Deepfake scam, Employee Theft causes $50bn in damages, and Employee right to disconnect

[00:00:00] Alright, I want to talk to you for a moment about retaining and developing your workforce. It's hard. Recruiting is hard. Retaining top employees is hard. Then you've got onboarding, payroll, benefits, time and labor management.

[00:00:13] You need to take care of your workforce and you can only do this successfully if you commit to transforming your employee experience. This is where ISoft comes in. They empower you to be successful.

[00:00:26] We've seen it with a number of companies that we've worked with and this is why we partner with them here at WRKdefined. We trust them and you should too. Check them out at isofthcm.com. So, BARF, Ryan, let's just talk a little bit about this.

[00:00:50] What is the BARF? Well, the BARF is our new show. Right? This is the look back at the week that was to help you get prepared for the week that is. Right? BARF, breaking news, acquisitions, research, funding.

[00:01:08] Some variation of that but these are things that you and I see throughout the week that catch our eyes. Things that we feel are going to be important to you. Yep.

[00:01:19] And we want to put a little bit of context and a little texture to it as we talk about these things. So, some of them are going to be really interesting to you. Some of them maybe not as interesting.

[00:01:29] We can't cover every new story because gosh, there's so many things that we are out there. So, why don't we start with our first one? You want to start? Yeah, let me kick off. So, this week we got to talk to Marissa Kikari. Am I saying that right?

[00:01:44] I think so. We got that right. So, new hire alert. This is Wilson HCG. So, Marissa is the new CMO. She's based in the UK obviously overseeing all things strategy for the RPO and I think this is an interesting hire.

[00:02:03] You know John, you know Wilson a lot so you can shed something right there. But I think this is interesting because she has a ridiculous background. If you go back and look, just go look at her LinkedIn profile. Just Google her and go look at her.

[00:02:16] I'm going to read this so I don't get it wrong. Ronstead CMO, she was a managing director at AMS. She had a brand for a pontoon. She was at Cornfury, had it up there global marketing and then if you go like way back into the 1900s.

[00:02:34] He's compact and nortel. I mean like she's got a background right? I think this is huge for Wilson right? But I think this is a big deal for Wilson having her there now to represent them in the space. Oh, 100%.

[00:02:52] I think first of all, this is the first professional truly with this type of experience. Marketer that Wilson has ever had and they've done fantastic up till now. So now imagine hiring this type of hire.

[00:03:06] I think as you said earlier, it's putting the industry on notice and basically saying hey we've made a move. This is a really, really, really powerful move. Congratulations to them. Yeah, look out for Wilson in the year to come. We'll say two years to come.

[00:03:25] She's got some big plans and really enjoyed the conversation with her. So I think she's going to be a love person in the industry again. Love it. So something that piqued my interest is a report from stateofworktoday.com and it

[00:03:40] was a stat that came out that basically said 30% of American workers are actively looking for a new job outside the company. I think that's interesting. It's like all we hear about is the negative, how the economy is not doing well, the election coming up, lots of layoffs.

[00:04:00] Every time you log in to LinkedIn, they laid off somebody and it's like wait a minute. Yeah. We got all these layoffs. Layoff. Layoffs. If we got all these layoffs going on, why are 30% a third of your workforce looking for new jobs?

[00:04:15] Just as something like I can't connect them. One of these things is not accurate. But yeah, if you want to take a look through the report, it's at stateofworktoday.com. And what was the number? Was 30%? 30% of American workers. I thought it would be more.

[00:04:31] I thought it would be more. Oh really? Yeah. I thought it would be more. So I'm disappointed but I thought it would be more. It just seems like a high number given all the angst about our economy. Yeah. That's why.

[00:04:48] I think for me, I thought it would be more because I just don't see the level of loyalty from employees to employer anymore. That's right. And so you're constantly thinking. Right? But maybe my numbers are off but you know what?

[00:05:04] So in line to that, we just talked about another call just randomly. But the right to disconnect. So this is out of Australia. So this is, Australia introduces the workers' right to disconnect. And so this is the debate, let's say the debate is real.

[00:05:25] This is not just work-life separation in theory. This is in, I know France has done this and some other countries in Europe. But this is Australia stepping up in the ministry saying you can't force people to work or penalize people to work past working hours.

[00:05:43] And what was the demoted? The podcast demoted, right? They literally just got crushed for something like this or making some comments. I forget the whole thing but it just all. It was an 8 AM meeting and the employee was like yeah, I go to the gym at 8 AM.

[00:06:05] So which again at first glance you're like, yeah, you have a job dude. You go do your job but at the same time it's like yeah, yeah, yeah, setting some boundaries especially I think with a smartphone.

[00:06:19] You get emails, you get texts, you get all this stuff at night on the weekends or in the morning. It's like creating some boundaries for people. Again if we don't do it company-wise they're going to legislate and that's what you kind of keyed in on in Australia.

