We cover all the hot topics in this episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast Does Recruitment Marketing: Pay transparency, ChatGPT and the Indeed / Glassdoor cartel. RecrtuimentMarketing.com's Julie Calli joins us, as usual, and her rant on Indeed is a can't-miss for anyone in the business. Plus, how will employers react to the real trend of salary transparency and is "prompt engineering" the new Boolean search string for sourcing pros?
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Chad Sowash: Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast.
Joel Cheesman: Oh, yeah. Workday will be a first time advertiser on this year's Super Bowl with an ad featuring Joan Jett and Ozzy Osbourne. Hi, kids! You're listening to The Chad and Cheese Podcast Does Recruitment Marketing. I'm your co-host, Joel Crazy Train Cheesman.
Chad Sowash: This is Chad Bullion Is Back Baby Sowash.
Julie Calli: This is Julie Pay Equity Calli.
Joel Cheesman: And on this episode, 80% of the time, it works every time, Mort, ChatGPT goodness and everyone is getting fed up with the Indeed, Glassdoor Cartel. Let's do this. Hi everybody.
Chad Sowash: Well, hello, it's the J to the Ulie, she's back.
Joel Cheesman: The J to the Ulie.
Julie Calli: Hello.
Joel Cheesman: Is that how the kids are talking these days? They can't spell the whole thing out anymore, the J to the U, to the L to the I, to the E. It's just the J to the Ulie?
Chad Sowash: Pretty much the prompt way, the shortcut to actually get to where you need to go. [laughter]
Joel Cheesman: Yeah.
Julie Calli: Well, thank you for singing to me Joel.
[laughter]
Joel Cheesman: Right. You missed last week, was it a rapper on Fiverr, or something, a 37 year old rapper doing raps on ChatGPT that's making a ton of money or he's singing the rap.
Chad Sowash: No, he's writing raps for Fiverr and making eight grand a month. Now, he might be doing it on ChatGPT, but that was not a part of the story.
Joel Cheesman: I actually read something that you can ask GPT to write a rap about Donald Trump in the voice of Tupac, and it will actually do it for you which is amazing.
Chad Sowash: [laughter] Yes. Well, it's good with poems, so it might be good at that. I don't know if it can Jay-Z style or Eminem style it, although I'd check it out, try it out.
Joel Cheesman: If it can't do vanilla ice, then I don't want any part of it, is what I'm saying.
[vocalization]
Chad Sowash: Oh, wait a minute. No, that's clean.
Julie Calli: That's kind of like Milli Vanilli, right? It's gonna... You just voice over it. [laughter]
Joel Cheesman: Girl you know it, girl you know it, girl you know it.
Chad Sowash: It's true.
[vocalization]
Joel Cheesman: I love you.
[laughter]
Chad Sowash: We're singing for Julie this morning.
Julie Calli: Yeah, I'm just gonna enjoy you guys singing. [laughter]
Chad Sowash: Yeah.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Julie is mic'd up this week, which is good, she had some technical difficulties last time, we're glad she's back.
Julie Calli: Glad to be back with better quality audio today.
Chad Sowash: Well, that being said, let's jump into some shout-outs. Shall we?
Joel Cheesman: Let's do some shout outs. Well, Chad, you know I like a good LinkedIn poll.
Chad Sowash: You're always about the poll.
Julie Calli: What are you doing step-bro?
Joel Cheesman: So last week I asked on LinkedIn, will the US outlaw TikTok? I was expecting about 80, 20. 80% saying no, they won't outlaw it. It ran about 67% to 33. 67 said, no, they will not make TikTok illegal. Almost 400 votes on the poll. A few highlights. Jim, the Indeed whisperer Durban, who voted yes on TikTok being shut down, said, "It will be, I'll put a bottle of bourbon against a bottle of tequila that it happens before the end of 2024." Chad, you were quick to take him up on this bet, we'll see who gets the liquor in January of 2024. Number two, a well-known pundit, Matt Charney and friend of the show commented, "It should be shut down." And number three, Trent Cotton, VP of Talent and Culture at Hatch Works said, "I hope not. It's my escape from reality." Shoutout to my TikTok poll.
