Pod Insights The Chad & Cheese Podcast Indeed Feed Frenzy with Jim Durbin About this episode In this episode, your loyal hosts roll out the red carpet for Jim Durbin, the industry's "Indeed Whisperer," who’s here to spill the beans on Indeed’s latest shenanigans. The trio dives into Indeed’s shiny new job posting policies, the corporate game of telephone gone wrong inside the company, and how this hot mess is shaking up agencies and recruiters like a bad TikTok dance. Jim drops some truth bombs about why quality candidates trump a flood of resumes, the nerdy allure of disposition data, and what these changes mean for the wild world of recruitment. The episode wraps with some crystal ball gazing, predicting who’ll be popping champagne and who’ll be crying into their LinkedIn profiles as the industry scrambles to keep up. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction to the Podcast and Guests 00:43 - Jim Durbin's Background and Expertise 01:45 - Indeed News and Changes in Recruitment Advertising05:08Impact of Changes on Agencies and TA Departments 09:52 - Understanding Indeed's Motives and Market Position 13:58 - The Role of Disposition Data in Recruitment 18:56 - The Future of Job Posting and Programmatic Solutions 20:19 - The Future of ATS and Data Management 22:29 - Challenges in ATS Integration and Data Quality 25:10 - Indeed's Strategy and Agency Dynamics 28:25 - The Impact of Quality Candidates on Recruitment 31:20 - Budgeting and the Future of Recruitment Advertising
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Dude, it turns out that Winston Smart Recruiter's first AI hiring sidekick is taking all the grunt work out of Recruiter's Day. Things like candidate screening, scheduling, all the admin garbage no one actually wants to touch. Winston can do it all.
0:17 Speaker 01 Man, you know I'm a fan of using new tech that takes the boring repetitive crap out of a Recruiter's Day and allows them to have more time to connect with hiring managers and candidates.
0:29 Speaker 00 Yep, Winston is doing the heavy lifting while recruiters kick back and do the actual hiring stuff. You know, like talking to people.
0:37 Speaker 01 I really dig that Smart Recruiters is evolving out of the legacy ATS model and embracing cleaner processes using AI. With most ATS providers, it's like, hey, 2003 called and it wants its 30-minute application process back.
0:53 Speaker 00 No doubt. It sounds like Rebecca and the team are using Winston to push Smart Recruiters into the future while the ATS vendors are basically on an AOL dial-up modem with a dashboard.
1:05 Speaker 01 With Smart Recruiters, Winston does the grind and the recruiters get the glory.
1:11 Speaker 00 For more information on superhuman hiring with Winston, visit smartrecruiters.com. That's smartrecruiters.com.
1:19 Speaker 01 Start using Winston today, or I guess you can stick with...
1:25 Speaker 02 Now we return you to our regular scheduled program in progress.
1:29 Speaker 03 Hides your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Soash and Joel Cheeseman 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 Cheeseman Podcast.
1:52 Speaker 00 Oh yeah, this is the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, riding shotgun is Chad Sowash. And please welcome with us Jim Durbin, the self-proclaimed Indeed Whisperer and VP of Recruitment Marketing at responsible.io. Jim, welcome again to HR's most dangerous podcast.
2:16 Speaker 04 Pleasure to be here.
2:17 Speaker 01 Lies, lies already, already.
2:20 Speaker 00 He looks so excited to be here.
2:22 Speaker 01 Lies, lies.
2:23 Speaker 04 Oh, that's beef tallow on the face. That's it. That's just moisturizer.
2:26 Speaker 01 Beef tallow on the face.
2:27 Speaker 00 All right, Jim, some of our, some of our listeners actually won't know you, believe it or not. Give them, give them the elevator pitch on you. What did I miss in the intro? Give us a little bit about you and what you do.
2:37 Speaker 04 Sure. I'm a consultant for TA, for talent acquisition, ran the gamut of staffing, recruiting, corporate, RPO, headhunting. In the last couple of years, I've been focusing on recruitment advertising internally and with RPOs. And then decided what we need to do maybe is focus on how we change our processes and tech for the internal stack. So I tend to work with TA departments on how to better work with their vendors. And that's the whole point is to build that next generation of leaders by showing them data, finance, AI, tech, and how to get more candidates when you need it, less candidates when they're too much, and how to get them cheaper. So it's kind of an interaction piece where I train young folks.
3:11 Speaker 00 In short, Jim, Jim is a wild man at parties, everybody. He loves, he loves sock and all that stuff.
3:18 Speaker 01 So being the Indeed Whisperer, you have Indeed news. So if you could go ahead and kind of consolidate and we'll run through some of what is happening at Indeed. So our listeners know what the fuck is going on, healthy budget requirements, all the, all the fun stuff. So let's chunk it up.
3:34 Speaker 00 Dump it down, Jim.
