Trust Is Down, AI Is Up, and Gen Z’s Changing Everything

[00:00:00] Hey Sandra, wir haben uns ja lange nicht mehr gesehen. Grüß dich, Nadine. Mensch, du siehst ja toll aus. Ja, danke. Ich hab mein Plus fürs gesündere Ich entdeckt. Was? Komm, ich zeig's dir. Die Bewegungskurse der AOK Plus. Kostenfrei für AOK Plus Versicherte. Entdecke dein Plus fürs gesündere Ich und starte mit unserem Selfcheck. Ganz einfach online auf aok.de. Aus Liebe zur Gesundheit. AOK Plus.

[00:00:40] Was ist ein bisschen, was? Ryan Leary, William Tinkup hier mit einer Episode von The BARF. Das ist unser Coming Back von Two Weeks von Travel. Episode von The BARF. William, wie du fühlst, Mann? Du hast du rekovert? Ich habe. Du hast die ersten zwei littleen Travels, Erie und Isolte von Charlotte. Es war zwei Vastlich-different-biss. Aber beide waren basically weeks von Travel.

[00:01:08] I mean, it was four days, so not the whole week. Yeah. But I'd forgotten that, you know, no one does your work while you're gone. Mm. Yeah, that's true. Nobody does your work. Uh-uh. That was the big, that was the adjustment that I have to make going forward with travel, is that I got to do more pre-work and post-work. Because I can't, well, I can. I choose not to do a lot of work when I'm at one of these conferences. You know what I mean?

[00:01:37] You've been traveling for like 25 years. Yeah. Well, I've never been good at it. Seriously, never. I can't point to a time where I'm like, I would see people working on their laptops. Yeah. And I'd be like, yeah. Well, it's work. Yeah, that sounds like work. I think I'm going to watch a movie. Yeah. Yeah, no, travel. Travel, I've always been decent with travel.

[00:02:04] Although this time, well, the last one that I saw that brought my daughter. And so it wasn't very good. So I got to do some catching up. Felt bad sitting there on the laptop. But you know what? These were two good events. I was glad to be out again. Yeah. It's been since. Hasn't been a while. It's been since the fall. Yeah. It hasn't been that long. But the first one we went to, just a quick little recap here, was Recruiting Innovation Summit by our friends over at ERE.

[00:02:34] And they combined SourceCon, Talent42, and ERE together into one event. And they called it the Recruiting Innovation Summit. Dude, I loved it. Me too. Me too. It's, you know, first of all, I love the venue. So let me start with the venue part of it is Red Rock Casino and Resort being, what, 10, 15 minutes away from the. It was 10 miles. 10 miles.

[00:03:03] So it's like, I love that just being away from the strip. You're in Vegas. But to me, it felt like I was in Scottsdale. Yeah. Because you still have the Saguaro's. You still have that stuff. And it's like, I couldn't see from my room. I couldn't see the strip. So I didn't think that I was. And I never went to the casino level. So I didn't hear the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I didn't hear any of that stuff. Mm-hmm. So, and I didn't go to the casino. So I like the venue.

[00:03:31] I would love for more folks to have conferences there. Because you don't leave. Once you're there, once you're that far out, you're not going to the strip. No. No, no. It was a great venue. It was beautiful outside. The, doing a lot of walking and, you know, see all the canyons and stuff. And it was really nice. It was, it was definitely better than the strip. But the event itself, we got to see a lot of people we haven't seen in a while. That's right. That's right.

[00:03:59] We were posted up at the Chatterworks booth, podcasting live at the event, which was pretty cool. That was fun. That was fun because people, I mean, there was only 20 vendors and all the meals and all the entertainment and stuff like that, that was all in that main room. And so they, you could walk through and check out the vendors in, you know, two hours and have good conversations. And they're all startups. I mean, not startups, they were early stage. Yeah. Companies.

[00:04:26] So it wasn't the usual suspects. Like it wasn't everyone's favorite CRM or ATS or, you know, whatever that bit is. Yeah. Or sourcing tool. It wasn't that. It was all folks that I think, you know, again, sometimes you associate innovation with startup. That can be true. That's not necessarily always true. But it was fun. I mean, you and I both walked around and talked to everybody and it didn't take that long.

[00:04:54] And then having conversations with Dave Manister and all of the folks at the show. It was just fun. I mean, it was kind of like our family reunion a little bit. It really was. Yeah. You guys got to see people you've seen like Joshua Jones. Yeah. I've seen him online every day. Yeah. Posting photos and stuff like that. But I haven't talked to him. Good God. Years. Yeah. Well, one of the, I mean, the events, the event, it was great.