Chad Sowash: Nobody spins a loss better than you do, maybe Trump does better than you do Joel, but yeah, two-thirds to one-third spanking what you thought was going to happen. Yeah, that's total bullshit. But yes. Jim Durban baby.
Joel Cheesman: You're pretty cocky on this one Chad. I'm going to really rub it in your face if TikTok gets outlawed.
Julie Calli: I mean, will they?
Joel Cheesman: I'm gonna do a major victory lap.
Chad Sowash: Not worry about it.
Julie Calli: Will they, will they not? A great question. But should they?
Chad Sowash: That's an entirely different question. Yeah.
Joel Cheesman: Who's they? Who's they? The government?
Julie Calli: The government deciding...
Joel Cheesman: Why shouldn't they? TikTok is the most potent propaganda tool ever created.
Julie Calli: Oh, so it's bad for you?
Joel Cheesman: Yes, it's bad for you.
Julie Calli: Like smoking and drinking.
Joel Cheesman: Social media is bad for you.
Julie Calli: Which all come with labels that say...
Chad Sowash: Yes, exactly.
Julie Calli: Consuming this product may be bad for you. I think they should put a warning label on it when you open the app that says consuming it may be bad for you.
Chad Sowash: So quick question, does Facebook still exist? And they didn't ban Facebook, did they?
Joel Cheesman: These are fine American companies, Chad.
Chad Sowash: Oh yes. I would like to mention Cambridge Analytica and how they actually fucked with the US election, and yet it is still around.
Joel Cheesman: The last time I checked, Facebook wasn't looking to invade Taiwan, maybe that's just me.
Chad Sowash: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 'cause TikTok will make that happen.
Julie Calli: I'll say it. I do not want the government deciding for me what technology I can and cannot use, I do not want that. As an American who believes in freedom, I want the freedom of choice to decide what's best for me and... Oh, and if it might be doing things that are not good for me, that's fine, let me know that and let me make that choice, but to just wipe it out and say Americans can't use it because it's... Okay, well, what are gonna be the consequence of that? What if other companies start to say that about American companies? Like Oh, Google, right? Oh, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, these are all American companies that other countries could turn around and say, "Hey, we have laws in our country that... " thanks to Snowden, "that let us know that anybody can access that information from the government and claim that it's for our protection." So that is a call out to all the countries that yes, the same thing that the American government is worried about from the Chinese government is also true here. So I don't wanna see other companies banning our tech companies, so we should not start that behavior by banning theirs. Let Americans have choice in a land of freedom.
Chad Sowash: You take a look at companies who do get fined by this country versus Europe, and we have just a little piddly ass fines and then now we wanna talk about bans. You do have a point, we're banning books, we're actually telling people what they can do with their bodies in this country, so I don't know. Maybe we will be dumb enough to actually ban TikTok, but I don't think we will. There's too much money involved.
Joel Cheesman: At a minimum, there will be some legislation around social media in general, maybe not TikTok.
Chad Sowash: Let's hope so, please.
Joel Cheesman: There's a generation of young people who feel worse about themselves about their country, about their families than there was in previous generations. And I think social media has a lot to do with that.
Julie Calli: I will agree with that. I do think that there are some negative outcomes of social media that's having generational effect. How do we solve that? I don't think it's banning it.
Joel Cheesman: Well, TikTok is an external threat, it's a little different.
Chad Sowash: Nothing but fear mongering. Good God.
Julie Calli: I feel like it's like foot loose, right? Like dancing is dangerous. Let's ban dancing.
[laughter]
Chad Sowash: Joel is John Lithgow in this point. [laughter]
Joel Cheesman: The important point is they'll never...
Chad Sowash: Young lady.
Joel Cheesman: They'll never outlaw Taco Bell.
Chad Sowash: Julie.
Julie Calli: What?
Chad Sowash: Shoutout.
Joel Cheesman: Shoutout babies. She got...
Julie Calli: [laughter] I was like what? Did what?
Joel Cheesman: She got so wrapped up in TikTok.
Julie Calli: Yeah, no, I'd like to give a shoutout to comprehensive IO. If you haven't gone there, take a look.
Chad Sowash: Oh yeah.
