Indeed Traffic Woes, TechWolf Howls, & FairNow Impresses

[00:00:00] Are you struggling to hire diverse tech talent? After all, every organization in the world is now a tech company. And the ability to attract higher and retain tech talent from all backgrounds is critical to their success. Enter Hackajob, a reverse marketplace that actively vets engineers.

[00:00:17] We flip the traditional model on its head, meaning companies apply to engineers versus candidates applying to jobs. With companies getting an 85% response rate to candidates they reach out to, as well as exposure to tech talent that directly meets their organization's diversity objectives.

[00:00:35] Companies such as S&P Global, CarMax, and Sensor Tower are all using Hackajob. Why not join them? Go to hackajob.com slash cheese to get your free 30-day trial today. Go to hackajob.com slash cheese to get your free 30-day trial today. Hide your kids! Lock the doors!

[00:00:55] You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Soosh and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, rash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls! It's time for the Chad & Cheese Podcasts!

[00:01:13] Chad Awwwwww, 2 guys who will never fall for the banana in the tailpipe. What's up boys and girls? It's the Chad & Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host Joel... Cheeseman. Chad And I'm Chad. He's baaaack. So wash. And on this week's episode, indeed traffic is declining, the EV revolution is deflating

[00:01:42] and Hooters restaurant business is sagging. Let's do this. Okay, listener, how can you help your employees become more productive? I have answers. How about automating manual and repetitive tasks, giving meaning to data, then allowing that data to actually drive decisions?

[00:02:06] And how about matching people to your jobs quicker? Well, wait. The Chad and Cheese has a new LLM. No, cheese man. I'm talking about Tex Colonel. Ah, okay. That makes more sense. What I'm hearing is the groundbreaking concept of wait for it. Simplicity. Seriously though, seriously.

[00:02:29] Tex Colonel cuts through the complexities like a tortilla chip through some hot nacho cheese. Oh my God, really? Nacho references already. Anyways, Tex Colonel brings efficiency and productivity to your operations. Tex Colonel seamlessly unifies your tools and data to drive efficiencies and success.

[00:02:49] Tex Colonel is creating new opportunities for your recruitment journey. Kind of like adding guac to my barbacoa burrito. Oh my God. How about extracting meaningful insights from data? I mean, that's something. Swiftly matching people with jobs, automating repetitive tasks.

[00:03:09] Who knew such advanced concepts were even possible in the land of human resources? We did, Chad. We did. Dude, wrap it up. I'm a little hungry. Imagine that. Okay, listener. Get ready to use today's tech to drive efficiencies and productivity. Visit TexColonel.com. That's T-E-X-T-K-E-R-N-E-L dot com. Nachos.

[00:03:39] Surprise, surprise, mother f***er. The king is back. Welcome back. Look at that tan. Did you miss me, Chad? Look at me. I'm tan rested and ready to go, baby. Oh yeah. We need a little recharge every now and again. Need a little recharge.

[00:03:59] So, a little bit of Vietnam, Singapore, getting a little background on those. How'd it go? Sure, sure. My wife had a conference in Singapore, the whole eating bugs thing that's a worldwide conference, a lot of money, and companies go to this thing.

[00:04:17] So it was in Singapore and I didn't want to pass the chance to go to Asia, which I've never been to. So we decided to make it kind of a couple weeks thing, get away. As you know, I unplugged as much as possible.

[00:04:29] I think the only time I heard from you was TexColonel got acquired because that was important enough to let me know that that happened. Otherwise, I tried to unplug as much as possible, which was healthy. We talked about where should we go to in Asia, near Singapore.

[00:04:44] It's a little relaxation. We picked Da Nang. Thanks for the recommendation from one of Paradox's employees that works in Vietnam. I believe they acquired someone out of Vietnam a few years ago. So anyway, a few takeaways from Asia. Number one, it's hot as balls.

[00:05:01] It's as hot as two rats fucking in a wool sock. It is in June, it is soupy, hot. Da Nang is like 95 and super humid. In Da Nang, you can stay at a five star resort for like the cost of a holiday in here in the US.

[00:05:20] So yeah, it's like super, super nice. If you want to get away, very different culture. I think my expectation maybe I'm not alone as an American thinking that your favorite scene from Full Metal Jacket is what Vietnam is like the whole country.

[00:05:35] It's a little bit like that, but not as much. It's chaos. It's probably 50 bikes and motorcycles to every car. There's no, like it's like a living organism at every intersection. Nobody hits each other, but it all works in tandem. But there are, there's a significant downtown, significant buildings.

[00:05:53] There are businesses that you and I know very well that are set up there. So they're sort of straddling the line of old Vietnam and the new Vietnam and being very commercially driven, but they're also a communist country. So there's sort of that element as well.

[00:06:07] Vietnam is pretty crazy if you want a wild adventure at a really cheap cost. I think beers that we drank were like a dollar 25, which was nice. Singapore, Singapore is the exact opposite. It's like 17 bucks a beer in Singapore. And oh, yeah, it's built for business.

[00:06:23] It's built like it's very wealthy. Clearly there's some historical pieces. It was an English colony for a long time. It was invaded and taken over by the Japanese in World War Two. And that history is really interesting.

[00:06:38] We tend to focus on Europe and the German, you know, the Nazis in America. But there's a really rich history of Japanese in World War Two and everything that went down there. Singapore for me is a little too sanitized. It's very safe.

[00:06:52] Like it's it's it's engineered by the government to just be comfortable. And, you know, I like my countries to have a drunk, you know, Scotsman on a bus named Gus, you know, talking shit. You know, I want to know that someone might vomit in the street

[00:07:08] at any point in my cities. Singapore has cameras everywhere. It's it's super shit like safe. They the cost of a car is super high because they want to limit traffic and traffic is limited. It's not crazy that the metro is really nice. Yeah, alcohol is really expensive

[00:07:25] because they want people to be sober. Imagine that people are more law abiding apparently when they're sober. So it's been engineered and it's very sanitized. It's very nice, but it's not really my jam. I'm not going to be in a hurry to get back to Singapore.