[00:05:23] The couple of highlights for me, obviously the podcasting part, which we'll get into today. The, I met a lot of people that I've never met before. Right. It wasn't the same cast of characters. Right. So it wasn't everybody that we knew historically. They had a really good resurgence of new people. And Ryan, one of my favorite interviews, I don't, I can't remember the guy's name, but he's at Hudson RPO. Oh yeah.

[00:05:53] I still don't know you while you figure it out. I still don't know if this was a bit by him or if he really didn't know who we were. Which I love. Either way, if it was a comedic bit, like, like he was just doing a bit, like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to act like I know you. Or I really don't know who the hell you are. But it was like three minutes into it. It's like, you guys actually don't understand recruiting. You get RPO. That's cool.

[00:06:19] I've already talked to people that understand that, you know, really understand the RPO market. And both of us, I'm like, he worked at an RPO. Yeah. I can't remember his name offhand, but he was, I'll tell you what. He was nice. Smart, well-spoken. Yeah. I'm going to find it. And he sang karaoke. He did. At rock band karaoke with Jim Stroud. You sent me that. It was like a, like Def Leppard or something. It was like a rock band. No, it was Beastie Boys. You got to fight for the ride.

[00:06:49] Yeah, fight or whatever. Yeah. It was fantastic. So, all right. So, the second event we were at was iSoft Connect. Yep. And that was at UNC Charlotte. So, I brought my daughter along to tag along. We visited the campus. Beautiful area, by the way. Super, super beautiful area. Yeah. You would think it was a, with a lot of the schools that are off of the main school. Yeah. They're usually urbanized.

[00:07:15] They put them in the downtown area for people to get to and stuff like that. This was out in the sticks. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they say this is an urban campus. I was like, bro, not an urban campus. Actually, my daughter, she says, bro, this ain't an urban campus. I'm like, I got you. I got thrown in jail for saying, bro. Yeah. I got you, fam. Yeah, we're good. All right. Skibbity, bro. Skibbity. Yeah. Whatever. Anyhow. It was a great, again, a great venue.

[00:07:46] The Marriott. Yes. At UNC Charlotte. Yeah. And so, it was legit. Great hotel. Great conference setup. So, they kind of had all of that. You know, everything had electricity. Electricity is important. To us, it is. Yeah. That's the one thing we have to have. Yeah. You know what? I think the trend of smaller events. Yeah. I'm starting to really dig. I like it.

[00:08:16] I think it's great. The big events aren't going to go away. No. But these smaller events, the attendees seem to learn a lot more. I get more out of it. Yeah. If I can see someone three times in the two days that we're there or something like that, see them getting food or see them in and out of a session or whatever, interviews, I like that. And then the big shows, it just never happens. You see somebody. And that's it. You really want to talk to. And then you just don't see them again. Yeah.

[00:08:45] You see somebody at these two, three times. You don't know them in the beginning. You say hi because you were introduced. By the end of the event, you're actually having real conversation. It's not a forced conversation. All right. Both of these fit that. They do. No, you're absolutely right. So great venues, great conferences for both. Okay. Let's get into some trends. We talked to a lot of people. I think we did over 40, maybe 45 interviews over the course of these four days.

[00:09:15] Probably more. Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about it. Um, the first one I want to bring up is, and I, and what will be nice to him because I, I genuinely think Glenn was upset about this. Uh, Glenn Cathy gave the keynote at recruiting innovation summit. And I'm sure everyone knows about this by now. And I want to have Glenn on here to talk about this because by all accounts, it was an amazing keynote.

[00:09:43] And everybody walked away with a big, like, Oh shit moment. Not even an, Oh, aha. It was like, Oh, Oh wow. Okay. And we teased them for a bit on it. Right. Because some people made some, some comments and jokes. And a lot of people did a lot of people are like, I'm still rocked by Glenn's speech. Like he's got me thinking because he did this bit. You've seen Reed Hoffman do this thing where they interview themselves.

[00:10:12] He did this bit where, and he showed them the video. Yeah. And, and it's like, you know, if you didn't think that this could replace you now there's okay. Video evidence that yes, it can indeed replace you. Uh, but it's not going to, um, in, in the ways that you think it will, you'll have to raise your game, step over your game, do this, move your skills around, et cetera, to stay relevant.