[00:06:37] Yeah well and I think the so the opposition to this which was really interesting it was complete capitalism at its finest. How's the company going to continue to make money? How are they going to be efficient? How are they going to get things done?

[00:06:49] Well that's on the company. That's not on the employee that you're paying for 9 to 5. Adapt. I like the idea, it's hard. We've all been there. It's hard to do that. I fully understand that. I'm not oblivious to the fact that you need to do something at 5 o'clock.

[00:07:05] Your shift ends at 4. Right. I've always taken the call because that's just how we've grown up. But that's not everybody. That's not today. So I think this is a real thing and I think it's going to we're going to see this continue. I don't know that.

[00:07:20] Yeah, I don't know that it takes hold in the US but I think employers, individual employers that want to build a culture that means something and build loyalty with their employee base. I think this is going to start to take hold. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with you.

[00:07:37] So a thing that piqued my interest today or this week I should say is average, this is a quote, average office occupancy across 10 US cities rose by 53% last week, a post pandemic hot. And this is from the references castle K A S T L E dot com.

[00:07:59] They they monitor, which is a really cool site, but they monitor office space in the United States like what the inventory is. How do they do that? Well, they know all the people at those at the companies that own those properties and they'll tell them.

[00:08:16] I mean, it's like, yeah, they want to rent. They want to rent. They want to rent. We have 30,000 square feet open up in this building. They want to they want that out. They're not they're not going to be private about the the commercial real

[00:08:29] state world is very, very transparent. But yeah, this is in their website. They have getting America back to work. So they study this and what it what it really kind of made me think about is like since the pandemic.

[00:08:43] We've had four years to kind of figure this out. Like if if this return to office is going to create a bunch of, you know, angst or whatever, but it's going to create a bunch of open office space.

[00:08:54] OK, well, why don't we flip those buildings into apartments or condos or multi-use space? Like why do we have all of this inventory? And so for me, it's just like, why do we first of all understand that that's a high number of an occupied

[00:09:14] space, but seems like that we should be we should like they should already have a plan. I also want to say, you know, that growing up in Dallas, you know, it's a real estate market. It is a it's a I mean, there's a real estate business general.

[00:09:31] Like it is a it is a real corporate real estate especially. And when you have a really strong economy, it's like looking at the oil prices and looking at the barrel of the cost. When you have a really strong real estate market, whether it's

[00:09:45] commercial or residential, you probably typically have a pretty good market going on. You probably have a pretty good, you know, you don't have some of the things that we're seeing right now. So like keeping an eye on something like this will be an indicator of when

[00:10:01] the market starts to come back, like just keep an eye on real estate. Yeah, two things I think about when I hear you say all that. How do you say the word? OIL. Oil. Oil prices. Oil prices. I say oil. Oil. Yeah, heavy emphasis on the O.

[00:10:21] I guess. And in Dallas, both bad, both bad. So now the. You think about the cowboys? Just said Dallas is enough. So where does this leave? So to multi space tenants, multi space use, in real estate, get it?

[00:10:43] Where does this leave companies like WeWork, which I looked up and their stock is ridiculously like, right? It's in the shit. But where does that leave companies like WeWork and these and these other whatever they have? Well, if they have a shared office space. Shared office spaces.

[00:11:02] If they if they continue with that model, so it's either you get that model right, which could be one thing is maybe they weren't charging enough. Right. So there's a fundamental like there's a business floor or economics model, either they occupy that space or you've got to do

[00:11:18] something different with the space. Having just having inventory is like a hotel. Having inventory in commercial real estate is not a good thing. No, I want a full building, full occupancy and long term contracts. That's that's what you want. It's like going down the street and seeing vacancy.

[00:11:37] Yeah. Yeah, those are not good things. No, never, never, never a good thing. And then they go for a lease. Not a good sign. That's a bad sign. Never, never again. Never the billboards advertise here. Like, yeah, just put an advertisement up. All right.

[00:11:51] So I've got one that that that I was, you know, I was listening to some stuff and reading some stuff and I just thought, let me go dig in. That is a bit more. This is I titled this The Hidden Cost of Employee Theft. Oh, OK.

[00:12:07] So the Hidden Cost of Employee Theft. Now we're not talking about like stealing pencils and shit like that. That's just a given. Yeah, yeah. So so UKG, which is one of the builders of work, right? Like fundamentally the tech, right? Half the world uses them. Got it, right?

[00:12:25] All all all good. They've partnered with I guess shift board integrated fully now and partnered with UKG on managing it. So I've been following. I love frontline work. The frontline workers base for whatever reason. Right? It's really interesting.

[00:12:41] And I mean, ultimately these are the people that power us. Right? They power everything that this country does or the world does really. The frontline workers. And so shift board is one of those companies that I love in this space

[00:12:56] because of what they do there in this space and they really have a phenomenal product, but this week and they just announced their partnership with UKG. Right? So so check this out. I'm going to throw a couple of stats out of here. I'm going to read this one.

