Remember your favorite double album (for those old enough)? That’s what this episode is like.
The boys drop news and discuss BIG TOPICS like...
...and well, TikTok (again :)
Actually, there’s so much good stuff in this show, I can’t even remember everything. Just get comfy and turn it up, man compliments of Sovren, JobAdX, and Jobvite!
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
INTRO (2s):
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.
Joel (22s):
Oh yeah. I'm back after missing last week show baby Richard Branson went to space and I went to Kentucky. What's up boys and girls. It's your favorite podcast AKA the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host Joel "rocketman" Cheeseman.
Chad (38s):
This is Chad "Italia" Sowash
Joel (42s):
And on this week show Google for Jobs isn't playing anymore y'all. LinkedIn keeps getting played and who wants to play a game of M and A? Just about everyone apparently.
Sovren (55s):
You already know that Sovren makes the world's best resume CV parser, but did you know that Sovren also makes the world's best AI matching engine? Only Sovren's AI matching engine goes beyond the buzzwords. With Sovren you control how the engine thinks with every match the Sovren engine tells you what matched and exactly how each matching document was scored. And if you don't agree with the way it's scored the matches, you can simply move some sliders to tell it, to score the matches your way. No other engine on earth gives you that combination of insight and control. With Sovren, matching isn't some frustrating "black box, trust us, it's magic, one shot deal"
Sovren (1m 39s):
like all the others. No, with Sovren, matching is completely understandable, completely controllable, and actually kind of fun. Sovren ~ software so human you'll want to take it to dinner.
Joel (1m 54s):
Did you miss me, man?
Chad (1m 55s):
Yeah, I did think about it as you buy the campfire with s'mores and the kids and mosquito repellent. Yeah, no, I was, I was envious. I was really envious!
Joel (2m 7s):
You were envious. Well, anytime you want to take my place, you're more than welcome. I enjoy about 15% of camping. And it's usually between the hours of like six and nine, when it is the campfire, it is, you know, whatever you're eating, it's drinking, it's cooling down, but yeah, it's sleeping on the ground. Nobody sleeps. Everybody's grumpy. It's hot as shit and Kentucky this time of year, by the way. Anyway.
Chad (2m 36s):
Well welcome back.
Joel (2m 38s):
It's good to be back in the comforts of air conditioning and you know, civilization. Nice to be back.
Chad (2m 47s):
Well, I got to give a shout out to Julie for stepping up last minute, last week. And filling in, she did a great job. She's a podcaster, so she kind of does this thing.
Joel (2m 59s):
Glad she could fill in while I was scratching my mosquito bites. Shout out from me to Richard Branson. I'm sure you saw this in the news, billionaires going in space, something we did 55, 60 years ago, but now it's celebrated because rich people are doing it. Shout out to him. And I can't wait to shout out to Jeff Bezos when he does it. Let's hope that he doesn't die in a horrible accident coming back to earth cause that would break your heart
Chad (3m 27s):
In his giant penis machine. Yes, I can see that.
Joel (3m 31s):
Yeah. Why don't these guys just sword fight with their cocks and get it over with? Like put the money to, I don't know global warming, hunger.
Chad (3m 41s):
Yeah.
Joel (3m 42s):
Don't spend it going into space.
Chad (3m 44s):
Well, and Richard Branson doing the whole, oh, as a kid and I wish everybody and it's like, motherfucker, you just wanted to spend your money on this ride. It's what you wanted to do. Just say it. You didn't want to spend it on world hunger. You didn't want to spend it on anything with regard to making lives better. I mean, you just wanted to take the ride. That's what you want to just fucking say it, dude. Come on.
Joel (4m 10s):
Yeah. And the fact that he moved it up to go before Bezos really kind of tells you right here. This whole thing is, it's like the mother load of midlife crises with these guys.
Chad (4m 22s):
But we do have some winners though. Kids, the UIFA Euro 2020, and Joel and I, we both picked England. Like I said, my heart was with Italy. I wanted Italy to win, but I thought England had the easiest route in their easiest group. They're on the easiest side of the bracket. After beating Germany, they really had an easy way all the way into the finals. And yet Italy after beating Belgium and really getting smacked around, you know, a little bit, they played a match, dude. It was pretty cool.
Joel (4m 53s):
Yeah. I'm going to save a lot of my commentary for our European show. So kids make sure you go check that out. But I, you know, by the numbers Italy should have won easily. Damn what a choke job by England. Yeah. And while we're on sports, can we come back to America for a second? So I think it's 13 days before training camp for the real football happens. I'm excited for that. And the NBA finals are all tied up as we record this podcast.
Chad (5m 20s):
And more winners, we've got a Rocket Mat out of Brazil. 1.5 million in funding. Barb Francillo. Is that how you say it Francillo?
Joel (5m 31s):
I don't know.
Chad (5m 31s):
Okay. She won beer
Joel (5m 33s):
from Adzuna I think.