Julie Calli: Since California and New York have put in pay transparency laws, that's made it possible now to go and index all the jobs that are out there and pull in the compensation and then start to report on some of those things so that we can have an understanding. This was never possible before because companies never made that information public. But now that it is, it can be collected, aggregated and reported on. So I absolutely love what they've done and what they're providing for free. You go and take a look at it and you can see some of the major companies in those two states and what they're paying for those open roles today.
Chad Sowash: Totally dig it. Once you go there, you can't go back, kids. My shoutout this week is to PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada, I think is how you pronounce it.
Joel Cheesman: You said duty.
Chad Sowash: For being a total dumb ass and quoting MLK while laying off 7% of her IT staff. Here's the quote, "I am reminded in moments like this, of something Martin Luther King said, that the ultimate measure of a leader is not where they stand in the moment of comfort and convenience, but where they stand in the times of challenge and controversy." Jennifer wrote at the end of an email replacing some of King's original words, and again, probably not the smartest thing to do when you're actually laying people off to talk about MLK and how MLK is really the foundation of why she feels confident in doing what she was doing.
[laughter]
Julie Calli: Yeah.
Joel Cheesman: Is this the same woman that made her staff stay in Florida for the hurricane? Are they related in some way?
Chad Sowash: No, no, they're probably friends though.
Joel Cheesman: Geez, geez.
[music]
Chad Sowash: Topics.
Joel Cheesman: Alright guys, this is from our friends at HR Dive, workers are demanding salary transparency and 80% of respondents, that's four out of five, in a recent survey, by resume lab, so they wouldn't apply for a job without salary range information included. 77% of respondents said it should be illegal to not include a salary in job postings. Pay transparency has benefits such as reducing recruiting costs and moving towards pay parity, but it also has drawbacks such as causing worker envy and causing employers to compress pay. Job postings for pilots at Netflix aside, Chad. Salary transparency seems to be trending with the masses, but are employers listening? Your thoughts.
Julie Calli: So salary transparency is happening in a localized situation right now, some cities, some states, so not everybody has to disclose compensation currently, but there's gonna be so much pressure and we're gonna see more states emerge, so what's difficult is that there's different requirements in each locality, this needs to go at the national level. We need a level playing field across the board. It's almost impossible for employers to manage all the different laws within all of the states when you're a national hire employer. So we need some uniformity in order to do this job well, and to deliver on this well. So I do want to see this elevate to the national level so that we can create some consistency. Of course, people want compensation displayed, but it's more than just showing the compensation, we've seen those examples where it's like zero to two million in the comp range. Like, hmm, I'll take the two million, please. So how do we start to make sense of this to make it easier for both job seekers and employers to connect on this? Companies need to start instituting a pay philosophy of why do you pay what you do? Because you need to be able to answer that question.
Julie Calli: If you have a candidate interviewing for a role and you show a range of between 50 and 100,000, of course, they want 100,000. That's what you showed. So you need to be able to say what is the difference between what we're gonna pay for 50 and what we're gonna pay 200. It could be tenor, it could be a skill and the level of experience, whatever it is, you need to have a reason why you pay what you did.
Joel Cheesman: And what odds would you give the federal government at passing such laws?
Julie Calli: Five years till they feel the pressure.
Joel Cheesman: So you think it's a good chance that the feds will pass a law around this? Okay.
Julie Calli: Yes, I do, because I think that a lot of the larger companies, the national employers are gonna continue to struggle with the management of people in different localities. I also am seeing a consequence come out of this. Alright, I'll bring this up. I believe that there's something happening now, because we don't have consistency across all of the states, we are starting to see what's called, what I'm calling location discrimination, and that... This is a bias against companies not wanting to hire people in certain states because they don't want to deal with the employment law in that state. California is probably the biggest one that suspect to this, because California is continuing to be so progressive ahead of all of the other states in how the PTO is managed, in how there's certain requirements for disclosure and because their bar is so much higher than the other states, employers are like, "God, if I hire people in California, then I have to run a whole different system. I have to manage my payroll differently. I have to manage my PTO differently, and I don't have enough time to run two different administration processes, so let's just not hire in California," which now means that if you live in California, that company is having a location bias against you because of your state law. That is happening.
