like a jersey.
Joel: You gotta go to YouTube.
Chad: It's like jersey quality.
Joel: Yeah. @ChadCheese. Chad bought an ugly sweater of our podcast, like the first or second year that we did this.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: I assume you still have that.
Chad: Oh God. Yeah 'cause it is fucking epic.
Joel: He's like, Well, let's sell this. I'm like, no one's gonna buy this shit. I don't know. Maybe we need to do like a special...
Chad: Everybody loved it.
Joel: Christmas sweater. Yeah. Sponsored by somebody.
Chad: Get with Mike from FactoryFix. See if he can do it in this kind of, this is like jersey material. This is fucking legit, thick. Nice.
Joel: It looks comfortable.
Chad: Oh yeah.
Joel: It doesn't look itchy at all. It looks really nice.
Chad: Perfect.
Joel: It looks really nice. Okay. Here's your leaderboard everybody. Probably the last week that we'd go through the whole thing before the playoffs.
[laughter]
Joel: Number one, she's been there all year. Pretty much...
Chad: Kicking ass.
Joel: Michelle, Sergeant Slaughter.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: And number one. Number two, she's been there just about the whole season. It's Marcy Playground Mall. Number three, funky Cold Medina Perro. Number four, Jagged Little Jill Patterson. Chad, just on the line at number five. Chad Future Ball Cheese Sowash. Number six. Joe Bagga Dixon. He's there, he's right there. He's the sixth one.
Joel: Number seven, Brent Musburger. Number eight. Billy Joel Cheesman. Number nine, Dean Wizard of Ossner. Number 10, Jasper The friendly ghost Spanjaart. Number 11, Dennis the Menace Tupper. And he's tied with Kristen Duncan Sheik Urban. That's right. She's barely, barely breathing at.
[laughter]
Joel: At number 12, but I'm more excited to see who's in the cellar at the end of the year. Then who's in the playoffs because Tupper and Urban are fighting for that last spot. And if Tupper goes from first to worst, we're gonna have to get him an epic something to like showcase as the loser, for the season.
Chad: Like a broom.
Joel: Also.
Chad: A toilet brush.
Joel: Also, notably, we will likely have an all female playoff, this season, which I think is fucking awesome.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: So fucking awesome. So fucking awesome.
Chad: Yep.
Joel: All right. That is your Fantasy Fix leaderboard once again. Sponsored by our friends at FactoryFix. By the way, the Browns play The Bears this week. If any of the FactoryFix people wanna lose some money, just hit me up on the DMs and we can figure that out, friends.
[music]
Joel: Alright, Chad, well missing last week. I know you're chomping at the bit to talk about a few of the items that we discussed.
Chad: Oh, yeah.
Joel: Jim Stroud was nice enough to join me, take some time off from SourceCon and fill in for you. But you have some stuff on your chest you want to get off? What's up?
Chad: Well, first off, yeah. So Jim, thanks again for guest hosting my friend, known Jim forever, but you might not remember...
[applause]
Chad: You might remember Jim was our very first guest host in April of 2017, when Jeremy was being born, he stepped in and we were very, very early into this fucking journey, so... Jim's the OG. Yeah, he's the OG. So I have to say it was quite refreshing to kinda sit back, listen to last week's show, digest it, and then pull together some comments, because the dumping of CPA seems to be just a big retreat by Indeed. Two quick points number one, a history lesson. How did Indeed take Organic away, the free traffic away first and foremost, or I guess, I'm sorry, transition to moving everybody to paid traffic.
Chad: They started with job boards first and they made them pay for traffic, so it was... They took that little piece out, it was a third of it, they took them out, they made them pay for traffic, then Indeed waited patiently. Then staffing company's jobs were taken out of the free feed and they had to pay the Indeed piper, right? After the dust settled on that one with staffing companies, then hiring companies were next, so how was that successful rollout different than what we experienced this year?
Joel: Tell me, Chad.
Chad: They did it all at once. They weren't fucking around, they didn't follow their tried and true trojan horse model, the indeed crew has grown cocky and sloppy. So why do you think that is? It just blew my mind seeing Raj Mukherji talk about, Well, things are getting better and employers are starting to like it and it's very new.
Joel: Sure.
Chad: And then we go back and now it's an experiment, so why are they getting so cocky and sloppy.