Chad (5m 35s):
She won beer from AdZuna so, she's loving her life right now with a fucking big stack of beer that was dropped on her front door and Rob Art wins whiskey.
Joel (5m 49s):
Yeah. Yeah. And speaking of Barb, she's down there in Phoenix so she can enjoy that beer while she roots on her sons. And if you haven't up for free shit, what's wrong with you? There are real winners. These are real people. Head out to chadcheese.com/free. Give us your info. And we just draw it out of a hat and they get free, free booze, free booze and t-shirts by Emissary, are all an option when you sign up for free. So do that today. If you haven't kids shout out to Candace Parker, she was announced the first woman ever on the NBA 2K that's, a video game, kids cover. Awesome basketball player and quite a looker by the way is.
Joel (6m 30s):
She's the first woman to be on the cover. It brought Shaquille O'Neal to tears on TV. So it's kind of a big moment in the world of sports and equity.
Chad (6m 38s):
He's a sensitive guy though. He's big, he's brawny, but he's sensitive and that's okay. This 2021 Joel. If you're out there and you're listening and you have topics or articles you believe we should be digging into here on the show, well, mosey on over to Twitter and share them using hashtag Chadcheese or tag us. You can also tag us on LinkedIn or just go to Chadcheese.com bottom of the page, click on the contact us button and engage. We enjoy it.
Joel (7m 10s):
Yeah. Shout out to Instawork. This show is so jam packed with news. This thing is a shout out. So Instawork announced a $60 million series C raise in financing, bringing its total funding to a hundred million dollars. Shout out to Instawork, man, in any other week, you'd be a main headline, but this week you're just a shout out. Sorry.
Chad (7m 33s):
Just a shout out today is going to be the M&A version. You ready for some topics?
Joel (7m 38s):
Oh my God. No. I've got a few more shout outs to boomers LA times this week reports that a 10,000 boomers are retiring every day in this country. That's going to open up some new jobs for a lot of people and probably some real estate. Shout out to Trump who keeps the fundraising enterprise going by suing big tech. Imagine that the funds that are coming in on that for all the Trump followers.
Chad (8m 2s):
You know that nothing's going to this quote unquote "suing." he got on a news channel, put a Fox news mic in front of him, started talking about suing somebody and please donate to my, you know, my campaign of suing these assholes. And all he's going to do is bank it. He's going to bank it. And I love how old white dudes claiming to quote unquote, "cancel culture." No asshole. You broke the rules. These are called the consequences. This is what happens when you do stupid shit.
Joel (8m 34s):
And by the way, when you do donate, you'll be defaulted into the ongoing monthly donations whether you want to do that or not. By the way, there's a new book on Facebook, that's pretty revealing. I'm going to check that out and maybe report back on that. Otherwise we have a few birthdays to mention, Bill Fisher from Vonq. He celebrates a birthday this week. Will Staney from Proactive Talent.
Chad (8m 58s):
Nice.
Joel (8m 58s):
Christian Anderson. If you don't remember Christian Anderson was the PR guy for Jobster.
Chad (9m 4s):
Oh yeah.
Joel (9m 5s):
And dealing with that PR nightmare had to be fun he's way out of this industry, but Christian happy birthday to you. Jason Morris, founder of Employee Screen IQ and my former boss and client, he celebrates a birthday. And Jeff Hunter, founder of Talentism also the former head of talent at EA and I think Bose really great guy, he's sort of disappeared, he used to blog a lot, but he celebrates a birthday. A lot of people getting older in our industry and shout out to those folks.
Chad (9m 38s):
TOPICS!
Joel (9m 41s):
Google for Jobs who would have thought this.
Chad (9m 45s):
What?
Joel (9m 45s):
So a little bit here, Google is adding direct, apply markup and new editorial guidelines for job postings, no traffic for you, which you coined. And I'll let you get in that a second. The new guidelines include rules around obstructive text and images, excessive and distractive ads or content that doesn't add any value to the job posting getting nixed. What do you got on no jobs for you?
Chad (10m 8s):
Dude. So it was funny because I remember we talked about Google Hire being like a 20% time project.
Joel (10m 17s):
A hobby.
Chad (10m 18s):
We automatically got calls from the Google team on that one. Seriously, Google for Jobs has felt like a 20% project because it's been a shitty experience the entire time. Now these new changes where they're going to be focusing on really looking for feeds with spam jobs, better user experience, whether you know that the organization is asking for registration, if there's an excessive or obstructive pop-up ads, updating your feeds to make sure that you don't have expired jobs in them, masking old jobs with new date.
Joel (10m 56s):
That's a biggie.
Chad (10m 57s):
That's a total Tom fuckery right there. That's when, you know, if somebody is doing that, kill their feed. Kill their feed, they're doing nothing but trying to gain the system and then adding data that wasn't really a wasn't originally on the job like salary, which I thought was interesting because you see Indeed and you see a ton of other organizations who do this to try to make more of a robust type of a job listing. But if it wasn't on the job in the first place, should it really be there? Google says, no, get that shit off there. But the direct apply thing I think is the markup itself. That's big.
