In this episode, Joel and Chad interview Jim Durbin, the Indeed Whisperer, about the challenges and future of job boards and recruitment marketing. They discuss the decline in traffic and revenue for Indeed, the potential expansion into temporary staffing, the importance of social media presence for job boards, and the CareerBuilder-Monster merger. Jim shares his insights on the industry and predicts that a tech company may acquire CareerBuilder and that ZipRecruiter may face challenges.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION (blame erroes on AI :)
Joel Cheesman (00:30.007)
Yeah, what's up boys and girls? It's your favorite guilty pleasure aka the Chad and cheese podcast. I'm your co host Joel Cheeseman joined as always, Chad. washes in the house as we welcome the indeed whisperer, Jim Durbin recruitment, marketing and advertising principal and newly contributor to the aim group, Jimmy, welcome to HR is most dangerous
Jim Durbin - Respondable (00:52.238)
Thank you. Glad to be back.
Chad Sowash (00:55.03)
Welcome back.
Joel Cheesman (00:56.759)
So a lot of our listeners don't know you. Why don't you give them a quick Twitter bio and then we'll get into some of the business of the
Jim Durbin - Respondable (01:06.478)
25 years of marketing and recruiting. I've been a headhunter, ran a marketing agency. I've been in recruitment marketing for advertising. I trained 10 ,000 people and now I tend to write about trends in the industry and then get into the details of what the world actually looks like from a TA perspective for analytics. And affectionately notice the Indeed whisperer. Yeah, I actually am a journalist. I actually have responsibilities. I have to say things like on background and off the record.
Joel Cheesman (01:24.599)
Are you a journalist now, Jim? Indeed,
Chad Sowash (01:27.494)
Truth Teller.
Joel Cheesman (01:34.421)
How'd that happen? How'd that happen? You know?
Jim Durbin - Respondable (01:34.582)
And I call CEOs and we talk about stuff. Peter Solman, Peter Solman and Steven Rothberg. I was talking to them and they made some suggestions. They were looking for a feature editor for recruitment marketing here in the United States. And I'm already doing a lot of that writing anyway. And it was just a it's a fun side project and I get the chance to learn some stuff that, a little bit outside of where I normally play, you know, more finance, more deals, not just the details,
Chad Sowash (01:39.898)
Gotcha.
Joel Cheesman (01:57.729)
Well, I'm enjoying the writing. I'm enjoying the writing. So keep it up. Hopefully Zulman listens to this and here's my endorsement, but I've enjoyed what you're putting out
Jim Durbin - Respondable (02:01.467)
thank you. I appreciate
Chad Sowash (02:08.976)
Yeah, yeah. We've got plenty to talk about today, kids. So let's just go ahead and jump straight into the red meat. And that would be indeed, go figure. know, Jim and I have been on different webinars. Joel was off enjoying Asia while this was going on. But indeed, traffic.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (02:09.24)
Thank
Chad Sowash (02:29.506)
revenue issues, which we've seen, not to mention their big explosion in their total addressable market. So tell us a little bit about, mean, this has unfolded over weeks and weeks and weeks. So tell us a little bit about that, Jim.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (02:45.326)
Well, you really want to first figure it out. Yeah, when the investor call that was in March was on video with them talking about, hey, we've had a bad year, a lot of the large job boards, sorry, recruitment marketplaces now, they're not even job searching to the recruitment marketplace. The nothing like changing a brand, right? Where do they go? So the problem is, is there as big as they're going to be, there's structural reasons behind that. And the chat, as you pointed out, that's a $20 billion market, they can't get much bigger.
Chad Sowash (02:56.619)
you
Joel Cheesman (03:02.101)
luck with
Jim Durbin - Respondable (03:11.566)
There's just there's no way for them to get bigger in that market. So they started pointing at temporary staffing in other places with 10 times the size of it. And I think you have a very compelling theory that they plan to go into staffing because recruit owns them. It makes sense. How could they possibly grow if they're kind of trapped in their current market? The problem the problem is, is can't how are they going to do it? Are they going to increase indeed higher? Are they going to increase indeed flex? Are they going to purchase a next staff or a higher quest?