Joel: So we talked about this, so I'll give you, I guess, three reasons. One is hubris, you mentioned it when you just get cocky and confident in you can't lose, then you just do stuff and think everyone's gonna love it. And that rarely works. The other one is they have a new sugar daddy, they have a new private equity firm that's probably forcing them to look at what's working and what isn't, and this probably wasn't working the way that it should, and somebody, a grown up in the room hopefully said, This needs to go... Because it's not the direction that we need to go. And I think the third one is a little bit of fear. I... Regardless of what people say, I think Google for Jobs is growing, I think once they start pay-per-click, some advertising solution there, it's gonna pull money away from Indeed, so doing things out of fear like this. Also programmatic, it's really hard to have a conversation as an Indeed salesperson and talk about like, I'm paying 12 cents a click here, but I'm paying you 84 cents like...
Chad: A click.
Joel: Why am I doing that? And that's a really hard conversation to have, if you create confusion in this new model that, No, it's not clicks, it's applicant or it's interested candidate, then you create confusion and then people just go, "Oh, okay." Then it's not 14 cents versus 52 cents. It's something different.
Chad: So that was point number one. They just seemed to be sloppy and cocky because they've been able to roll these things out very effectively before. Number two, you made a Google comparison to Indeed, which was pretty apples and oranges, and let me hit this up, so Google doesn't control the product and they never did. They were like the marketplace, but they never controlled the product. Indeed controls the entire ecosystem, right? That's a huge difference, indeed. I'm predicting they can and they will do CPA, why? They have no fucking choice with Google for Jobs and LinkedIn breathing down their necks, once Indeed finally invest cash in a system that can actually match candidates against experiences and skills to do job requirements. It's a done deal, and that's not complex at all, as a matter of fact, ZipRecruiter should have productized this already, I can't believe they didn't. You want 10 candidates that meet your requirements to apply, done, then the ad shuts off after 10 applies happen. It's not hard. We've gotten the information, we know their qualified... Boom, you got what you asked for. They might not be exactly what you want. But it doesn't matter.
Chad: You wanted qualified applicants, you got 10 qualified applicants. What's hard is Indeed's matching technology is shit, and their back-end system is in legacy status, I spoke with some people last week when I was in London, and they pointed directly at Indeed getting fat and lazy like Monster did, and that their back-end literally not changing for seven years. So Indeed will have to spend the money, they have plenty, they've gotta do it to retool to make CPA happen, the cost per started apply, that's another mess and another story, but I think CPA.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: Which they say they dumped. I think that's coming, they just have to do a shit ton of retooling on the back-end, because with their forced registration right now they're gaining more candidates into their database, they need to start asking more information of those candidates, create richer profiles, and then they need a better matching system. In the end, I don't know, maybe they try to buy Textkernel or something like that. Somebody who actually works...
SFX: 60% of the time, it's crazy.
[laughter]
Joel: Now you're getting crazy. Now, you're getting crazy, I would love to see when Google launches their paid product or they're paid option, if they go like bottom feeder per click pricing, talking $0.05 a click, I'll talking disrupt the Programmatic people. Disrupt Indeed. Totally throw a grenade down the hallway of the job board industry. I don't think they'll do that, but it would be really fun to watch. The other thing is there's a technical side to this, and there's a human side to it, because people can do the math in their head saying, "Okay, I pay this many for this many clicks and I got this many candidates, and okay... " they've somehow adjusted to the cost of that, and they're okay with it. When they start paying tens of dollars for an applicant, if that applicant is not great, the math on that is tougher because I'm paying dollars as opposed to cents for garbage, and there's a mental human thing that they have to have to figure out if they can. The technical part is one of it, but if you can't convince people that I'm cool with paying for an applicant, I'm cool paying this much for it, then it's not gonna work, so that's a bigger problem for me with them than it is the tech side.
Joel: Or do they have something else that's different. It's gonna be fun to watch. I think they're stuck between a rock and a hard place, and if Google comes out with bottom dweller pricing, it's gonna be really, really interesting, and if they start putting those ads in your Gmail, they start putting job postings on YouTube and other places in their network that's gonna shake up the programmatic folks, it's gotta be fun. Come on Google, let's get it done.
Chad: I see Indeed buying a lot of that real estate, by the way.
Joel: They already are.
Chad: And then secondarily talking about Appcast and Twitter and Greenhouse and Lever a couple of weeks ago. So our discussion, were you dug into the jobs feed of the Twitter's new "hiring platform". Yes, if you're not watching on YouTube, I'm using air quotes, hiring platform.