Joel (11m 35s):
Yeah, for sure. So in addition to, I guess the anti-spam moves, which are surprising and probably fantastic from a user's perspective, they added a new direct apply property to the job posting structured data. This property gives websites an optional way to share if your job listing offers a direct apply experience, right from Google search. Google defines a direct apply experience in terms of the actions that are required from the users to apply to the job. This means that a user is offered a short and simple application process on your page without unnecessary intermediate steps. If the user has to click apply complete an application form, sign in or log in more than once in the application journey, it means that you aren't offering a direct apply experience, no traffic for you.
Joel (12m 23s):
This is really, really interesting on a few levels. I do want to echo your sentiment about the old Google versus the new Google.
Chad (12m 32s):
Yeah.
Joel (12m 32s):
And 15 years ago, Google probably would have looked at all the spam and criticism like people like you and me give them. And would've just said, fuck it. And shut the whole thing down. Now they're digging in and caring about the product, which I think may be a component of lawsuits around the world and they're gonna have to pay media companies a lot of money, which will, we'll also talk about, I think, in the European show. But in while they're paying media companies to put their news onto Google, there'll be simultaneously sticking the knife in their back as they take their classifieds money with Google for Jobs and, and other components. So I wanted to put that out there.
Joel (13m 13s):
But the direct apply is huge. I mean, if particularly ATSs figure out how they can allow users of Google for Jobs to apply directly from Google is game-changer too much of hyperbole around that? Because if you can do that one, people don't even need to go to sites anymore, which they haven't really been doing anyway. And we've been hearing a lot about no one's going to job sites anymore and no one's clicking on jobs anymore. But it also really fucks, fucks you a few if you make your business by pay-per-click ads or clicking on ads, because if no one's clicking there and they're applying directly from Google, that's taking out the middleman almost entirely.
Joel (13m 56s):
So if this thing takes off and they work with the ATSs, and like, I think it's big potentially for the LinkedIn's where people trust and they maybe have data already in LinkedIn to apply easily. That's huge. Now people like Alex Murphy have thrown out the issue of, well, is there pre-screening in that? Is there any kind of like just basic level, otherwise it's just sort of a CRM and you're capturing data. So it's still left to be determined exactly how this looks and if people will actually embrace it, but if it works right, holy shit, it's a big deal for sure.
Chad (14m 32s):
I think for the most part, what they're looking at right now for direct apply is that if I am applying for a job at IBM, when I click on that job, does it send me to a job posting on Glassdoor or Monster, right? That's not direct, but if I click on that job and it sends me to the actual job posting on IBM will, that is direct. Now there are other editorial pieces on the guideline process for user experience. And that's when you dig deeper into it. So first and foremost, you have many different components. The first component is that direct apply component. Is it direct? If it has to go through an actual job board itself before they apply directly to them, then it's not direct, right?
Chad (15m 17s):
And you'll be say penalized. But when you're talking about the actual process methodology and take it half an hour to fill out a fucking application, that's an entirely different conversation and you could be penalized as well. So job boards could, in some effect, whether they're a direct apply or not, could still rank higher than jobs on applicant tracking systems, because the user experience is shit on many applicant tracking systems. And that's not the fault of the applicant tracking system in many cases. In many cases, it's because the company has some old ass process methodology, which they haven't changed in 10, 15, 20 years.
Joel (16m 1s):
So my interpretation was that there was actually applying from Google for Jobs that you didn't have to click on anything and go to any site, but you could also do it as going directly to apply.
Chad (16m 12s):
Yeah. But you can't, you don't have your information available on Google to be able to just push it into an applicant tracking system. I think that's something that could come later, but right.
Joel (16m 24s):
So when did they, when did they launch Google resume or Google profile or something?
Chad (16m 29s):
You know, if you're using Google docs, you could have it in a Google doc as it is. And if you, if you hit apply, you can choose, you know, apply with, you know, a Google doc or whatever, right? So there, there are some opportunities that could happen there with their current infrastructure of their G-Suite. But overall, that's not going to happen right out of the gate. No way.
Joel (16m 50s):
I think the summary is Google cares about this shit and if you thought they were just going to ignore it and go away, you're probably mistaken.
Chad (16m 58s):
And performance based ads, baby, that's the next step. They're cleaning this up so that they can say, okay, look, now we have better rules in place, we've been doing this long enough. We know where we're getting scammed. We know where people are actually gaming us. We've put these rules in place. Now we can start doing performance based ads.
Joel (17m 19s):
Follow the money. Chad is my mantra. And speaking of following the money, we got some fucking MNA action that went on, went on this week. Which one do you want to start with? We got Yello, Hireology and Circa.
Chad (17m 31s):
Let's go with Yellow and WayUp.
Joel (17m 33s):
All right, what's going on there? You did a shred on it. Yep.