[00:10:38] But, but a lot of people took that as they took that fear. And because it's Glenn. Yeah. And also because he does a lot of research. He's very thoughtful. And he put a really good presentation together that I think it terrified. I think people walked out of there like thinking, I, this is, again, this is going to happen a lot faster. Yeah. And they, and they should, and they should be scared, right? They should, this should drive them.

[00:11:03] Now I think that the problem is going to be is 90% of those people left the venue after the event, talked about it during the event, left the event and forgot about it. Went right back to work. Right back to work. And so, you know, that's what I hate about events. So hopefully that didn't happen. But they were calling him the Grim Reaper. Like before we got to him, he was our last interview on that first day. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:29] And before we got to him, there had been six, maybe seven or eight people that had said, I'm still thinking about Glenn. Yeah. I'm still thinking about his presentation, which normally doesn't happen, by the way. I think when you said that, when you said, he was like, I thought it was fair. The look on his face was just like, I couldn't tell if it was a, a fuck you or a, like, oh my God. That's like Glenn's bit. Yeah.

[00:11:58] Because he thought he was balanced. You know, and he is a thought provoking speaker. So, you know what you're getting with him. Kudos. We'll have him on because we need to dig through it and, and really kind of get the full, the full skinny on it. But the, the second piece, we were at ISOF and I'll let you, there's a, there's a photo of you. I don't know if you saw it yet. Yeah, I did. We were interviewing Steve. Yeah. Steve Lederman or Letterman. Hopefully got his name right.

[00:12:28] From ISOF. He is their head of fraud prevention. He had said something. I don't know what he said, but your face at that moment was just like jaw drop freeze frame. And the photographer got it at the perfect moment. It's the exact right moment.

[00:12:46] I think the thing is, it was the first time he talked about the way that people are using fraud in payroll where he was like, they're not just going after an individual. They're going after, they're setting up companies and running payroll. And usually there's a float with payroll companies. Sure. So you set up a company, you've got 150 employees, your payrolls, dollars, you set everything up.

[00:13:13] They don't, they don't, they have access to your bank and all that stuff. And you set all that stuff up, but, and you can have the money in there for that day. You run payroll and then you fold up shop and you just move on a new thing. And I'm like, I had not considered that. And he came out of the banking industry and credit card fraud. So he's seen this. He's seen all this stuff. Spent, spent many hours on the dark web. I think the other thing is like, you can buy someone's identity for like $6.

[00:13:43] Yeah. I'm like, that, that was another one. I'm like, really? Okay. Well, that proved my point about privacy. So there you go. Good. Yeah. But yeah, I think the thing that we talk about payroll a lot and we talked to a lot of payroll companies and it just never, the idea of fraud, like I'd always kind of thought about mistakes, honest mistakes. I didn't put in my hours correctly. They weren't approved correctly. Payroll administrator didn't get them in correctly.

[00:14:13] Like this errors. I'd really never dug deep into fraud and payroll. Yeah. Well, none of them actually brought whether or not that's not just what they want to talk to us about, but they haven't brought it up. I know. Nobody's brought it up. He was the first and for obvious reasons, because this is what he does. He has a team. Yeah. Yeah. But I think the, one of the, we always like to ask the question, what should customers or prospects ask you?

[00:14:43] Right. And, and he just, he just laid it out. He's a fraud. He's like, let's talk about that. And if they don't have someone in charge of fraud, then walk the other way. Yeah. It's, it's, it's all a risk. It's company risk and they're not going to sue the payroll company. They're going to sue the company. Yeah. So the risk is actually at the company level. So that's why you want to make sure that you have a fraud, a fraud prevention team. Yeah.

[00:15:10] With somebody that's actually got skills in that area. So that, so any of the, any of the payroll plays that we know, core HR plays that we know, if they don't already have a fraud prevention team in place, they're behind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a great buying question. It really is. All right. You want to get into some breaking news here? Yeah, let's do it. Let's jump into it. All right. So I, I put this story in cause I just, I don't know. I liked it.

[00:15:38] Uh, the U S office of personnel management. So OPM has awarded $342,000, $342,200 as a sole source contract to work day to overhaul its HR systems throughout the entire government. So this was a decision, uh, just came out. Uh, I believe it was on the eighth or the seventh, something like that.

[00:16:05] Um, decision was made, uh, without competitive built, uh, bidding and they cited obviously, uh, urgent operational failures. Um, and it was able to pull like kind of wartime stuff, right. Pulls up federal mandates that they don't require them to, to go through a bidding process. Um, and they, and they say that, that work day is able to manage all of these issues, the payroll errors, the benefit issues, the poor hiring system to bring it up.

