Breaking News: Layoffs and Lawsuits

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[00:00:29] Welcome to Episode 83 of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces podcast.

[00:00:34] I am one of your two co-hosts, Steven Rothberg with College Recruiter, where we believe that every student and recent graduate deserves a great career.

[00:00:42] And I am the one who is not in the path of a hurricane.

[00:00:47] I'm in the middle of a hurricane, never mind in the path of a hurricane.

[00:00:52] I could turn the camera and you could see outside. It's raining and windy and, but it looks like it's going to skirt me in Orlando. We certainly hope so.

[00:01:02] For those of our viewers who are not familiar with Florida geography, Orlando is kind of in the middle.

[00:01:08] You're not anywhere near a coast. So you're still going to have a pretty significant storm, but you're not in the way of any kind of tidal surges or anything like that.

[00:01:19] Let's get to the layoffs and lawsuits, but I'll tell you no tidal surges here, but there's been some serious flooding in past storms and trees go down into people's houses.

[00:01:30] And it's not far enough inland to say, oh, you're out of the woods.

[00:01:35] And if you don't understand that Asheville, North Carolina and Western North Carolina, where they had devastation two weeks ago from hurricane or Haleen, it's about 400 miles inland.

[00:01:49] So it can happen. Layoffs and lawsuits.

[00:01:55] I'm Peter Zollman. I'm with the aim group. First, we'll start with layoffs.

[00:02:00] Here's the least shocking news of the week.

[00:02:03] Career builder plus monster is becoming a little or a lot slimmer.

[00:02:09] We're picking up various notes from people about layoffs.

[00:02:15] It appears they are mainly people who were at monster, but it could be monster and career builder people.

[00:02:26] I have sent an email to our friends at career builder.

[00:02:30] They're media people, and I only sent it 20 minutes ago.

[00:02:35] So I can't fault them for not responding yet.

[00:02:38] And of course, they don't have a phone number and all of our media contacts there have long since moved on.

[00:02:45] So they combined the companies.

[00:02:49] They are trying to figure out a brand name.

[00:02:52] Other than for now, they have career builder plus monster, which is certainly not a terrific brand name.

[00:03:00] They still run two separate recruitment marketplaces.

[00:03:05] Both of them have shrunken radically since we knew them as number one and number two, and then number two and number one and number one and number two.

[00:03:14] You know, when I talked to Matt Ferguson 20 some odd years ago.

[00:03:20] Former CEO of career builder.

[00:03:22] He was a relatively new CEO of career builder.

[00:03:27] Said his marching orders were two words.

[00:03:30] Beat monster.

[00:03:32] Yeah.

[00:03:33] And then a few years later, he did.

[00:03:35] And now both of them are sad shells of their one time self.

[00:03:41] So the layoffs that we're seeing are so far, at least what we've seen is relatively small in number.

[00:03:47] We've seen a few people there.

[00:03:49] They posted on LinkedIn that they were part of a layoff.

[00:03:52] Look to me like at least one of the people was in a partnerships group and maybe doing the same job for monster or had been doing the same job for monster as somebody had been doing for career builder.

[00:04:07] And the newly combined organization is basically saying we only need one person in that role, not two.

[00:04:13] Until we find out for sure.

[00:04:15] But that was one of the people we saw laid off.

[00:04:18] I saw a post from somebody in a sales role and I saw another post.

[00:04:23] So we're up to three.

[00:04:24] We know of that probably means there were a fair number more, whether it's 10, 20, 30, 50.

[00:04:31] Don't know yet, but we'll find out.

[00:04:33] Right.

[00:04:34] We will find out.

[00:04:35] The lack of a proactive press release and sort of seeing things piecemeal on LinkedIn is pretty normal.

[00:04:44] Yeah.

[00:04:44] But it reminds me of just a couple weeks ago, maybe with three weeks ago now, two weeks ago, when AppCast had a somewhat similar round of layoffs where we saw a few people initially and it ended up being something like 18 to 20.

[00:05:00] Yeah.

[00:05:00] So perhaps it's going to be something like that.

[00:05:02] Very open about that.

[00:05:04] We asked them and they got back to us pretty much instantaneously.

[00:05:08] Yep.

[00:05:09] Yep.

[00:05:09] And Indeed has had layoffs this year and Zip has had layoffs and you name it, everybody has had layoffs.

[00:05:17] So it's not a surprise.

[00:05:20] It's just disappointing when people get laid off.

[00:05:22] Yeah.

[00:05:23] Speaking of Indeed.

[00:05:23] You stole the words right out of my mouth.

[00:05:27] I was literally going to say speaking of Indeed, but you said it first.

[00:05:32] So I'm going to let you go first.

[00:05:34] Aren't I gracious?

[00:05:35] Okay.

[00:05:37] A little bit of a spat there between the number one and the number two job board in the US.

[00:05:43] Yeah.

[00:05:44] If you like swiping, then head over to Substack and search up work defined.

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[00:05:52] By traffic.

[00:05:53] Although job case looks like it's got lots and lots of traffic too, but different.

[00:05:59] Indeed filed a lawsuit this week in US district court for the Western district of Texas, i.e.

[00:06:08] Austin, where Indeed is headquartered.

[00:06:11] And they're slapping zip around for posts and emails.

[00:06:17] Posts made by their employees to LinkedIn and emails sent by their employees to Indeed customers.

[00:06:27] Indeed announced earlier this fall that if you were an employer and they were scraping or sending and you were sending them a feed of your jobs, that you would not also be able to manually post any of those jobs for free.

[00:06:46] You could manually post any of those jobs.

