In this snark-filled episode, Chad & Cheese take a deep dive into one of the most talked-about events of 2024: the merger between two job board giants, Monster and CareerBuilder. Once the dominant forces in the recruitment industry, these two "dinosaurs" are now struggling to survive as they attempt to snuggle up and weather the changing landscape. Chad & Cheese break down how these industry titans fell from grace, touching on Monster’s acquisition by Randstad and CareerBuilder’s dismemberment by Apollo. With their trademark wit, they explore what went wrong—spoiler: Super Bowl commercials and bad leadership played a part—and predict how the merger will likely end.
As they navigate the impact of the merger, Chad & Cheese explain why the job board industry is evolving into something more focused on niche markets and innovative performance models, while the "Titans of Old" are left rearranging deck chairs on the sinking ship. Filled with sharp insights and unfiltered commentary, this episode offers listeners a front-row seat to the job board "meteor crash" and what it means for the future of recruiting.
Get ready for some brutal honesty about where the industry is headed and why the old giants may not survive unless they evolve—fast.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Chad: The audience can see us now. That's.
Krista: They can. Hello everybody.
Joel: Good morning TA Day.
Chad: Good to see, Krista. Where'd you go? Where'd you go?
Krista: I don't know. I've disappeared again. I can't. I have lost my own visual, but we'll figure it out. It's okay. Good morning everyone. Happy global TA Day. It is 8:00 AM Eastern Time. We're all chugging our coffee and waking up. It is Ghost Krista. Sorry Joe, I was just on camera. I'm not confident what happened. I'll work on it though. Thank you for joining us today.
Joel: I love How buttoned up, ATAP is so buttoned up. We do these corporate events. It's like a team of 12 we're dealing with all this and then she's just like, eh.
Chad: It's good.
Krista: It's good.
Joel: Ghost Krista.
Krista: Well, these two fellows don't need much of an introduction. We have got Chad and Cheese with us today, the kings of snark and sarcasm, real talk and unfiltered. Today we have asked them to join us to give us their thoughts on how 2024 went and what they think 2025 is gonna bring us. So I will turn it over to Chad and Joel.
Joel: Did she say kings of snark? Are we the kings of snark now?
Chad: Well, yeah.
Joel: Sounds like a battle.
Chad: And you're gonna get an extra snarky Chad today because I am, my first, last night I landed...
Joel: God.
Chad: In the US. Now I'm not Euro Chad anymore, so I'm back to heavily American and very snarky.
Joel: Yeah. If you don't listen to the show, everybody, Chad has a real estate empire in Europe and he has a home in Portugal.
Chad: One flat.
Joel: And when he is in Portugal, he's the nicest guy in the world. And he's like a stock. As soon as like the Back to America stage happens, like the stock crashes and he turns into the salty old bastard that he is. So, you guys get this at 8:00 in the morning. I've had Euro Chad for six months. Wish me luck. But yes, kings of snark. It's like a bad cover band of Kings of Leon, we're the kings of snark. Oh, God.
Chad: A bad cover band.
Joel: What are we talking about today?
Chad: A bad cover band. So yeah, Joel actually came up to.
Joel: Some don't know who we are, Chad.
Chad: What?
Joel: Some don't know who we are. Where can they listen to us.
Chad: I don't believe that shit at all. Yeah, I, Chad and queijo, I love that. And that's the Portuguese spelling of cheese, Steve Levy. That's very nice. Good job. Yeah, Chad and Cheese, go to chadcheese.com. Been around for seven years as a podcast. Pretty much, you know, anything that you want to know about the industry, we try to encapsulate that every week. So do a weekly podcast. We do interviews, firing squad, talk to startups, talk to CEOs, talking pretty much to everybody. We've now, over the last seven years plus, have done 1300 plus episodes. Yes, that's 1,300 episodes. We have a YouTube channel. If you're a big fan of YouTube, go ahead and head out there and subscribe there or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, just so you know, again, this is going to be snarky, but also, you know, if you got kids around, you might wanna put the AirPods in, because there might be an F bomb or two. So there you go.