Chad (17m 37s):
Yellow. And this is from the press release. Yello, the leader in early talent and campus recruitment and WayUp the leader in DEI and diversity sourcing announced that the companies are joining forces AKA they're merging. The WayUp team will be joining Yello and WayUp co-founders will play major roles in the combined company. I got to give a shout out to Madeline Lorato over at Aptitude Research for inviting me into interview with her. Liz Wessel, who CEO of WayUp and Corey Ferengul, who is the CEO of yellow earlier this week. And whether, I don't know if you know this or not Joel, but Liz has been a long time Chad and Cheese junkie.
Chad (18m 22s):
And she actually has a kind of like a podcast book club at WayUp. Yeah.
Joel (18m 28s):
There needs to be an opioid for that addiction. What struck me was so WayUps total funding was, is 37 million. They were founded in 2014. Yello's total funding is 46 million. They're the old dog here they've been around since 2008, apparently. So an acquisition by those two companies with sort of, I guess, valued at the same I'm struggling with how the deal went down and how somebody had enough money to pay for it. And I, one of the things from the college perspective that I find fascinating is sort of how quickly handshake has impacted that industry. And I'm not an expert on the college recruiting scene, but clearly handshake has, has made a huge dent in that whole ecosystem.
Joel (19m 17s):
So for me, this is a little bit of, from my perspective, I've talked about, you know, Hey, if two dinosaurs can cuddle together, you know, do they survive the asteroid longer than those that don't? To me, this is like two companies that are sort of, they're not Handshake. Handshake is takes taking all the oxygen out of the room, these guys getting together and saying, Hey, if we partner up this diversity thing is big. Companies have budgets specifically now for diversity and they have new money in those budgets. So it's like, let's join forces. Let's get some of that diversity cabbage and take on Handshake. Am I correct in that perception? Or am I off?
Chad (19m 56s):
Think of it this way, Handshake and Simplicity, both of those platforms, they own probably 80% of the market with regard to college recruiting platforms, right. But that's the old model Yello and WayUp would be the entirely new model. Right? So if I'm an employer and I go to, you know, all these different schools, I'm using different platforms to be able to do on-campus recruiting. Well, why don't I just have my own platform, right? I should be building my own talent pipelines. Why don't I just have my own platform and a couple of different areas first and foremost, Yello is that enterprise platform.
Chad (20m 36s):
Now what WayUp does is they have about 10 to 30,000 students signing up with them every week. So instead of having something that is just built inside of the University that sucks all the cash out of it.
Joel (20m 49s):
Yeah.
Chad (20m 50s):
Why not have an SMB model where small companies can go and pay a small fee to be able to get candidates from wherever and whatever university?
Joel (20m 59s):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're touting 6 million candidates, a database of 6 million candidates, recent graduates and students for more than 7,000 campuses. And they're claiming 71% are black, Hispanic, or female as well as tens of thousands of veterans. So they're clearly doing something right. From what you're saying is these two companies combined are going to be a major force in college campus recruiting?
Chad (21m 23s):
I think even though I sound so bullish about it, that this is really a shot in the dark because the college recruiting industry in itself is built in the 1950s and it still is there. So trying to drag it out of that is going to be incredibly hard for any organization. But I do see Handshake and Simplicity as the old model and then the combination of WayUp and Yello as the new model. We'll see which one wins.
Joel (21m 54s):
Yeah. And it's, it's tough because you've got, when something like that happens, you think where's change going to happen. And in this model you would say like, well, the students probably don't give a shit, they're not out there with pitchforks saying, get rid of the career centers.
Chad (22m 6s):
They're just not using them.
Joel (22m 7s):
The companies are probably where it should happen, but we've heard stories of if you screw over the college, then you get moved down the list of the job of the job fair prime real estate corner or whatever. Like, I don't know if we can mention his name, but the conversation we had on LinkedIn was like, companies are afraid to cross the college because they're afraid that they'll, they'll get, you know, non preferential treatment at the next job fair if they go do something outside of the college campus.
Chad (22m 34s):
How many students actually utilize the college career center? It's not over 50%. That's for fucking sure.
Joel (22m 42s):
Back in the nineties Chad, I used to live at the career center.
Chad (22m 45s):
That's only because they had hot chicks at work there.
Joel (22m 49s):
That is true. That is true. All right. We still got Hireology and Circa. What do you want next?
Chad (22m 55s):
Hireology buys EmployUs. So Hireology, friend of the show, "the leading recruitment CRM built for multi location decentralized enterprises" (Wow. Marketing, you need to work on that) announced the acquisition of employee referral technology provider EmployUs. No figures were disclosed, which means to me it was on bargain basement pricing.
Joel (23m 19s):
TJ Maxx, baby.
Chad (23m 20s):
Yup. Yeah. I think core platforms, especially niche and SMB they need to be able to provide a reason for hiring companies with the disparate locations to not just go to ZipRecruiter. Right? And this is the biggest issue. Employee referrals are all already one of the best sources for hiring, right? So why do I need a fucking platform to do that?