[00:06:48] You could manually post the jobs and pay for that and have them be sponsored, but not basically have two free postings.

[00:06:55] It seems to me that as with so many things by large company, and I'm not referring to Indeed, just any large company.

[00:07:09] Yeah.

[00:07:09] The messaging was handled poorly.

[00:07:13] And people were confused.

[00:07:16] Okay.

[00:07:17] All free ads going away.

[00:07:18] Some free ads going away.

[00:07:20] What's going away?

[00:07:21] What's not going away?

[00:07:23] Indeed has tried to clarify that.

[00:07:27] Let's see.

[00:07:27] It says it still allows employers to post jobs for free, but to avoid duplicate listings, we updated our policy to allow only one source of job listings to appear in job seeker search results.

[00:07:43] So if you post it this way, it's free.

[00:07:46] If you post it this way, it may be free.

[00:07:48] If you post it this way, they're only going to have one of them.

[00:07:51] It seems reasonable if only you understand that.

[00:07:56] And that's a really good way of putting it, Peter, because my reading of that announcement a month ago or whatever it was now, maybe two months ago, I had to kind of read it a couple of times to really understand what was happening there.

[00:08:11] And I'm an owner of a job board.

[00:08:13] Yeah, but not necessarily a very bright one.

[00:08:17] Well, not necessarily.

[00:08:19] You could just get rid of the necessarily.

[00:08:20] But most days, I am able to get out of bed without really hurting myself badly.

[00:08:26] So that's a good thing.

[00:08:27] In all seriousness, when I read the announcement, read it a couple times, thought about, what is it going on here?

[00:08:34] It's exactly what you just said.

[00:08:35] You can post jobs one way for free or another way for free, but not both.

[00:08:39] But if I'm a typical employer, even if I'm in employment marketing or talent acquisition and a primary core function is posting ads or whatever to sites like Indeed, it's still a relatively small part of my job to understand how Indeed works versus zip recruiter versus job case versus any other site and to really understand what is a source.

[00:09:06] That kind of language makes sense to those within Indeed and other job boards.

[00:09:12] But a lot of employers just might not really understand the technical details of that.

[00:09:18] And so I'm not surprised that there was confusion, but it sounds like what some folks at ZipRecruiter were doing was sharing that in an effort to win business away from Indeed.

[00:09:31] Indeed, and Indeed wasn't very thrilled about that.

[00:09:36] Yeah.

[00:09:36] And the real question is, was it legitimate competition, which of course is totally permitted, or was it undue and improper behavior?

[00:09:51] And by the way, kudos to HR Dive for breaking the story.

[00:09:54] Jim Durbin, our recruitment writer, got a lot more detail, but the HR Dive broke the story and we'll have the full story.

[00:10:03] It's already on our website, but we'll have it in recruitment intelligence report.

[00:10:07] Thank you for that nifty QR code.

[00:10:10] aimgroup.com slash recruitment dash intelligence dash landing.

[00:10:15] For those listening to the audio only.

[00:10:17] I think what it comes down to is Zip took advantage of some unclear messaging by Indeed and whether they're going to have to stop.

[00:10:33] They apparently pulled down the LinkedIn posts or the LinkedIn posts.

[00:10:38] Some of them, if not all of them, have been pulled down.

[00:10:40] And one would guess that the emails will have stopped or soon will stop.

[00:10:46] And then, you know, it's probably all over but the shouting and pulling the lawsuit and shaking hands.

[00:10:53] I don't know.

[00:10:54] It looked to me from the post that I saw that Jim Durbin posted on LinkedIn earlier today that what Indeed was upset about was that they're alleging that Zip Recruiter employees were posting that you can no longer post jobs for free.

[00:11:11] Kind of, you know, period, full stop, and a story.

[00:11:14] And if that's what the Zip Recruiter people were writing, it's not really the whole truth.

[00:11:21] You can't post jobs for free twice.

[00:11:25] Yeah.

[00:11:25] And the other question is, was this posted under the aegis of Zip Recruiter?

[00:11:33] Yeah.

[00:11:34] Or was it individuals or maybe even one individual who posted it?

[00:11:39] But anyway, fun times.

[00:11:42] Yep.

[00:11:43] Unfortunately, not fun times for the people who got laid off at Monster and or Career Builder.

[00:11:48] We will no doubt have a report on that later this week on our website when we get more details.

[00:11:55] So far, details are sketchy.

[00:11:57] Kind of like, oh, no, I better not say that.

[00:12:01] But details are sketchy.

[00:12:03] And we're, you know, we're working to find out.

[00:12:06] And for that, I think, Mr. Rothberg, I shall say thank you for setting this up on 40 minutes notice.

[00:12:16] Yeah.

[00:12:16] And here we go.

[00:12:18] Yeah.

[00:12:19] Awesome.

[00:12:19] So, it'd be good to see you.

[00:12:21] I know that you're going to be missing the next regularly scheduled episode in about a week and a half.

[00:12:26] So, I will see you back probably in about three and a half weeks or so.

[00:12:31] Yeah.

[00:12:31] And actually, the next regularly scheduled episode is one week and one day from today.

[00:12:38] Eight days.

[00:12:39] Frightening.

[00:12:40] Yep.

[00:12:41] Cheers, my friend.

[00:12:42] Stay safe.

[00:12:42] Thanks.

[00:12:43] Take care.

[00:12:43] Bye-bye.

[00:12:44] I get it.

[00:12:45] The podcast just isn't enough.

[00:12:47] That's all right.

[00:12:48] Head over to your favorite social app.

[00:12:50] Search up Work Defined.

[00:12:51] W-R-K Defined.

[00:12:53] And connect with us.