[00:13:12] I don't get it wrong. Seven percent of annual payroll and about one third of all business failures are caused by employee theft. So to put that into perspective, that's more than fifty billion dollars a year in employee theft.

[00:13:31] Now again, this isn't stealing the bag of Doritos on the shelf. This is time, time clocks swiping, punching the time card. Right? People checking in ten minutes early or checking out ten minutes late. And so as I got into this and thinking deeper,

[00:13:49] like, OK, that's a lot of money. Like, but really it's just a problem turns out turns out it's a lot of money. But when you dig deeper and you actually put some brain power behind you, you think about this, you're getting into overtime cost.

[00:14:01] You're getting into contracts and union contracts and labor cost. All of this stuff, right? That should people have benefited all of this stuff. And it's all it's all in this in this in this article that I'll share.

[00:14:15] Forget where I found them, but I'll go back and look and see if I can find it. I was on business wire, which we'll have in the show notes for everybody there to take a look. But it's called fake time, fake time clocking.

[00:14:30] Just not something I've ever thought of. And I just thought this is I have to admit, I've both been a receiver and a catcher on that deal because you clock people in and I've had people clock me in. So

[00:14:45] I think the statute of limitations has run out on that for me. So I think we're good. I don't think I'll be fine. It is a big number. I get you now you can't give me. But the thing is, it is a big number.

[00:14:57] So how do companies crack down? How do they get that money? They're not going to get the money back. But how do they lessen that money? In retail, you're always going to have you're always going to have theft.

[00:15:08] It's it's a game of how do you make the theft around here? And so that's a first of all, we need to just keep track of that. That's a really, really good thing to keep track of. And there's there's a lot of players in this space.

[00:15:21] And me and me is another one in front line workers. There's a lot of others. But for some reason, this one just the numbers in there kind of shocked me. And so I thought there's other people out there that one don't know this and two

[00:15:34] are probably experiencing the pain you need to you need to know about this. Follow it. So another story that kind of piqued my interest this week was hyper and this is quote high performers, women, millennials, comma, comma women, comma millennials are the greatest flight risks when strict

[00:15:53] return to office mandates are imported. And what is this is my gardener. So you can go to Gardner and search for it. It's research that they did around return to office. And what it got me thinking about was, OK, if if your high potentials,

[00:16:09] your high performers, top talent, great talent, whatever you want to call them, if they all have a kind of a yeah, we're just not going to do return to office, RTO as a concept, we're just not going to do it.

[00:16:23] Do we end up with C players at the office? And you know, I'm saying like when we mandate, it's really kind of strict return to office mandate. If we mandate and our top talent says, yeah, you can mandate all you want to homie.

[00:16:38] We're not coming so you can mandate it. You know that we are talking C players in the physical office or C players at the company. See, it seems to me if this is if this tracks, eight players have options, eight players are going to go work for

[00:16:57] whether there's a very flexible office environment where they could go to work or could go to the office or they don't have to. Whereas when you have a strict return to office, meaning you have to whatever the context of that is, those folks are to me,

[00:17:13] those folks are just they have options because they're top talent. They can take their talents to Miami or wherever. I knew that was coming. Did you? Well, we need to go ahead and say that. But so like it's like the one I read it, I thought Peter principle

[00:17:32] and the concept of Peter principle is you're promoted to one state, one level above your competency level. And if the eight players all leave for companies that have better RTO structures or more flexible, whatever the bid is, then who's left?

[00:17:52] And that's that's actually what I was thinking about. OK, well, if they're all leaving and they who's who's still going to the office? Yeah, yeah. So so OK, so what does an organization need to do to that? Not every organization is going to want completely hybrid or remote

[00:18:14] or distribute. They're going to want some type of office presence. Just now you have the question of do you want top talent? That's that's the really the kind of slap in the face here is as Gartner puts it.

[00:18:25] It's if you want top talent, you're going to have to ease your idea of what work looks like. Times of change. You just got to get with it or move on. Yeah. Yeah. Adaptor. Yeah. You got the little T-Rex hands.

[00:18:40] You can either get the apples or you can't get the apples. I don't know. If you want to color orange or something. I got it. What do you got? All right. So so Dex, D-E-X experience. So Dex is just the acronym. But so next thing is the company.

[00:19:07] Right. Next thing acquired a company called Aplerm. OK, so this is all about remote work, right? So just the theme going. It's this is an interesting one for me. So they've been this has been covered, obviously, through BusinessWire and all

[00:19:24] the other, you know, press release for press release sites that are out there. Forbes had a really good, good article on this. And it was in this is in combination. This ties into, I should say, the into the acquisition. Now, the study was not on the acquisition.

[00:19:41] I'm going to cheat here. I'm going to throw a couple of things in because it just makes sense. So listen to these numbers. I'm going to run through with you real quick. There's a couple of bullet points here.