3:35 Speaker 04 Well, it's probably best to go upstream real quick and think about the story you broke last year where Heim's came out and they talked about the total addressable market and how they're going to start to move further up the funnel. They've been paying for years, you just pay for clicks. Now you're paying for applications. And the idea was eventually to start paying for hires and healthcare and technology. So everything has to be seen through that lens because there have been a number of moves they've made. And in trademark Indeed fashion, they're not communicating them well, which is why I got a phone call and then another phone call and my phone was blowing up. From about last week and continues to do it today. What's going on? And the big news coming out of them is that single source feeds coming out, basically XML feeds from agencies are no longer going to be accepted.
4:17 Speaker 04 So the official and the official announcement, the email announcement says no more single source feeds. And I already know one person that they've been rejected. What that means is all the data's got to come out of your ATS. So it only counts, there's always a couple of caveats. It only counts if you have integrated with an ATS. But that's like over 350 of them now at this point. So pretty much every major, every major company has an ATS that's been integrated with Indeed. So if you're using an agency now, this is quite a big chunk of their work. The reason you even have an agency is because the job data you have, all your job postings put together by recruiters over the years, there's lots of errors in it. It's user generated information. So it's not clean. It's not a good source for advertising.
5:00 Speaker 04 And every time you try to look at that data, you're kind of horrified. So the agency takes it, cleans it up, sends it in this pretty little thing called an XML feed and chooses which jobs are sponsored, how they're supposed to look. It's a way of making sure that the data that gets to Indeed is, is better. And they're cutting that off. So I've talked to a lot of agency heads, they had calls with each of them. They're a little confused as to why, but of course it's always hard to figure out the perceptions.
5:25 Speaker 01 Of course.
5:26 Speaker 04 What's scary is they're all have a different take on it. Some like, oh, we already have a programming fix for it, which I don't see how that's possible because you can't clean up user generated information. You can't fix your recruiters unless you fix the process.
5:39 Speaker 01 Yes.
5:40 Speaker 04 Which means the only people I've ever seen do it are RPOs that you have teams of admins whose whole job is to make that data clean for reporting. Almost no TA department has that kind of resource and they're not going to go back and clean things up. I mean, we have folks that'll open up a job and leave it for three years because it's an evergreen.
5:57 Speaker 01 Right.
5:57 Speaker 04 The only way to get that advertised without spending a massive amount of money is to put it into an XML and have it new. So I'm not sure, it'd be terrifying if Indeed doesn't understand this, but we're looking at changing the way that we do processes internally because the agencies won't have that access, but no one's told the clients. So it looks like it's not going to be a happy thing and it really is an asteroid changing impact. The agencies are restricted from doing more and more and now they don't have the data. They're going to have to change their business models. If any of this is remotely true, because now you have some people say, oh, it's just new ones. No, it's just some minor fee difference. It's over an override. This is goes right to the heart of what I do with every client. I clean up the job
6:38 Speaker 04 descriptions, the title, the databases, the ATS, and work with the vendors to make that clean. That's not an easy job to do and I don't see how it's even going to work without having really, really terrible data starting to come out of these ATSs.
6:52 Speaker 00 So you're optimistic about what's gonna happen, it sounds like, Jim?
6:56 Speaker 04 I'm gonna make a lot of money, so I guess that's happy.
6:58 Speaker 01 They're really bad about communication. Now, is that on purpose? Because it feels like they're trying to create chaos and it's just moving from chaos to chaos, right? So this healthy budget bullshit, now they're moving directly into this and they really suck at clarification around what is happening, right? And really, the devil's in the details, especially things like this, especially when you're trying to, you've got an API to the applicant tracking system. Obviously, if you've ever worked with applicant tracking system before, you know, the maintenance cycles and those types of things, they fucking suck. It's hard, right? And it's not that it's an easy system to actually manage. So do you think this narrative control and this controlled chaos is really just a part of the process for them?
7:40 Speaker 04 I really don't think so. I mean, I've heard some people talk through that. I think the issue is this, it's a big company with a lot of different competing issues. When we talk about recruiting, someone will yell at you because you talk about something you did in executive headhunting and that's not how they do it in high volume. I think there's a lot of that. If you go talk to a CSM, I've been fortunate enough with enough clients, I've sat in front of their enterprise CSMs, their RPO CSMs, their agency ones. It's not just talking to agencies and clients, you're going to hear different things from inside and deep. The funniest thing about this, I think, was that the agency reps themselves didn't know. So this came from up high, hey, we're going to make that change. So they don't communicate to each other. And in the past, I've been okay with it because it's kind of like the way Google's not going to tell you exactly.