[00:07:38] And then the third takeaway is that we're really comfortable in America in terms of like threats. We sort of forget that there's a war in Ukraine. There's like Middle East shit and there's this China North Korea thing. And when you're in Asia, I there's there's an underlying discomfort.

[00:07:56] We have a buffer knowing that shit could go down at any time. And there were there were, you know, there were jets flying around Singapore. There's a military presence. Everyone in Singapore does military service of some kind as part of their citizenship.

[00:08:12] So we're really comfortable in America in this bubble. And I think maybe we may be sleepwalking as at times as to what the world is going through. But going to Asia makes you very aware like we can go down at any minute

[00:08:24] and you need to sort of be thinking about that just in case. Yeah, yeah. Oof. I thought it was a fun trip. You've never been to Asia, correct? I have not. No, no, I have not. Jewels been to India. I'm good. I'm good off that.

[00:08:38] I definitely want to go to Vietnam. Definitely want to go to Singapore. So a lot of Aussies in Singapore, though, that was a good time. They they like to have fun in Singapore. I think that's a pretty cheap. Yeah, yeah. Light for them to to go there.

[00:08:49] Yeah. And so it's nice to it was nice to get away. It's nice to experience that. I don't think I'm going to hurry to get back to Asia, but it was it was a good experience. And I'm glad to be back, baby.

[00:09:00] A couple of weeks off is good for you. Good for the soul. Very nice. Let's do some shout outs, man. Shout out. You're back. So you go first. I love it. Yeah. So a couple of people to highlight and when I was in Singapore

[00:09:10] and this is the power of the podcast, people listen, people know I talked about it. They reached out JJ who we know at Anlu. If you haven't listened to that firing squad. Oh, yeah. Check that out. JJ reached out. We had lunch.

[00:09:23] I saw the the headquarters, if you will, of the company. He I took a T-shirt to him. He probably saw it on LinkedIn. And then Daniel Callahan from Bearmark. He reached out while I was out there. We hooked up for some beers, pretty cool.

[00:09:37] It was called the beer company. It was like a huge fridge of beers from light to dark. You just picked out beer, scanned it, ordered food. That was kind of a cool experience. But shout out to those two guys. Thanks for showing me a good time in Singapore.

[00:09:52] And while I was gone, I got to give a shout out to Mo and Joel Jr. Joel 2.0, whatever we're calling him for filling in. While I was out, it sounds like you guys had a good time. And hopefully the listeners enjoyed a little

[00:10:05] little change of pace on the show for me. Yeah. Well, big news, big news while you're gone for some, maybe not for all. Be quick. We got to get some big stuff today. So Bullhorn buys, buys text kernel. What did you think? It's big news.

[00:10:17] I think it's it's it's a win, win, win, win. And maybe another win if if if Robert Ruff, our friend at Sovereign, had had shares in text kernel, he's a he's a winner again. And he can buy some more land in Jackson Hole or wherever he is

[00:10:31] at the moment. But a big win for Bullhorn. Look, there's not a lot of parsing services out there. It's a little bit like programmatic advertising. If you can if you can snag up one of these players and text kernel by far is the top player.

[00:10:44] And I'm not just saying that because they're a sponsor of the show. I think that's a pretty universal opinion. Easy. That's a huge win for them and a sign that Bullhorn is doing pretty well.

[00:10:53] And as I think we both know that they've been around for a long time. So big one for them. Big one for text kernel. Look, Herard has this magical ability to kind of see around corners. And I'll get to that in a second.

[00:11:06] But you know, I think that, you know, this is he sold to career builder. Main capital comes in main capital is another winner, by the way, in this and then found an opportunity to get to Bullhorn. I love the the European show this this past week where

[00:11:21] Lee even talked about Bullhorn and Gerard being at the event in Amsterdam. Miracles happen when you go to conferences. By the way, if you want to get acquired, it's not a bad idea to sponsor the Chad and cheese podcast.

[00:11:34] We have an amazing like line up of companies that have been acquired after sponsoring the show. So anyway, if you're if you're thinking about sponsoring and being acquired, that might be a good opportunity for you. I think that the interesting part around the sort of see around corners

[00:11:49] is that you touched on this in the European show, but the AI question. Look, parsing, a lot of data, figuring all that stuff out. You know, there's there's a there's a school of thought out there that that AI and large language models, generative AI can kind of do

[00:12:04] some of the heavy lifting of the parsing and matching and things like that. I think the jury is out on that. But but it is a threat. And the fact that open AI is now in bed with with Microsoft and LinkedIn.

[00:12:16] I know the jury is out as to whether or not LinkedIn can figure that shit out, but it is still a threat. You've got indeed building what they what I think is kind of a LinkedIn competitor beefing up their profiles.

[00:12:29] So there's a there's a case to be made that they're going to get better at what they're doing. And I think bullhorn and bullhorn needed to do this from a strategic advantage perspective. They didn't want to fall behind some competitors.

[00:12:41] So I think that was really smart on their end. But also, I think timing may have been perfect for a text kernel to look for an acquisition partner. Time will tell. But I think if you hedge your bets, Herard was on is going to be on the

[00:12:54] right side of history. And this is going to be a move that we look back and say timing was perfect on that acquisition. So good for everybody, even good for our chili. Yeah, probably the only one left of notes.

[00:13:06] You know, if you're indeed, you know, maybe you want to look at our chili as an acquisition to partial, you know, indeed resume. So yeah, we're going to talk about one later. Yeah, there's still more out there. But overall, when stepstone, stepstone rebrand, the rebrand.