Joel (23m 45s):
That's a good question, Chad. And the platform didn't strike me as, you know, superior innovation. It was sort of like email your employees, and say, do you know anybody for this job or text them the same thing? My question is, I mean, we know referral programs work, they are continually the number one source of hire or new hires in a company. My question is, and this is more for you because this is your lane. As we get more into referral programs and diversity, that seems to me like a collision course for disaster, because at its heart, to me, referral programs are recommend people that, you know, for this job.
Chad (24m 29s):
Friends of Bob.
Joel (24m 30s):
So at the end of the day, if you're really focused on referral programs, then your whole company just looks like each, everybody looks like each other.
Chad (24m 37s):
Yeah.
Joel (24m 37s):
And I know that's general generalizing, but that's kinda what it is, right? If you want to really inject diversity into your organization, it seems to me like referral programs have to figure that out and good luck with that. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, it feels like if we're really focused on diversity, then, then referral programs kind of suck.
Chad (24m 56s):
Well that's a company issue, not a referral program issue because if you are working on your foundational diversity efforts and you are hiring people of color and more females and so on and so forth, then what you're going to do is you're going to amplify that. Right. So, you know, that's not an employee referral issue, that's a, that's a foundational corporate issue. Right. And so, but, but that's a good question because you've got to fix the foundational issue before you actually start the employee referral.
Joel (25m 28s):
Think is where a lot of companies are or most companies.
Chad (25m 31s):
I would think so, but I'm, you know, I'm not a hundred percent sure. I mean, this is a journey where companies really have to focus on and they should be transparent about it. And most aren't, you know, in their workforce composition. And at that point, you challenge yourself publicly to do better. And as you do better, you start to institute employee referral programs, which could if done correctly, amplify diversity within your organization. That's I mean, and that's from the ground up for the most part. So yeah, I think there are two different problems you have to have that foundational change made before you can really Institute the employee referral piece.
Joel (26m 10s):
Do we know of any referral software out there that sort of incentivizes bringing in diverse candidates? Because that seems like that would be a solid business that would get a lot of money because it's diversity.
Chad (26m 23s):
First off again, I don't believe a referral platform is going to help you there. What I do believe though, if you do focus on your DEI efforts and you want to be able to amplify them, then you should be doing referrals and like a company like Real Links who, you know, Sam out of out London, I've been working with them for a little while. They've got an amazing platform that is focused on engagement. That's one of the issues that most employee referral platforms have, is keeping employees engaged and actually using the platform. If you've done your job as a company, and you have created that diverse foundation of a workforce, then a platform like Real Links is one that you can plug in.
Chad (27m 10s):
But again, I don't see an employee referral platform answering any DEI initiatives by itself.
Joel (27m 20s):
By the way, Hireology has raised a total of 60 million. EmployUs raised $750,000 back in 2014. So your guess today was probably a discounted purchase. Something that Hireology could easily do is probably correct. They've added that technology to their platform.
Chad (27m 38s):
Last but not least we have Circa buying Lap Pro. So Circa announced to the future, the purchase of Colorado based Lap Pro doing business as Diversity Jobs, a leading recruit, diversity recruitment and OFCCP, HR compliance, technology solution provider, no figures were disclosed on the deal. LapPro CEO, Eric Shannon, who is a stalwart and a veteran in this industry is off to another adventure right out of the gate. This to me is fairly simple. Circa is consistently adding to their diversity and compliance portfolio. The acquisition of AJE was huge.
Joel (28m 20s):
Yeah.
Chad (28m 21s):
You know, what about a year or so ago? And this is a continued march toward becoming the best in the space. Overall though, I got to say that, you know, seeing Eric Shannon out of the space gets, you know, gets a guy a little misty.
Joel (28m 35s):
Yeah. Yeah. Eric wasn't even mentioned on the PR. So that's how gone he is.
Chad (28m 40s):
That's how Eric is, man. He likes to be behind the curtain. He doesn't like the limelight.
Joel (28m 46s):
He's an interesting cat. Yeah. I had a few conversations with them back in the day, but so I think a history lesson is interesting for the kids out there, real quick in addition to just Eric Shannon. You know, before social media, diverse recruiting usually meant you had a good URL, like diversity was in it and maybe some search rankings for searches around diversity jobs, which made diversityjobs.com pretty valuable. I mean, they totally nailed it. And employers, you know, this firsthand employers were able to check off diversity for EOC or whoever else because they were advertising on these sites. Since then with social media, sourcing, AI, all kinds of tools, the old ways of targeting diversity candidates were kind of antiquated, to say the least.
Joel (29m 35s):
So I think Eric probably saw the writing on the wall that he wasn't going to be able to sort of milk that Diversity Jobs cow much longer, and that he needed to put the company into hands with more resources and maybe the ability to provide more services. I think the big play here for a Circa was they're getting 15 some years of clients that care about diversity and are willing to spend money on that. Like that is huge. I mean, just the client base that Eric has built over the last 15 years. That's where the value is not so much the diversityjobs.com domain.