8:25 Speaker 04 How to rank number one on the page. People like Joel and I used to take advantage of that. That's how we made our money. So they can't tell you everything. So the CSMs, the customer success managers are stuck telling you what another client did, or what bits of information they got from trust and safety, or from product, or... So they're not given all the information because they don't want to spread it all, because then we'd game it and we'd try to figure that information out. This feels different, though. If you talk to different people, Indeed, we had some joker jump on one of our pages and begin to try to insult us, that we didn't understand how stuff was going. And I was like, dude, you're a sales guy. It's been there 10 months. So I wasn't sure if I corrected him or just hushed him to do so, but then that disappeared. It's scary when they don't know. I think that's the hardest part is where do you go to to find out this information?
9:09 Speaker 04 If what I'm saying is true, it's remotely true. Every TA leader who's gonna be sending stuff, everyone this impacts, and who knows, maybe it's 20% of the agencies, maybe it's 60. They're all gonna have to change the way they post jobs. That is not easy to do. I've lost quite a few clients when I say you have to... You're losing 15 grand a month because you refuse to make this change. And they don't want to make that change because internally then they have to ride shotgun on it. So do they even understand how we do business? Because it reminds me of a couple of years ago when they ran that CPA test. And what did they do? They would tell you, you have to hire people. Oh, you have 72 hours to respond, or you're gonna get charged. And small businesses lost their mind about that. And the response from Indeed at the time, from multiple account managers,
9:54 Speaker 04 you're just gonna have to hire somebody to do that. That's a breathtaking amount of arrogance. And it feels like that too. So do they understand? But this isn't something you can easily roll back. Some of these agencies have just had to trash some programming they've done. It's cost them real dollars already. So it's not minor if someone says, I just lost 30K. That can't be applied to this, or we're gonna have to make these changes. So this is bigger than they've let on, and they haven't even communicated to every agency. They've only talked to the programmatic agencies, which is why my phone was blowing up. They're like, did you hear about this? Did you follow up? And I mean, it definitely, it definitely, I think this is bigger news. You can't get rid of the thing that cleans up your data and then go, wait, what happened?
10:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, I want to go back, go back to the why a little bit. And by the way, Jim and I had a lot more SEO money before our ex-wives went loco. But that's a different show altogether. You touched on why, but you and I, we've, all three of us have been in this industry for a long time. Why, why is Indeed really doing this? Is it to stick it to programmatic? Is it a LinkedIn defense mechanism? Like really, why do, why do you think it is? If you're reading between the lines, why is Indeed really doing this?
11:05 Speaker 04 So it's kind of hard to do that without being tactical. I try not to guess motives since I'm not in the room and it's not like Heim's or Deco were calling me and saying, "Hey, this is why I'm doing it." But I do know this, quality has become a real issue. What do they tell us when you broke that story last year? You're going to get better quality candidates, they're going to cost more. And that's actually happened. In fact, when you start looking at what happens, the, the new algorithm, they have smoothed it all down. They've added smart sourcing, which now is attached to the brain. So you can actually figure out the algorithm by just looking at the smart sourcing panel. You can see how it works. And once they tell you how it works, then you have a good sense of how it's going to. And so they are selecting for good candidates. So if you have a good job description and you have a good resume that's accurate, it does a pretty good job
11:47 Speaker 04 of matching until it doesn't. And this is something I just did it again yesterday. Once, once they can no longer give you your top matches, which is their behavior, their IPs, what you've clicked on, other information, it reverts back to the simple search, which is a text search of the title. So if you're looking for CNAs and you're a certified medical assistant, which is not a CNA, but the word certified's in it, you're going to pop up with one of these jobs and they're going to invite you to apply for it. If you're looking for techs of some kind and you write technician or technologist or just the word tech, you'll get EMT techs and firefighter techs. Not at first, but once the algorithm basically gets, it stutters and it breaks. So you're getting these great people, but the second
12:27 Speaker 04 they try to expand it, then you're getting sometimes 40, 50% just garbage wrecks coming out of it. And this is something we knew earlier in the year. That's a big deal. That means that they are either running out of supply or the algorithm has been so smoothed. And the reason they're mad at programmatic is programmatic keeps changing what they're doing. Every CSM will say, "Do this. Post your jobs, leave them 30 days and then just give us 20% more every time we ask for it." That's their basic pitch. And the problem is, is programmatic kind of gets around that. I mean, it's the whole point of programmatic. It's a smooth that decide which jobs go up and down. So you're not getting waste.
13:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:01 Speaker 04 The real question is, is this model mature now? Like the old joke in marketing, Joel, you know, this one is 50% of my budget's wasted. I just don't know which 50%.
13:11 Speaker 01 Yep.
13:11 Speaker 04 I think we might have reached a point where Indeed can't grow. They have too many candidates that are sitting out there. They've made it too easy with easy apply. How do they actually begin to add to that when they're sending out emails saying, hey, take this other job, or if I quit my job, I can get another one instantly. So they've reached the law of large numbers. I don't think they can grow. And I think this is a big aspect of that. How do I get more money? Because we're not going to be able to grow our size in the industry.