[00:13:20] So stepstone rebrand again, I think the European show, I think, I think Leven nailed it with the IPO comment. Look, stepstone has been talking about IPO. They have all these properties. I know it sounds stupid, but I'm telling you there was a

[00:13:34] meeting at stepstone with marketing and the business people. And they were like, OK, we need to create a consistent look and feel across all of our properties. So when we go public and we talk to Wall Street about what we're doing

[00:13:49] to go public in Germany, whatever the equivalent of Wall Street is in Germany. And we need people to go to these sites and there's a there's a consistent look and feel. So like that meeting happened.

[00:14:00] And part of that was like, let's have a masthead that looks all the same. Let's have fonts that are the same. And thus, the rebrand. Now, the question I have is my prediction of career builder and or monster being acquired by stepstone.

[00:14:15] So I'm checking out we're building a monster on a regular basis to see if their color palette and their masthead changes. Because if you see it in that that nasty pink and brown or orangey yellow thing that they have, it's a clear sign.

[00:14:29] It's a clear sign that stepstone whenever the fire is your career builder and or monster. But I think it's all about IPO creating consistency on the brand. That was the reason for all this. I don't think it was any anything more deep than that. It's more cutting costs.

[00:14:44] OK, so I'm going to shout out since a little time for solace kids as Ryan McCabe, a CEO of Audra died over the weekend in a motorcycle accident in Scotland. I didn't know Ryan really well, but you know, with the few interactions

[00:14:59] I did have with him, he was always an incredibly happy and positive guy. And when I told him we were prepping for the Scotland trip, when I told him that Julie and I would be spending about four or five

[00:15:09] days after we were in Glasgow and in Edinburgh doing the shows, he was the one who recommended Lock Fine. And that's where we ended up finishing out our trip. It was amazing. And you know, I never got a chance to say thanks.

[00:15:25] So, you know, thanks, Ryan and rest in peace, buddy. Life is short. Enjoy it while while the ride while you're on the ride, kids. Short and fragile. I'll make another quick shout out to candidate.fyi,

[00:15:37] our friend Colin Day, Founder and CEO of Isems, who has since moved on this company founded by an ex-Googler, brought him on as an advisor with a pretty good portfolio or lineup of advisors. They got a former CRO of Disney.

[00:15:51] And they've only raised one point three million dollars. So candidate.fyi is one to watch if someone like Colin Day is looking at them and saying, I want to be a part of it. Like that's a company to look out for. So shout out to Colin Day.

[00:16:05] Now that he's back in the biz, maybe you can come back on the show and update us on what's going on in his life. Yeah, or maybe we'll just send Colin some free stuff, you know, t-shirts from Erin Aplo, Chad and cheese t-shirts.

[00:16:16] Everybody here, I brought a bunch of t-shirts here to Portugal for friends to be able to, you know, give them out. And whenever they wear them, they always come up to me and they always, the first thing they do is they mention how good it feels.

[00:16:29] That's right. It's like a hug from Chad and cheese. And that's courtesy of Erin Aplo. Beer always lovely, tasty craft beer sent by Aspen Tech Labs. Love those guys. Whiskey from just acquired by Bullhorn. Text Colonel. Birthdays, guess what? Rum with plum. Did you feel the tension?

[00:16:51] And you can't win unless you go to ChadCheese.com slash Free Kids. All the way down to my plums. That's right, gang. If it's your birthday, we're going to shout out to you. And again, like Chad said, you could win a bottle of rum,

[00:17:05] but celebrating another trip around the sun and listeners include Tom Bickel, Eli Carstens, Brittany Porter, Sepe Nairi, super fan of the show, by the way, Heather Meyers, Colleen DeGeorge, Ginny Shioch, I think, Sean Paulseth, Robert Rudolph, Buddy Hanika, Shannon Pritchard, Keri Corbin, Mike Okars and Faith Rothberg

[00:17:28] are all celebrating another trip around the sun. So happy birthday to them. Very nice. Very nice. Hopefully we will see them in London. That's right. We're going to Reckfest July 11th at Nebworth Park. And guess who is joining us on stage to talk about?

[00:17:46] Please tell me who's joining us. Lord Nathaniel Mengyang Wei of the House of Lords will share his experience in technology, entrepreneurship and social innovation. We're going to discuss Nat's Maker Life Initiative aimed at integrating disadvantaged and underemployed individuals into the tech industry. Pretty cool and definitely needed.

[00:18:10] Apparently, Lord Wei has formed a team to drive this initiative, emphasizing the importance of growth mindset for previously people lacking access to AI data and platform technology. So his vision is now supported by our friends over at This Way Global.

[00:18:28] So thanks to Angela and the crew over at This Way Global for pulling this conversation and getting a Lord on stage with us. Not to mention, we also have invites for dinner at the House of Commons. I have no clue what to wear.

[00:18:44] I can't wait to see what Cole wears. That's going to be the fun part. Giving Cole a formal attire might be a stretch, but we'll see. Maybe he'll rock a Winston Churchill hat and overcoat maybe. I don't know. We have a Lord on... Does this...

[00:18:59] He has a PR person that's about to get fired if he's coming on stage with us at Reckfest. By the way, there was a Lord Cheeseman at one point who was a Falconer apparently. I might ask if they know each other by now.

[00:19:12] There's a big election in England on the 4th of July, ironically. So we may be going into a cats and dogs living together situation in England while we're there. It could be a really interesting time to talk to a Lord about the goings on of the UK.

[00:19:28] That's kind of exciting. Kind of exciting. I agree. Almost exciting chat as the jobs report that we talk about on a monthly basis with Linkup CEO Toby Dayton on the show. CEO Toby Dayton on the show. One thing I'm interested in, Chad, there's some growing buzz

[00:19:44] around ghost postings. Some people are talking about high numbers in terms of jobs that aren't even available and what kind of impact that has. So I'm interested to see what Toby's opinion is on the ghost postings trend that I'm seeing a lot more in our industry.

