iCIMS Buys a Trojan Horse and Walmart Pours Some Sugar On...

January 12, 2018

On this week's episode, iCIMS buys a Trojan horse, Walmart adds a little sugar to make the layoff medicine go down and hiQ gets some good news regarding its epic battle with LinkedIn. You don't want to miss a second, but if you do, we can still be friends.

What else? Here you go:


- Harver.com gets $4.2 million to bring unbiased hiring to the masses
- Iceland makes a certain employment practice illegal
- Walmart has its cake and wants to eat it too (not so fast!)
- Shoutouts to Sling, Monster, and the 
#ChadCheese faithful

... and much more.


Tune in for free now! Give all your money to our sponsors instead: Sovren, America's Job Exchange, Ratedly, Nexxt and Catch 22 Consulting.



Announcer:       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:                     Hidy ho, boys and girls, we're back to our regularly scheduled show. This is Chad and Cheese, HR's most dangerous podcast. I'm Joel Cheesman.


Chad:                  I'm Chad Sowash.


Joel:                     On this week's episode, iCIMS buys a Trojan horse, Walmart adds a little sugar to make the layoff medicine go down. You like that one? And hiQ gets some good new regarding its epic battle with LinkedIn. You don't want to miss a second, but if you do, we can still be friends. Stay tuned after this word from our sponsor. Chad, there are a lot of employer review sites out there, we've talked about this before.


Chad:                  Yeah, we have.


Joel:                     We've talked about how they're sort of starting to specialize. One such example is review sites specifically for females.


Chad:                  Really?


Joel:                     Yeah, for sure. We don't frequent them because we're not women, but they are out there.


Chad:                  It would be really weird.


Joel:                     Probably, probably, my wife might ask some questions. There are out there and there are two that have been pretty prevalent for a while. One is called InHerSight. One is called is Fairygodboss ...


Chad:                  Yeah.


Joel:                     ... which are specifically for women, so they talk about the glass ceiling, they talk about pay equities, anything harassment, all that stuff. It takes it from that view point. Well, there's another site out there called WomenHack and so this is for women that are technology-focused.


Chad:                  Man, there's going to be a lot of flaming going on there.


Joel:                     There could be. We've talked a lot about the brogramming culture out there in Silicon Valley that sort of permeates everywhere. This site is out there for women to talk about specifically technology and jobs and bosses at these companies and technology. Anyway, it's a lot to keep up with. Monitoring these sites is a real headache. You might want a tool to help you monitor all these sites, which is why I created Ratedly. Ratedly goes out and monitors about 15 employer review sites. You don't have to do it, it does it automatically. Our little system goes out there and does it. We bring it back to you on an easy to read dashboard. We'll also alert you when new reviews come in. Sounds great, right?


Chad:                  That's more than great. Can you imagine the people that you don't have to do with this administrative shit that everything just comes together.


Joel:                     Look, we talk a lot about employer branding, about managing that system. You can't manage something unless you measure it and monitor it. Ratedly is there to help you do that. Now, how much would you expect to pay for such a service?


Chad:                  $10,000 a month.


Joel:                     A month, a year? A month, okay. Surprisingly, our price is only $147 per month for us to do that.


Chad:                  What?


Joel:                     Yep, and we're building in some analytics that's going to be released here this month or early next month that we're really excited about. Ratedly, if employer branding is important to you, if monitoring all these sites and growing is becoming a hassle, look to Ratedly and solve that problem. Especially for Chad and Cheese listeners, use the coupon code cheddar, and you can try us for just $1. If you don't like us, cancel us and you don't have to see us ever again.


Chad:                  Yeah.


Joel:                     It's completely risk-free. Check us out at Ratedly.com, R-A-T-E-D-L-Y.com. Again, that's coupon code cheddar, C-H-E-D-D-A-R.


Chad:                  Yeah, I'm going to try to talk you out of that dollar thing because the whole $149 a month is super cheap as it is. If you're out there and you want to try Ratedly, I'm going to try to talk Joe out of that dollar kind of coupon code thing, so you better use that shit quick.


Joel:                     I could be talked out of that, for sure. Anyway, use it while it lasts, cheddar, a dollar trial of Ratedly.


Chad:                  Boom.


Joel:                     All right, let's get to the show.