13:35 Speaker 01 Well, well, first off, I mean, they're saying that better quality costs more. Totally get that. Makes sense, right? I don't want a thousand candidates that are for shit, right? And I have to weed through them. Number one. So that makes sense. I get it. This doesn't make sense because you're going to get worse data to be able to match upon, right? Not to mention, let's dig it a little bit further into that disposition data going down funnel. It's not their fucking job. Fixing the top of the funnel is their job. Plus, it's none of their goddamn business who your company is pushing into interview stages, knocking out and hiring. If Indeed did their damn job and matched candidates up at the actual job requirements and provided companies with the market data around the amount of talent actually available
14:20 Speaker 01 within their ecosystem, which matches said requirements, that would be a great service that companies would pay more for. But they don't give a fuck about what the company needs are actually fixing the real problem. That's the thing that drives me crazy the most. This is not the problem. You don't need disposition data. You don't need those signals. What you need to, what you need to know is you have to have better data, which is what the agencies were trying to give you. And now you've just ripped that away from them to be able to make a match on the top of the funnel. Stay out of my systems. That's the thing that gets me. I don't get it.
14:54 Speaker 04 Well, I think the disposition data, why they're so interested in it. If you look back at the way marketing used to work, they went from search and SEO and SEM to conversion companies. They were forced to move down the pipeline because no one cares. cares about clicks and impressions anymore, nor should they ever of the bizarre fake marketing stuff.
15:10 Speaker 01 That's different between qualified, right?
15:12 Speaker 04 Yeah, because because you're buying, you're buying a product.
15:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:15 Speaker 04 You're buying a service. A person is not like that. It goes much further than that. So they're not going to be able to gather that data. What they're really looking for, I think, is what disposition data is. And that's stage, schedule, interview, did someone get hired, how far along they went? That's pretty valuable to figure out what kind of people that you're picking, but are you going to give that to a vendor? I think that's the answer for those. The scarier thing is they're going to come back and they're going to use it just so they want your data so they can justify charging more. That's it. That's the whole game. Hey, you did this hire? Now it's $800. That's how we justify it. And here's how you justify it up the chain. And I get the reasoning behind it, but they're still missing that it's a big ecosystem. And what it takes, I don't know what company out there that has all of their disposition. I mean, sometimes it's all in the hands of the hiring manager.
16:00 Speaker 04 Sometimes you'll go in and you'll have recruiters with negative five days contact to hire because they went in after the fact. When they were busy and put that information in, you can't trust your disposition data because no recruiter got hired or promoted. And they're even praised for having the cleanest database. It's just not something that we do. It's the whole point. You have to clean it up.
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17:09 Speaker 04 So I do think that's a bit of a fool's errand. If they actually got that data, it's going to give you false positives. Like the company that was telling me. That one out of every four candidates from LinkedIn was hired. I was like, that's not possible. And he showed me in his ATS. I'm like, careful with that. Careful, because he had some recruiter cherry picking what was going on. And entering, so one out of four candidates submitted.
17:29 Speaker 01 It was a dropdown.
17:30 Speaker 04 But that's what the report said.
17:32 Speaker 00 Was the first, first one.
17:34 Speaker 01 Yes, yes.
17:35 Speaker 04 Terrifying for those kinds of things. Yeah.
17:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:38 Speaker 04 But it's not just that. It's also the, the $25 minimum one that came out. So.
17:43 Speaker 01 Healthy budget.
17:44 Speaker 04 They announced that like a year, two years ago, the 20, you need $25 minimum for every job, which makes sense. It really affects small businesses more than the large ones. But they just recently came out and I know this is happening because I've had accounts that are flagged for it, that if you add jobs. And this is, this is where the confusion gets. If you, let's say you have a hundred jobs and you're spending $10,000. 15 of those during the course of the month are closed and you want to add 15 more. They're telling you, you have to add to that budget, to that $10,000 budget. Where before it was, here's my budget for the month. I can move as many jobs in or out of that, like it's described as a parking space. Like our parking lot, I can move cars in and out of it. So I've talked to agencies that said, that's still operative. It didn't make any sense. Why would they have a new announcement if that's been around for two years?
18:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:29 Speaker 04 So what it's really leading to is people like having to cut their budgets in half. So if you have a $50,000 budget, you start with 25. And as you add jobs over the course of the month, you add to the budget. That's, that's going to cause a massive amount of spending and that, that's the exact problem now. All that money you had in the beginning is going to go to your old jobs, which means it's going to be more expensive. They're going to pop up. They're going to send them to worse people. If that's really the case, that's probably, it's just shocking that this isn't communicated and they haven't really told you. All they're telling you now is you're getting flagged for it. You have too many jobs they're adding without your budget. So it's just, it's just fascinating. You can't get answers about any of these things. But both of those are pretty huge for us who actually do the work.