Chad (30m 11s):
Portfolio doesn't hurt that's for fucking sure and a name that people are used to. Not to mention a line item that people have been paying for 10 years. Right. It's like when you get on to a federal contractors buy list, it's hard to get on, but it sure, it's almost impossible to get off.
Joel (30m 31s):
Yeah and Eric was probably ready to go. Yeah. He was probably ready to go.
Chad (30m 35s):
He's in a bunker somewhere in Colorado. Yeah. Let's take a quick break.
Jobvite (30m 39s):
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Joel (31m 8s):
Unicorns, unicorns everywhere, everywhere. Oh my God. I told you this show is going to be our White Album. So George Larock, our buddy is added again. So he tracks money that goes in and out of the industry. So global investment in work tech exceeded 4.9 billion in the second quarter of 2021 resulting in an 18 quarter average of 1.2 billion. The quarters investment was spread across 91 deals. Q2 of 2021 was the biggest quarter for VC investment in work tech since George started tracking all this shit back in 2017, the amount catapults this year to the biggest ever for global work tech VC investment.
Chad (31m 52s):
Already.
Joel (31m 53s):
Combined with Q1 of 21 previous record setting, quarter of 2.7 billion seven point 62 billion was invested globally in work tech the first half of this year.
Chad (32m 6s):
Yes.
Joel (32m 6s):
Surpassing the biggest year in the category by more than $2 billion. Holy shit, Chad nine unicorns were added to the list. Those are varying degrees of work tech. You got Loom, Handshake, Degreed, Allen, which does health, mainly for employees, Eightfold, Phenom, Safety Culture, Deal, which has payroll and Vizier. And we're going to add another one to the list here once we get done talking about these nine. Your thoughts?
Chad (32m 36s):
Yeah. So you and I had a bet. I'm winning that. Human Capital Management Tech represented about 3 billion this quarter, which dwarfed Talent Acquisition and Talent Management, they were both hovering around a billion, a piece, which means in the year over year prediction segments, my friends. Yeah. I'm beating your ass.
Joel (32m 60s):
Don't forget. I picked ZipRecruiter to go IPO three, three years in a row. And they finally did it. Don't forget that.
Chad (33m 7s):
But if you take a look at the deals, it's interesting because again, the U S just is killing it. 59 deals. Number two was the UK with seven and France was number three with five. We're always having Europeans ask us why we believe our tech is so good. I don't know, but it's getting a lot of money, guys. The subcategories were number one, benefits. Number two, this surprised the hell out of me, marketplace/job boards. That was the second most amount of money. And the number three core HR. Then the top three was WorkRise with 300 million, Collective Health with 280 million and Beison out of China with 260 million.
Chad (33m 56s):
If you can't get cash right now, if you're a startup and you're a co-founder and you're listening to us, if you can't get cash right now, you were doing something wrong.
Joel (34m 8s):
Can you say frothy? I don't, I don't know where all this goes. Like they all have to go IPO. ZipRecruiter being successful, I guess, is only going to spur. I guess it's going. The courage is going to flow. iCIMS is going to go at some point, who knows Smart Recruiters. Jobvite. Greenhouse. Like all these guys will probably go IPO. All these guys that we talked about are going to go IPO. I don't know if it ends well. I mean, for some of it will, but damn, there's a lot of money going into this space and I'm not sure it feels like a feeding frenzy. I'm not sure it's warranted.
Chad (34m 44s):
It is and the reason it is, is because take a look at 2020, right. There was money spent, but you know, it wasn't, it wasn't following the rise of 2019 because of the pandemic go figure. So you have all these pent up investors who have cash, and they also see what's happening in the jobs market. And they know remote work hybrid work, people getting back to work, working all over the world. All of these things are new opportunities with new concepts and ideas. Now, are they all great? No, not even close. Maybe 10% are great.
Chad (35m 25s):
So I agree. There's going to be, there's going to be a big shakeout and they're going to be a lot who just fall.
Joel (35m 31s):
Which always happens. But the amount of money that's being put in these companies is just really, really nuts. Dude.
Chad (35m 38s):
I guarantee you, some of them are putting money on the market with all that LinkedIn data that was stolen.
Joel (35m 45s):
Yeah. Yeah. We'll get to that in a second. I want to add another. So another company really quickly that will join George's unicorns list, will be Remote, who we've covered on past shows. The company has a big play on the work from home movement and provides a platform that enables client companies to onboard pay and manage both contractors and full-time employees on distributed teams. Work from home, again this week, they announced a $150 million series B. That's a hell of a B round. The deal valued the New York based company at more than 1 billion, this follows the 35 million they raised back just in November of 2020. And they also had an $11 million seed round.
Joel (36m 27s):
That's a hell of a seed round.
Chad (36m 28s):
Yes.