Joel: Could be, could be. I love Steve Levy saying he'd rather hear from Julie. Julie's probably still in bed after the trip last night.
Chad: That makes two of us. No, we're still five hours ahead. So, I mean, this is, you know, we, we're actually up at 5:00 in the morning.
Joel: Okay, well, good for you guys.
Chad: 'Cause it was 10:00.
Joel: Good for you guys. Good for you guys. So, yesterday we reached out to Krista and said, what the hell do you want us to talk about? And Krista said, eh, whatever y'all want. A review of '24 would be nice. Maybe some predictions for '25. So I was like, easy enough. Let's put some categories together. I guess we have 30 minutes, which means we have 23 at this point. And then open it up to Q&A. I don't know if you guys will pop up. I don't know if it's all just Chad. And we'll read the questions and what's going on. But it's great to be here. We love ATAP. We love the seat of your pants. Like, recruiting is the freak show in this industry. You go to SourceCon and it's the Freaks and Geeks. It's the people that like secretly run the show behind the scenes. So we love getting in front of you guys and having a chat. So hopefully you guys will engage, ask questions. I know Steve will not have any trouble talking out and asking questions and speaking up. But anyway, without further ado, Chad, I guess we can start kind of like some of our highlights from the year.
Chad: Takeaways.
Joel: And then some, throw some spaghetti at the wall for '25 to see what might happen.
Chad: Gas on the fire at this point. Okay. So yeah.
Joel: We don't have sound bites with the drum roll, so just pretend like we got a drum roll here. So, the number one story, maybe not number one, but certainly what a lot of our folks were talking about was the merger between two dinosaurs hoping to snuggle up together and survive the meteor crash. Monster and CareerBuilder merged this year. Little background, 2016 Monster is acquired by Randstad out of Germany. A year later, Apollo, a private equity firm, comes in and gobbles up CareerBuilder. It quickly dismembers the company, sells off the piece in parts.
Chad: Chop, yeah.
Joel: Lays off mostly everyone. Brings in a couple accountants to run the show.
Chad: That's what Apollo does.
Joel: Which we kind of think, so Apollo, Randstad. Apollo is now the main, majority shareholder of Monster. I think it's a rinse and repeat kind of deal. I think that they're gonna chop up the pieces, sell off any parts that they can. The CEO, Scott Gutz, who we've been predicting for a while would not have a job, has left the company. So starting with the CEO.
Chad: Imagine that.
Joel: The CEO's gone. But these are two, you know, former numbered one and two brand. This was Coke and Pepsi of our industry.
Chad: Flipped back and forth. Yeah.
Joel: And it has since changed course and we are where we are today. Chad, what are some of your thoughts on the CareerBuilder Monster merger?
Chad: Yeah. Scott Gutz, ejected about as quickly as we thought he would. Because knowing that they're not gonna be two CEOs and that Monster was not going to take the lead on this, that Apollo was gonna take the lead on this, they're gonna put somebody in place that is going to do exactly what Apollo wants. Which, I mean, I think the facility guys who leads a CareerBuilder at this point is gonna.
Joel: Yeah, the pencil pushers.
Chad: Yeah. Yeah. Pencil pushers. So they're going to try to, it looks like they're gonna try to just smash these two together, come up with a brand, come up with some BS MVP, and then try to sell it off. And some sucker will probably sell it and/or pieces, parts of it. But to me, and we've talked about this on the show, it's literally two carcasses of once great organizations. And I guess we could talk about the downfall, right? And how they came to prominence in the first place. And that, to be quite frank, 'cause I was there at Monster, January '99, what happened? We did Super Bowl commercials, right? So, when you are a company, and then, CareerBuilder did the same thing. But when you're a company and you have to spend that kind of cash to be able to sustain traffic, it's gonna be a problem long term. And that's what they found out. Indeed won the SEO game. They didn't need Super Bowl commercials until they did. Until they did. And then what are we seeing happening with Indeed? Indeed's actually regressing into more of a traditional job board model, and they're doing everything they can because they're losing the SEO juice. So it's interesting when we start to see these bigger organizations, they become the Titanic and they're either sinking because they just can't make the course correction fast enough. And that's what I think we're saying.