Chad: Had us scratching our head and wondering what the actual fuck is going on over there. I mean, huge brands have directed their big marketing agencies to pull all advertising from Twitter, but what happens if those same companies' jobs start showing up beside antisemitic posts powered by jobs feed given to them by Greenhouse, Lever, Appcast, whomever, right? So we receive tons of opinions, which we always do from listeners, and that's great, and a response from the man with the million dollar smile, the COO over at Appcast, that's Matt Molinari. Matt posted, "Hey all, I'd like to clarify a few points. On behalf of Appcast, we have always empowered our customers to direct us to remove sites and channels from their job advertising strategy, Appcast customers, with jobs distributed to X. Twitter, have been made aware and have the choice if they'd like to continue doing so, that said Appcast remains committed to staying at the cutting edge of job ad distribution. Yada, yada, yada, yada, a bunch of policy stuff.
Joel: Yada, yada, yada, yada.
Chad: I totally love it, the latter part was more I think legal, than it was Matt. I love it. But why is this a big deal? So there was a bit of gaslighting on the socials last week, and running parallels between LinkedIn and Indeed job postings with these Twitter postings, and let me qualify why this is so different, antisemitic tweets, social posts will not show up in the Indeed or LinkedIn feed next to your employer's jobs, the end goal of the Twitter hiring platform is to add job content into the main Twitter feed, this is where all the toxic posts are happening, there's a huge difference in saying that I wanna use Indeed, I just... I don't like their pricing model versus I don't wanna use Twitter because they've got antisemitic posts. Those are entirely different. So that was last week. And remember jobs are not yet in with the tweets. They're not there yet, but they will be. So just imagine your brand showing up beside a purely toxic tweet or maybe I don't know. A tweet from Alex Jones. That's right, kids. Alex Jones was allowed back on Twitter this week, the very anniversary of Sandy Hook School massacre. Who's Alex Jones, you might ask?
Chad: Well, if you forgot, Alex Jones claimed for years that the killing of 20 students and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary school, elementary school, in Newton, Connecticut was staged with actors as a part of a government plot to cease Americans guns. So yes, I do trust Matt's words 'cause I trust Matt, he's an awesome dude. But I'm also a huge believer in trust, but verify, make sure you know where your fucking jobs are showing up, the jobs are not co-mingling yet in the actual Twitter feed, but when that shit starts happening, stay diligent, kids.
SFX: Another one.
Joel: So we talked about this pretty extensively, talked about Appcast providing backfill for Twitter, which it still is as well as Greenhouse and others, and Matt was quick to point out that advertisers have control over where their jobs show up, yada, yada, and that's great that he reached out. A lot of companies don't reach out or publicly explain what's going on, and that's their right. I would say when you get to a certain size, you should have a team or somebody dedicated to giving a heads up to the industry media, the bloggers, the podcasters, whatever, and by doing that, you and I or one of us should have gotten a heads up like, Hey guys,
they never reached out to me, the PR, like the PR person.
Chad: Well, I just wanna say that I reached out to somebody of one of the big companies who actually had their marketing pulled off Twitter to ask TA if they received anything from their applicant tracking system or anything like that about this whole thing, received nothing. But yes, we definitely need to receive that shit, but before we do, the companies do.
Joel: The customers do, yeah...
Chad: Yeah, when we start actually being the ones who are heading all of these conversations, which we shouldn't be, but... Fuck it. That's who we are.
Joel: That's it. If you wanna control the narrative, you have to communicate with the people who talk about this stuff, and then you're not stuck on LinkedIn with your COO talking about like, "Oh, here's the policy, guys" or "Here's what's going on, in case there are any questions". We should have known before the deal was done, "Hey, we're doing this, anyone that doesn't wanna be on Twitter can not be on it, we've let our customers know." So we could have gone on the show and said, Hey, this has happened, and Appcast is there, but they've done the due diligence of letting their companies get off if they don't wanna be on the Twitter platform. There's nothing on their website that I saw that says anything about customers can control where the stuff goes. I'm sure it's there, maybe when you log in, but when you get to a certain size as a company, have people, have one person dedicated to building a bridge to all the media that's industry-wide, give us a call, we'll give you... We'll give you the first dozen...
Chad: We know those people well already.
Joel: It's not a big community, but let them know because I can tell you I've never gotten anything from Appcast like, "Hey, this is coming. Here's a news release, we're dropping on whatever", nothing. So Appcast, you bought an agency, agencies do this for a living, empower them to reach out to the industry media and anybody that's a certain size, think about people like us because we talk and your customers listen, your partners listen, and it could save you a lot of headaches, if you control the message before it drops.
Chad: No question.