Chad:                  Let's go.


Joel:                     Big news this week.


Chad:                  Huge.


Joel:                     The biggest news by far, and January is usually slow, so this was nice to see. iCIMS, ATS, Susan Vitale has been on our show, we love her ...


Chad:                  Yeah.


Joel:                     ... acquired TextRecruit who we've been on a webinar with in the past. This was a big acquisition. I have some thoughts on it. We don't how much they paid. We do know that TextRecruit got three million in funding last year. If they got 10x then this is a 30 million dollar deal for them, which is nice. They'll be a standalone company for iCIMS for the foreseeable future. What do you think about this deal, Chad?


Chad:                  I think it was a no brainer. I think we knew that TextRecruit was going to be acquired somehow, someway. We've been talking about TextRecruit and just text recruiting overall for months. There's no question, I think it's incredibly smart for iCIMS. There's no question. Then you have to take a look at how smart it is for a company like Nexxt because they're already integrated into that TextRecruit system. They're already implemented into it. It's like they have a user base or a prospective employer base or customer base, that is going to be just add water. If you've partnered with these types of companies, it just makes a whole hell of lot of sense. Big ups to TextRecruit, to Nexxt. I know Monster just released that they're going to be partnering with them. Shit man, I think it's ...


Joel:                     We talked about that in the last show.


Chad:                  Yeah, so I think it's a good plan all the way around. Again, Erik and crew, they've been growing out there on the West Coast. This is something that you just had to see coming. There's going to be a lot more of this happening.


Joel:                     Yeah, good for them. I think it's potentially quite a Trojan horse for iCIMS to have. TextRecruit has done a fantastic job of being sort of the go to brand for text messaging and communications with candidates. They're integrated with everybody and everyone, most people that do text messaging are using TextRecruit, or using their underlying technology. They have a great API. I know Nexxt's solution is I think driven largely by TextRecruit. They're the either the underbelly or the underpinnings of a lot of these systems. If iCIMS ever wants to put a fat toll on all these other ATSes to use their text messaging service, I think that's a really dangerous thing for most other ATSes.


Joel:                     I think there's a question of is this just a feature or is an actual product? I think in most cases I would say it's a feature, but it's not easily replicatable. In other words, there are legal hurdles to text messaging. There are things from a globe perspective that are challenging. If I was a competing ATS, I would be looking at who are the competitors to TextRecruit. Canvas, I think we've talked about in the show, they're actually based here in Indianapolis. If they're not getting calls from ATSes and job boards about acquisition or how can we partner together, then I would be shocked at that. Text messaging is future. Email is dying. Mail is not as effective as text messaging by far. This is the way of the future. This is how millennials as much as I hate them are communicating.


Chad:                  Everybody does that.


Joel:                     If you're not recruiting in this fashion, you're in trouble. iCIMS did a very brilliant thing in buying these guys.


Chad:                  Yeah.


Joel:                     We'll see how it plays out. I don't think it's a warm and fuzzy, we're going to let them operate as they have for the next forever. I think eventually it will be rolled into iCIMS and they'll have it exclusively as an iCIMS product. All the other ATSes who don't have it will be screwed.


Chad:                  Yeah, I think it's smart for iCIMS to obviously have different features and different types of dashboards and things like that that are integrated into iCIMS. I think it would be a big mistake if they cut it off to other applicant tracking systems, because there's a huge revenue base there that they would be cutting off. That makes no sense whatsoever. I think it's smart from them from a strategic standpoint to be able to take a look at products that can prospectively generate revenue outside of their system, outside of iCIMS itself.


Joel:                     Yeah, that's definitely one way that it could go. There are a lot of ways that they can pull the levers to make it beneficial to use iCIMS. You can say, hey, if you're an iCIMS customer, you get TextRecruit for free.


Chad:                  Yes.


Joel:                     It's an incentive to use iCIMS because it's their partner, maybe the integration is better, or maybe they have features that the other partners don't have because they ... They could make it better, they could incentivize people to use iCIMS in a lot of different ways. They don't necessarily have to just cut it off for everybody. It will be interesting to see how they leverage this new toy because this new toy is a hammer that's pretty powerful and we'll see what they do with it.