Joel Cheesman: So there could still be... And I'm not a legal professional, but just like with taxes, you have federal taxes and local taxes and the state taxes, you could still have a federal law, and then state laws and local laws that you still have to deal with. So federal law might solve the problem. But I still think you'd see states like California go above whatever the federal threshold was on what states state should do or the nation should do.
Julie Calli: Right. And they're being progressive, and that's great that they want to bring all that value to the people within their state, but at the same time, if they're too progressive ahead of all of the others, then employers don't wanna hire from that state. And I can tell you there's probably a tremendous amount of people who've been laid off in the tech space that are in California right now, where employers would love to hire them, but they're not interested in bringing in California employment because they're going to have to then manage that administration that goes with that type of hire.
Chad Sowash: It's interesting 'cause the story talked about worker envy, and worker envy is created because there's no parity, so these employers are actually creating this mess in the first place. If they just focused on equity and treating people fairly, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Next, we have a shortcut in how we can actually take the federal government to, like you said, five years, Julie. I agree, I think we can actually do it faster through government contractors. And if you are a government contractor, you have to abide by OFCCP, and in that case, if you're getting money, if you're a government contractor, you're actually receiving money from the government, and you have to abide by different laws. Well, this new law could be just for government contractors, and they could do that on the federal scale. What that would do is it would force every single state to actually do what's necessary for these huge employers, and then it would trickle down from there. So that's a shortcut to actually force it into play much faster and then get that done. It's interesting because the survey said 79% of respondents said omitting salary was likely due to employers not wanting current employees to know that they're under-paid.
Chad Sowash: So let's be clear, this is the real problem here kids, this is the real problem for employers, getting systems aligned to show a salary range on a job is easy compared to bringing the pay of underpaid employees up to the level of fairness. So employers don't want you to know that you're getting screwed, but more so, they don't want to pay you fairly because that's gonna come out of their profits. So this is an issue that companies made themselves and now they're whining and crying about it. It's your fault, assholes. Fix it.
Joel Cheesman: Show me a 10-foot wall and I'll show you an 11-foot ladder, is something my dad used to say. And I feel like my point of taxes is sort of pressure because most people pay their taxes as they're supposed to do. However, there a lot of people that try to get around paying taxes using loopholes. I think a lot of companies will abide by not even the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law of being transparent in what you pay people. However, I think there's a certain percentage of companies, they're gonna have an army of lawyers and try to figure out how do we sort of get around this. And Chad, we talked about this on a recent show, and I went and looked at some of the legal S, what the law says, some of the ambiguities in the law. Certainly at the beginning, there was questions around what does salary mean? Is that just your base salary? Is it compensation? Is it benefits, healthcare, etcetera. And what I found most recently, is the law says that you have to submit salary, but everything beyond that is voluntary. So if you say base salary is this, but you can also earn this, is that transparency or is that finding a loophole?
Joel Cheesman: The problem is, if I'm a company competing for talent and I'm playing by the rules and saying what our salary is, and I've got other companies skewing or jumping through those loopholes and making me look like I under pay for the same job, then I become... I'm at a disadvantage to the company that isn't playing by the rules and that influences me to play their game in terms of being gray and ambiguity. I think you're gonna see companies create commission structures that they didn't have before to play in that gray area, you're gonna see revenue share or maybe benefits that they didn't have before to compensate for that. So to Julie's point, I think a lot of companies are gonna lobby Congress to say, "Look, we're losing to these people that are just sort of playing on the line. We need some federal regulation to sort of level the playing field." And until that happens I think there's just gonna be a lot of looking for loopholes, do we play by the rules or do we not? We're losing talent because it looks we're not paying enough. I think this is a big mess and I think we're just starting. Federal intervention is probably what's gonna have to happen eventually.
Chad Sowash: The thing is though if you're pushing salary out there, the companies that are actually doing the right thing, they're pushing the salary out there and people are trying to play toward loopholes with commissions. The salary on the commission based job or bonus based job's gonna be lower. So they're going to post their sa... So they're going... They're gonna screw themselves So that makes no sense whatsoever. So when you start playing this game, yes, you can have commissions, you can have total comp but salary in itself what you're gonna take home every other week, every week, every month whatever it is that's gonna be higher. If you're playing the commission game your salary's gonna be lower. So you're gonna be fucking yourself. Makes no sense whatsoever. I do agree that there has to be a standard and we should be... And again, I think a shortcut is through government contractors. You push that through, the entire system changes, 'cause it has to because we have hundreds of thousands of companies within the US that are federal contractors today, that changes it overnight.