Joel: Yeah. And this, the sort of, the job board industry tends to fall in this space. The two public companies that most of our attendees will know are ZipRecruiter and Dice. ZipRecruiter went public at $19 a few years ago. As of last month, it dipped as low as $7.25 a share. Dice went public in 2011, at about $11 a share.
Chad: Big mistake.
Joel: It's now trading at $1.70. And I was reminded of some of the recent news, you've probably heard about the stranded astronauts. Where Boeing can't go get them.
Chad: Boeing just can't do anything right.
Joel: Think about that for a second. When you and I grew up, Boeing was the gold standard of brands and innovation and safety. It was just like a beacon of American capitalism. Well, what happened to Boeing is they went from like engineers running the company to like, spreadsheet readers running the company. And they left out innovation, they left out like what made them great. And they said, let's just make it as profitable as possible and we'll be fine. Now, sometimes you can do that. But when you're going to space and dealing with people in space, like that's kind of a bad idea. And I think that these companies, these job boards in our space have a similar trajectory, like whether it's we're going to brand as the biggest monster on the block, pun intended, and innovate in that way. And then they just get into like, let's just make it as profitable as possible. We're a commodity. And we're seeing that from Indeed. Imagine, like, for those that remember, the innovation around Indeed was SEO, whether it was like, backfill, whether it was like speed of the, like they were doing things that other people weren't, you know, rev share of backfill job postings.
Joel: And they all just fall back into this, we're a commodity, we need to like, prioritize profits. And like, this is a rinse and repeat. Without the staffing company, Indeed would be in a very similar place, in my opinion. But they do have a staffing company that owns that. And they have.
Chad: I don't think they would. I mean, it's almost like Nvidia, Nvidia hits 120% and then they're under expectations, right? They're blowing numbers out of the water, but yet they're still under expectations. I think our market, which you're just talking about, we've gone from focusing on innovation, and we've gone to more to spreadsheets. And I think if you take a look at like a Aip or a Dice, Zip at one time had an amazing model, they just didn't carry through with it. They went IPO, everything went stagnant. And this is, I mean, we are where we are today. Dice put Art the dart in charge. And they're pretty much doing the exact same thing. They're sharpening their pencils. And they're not focusing on being more innovative, or moving with the market. So just like what I talked about with Monster and CareerBuilder, we're seeing a lot of these companies where they're not focusing on changing of the model.
Chad: Now, according to people, Peter Weddle, there's an estimated 150,000 job boards that are out there. Most of those niche job boards are doing incredibly well. You wouldn't know that 'cause guess what, they're not public. So it's not publicly available. But you have a market today where niche is really doing incredibly well. Not to mention, you also have to remember that a lot of these companies with all these layoffs are going away from full-time employees from those layoffs, and they're going to have to get the job done, which means they're gonna have to go to project base, which is why Upwork is exploding. So if we take a look at markets, you will see niche job sites who are not in old stale models to some extent, are doing incredibly well. They're not just focusing on duration base, they're also focusing on performance base, what we call "programmatic". So they're doing incredibly well. But the ones that are just still trying to hang on to old design, much like Monster did with duration based and not moving to performance. Same thing with CareerBuilder. I mean, again, the job sites aren't dying, the ones who are the Titanic's unfortunately are sinking because they're rearranging the deck chairs as opposed to actually making those course corrections much earlier.
Joel: There you go. Keep in mind, this is all in light of like, unbelievable employment numbers for the last decade. So anyway.
Chad: People get hired.
Joel: We spent a lot of time on job boards. Let's go on to our next takeaway from 2024. The old adage of when the tide goes out, you figure out or find out who's wearing a bathing suit and who isn't.
Chad: Not always a good picture.