Like how are they possibly going to actually do that? Or are they going to make some weird wallet share thing with that dynamic pricing, which they were talking about? I'm confused because it really is a compelling theory and it makes sense that they have to do something. There's no way they're moving into temporary staffing though. So let me just pitch two quick things. I was talking yesterday to Matt Buffington, CEO of Knyso Software, which is software for temporary staffing. He's run temporary staffing firms.
He's built them so he knows it very well. And the whole point he had is that nobody is a dominant player in the market. Not only they're not dominant players, there's nobody who has 50 % of any Metro or most of them don't even have 50 % of a single company. And the only ones that do have such low margins, it's like the old days when we used to work on mole road on SBC, I'm like, I'm not working at 15%. That's great for the company, but I'll go broke and burn out my recruiters. So that there isn't anybody because temporary staffing is hard. You have to be on the ground, you have an office.
And indeed has something that if you know, if you notice where they're struggling right now, the easiest way to get a job is the high volume stuff. Everybody's like five minutes, 10 minutes automated. We never want to talk to a human. The whole idea of indeed flexes, you jump to a shift, but here's the problem. They've reached their own limits called the law of large numbers there. When you go to indeed, if you get a job in 15 minutes, you have no incentive to be loyal or care about it. If you don't like it, you don't show up. So ghosting is through the roof with automated hires like
People quitting because if you can get another job that easy, why would you care that they can't really expand that the more jobs you have on indeed the more companies the more likely that these Candidates and job seekers will just bounce which means the entire point of hiring from indeed goes away if people don't stay So how are they possibly going to grow that high volume area and unless they put boots on the
Jim Durbin - Respondable (05:31.822)
They're not going to be able to fight because temporary staffing is about a quarter here, quarter there, like 25 cents. I'll move for 25 cents. How are they possibly going to automate something when they've already reached a limit? Where else they going to go? So this is their dynamic pricing pitch. They want more wallet share. think, and I'll share what I've heard from people inside it. I think what's going to happen is they're going to try to go to their clients and say, were doing $5 ,000 for hire by using Indeed. It's only 4 ,000. So instead of 50 bucks, we want 500.
Joel Cheesman (05:46.91)
Mm -hmm.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (06:02.062)
That's great. think companies will be like, sure, you did such a good job. We'll let you increase your bill 10 times. I don't think CFOs will allow that. That's not been the history of TA. We don't know our own budgets. Trying to figure out cost per hire is brutal. And is Indeed going to teach us how to do cost per hire? I don't think so. And so from the people I've talked to, I do talk to lot of folks from Indeed. It's funny, they don't call to talk about Indeed. Ever since I came on the show and we called ourselves Indeed
Chad Sowash (06:19.034)
No.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (06:30.028)
It's all of a sudden, it's like I'm a, you know, they're just calling in, but they don't talk about it to you. They talk about the market or candidates or technology. I haven't heard anybody who has a clue what they're doing from this. So either this is the best kept secret and they're going to buy some acquisition or it's just such a compelling theory you had, Chad, but I don't see how they execute it. And that that's the real question. How are they possibly going to grow? What is the plan? It's not laid out. That that's my concern for it because
Chad Sowash (06:50.779)
Yeah.
Chad Sowash (06:58.47)
Yeah, well, I think some of the things that you pointed at are actually a change in the workforce in saying that it's too easy to get a job to be able to fill shifts. I think we're going to move toward, and I don't think we're going to move quickly, to more of a shift economy on the lower end. And then at that point, if you have tech, 15%, you don't need 15 % on tech, and it's all about transactions, right?
So being able to charge via transaction, via shift, et cetera, et cetera. I think that's where they want to go, whether they can get there or not is an entirely different discussion. You take a look at the TAM, 127 billion versus like 32 billion, which is what they're in right now. It looks nice to investors, but how are they going to execute?