19:10 Speaker 00 You know, historically speaking, and I hate being an old guy always doing this, but this sounds really familiar with like the job board drama. So back in the day, job boards used to like want to plug in redirects on Indeed. So like the traffic will get redirected to them. So they look like the. Source for the applicant instead of Indeed and Indeed had to like play whack a mole. And eventually like got so sick of the job boards that they started like algorithmically destroying them. And then, does this rhyme with history or is this a totally different beast altogether? It feels like whack a mole, like Indeed is like the programmatic providers are the new job boards and Indeed is sick of their shit. And they're like, okay, finally we'll just go to the ATS and that's the final solution. No?
19:52 Speaker 04 It would not surprise me. I mean, I can't, I can't predict or say it without having someone tell me.
19:57 Speaker 00 Oh, don't be so nice, Jim.
19:58 Speaker 04 Surprise me. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to find out that's the case. Because programmatic comes in and it makes all the adjustments. They want you to just leave your jobs there. They want you to hand you the money, hand you the jobs, go away and you can get what you get. Programmatic literally goes and interferes with it. A lot of the stuff that I did, the way I posted jobs. I mean, I figured out how to change job descriptions to get higher quality, but I run that through test. If they're not allowing you to do that and you're going to edit it to the job API instead of the XML. A lot of that ability to test things goes away. And I think that ultimately comes down to is it's stuttering their algorithm. And I mean, if you think about all those companies putting in, if they can control it, that's exactly what they're doing is they're controlling their bids.
20:40 Speaker 04 They're controlling how their jobs go up and down. They're stopping a lot of waste. Why get 300 candidates for one job when it should be distributed? Well, then you put caps on it. That's very difficult to do manually if you have hundreds of jobs. And you have to communicate with the managers. That's the whole point of using a programmatic solution, but that makes it harder for Indeed to track the data. And I think that's what a lot of this is about, is cutting off those avenues. The same way LinkedIn used to, you know, you go to SourceCon. And someone from LinkedIn be sitting in the back and whatever tips that you got that day stopped working two or three days later.
21:11 Speaker 00 Yeah.
21:11 Speaker 04 It kind of feels like that.
21:12 Speaker 00 Yeah.
21:13 Speaker 04 Yeah. You know, quit telling people what we're doing.
21:16 Speaker 00 Let's go back to history, Jim. When SEO dropped, none of the ATSs understood like readable URLs and title tag. Like, they didn't know any of that shit. And consultants had a really nice time for four or five years of like creating landing pages that were SEO friendly, like the jobs to webs and those services. Is this similar? Are the ATSs just eventually going to say like, "Oh, we have to have our data cleaned up. We have to like appeal to Indeed. And three or four years from now, all the ATSs just do it right. And we're not even having this conversation anymore."
21:51 Speaker 04 I don't think there's enough money to fix that.
21:53 Speaker 00 You don't see ATSs saying, "We are an ATS that is friendly to Indeed's?"
21:58 Speaker 04 Not at all.
21:58 Speaker 00 Really?
21:59 Speaker 04 What are the favorite ATSs that are out there?
22:01 Speaker 00 They will if their customers say it means something to them. Yes.
22:04 Speaker 04 Greenhouse lever, where the darlings-
22:06 Speaker 01 They've said that for years.
22:07 Speaker 00 Well, they went SEO. They put little like buttons on their jobs. Like, they do respond to customers saying they want shit. And if their customers say, "Look, Indeed wants this, you guys need to provide that," I think they will. But if customers don't get it-
22:20 Speaker 04 I think that you should go look at some of the integrations that have been done. All integrations are not equal. Just because you're integrated, it's not possible. They're not built right. So, Greenhouse and Lever were the two favorite ATSs a couple of years ago. Now, everybody's on to Ashby. It's real simple. The most recent codebase tends to be better because it's built for the modern web. What do you do when you have these old places that are out there? They can't change because they go in and they customize, and they customize, and they customize. Then they have tactical debt. It's not possible to fix unless you tear it out and start over, which is what Oracle tried to do. You know, when they went from Taleo over to the Oracle infrastructures, those are nightmare implementations because there's so much built. We've automated things. Sometimes you just tear it down and start
23:03 Speaker 04 it over. It's very hard to go back when you don't even have the engineers anymore.
23:07 Speaker 00 Yeah.