Joel: 2020 to '22, we saw immense amount of money come into this space. Investment was aplenty. Dollars were free from the bank, zero interest rates. We saw unicorns galore. We're starting to see some cracks in the payment. We're starting to see like who has real shit and who doesn't. A couple that come to mind for me that aren't quite what we thought they were will be X Hiring. I'll throw that out there. It's only only what 17 minutes to mention Elon and Twitter. X Hiring. They lost the founding member of Lasky who was the first startup of Elon's tenure at Twitter. Oyster raised $150 million. They've been sideways in headcount. Beamery raised $50 million. Their headcount is down 20% as of this year and probably more so if we go back two years. ICims had their CEO leave abruptly who was brand new, spanking new before a year was even out, which doesn't really signal a good thing at iCims. So we kind of are finding out like who are the winners gonna be? Who are the losers gonna be in '24? And this will continue to unfold next year, but I thought that Chad and I both realized that man, a lot of these companies got a lot of money. There was a lot of Wizard of Oz shit, somebody around the corner that, a lot of vaporware. What were some of your takeaways from that perspective, Chad?
Chad: Yeah, I mean, we've been calling Eightfold pretty much the Theranos of our industry for a very long time. It's, when you get that much money, you've gotta spread the total adjustable marketing incredibly fast. And that's what they tried to do. The problem was they didn't actually have the product to be able to go with what they were saying they were doing. When it comes to X, it's interesting, and I don't think this is just a X Hiring issue. I mean, I think, I saw reports today that Elon has lost 90%, $40 billion of the actual company value. So that thing is a flaming turd to say the least at this point. The companies that I think are getting it right, to go more on the positive.
Joel: Sure.
Chad: They're going down funnel and they understand that in talent acquisition there's a good amount of cash, right? There's a good amount of cash. Although in talent management, there's about three times, if not four times as much cash. So you're seeing Deel actually move down funnel. And they're starting to actually buy companies that makes you pretty much a part of the actual employee, the employee lifestyle every single day. If you're getting paid, well, you wanna be able to use that app, that Deel app, right? If you're looking at trying to schedule time off or schedule shifts or what have you, you want to be able to have that app. So any of these companies, so as I talked about before with some of those older job sites who didn't focus on evolution, companies like Deel are starting to do that. We talked to Atlas CEO, Jim McCoy, and they're actually seeing themselves as morphing into a better staffing model. And I really think, and this is something we haven't talked about yet, Cheese, Indeed, going into staffing, EOR companies exploding and pretty much looking like they're going to push staffing out of the way as well. If staffing does not evolve, they're going to have issues. They're gonna have issues.
Joel: You know, you mentioned Eightfold, Chad, and you and I have such a fun time at HR Tech every year, I forget what year it was, but Eightfold had such a big booth.
Chad: Two years ago, I think.
Joel: That they actually had a baby booth. Like, we don't have enough island space we have to buy another a little island. So you had like 80 by 80 Eightfold. 100 by 100. And then you had like a 10 by 10 Eightfold right beside it 'cause they just needed that much room. So that's a clear sign if someone shows up at HR Tech this year with a baby booth because they've bought too much booth space, that's the sign that their downfall is coming.
Chad: That's a cry for help. That's a cry for help.
Joel: Well, or, they're compensating, you know what I'm saying? They're compensating for something. I don't know.
Chad: I understand.
Joel: Alright, let's get to our next takeaway. It's consolidation, baby. We kind of knew with a lot of companies that raised money in 2020, '21, '22 consolidations are gonna happen. We've seen some big ones, some small ones we've already mentioned CareerBuilder and Monster, Bullhorn Textkernel, Glassdoor. Our ZipRecruiter and Breakroom, Workday and HiredScore. '23, we started seeing this with Lever going to Employ, SmartRecruiters and iCIMS were allegedly gonna get together, but that didn't happen. So we're seeing consolidation. I expect that we'll see more of that in '25. But, what was your take from the consolidation that happened in '24, Chad?
Chad: Yeah. So Bullhorn Textkernel, that was very surprising. It was funny 'cause I was on the Paddle Court in Portugal when Herrad called me and said, I've got some news for you, but you can't tell anybody.
Joel: Such a tease.