[00:20:00] Same here, same here. But with that... Yes. Job X! Don't call them Job Fox, Chad. Belgian startup Tech Wolf has secured $43 million in Series B funding to develop its infrastructure for employee skills. That brings its total to $55.6 million. The company founded by three computer science graduates in

[00:20:25] 2018 says it uses AI language models to infer employees' skills from digital interactions, eliminating those pesky manual assessments. Chad, we all remember the Wolf from Pulp Fiction who fixed everything but can this wolf fix the skills gaps within companies? Well, let's put it this way.

[00:20:45] Everything that they put out there is really cool and skills focused but they are a parsing and matching organization. So holy shit, Daxter gets serious and hires a new CEO then Tex Colonel was acquired by Bullhorn and then last

[00:21:01] week a much smaller competitor, Tech Wolf, gets a Series B. A very nice size Series B. So that's saying something for the parsing and matching in data skills companies. That's not too bad. You know, I do have to mention like you said earlier

[00:21:19] that many people thought that the Tex Colonel deal was because AI was coming for Tex Colonel. I don't believe that. I really believe that domain experts understand the data they need and how to train LLMs because all of these companies are already using large language models.

[00:21:36] They've already been using these crazy algorithms for years. Now, Gen AI, what does that do? It just puts jet fuel in their fucking rocket ship kids. So you got to ask yourself this question. Why would Felix Capital, 20 BC, Acadian Ventures for Tuna? Service now, Workday.

[00:21:55] SAP, Workday Ventures and yet, oh my God, and people from DeepMind and Meta put money into an almost dead category. Here's the answer kids, they wouldn't. They wouldn't because you've got to understand that AI is much more complex than you fucking think it is.

[00:22:15] And thinking that open AI is coming after parsing in skills matching, it's not how it fucking goes. So with 50% of their pipeline in the US, Tech Wolf will use those funds to expand their presence into the US, which is incredibly smart since once again, the text kernel acquisition.

[00:22:35] You get an acquisition like this and you start to play off the waves of that. Daxter is doing that. We've seen emails and promotions and things of that nature that are going out to text kernel companies just makes sense. They had a series A in May of 2022, $10 million.

[00:22:51] So for me, it's incredibly clear this segment is just going to grow. And the term AI was used 12 times in the Tech EU article. So I mean, again, it's alive, it's growing, it's flourishing and Tech Wolf, I think they're in a good place

[00:23:10] along with Daxter along with higher rise. There are handful left. All right, all right, all right. First of all, can we take a second to applause the rebirth of animal names in URLs? Job Fox, Tech Wolf, Farotley, Talenzoo. Like I've missed the trend of animals

[00:23:30] being in all these company names. So I salute, well, Farot, Farotley. I salute the return of animals in URLs. So these guys are serious. This is a lot of money. They're backed by a lot of serious people. Like you mentioned, Acadian Ventures,

[00:23:46] Jason Carcelo, our friend was very excited about this. They sent on an email to investors where Jason said quote, workers should be defined by their skills, not titles. And employers will fill jobs in the future based on skills development and expertise, not job descriptions.

[00:24:04] We've talked about this trend many times. People looking to get away from the traditional post-a-job, pray, hope that the right person shows up. It's more about who's already in the stable? Who's already in the kitty? How do we develop them? What jobs are they most positioned for?

[00:24:20] And how do we engage with them and get them on the right track for that position? So this falls right into the huge trend of getting away from the old way of doing things and looking at who you currently have because hiring is expensive. Recruiting is expensive.

[00:24:34] It's a pain in the ass. Recruiters are expensive. It's much more efficient to do it this way. And from what I can tell, these guys are gonna be a serious player in what's going on. What is interesting though, there is some pushback on skills-based hiring.

[00:24:49] There was an article in Forbes back in March that was titled Skills-Based Hiring Has Not Worked. Now, the gist of that article was it's not so much effective with college graduates that people aren't doing that with with three folks out of school.

[00:25:05] They still look at where they graduate from. But that doesn't impact the 30-year-old that's been a sales guy, is a future chief revenue officer. That's what we're talking about. And this trend is gonna continue and I think that these guys are in the right place

[00:25:21] at the right time and they've got money and brains and supporters behind them to really make a big dent in this. This is one to watch as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, no question. I think the biggest issue that we have with skills-based hiring is companies don't know

[00:25:35] what the fucking skills are for the job in the first place. And a job is a set of tasks. And within those tasks, there are specific skills for each task, right? Companies don't understand, they don't break that down, right? And they don't understand that. If they understand that,

[00:25:52] then they understand specifically the skills that you need. So there's that first and foremost to identify the skills that you need. And then secondly, the ability to then not only say, hey, can you do this and trust that the person can fucking do it,

[00:26:07] but then test for it, right? Prior to actually hiring the individual. So the whole screening process of can you do this, that, the other thing, fuck all that. Give them a test, let them take it, and then they can shoot right to the top of the slate

[00:26:21] if they kick ass and take names. Then you have at this point, a qualified candidate, a qualified and interested candidate. That is worth 10,000 fucking clicks easily, right? So this is where we're moving. I agree 100%, but we still have a lot of foundational work to do as companies

[00:26:39] to understand what those jobs and skills actually are. Look, if you're a company with, you know, we talked to UPS recently. If you're a company with 10, 20, 50,000 employees and plus this tool is invaluable because it's very hard to track that many employees, what their strong suits are like.

[00:26:55] If you can leverage a tool like this and have tens of thousands employees and start, you know, rank managing like where they should fit in in the future and where they belong. This is an incredibly powerful tool and trend for companies that are huge.