23:07 Speaker 04 I mean, and there's so many vestigial tales in those ATSs. The quality of the data really is astoundingly bad. Because, of course, no one's minded the store for years. We've let agencies take over for us. Or we just didn't think about it. I mean, how many times have you, "Oh, I have 300 jobs. Oh, God, I have 700. I just couldn't see them." Well, the system sees them, and now I've got to sort through those 700 to pick the 300 I want. "Oh, and the title's wrong on this one. And this one has the percent sign in it. Oh, and this one lacks salary data. And, oh, my God, I posted it in New York City. I've got 300 jobs in New York City without salary data. Now I'm getting fined." I mean, this is serious stuff. This is why this needs to be addressed. And they've just got to do a better job of explaining it. Here's one for you, single source.
23:50 Speaker 04 So based on the letter, and because they didn't discuss this, no one knows this yet. The ATS data, if you're integrated with the ATS, you can't have a single source feed. Does that count Phenom, Paradox, Chatter? Those all have integrations. Not all of them are turned on, maybe it's just the Indeed apply.
24:06 Speaker 00 They're all now ATSs.
24:07 Speaker 04 Phenom covers everything up. That's one of the problems is the source data comes from Phenom because they're scheduling interviews, they're talking people. That's a big question. Nobody knows that yet, or maybe hopefully they've gotten some clarity, but I mean,
24:23 Speaker 04 if they go by the letter of the law, those are all there. By what they said, that's not counting. Or is it going to be selective?
24:29 Speaker 00 Indeed will be able to say you're an ATS and you're not. They're going to be judge and jury on this, right?
24:34 Speaker 01 And again, you go back to a lot of these companies have more cosmetic layers over top of the applicant tracking system because they're just the cosmetic piece of the applicant tracking system, just as ugly as shit, right? So they've got cosmetic layers, right? And those cosmetic layers fix in some cases, those problems where the agencies come in or the RPOs come in and they actually clean all that stuff up. But it's not happening at the applicant tracking system. It's going to be interesting to see who they take the actual feed from, right? And who they actually get.
25:07 Speaker 04 That's the question.
25:08 Speaker 01 The integrations from.
25:09 Speaker 04 And they're not going to cut all the feeds off overnight. That'd be insane. Everybody would die if that happened. It's too much money coming in for Indeed. But they were clear, they were shifting that letter, new or maintain. You can't create new or maintain. So is this the sunset provision that occurred like they did with the CPC where you could leave your campaigns up for a few months? But you couldn't create new ones? Is this three months, all those feeds will be gone or will be selective as they go through? Again, we're not sure because they just said further updates for your existing customers.
25:41 Speaker 00 It's commercial time.
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26:28 Speaker 01 More qualified applicants, less cash. So if you're hiring in the high-volume space like logistics, healthcare, retail, hospitality, warehouse, manufacturing, you get the idea. Stop wasting your time on resume spam. Check out Smart Qualify at talru.com. That's T-A-L-R-O-O dot com. Talru: clarity in job advertising. It's showtime. So back to the agency side of the house, right? So I've talked to a lot of agencies, back and forth messaging, and actually had some calls. And a lot of them were just soft-shooting around it because they weren't really sure what the hell was going on, right?
27:09 Speaker 01 And you can't trust Indeed when they tell you what's going on. But at the end of the day, this move is about centralizing control, reducing agency influence, and extracting more value from employers by getting closer to the source of job data. That was directly from an agency executive. To me, again, getting directly to the source of job data, this is over-engineering a problem. They want all of those signals. They don't need all of those signals. There's no reason for them to have all those signals. They need to do their job up front at the top of the funnel. They're not doing their job at the top of the funnel. Why? That's the big question. That's what they're trying to get to this disposition data. They're not doing their job.
27:51 Speaker 04 They're getting better quality candidates. They can't grow anymore. They've hit a ceiling.
27:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, they can grow their models if they if they move to and like you'd said before, they said more quality is going to do what it's going to cost more, right? Which means they will be able to drive more revenue, right? It's going to cost more. You're going to drive more revenue, which means I can give you less candidates that are more qualified and it's going to cost you more. Makes sense. Makes sense. Plus, I'm not feeding your system with a bunch of individuals who are qualified that you haven't hired. And we just talked to Megan over at Marriott, and they have 10 million people in their database and they're going there first before they go to Indeed. Right? So what Indeed is actually looking at doing right now, which is the stupidest fucking business model,
28:38 Speaker 01 I think I've heard, is we're just going to pour all these people in and then we're going to see who you hire. Well, the next time I go into the process, I don't need to send jobs to you because you just sent me a shit ton of candidates. This, none of this makes sense to me. You don't need the disposition data. You're not doing your job at the top of the funnel. And you want to send me a shit ton of candidates that literally UPS hired 35,000 of 150,000 out of their database that they didn't have to go spend money on Indeed. This, none of it makes sense.
29:09 Speaker 04 Certainly what we should be doing.
29:10 Speaker 01 Yes.