[00:19:52] All right, I want to talk to you for a moment about retaining and developing your workforce is hard. Recruiting is hard. Retaining top employees is hard. Then you've got onboarding, payroll, benefits, time and labor management. You need to take care of your workforce.

[00:20:08] And you can only do this successfully if you commit to transforming your employee experience. This is where I solve comes in. They empower you to be successful. We've seen it with a number of companies that we've worked with.

[00:20:21] And this is why we partner with them here at work to find. We trust them and you should too. Check them out at I solved H C M dot com. 12.7 percent of full time workers, full time employees work from home. Twenty eight percent work a hybrid model.

[00:20:38] OK, by 2025, thirty two point six million Americans because we only think in American terms when our global here, of course. Right. No kidding. We'll work remotely as an FTE full time employee. Ninety three percent of employers plan to continue conducting job interviews remotely, right?

[00:20:59] Sixteen but just 16 percent of the companies actually operate fully remotely with no physical location. So 93 percent will run the entire thing and interview process remotely. But just 16 percent say you don't actually have to come in the office. It's convenient for us to interview you

[00:21:21] remotely, but you need to get your butt in here. Fifty seven percent. Fifty seven percent of these workers said they'd be on the market looking for a new opportunity if their current company did not allow some form of remote

[00:21:35] work and somewhere in there might have been somewhere else that I've seen it. That some form was in the 60 to 70 percent range. 100 percent, right? So this is what you were saying.

[00:21:46] I think it's the you know, if you want to win like this is the this is the bit like I give you a Texas Rangers story. Texas Rangers historically and again. No, no, no. Right. Right. Historically because we had open

[00:22:02] stadiums down here in Arlington and the previous two stadiums were open stadiums. Right. So by the time you mean open air. No, no, no. So like the rest of the country open air. Right. So open air. Problem is is in April they're doing well.

[00:22:21] May killing it, you know, get into June. And then all of a sudden you hit the All Star game tank. And it was for no other reason outside of talent. We'll put that aside for a moment. It's because it was down on the field. It was 120 degrees.

[00:22:38] Now, it was 100 degrees for everybody. But it's still 120 degrees down on the field. So, you know, at the time. No, we always had grass. The original stadium in the newest stadium that was the newer stadium that the George Bush actually when he was governor,

[00:22:57] he was a part of putting it all together before he became government. Right. The original veteran stadium in Philly was Astroturf. That was ridiculous. I played on that and that was insane. No, that's how you get concussions. Now, that's not a good thing. Well, you can get off.

[00:23:15] Well, think about like look at this. The Rangers got a new stadium and it's a dome, right? It's beautiful. All of that stuff is kind of a modern kind of one of those stadiums. But a couple years later, they won the World Series.

[00:23:30] This is a team that's been around for 75 years as either the Washington Senators or the Rangers, they've been around forever. But like to win, they had to realize we have to do something different.

[00:23:42] And that different is we need a dome stadium because it's hot as Hades in Texas in the summer. So I think it's this the parallel for companies that want to win and you want to win with talent because that's pretty much how you're going

[00:23:56] to win. You're just going to have to adapt. You're going to have to bend to the talent, especially the top talent. If you want if you want them because they'll go elsewhere. They'll just do something differently. And so I think you're I think you're on to something.

[00:24:12] And I think it's just something that we should keep an eye on. So let me let me give you one around wellness and financial wellness and kind of came across the desk that I really liked. So this is from SoFi at work.

[00:24:25] So if you're not following SoFi work, it's SoFi at work.com. And then they report a future of workplace financial well-being. So first number 86. And this is quotes 86 percent of employees feel increasingly stressed about their finances. 86. First of all, that number is probably finances, meaning like your personal

[00:24:49] finance, not personal finances. No, personal finances. So that's that first of all, that's probably always going to be a percentage of your workforce that's going to be looking for a job. And that's, you know, they are concerned about their finances.

[00:25:04] So I'm not like, OK, we're going to get that we're never going to get that to zero. They're always going to be somebody that's like, I'm stressed out about my amEx. OK, got it. However, that's a really high number.

[00:25:16] And so what it made me think of when I was reading it is like they had more stats that really kind of like, you know, 37 percent of employees are taking on credit card debt. One in five have borrowed against retirements savings.

[00:25:31] So that's 20 percent for those the non math majors. And again, if you want to retain this talent, as we've talked about, kind of returned to office and some of these other things, if you want to retain top talent, you need to create a really, really kick ass financial

[00:25:47] wellness strategy. And, you know, when it comes down to money, I think we've historically said it's the money that we pay you, but we don't need to think about it. The money that you have that needs help, whether or not it's financial

[00:26:02] like student loans or debt relief or whatever it is, like as a company. Again, if you want that top talent, you've got to cross over and care about their financial situation, whatever it may be. And their programs of place. Yeah, their financial literacy is

[00:26:19] is going to pay off for you. This is very similar to sports and I felt NBA, etc., where they now have. And for years, they didn't. I know. And people were getting massive, massive endorsement deals and they couldn't handle it. Right. And so percent. And so yeah.