If they do try to buy staffing organizations, much like job .com did, what are they going to do? Are they going to take that 20%, 15 % and then take it to 2 %? You're killing yourself at that point. So I don't know that that is the strategy to get in there. And obviously we're watching pretty much job .com going down in flames today because they thought they could do that. And we all know.
that if you give somebody a pile of money at 20 % and you say, investors, we're gonna take that 20 % to 2 % and we're gonna do more transactions, that's never gonna work. So I think they're betting on a change in the shift economy. They're hoping for a change in the shift economy. And to be quite frank, I hope there is one because we've been doing shit so much the same for so long. Hopefully there is a change. I don't know what it looks like though.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (08:40.43)
Well, there is one thing that they have done that's kind of fallen under the radar. It's the Chrome extension that they use for recruiters. So their big pitch has always been the whole pitch for cost per application they did last year was catastrophically rolled back. They want to move further down the funnel. know that that's what they can prove that they're doing the work. That's always been the one stage status on whether or not you hired so they can come to you the next month, the next year and say, look how well we did increase your budget. Like that is a kind of standard sales tactic for
That Chrome extension tells you a lot of stuff. And so if recruiters are using that and are pushing that to resume, that gives them the information that they've been craving, which is what's actually happening. Where are people searching? What are candidates doing? I think they're going to try to use that to point out how effective they are. And the question is whether that's not worth more money. I just see TA budgets doing
Chad Sowash (09:32.663)
Cost per hire is like a mirage though, right? mean, number one, it's a pain in the ass to get to. Number two, from a vendor standpoint, it's dumb.
Joel Cheesman (09:37.11)
Mm -hmm.
Chad Sowash (09:39.782)
It is completely utterly stupid because I just gave you a slate of 10 incredibly qualified and interested candidates. You're gonna hire one so you only have to pay for one. Fuck you. That's bullshit, right? So cost per hire is literally, it's like a mirage that first and foremost is hard to get to. And secondarily from a vendor standpoint, it is a stupid business model.
Joel Cheesman (09:48.459)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (10:07.01)
I've been assured that top people are working on
Chad Sowash (10:09.562)
Yeah, top stupid people,
Joel Cheesman (10:10.367)
Yeah. I mean, we could have, we could have done this 20 years ago. It just, it's doesn't, it doesn't work. It's like a referrals, uh, getting paid for referrals, uh, H three anyway, Jim, we talked about, we talked about the challenges in terms of increasing wallet share. You had a great post about, uh, indeed traffic falling 10 % um, in the last five months or so, how much of that is a major shift in behavior search?
Jim Durbin - Respondable (10:10.808)
Top people,
Chad Sowash (10:20.245)
Hahaha
Jim Durbin - Respondable (10:21.07)
I wish they'd increase our referrals,
Joel Cheesman (10:39.863)
how we find information, how much is like death by a thousand cuts? Spam filters are better in email. So email alerts are less effective. Or is it both equally? Like what's your take on what's really the problem with driving traffic to Indeed these days?
Jim Durbin - Respondable (10:57.954)
Well, I I use similar web and other tools to estimate traffic. So I wanted to be real careful to go. That's not an accurate representation. It's not the same, but the trends usually are. And when you compare them and the problem is there's nobody else the size of a deed. And we know that January is the highest traffic month and it does kind of roll down for the rest of the year. But why was ZipRecruiter's traffic up for that? Now it could have been a tactical aspect of it, but something's happening. And I think what it is is that it could be people just aren't spending as much time. Maybe that direct apply is so fast. They're just not there as much.
Maybe they don't believe that they're getting results. If you apply for a hundred jobs and nothing happens, that's part of the problem. I used to apply for jobs and get rejected. They wanted jobs I wanted. And I still felt that sting a little bit. I'm like, wait, I didn't get that job that I didn't want. What happens to your brain when you do that a thousand times? It's like the tenderization of stuff. You go out and get rejected by a hundred women. You're probably not going to talk to it. You get rejected by a thousand.
or 5000 or 50 ,000, you just feel like a loser. And I think that's what happening with jobs. I see people giving up. They'd rather salvage their salvage their pride and get a job, which is why they go on TikTok and they make complaints. I think people are giving up which is scary. Because how are they finding jobs, but I don't think they're doing the old way of just going online and clicking anymore.
Joel Cheesman (12:15.159)
I love that you mentioned, you mentioned TikTok indeed is awful at social media. Um, their TikTok account, literally the last post on TikTok indeed had was in April. And the last one before that was in 2023. Any theories on why indeed is so bad. I mean, if they're trying to attract a new audience, if they're trying to attract a younger audience that maybe doesn't even know about indeed.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (12:32.078)
They probably thought it was going be banned by the government.