Chad:                  It is but every single thing that we think about, the whole, is going to be attached to revenue. The broader base of revenue that they're going to be able to tap into it's there man, it's there. Now, what about the like you're talking about Canvas. We also heard about the Jobalign this week.


Joel:                     Yeah, tell us about the Jobalign.


Chad:                  It seems very, very smart for them that we saw an announcement. Recruiters and managers can now reach out immediately via text via Jobalign. One of their big focuses, which is very smart from a texting standpoint is they include in a fully compliant manner. They're adding these different aspects to their platform and again, why the hell not? It just makes good sense, especially if they're looking at ... I really don't know Jobalign that well, and I don't know if they're looking to prospectively be acquired this year. This would be one of the things that would be primary on a roadmap to be able to kind of fill out a platform.


Joel:                     They highlighted at the hourly work or the service worker in their service and if you're looking to hire that sort of demographic, text messaging is paramount because these are younger folks, that may not even have a computer, that may not even have an email address. That's literally a thing now.


Chad:                  Yeah.


Joel:                     Younger people don't even have email addresses. If they do it's like because they go to school and they have one but they never use it. Recruiting young people in this fashion like if you don't have text messaging, you're not even going to get to them. Kudos to these guys for realizing that and launching it.


Chad:                  And remember a few months back we talked about Cielo and their high volume product that they put together? That was a lot of that, the engagement piece was based on text. A lot of it was based on text.


Joel:                     Can I interject that I love Cielo's song Gangsta's Paradise before we ... Oh, that's Coolio, my bad, never mind.


Chad:                  Yeah, no it's close though, it's close. I know it's early, you need more coffee. I'm going to have to hum Gangsta's Paradise in my brain all day. It's not bad though.


Joel:                     Not bad, you could have weird house versions in your head all day.


Chad:                  Don't say it.


Joel:                     By the way, speaking of coffee, we totally skipped shout outs.


Chad:                  We should do those because everybody loves a shout out.


Joel:                     Yeah, let's do shout outs. Sorry guys.


Chad:                  Tell us the story about Sling TV.


Joel:                     Sling TV, all right, totally has no connection to the show whatsoever. I'm a cord cutter. I've cut the cord for over a year. We were on Sling but we moved over to Direct TV now for the reason that they had local channels, more local channels on Direct TV now. We went on and it's kind of been a shit show. Like a lot of buffering, a lot of like non-clear picture, which we can only attribute to Direct TV now, because we don't get it on Netflix, Hulu or any of the other services that we use. Anyway, during the national football title game, it was cutting out, I wasn't getting to see what was a pretty good game. I took it out, Direct TV now is adding poop emoji and then I said I got to get back on Sling. You got into it somehow.


Chad:                  Yeah, I was trying to troll you on Twitter.


Joel:                     Yeah, Chad trolls me all the time, stalking. Sling sent me a shout out and said, "Welcome back or hello," which was kind of cool. Quick shout out to Slang. Thanks, appreciate it.


Chad:                  It was my genius of my bye, bye, bye gif that I threw out there and they came back with another gif. Yeah, they were given a slot, that was good stuff. That's what happens. Even outside of the recruiting industry, Chad and Cheese are very powerful on the Twitter.


Joel:                     You know the recruiters of Sling are tuning in to show for sure.


Chad:                  I know it. Before we get into hashtag stuff, I've got to say hey Philly, I love you. Yeah, I know I gave Saquon a bunch of shit because I don't think he's going to do a lot hopefully he does. I'll let you guys know that I'll be rooting for the Eagles tomorrow against the Falcons. There's no question. The Colts obviously are not going to be out there. Even though they from what Joe says, they'll probably be talking Saquon. Hashtag Chad and Cheese on Twitter. Our buddy Jonathan Zila gave us some love. Love the last show and giving us some shit. Yeah, we love you Ed. Cory Kapner man, he's hilarious and he's totally bull shitting us. He says, "I love the podcast, using your episodes to help train new hires." Those are going to be some of the dumbest new hires.


Joel:                     I got to get ... That's got to get the gun man because that company is going in the toilet if they're training new employees with the show. I got to ...


Chad:                  So freaking funny. Monster was giving us love. Monster it's hilarious. Nobody has said anything good about this company, probably for what you say, two, three years?

Joel:                     They haven't said anything, not good, bad.