[00:26:40] And so this is this is more of the same with that. And this isn't your PBS Suzy Ormond special, right? Right. This is actually managing real money and helping your employees survive and do what they can do to have a better life financially. Yeah. This is interesting.

[00:26:59] It's an interesting place. So I want to back up to the previous numbers that I shared, which, by the way, indeed, up work and flex jobs or friends over there were all quoted in that study. So then there's a whole bunch of companies,

[00:27:18] but those three were provided a lot of data. The so the the piece that comes off of that and what made that really interesting to me and I wanted to tie these two back together. So I said D.E.S.

[00:27:33] And so just so there's no just to clarify. D.E.X. is not the company. D.E.X. is digital employee experience. OK, now this isn't for those that are listening. I may not be familiar with this. D.E.X.

[00:27:48] Digital employee experience is not the tech that you're using. It's not how do I create an experience or an engaging environment for the employee? This is this is how do we manage our workforce? The tech that they're using. How do we support that?

[00:28:07] How do we build that adoption? And so for its 20th birthday, next thing, right, they've been around 20 years now. So they went out and they went to any one shop and they bought some things. And one of those things was App Learn.

[00:28:20] And so this is all about productivity. And I really like this as I dug deeper into it. And so the I shared the information on the previously on the on the study. But there are, where is it at here?

[00:28:37] I wrote it down because I knew that I was going to forget it. The hybrid model, right? So 28 percent of current workforce is in a hybrid model. Twenty percent of companies in America anyway are hybrid. I think it's going to be more overseas. I could be very wrong.

[00:28:57] So so what? So why this is, I think, important for maybe not everybody. But I think this is important to watch because the more we get into a hybrid model, the more support is going to be needed.

[00:29:10] And so what this allows next thing to do next thing to do, sorry, next thing is the RPO, right? That's the RPO next thing. It is. Yeah. So next thing is what this allows them to do is actually support remotely all of their employee base.

[00:29:27] OK, so this is not just supporting when I have an issue like, hey, I can't get into my computer. OK, tech comes in and they log in. It's my login. This is preventing issues from happening. Right? So this allows the this allows the company that they're, you know,

[00:29:44] the allows a company that we run, for example, of like 10,000, 20,000, 40,000 people and allows us to understand. Now it's IT to know, hey, you have an issue coming. This is going to be the issue or Ryan has an issue he doesn't know about.

[00:29:59] You need to go and fix this. And so it gives that IT department, it gives that company the ability to fix a problem for people that they may not even know they have, whether it's an upgrade to software, there's a conflict in software,

[00:30:11] whatever it is, they can now do that. Now, App Learn bolsters that right? And then works with them with with the adoption of all the tech within. And so those two together, I think is is going to be a significant win for

[00:30:26] a lot of these companies in a hybrid model. There's a lot of players out there, but this potentially this is one of the bigger of those. Yeah, I think you're first of all, I think COVID, you know, we cobbled stuff together.

[00:30:41] You know, OK, on March 3rd, everybody goes home and is like, oh, how the hell do we do this thing? And so we kind of fletched our way through that that now we're looking at the efficiency, you know, years later we're looking at, OK, now that's not that's

[00:30:55] going to continue. How do we make that better? We're going to see a bunch of those types of things happen. Side note, I was an early advisor to App Learn and almost an employee, almost the CMO of App Learn, they're based out of Manchester,

[00:31:09] wonderful company, and the founders are also Manchester United supporters. So big huge shout out to App Learn. I figured you were a fan. 100 percent, 100 percent. Great people, great people. I love it. I just think it's going to be a good thing.

[00:31:26] The red side of Manchester, not the blue side. All right, so something on the news side today this week, excuse me. You and I have worked with smart recruiters since it's been around for 10 years, maybe even longer. I was an advisor to Jerome and when Jerome left,

[00:31:48] they went quiet. I mean, they just went quiet like people would ask me like, hey, man, are you still involved? No, not so involved. But I don't know where Jerome is. Probably in the South France, just a guest. What a sale boat. And we just have, yeah, yeah.

[00:32:03] And we just haven't heard from them. So I read this bit this week. It says smart recruiters relaunches their marketplace. And it's that's at marketplace.smartprojectors.com. But when I looked at it, when I dug into it, I'm like, OK, cool, cool, they're coming back.

[00:32:18] You know, everybody likes it. Everybody likes to come back story. Everybody likes that. And once I dug into it, it's like, OK, they've got 183 integrations, which sounds fantastic. And congratulations to none of that stuff's easy. I get it. But then you look at Greenhouse, again,

[00:32:34] someone that we do a lot of work with and have done a lot of work with. They have 484 integrations. That'd be for those non-map majors. A lot more. 300 more integrations. So it's like, should this have been just kind of a quiet announcement?