[00:16:35] All in house and handle it for them. That doesn't seem like a lot of money. First of all, I like the deal. I like having this 12 month. That's a 12 month agreement. Doesn't seem like $400,000. Yeah. It doesn't seem like a ton of money. Yeah. And they did, they did put a cost savings on it of 70%. So I don't know. Oh, that's probably a, that's probably a, I don't know if that meant like over what they're currently doing. Right. Or who knows, but that's just where. I like, uh, first of all, work, work day is fun.

[00:17:05] Especially in a single source. And now that they've built out a great marketplace ecosystem, stuff like that. Somebody's got to do that. Whether or not it's, it's going to be ASAP or a work day. Somebody's got to be able to own that business and be able to kind of really clean things up. And that's what they're really trying to do. I mean, that's, at least that's what you hear in the media. That's what those are trying to do is just like clean shit. Yeah. And some of that's with humans and some of that's with technology. Correct.

[00:17:34] If all the data is on one platform, that's good for everybody. Yeah. So congrats to work day and. 100%. And all of that. Yeah. I like, I like that. Okay. So, uh, let me explain this story and just kind of hold your, hold your response to the end. I hold me applause. No, no, it won't be applause. Employees want to, to work micro shifts or six hour working shifts at a time.

[00:18:03] Gen Z sets another workforce trend in 2025. This is a Forbes article. So you can go to Forbes.com and read more about it. All right. So I'll give you my bit. Tone deaf. Uh, we're in a long-term economic decline. With no ending in sight. No one really knows it could turn around right tomorrow, which would be great or not. And that would not be great. And, uh, these fuckers are thinking about working less.

[00:18:33] Like, I don't, I don't understand. I mean, you know, this is something you, you usually get when the economy is buzzing. Just crazy. And it's just like, Hey, why don't we do? Why don't we do more stuff to like burnout? It's going to be really real. Why don't we go to a four-day work week? Why don't we do some smaller shifts? Why don't we do something like that? So that we can keep people and retain them because it's going to be harder to recruit them.

[00:19:02] Uh, that's not true right now. It's actually pretty easy to recruit. Yeah. Look, these are the same people using their, you know, texting their, their buddies during the interview. Right. I'm just saying you're coming around to my side. I get it. I'm just saying. I get it. Which by the way, I will say for anyone that remembers that story a couple of weeks back, 20 people during the interviews. Didn't go well for me. And you lost every stinking one.

[00:19:31] Not even with a Gen Z expert. The Gen Z expert said, no, get out of here. You're out of your mind. The, the, the, the top people at some of the largest companies. Oh yeah. Just looked at you and was like. I, Melissa at Ford. Yeah. She's just, oh hell no. I'm walking. I believe her bit was I'm getting up and I'm walking out of the interview. I'm like, that's a little bit harsh. So here's, here, here's where I'm going to throw a monkey wrench into this. I don't hate a six hour shit. I don't either.

[00:20:01] I don't, I don't either again, but are you going to, are you going to do five of those? That means 30 hours a week. Are you going to do six of those and get it closer to 36, 38? Like how do you get your hours in with six day, six hour shifts? See, I've all, I, where it's a quick Google search. Why do we call it consider 40 hours a full week? Cause that's legally that's, that's actually the legal. Well, yeah, no, I get that.

[00:20:29] But I'm like, who just arbitrarily picked the hours of 40? Why not 45? Why not 50 or 35? Well, you have to draw a line in the sand. So the, the, it got drawn in the sand because of abuse. Yeah. I think all the way up until, all the way up until like in the early aughts. Yeah. There were big companies that got, that got carried away with people working over 35 hours and not having benefits. So over a certain threshold, you have to offer their full-time employees. Yeah.

[00:20:59] Oh, correct. No, I get, I get that. So I think that number is going down. You've got to draw the line somewhere. I think that number is going down. I think it's going to continue to go down. I think the new norm is going to be 30 to 35 hours. That's what it was in Australia in the early nineties. It was 35 hours. Yeah. I don't, I don't think we're going to see it, see it go up. So I, I don't, I don't hate it. All right. So I'm going to build off of my last one.

[00:21:23] The UK government cuts HR jobs in favor of hiring data and digital experts. So this is going to affect roughly 15% of their workforce over, well through 2030. So it's got five years, right? So not massive, but they're trimming traditional HR roles in the government and swapping them for what they're calling data specialists.

[00:21:52] They don't need people to, and we've talked about this. They don't need people to take, turn raw data, all the numbers into decisions, right? They need, they're going to use technology for it. They're going to use technology to say, here's all this stuff, all these reports. Here's the data. Here's what it is. Here's, I'm going to make sense of it. They need people that can take that data and make decisions off of that.