Chad:                  No, I mean, people saying things about Monster. I don't think they've seen anything good. We've provided a little prediction thinking that with this new leadership that they're coming in with, with new owner Randstad that I think, Joe doesn't think, that I think that this could be their year. Thanks Monster for the tweets, love it.


Joel:                     Chris Cho out there, big fan of Monster and Penny, don't know her last name.


Chad:                  Queller, love it. Chris Russell, yes, the pod father, definitely get a shout out man. We'll see you in Dublin. Nancy from Philly. The job board doctor literally tweets at us about 20 times while he's listening.


Joel:                     Get a life, doctor, Jesus.


Chad:                  Yeah, we love you man. No, don't get a ... just continue man, that's good contact. That's all I've got for the hashtag side of the house. Like I said, Philly is representing out there. I know we have different pockets throughout the United States who are listening.


Joel:                     Philly brings it...


Chad:                  Shout out, hit us with the hashtag and that's all I got ...


Joel:                     Maybe it's the Nexxt connection out there in Philly that really, that's on steroids.


Chad:                  It could be the Nexxt connection.


Joel:                     Tatech.ai conference. I know they're on the list. Tell us about that.


Chad:                  Yeah. They're on the list, February 12th in sunny Arizona, that's where you want to be. You can go to ... you can go to chadcheese.com, we've got actually a banner that's there, you can click on it. Then we have a discount code.


Joel:                     Damn.


Chad:                  Our discount code is Tatechten, spell out ten, T-E-N and then the number 18. Yes, it can't be harder than that. Tatechten18, tatech18. Then we're going to be in Dublin for TA Tech Europe, March 13th and 14th, and that's around what time, Joel?


Joel:                     I can't get over the fact that my Wifi password is probably shorter than the coupon code. That's difficult to remember. I'm sorry what was your question again?


Chad:                  That timeframe that we're going to be in Dublin. What's happening around that timeframe?


Joel:                     Oh, St. Patrick's Day.


Chad:                  If you are in Europe and you're listening, you definitely have to be there, that's a give and that's a hop skip and a jump for goodness sakes. If you're in the US and you definitely want to be able to enjoy some St. Patrick's Day, not to mention some TA Tech, this is perfect for you guys. Check it out. Go to tatech.org and register.


Joel:                     Chad's trying to get me to do kind of a lord of the dance thing in our session and I'm not sure I'm ready for it. However, there's enough goodness in that country to maybe make me change my mind.


Chad:                  I think I can, I think I can.


Joel:                     All right, we're done with shout outs.


Chad:                  Yeah.


Joel:                     All right. Thinkful, T-H-I-N-K-F-U-L is in the news. Tell us about them.


Chad:                  Okay. Thinkful. This is actually off of Tim's prediction. Tim, if you guys listened to the prediction show and you should have, just a couple of shows ago. He said that in 2018, companies will be hiring people without degrees, more of hiring people without degrees, degree-less talent. Thinkful is a coding bootcamp, so instead of getting degrees, you're getting these certifications, you're getting the knowledge that you need to go directly into an organization without getting a four year degree. They just raised 9.6 million dollars in a Series A fund. They're merely at 16 million right now, but if you're looking for full stack developers, data scientists, front end developers, they guys train them up.


Chad:                  From my standpoint, just being on the workforce side of the house and knowing from an economic development side of the house from business, you have to be able to look at building talent pipelines beyond just going to a school. That's just a ... especially when you take a look at the unemployment rate today. I think this is something where Thinkful is charging I think like $15000, $8000 or something like that, for some of these courses. Companies would be incredibly smart if they engaged with Thinkful and they started pipe lining these candidates in, paying those fees and getting this talent on contract.


Chad:                  It's all right there in front of our faces, but for some reason, we want to do things the old fashion way. We need to get out of that shit. We need to start doing things which pipelines candidates.


Joel:                     It seems like we're going to be getting away from these sort of four year degree or have a college bachelors and success is going to be defined by do you have the most up to date skills in sort of these bite-sized educational systems online, almost like badges. Like you'll need this certification and you'll need this ... 'Cause like most people that are in four year colleges that are learning computer science and coding and all that, a lot of stuff is going to be irrelevant in 10, 20 years.