[00:32:51] Like, is this the thing that announces that you're back when you're not? You're a 300 off of another person that you would compete with in Greenhouse? Like, what do you what's your take on that? You know, it's even when looking, I haven't found anything on smart recruiters.

[00:33:15] You know, and part of me wonders, I mean, I love the team. I love that. I don't really know who's in now. But part of me wonders. Is it relevant? Right. Is smart recruiters relevant in today's marketplace? I don't know that answer. Right.

[00:33:33] When they when you come out with a story that's showing in, you know, one of your competitors and hey, we have less than half of what they have. It's an interesting play. Yes, an interesting play. And I'm sure we'll dig in and we'll get more answers there.

[00:33:46] Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully there's more to come. It just seems like an odd press release that we're going to announce is that we've relaunched our marketplace, which is congratulations again. That's a heavy lift. However, maybe not a press release.

[00:34:02] Maybe that's just something you go back out to your customers and prospects with. And you make it known to them that they've got all these integrations at their disposal, et cetera, you got great partners, that all that tracks for me. Right.

[00:34:16] But what does it track for me is why is that a press release? And so it just again, it made me then go look at, you know, it made me go look at a greenhouse and lever and a bunch of others and go,

[00:34:31] yeah, this is not something you should have talked about in my opinion. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So OK, so a good question on on on on on this one here. So Oracle, it's just kind of an Oracle and ADP play because they're both kind of

[00:34:50] doing the same or Oracle just announced and it was a pretty big announcement that they made and they're really putting a lot of push behind us. So the announcement was Oracle embeds generative AI across the tech stack to enable enterprise AI adoption at scale.

[00:35:08] And so obviously there's a bajillion things that can mean, right? I'm not an expert, I'm not going to want to pretend to be an expert there. So I dug a little deeper on this to see really where this affects town

[00:35:23] acquisition, HR recruiting and it's it feels like it's more the same. It's job descriptions, it's, you know, things like that, right? Like we can write job descriptions, we can write whatever it was like payroll validations and all this stuff. Right. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

[00:35:43] But yeah, I'm tracking with you. Yeah. Yeah. So so my question to you is where where does this sit on the important meter in your mind for the space? Well, because both those companies are public.

[00:35:58] They're really this has nothing to do with HR or their clients or anything like this. This is just this is for Wall Street. This is a press release for Wall Street that basically says we're not getting left behind. You know, we're not we're an innovative company.

[00:36:13] We do innovative stuff and we're not going to be left behind. Does the customer care? No, not at all. Nor should they quite frankly. Yeah. Again, how something gets done unless it's unless it really impacts them then. Yeah, I just want to those things.

[00:36:30] Yeah, I mean, first of all, I think it's needed. I mean, first of all, they're getting great advice from their PR firm or their investor relations team is you should you should make sure that you're always mentioning that these things are happening. We're working on it.

[00:36:43] We've been working on it like with Oracle. They've been working on their own large language model for two years. Yeah, I think. Yeah, it's not new 100 percent. It's not it's not new, but they've got it. Wall Street has a short-term span.

[00:36:57] So they've got to they've got to remind Wall Street that that they're doing innovative stuff now if you strip that away and like does Jimmy or Sally CHRO care? No, not at all. No, not at all. No, forcing them to care is a mistake.

[00:37:15] Well, that's never going to work. So in the same breath, ADP announced ADP assist. Yeah. So saw this on work on workforce AI and some of the others that are out there, which basically is just a conversational interface, right? The health HR, it's a productivity tool,

[00:37:35] it's workflow, database decision making. Yeah, it's not a bad thing at all. But three things kind of stuck out to me, which is interesting. So I'm not a blockchain person, right? I don't I mean, I know I need to know it, but I don't know.

[00:37:48] I'm just going to be honest. Blockchain and staffing is probably the best the best example because it eliminates fraud. You get all they have to be real people and all that stuff. That makes sense. Yeah.

[00:38:00] So OK, so so three things I liked about this in with the ADP assist was I'm not sure I love the chat feature yet. I'm sure it's got to get better, right? I've never used it.

[00:38:10] I can't say one way or the other, but I can say from others that I've used. It's just a. So take me to your leader quickly. Yeah, I mean, human quickly. I just type in agent agent agent agent. Eventually I get somebody.

[00:38:25] But then you don't respond in 30 seconds and they end it right there. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. OK, so so a couple of things I saw here. One was payroll validation. OK, so I thought this was really interesting. So ADP assist will look for anomalies in payroll.

[00:38:42] OK, yes, making sure people are getting paid correctly, whether it's not a bad thing. You're not getting paid enough. They're not getting paid on time. There's something wrong with the time cut, whatever it is. Right? I like that. I think that's and I know that's been there.