Joel Cheesman (12:42.645)
Why be so awful at social media? Maybe that's a big part of the problem.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (12:46.306)
That's a huge mistake because there are lot of companies that are out there that are starting to convert. I remember when Facebook Marketplace was spitting out candidates. It was amazing. You got all these candidates for free. It was our number one source of traffic and people read you for a while till it got cut off. And all we had to do was instantly respond to them and they turn into candidates. I was really surprised at that. If you can convert social media traffic, you're not stuck with the job boards. You're not trapped. And so I think it's a huge mistake for them not to be able to do
it's surprising. It's surprising because that is the biggest source of candidates that are out there and tick -tock as much as I can't stand it absolutely drives the user behavior. It does.
Chad Sowash (13:27.224)
I love it. I love it. Makes me happy.
Joel Cheesman (13:27.893)
Yeah. Speaking of tech talks, shall we move over to X?
Chad Sowash (13:32.271)
Yes.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (13:32.647)
Mmm. So I wrote a piece on
Joel Cheesman (13:33.675)
You have some thoughts on X as a LinkedIn killer and a player in our industry.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (13:38.478)
Yeah. So I wrote a piece on it and it was, it took me six weeks because I couldn't get anybody to talk about it. And there isn't really a press thing. I think is this, it's still the potential, right? So here's the thing that X has that other people don't. They get you to pay for your own verification. That's a big deal because verified people is kind of the future. Did you guys see the, I forget who did it, but someone created 400 ,000 profiles on LinkedIn and then just got sued and shut down because they were creating these fake engagement.
It is really easy to create fake profiles and get a little money for doing so. Companies are making money off of that. So verification has becomes very, very important. How do I know that you're you and tick tock if they can verify it with bank accounts. So their whole everything app is sexy in the sense that if it works, you'll know who those people are and they're verified. But that's all in the future. It takes a lot to get to that point. Right now they're just the traffic source.
because they are larger than 90 million monthly app users or something like that for the US. You can't even track it, but there are some folks like Rob John -Gooley was talking about it, Matt Mulinary from AppCast. It's just a traffic source like Google or Deedre and the place else. And the problem is it's being sent just to the websites. So it's bigger than some of the other niche sites. It's bigger than, I mean, if it's the number three or four source, the problem is 1 % in the number three source isn't cool.
It's the number three source, but it's still maybe 1%. And it's just traffic. There's no way of tracking it. So I think it's way off. I mean, how many times have these social media giants tried to do this and then give it up? So there's a lot of other things that need to occur on X long before I think they get to jobs. But if they do figure out how to start paying people in micro payments and crypto, they do something like that. I think that there's an opportunity there. And it's a giant network.
Chad Sowash (15:12.968)
yeah.
Joel Cheesman (15:28.896)
The folks you talked to, were they posting directly to Twitter X? Were they advertising, like putting display ads?
Jim Durbin - Respondable (15:37.038)
You can purchase for 200 bucks. it's a company. So what is you pay as a company to be a featured company. It's like 200 bucks a month, which is deadly cheap for all the traffic. And then your jobs end up being a feed. You're just sending a feed over to them and they're publishing your jobs. I mean, that's it. That's a pure feed play. And it's pretty, it's pretty good for that size, but is it the right kind of traffic? There's a lot of bot traffic on share.
Joel Cheesman (15:57.985)
And you, you had a screenshot on your, on your story, a screenshot where jobs was actually part of the navigation. Is that something that rolling out that you actually saw?
Jim Durbin - Respondable (16:08.72)
yeah, that's, that's already out. Yeah. They rolled it out in December. The problem is, is nobody goes. mean, the search is not great. I mean, it's, it's not just not much there. I don't, don't know why I would go there and look for jobs unless someone told me. And sadly, after I was having to buy you a bottle, or buy your wife a bottle of bourbon, still clever. I swear she told me that was yours. She said it was your, your favorite. It was the,
Chad Sowash (16:31.56)
she's good.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (16:35.392)
No, but that's the problem. Who's going to utilize Twitter for that? And I can't think, but you're much better off going to TikTok and converting TikTok traffic because there was engaged people that are talking about something and Twitter is still a place where it's more of a light breaking or conspiracy theory or people in a wild west screaming. It's not really a place you've got to look for jobs. You've seen some people, I'm in real estate. I'm making all this money, but it's the internet. So don't believe half of them. It's,
It's the same book as Facebook. I think it's Facebook years ago. You're not talking about business. And when the time they finally got to business, it was too old to matter. I there's still people on Facebook, but they're older than me. I make fun of people for being on Facebook now. So I'm 50 and I make, how are you so old you're on Facebook? know? I don't think that's true.