Joel (36m 29s):
The money will accelerate Remote's global expansion, plans to be in 80 countries by the end of this year. Keep in mind this company was founded in 2019.
Chad (36m 39s):
Yeah.
Joel (36m 39s):
Talk about a fucking rocket ship worthy of sir Richard Branson.
Chad (36m 44s):
So this is a boring fucking company, but it is necessary. So 2019, they saw that obviously there was going to be this need. And again, it luck and timing, right? Nobody knew about this pandemic thing, but from a timing standpoint, this platform helps in organization who wants to hire all over the world, right? Without having to establish an HQ in every single fucking country. Right? So it makes it much easier for companies to do business. It's boring stuff. It is administrative. It sucks. I want somebody to do it for me.
Chad (37m 25s):
Oh, Hey look, remote. Remote will do it for me.
Joel (37m 30s):
Holy shit. This story, I don't think gets enough attention in our space. And in fact, I, I didn't know much about it. It gets a lot of news. It gets a lot of up on like hacker sites and all that shit. So LinkedIn recently experienced a huge data scrape. It was their third in four months with 600 million profiles. Keep in mind, they have about 800 billion, I think are 800, 800 million. So 600 million profiles are now on sale online. Reports from various sources say the data is for sale on a hacker forum from an, for an unknown sum. The sellers have shared sample profiles that include full names, email addresses, and of course, professional titles and other work related data.
Joel (38m 17s):
The company, that's LinkedIn as quick to point out that this was not a breach, so no passwords or payment data or whatever was stolen, but it's still a big deal for a company that cares so much about their data. Remember they're suing itty-bitty HighQ over scraping their public data while they're watching hackers take hundreds of millions of profiles. So Chad, what's the discussion at LinkedIn HQ like this summer regarding their data.
Chad (38m 46s):
That's a hard one. I mean, it really is because it is public data. Let's face it. This is public data and this is what they're actually fighting in the courts right now with HighQ. So I think, I think overall, LinkedIn's got to pick a side of the road. Are you going to be public or are you going to be private? It's one or the other, you can't have it both ways and they have tried.
Joel (39m 12s):
Yeah. I mean, look, the old adage of if a product is free, you're the product, right? And Facebook has had sort of no problem with selling data to third parties, whether it be for advertising or data analytics, for whatever, right? For whatever reason, LinkedIn is sort of in this gray area of like, well, this is my professional profile. I don't want my data to be sort of freely, freely distributed where my boss can find out that I'm looking. I don't know what they do. They either pick a side and say, sorry, users. We're going to make money on your free profile.
Chad (39m 49s):
They're already doing that.
Joel (39m 49s):
Good luck. Good luck going somewhere else. But I mean, they're not telling people they're making money off LinkedIn's platform, but no one joins LinkedIn and thinks, oh, third parties can just access my data.
Chad (39m 60s):
Yeah. they can. They're called recruiter seats.
Joel (40m 2s):
Well, yeah, that's on, let's on LinkedIn's platform.
Chad (40m 5s):
There's still, you are still the product. It's six in one/half a dozen of the other. It doesn't matter whether LinkedIn, I mean, LinkedIn is going to make cash either way, but you were still the product. And to think that somebody is on LinkedIn and their boss doesn't know that is fucking ridiculous. This is not a monster resume database.
Joel (40m 25s):
In your world. Open up the APIs, make a ton of money on the APIs and the data and like let the good times roll, which I don't disagree with. They just have to play a little bit of PR on that.
Chad (40m 35s):
I have no clue why they're I have no clue why they're so reticent to do this
Joel (40m 40s):
I'm sure. HighQ would much rather pay LinkedIn instead of their lawyers to get access to LinkedIn's data. And I'm sure a ton of companies would follow suit. They could make a ton of money on this shit.
Chad (40m 51s):
Right? It makes no sense at all. It has been one of the most confusing decisions that I have seen from a quote unquote "professional platform" that everybody knows is already monetizing you and your data. They already are doing it every single fucking day. Right? Yeah.
Joel (41m 9s):
On paper, it's walled garden, you know, it stays here, we keep the money here. I mean, but they discounted hackers. They discounted scrapers. They discounted all of that and they gotta make some hard decisions. Yeah. Now what do they decide is the question?
Chad (41m 24s):
This to me again, is a leadership issue. This is the second week in the row that I've called out leadership. Last week, I called out Indeed's leadership and said they need to clean house and get rid of all those fuckers because they don't know what they're doing at Indeed. LinkedIn-wise, I almost have to say the same thing. I mean, they have an opportunity to really streamline partnerships and also revenue opportunities, but they keep playing this fucking game. And the reason that they do it, we all know because they want the opportunity to build it themselves later. Okay. You can still do that. It's called competing products. Amazon does it all the time!