Joel: No question. Alright, well, somebody who generally does get the message but does not reach out to us.
SFX:
Chad: [laughter]
Joel: Google is in the news, let's talk about Google's Gemini, they've, making some waves in the tech world, to say the least, it's designed to be a multi-modal, which means it can understand and work in various types of information such as text, images, audio, video and code, Google has big plans for Gemini, they're integrating it into many of their products, including search, their ad platform and their web browser, Chrome. It's largely been celebrated as an ambitious project that has the potential to change the way we interact with technology. Chad, my favorite. Gemini, by the way, what are your thoughts on Gemini?
Chad: Question. Did you see the promotional video?
Joel: I did, I did.
Chad: It was a promotional video, was not a demo, but it was pretty astounding, I think we need to stand in awe of where we've come in just the last year, ChatGPT was opened up to the public a little over a year ago, and we're now, we were marveling over poems and image generation because it was fucking cool. So when you start taking a look at multi-modal, why I tell you what, we talked about this, and just like to let you know that the Chad and Cheese brought this to you back in July, kids, go ahead and play that beautiful bean footage, Joel.
Joel: Yep, have a listen.
SFX:
Chad: The big key here that I think through these three; inflection, runway and typeface is multi-modal, and when you're talking about multi-modal models, it's not just consuming text, but you're also consuming audio and video. So if you wanna contextualize the data, which is really what this is all about, You need all aspects of that data, so think about it, if you're reading something, you gain some context, if you're listening to it, then you gain more context than reading, listening than watching, you're just continual starting to understand how AI can learn.
Chad: So we're getting past just the text aspect.
Joel: Bingo. Boom.
Chad: Again, we talked about multi-modal, so Gemini is the first model to outperform humans on what they call an MMLU, a massive multi-task language understanding, there are so many fucking acronyms in this shit. One of the most popular methods to test the knowledge and problem solving of any AI model, Gemini beats ChatGPT-4 in every general AI reasoning, math and code category, only ChatGPT-4 was better in reasoning, one of the subsets, common sense reasoning for everyday tasks. So they have three offerings, one is nano, which is gonna be for my droid phone, which is gonna be awesome. Chrome and some of the devices. Then you've got Pro, which I'm assuming is gonna be more of an SMB model, and then Enterprise, which is where every... Those big companies are gonna start grinding data. Two weeks ago, we talked about how these large language models are cars, and the data you feed into them are the fuel. What's happening is the car is evolving from a Model T to Ferrari in record fucking pace, so what you can do with that data is going to be amazing, it's gonna be mind-boggling to be quite frank.
Chad: So with these numbers, Google just leap frogged OpenAI, aka Microsoft. Get ready because Microsoft's answer, then maybe Amazon or Anthropic's answer is gonna be a leap frogging Google. This is going to be the race, kids, and it's not gonna be who wins because this race is just going to fucking continue and those big three players, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, they're gonna stay in the race. Anthropic, we'll see who actually gobbles them up, 'cause somebody's going to.
SFX: Just the tip.
Joel: Yeah, Google went deep on this.
[laughter]
Joel: To explain the video if you haven't seen it, there's a developer and a voice, the voice is the AI, and he starts by drawing a squiggly line and the voice says... And he says, "What's this?" He's like, "It looks like a squiggly line," and then he finishes it. It looks like a duck. And the voice says, "Oh, it looks like a duck." He draws water, the AI is like, "Oh, the duck is in water," and it kinda keeps going, different shapes. It shows like a rubber ducky, and then it says, it has a duck, a rubber duck and has two roads, one ends in a bear, one ends in another duck and they're like, "Which road should I take?" And it says, "One of them looks like there's a bear, the other one is duck, so ducks are friendly, go to the duck," that's kind of where this thing is going, and it's pretty mind-blowing, and I think about how that could impact our space. Look, you could see a world where a video camera watches you at work all day, and then the AI says at the end of the year, did they deserve a raise or not based on what they saw, what...
Joel: How much work they did, facial expressions, whatever, how much of a raise should they get, how do they compare with the other workers in their department because we've been watching them the whole time. You could see a world where this thing watches an interview and says which candidate they would hire as part of it, and why would they do that. Are there ones that they thought were sketchy, and this gets into higher view facial recognition stuff, this gets our friend Keith Sonderling interested, I'm sure in terms of how this could play into exclusivity and racism and bias.