[00:38:55] But that's one of those things that a human. Has historically done. Right. And that's just not something a human should be doing. No, this is something technology can handle. I do like and I did see this part.

[00:39:13] It's a I forget what it's called, but it's a reporting suite. Basically, you just tell what you want. Like, I want to see this. Love it right now. I don't know how accurate or not that. But I liked what I saw.

[00:39:24] Right? So I think that's definitely worth looking at. The AI based support, that's more the, you know, the chat stuff. I don't know it's not new. I don't know how great it is or not. But those are the three things that stuck out

[00:39:38] to me with that and that's very similar to the Oracle with, you know, embedding the generative AI across the entire suite. They're all kind of doing the same things. Yeah. Right. So another news article that came across that I really found fascinating

[00:39:57] is Workday and Insparity announced exclusive strategic partnership to provide best in class HR service and technology to small and mid-sized businesses. So Insparity for those that might not know, those admin staff. So back in the day, if you'd have thought of it, one of the largest CEOs.

[00:40:16] And so that's at newsroom.workday.com. You can go and kind of search for it and find the article. But, you know, when you hear the word workday, you automatically most people in the industry they all make you think, OK, SAP and Oracle. That's who you are.

[00:40:34] And that the Fortune 1000, you think of them, the global players, etc. But Insparity doesn't play at that market. Generally speaking, they play down market with SMB and even mid-market. Now what Workdays is, you know, again, don't sleep on this announcement because what they're conveying to people

[00:40:57] is that they are actually going after all the market, not just the upmarket, not even some of the mid-market. They're going after all the market and they're doing it through a partner and a wonderful partner in Insparity. So just don't sleep on that partnership.

[00:41:13] Don't don't because again, it's easy to kind of put people in a box and then say, oh, yeah, I get it. You know, this is the box you play in. No, they're redefining their box and they're doing it with a wonderful partner. Yeah. OK, so funding news.

[00:41:28] OK, yeah, what you got? Compa, right? They went through a funding round, they got some cash. This is a company that you know very well. Yep, I'm an advisor. You are an advisor, right? So we'll just pull disclosure there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah.

[00:41:45] So give us some insight there. Why is this important for Compa? Well, you've got two things. So when Charlie and his co-founders, when they first put it together, it was a combination because he's a comp guy. In fact, he was at work for 10 years or whatever before this.

[00:42:02] And he's a comp full on comp professional. Right. What they were trying to do is make it easier for talent acquisition to create offer letters. So comp is usually inside of an organization. It's off to the side. It's very siloed.

[00:42:18] You know, finance has probably more interaction with comp than HR. Some companies. And so what he was trying to do with comp was bring those two things together, but for talent acquisition. So that you're trying to get a job out of,

[00:42:32] you're trying to or excuse me, you're trying to get an offer letter out. Boom, you've got like 30 minutes. You know, so how do you get real time data on what we can and can't do from a comp perspective?

[00:42:44] But also it's also kind of flagged the importance of pay equity. And I think that that again, one of the things that they're winning on is some of their indexing and the way that they look at comp data

[00:42:57] and show people here's what's going on in your space and your market as the other so that you can be equal. So I think that to me, I think the funding makes sense. It is a really, really tough time to get funding.

[00:43:11] Let's just let's just kind of throw that out. It is a difficult time to raise money if you're institutional. It's also a very difficult time as a startup to raise money. And so for them to get a series A, again, they didn't need it.

[00:43:28] They got it on their preferred terms that they wanted. Now they're poised for growth. Now they can actually do something. But this is a company that started in, you know, two or three of the founders are all working from home.

[00:43:42] And it's nice to see that they've gotten the recognition and they've also now they've got some growth money so that they can actually do something, you know, now that but you'll remember from HR Tech.

[00:43:56] I think it was last year, maybe a year before Compa had a booth down from Jovio and they all they did was put down 50s and 100s and 20s. A little golf. And the stroke. It hit one of those things.

[00:44:14] And they gave me like 100 tries to I was just a failed bit because it would just run over those bills. I'm like, yeah, they were waiting for golf balls and it was a bunch of BS. They cheated everybody. No. All right, I got one for you.

[00:44:29] So Paycom launches a global ACM solution, expands internationally. So here's the deal. Paycom is a lot of the pay. Paylosti, Paycom, Paycore, you know, OK, you go on with them. There's about 400 of them. They all kind of drafted behind ADP and got business from ADP.

[00:44:48] They're being faster, cheaper, higher quality, whatever the bit was. But this is actually really interesting because normally a lot of these they stay within the four walls of the United States. And with Paycom, they've actually already got Canada. They've already got Mexico.

[00:45:05] So they've already got they've already done those payroll libraries. Now they're going to the UK. And once they get into the UK, you're one step away from global payroll. That's that's the thing is once you go to the UK, you figure out how to do all the UK.