Joel Cheesman: So it's intriguing that you said contractors. There was a story out this week that talked about how more and more companies that laid off people are now rehiring them as contract workers.
Chad Sowash: Yes.
Joel Cheesman: And that may partially be a symptom of I don't have to... With contractors I don't have to play by the rules of pay transparency. They're all sort of different based on what they think they're worth. So another way of companies getting around this is we'll just hire contractors.
Chad Sowash: But the thing is there are definitely some nuances there, not to mention, you can scale down contractors much quicker than it's easier to than employees.
Joel Cheesman: Oh they're a lot of really good reason to hire contractors not just the pay issue. But it's another reason why companies might be looking at contract work versus full-timers. Let's take a quick break and gee, ChatGPT, has any anyone ever heard of it? We'll talk about that. ChatGPT time everybody. Alright. An article entitled the Best Prompts for Using ChatGPT for Digital Marketing caught our attention this week, probably because you could easily replace marketing with recruiting. It summarizes how to use ChatGPT for different aspects of digital marketing including content marketing, email marketing, search marketing and social media marketing. The author explains that prompt engineering is a key skill for marketers to learn such as setting the context, defining the task and goal and explaining why the copy has been generated. Chad, are you a buy or sell on prompt engineering and how it relates to recruiting?
Chad Sowash: I'm a short term buy and here's why, a week or so ago I saw a spreadsheet posted with the best prompts to use to start better ChatGPT conversations. These are shortcuts, this is really what it is. And really prompts are just the best way to get the information you want from ChatGPT quicker. So much like back in the day when keyword searching Google and resume databases, recruiters started creating Boolean strings, which is basically just a keyword string shortcut to help users get to the information they wanted faster. It's the exact same thing. So it's almost a rejuvenation of what we saw back in the day. So much like Google moved away from Boolean. As ChatGPT evolves and it's gonna evolve much faster I think the need for spreadsheets of prompts won't be necessary. So I think we're gonna see a need for these early on but tech is moving so much faster today that we were using Boolean strings for shit, 10 plus years. I don't think we're gonna need prompts for two years.
Julie Calli: I agree with you, I think... I mean it's an incredible piece of technology that has so much potential but only as good as the user. [laughter] So how do you use it? A lot of people have been given it a go and beaten up on it and trying different things but if you don't know how to use it well to get a good output by what you put into it then it's not gonna help you. So I do think that there's some skilling that needs to happen for people to be able to use it well and I think this is great to help people see potential by using good prompts is only gonna lead to people adding more ideas around how they can prompt it to get better outcomes. So as we continue to use it, it'll get better and better, but yeah, we all need to teach each other how we're using it and having success so we can continue to compound on that innovation. But it's gonna become a skill, for sure.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah. That's right.
Joel Cheesman: So I loved you sharing that Chad and the graphic took me back man. You're right. This is back to the future shit. I'm gonna go really old school on you back to '05. And when I first met Shally Steckerl, his business card was literally a fold out...
Chad Sowash: Yes. Yes.
Joel Cheesman: Where it had Boolean string... Like popular Boolean strings, popular search engines like aren't... That aren't called Google. And the chart looked a lot what you shared in terms of these prompts. So for me, either short... I don't know, if it's 10 years maybe two years, five years but you're gonna see the rise of these experts on how to write prompts and engineer prompts. They're gonna be the the all stars of the conference of the future. They're gonna talk at all the conferences we attend.
Chad Sowash: [laughter] Yes.
Joel Cheesman: They're gonna give you the best prompts to find, write the best ads, write the best job descriptions yada, yada, yada. And they're gonna be the rock stars. Now, eventually, just like sourcing, you had seek out hire tool, hiring so... All these companies created technologies where the normal everyday recruiter could just plug it in, plug in whatever they wanted and the tech would figure it out. And eventually there will be startups around ChatGPT and how to just push a button and have this thing work and have it appeal to the masses. But I'm anxious to see this rise of the expert of prompts. In fact I actually went out to GoDaddy and searched Prompt Con, 'cause I'm like there's gonna be a conference like Source Con where people just get together and figure out how to write. So Prompt Con has been acquired so you can't get it So somebody...