29:11 Speaker 04 Again, TA has got its own problems with this. We've let them put us in this situation. We refuse to change what we're doing. So, but the same, we're also burnt out. They're laying us off. They're talking about getting AI and aspects. And we're not rewarded for those. And this is all brand new. Most TA leaders don't come from a data tech finance background. Why would they? They know how to manage recruiters and put people to work. So a lot of this is new. You start talking XMLs, APIs, webhooks. They don't know what it means necessarily. And a lot of their HRS teams don't either.
29:41 Speaker 01 You've been talking about APIs for 20 years, Jim.
29:43 Speaker 04 And we could be talking about it for 20 more.
29:48 Speaker 04 Apparently XML is not good enough.
29:49 Speaker 00 Might not be around in 20 years. I hope, I hope none of us are around in 20 years.
29:53 Speaker 04 2000, I remember this guy coming to with this great idea for HR XML was going to revolutionize the ways that what we're doing.
30:00 Speaker 00 Yes.
30:01 Speaker 04 It was 2000 when he was like, he was a big thing. They were take money and build an HR XML to standardize. Didn't go anywhere, but XML took over everything. I mean, that was, everyone used it. It's real simple.
30:10 Speaker 01 I think Sherm got behind that, which is probably why it didn't go anywhere.
30:14 Speaker 04 And they got rid of readers.
30:15 Speaker 00 Jim, give me, give me your breakdown of like the winners and losers in this. And most importantly is indeed ultimately going to be a winner loser in this deal, in this deal.
30:23 Speaker 04 I think that this is going to be a slow rollback. I, I can't imagine them actually cutting everybody else off. And if they really try to go for that ATS data, they're going to have a lot of angry clients because it, it just doesn't work. Flat out does. I wouldn't know what to do if I couldn't have access to all that. Some of the programatics, they think that there's automotive, they can do automation for this. I'm not sure. I think this goes back to changing the way we post jobs, which is not the worst thing in the world for us to do is just galling for Indeed to take, you have to do it. You take this expense because we're going to keep shoving candidates at you. If their quality was 90%. If there were someone like Vivian, like Vivian does travel nurses and allied, they tend to be really high quality, but they also tend to be pretty, they tell you what they're going to allow and what they're not going to allow because they, they went from market
31:08 Speaker 04 to market and they're careful not to give you people who aren't good fits. There's no way, the only way they could grow is just more volume. So I think what's really going to happen is the small and medium players are going to pick up people who can actually prove that they have quality, which is not a lot of the boards that are out there, but the assessment companies that are coming along, there's a bunch of new tools for that that are judging intent. So you apply for a job and it starts asking you questions. And because of the way that you move forward, you're like, oh, I actually care about this job versus if it's fully automated, you end up ghosting everybody. So the problem is where do those sit? Does that sit in front of the agency? Does that fit in front of the ATS? And if you're paying for 60% of slop, people who just clicked and have no clue
31:50 Speaker 04 who you are, that, that cost begins to add up after a while. So I think people who are focused on quality are going to do really well. I think recruitment. Marketing consultants are going to make a little extra money and obviously they're going to be start paying because they don't, we don't pay consulting dollars. That's the dirty thing of the agencies is that they do so much for free because of the money they're getting from Indeed.
32:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:09 Speaker 04 So you don't pay for vendor hours. You don't pay for them cleaning up your data. You don't pay for the CSM sitting up at night, putting together giant list of Excel of all the jobs. That, that, that's hard to do, guys.
32:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:21 Speaker 04 No, it's heavy lifting that right now because so much money is coming on the other side.
32:25 Speaker 00 But they will going forward.
32:26 Speaker 04 What will be funny is if Indeed captures a bunch of people and they end up coming back into the fold. You may end up with the two-tier thing here where you have one budget for Indeed and your agencies cover everything but Indeed, which will then push everybody else to innovate because you can't have one source of hire. But I, I think it's going to be a muddled mix. I don't think they're going to be clear winners. Some small company is going to do great. I think the agencies are going to start to be restricted and not all of them are going to make it. I've heard that.
32:51 Speaker 00 Yeah.
32:52 Speaker 04 If what they're saying is true about the single source and they really do cut them off in three months, what does that do to your reporting? What's the, what's the even point of having an agency if they can't clean it up, can't report and they can only edit something at the API?
33:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:04 Speaker 04 That, if that's the case, that's a dagger through a heart. If they really go that far, that's going to be a big deal. A lot of the agencies aren't going to be able to make it from there. I don't think that's the case.
33:13 Speaker 01 Well, not, not on day one.
33:15 Speaker 04 Money flowing to Indeed from the agencies. But again, it goes, we're going to have to learn more just as an industry, we're going to have to start fighting for budget, be clear. Look for alternatives, focus in on our own databases.
33:27 Speaker 00 That sounds like a lot of work, Jim.