[00:22:17] So all the administrative stuff, they're already cutting out and they've been very public about that. Well, if you get back to the workday example in your first story, again, the data is there. You don't need people going and doing data. You need the data to then come to them and then an action. Yeah, I need a person. Yeah. Yeah, I need a person to be able to make a decision based off that data.

[00:22:44] And I think what we see is a lot of people that can't make decisions, but they're really good at wasting time getting all the information. Yeah, well, I mean. But then they don't make a decision. This goes back 15 years, but I remember talking to, this was a global CHRO. And she goes, you know, well, I got 22 different payroll systems. I'm like, say that again? And she goes, different countries, got all this stuff. How do you manage to comply?

[00:23:13] And she's like, you know, I've got like eight different analysts working on that. She goes, you know the hardest question that I have to answer? I'm like, ah. She goes, how many employees we have? Yeah, I've heard that before a lot of time. CHRO will ask me, how many employees do we have right now, right at this moment? How many do we have? And because we have all these different, it takes two, back then, this was 15 years ago. It took her two weeks to get that person a number. Now it doesn't.

[00:23:40] I mean, there's some refinement in there, but it's like, that stuff should just be easy. Okay, we have 142,382 people at this moment. Payroll fraud was pretty easy back then. Yeah. Good God. Can you imagine? All right. Amazon revised its pay structure to favor employees who have received the highest possible performance. Okay.

[00:24:09] Review rating for four consecutive years. These employees will now be compensated with 110% of their pay banned. So basically this is on Business Insider so you can read more about the story because it's fascinating. Well, in theory, performance is tied to comp, is tied to consistency, and they ditched a cap.

[00:24:34] So what's in this story, which probably should be highlighted more, is they used to have a cap on how much you could go up in your band. Right. Based on your review. Now they don't. Yeah. You can get the max. Yeah. Four years. So consistency. If you do it for one year, good. If you do it for two, good. Like, you know, you got to do four years. I would do three years. Yeah.

[00:24:59] I think with this group of people, with this employee population, excuse me, yeah, I'd probably do three years. I might even go to two. Four years is kind of a, you know. That's a long stamp. It is. And you're probably not going to be in that job and potentially that band if you're doing that well for four years. Good point. You know, it's kind of like give them a look. It's kind of like in sports teams where it's like 10 to 12 year olds and then 12 to 14. It's like, okay, you're 12 years old, but you missed it. You hit the cutoff date.

[00:25:29] So you were 12 year old in September, but you can now play with all the 10 year olds. And you crush the league. That's what this is. We at IBM, when I was with IBM, we had this structure. Right. But we weren't ever able to get to a certain percentage of your band. So when you were already maxed out. So it's a disincentive at that point. It really is. Like you get to that max band and it happened to me a number of times because I would get to a point, but I really couldn't go anywhere.

[00:25:59] And I couldn't go here or here unless I completely switched jobs. So what am I going to do? I mean, personally, I want to work my ass off because I just enjoy it. That's how I was. But I'm not getting compensated. The bonus structure never changed. None of that ever changed. It disincentivized me to work hard and put the extra hours in. And so I worked as hard as I could during my hours, but I stopped after that. And that's when I learned at that point. That's actually when I started to learn. I don't need to go 10 hours.

[00:26:29] I can get it. Whatever I get done in eight hours will be there tomorrow. Right. Unless they're paying me for it. And they should. And they weren't though. I think the idea of going down to three years is good because it's a disincentive for people that are really high performers because you're going to want to promote them. And then they've got to restart that clock. They've got to restart the clock. Now, if it was four consistent years, period. Period. Different. Oh, yeah. I like that even better.

[00:26:57] Three years, it incentivizes the employee and it also incentivizes the company to say, let's not pay you 110%. Let's get you somewhere else and just pay you more money. I like that a lot. And I'll go back and reread the article to make sure that it didn't say that. But I don't think it did. I think it is. This is why companies need to bring us in to consult. I mean, we're for hire people. Come on now. Email us. Call us. Oh, God. All right. Acquisitions.

[00:27:27] We got two of them. Yeah. I don't want to mispronounce this company. Revelo? Revele? Revelelio? How do you say that? I'm just leaving it with you. Revelelio? Yeah, sure. Go Revelelio. Sorry, guys. Revelelio Labs. Revele? Revele. I think half of our episodes have like five minutes of mispronounce. 100%. Revelelio sounds right. Revelelio Labs acquires salary board to expand real-time comp intelligence. Smart. Yeah.