[laughter]
Joel Cheesman: Somebody's thinking along those lines. But it's gonna be fun to watch this wild west of ChatGPT and how people are using it individually until the companies and startups figure out how to make it for the masses.
Julie Calli: Yeah. Share, share, share your tips with others so that we can all learn and innovate on this together.
Chad Sowash: I remember when Shally and Jim used to have Boolean string workshops. I mean they had workshops that recruiters would pay and companies would...
Joel Cheesman: Companies.
Chad Sowash: Pay, and they would bring them in and they had their own universities that had Boolean like whole catalogs for Boolean. But once again, we have to remember that was back in the olden days, let's just say that. And the way that ChatGPT... And I think just tech in itself is evolving so quickly, this is gonna be a very, very short window. Well, that was a long window that lasted, I don't think this window's gonna last very long. I think you might have two years to be able to get into your "Chat prompt" So if you if you want to to do speeches at SHRM or something of that nature, get into it now 'cause I don't think it's gonna be around for long.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah, it'll be hot for a couple years I think. It'll be in demand. Some of the differences are I mean ChatGPT and OpenAI seem it's sort of built for APIs. It's sort of built for people to use it and build on top of it. And at least for the moment there's no other ChatGPT competitor now. Once Google releases their thing and maybe Amazon, or... There'll be people that go "Okay I'm an expert in OpenAI. I'm an expert in Google's AI." They're gonna... People are gonna come out and be experts and all this thing and they're gonna make a lot of money you said, companies will pay them to come in. People will attend webinars at a hundred bucks a pop. There's a lot of money to be made in this industry. Sell the picks and the shovels everybody, you'll make a a penny.
Chad Sowash: Alright. Let's hurry up. Let's get to Indeed because I'm waiting to sit back and watch the fireworks. [laughter]
Joel Cheesman: Yeah. This is gonna be a big one. So we have a lot to talk about here on Indeed sucks. Our Indeed sucks round our block. So a TikTok user who applied to 80 jobs on Indeed received no response from any employer. A TikToker Katie Kepler shows a list of applications she submitted on the platform all of which got marked not selected by employer quote "Why, why?" She writes in the caption, "I have applied to 80 jobs and I have received zero reason for why I can't get hired anywhere." And on the other side of the coin employers are feeling they have little choice than to use the Indeed and Glassdoor cartel. Terry Kahler at SSM Health set on LinkedIn in response to one of my criticisms of Link Door by not highlighting Apple and Facebook as a top 100 employer. She said quote "As the main buyer of Glassdoor from my organization and the other job board who is owned by them." That's Indeed everybody in case you weren't paying attention. "I often get frustrated by this feeling that they want to take my credit card and swipe it all day long. And I really don't have the choice because they own the market. They have the data on job seeker behavior. They have our data and our competition's data because they are in control of these things. Ultimately they are also in control of me and my buying behavior."
Joel Cheesman: Let's go to Julie your thoughts on the disappointing state of job search in 2023.
Julie Calli: Well, first, I'd love to help Ms. Kepler understand the answer to her question. "Why, why, why? I applied to 80 jobs and I've gotten no response." Well, in that TikTok she made, she also put up a screenshot of some of the jobs that she applied to. Now, I've looked up Ms. Kepler she has about five years customer service experience. Her work experience as a staff reporter and working in a call center. The three jobs that she screenshotted were a paid media specialist that had over 640 applications to it. So a lot of people were applying to this job yet she has no indication that she has any experience in paid search, [chuckle] let alone to qualify as a specialist. The other job she applied to was a marketing manager had 205 applications to it. The other was director of brand development with only about 35 applications on it. So one, here you have a candidate who can just click on a button easy apply, apply apply, apply, apply. Now, how long did it take her to apply to those 80 jobs? Probably less than two hours. Okay. So she's not qualified for those jobs based on her profile.
Chad Sowash: Probably less than two minutes.