Joel: So this is cool, but it's gonna do some really weird, interesting things for the workforce, because I could see a day where Big Brother is watching you all day and giving a report to everybody about what it saw, what it thinks about what your job is, that gets into Minority Report status, predicting what you're gonna do like how you are gonna respond to stuff, it could be sales process, it could be like going into a store, could be... Think about school shootings, you mentioned Sandy Hook, imagine a video camera outside of every school that says, "Oh, this looks like a bad guy" for whatever reason, and then locks the doors until there's some approval process, so you could look at security very differently than we do now. But yeah, very impressive. I'm anxious to see where this goes, it's slightly scary. I was really hoping that he was gonna set down like a dildo or draw some boobs to see what the AI, if it could recognize those or not, but unfortunately, it wasn't a 12-year-old boy doing the demos for AI.
Chad: Maybe next time.
Joel: People are gonna abuse this thing, have fun with it, joke around with it, but yeah, it is impressive technology, and it is gonna change the way work is done and how people are evaluated and how people are hired for sure.
Chad: I can see contextualized AI videos, contextualized AI interviews. So video creation, audio creation, a lot of stuff you're talking about is very dystopian, trying to look at the little stuff, the things that we can see in our space and how these models could perspectively create just a better experience for recruiters and for job seekers.
Joel: We're talking about augmented stuff, it's like literally assistant watching and looking and seeing things as they are, like voice, video, audio, all that stuff being gobbled up and chewed up and spit out in an intelligent way. Alright, well, my mind's a little bit blown. Let's take a break and we'll talk about LinkedIn when we get back. Alright, Chad, let's talk a little LinkedIn. LinkedIn continues its fight against fake accounts by winning a legal case against top social and social BD24. The defendants were found to have created over 400,000 fake LinkedIn accounts and were ordered to pay damages and prohibited from offering fake followers, likes, views, comments or connections. Sarah white, a VP of Legal at LinkedIn said, "We're encouraged by our decisive win and will continue to leverage all available tools, including legal action when necessary to ensure the LinkedIn community remains trusted and authentic." Finally, I feel safe using LinkedIn. Chad, what are your thoughts on the news out of our favorite social business network?
Chad: Damn. So I think this is a pretty amazing precedent that's being set, but $43,000 for damages, that's a slap on the wrist. $430,000 would provide a punch in the mouth that I think this deserves. This is a shot over the bow to companies out there that are inflating their company size with fake employees on LinkedIn, and it's happening. And we're seeing it happen. Why are they doing that? Number one to bloat what people think the size of their organization is. Number one, not to mention sharing content, commenting on content, bloating really all the commenting segments and engagement segments with fake engagement. I don't see this just as these companies who are nailed with a pissy ass fine, there are companies that are out there today that hopefully, LinkedIn has a reporting methodology to ensure that they can start to prove that some of these people are actually real, instead of just finding an image on Midjourney and are creating a image on Midjourney and starting to create profiles.
Joel: So here's the LinkedIn playbook as I see it, Chad. Step one, keep everyone out of your house, this is sue everyone scraping your profiles, everyone that's using it to create new services and solutions, the HighQ legal case has kinda solved that for the most part, in combination with like playing whack-a-mole with spiders and scrapers that come to the site. But for the most part, the products and services created to scrape LinkedIn has subsided, so step one has been achieved, I think for the most part, number two is just what happened is legitimize your data, if people can't get to the data, but the data is garbage, then it's not worth as much as if it's legitimized and original content. So step two is taking place, who's putting fake profiles?
Joel: How do we identify those? Get them out. Step two is en route, and there's a lot of... If these knuckle heads were putting out $400,000 fake accounts, imagine somebody who's serious about this and what they could do to the data that's in there. Once they've achieved that, and by the way, they've partnered with Clear and other services to try to help legitimize the profiles that are there, if they can get to a point where 85, 90-plus percent of the profiles are all original or even closer to 100%, then it's like turn on the money printing machine because you have achieved Xanadu in terms of what they do, look, Microsoft pay $26 billion not for the job board, not for the learning up-scaling solution that they have, they did it for the people that are on LinkedIn. The directory of professionals is highly monetizable, but they gotta get those in line with being legitimate people who are real, so this is their next step, if they get to step three, think about what you're gonna be paying for LinkedIn, you think you're paying a lot now, if they feel like they have a high level of real people and profiles on the platform, what you pay now for LinkedIn is gonna be a pittance for what you're gonna be paying for it in the future.
Chad: Oh yeah.
Joel: Three steps to the money making machine, the money printing machine at LinkedIn, it's happening, people. It's happening.
Chad: [laughter] With their old ass tech, it's happening.