[00:27:55] So this is more of an they absorbed the salary board. So it didn't really say acquire. It said absorb. Absorb. But it was good enough for me. So they're looking to improve their insights into their labor market trends and reporting and also use this to accelerate their international. I love – I mean, there's a – one of our funding stories is about a global compensation player that got funding. That's right. Yeah. I mean, so that's wonderful.

[00:28:25] I mean, so you can kind of see the market do this type of bit where it starts to look at things and go global compensation is a thing. You should probably put some money into that, whether or not that's through acquisition or through funding startups or companies, et cetera. Like, actually, that's really important. It is. Because you can be – just not being calibrated. But it will be off – the data can be off by two years. Just a little bit. Yeah.

[00:28:53] That's a big thing, cost savings-wise or retention-wise. Yeah. Yeah. All of the above. All right. You ready for some research? I would love to hear some research, Ryan. Would you? I don't believe you. No. No, because I got a good one. I can't wait to pitch you, actually. All right. So this is a – this is some research that was put out by Edelman. This is trust in CEOs, government, and media hits record lows in 2025, according to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer.

[00:29:24] So the barometer is not good. It shows a really bad, steep drop across the board. Spoiler alert for those of you who are on the edge of your seat. This is the leading indicator of organizational health. This is right off the top, right? Like, your executives aren't trusted. Your leadership's not trusted. Your CEO is not trusted. Your company's probably not doing really well.

[00:29:53] So companies that miss this are the ones that are scrambling during layoffs, right? We've talked about RTO, all of that stuff. This is where companies can't communicate. They can't handle it. Trust is down. And what's crazy, Brian – It's just chaos. It's during COVID, like at the beginning of COVID, so March of 20, for the first year and a half of COVID. Yeah. Man, we got good at communication. Crushed it. CEOs got good.

[00:30:23] Really good. Executive teams, boards, HR, all those folks in employee communications. Man, it's like they had PhDs. Yeah. Not anymore. And comms. Yeah. Like, what happened? We built a skill set during a pandemic, and it looks like – I don't think we – I think we had the skill set. We had to do it, and there was nothing else that we could do. Now, we're going back to the norm, and the norm is not the norm, right? Like, it's just not there anymore.

[00:30:52] So, let me throw these couple stats out of you. All right. What do you got? 70% of people believe CEOs, politicians, and media knowingly mislead the public. That's probably a low number. Yeah. I think – I do think it's higher myself, and I'm usually a little nicer on these. You are. You are. Yeah. Since 2021, CEOs have dropped 21%. That's got to be tied to RTO. Yeah. I think so. That's got to be tied to that. Yeah.

[00:31:22] No, 100%. So, you know, it was an interesting report that got some good graphics behind it. Check it out. Just Google Edelman Trump. I like that. Yeah. They put that every year. I think that's a longitudinal deal that they do because we've quoted it before. It's a cool – I mean, first of all, it's just beautiful. Edelman's a – people don't know. It's a global PR media company. And so they've got a vested interest in understanding trust. Right. And they do a great study. So good for them. Yeah. There you go. Good catch.

[00:31:52] All right. Ryan, you'll be shocked and amazed. The most likable candidate gets the job, even if they're not the most qualified according to the state of interview – state of interview feedback report from Textio. Wow. Yeah. So the most likable candidate gets the job, even if they're not the most qualified according to state of interview report from Textio. I'm guilty of that. I'm not going to lie.

[00:32:22] A hundred percent. Good God. I'm guilty of that. I couldn't be more guilty. Yeah. So, you know, I absolutely pick up what they're putting down with this report and this particular statistic. And oh, by the way, in the statistics, when you look at the report, vibe is a thing that they measure. Yeah. Are we on the same – are we vibing? Yeah. Like, that's a thing. I'm sure we used different words in the past for that. But vibe is a – Culture fit.

[00:32:52] Yeah. Yeah. I'm so guilty of that. Oh, my God. They're a great culture fit. No, I probably hired half a dozen people at least based on the fact that like, okay, I know you can do the job. I know they can do it better. But are you going to fit into my team? Are you going to vibe with the team? Like, yeah, and I don't know that that's a bad thing. It's the thing that most qualified.

[00:33:19] So for people that are, I think, purist on any level of skills thinks that the most skilled person should win. That's the purist view of that is like if you have the better skills, deeper, broader, whatever that is, and if you're just more skilled than that other person, you should win even if you're toxic. All the way to that extreme. Yeah. If you've got the skills.