[00:45:22] Boom. Now you can go where do you want to go next? And their customers will take them wherever they want to go next. So it's something to keep note of like, OK, the paycom that you thought of is not the paycom of today.

[00:45:34] And it won't be the paycom of tomorrow. Right. And Paycom just appointed their own CMO. Steve Sturgis, I think it was Sturgis. Sturgis, yes, Sturgis. Let me look it up on Miss Bell, Miss Pernoud. Steve Sturgis. Yeah. So he just started last month as their CMO as well.

[00:45:54] And so he comes from a long story background as well. Actually, it looks like he was from University of Oklahoma. Not one of your favorites. 100 percent. Yeah. So you guys have something to talk about. So SpaceX, probed by California over sex bias retaliation claims.

[00:46:15] This will be fascinating to kind of watch it play out because, you know, SpaceX, as we all know, SpaceX is a really cool company. They do really cool stuff. But how in the NLRB National Labor Relations Board, how they process this,

[00:46:34] both California and nationally, how they process this and prove bias versus preference is going to be really fascinating to watch. So let's just, you know, that's on Reuters. So you can look on Reuters and obviously search there to find out more about the particular story and in track.

[00:46:50] Yeah. That's one to track. That's a big company and California is going to go rightfully so. Whether it's smoke, there's probably fire. They're going to go after them. And I think this could be interesting. And California will find it. California has 100% rules and things for everything.

[00:47:08] They will find so. So let me give you another one that was came out of the Hong Kong. I found fascinating. So deepfakes colleagues trick a Hong Kong clerk into paying Hong Kong $200 million. Yeah. OK, I don't know. OK, so here's the bit when you read my article.

[00:47:31] This is news.RTHK.HK. So HK. I'm going to pull this up. It's not going to. So here's the bit. These folks put together basically a Zoom meeting with all AI deepfakes. I'm serious. So they look at it now. It blows my mind.

[00:47:56] They put it all together so the guy on the other end thinks, OK, this is legit. Yep, OK, sounds good. OK, great. Makes a payment, whatever. And it's all fake. And so what's what's newsworthy for me out of this bit is you can't trust anything.

[00:48:13] So like when we're thinking about this, we're thinking about all the positives of AI, generative AI, etc. But when people think about deepfakes, you know, we've got to both from a vigilance perspective, but also training perspective. We've got to train ourselves and our employees and our executives to,

[00:48:32] you know, do what Reagan, I guess said, trust but verify. It's the verification part that I think is going to be very, very difficult. And so it's something to keep an eye on. It's like the first one was just

[00:48:45] I mean, if Lord may be reading it going, how could you fake? And again, this is just a con. It's a scam. It's just like anything else. They're just doing it and it's more real like that had to be pretty damn good.

[00:48:59] It had to be really good, 100 percent. Two hundred million dollars. And that's Hong Kong dollars. I don't know what the translation is, but even if it was 50 bucks, doesn't matter the fact that they would con somebody right out of out

[00:49:15] of being able to con somebody out of money using deepfakes. That's interesting. So this is discover the top three hundred and fifty four most innovative and influential talent management tech companies. So ecosystem, the talent, the talent tech labs dot com. They put out these graphics.

[00:49:33] It's like an infographic has a bunch of bubbles and it shows you the different players. First of all, I hate ecosystem graphics. They usually they just suck like we could go into that for hours, but we won't.

[00:49:46] But TTL, Town Tech Labs, they do the best at pulling these budget, these bubbles together and try to make sense of a confusing market. It's free. Go to the site, download it and take a look at it and see if there's folks that you

[00:49:59] know or don't know on the list. Every year they do or I think it's every year, but their their graphics are easy to read and get interactive and fantastic. And the conversion, by the way, is roughly 25 million, assuming I did it properly. Right. That's a lot of money.

[00:50:15] That's that's a that's a that's a bar tab. Yeah, I got to mention this. I said those the last thing that I got to mention is Katie and Ventures Fun 2. Thirty million dollar early stage funds focused on the next generation of work

[00:50:27] technologies. You can look them up at AkkadianVentures.com. These are friends of ours. So Jason Corsello and Thomas Otter, we've known for 100, 100 years. They in their fund one, they made really, really good bets. I mean, really good. A compo was one of them.

[00:50:45] So they made really, really good bets. Make sure you track Akkadian Ventures so that you find out what they're funding. They do great announcements on who they funded. They just funded for which you and I talked to Joe Esenfeld earlier this week. So they make good bets.

[00:51:02] And if you want to know about the future of work, you look at the funding agents, you look at the people that are looking at this stuff and putting money into these plays. So track that one. Yeah. Well, that's going to wrap it up for the barf.

[00:51:14] It's the barf. If you haven't already subscribed everywhere, anywhere you get your podcast, work to find barf, everything is there. Social, of course, YouTube itself right here. So next time.