Julie Calli: Well she applied to 80 of them. So click, click, click, click, click, click, click.
Chad Sowash: Yeah, yeah.
Julie Calli: So here's this really fast ability to apply for jobs in which she does not appear to be qualified for. And now, so let's flip the coin. There's a recruiter on the other side who in just these three jobs that she screenshotted there are over 850 applications across these three jobs. So now, other side of this is that somebody has to review those for her to get the response that she's looking for. Someone needs to review them and then candidates want a response. So let's just say it takes about five minutes to read a resume and then craft a response to that. If each one of these applications she submitted took about five minutes of review, there was 80 of them That's over six hours of review time and response. So, six hours. Let's just say a recruiter makes about $30 an hour. That means all of her applications have costed over $200 in corporate investment for those to be reviewed and responded to. Now you take that by a million we have an unqualified candidate costing over 200 million being taxed against her hiring that we're doing.
Julie Calli: This is where the problem lives is that candidates do want a response. They wanna know why they were not qualified. I think that they should get that. However that costs money. That costs a lot of money to be able to give those thoughtful responses. Every candidate should get at least an automated response that we reviewed your resume and you're not qualified. That should at least happen. But I'd also add some advice for Ms. Kepler. If you're going to be applying for roles in marketing take a look at what is publicly available on your profile. She has a heavy social media presence that's very public. And I as someone who is a leader in marketing, within 30 seconds of reviewing her public TikTok profiles can... I would just say out loud and very comfortably, I would mark you as unemployable because if you're working in brand, you need to pay attention to your personal brand and what information is publicly available out there on TikTok. So if you're wondering why employers haven't gotten back to you, take a look at your public profile. I do think in this case Ms. Kepler, there's lots of reasons why she probably is not getting a response. But I also wanna look at the other side of this and say Indeed it's charging on a paper application basis.
Joel Cheesman: Yes. And they're making it easy.
Julie Calli: Well, I just talked about the investment of time that it would take for a recruiter to even review that. Let's just say each application was $5. It costs $400 for all of those applications to happen. And that was billed to the employer for a candidate that did not match their job. So both sides are getting robbed in the experience here. This is where we need to find better solutions for this.
Joel Cheesman: Indeed said that they were going to fix this whole fucked up scenario with easy apply. Obviously, that's not the case. So paper start to apply was supposed to be this new big thing that just made sense and it was going to fix this problem. Apparently that's not true. What you're saying is more... A lot of quick applies that turn into rage applies. Right?
Julie Calli: Rage applies Yes [chuckle]
Joel Cheesman: So as Indeed bullshits their way through and now they're talking about something from a you have to register to Indeed to apply. Now I don't know if anybody remembers this or not. But Julie you might remember this, back in the day, I think it might have been 2016, '17, '18 something that, it was a no-no to register to apply. Indeed said that that was bad practice. It was bad for job seekers. Well, wait a minute, they're doing it today and all that's doing is pushing toward this crazy quick apply rage apply that's happening. I mean they are the problem.
Julie Calli: Yes. March 2017.
Joel Cheesman: There it is.
Julie Calli: Indeed made a decision that any registration prior to application on the employer site was not a good candidate and job seeker experience. And therefore that belief led to job boards and staffing companies who have a registration process when you land on their site to be removed from Indeed so that only direct employers could publish jobs. In doing that, they made a stance that we care about the candidate experience and we don't think that registration prior to application is a good experience. So that is why, and then they removed a significant amount of companies that depended on Indeed's traffic for their business. That was painful That was so painful. I cried that day with every single company that I worked with. So many people were infuriated to understand like why can Indeed have such power over my business and how am I supposed to carry on? And I'll tell you what, those businesses did. They found a way to carry on. They found a way to get traffic. They found a way to get candidates other ways than Indeed. But right now employers are are on Indeed.
Julie Calli: And now Indeed go and take a look search for a job, it will say right there on your job that belongs to you [laughter] must register with Indeed before you can apply. So that means. Right. Let's talk about what that means. Your job has now become an advertisement for Indeed, for people, to come into who want to apply to your job, but they're gonna have to register with Indeed first. When they register with Indeed they now are gonna continue to receive job search alerts and notifications from other employers.
Chad Sowash: It's monster.com.