[00:33:46] So that's what it really kind of – if you believe like skills-based hiring. Okay, you have skills-based hiring up until the point where – You don't fit the vibe. I don't really like the person. So is it skills-based hiring then? And I think it's – and go with me on this for a minute because you'll probably tear it apart. And I'll call it vibe because you mentioned vibe. The vibe, right? The feel of that person. Is that not a skill?

[00:34:16] It's not a skill. But it counts. Yes. It counts to you. It has to count because how can you – okay. So you're a genius, right? You're like, oh, he's perfect. He's amazing. Are you talking about me? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if I brought you into a team that's like ultra conservative. Oh, my God. That team would blow up in like two minutes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. How could I – what do I do? Prep – I got to prep the team and onboard the team. Guys, look.

[00:34:45] He's going to be an ass. He's going to do this. He's going to be a dart. He's going to be a dart. He's going to break shit. But he's amazing. They're going to be like, okay. And then the locker room explodes. That's what Jerry Crispin did at Johnson & Johnson. He had a boss that basically said, I'll protect you. Go break shit. And like all of his peers and his peers' bosses all would go to his boss and bitch and complain. And he just let Jerry go break shit. Well, that's a different story. That's rare. If that's why you're going in.

[00:35:15] Yes. Different story. If you're talking about just adding a personality that just doesn't fit with the other personalities. And again, now you're dealing with, okay, diversity of thought. Okay, we don't think the same. But that's actually a good thing because it creates that conflict that's needed. Yeah. Because if everybody thinks the same, then nothing gets innovated. Well, thinking, yes. Yes. Toxic. Vibing. Vibing. Vibing, yes. Toxic, no.

[00:35:42] See, I think the thing is for your purist on skills and capabilities, they're going to say that's bias. Yes. And they're going to pay. Now that gets into the tricky, slippery, tricky area of are you just hiring people like you? Here's one. Or like you like. It's a preference. Yes, it is. There you go. Preference leads to bias. Time for funding. Talk about dollars, please. All right. Ready?

[00:36:13] Yes. Wind, Windfall, which is a fantastic name. Yeah. It's a provider of people, intelligence, and AI work for a solution. Raise $65 million. That's a windfall. So go to windfall.com and you can read all about it and what they're going to do with it.

[00:36:35] Now, for me, the first thing I caught a glimpse of was funding was largely, if not all, funded by Morgan Stanley, the expansion capital. Morgan Stanley, much like Goldman Sachs, they don't play with money. They win. So when you see their names attached to funding, it's usually, just go ahead and bet on that one. I've got one.

[00:37:03] Not really a funding story, but a big congratulations to the team at Higher Brain. Love Higher Brain. Morgan Stanley recently won the Unleash America's 2025 startup competition for transforming hiring collaboration. I guess that was a category. $50,000. So golf clap to these guys. Good job. I love Higher Brain. I like what they do. We spoke with Master recently.

[00:37:32] Got to see a few updates. And, you know, it's one of these things. It's not like there's so many extensions out there. I know. Right? Just like Chrome extensions or, hey, it's an add-on into whatever system. But this just layers onto your existing system and helps guide hiring managers in real time. It's really useful. It's really nice and easy to use. So if you haven't seen it, check it out. But congrats to these guys.

[00:38:00] Maybe we'll, you know, we'll give them a little, we'll get them on a call and we'll get to talk to them. And usually when a conference does, all conferences do kind of startup competitions, what they do is they don't give them cash per se. I mean, it is cash in a form of the next year's event. So booth space, stuff like that. So they don't get a cash. Usually we could dig into it.

[00:38:29] Yeah, I'm not sure how Unleash does it. Yeah. Normally what happens is they'll take that and they'll give you a credit towards next year's conference. But $50,000 goes a long way at a conference. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, congrats to them. They've done a good job. And we like them. Skill view. Like hire view, but skill. Skill view raises $6.3 million to transfer how companies discover and develop hidden talent.

[00:38:58] So you can go to Global Newswire and read more about the story. But basically it's HR tech platform that evolved from a recruiting tool. So they started in recruiting in TA. And they build kind of a – basically how do you get inside an internal mobility? How do you then find skills and capabilities? And so they basically moved, said, okay, recruiting was fun. Doing this with candidates was fun.

[00:39:28] Now what can we do for the company? So they do both sides. So they do the candidate side on the recruiting. And they find that hidden talent, really the hidden skills, the hidden talent that has the hidden skills. And then they also do it internally. So they're doing both sides. So now they do employees and candidates. Love it. I mean that was a Series A. So it's a pretty large Series A in this market. So congratulations to Skill View. Good job. Nice. All right.