Chad:                  Yeah, but that's what I'm saying is that you can't expect somebody to come out job ready, you can't. Not so much when you go from company to company to company. They have different kind of nuances on what they want you to learn and how you want them to learn it. That's why when they pop out or they're just available and ready and they want to be able to do this, companies should be pushing this. They should be pushing these training programs and then pulling talent in for like I said, three year contract, who knows what it might be.


Chad:                  This is exactly what the military does. If you look at how the military runs. You pull them in, they've got a job, they go through job training and boom, they've got a job for three years, four years, whatever it is. It can be obviously much easier than that without a drill sergeant yelling at you. It just makes a hell of a lot more sense. You're pipe lining your damn talent straight into where you need it.


Joel:                     Military. Yeah, these guys should be contacting companies to give them bulk deals on educating anyone that they need to sort of keep sharp on these systems and new technologies. Yeah, I like this trend and I think it's going to happen. I think what's interesting is how it affects the traditional four year, two year college and the value of that degree. I think what Tim thinks and I think you agree as well, is that we're going to get away from that being so valuable. Frankly, it's so expensive to go to college today.


Chad:                  Oh dude, do you know what Stanford's endowment is?


Joel:                     I do not but you have kids that are looking at these things.


Chad:                  Yeah, this is why I know, 22 billion dollars, that's what their endowment is. It's ridiculous and it is totally tax-free money.


Joel:                     Yeah.


Chad:                  Anyway, that's an entirely different subject but that's why shit's going to change is because it's too expensive, number one. Number two, because we can't get these skills that we need fast enough. Companies are going to have to start playing a role on this. They're going to get the talent that they want and they need.


Joel:                     We got a lot of stuff to go through, so let's take a quick break and hear from Sovren. When we come back, we'll talk a little bit of a ripple in the hiQ versus LinkedIn case.


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Joel:                     hiQ in the news sort of.


Chad:                  Yeah.


Joel:                     Okay, neither one of us are lawyers. I'm going to try to paint this picture about what happened or what the case was about. Rimini Street, I'd never heard of but they're in a case with Oracle who most people know. They essentially provide a service that would go in and log in automatically as opposed to going in manually. They would download materials from Oracle's website and then bring it into their company's whatever clients' dashboard or whatever. Ultimately, the case was they were automatically going into Oracles' software, automatically downloading stuff for clients. Oracle didn't like this.


Joel:                     They said that their terms of service disallowed this thing. That was their core case. The first time they won, Oracle beat Rimini Street. However, there was an appeal. The latest is Rimini Street has been okayed to do what they were doing and that Oracle could not sort of rely on their terms of service, as saying that's how people had to behave on their website. That there were bigger laws or bigger freedoms at play, not just corporate sort of, here's what's allowed and what's not.


Joel:                     Anyway, this is important in recruiting because of the hiQ-LinkedIn case. It does create some precedent of another company going onto another company site, automatically doing something, whether it's getting content on a publicly available by the way site, and making that okay. We'll see how this plays out. Obviously, this whole year we're going to talk about hiQ and LinkedIn and what happens there. The hiQ family seems to be pretty excited about this case against Oracle, and they think this is going to help their case against LinkedIn.


Chad:                  Well, and it should because Rimini Street, they actually had to go through a log in process to get the information. Now, the information was paid for information from their client. Their client was going to have access anyway. They were just facilitating, making sure that they had the information that they felt was necessary to support their client using Oracle products.


Joel:                     Yeah.


Chad:                  Right, makes sense. I don't know why Oracle is even wasting their damn time. This seems like a huge waste of time. Anyway, they're doing it. Oracle has lawyers. They pay a bunch of money for lawyers and what lawyers do this kind of a stupid shit that they do. From hiQ standpoint, yeah, everything that they're pulling is all public data. Yeah, these types of ... We talked about another organization a couple of weeks ago that is, they're standing to band together, and we're starting to see I think a trend and the courts understanding this whole Internet thing. Because we're using dated regulations from like 20 years, which is all bullshit. Yeah, no, I think this is really good hiQ and again, if LinkedIn wants to get off the naughty list, they need to quit doing stupid shit and creating a terms of service that much like Oracle are bullshit. They go beyond actual regulatory statutes have.