Joel Cheesman (17:18.5)
You're so hip. You're so hip, Jim. You're so hip.
Chad Sowash (17:23.366)
Is hip to be square. So you talk about personal verification. I mean, it feels like we're having a conversation from the early 2000s, right? About where they're at and what they're doing and verifying somebody. Verification process. mean, if you can pay me $9 .99 or whatever it is a month, you're verified.
But now we're more into skills validation, trying to validate that you're actually, you can do what you say you're doing, right? So the big question is, know, how in the hell are they going to be able to catch up or will they be able to catch up? Lasky.
was a matching platform at best. And I think it's loosely calling it a matching platform is very nice. I don't think they had any of that available to them, at least in a validated way. So how did they push forward? Is this literally just trying to... Yeah.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (18:17.752)
they're going to have to buy somebody. It's that simple. We'll know when they, because they purchased last game, it was the first acquisition after the purchase of X. Basically, it's not worth chatting about until they buy a real player, until they buy someone who has market, has clients, has already done it right. Because they're not going to create that. I mean, they could, but they're trying to go to Mars and get electric cars and get free speech on the internet. Jobs is not going to be important, but there's a lot of money
Chad Sowash (18:24.612)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (18:47.692)
is a lot of money. So the question is, is how far do they actually take the
Joel Cheesman (18:47.863)
But Elon mentions it, Elon talks about it. He talks about killing LinkedIn, LinkedIn is cringe and we're going to do something really cool. it's on his mind among the other things,
Chad Sowash (18:56.902)
He just has a beef. Reid Hoffman. That's what his problem is. He has beefs and he wants to be able to try to beat them at their own game. think he'll lose interest after a while. Not to mention after he sees how much revenue is actually available in the space, 32 billion on the recruitment marketing side of the house, he's going to say, wait a minute, I've got that in my couch cushions. I don't have to fuck with this.
Joel Cheesman (19:19.775)
Yeah. Do you agree, Jim? How serious is Elon about this space?
Jim Durbin - Respondable (19:25.858)
I think we'll get to Mars before we have a functional social media job posting.
Chad Sowash (19:28.487)
Hahaha
Joel Cheesman (19:30.358)
Wow.
Chad Sowash (19:33.06)
Neuralink. let's get into the jobs. First and foremost, where are they getting their jobs? We're seeing a lot from ClickCast, AppCast. I'm wondering if companies like the Cummins Engine Company, Dollar Tree, Domino's Pizza, a lot of these big brands.
Joel Cheesman (19:39.774)
Appcast.
Chad Sowash (19:51.36)
know that their jobs are getting distributed into an ecosystem like now X because they're actually going to X .com. I can call them X. Do they know that number one, I talked to Talk to Appcast about this and they're kind of like, you know, warm and fuzzy. Well, we try everything for our clients. Yeah, I don't know. They really have a choice because most of these companies don't know where their jobs are going, right? They don't know where their jobs are going. They just know that they're getting they're getting
Joel Cheesman (20:10.529)
They have a choice.
Joel Cheesman (20:15.307)
Ha
Chad Sowash (20:21.224)
on those. The big problem is if I see my job pop up by you know a swastika or who knows you know anti roe versus Wade or who knows right there's an optics issue here.
And that's not going to change anytime soon. So I mean, how does an organization like AppCast get affiliated with a platform? I don't care if there's traffic there or not. That could prospectively be bad from an optics standpoint for a huge organization like the Cummins Engine Company.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (20:53.27)
It's the same thing as Facebook and TikTok though. So advertisers do have the ability to pull themselves out and usually they get some an activist, like they're actual activist groups that go around and try to shame companies. The fact is a giant lawsuit that Musk is suing the advertisers because they're, because they're chasing that down and it's torsuous interference. And there's an opportunity for that for advertising. It's like the old days when Fox news would play my pillow or gold commercials. Well, MSNBC was playing Cadillac commercials. It's just how Madison.