[00:39:58] Ravio. Ravio. Where I'm from, we say Ravio. Where you're from, probably Ravio. They raise $12 million to bring real-time compensation data to HR teams. So this is not the same company I spoke about earlier, but a similar play. So this one's interesting. This is comp, equity, and benefits all together. So this isn't just what are they making based out. This is like full package visibility.

[00:40:27] So these guys are directly connected. They're directly in the HR, a whole bunch of HR systems, obviously, across all of Europe. And so no need for looking at old school spreadsheets and old surveys and running comp surveys and stuff like that. But you get access to the full comp benefits, equity, the entire package.

[00:40:52] So obviously, this is good for when you're making offers or payroll decisions and things like that. So I like these plays. There's a number of them out there. We have similar ones here in the States. This one's Europe only right now. But we have similar ones in the States that also run across and show you full packages. But there you go. $12 million. That's great. Fantastic, actually. When you said Ravio, I heard Fabio.

[00:41:21] So I was thinking about the dude with the long hair and all the romance novels. Uh-huh. And so I couldn't get off of that. Sorry. So you don't know what I said then? No, I did. I was listening. You were just infatuated. I can actually parallel process. I'm good. There you go. I'm good. There you go. Yeah. Some say that you can't micro. You can't do multitasking. Oh, man. Don't get into this again. All right. So here's one. This is actually a really fun one. Tended. T-E-N-D-E-D.

[00:41:52] A railway wearable safety tech. So that's a lot of combination of words. And they raised two million pounds. And so, you know, you can tell by what I said, basically what they do. But this is UKtechnews.info. So if you want to read more about Tended. So this is a geospatial positioning device to alert rail workers when they exit designated safe zones,

[00:42:20] allowing them to maintain a safe distance from on-site hazards, such as open lines, in-use, heavy machinery. Yeah. I like that. This is the category of wearable safety tech. Solid, super solid idea. And again, we're so into software and all that stuff. And like, this is helping guys and gals that are out there on rail lines, not get run over by. Yeah. Or electrocuted or electrocuted. I like this.

[00:42:50] You know what I'm saying? It brings up a question. Whatever happened to our safety vests we were supposed to get? I looked at those. We didn't order them. No. Well, they were sending it over. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Something fell through. I can't remember. Yeah. But anyhow, wearable tech. We'll cover more wearable tech in the future for sure. Because this is just railway. And again, they're probably going to then move into construction and move into manufacturing and all that other stuff.

[00:43:19] But it's cool. Yeah. It's really cool. I like that one. That was a good way to end. So that's all we got. That's it, buddy. We're done for today. We do have some travel coming up. We will be at Cornerstone Spark at the end of this month. Right. So if you guys are going to be there, please hit us up. We'll be podcasting there. And then you will be solo because I will be traveling with the family. That's correct. You will be in Rosemont, which is Chicago. I know, in Chicago.

[00:43:49] I said it to get under your skin. At the next iSolve Connect. So that'll be fun. These are regional. We have four regional conferences with iSolve. And so Charlotte was one. Then Chicago. Not going to say that other word. Rosemont. And then Philadelphia in November, which is still questioning some decision making there. Let's take it to an Eagles game. Oh, let's get tickets to an Eagles game. I actually love to go to an Eagles game. Let's get tickets to an Eagles game.

[00:44:18] I'm going to find tickets. I would love to go to an Eagles game. I'm going to have to wear white. No, no. You're going to wear a Dallas jersey. No. Yeah. We'd have to check into what type of insurance we have. The last thing, as a Catholic, I would be remiss. And not congratulating our new Pope. So very happy. Our graduate of Villanova. Chicagoan. Chicagoan. Chicagoan. Folks in Chicago are like, is he a White Sox?

[00:44:48] Is he Cubs? Is he Cubs? Yeah. He's from Rosemont. So it's cool. But he graduated from Villanova, which is only a couple, 20, 30 minutes from me. Which is cool. We'll also be at SHRM. Forgot to say that. SHRM. We'll be at SHRM. At the end of June. Oh, yeah. We'll be there for Icehold. In their booth. Yeah. And hang out. Get some stuff. They have all kinds of cool giveaways. Yeah. Good talk to them as well. But yeah. Dude, all kinds of good stuff. That's all we got for this week. So thank you all for listening and watching.

[00:45:18] We shall see you next week. Yeah. Maybe.