Joel:                     They're on my nice list, by the way. If you haven't listened to the Naughty Nice podcast, you should. One of our better episodes, I think. Yeah, there's going to be some pressing around this. This is big stuff. These were laws written in the '80s that have really very little relevance to today's world. The shakeout is happening and it will have ramifications to a lot of businesses. I think we'll see more cases like this that will help or hurt hiQ's case. Yeah, we wanted to bring it to our listeners' attention because it is something that we've been talking about quite a bit.


Chad:                  Go hiQ!


Joel:                     All right. You can sing your 500 mile song. This news biased Chad is singing really bad '90s songs.


Chad:                  Who? Wait a minute. I think on record, you have sang many more '80s and '90s, bad '80s and '90s songs than I have on this pod. Harver, tell us about Harver.


Joel:                     Harver got 4.2 million dollars in Series A investment. That's news worthy in and of itself. Now, what I think is interesting and this is your lane more than mine. They are really pimping their service as sort of an unbiased way of recruiting. They have all the buzz words that they need, automation, AI, deep learning, blah, blah, blah, to present candidates to their clients that are bias-free. They don't look at sex, age, color, creed, religion, whatever. They take that out of the equation. To me, what's interesting is can we become a more diverse workforce through automation AI?


Chad:                  Well, yes, but there's things that need to change that I'd also like to call out. This is another Tim Sackett prediction, where sourcing is dead because AI is starting to do that. This is one of the reasons why it makes sense for machine learning and AI to do it, because it takes I would say a good amount of the bias out of sourcing. Yes, I think this is something that is definitely brilliant for an organization like Harver to be able to kind of pivot off of and angle in off of. Really none of that's going to change until we can totally understand that our job descriptions and the way that we actually go after clients, the actual talent pools and the different sites that we use are already bias. Take a look at the job descriptions, we talked about that on the predictions show too, job descriptions that have four year degrees on them that should not have four year degrees on them.


Chad:                  That's automatically creating bias, socioeconomic bias. If you're in talent acquisition out there and you haven't even thought about this, shame on you first of. Second, get that shit off of your job postings and understand that you are impacting the diversity of the actual candidates who are prospectively qualified besides your basic qualifications, which are bullshit.  That's, why one the big reasons why you're not getting diverse candidates. Those are big pieces. Technology can't help everything because humans screw shit up no matter what.


Chad:                  We've got to fix those guidelines, those gargoyles and then AI can help out more. I think Harver is smart in being able to try to spin this and I think there are more companies that are out there trying to do the same thing. Until we fix our behaviors and the stupid shit we've been doing for years, no technology is going to fix us.


Joel:                     How soon before you think there's a solution that creates incredible bias in their sourcing?


Chad:                  I think it's already out there.


Joel:                     It's called human beings but I'm assuming like at some point they'll say like, "Only recruit male fraternity member," whatever that is.


Chad:                  Yeah, so you see today, I've never heard of it so it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, but you don't see companies that are saying, "Hey, look, let's go after old white males."


Joel:                     Bullshit because Facebook is under some scrutiny about people advertising on Facebook for ageism and other shit.


Chad:                  Yeah, but they're doing it the other way around. What they're saying is and the guy was bitching on about it was an old white guy. Because he was being kept out of seeing some jobs that he felt he was qualified for. The thing is and we have to understand from a company standpoint and from an advertising standpoint outreach, targeting, is that we know that we want to be able to have a more diverse talent pool.


Joel:                     Sure.


Chad:                  To be able to do that, we've got to go into some of these different platforms like Facebook and micro-target for younger, for maybe different regions of the United States or what have you. Facebook isn't allowing that, which I think is bullshit.


Joel:                     Well, may if there are areas that are specifically a different demographic. I'm not even saying that it's evil or that it's on purpose, but that kind of but like seriously, you can advertise on Facebook by age, do they have a college degree, what are they interested in, age. There are so many things that you can segment by and I think age is a missed part of that. Anyway, we're getting off topic but as great as is it, you can source and take out bias, you can also source and put in biases.


Chad:                  Yeah.


Joel:                     I think it will be interesting to see how this plays out.


Chad:                  You definitely have to be careful. You have to be careful and I think this actually rolls into a little place called Iceland, doesn't it?