[00:27:08] Maybe not the small businesses, but if you're huge, you need a tool like TechWolf to help you make sense of your thousands and thousands of employees. If you're a vendor, if you're a vendor and you have a huge database and you can start to actually push out

[00:27:21] slates of candidates that are more qualified, companies will pay more than per click. They will pay, I mean, they're gonna pay for qualified leads, which is what sales and marketing have been doing forever. So we're finally catching up to some extent.

[00:27:35] It is much harder, obviously in our job than it is in sales and marketing's job to do that from a lead standpoint, but this is where it's at. Good job. Well, from one company we like to another one, Fair Now, an AI governance software company

[00:27:49] based out of McLean, Virginia has raised $3.5 million in seed funding to expand operations and staff. The company led by CEO and Chad and Cheese fan, Guru Sibu Pathy, helps enterprises manage AI risks and compliance focusing on highly regulated industries. Fair Now got two enthusiastic thumbs up

[00:28:09] on our firing squad show, but are you still on board following this news chat? AI is a big topic. Compliance is a big business. An AI compliance company, I say winner, winner, robot, chicken, dinner baby. So seriously though, hiring companies are going to need experts in this space

[00:28:28] and the traditional hiring compliance people, they're gonna have a hard time covering this gap using spreadsheets. So, you know, I was in compliance, in compliance business on the technology side for five or six years in hiring companies ability to explain and or defend their processes, standard operating procedures,

[00:28:50] data management techniques, candidate slates and overall hiring outcomes will be a humongous business due to the new scale AI affords companies to create more efficient processes, identify qualified candidates and fill open positions for either internal or external candidate pools. So, I mean for me, this is,

[00:29:13] I mean this is, I think I'm gonna go overboard a little bit, but this feels almost like the Nvidia of our space, right? There aren't many of them. There aren't many of them, but this is gonna be something that's gonna be needed

[00:29:25] by every single big swing and you know what, fucking company. So congrats to Guru and the team at Fair Now. I believe this is definitely gonna be, give him a leg up on the competition and who knows there might be acquisition talks before you know it

[00:29:42] because somebody's gonna need this shit. That escalated quickly. Anytime that you have government regulation meet product solution, it's a home run because buyers now have an intrinsic interest in buying a product that can manage their risk, keep them out of court,

[00:30:02] keep them out of trouble from their losses. We saw direct employers compliance, like this, you know this better than I do, but you look at- This made the organization. Hey, we post jobs on diversityjobs.com because well that's a diverse audience

[00:30:18] and that was something that they could show the powers that be. There's a new law in Europe, a whistleblower law where companies of certain size have to give whistleblowers an anonymous portal to submit cases of the company, behaving badly. Well, guess what?

[00:30:37] There's gonna be a whole lot of companies come out of Europe with this whistleblower dashboard anonymous thing because the government says you have to have it. This is the same thing. AI is everywhere if you don't use it you're gonna fall behind, but guess what?

[00:30:52] There's more laws and regulation to come down the pike. You need some service solution to make sure you're covering your ass that you can go to whatever law agency comes knock on the door and saying no, we're good. Here's Fair Now, here's our shit,

[00:31:07] here's our certification, whatever that is. And Fair Now is in a position to like print money. And tell me I'm wrong, but I haven't seen any competitors come out of the woodwork yet, which really surprises me but right now, as far as I can see,

[00:31:22] Fair Now is in the poll position to handle all companies using AI to recruit to make sure that you're keeping your nose clean and they are gonna print money because of that. I was surprised that it was only 3.5 million. So I have to think that Guru,

[00:31:38] being the Guru that he is said, we're only gonna take what we need. I still wanna have as much control as possible. So we talk all the time about companies fail because they take too much money. I was glad to see Guru not taking a ransom sum

[00:31:54] to start this company because I think he's really smart around this. And yeah, in terms of acquisition opportunities, come on, this is gonna be interesting. So shout out to him, this is a home run. Yeah, yeah, huge applause. Huge applause just like we did

[00:32:10] when he was on Firing Squad. If you haven't listened to that episode and you wanna know more about Fair Now, check that one out. Well from two companies we love to well maybe one that's not so much. 60% of the time it works. Wow.

[00:32:25] So in an article by our friend Jim, the Indeed Whisperer Durban for AIM Group, job search engine Indeed is in a 10% global and 9.4% US traffic drop from January through May. Raising concerns about seasonal trends or AI influence, Jim highlights the fact that competitors

[00:32:46] like Zip Recruiter show different trends such as showing a drop from January followed by four month upward trend suggesting specific challenges for Indeed. What kind of challenges you ask Chad? How about changes in Google's algorithm favoring AI summaries over direct clicks to job boards?

[00:33:04] Chad, your take on Indeed's recent traffic woes. Yeah, you've talked about no-click SEO, right? For I think a couple of years now because they've started to just provide more information before you even need to go to the website and Indeed was the winner of the SEO Olympics

[00:33:23] with Google for goodness sake. So this right now, that could be a very, very bad thing for them. But this kids is just another reason for Indeed to move into staffing. I mean, when you hit the outer edges of your market, what else would you expect

[00:33:38] if you've already hit that TAM and you can't see any other way out, you blow through the walls and you do something more? And again, I really believe, and I said this on the last week show for me, this is incredibly smart, not just for Indeed Flex

[00:33:56] but for the market because it's going to force traditional staffing companies to stop being so fucking traditional, right? They're going to have to employ technologies. They're going to have to be smarter. They're going to have to be good at what they fucking do for God's sakes.

[00:34:11] This is gonna be interesting. So I'm gonna love watching what happens here. Just the tip. So Seth Godin who I've mentioned on the show once or twice before, a well-known marketing guy been around forever. He had a post on his blog recently entitled Better Than Google.