Joel (42m 4s):
Which they may or may not get in trouble for in the next two years or so, but let's take a break. And my God talk about TikToktok
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Joel (43m 4s):
Holy hell. As if Google getting serious about job search wasn't enough here comes some more TikTok shit. Okay. So earlier this month, the company launched TikTok Resumes. I can't believe I'm reporting this. As a pilot program designed to continue expanding and enhancing TikTok as a new channel for recruitment and job discovery. TikTok is teaming up with select companies and inviting job seekers to apply to entry-level and experience to positions with some of the world's most sought after employers, including...
Chad (43m 34s):
Your favorite!
Joel (43m 35s):
Chipolte, Target, WWE, Shopify, and many more. According to the company released with a TikTok video resume. Interested candidates are encouraged to creatively and authentically showcase their skillsets and experiences and use hashtag #TikTokresumes in their caption when publishing their video resume to TikTok. TikTok resumes can be found in the app through hashtag #TikTokresumes and at they actually have a site for this shit tikTokresumes.com. Candidates are invited to peruse job listings, examples of standout TikTok videos, profiles of TikTok creators who create career or job related content and submit videos for posted jobs are on the site.
Joel (44m 20s):
The webpage will be accessible through a number of entry points, including the TikTok discover page. The program is accepting video resumes for US job openings from July 7th through July 31st. Chad does this thing keep going after July 31st, will the nightmare not end?
Chad (44m 40s):
No. We will not keep going because there's no way to actually go through all of this data in a scalable fashion. I mean, if I get, if I get, you know, 110 TikTok resumes, how do I, I've got to look, I've got to look through them. Every single one of them by video, right? I mean it's to actually source and then screen candidates like this is a fucking nightmare. I've already reached out to our friends over at Chipolte to see how in the hell they're going to, they're going to scale something like this because these guys, they hire hundreds of thousands of people nationwide.
Chad (45m 20s):
How do you scale that?
Joel (45m 22s):
And have you seen some of the examples of resumes that they posted?
Chad (45m 26s):
Yes, I couldn't do it. I it's mind boggling. I love TikTok , but this just makes no sense.
Joel (45m 32s):
I've tried to go outside the box. I've tried to admit maybe I'm just an old fucker and figure out why is TikTok doing this? Because all the reasons you mentioned it makes it a horrible idea. Are they doing it for like public approval, political approval? Like I keep thinking there's like some deep, dark reason why TikTok would give a shit about resumes and employers. Maybe it's funneled them into advertising. Some, I, it just it's, I really can't figure it out. If someone knows, please please slide into my DMS and explain it to me.
Chad (46m 10s):
Remember Snap Locations? I mean the application, everybody everybody's got to try, right? Because some idiot in the back room is like, look at the market. People need to find jobs. We can help them find jobs. And it's like, well, you don't understand the problem in the first place.
Joel (46m 27s):
It has to fail. Otherwise millennials and gen Zs will haunt me for the rest of my life telling me how I was so wrong about TikTok. However you mentioned, you know how it wasn't going to work. They're doing something I think is really smart. This may or may not. This probably will affect our space at some point, but get ready for Bite Plus Recommend, this is a product from TikTok's parent company Bite Dance. With Bite Plus Recommends entrepreneurs and developers will get access to TikTok's recommendation engine, which is pretty good by the way. I don't know Chad, if you've seen this or not, but it's a pretty good algorithm. The adoption of which could impact businesses success globally, no shit.
Joel (47m 10s):
According to the Bite Plus website, after implementing Bite Plus Recommends Singapore based travel app WeGo enjoyed a 40% increase in conversions. We've talked a lot on the show about how poor many of the job site recommendation engines are. Just this week I was recommended for a job at McDonald's again from Glassdoor. I don't know what the universe is telling me with that, but anyway, so who will be the first to plug-in TikTok's algorithm into job search. I like maybe it's just TikTok itself. I don't know. Get your popcorn ready? What are your thoughts?
Chad (47m 44s):
I think that it's genius with regard to short form video, the signal liquidity that TikTok has after a half an hour of being on the app is more than some platforms get in a year. The only problem I see here is that you're going to have to be incredibly smart about how you would even implement this, because this is all focused on short form video. How does it learn the signals that you're actually getting? I mean, that's the thing. So do I think it could work? Yeah. But in certain segments and you really have to, you're going to have to engineer your business toward the algorithm.
Joel (48m 26s):
Yeah. I mean, you're totally right. And you'd have to look under the hood to know exactly how this thing works and what it like, what exactly can you plug it into, but for jobs, I mean, it makes sense to say, Hey, what kind of jobs are you clicking on? We'll show you more of those jobs or put those higher on the list. What are you, what companies you're applying to? Like, there are ways that you could algorithmically make job search better to be seen. It seems like Google's API for search is still a thing, but we don't hear much about it anymore. I guess companies that used it three, four years ago are still using it. Yeah.
Chad (48m 58s):
They obviously are now focusing on making sure that they get jobs right.
Joel (49m 2s):
As they should be pay-per-click dollars, baby.
Chad (49m 5s):
Amen.
Joel and Chad (49m 7s):
We out.
5 (50m 3s):
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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