Chad: I almost had to stop. Yeah. I almost had to stop play, but I couldn't.
Joel: The Dutch.
Chad: Yeah, the Dutch. That was a big move. That was a huge move. And if you guys remember Sovereign Technologies, they were the biggest. I mean, Textkernel was big too, but they were the biggest parsing and matching engine in the US, period. They owned the US and then Textkernel pretty much had a much larger footprint in Europe and in the rest of the world. Well, Textkernel then bought Sovereign, which just obviously made them the biggest and the best and far beyond anybody else who was out there, and there are a few other smaller players, other than Daxtra. Daxtra's pretty big and they're seeing a comeback. But at the end of the day, that is one of the heaviest lifts from a tech standpoint in our industry. Being able to take all that junk data. You guys know, those job descriptions are shit. Okay. Those resumes are shit.
Chad: So being able to rip those apart, contextualize, and then start to try to match and make sense of that stuff, they were the best in the business and they're still the best in the business. And then we saw Indeed move toward going to staffing and Bullhorn buys Textkernel. Now, how do those two go together? Well, Bullhorn, obviously a staffing applicant tracking system, I guess is the best description for them. They needed something to be able to lure those staffing companies, more of those staffing companies, not to mention great retention into Bullhorn, which is why Textkernel made a hell of a lot of sense. Because if you want to fight the fight against Indeed, and you're not a Randstad or an Adecco or Kelly, well, you're gonna need some ammo and there's no way in hell you're gonna be able to develop that yourself. So Bullhorn was the next logical place. But that to me was probably the biggest, no, it was as the biggest acquisition story of the year.
Joel: More than HiredScore and Workday?
Chad: Yeah. I mean, because for me, and that's a good one, but for me, Athena, they bought the tech, don't get me wrong, they bought the tech, tech's great. But they definitely needed Athena because she, first and foremost, Workday was having, they're having an AI problem themselves from a litigation standpoint. You bring Athena in who knows how to defend and explain, and she's probably the best in our industry in doing that, other than maybe, she on the AI side, and then you've got Keith Sonderling on the governmental side. But I think that was more of a Athena Plus platform. But I still think the Textkernel one was much larger.
Joel: Yeah, you're right. My takeaway from that is, it's interesting to me. Look, recruiting is changing. I'm not saying anything that no one on this call knows or doesn't know. We had the year of efficiency. We had recruiters laid off. We had companies say like, what are we gonna do with recruiting now that we're hiring again? Do we need as many recruiters? Like, what are the recruiters gonna do? What are, what does recruiting look like? So you have a traditional company like Bullhorn say, okay, how are we going to build our stack to where we are a valuable service going into the future? Buying Textkernel was a pretty good way to do that. And we're seeing companies that, commodity might be the wrong word but their service is different than it was 10 years ago, and they need to adapt. Some of them won't. But clearly, like what Bullhorn is doing is taking a big swing at the future. And what are we gonna be to a recruiting team going forward? Well, let's get onto our fourth and final.
Chad: Real...
Joel: Go ahead.
Chad: Real quick, real quick, real quick, real quick, because I wanna hit the Glassdoor Break Room thing. I think that what ZipRecruiter did, whether they can pull this off or not, I'm not 100% sure. I really think Ian needs to go take a long vacation and just quit.
Joel: We'll do predictions late. We'll do predictions next show, save it.
Chad: But Glassdoor has always been this kinda like frenzy of chaos. And you take a look at what Break Room is doing. And what they did in the UK is they're actually being able to, instead of the noise that you get from Glassdoor, you're getting actual signal from Break Room. And I think this is going to be a trend that we're gonna see from many different platforms that are out there. Why? We just talked about it, AI. The best way that you can actually structure data so that AI can understand it, which is why Textkernel is such a big deal 'cause they can structure it, they can structure unstructured data. Same thing here with with Break Room. They are structuring that data right out of the gate. So anyway, that's... I wanted to get that in there 'cause I think Glassdoor, to be quite frank, is a dead model. Break Room is the new model moving forward around data and AI.