Joel:                     It does but I do want to interject real quick. Tim, I believe was on Suicide Watch last week because the Black Eyes destroyed his number one ranked Spartans. Again, we hope that you're understand-clutched in the corner and you're feeling okay after that embarrassing moment.


Chad:                  Yes.


Joel:                     Yes, let's go to Iceland, shall we? I don't have a good MP3 Mpeg for that. Let's just big applause to Iceland. Iceland did something very cool this recently. What did they do?


Chad:                  They made it illegal to pay women less. This is coming out of a New York post article. On Monday, Iceland became the first country in the world to force employers to pay workers the same rate regardless of gender, sexuality or ethnicity. The two words that I think are very prominent just in that quote is force employers and why is that.


Joel:                     What do you mean, you don't like that, you like that? What do you mean?


Chad:                  No, I think it's bullshit that employers should already be doing this in the first place. To be able to force them as we hear, it's an equal opportunity employer or they've got diversity and inclusion on their website. Or they've got all these warm and fuzzy bullshit pages, campaigns, it doesn't matter if that's the case. We've been talking about this for over a decade, if you are this equal opportunity employer, then you shouldn't be forced to do any of this. You should be doing this already and it should be fixed, period. That's all there is to it.


Chad:                  I'm giving Iceland props but there's still the forcibly piece of this happening. You know why it happened, here is why it happened. Iceland has nearly equalized the share of women in elective office, that's why. They're about 50-50% men to women in office, and 40% of the seats today in local government and national legislature are held by females. That's why shit's changing in Iceland. When you take a look at our congress and it's a bunch of old white dudes in most cases, that's our issue.


Joel:                     This is a plea from you for more women to run for office?


Chad:                  Yeah, no question. I think we're seeing a lot of that as well. You can see how things change and unfortunately, they had to force employers to go there. Employers should automatically know that paying somebody less and females in Iceland were being paid 14% less, who are doing the exact same job. That's wrong. You need to fix that shit and if you know it's wrong, fix it.

Joel:                     Amen, I got nothing else. I think this is unique to certain countries, particularly socialized countries. This could never happen in America for example. Not never but not in our lifetimes. There's too much commercial interests that's there. You could not make a company pay someone the same because of capitalistic systems that say, we're negotiating by the individual. You can do it for government staff but for private industry, I just don't ...


Chad:                  That's already happening though. It's happening. OFCCP is actually enforcing these types of standards. They understand that and there's actual empirical data that demonstrates that women are poor negotiators when it comes to salary versus men. When you start to see the change and trajectory of what that means 10 years down the road, if everybody gets a 3% raise. If a man's automatically getting paid a couple of thousand dollars right out of the gate higher that his female counterpart, what does that mean 10 years from now?


Chad:                  That's where the huge disparity happens. That's where we understand where the issues are at, we do. That's where we have to take a look at compensation and we have to look at it through unfortunately, the office of the OFCCP. They're the enforcement group of the department of labor. This is happening, whether you know it or not.


Joel:                     The government blah, blah, blah.


Chad:                  You don't want to pay females fair? That's all you man.


Joel:                     I just man ... just because picking sex or anything out of it, just because someone has the same title, shouldn't make a employer pay the same amount for the same job title. Certain people are better than others even though they have the same job. Just because I'm a point guard on a basketball team doesn't mean I'm as good as Kyrie Irving.


Chad:                  Right.


Joel:                     Or Isaac Thomas, right. Because I have the title point guard, I should get the same amount of money. It's just un-American. I understand ...


Chad:                  Un-American, okay, so that's a fine because our military actually has pay grade that specifically focused on that.


Joel:                     Well, that's government, everyone goes in at the same time, they all get the same training. It's not the same thing. If I go to Purdue versus the University of Phoenix online and we're both whatever title, it's just I don't know, I just think it's such a gray area in most cases. Anyway, in a perfect world, yeah, it's communism and everyone has a title and the government says, "Hey, you're going to do this job." I just think it's a very touchy issue and people are sensitive about it.


Joel:                     To me, the world should be a meritocracy, and if you're the best at it you should be paid the most. If it's in demand, like the market forces should dictate the pays. I don't care what color, what sex. If you're the best and it's in demand, you're going to get paid.


Chad:                  That's where bonuses and performance come in, right?


Joel:                     Sure.