Avenue works. It's how the advertising agency works. So I think that's overblown. That's fun for people to talk about. And it freaks somebody out. But generally, I don't think people are paying attention to and there's no way to stop it. In fact, I could go on make a post that drives one of those ads, take a screenshot, and then go yell at a company. In fact, somebody just did that. That was one of the things that said they deliberately tried to fake that and make it a news story. So is it a concern? Should we be aware of it? Yes.
Chad Sowash (21:44.795)
Mm.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (21:48.3)
Yes, the bigger question is, is any of that traffic worth it? If you're not, and that's what we don't know. If the traffic's not, if the traffic's converting, no company's going to care. But if it's not converting, why, why get hassled and yelled at for nothing? I think that's a big part of it.
Joel Cheesman (22:03.21)
Which is why Grindr for jobs is the next big thing, Jim. Keep your eye on Grindr for jobs.
Chad Sowash (22:03.86)
It also seems like companies are...
Jim Durbin - Respondable (22:06.766)
That grinder for jobs is pretty much skills based hiring. Think about that's really what it is. It's skills based hiring. want this, this and this. I want to do this, this and this. I haven't been on
Chad Sowash (22:16.698)
What kind of skill, what kind of skill are we talking about here, Jim? Are we a fluffer versus, mean, I don't...
Jim Durbin - Respondable (22:24.246)
I hear there's a lot of hot guys on there, so I'm joining so I can't wait for the women. I know women are going onto that platform eventually to see the hot guys. I'm just, an early adopter. Totally a joke. Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, right?
Chad Sowash (22:26.692)
Hahaha
Chad Sowash (22:31.702)
Yeah, yeah, they're looking for they're looking for they're looking for beards is what they're looking for But it seems like it seems like companies are starting to get numb to a lot of this right because they're there's just no way that they can win so they just have to go out
Jim Durbin - Respondable (22:47.672)
Well, Microsoft just fired their entire DEI team. And then the guy sent out the email, I saw this this morning, he sent out an email going, nobody cares about this anymore. I think a lot of that stuff has to do with if the economy is doing great, we have time for those. And because it's not essential, I don't think any major corporation has an initiative that works like that. I think it's almost all fake. It's like, Microsoft hires all these women and then they've invested T -Mobile and all of sudden their percentage of women dropped because they were all on the call
If you really invested in that stuff, I think it comes from the individual recruiters, the hiring managers, the TA leaders. And honestly, I think the changing demographics of the country to some extent begin, I mean, there's, if you know people from Gen Z, they're very, very diverse. is not the country that we grew up in where it was 80 % white at that point. So I think the fact that there are so many minorities already out there that the demographics have changed. makes it less important because it's just a bunch of old white guys trying not to yell that further stock versus.
these are real people doing real work, let's actually figure out how we work together. So that could be a good thing. Maybe tone the rhetoric down a little bit and it's happening. That is a spin a little bit. Yeah. I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful that's true.
Chad Sowash (23:53.943)
I like the spin. I like the spin. That is a good spin. That is a good spin. No, it's a good spin. That's a good spin.
Joel Cheesman (23:56.235)
of
Speaking of less important, let's talk about the Career Builder Monster merger. What are your thoughts on
Chad Sowash (24:07.844)
Hahaha
Jim Durbin - Respondable (24:11.654)
as a gen Xer, it hurt a little bit, because I think the only people that cared were people our age. And I was terrified to watch people make bad internet jokes about CompuServe and Netscape. I felt like for our generation in TA, this was our okay boomer moment. I mean, that was just our opportunity to have a little nostalgia member berry kind of nonsense. and, I mean, the truth of merger is though, basically Ransdad gave up and said, we don't care about Monster anymore.
And Apollo's doing what PE companies do. Peter Zollman has, I mean, and all the AIM group has massive history on these guys. they, you know, that piece that they put out, there was so much information that I only tangentially was thinking about. But as I was talking to folks, I was surprised, but it shows you the power of brands. CareerBuilder, Monster still make money for as much as we make fun of them. And it reminds me that the most important thing a company has is a group of clients that continue paying their invoices monthly.