Joel: But good for them. LinkedIn is better if it's real people.
Chad: No, agree 100%. Agree 100%.
Joel: No one can be pissed off about, Yeah, get all the fake stuff off, that's perfectly great.
Chad: Yeah, they can be pissed off about Facebook though.
Joel: Yes, they can definitely pissed off by Facebook, yeah. That's...
SFX: Does anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
Joel: Alright, a little Facebook fraud. Can I interest you in that?
Chad: Let's do that.
[overlapping conversation]
Joel: Barbra Furlow-Smiles, a former Global Diversity Executive at Facebook has pleaded guilty to stealing over $4 million from the company through an elaborate scheme involving fraudulent vendors, fictitious charges and cash kickbacks. She used her position to make Facebook pay numerous individuals for goods and services that were never provided and then received kickbacks from them. She also caused Facebook to onboard vendors owned by friends and associates who paid her kickbacks after receiving payment from Facebook. She used the stolen money to live a luxurious lifestyle in California and Georgia. I guess as luxurious as Georgia can be, she lived it. She is scheduled to be sentenced in March of 2024. Just in time for March Madness. Chad, what are your thoughts on fraud at Facebook?
Chad: Yeah. So Barbara Furlow-Smiles served as a lead strategist, global head of employee resource groups and diversity engagement at Facebook. This is her own community, this is her own fucking community that she's fucking over. No wonder why the damn DEIB initiative over there failed, we've been making fun of it for years, they spent all this money and nothing happened, this is why. It was rotting from the fucking head, it was rotting from this Barbara Furlow-Smiles. She deserves the orange jumpsuit for 2023. She gets the orange jumpsuit award. Her and ol' girl from Joonko. This has been the year of fraud for a couple of females in leadership positions, which just... I am fucking floored.
Joel: What she had going on was one hell of a fucking like OG Capone style racket going on, and the sad thing to me is people are gonna connect DEI person with criminal, and that's just wrong. And I encourage any company that's listening to separate the two, DEI is not her, she's not representative of Facebook and what they have been doing. Take out what Facebook's been doing for the last five years in DEI off the table. Separate the two from your brain because they have nothing to do with each other, and it's sad that it will. People will connect the two. And it sucks for the movement, for sure.
Joel: Damn it. I need to take a break and maybe talk about strippers, maybe that'll make me feel better, I don't know. We'll be right back, everybody.
Chad: Well, Joel, unfortunately, I'm going to go ahead and actually bust in with some breaking news, so we're not gonna talk about strippers this week, I'm sorry. ICIMS is following a thorough search to ensure they bring in the right leader to lead iCIMS into the next chapter. They have identified their new CEO, Jason Edelboim will be the CEO effective January 2nd. He brings nearly two decades of experience in data technology and enterprise software and previously held senior leadership positions at Cision, PR at Newswire and Bloomberg. He's a PR guy. He most recently served as President and COO at Data Miner, an AI platform company that pioneer technology for the real-time detection of events and business critical information for public data sources to corporate enterprises and government organizations. That's right, kids. January 2nd, iCIMS will have a new CEO, that's fucking awesome. But yes, this literally just came into my email and it is hot off the presses. What do you think?
Joel: So a few things in there, Data Miner, a public company, I believe that went IPO fairly recently, I don't know if this guy was part of that process, but if iCIMS wants to go public, having someone with that experience obviously makes a lot of sense, and I thought that was one of the reasons why they had the last two CEOs. Certainly took enough time, so I hope they vetted everyone and had long conversations, and...
Chad: After the last one, they had to take the time.
Joel: Hopefully this guy sticks around a while. Hopefully he sticks around a while. Cision you said was the company that he's coming from, I don't know anything about Cision, so I don't know...
Chad: He's from Data Miner so Cision is...
Joel: So Data Miner is his most recent gig.
Chad: One of the PR groups, one of the actual PR marketing groups.
Joel: But yeah, I'm sure everyone at iCIMS is just happy to have a captain of the ship again.
Chad: Well, breaking news, and hopefully next week you can talk about strippers.
Joel: Can I give you a stripper joke though?
Chad: Sure.
Joel: The worst stripper joke. What's the difference between a waitress at a strip club and a stripper? A waitress at a strip club and a stripper. What's the difference?
Chad: One's topless and the other one isn't?
Joel: About two weeks, we out.
Chad: Oh. We out.
Outro: Wow. Look at you, you made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast, or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there is no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back, like an awful train wreck, you can't look away and like Chad's favorite western, you can't quit them either. We out.
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