[00:34:27] In this post, he cited perplexity as a better experience than Google. If you haven't checked out perplexity, I encourage you to do that. But he says in his first line that he hasn't done a Google search in months. Pretty prescient and on our AMA call yesterday

[00:34:47] with Jeff Lackey, he mentioned the lack of Google searches that he's done lately. I do think there are some underlying issues that Google's gonna have to face. I mean, employment is the least of their worries, but if you rely on Google traffic,

[00:35:02] like a lot of our job search brothers and sisters do, Google is gonna be really hard mountain to climb based on some of the commentary that I've done. And I think in my own use, I use Google less than I typically have.

[00:35:14] Now, I still think we're a long way from the summaries that Jim talks about. I think we're a long way from saying into perplexity or chat GPT or whatever, what's a job I can do or what job should I take in Indianapolis for sales?

[00:35:29] It's not gonna give you a summary of companies. Like it's the classified world is still very old school and I don't see that changing because of AI. Now, what was interesting to me was his comment about ZipRecruit doing better or not seeing a drop versus indeed.

[00:35:44] So I did a little bit of research before the show, Chad. And this is by no means scientific, but every search that I did where indeed and ZipRecruiter both had the same job, ZipRecruiter was before Indeed. So it says apply on Indeed, apply on LinkedIn, apply on ZipRecruiter

[00:36:04] was always before Indeed. Why is that? I have no fucking clue. It can't be an SEO issue, you know, is indeed like his Google like testing out like what if we own ZipRecruiter and what do people, I don't know, man, but it's if ZipRecruiter traffic

[00:36:22] hasn't crashed and indeed is sagging and a search that I did that ZipRecruiter comes first, you know, before Indeed, you gotta put two and two together in common sense and say more job seekers are clicking ZipRecruiter because it comes before Indeed and LinkedIn everybody else

[00:36:38] just because that's the habit of human beings. So no conspiracy theory yet Chad, but it's kind of weird. And look, indeed, Indeed stuck it to Google for a long time. They wouldn't play with Google for jobs. ZipRecruiter was an early, early entrant to that.

[00:36:55] Is this like Google sticking it to Indeed? Is this, I don't know, but it's something to watch and this decrease in traffic, I think maybe go deeper than just Google summaries and not Googling like it may be deeper. Sorry for the conspiracy theory,

[00:37:11] but it's kind of weird that that's happening. It's so weird. It's kind of weird. It's kind of weird, yes. Again, it's so weird. It's so weird, yeah. Expanded the time, baby, expanded the time. Yeah, no one's crying for Indeed. All right, we'll take a quick break

[00:37:26] and talk about cars. Human resources is supposed to be about humans. I mean, it's right there in the name, but when your hiring team is more like an assembly line glued to their computers, manually posting heaps of jobs everywhere they can think of,

[00:37:45] that human part feels nowhere to be found. This is a new era. Pando IQ takes the mind-numbing copy-pasting and nerve-wracking guesswork out of the job posting process. When you plan a hiring campaign with Pando IQ, you tell us who you need. Then, before you ever spend a cent,

[00:38:01] we predict what it will cost to find them. Pando IQ chooses the ideal recruiting sites from thousands of options, targeting the ones your next great hire frequently visits, then fires off your ads at precisely calculated times, surfacing the most relevant applicants for you to pick from.

[00:38:16] Now you're free to get to know the best talent, build great teams, and take care of your humans. Pando IQ will do the rest so you can get back to doing what the computers can't. For more information on Pando IQ, go to pandologic.com. That's pandologic.com.

[00:38:35] All right, Chad, we like a good car news story. We like good Tesla story and EV stories. Let's throw them all together. This week there was quite a bit of car news first. Internal data out of Tesla shows the company slashed at least 14% of the workforce this year.

[00:38:50] Secondly, Autonomous Taxi Service, WAMO, announced they're ditching the wait list and opening up to everyone in the San Francisco area. And lastly, McKinsey found that 46% of EV owners in the US said they were, quote, very likely to switch back to owning a gas-powered vehicle for their next purchase.

[00:39:11] Chad, what do you make of all this activity in the car industry this week? Yeah, I'm flipping around a little bit. Start with Waymo. I mean, it's just a matter of time. The tech will get better. Traffic cones on hoods won't bother the systems anymore.

[00:39:24] And for people like my wife Julie who hates driving, this is gonna be her transportation panacea for God's sakes. I think GM pulled the plug on cruise way too soon and they're gonna regret it. As for the EV switch, there are a couple of different things here.

[00:39:39] It's like all or none. It's either combustion or it's EV. And the first problem is infrastructure. I mean, when you have a gas-powered car, when you go to fill it up, it takes five minutes. You go to fill it up to plug in somewhere

[00:39:55] if you're taking a long trip, 20 to 30 minutes, right? And we are all about immediacy. So access and then immediacy. So those are the two problems. And then at the end of the day, well, let's put this way. That's why when I buy a car here in Portugal,

[00:40:13] it's gonna be hybrid. It doesn't have to be one or the other. It can be both people. Jesus Christ. And then Tesla layoffs, if you've been listening to the prior stories at all and watching BYD move toward market dominance, none of this should be a surprise.

[00:40:28] None of it should be a surprise. So it was great. I think obviously Tesla came out of the barrel incredibly hot. They had sexy cars. They went incredibly fast. They had plaid speed from spaceballs. I mean, all these really cool, you know, weird Elon things,

[00:40:44] but it is for me, I think it's really short lived personally. Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Other way to add, Spaceballs was released this week back in 1987. Little factoid for the listeners out there who I know enjoy a good spaceballs reference.