Chad Sowash (24:59.738)
Yeah.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (25:08.686)
Career Builder and Monster were just things that you added on and they were still spitting out money. The rumors are 10X, 10X what they've done. If you go search Monster right now, it's Monster Energy Drink and the rumors been around. I forget who said this. It might have been one you guys. The $100 million for the name. So, I mean, they're going to continue to sell and make money off of that, but it's not competitive. It's not ever going to be competitive again. Brands don't get rejuvenated.
Joel Cheesman (25:35.639)
Jim, have a side note. I was consulting a company over a decade ago for marketing stuff. And I was talking about like, let's reengage your clients and let's like do an email or do something content wise. They're like, whoa, the last time we engaged our clients, we lost 10 % of them. We don't want them to know, like we don't want them to go, oh shit, I'm still paying for this. Like just shut up. Like let them keep paying.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (25:37.751)
except for Fireball.
Chad Sowash (25:56.666)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It's like a gym membership.
Joel Cheesman (26:04.265)
It's just, it's crazy. Yeah.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (26:05.006)
That's a huge point. That's a huge point. And it happened to LinkedIn. So LinkedIn started saying, we want three years master's agreements, because they saw the drop coming. We're going to force you into these master service agreements. We're going to jack our prices up for LinkedIn recruiter. And every company I know started going, well, let's take a look at usage. And the dirty secret of all that is that less than 50 % of LinkedIn recruiter license are ever signed into. And almost all of the activity is a few super users who are just blasting out those in -mails. When you look at that data,
Chad Sowash (26:09.253)
Yeah.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (26:34.686)
Every company I've ever looked at, every one, which is hundreds at this point, they don't utilize that. And when they looked at it, they're like, well, why are we paying for it? And so to the salespeople out there selling software, target those LinkedIn budgets. It's the way that we used to sell blogs and social media by taking away from the yellow pages. Don't ask them to spend something new. Say cut your LinkedIn spend. You're not using it anyway. Because it wants, once you looked at it, they're like, wait a minute, why are we paying all this for
It's the bigger, it's bigger question. If we don't know where our money's going, we had 42 % drop in TA budgets last year. And now they want to spend again, but they're not going to do it unless they know why. So TA leaders who are looking at what's working and can explain it are going to do fantastic. Tie the budget into outcomes. Don't talk about time to hire a KPIs or this other nonsense. Quit saying we have to do more with less.
I don't know why these people are beating themselves up. The joke I told the ERE was there was like, I just kind of fell into recruiting. I fell into HR and never got out. Is it a well? Do you need a news crew? What kind of person says I fell into something I can't get out? You're telling the CFO that you're an idiot and there's no reason to hire you. So I really want us to have more pride, but you can't have pride unless you're good. So if you don't know where your dollars are going, someone else is going to come in and eat your lunch.
That's exactly what we're seeing right
Chad Sowash (28:03.258)
it not not only that. Not only that, but you take a look at, let's say, for instance, marketing, they spend all this money for leads. They use the leads right to be able to to to generate on the sales side revenue side. We we buy all these leads. We throw them in an applicant tracking system that we never fucking use them again. Right. So I mean, there there is this this this feeling among many talent acquisition professionals who do.
They have systems that really focus on utilizing what they've paid for, but that's only like a 5 % of the population. So that being said, let's get into predictions really quick. So I wanna hear this from you. So Apollo bought Career Builder, chopped it up into little pieces, sold everything. They've got a really empty carcass that's left called Career Builder, still the brand. And now they've got another carcass, Monster.
They're gonna slap them together. So two predictions. What are they gonna call it? Number one and number two, who the fuck is gonna buy this
Jim Durbin - Respondable (29:07.534)
So I don't have secret insider knowledge for this, but I'm just going to use basic deductive reasoning. Career Builder is a bigger brand. More people buy from it. In fact, for healthcare, it's actually 6 % of all the links. And healthcare is still big for healthcare. So it still works from there. I think Monster is dying. It's pretty much done. So I think they're going to get rid of that brand. Even though it's a little cooler, I think they're going to sell that off. Why would they? They're not going to hold onto both of them. If it really is a hundred million dollars.