Julie Calli: Because of your job.
Chad Sowash: It's monster.com in 1999. It's the same damn thing, other than they're charging more.
Joel Cheesman: 'Cause I remember crying with Job Boards in 2010 when Indeed shut them off or made them algorithmically invisible. So many of them.
Chad Sowash: Yes. And then we take a look at employers.
Joel Cheesman: Yep.
Chad Sowash: Employers made their own bed. They're doing this to themselves. They spend millions of dollars building resume databases. They have tons of silver medalists, bronze medalists, amazing, amazing, amazing talent in their databases that just atrophy and go away. But yet they bitch and they whine in the complaint how much they have to to pay for Indeed. Now I think Indeed's whole PPSA thing is total bullshit. I mean, it's do as I say not as I do scenario stuff. But in this case the employers aren't looking past their nose on this. They should know better. It's happened to Job Boards as Joel said. It's happened to staffing companies. What makes them think this isn't gonna happen to them?
Julie Calli: Oh, yes. I totally agree with that. Look at the behavior, it repeats itself.
Chad Sowash: Yes.
Julie Calli: It did it to Job Boards, it did it to staffing, who's next? The direct employer. And the direct employer is at the mercy of what Indeed decides. Now that decision could be a shift that they wanna focus more on small business, mid-market or enterprise, whatever they decide, they're choosing to serve a market which may cause one of the employers that are in one of those different segments to get consequences from those choices. We've seen that behavior. But this is what I would say. This is the same advice you're gonna get from a financial advisor. Diversify your portfolio.
Chad Sowash: Yes.
Julie Calli: If you put all of your investment in one place you can't then cry when it's at risk. If you give Indeed and Glassdoor all of your budget and you are not looking to find alternatives, then you are at risk. You are at risk because whatever happens with Indeed is now part of your strategy. And you have to live with that and adapt that because you did not diversify your portfolio and you have not created a pipeline of other opportunity. You should never put a hundred percent into one source You should always be sampling other sources.
Joel Cheesman: And what's unique is, I sympathize with Ms. Kahler, but there was a time where the local newspaper was all you had, really, to advertise a job. There were free papers, may be a radio spot but...
Chad Sowash: Help one inside.
Joel Cheesman: There were incredible limits to how you could market a job back in the day before the web. Now, you have programmatic, Google, social media. Like there are so many ways to market your company and your jobs. You should not have the mentality of, I am locked in with Indeed and Glassdoor. That's not the case. Talk to people professionals. There are options out there that we have today that we didn't have 30 years ago. And if you're crying about, "I can't go anywhere else, they just swipe my card," then you're you're being lazy frankly. And you need to educate yourself on what else you can do to market your company and your opportunities.
Julie Calli: Or you're not investing in your recruitment marketing period. Recruitment marketing has a lot of different skills that live within it. It's got an analytical competency to be able to look at the data and understand where things are coming from, understand attribution logic, so you're appropriately giving assignment of source to the right place. And then, take that to performance marketing. The ability to control and manipulate what you're putting putting out there, to get better outcomes. It has the storytelling that's involved with employer branding. There's a lot of work to do in recruitment marketing. And if you are expecting all of that work to be done as part of somebody else's job. If your recruiter is responsible for doing all that work, if your HR generalist is responsible for doing that work, you're not investing in it properly. Put a person name behind it.
Joel Cheesman: Is there a website I could go to to get a progressive cutting edge commentary on recruitment marketing?
Julie Calli: You know, I'm all about empowering the people that do the work of recruitment marketing, because the industry is growing so fast. We are having such acceleration. People need to build skill in this area, so at recruitmentmarketing.com that's exactly what we're doing. We're trying to empower the people that have to do this work with the most relevant information to do the job.
Chad Sowash: You're like leading the witness Cheesman.
[laughter]
Joel Cheesman: That's what we do on this show Chad. Recruitmentmarketing.com people, Chad, Julie another one in the can, we out.
Chad Sowash: We out.
Julie Calli: We out.
Joel Cheesman: Wow. Look at you You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey or just watch Big Booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckle heads and stand. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt but save some soap because you'll be back like an awful train wreck you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite western, you can't quit them either. We out.
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