Chad:                  There are different triggers that you can play with that, but we're talking about base salary. We're talking about base salary, and if you want to try to confuse fairness with communism, that's entirely up to you.


Joel:                     Anyway, let's get out of this landmine-ridden landscape. Let's hear from AJE, which is a great segue for what we just talked about.


Chad:                  That's exactly right.


Announcer:          America's Job Exchange is celebrating our 10th year as an industry leader in diversity recruitment, and OFCCP compliance. We've been helping our thousand plus customers comply with OFCCP regulations, that directly support positive and effective diversity recruitment, designed to attract and convert veterans, individuals with disabilities, women and minorities, and empower employers to pursue and attract active outreach, with their local community-based organizations. Want to learn more? Call us at 866-926-6284, or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com.


Chad:                  Go to the Chad and Cheese website, click on their logo, boom and it will take you there, so much quicker.


Joel:                     Chadcheese.com


Chad:                  Yeah.


Joel:                     Politics is so, it's just entrenched today in hiring news and it's I don't know if I like it or not. Anyway, some tax cuts came through, new tax policy, republicans here in the United States. Tale of two cities this week, we had Walmart announce an increase in entry level salary, which was previously $10 an hour, now it's $11 an hour. They have their bonus structures and their paying people [inaudible 00:40:44]. They're sort of saying the tax policy has dictated this. I'm pretty sure someone important, president, made a call to the CEO of Walmart and said, "Hey, we want you guys to do something and make this thing work."


Joel:                     I'm sure they were inspired a little bit like a lot of other companies. AT&T and what not, they gave holiday bonuses. Anyway, that happened, but then we also had on the other side Sam's Costco competitor, Sam's Club lay off or close 80 stores. I'm trying to remember ...


Chad:                  63.


Joel:                     63.


Chad:                  Yeah, from a PR standpoint, this is where it's really bad falling for Walmart. They go out and they want to say, "Oh, yay, taxes and tit's great and we're saving money and we can pay our employees a dollar more." Then on the backend of it, they quietly try to shut down 63 Sam's Clubs. There are actually individuals who are showing up to work and the doors were locked. This is where if you're trying to mask and don't get me wrong, I understand the scale, a million employees. This is business, but to try to pull this both together, have a huge announcement and then try to just maybe in your Twitter account throw a tweet. This is not the way to do business.


Joel:                     No, the optics on this are awful. This feels like the old a little sugar makes the medicine go down thing. Like we're going to throw some sugar at the PR gods, but then we're going to hopefully get little attention on this medicine that's going down. I tend to think that Amazon is at the heart of all this. I think that Walmart is gradually going all in on Walmart. The Sam's Club, and I think to a certain really, but jet.com, look about a year ago. I think that is something they want to focus on, the online component, what they're doing.


Joel:                     To me, Sam's Club, Costco is already doing it and doing it pretty well. I think the bulk stuff with Jet, which is owned by Walmart, maybe that's more of the focus for them. I think laying off people sucks and closing places down sucks. To me, this is probably more of market force than just pure evil by the Walmart folks.


Chad:                  Yeah, well it's not that it was evil. Business is business and you've got to do what you've got to do. But don't try to mask ...


Joel:                     Yeah, the optics suck.


Chad:                  Yeah, don't try to mask it with something you're giving a dollar a month to everybody. Don't try to mask that shit. Here's the thing, and I agree the change with Amazon and what not. I also believe as you're 100% right, as they're focusing on the Walmart side of the house, where they're gaining traction for individuals who shop without actually going to Walmart. This is actually what Julie does and she loves it 'cause she hates to go grocery shopping. She hates to go with me because it takes me forever.


Chad:                  She goes online, she buys everything online. She shows up, they fill the back of the car. She signs off and boom, she's home. She doesn't even have to go in the grocery store. There's a ton of traction that's actually happening there. You're still buying local, all those different pieces. I think Walmart's looking to try to, no question, pivot. Just again, optics, there's not enough sugar to make this medicine go down when you try to hide this shit.


Joel:                     I think we should end on that. We out.


Chad:                  We out.


Announcer:       This has been the Chad and Cheese podcast. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a single show. And check out our sponsors, because they make it all possible. For more visit hiredaily.com and you're welcome.








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