Joel: Yeah. As interest rates come down and companies run outta money that we're in sort of this seed and A stage, I think you're gonna see a lot more consolidation going into 2025. But our fourth takeaway from 2024, I don't want to call it the death of DEI, but it was certainly a punch and a half to the gut, to the DEI trend. We saw companies both publicly say we're done with DEI, we had SHRM change the name from DEI to D and I, so I'm not even sure what we're calling it today. Tractor Supply, Deer, I think Home Depot. I know Harley Davidson and even Microsoft said the quiet part out loud in a leaked memo saying that DEI initiatives were sort of a waste of money and time. But that trend took a big punch to the gut this year, Chad. What are your take? I know this is something you care a ton about, takeaways and maybe predictions for next year?
Chad: To me, I am not gonna say it's a positive, but I think it moves the effort in the right direction, just from the standpoint of most of the DEI initiatives that were out there in the first place were just fluff. They had chief diversity officers that they put in place that didn't give them any resources whatsoever. So now, hopefully we'll be able to actually see people moving toward real diversity inclusive types of initiatives. No matter what they call it, I don't give a shit what they call it. I just wanna see outcomes. And that was one of the things that companies were not focusing on. They were focusing on what everybody else is saying out there. And I'm saying this from the standpoint of being a veteran and actually building veteran hiring programs for years. It was mainly all bullshit.
Chad: People were just waving the flag and they were saying, happy Veterans Day. And it really meant nothing. And many of these DEI initiatives were the same. So I think this is going to really make people buckle down and they're going to have to build business cases around why diversity means something, inclusion. Obviously equity. Hell, I mean, Johnny took equity out of the whole SHRM definition in the first place. So I guess he doesn't give two shits whether women are being paid equal to men for doing the exact same job. This tells you who the leader is, number one, which is great. Right? And it gives you an opportunity to actually double down and build business models and business cases around it.
Joel: I think politically as well, this is an interesting interesting take in that you and I both remember when Trump was elected we had a Super Bowl ad about immigration, a mother and a daughter, I think come across and companies really embraced the political side of it. Everything was made in America. Everything was like USA and Trump-like. 2020 we're just happy to survive, I think the pandemic. There wasn't a lot of of stuff. Of course, you had Me Too. You had George Floyd. I'm curious now that it's an election year, what this, the DEI trend will escalate up again or continue to go down? Of course, we have the Supreme Court with affirmative action, and Chad and I both thought that that might be the first nail in the coffin of this trend.
Joel: But we'll see, 2024 is gonna be interesting. The next 100, I don't know how many days to election, 60-something? It'll be an interesting period for sure. But let's get to some quick predictions for 2025 as we're at the 8:30 mark. Krista, hopefully we're all right on time. And for questions, we'll try to run through this fairly quickly. Our first prediction, Chad mentioned Deel in our 2024 takeaways. But a Deel IPO, public offering should happen whether it happens next year or the year after, but we're gonna predict that 2025 we'll see a Deel IPO. Look, their head count is up almost 200% this year. They have $500 million ARR. They're acquiring companies like PaySpace and Hofy. That makes sense that, that bring pieces to a whole platform, like a one platform to rule them all business strategy. And we think Deel is primed to like hit the ground in 2025 as as an IPO. Chad, your thoughts on Deel and going public as a prediction for 2025.
Chad: Yeah. I hope they don't, I hope somebody actually buys them. So let's say you take a look at some of these very old systems like ADP, they're going to need to recalibrate with their tech, period, right? And they're going to have to take a look at the EOR markets, the employee of record market. And because ADP is an incredibly global organization, it makes sense to start to take a look at your plumbing and start to use new tech to be able to do that. So I think an acquisition of an organization like Deel, UKG, one of those bigger organizations, I think to me is smart. I hope they don't go IPO 'cause that just means it's been the death nail for anybody in our space.
Joel: Yeah. I mean, they've raised a ton of money.
Chad: They have.