Chad Sowash (29:15.993)
huh.
Chad Sowash (29:32.546)
So sell the domain. Yeah.
Jim Durbin - Respondable (29:36.408)
How could they not? And I think that that was, know, so when Randstad, they just took some points in it, they're going to make some money off of it back. It becomes Creel Builder, they add the two, they eventually roll the traffic over. They combine, you know, they combine the sales stuff. I don't know, I think it just ends up as an itch board. It lasts a long time though. It lasts a long time. I don't think Creel Builder is going anywhere because I mean, there's still newspaper ads, you know?
Chad Sowash (29:55.93)
Yeah.
Chad Sowash (30:01.87)
Yeah, but somebody's got to buy it, right? So who's going to buy it? Because Apollo does not want this empty, or two empty carcasses for God's sakes. Who buys this bundle of shit?
Jim Durbin - Respondable (30:12.236)
I think it'll be so if you look at when they sold Broadbean to Veritone, I think there'll be a tech company that comes in with a little money. I'm surprised town .com wouldn't have done something, but they really kind of squandered the hundred million that they brought in. just not as big as they could be for that kind of bonus. I think someone else from outside is going to come in and see it, look at the traffic and go, I can do something with this. And they're going to buy it for a premium. And we're going to talk about it and we're going get excited about it. And then five years later, whatever happened to that company?
Because buying tracks like you know, it's like buying, it just doesn't work like like buying a consulting company, the value is in the people. And so the brand isn't important anymore. No one under 30 even knows what monster and crewbuilder are when they when they were told this other one I talked to was like, and we were excited because we were reliving youth when we all had hair and things worked out. I mean, some of us still have it but
Chad Sowash (30:56.294)
Who cares?
Joel Cheesman (31:00.863)
Who, who, the Apollo thing feels a lot, a lot of like rinse and repeat to me. got to think they're thinking about who, what are the jobsite can we buy and gut and do the same thing that we do with career builder? Any, any predictions on who is in the cross hairs of Apollo?
Jim Durbin - Respondable (31:20.949)
Um, ZipRecruiter is really hurting and their tech is struggling. It's one thing when Indeed drops because they were so high that Zip losing 20, 30 % is a challenge. I actually love ZipRecruiter. I love it. It is the second source. We got real value from it. I think it was the right size. But some of their tech, I think it's just hard. I think it's hard over the job boards. I don't know if they're sufficiently capitalized. So it wouldn't be surprising if somebody came in and did
Joel Cheesman (31:43.287)
Jim also loves members only jackets and parachute pants. So take that for what it's worth. And 18 cowboy hats in the background.
Chad Sowash (31:49.72)
you
Jim Durbin - Respondable (31:49.878)
I have Birkenstocks and Tiva Sandals. And I bought those in the last two years. Just four.
Joel Cheesman (31:58.913)
Well, Jim, thanks for joining us as always. It's a treat for our listeners that want to connect with you. I understand you might actually have a deal for some of our listeners, which we really love on this show. Give them the, give them the four one one.
Chad Sowash (32:09.304)
What?
Jim Durbin - Respondable (32:09.634)
Yes, yes.
It's real simple. I do audits of your Indeed spinning, really your job board spending that's a respondable does. so for Chad and Cheese listeners, go to IndeedWhisperer .com. Yes, I bought the URL. Go to IndeedWhisperer .com and it will send you to 25 % off audit on my website. So if you just want to take a look and say, how am I spending my money? That's a great way to do it. In a couple of hours and a good sheet, it'll give you a good sense of how you're spending your money for a very cheap $750. You're welcome, Chad and Cheese listeners.
Chad Sowash (32:25.114)
Jim Durbin - Respondable (32:42.816)
Indeed whisper
Joel Cheesman (32:45.015)
And Chad and I get no percentage of that whatsoever, just in case you're wondering. And I'm pretty sure Jim's on LinkedIn if you haven't connected with him yet. Chad, that is another one in the can with the Indeed Whisperer. We out.
Chad Sowash (32:45.144)
And that's the end of three old white guys talking recruitment tech.
Chad Sowash (32:54.266)
Yes.
Way out.
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