[00:41:01] So I'll go in your order. Waymo, yes. You and I saw these cars in action when we were in Phoenix. I did not try one because we had an Uber credit to use, but I don't know if you did or not.

[00:41:11] But the people who had enjoyed the experience, very little negative commentary around Waymo. And I'm with you, man. If I didn't have to own a car, I wouldn't. The insurance sucks. Like what you pay for it, it takes up space. Like it's just a bad investment.

[00:41:28] It's not an investment at all. It depreciates to hell. The second you drive it off the lot. If I could just on an app, get a Waymo, take me to Chipotle, pick me back up. I would totally do that. Now it's not in our market,

[00:41:41] but I think it's just a matter of time before Waymo and there's more competition around the self-driving. By the way, all these Waymos are EVs. So take that for what it's worth if this trend grows, EVs are going to grow. In terms of the sentiment around

[00:41:56] I bought an electric car, but my next car is gonna be gas. Okay, we don't test so that my wife drives. Crazy, I'm kind of, but I get to drive it every so often. And I will tell you that it's a fun experience.

[00:42:06] Like I would buy another EV and that might be our next car. I do appreciate the pushback that if we wanna go on a long trip, so let's say when we wanna go to Louisville. So from Andy to Louisville, there are no Tesla charging stations, right?

[00:42:23] You're in Columbus which is right in the middle. It'd be perfect, right? Put it at that exit where there's a B-Dubs and some other stuff, right? There's a Freddy's Burgers. So like- If we go to Louisville from where we are,

[00:42:35] which is about a two hour drive to Jeffersonville, we have to go further south to charge it in Louisville to then go back to Minneapolis. That's pretty inconvenient. So we've had times where we've said, let's just take the minivan

[00:42:46] because we don't wanna go like an extra five miles to go charge it over in Louisville. We go to Canada often. It's not super convenient. We gotta like kinda go out of the way. So there has to be more charging stations

[00:42:58] to your point that hybrids are having a moment. So to say like nobody wants an EV, I'm not sure that's correct. They wanna be more efficient. They wanna do the environmental thing. Although you can argue whether or not Teslas are that good for the environment

[00:43:11] and I appreciate that as well. But if you solve the problem of easy access to chargers, I think that people would feel much differently about changing back to a gas car and watch the fluctuations of gas prices go up and sentiment is gonna go the other way

[00:43:27] and that's gonna escalate based on gas prices. So I'm not bearish at all on EVs. They're gonna figure some of that stuff out, I think. But anyway, in terms of Tesla, you're right. The stock has been sideways for a year

[00:43:40] or for this whole year, stock has been sideways. China's gonna get in this market in a huge way and even though it won't, you won't see them in America for sure 100% don't have to tax on that. And then even in the EU,

[00:43:52] I think there's like a 38% tax on those cars but in terms of Africa, rest of Asia, South America, these are gonna be a trend and Tesla's gonna suffer for it. I don't see anything anyway around it. They're half the price. They're like $9,000.

[00:44:07] They're half the price of a Tesla. So therefore if it's a 38% tax, yeah, it's 38% tax is like, okay, they're still cheaper. Yeah. And they're talking about like, they're gonna make them in Mexico and because of NAFTA, it's free trade from Mexico. So it's gonna be a pickle

[00:44:23] and Tesla's sort of what's gonna happen to them. I mean, 200,000 people work for Tesla roughly, or sorry, 140,000 people work for Tesla. So let's call it 20,000 people lost their jobs if these numbers are true. I mean, those are real people with real lives and families.

[00:44:39] So my heart goes out to them. It's easy to say 14%, but what does that mean in human terms? So Tesla's got some shit to figure out and some competition coming on the pike. So I think it's gonna be trend, it's gonna be tough.

[00:44:51] Rivian just got a big investment from Volkswagen but then also Fisker declared bankruptcy. So we're seeing a lot of volatility in the EV market, but I think at the end of the day, I think that's the future. Don't deny it, don't deny it. Yeah, yeah. Hybrid now though.

[00:45:07] Hybrid for now kids, hybrid for now. Let's go to some more automation stories. This is pretty interesting. Morgan Stanley, I know that's where you keep all your money chat is rolling out what they call Debrief, a generative AI assistant to help its financial advisors with administrative tasks

[00:45:24] improving efficiency and client engagement. The tool built on OpenAI's GPT-4 will summarize meetings, draft emails and manage notes with the expectation of enhancing an advisor's productivity. I think I smell a trend Chad, what are your thoughts? Yeah, it's too easy. It's too easy.

[00:45:41] I mean, no more taking notes, entering summaries into your CRM, boiling down highlights, creating action items, drafting emails. I mean, that's just for starters. I mean, that's just for starters. It's gonna get smarter. And that's the scary part because as this happens, you're training the LLM, right?

[00:46:00] So the AI could isolate if you're in sales, objections and the best ways to handle those objections which would be amazing for an individual and group trainings. Then it could take the next step, AI voice technology which starts fielding incoming calls, making outgoing calls, emails and other communications.

[00:46:20] Much like teleperformance are using their AI to help customer service reps find appropriate responses and answers faster. Those human interactions are also training the large language model to do what? Well, to provide better responses and answers and possibly take the humans fucking jobs.

[00:46:39] How does this work for recruiting? This is fun. Check out talktosam.ai. It's already happening and it's just the beginning as the LLMs are just a puppy in training right now. It's gonna get smarter, it's gonna get better and our buddy Max Armbruster over at Talk Push

[00:46:57] they did this talktosam thing and he's like, try it out. I'm like, oh, come on man, this is gonna be hokey and corny and just gonna suck. It's gonna be all war games 1984. It was legit. Shall we play a game? Exactly.