Joel: Investors want liquidity. They want their money back. What Deel has going forward is it's still a young company in the minds of an investor. So they do have some more runway to grow more, to potentially get acquired before they grow too much. The list of acquirers is shrinking for sure. I mean, it's like we're in like Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce skies for that.
Chad: ADP.
Joel: Yeah. But yeah, like Deel has been an amazing success story. We talked about companies that the tide has gone out and they're not wearing any swimsuit. Deel has been an amazing success story. They have a woman co-founder. They're an international company. They are super impressive. And the companies that they're acquiring are pieces to a puzzle that they're building.
Chad: Smart.
Joel: They're not like, oh, this company, this is an acqui-hire. We like their founder. Or, Hey, this is kind of fun. They're on the clearance rack at TJ Maxx. They're making really smart acquisitions and they're fun to watch. And whether they go public or not, they're gonna continue to, I think, kick ass and take names. Our second prediction for next year, Paradox, another great success story. Talk about acquisition. We're gonna predict a multi-billion dollar acquisition of Paradox in 2025. Probably arguably the best team in our industry of who they've been able to build this company around. And that goes from the board of directors down to the grunt workers in the trenches. I mean, they're a solid, solid team. Their founder has scars to show, he learned lessons. They're really close to Workday and some other big companies, like they're sort of priming themselves for a marriage. And we think probably it's time, if they keep growing, we're gonna start talking IPO with them. This is like their sweet spot of like, we can still be bought and now's the time to do it. Your thoughts, Chad?
Chad: Yeah. I mean, if you take a look at Adam Godson who's their current CEO, he started as a recruiter. He knows this space. One of the things that we see that is so fucked up about this space as we bring CEOs in, PE usually does, CEOs from other industries to try to run HR companies, right? HR tech companies, TA tech companies. And it doesn't work because they don't know the space. A guy like Adam and a guy like Aaron, and a guy like Jay-Z Josh over there, they understand this space. And for me, I think it's a model for most of these companies that are out there who are looking for CEOs to start to look for somebody who actually has been born and bred and brought up in this space, and has become a leader in this space. So, yeah. I mean, I am big on Paradox. You know when they first started off, I was not and they've more than proved themselves, I tell you.
Joel: Yep. And by the way, full disclosure, they are a sponsor of the show. So take our comments with that however you want, but yes, we we're not faking our love for Paradox. Trust us.
Chad: I forgot.
Joel: And our third prediction for 25, it's time for European invasion. Chad and I do a European show. We talk about these companies specifically. They are... One, they're too many big companies that are kicking ass in Europe, not to like stake their claim in America. A few that came off the top of my head were Jobandtalent, Personio, HiBob, which they're all opening offices in the US. They're building staff. And we also talk about, there's a ton of seed money going into Europe. I wouldn't say more so than the US but at least a pretty equal amount. And there's a lot of bets being made on startups in our industry in Europe. Inevitably, some of those are gonna either be gobbled up, continue to grow, eventually come to the US. So we like to keep our eye on some of the seed and A rounds. The companies that will be coming to the future. But there's no, we're a global... This business is global now. Europe is doing some really exciting things. It's time for like a handful of them to really make their mark in the US. And I think we both believe in 2025, we'll see a couple really start to make waves in the US.
Chad: Agreed. Can't say any more about that. Are there any questions? I wanna make sure we get the questions. Make sure we get the questions.
Joel: Prediction for 2025 on either company or industry that's going to explode in regard to hiring. Healthcare. Healthcare, healthcare. Healthcare.
Chad: Yeah. Healthcare. I mean, and we're still in the phase where, you know, everybody's saying that coding's gonna be gone, but tech is still gonna be huge. Right? And I mean, it's going to be to the point where one day we we're gonna need less bodies to actually code. But that's not today. I don't see that's gonna be in the next five years. So I think there's going to still be a lot of hiring in that space. One of the problems that we've had is the bloat that most of these fang companies had. They had money so that they were trying to take pieces off the chess board. So they did. And they had a lot of talent that to be quite frankly, they really didn't need. And when the market started to turn, they pushed all that talent that they didn't need back into the market.