33:29 Speaker 04 Maybe some of these AI sourcing tools will take some of the pressure off.
33:32 Speaker 01 The behavior is already there. I remember back in the day of, of the, the monster heyday. They bought Monster and Career Builder. Why? Because of the name. That was it. That was because of the behavior. That was what it was. And it feels like Indeed slowly starting to try to, again, as my agency contact said, trying to knock them down wrong so that they don't have as much control and they're not as close to the, the customer anymore. Uh, and the customer is just like, yeah, just go ahead and throw it in, into Indeed. That's how we do business. That's how they did business back in the monster days. This does not.
34:03 Speaker 04 This has the potential to interrupt how we do business. When I say we, I mean internal, not consultants, not agencies. This is the way that it's going to impact TA in a way that they can't just ignore. And I think there's enough anger out there. I mean, we've seen enough people spit when they say the name Indeed. That's not a good sign. As you pointed out, hey, you made the bed. If you're not willing to make changes, you don't get a cry if Indeed does something for their own business. So it's not even, they're not some evil empire with 15 steps ahead, planning all this 5D chess nonsense.
34:34 Speaker 01 Maybe not 15 steps ahead, but they are the evil empire.
34:37 Speaker 04 This is part of the long-term, if this fits in exactly with what they told us that they were going to do, which is try to become, the only way for them to grow is to basically take over as much of the data as they can, control it, and then come back to you and say, you got to spend more. I mean, that's, that's. I'm not fucking leaving.
34:56 Speaker 04 You can't complain if you're not doing anything about it, but they're just so big in the market. They really are 90% for a lot of companies.
35:04 Speaker 01 So we've heard from many individuals that they don't think that the competitor that's out there for Indeed are job boards or programmatic players. They feel like it's more like the Paradox, the Gem, the Fountain. I mean, all of, all of those systems that allow you to finally dig in and start matching and engaging the individuals that you've already bought. Because most of these companies are starting to realize they've bought the same fucking candidate six or seven times out over, right? And now it's like, wait a minute, timeout. We're just going to do the same thing over and over. We don't want to do that. We already have a limited budget as it is. We need to start using the candidates that we've already,
35:49 Speaker 01 we've already paid for. And some of them, again, like Marriott, over 10 million in their database. I mean, you're going to see enterprise companies start moving that way, which means there's going to be less money for Indeed. I don't think this move for Indeed is going to get them what they think it's going to get them.
36:04 Speaker 04 It's the same thing, I think, as what happened with LinkedIn, when they started charging three-year contracts. They came to everybody at one point and said, hey, by the way, you owe us 700,000 more. We've been misclassifying how you used Recruiter. And we're like, no, we don't. We're just not going to do it anymore. So.
36:18 Speaker 05 You're not going to fall for the banana, the tailpipe?
36:20 Speaker 04 Not at all. You've got to go in and I think what happens is the good news is everyone's going to look at their budget, but as we know, it's waste. Why wouldn't you just turn your budget off for the last four days of the month if it just ends up getting crying? If you're actually looking at the quality day in and day out, once you start looking at it like I do for every client, it's very easy to cut budget. The problem is, nobody wanted to do that because they didn't have other places to put that money. And there's so much pressure, don't add something new. So if you're not careful and they cut that budget, you don't get it back. So the question is, is if we can get better fungible budgeting, we're going to start taking it from somewhere. And I guarantee you, there's waste in every Indeed advertising budget. Once you're aware of that, then you start finding solutions. So it'll take a little courage on our side. Yeah. I think overall, I think it's going
37:04 Speaker 04 to end up dropping the revenues overall. All of these little steps together.
37:07 Speaker 00 Indeed, the gift that keeps on giving, everybody. And Jim Durbin, thanks for coming back on the Chad and Cheese Podcast. For those listeners that want to know more about you, where should they go?
37:22 Speaker 04 Respondable.io, or you can go to LinkedIn. You'll find me on there. Just search the Indeed Whisperer. It'll take you where it's probably the easiest.
37:29 Speaker 01 If you need help with this problem, I don't know, maybe, maybe reach out to Jim.
37:33 Speaker 04 When you're in trouble, look for a man in a hat.
37:36 Speaker 00 How many times is this for you on the show, Jim? Two, three? I know it's two at least.
37:39 Speaker 04 This is the third time I think I've been on because we did, yeah, it's the third time. Always about Indeed. I guess I don't have anything else interesting to talk about.
37:46 Speaker 01 That's what happens when you are the Indeed Whisperer. I mean,
37:50 Speaker 00 We wish we knew how to quit you, Jim. Chad, that is another one in the can. Way out.
37:55 Speaker 06 Thank you for listening to, what's it called? 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, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Anywho, be sure to subscribe.
38:30 Speaker 06 ...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.jadcheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. It's so weird. We out.
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