[00:47:12] And then we take a look at how we do podcasts. We use Riverside. They've got it infused with some large language model and it saves us a huge amount of time. I also use chat, GPT, Dolly. I mean, so for me, if you're not using these tools,

[00:47:29] two things, first and foremost, you gotta be aware that you're training them in the first place. But secondly, I mean, they're just, they're making life so much easier. Much easier. What are you doing, step bro? This is just sexy. This is the way it's gonna be.

[00:47:43] Look, we talked to Eileen at General Motors when we were in Phoenix. She talked about laying off 200 schedulers, human beings whose only job was to schedule, reschedule, cancel whatever interviews. That's insane. And in today's world, you don't need 200 people working your scheduling. And GM is now 200 employees lighter

[00:48:06] because of technology and Morgan Stanley is following suit and more and more companies will be doing this. Morgan Stanley employs 15,000 or so people. These are some of the numbers posted by one of their executives. They believe it will save 30 minutes of work per meeting.

[00:48:22] Little context, they expect to have, to conduct roughly 1 million Zoom meetings per year. If you're doing the math, that's roughly 500,000 hours that they're saving. Or if you're working a 40 hour week, that's 250,000 full-time employees that will be doing that work.

[00:48:40] So the year of efficiency goes on past its first year. Decades. This is going to impact the bottom line. This is going to impact stock price. People are going excited. This is going to be a huge trend that we're going to see at every company

[00:48:54] that has a certain amount of employees, maybe every company no matter how many employees. The biggest piece around this is data. All of this transcription information, everything gets pushed into your sales force. If they have access to sales force,

[00:49:08] they can see how those leads actually go through the system. The sales cycle for every single individual contributor, so on and so forth. I mean, this is going to make things so much smarter, not just from the standpoint of sales

[00:49:23] and customer service and so on and so forth, but it's going to help managers identify where people are falling down and hopefully help them before they get fucking fired. So that amount of data though is just key. Yeah, if you're not on this train well...

[00:49:38] You done messed up, A.A. Ron! Let's take a quick break and talk about Hooters. What else would you expect after a two week break from Cheezment? Duh. Are you struggling to attract the talent you need today? Do you lack visibility

[00:49:54] into where your recruitment ad dollars are really going? There's a better way. Acquire ROI is a programmatic job advertising platform built to optimize your budget and supercharge hiring. Acquire ROI automatically manages and measures recruitment ads across job boards so you can allocate your budget based on insights,

[00:50:13] not hunches. Get to quality candidates faster and cost effectively scale hiring across roles all while gaining complete visibility and control over your recruitment marketing investments. Say goodbye to manual guesswork, inconsistent performance and wasted spending and hello to optimized automated campaigns that produce qualified applicants.

[00:50:33] At Acquire ROI, we make job advertising easy. Visit us at AcquireROI.com and start transforming your talent acquisition today. All right Chad, while Hooters are all the rage at Edmonton Oilers games and portals between Dublin and New York City,

[00:50:50] not all Hooters are enjoying their time in the sun. Once popular, Breasturant, or I mean Restaurant Hooters, the home of chicken wings and female breasts recently closed approximately 40 of its 300 restaurants worldwide, citing economic pressures. This move is part of a broader trend

[00:51:10] among restaurant chains facing challenges from inflation and that's the money kind of inflation, not the mammary kind Chad. The changing consumer spending habits are impacting it as well. Chad, your thoughts on the sagging business at Hooters? I think once again, this is a business model issue.

[00:51:27] Buffalo Wild Wings was an evolution of Hooters. They serve better wings. They have more TV and most importantly, half of the population, women, actually want to frequent BW3s instead of having a half-naked woman put their tits in their husband's face at Hooters.

[00:51:43] It just makes good business sense not to piss off half the population plus those Hooters girls can probably make more money without fighting off grabbing drunks on OnlyFans. You know Hooters is really going south. I wish they'd get some support somewhere for that.

[00:52:01] Chad, we used to read Playboy for the articles and we used to go to Hooters for the wings. Yeah, sure. None of that was true, of course. We wanted to see women naked or at least partially naked. Look, the biggest thing is that wingstop makes better wings now

[00:52:18] and we have Pornhub and OnlyFans to replace Playboy. So where does Hooters fit in this current trend? It ain't the food and frankly, the outfits are outdated. You feel a little dirty when you go. The wings aren't that like, there's really no good reason

[00:52:34] and you can't take your family there. You can't, you know, you can't take your wife, girlfriend there. You got flat screen TVs that are 85 plus inches large. You can watch any game from home, fry up your own wings. Like it just doesn't make sense to have a Hooters

[00:52:51] in the current day landscape. So I think no amount of support is going to save this company. They're going down the tubes. So I always wondered what it was like to apply for a job at Hooters.

[00:53:02] Like, did they just give them a bra and say, fill this out? Is that how that works? I don't know. Wait a minute, Chad, I've been gone for a while. Welcome back, Teaser. I got another dad joke. My wife was so happy to hear

[00:53:17] that I was giving so much money to Charity until she found out that Charity was a waitress at Hooters. That's right kids, that's right, that's right. I'm back baby. Surprise, surprise mother. The king is back. We out. We out. Thank you for listening to what's it called?

[00:53:36] A podcast. The Chad, the cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology. But most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know. And yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one cheddar.

[00:53:57] Blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. There's so many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Anywho, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.ChadCheese.com.

[00:54:23] Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. It's so weird. We out. How much do you understand the future of finance? I'm Jim Maruz, a top 10 banking influencer and host of the podcast Banking Transform, where we dive deeply into the rapidly evolving world

[00:54:43] of banking and financial technology. Join me as I interview industry experts thought leaders and innovators as they unravel the latest banking trends, disruptions and game changing technologies reshaping the world of finance. Redefine your understanding of the banking ecosystem. Subscribe now to Banking Transform,

[00:55:04] available wherever you get your podcasts and now available on YouTube.