Joel: And I would throw out the, the essential workers are still a big deal. Until Flippy serves me my Shake Shack burger, we're still a ways from the robots taking over the essential worker set. What are your top three European companies? I mean, I mentioned three in my 20... In my predictions. I mean, Personio, Jobandtalent.
Chad: Jobandtalent.
Joel: HiBob. Andela is kind of up there.
Chad: Look for any company that is making strides in Africa. Africa, I mean, from a a population standpoint, they, companies that are spending money in Africa understand long term from a talent standpoints. In like, let's say for instance the demographics in Europe, they're not great. There's a huge gap in the younger demographic, but there's not in Africa. So yeah, I think most of those companies who understand, some of the bigger companies who are looking into Africa to expand into Africa, incredibly smart.
Joel: Yeah. And I'd throw in Textkernel who you mentioned and also we're really close with House of HR, who has 40 or 50 brands throughout Europe that are doing some really interesting things. So House of HR and Textkernel I would throw in there. And our friends in Scotland, Willow, Poetry we like what they're doing as well as some other companies.
Chad: And now that Textkernel was bought, Daxtra, I think has a running chance at the outside, not just being a pilot fish, but actually gobbling up some markets. Because again, if you take a look at AI, this is not about AI anymore 'cause everybody has it. It's a commodity. It's about the data. And if you get to a company who actually does nothing but parse and structure data, that to me is where the gold is, kids.
Joel: Yep. All right. We're down to one minute. What about LATAM? Any predictions about Latin America?
Chad: Yeah, they're slow. And wow, this is a hard one just from standpoint.
Joel: I mean, look, we had Seek. Remember Seek who's a, who's probably a top job board.
Chad: They got out of.
Joel: Australian.
Chad: They got out.
Joel: They got out of Latin America. Latin America is a political...
Chad: It's hard.
Joel: Football. Like you have Brazil, Venezuela, you have Mexico, which is prime to explode with the US, you have Argentina, which politically is like totally flipping the table going towards the right. And then you have left company. So whereas Africa, I think Chad mentioned, there's so much opportunity there. Latin America is tough. Like it's, I wouldn't say that we have a real core competence around what's going on in Latin America.
Chad: No. And any of the companies, any of the companies that I've actually talked to where we, Joel and I both do advising for startups. There are some amazing companies around there. But the biggest problems for the founders is being able to get resources. Much like in Europe where it used to be, where it was hard to get cash, hard to get funding. That's not the case as much anymore. It's still not as much as Silicon Valley, but Latin America it is, it's not easy to get cash. And then to be able to string all of those countries together to again, to be able to create a much bigger platform, that again, is not happening.
Krista: You did it.
Joel: That's our show folks.
Krista: Right on the button. I'm so proud of both of you.
Chad: Take that Steve Levy.
Krista: Thank you so much for joining us, Chad and Cheese. I have put the links to the podcast. Be sure to check it out. It's one of my favorite ones that I listen to.
Chad: Go on.
Krista: Don't forget to sign up.
Joel: One of your favorites. Come on now.
Krista: I only listen to you guys and one other person and he knows that. I'm not a big podcaster. So you can take it with a grain of salt. You're the top two.
Chad: I love it. I love it.
Joel: Sloppy seconds, Chad. We get sloppy seconds.
Chad: I'll take it.
Krista: I didn't say you were second.
Chad: I'll take it.
Joel: You didn't have to. You didn't have to. I know the Canadian...
Krista: You sent me a shirt, you're my number one.
Joel: I know...
Krista: You're my number one, I got the shirt.
Joel: I know the passive aggressiveness of you Canadians. I know what you were saying. I know what you're saying.
Krista: Thank you everyone. We have that Matt Alder up next, continue to join us. Make sure you sign up for your memberships today. This is where all of our sessions are gonna be recorded, is in the ATAP exclusive social platform. So keep an eye on the links that the moderators will be sharing. Chad and cheese, thank you for joining us and we'll see you in the next session.
Joel: See you, Kristen.
Chad: We out.
Joel: We out.
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