The Chad & Cheese Podcast

90 Days Hired, They Stay a Year w/ Jolene Hostal 04.08.2026 26min

In this episode, HR veteran Jolene Hostal joins Joel and Chad to discuss how a legacy brand like Stanley Steemer stays "young and vibrant" in a competitive labor market. Managing high-volume hiring for thousands of technicians across 57 corporate locations, Jolene breaks down how modern tech integrations, fast candidate screening, and a strong culture drive their talent acquisition strategy. Mobile-First High-Volume Hiring: Because candidates for cleaning technician roles are constantly on the move, Stanley Steemer uses Paradox’s chatbot ("Maria") to let applicants apply in 90 seconds or less. Open Architecture Tech Stack: Jolene explains choosing Dayforce as their HCM due to its strong API connections, allowing seamless integration with Paradox and background check partners like First Advantage. The "90-Day" Retention Milestone: Highlighting the physical demands of technician roles, Jolene notes that if a technician stays for 90 days, they almost always stay for a full year. Career Progression from the Trucks: The company boasts strong internal mobility—73% of company managers started out as service technicians, proving that entry-level roles can lead to long-term career paths. Keeping the Remote Workforce Connected: Field technicians receive job dispatches, safety updates, and communication through in-van tablets and driver safety monitoring systems.

LinkedIn Sloppin, Google's No Click AI Poppin', and OpenAI's Jail Breakin' 31.07.2026 1t 1min

Is LinkedIn turning into a bot-ridden wasteland? Is Google actively blowing up its own revenue model? And are AI agents already plotting their escape from human containment? The crew is back together, hot out of the chamber, to slice through corporate PR and tackle the messiest stories in tech and workplace culture. From outrageous ageism in the C-suite to the high-stakes risk of unchecked AI, Chad, JT, and Mo are serving up the unfettered truth with zero filters. Surveillance, Smoke, & Creepy Ray-Bans The $600K Employee Influencer Win Lattice CEO’s "Calcified" Slip-Up "Just because you can doesn't mean you should, is my theme for 2026 on this pod... You don't replace judgment and have AI do it." — JT O'Donnell LinkedIn: Sexy Bots & The King of Slop The Nano-Influencer Arbitrage. Google Search Enters Its Zero-Click Era Autonomous Bots & The AI Singularity "I'm going to tell you right now, if you're at a party and you're not at least asking Charney for his vape pen, you're wrong. Charney brings the best weed." — Chad Sowash Enjoy!

Shredded: Kforce, Indeed, OpenAI, ZipRecruiter, Skello, Fiverr, & More 30.07.2026 4min

The Shred is a weekly roundup of what’s making headlines in the world of employment.

Startup Nightmares w/ Kristy McCann 28.07.2026 37min

On this week's The Chad & Cheese Podcast interview episode, Joel and Chad sit down with Kristy McCann founder, former CEO of Skill Cycle, and overall HR force of nature who proves the ultimate golden rule: Do NOT mess with HR. Ever wondered what a founder’s absolute worst nightmare looks like? Picture this: You bootstrap your HR tech startup, navigate COVID without losing your shirt, grow fourfold, and then win an "Opportunity Fund" competition. Sounds great, right? Except the folks writing the checks didn't just want a seat at the table they wanted to lock you out of the house, revalue your $30 million company down to $8 million, and suggest you replace your human coaching marketplace with an AI bot. In this wildly candid episode, Kristy spills all the tea (and Burger King) on: The Georgia Ambush VC Playbooks & "Pay-to-Play" RICO & Receipts It’s a cautionary tale full of red flags, "bipolar 5.5-sense" gut instincts, and a Masterclass in why discovery in a courtroom is a VC's absolute worst enemy. "You wanna fuck with me? Fine. Let's bring it out into a courtroom." — Kristy McCann Grab your popcorn, founders you’re going to want to take notes on this one.

Indeed Terms, LinkedIn Ghosts, & Google Pitchforks 24.07.2026 58min

The latest episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast kicks off with hosts Joel Cheesman and Chad Sowash diving into a massive recap of the World Cup tournament, complete with a look at the spectacular multi-artist halftime show, light political jabs, a hilarious Taco Bell fast-food mishap, and a celebratory beer for a record-breaking Scottish runner. After sharing details on how you can score a free podcast t-shirt, the boys move straight into their high-stakes "Buy or Sell" segment, where they aggressively debate the business prospects of recent major industry acquisitions and funding rounds involving Signal Labs, BrassRing, Adzuna, JobLift, and the controversial candidate-pays model of Refer. The main events of the episode take an even sharper turn into major industry compliance, legal drama, and worker rights. First, Chad and Joel unleash a highly critical teardown of the brand-new terms of service rolling out from Indeed, exposing massive financial and legal implications for both employers and job seekers. Next, they tackle the legal spotlight hitting LinkedIn, debating whether a high-profile investigation by the Texas Attorney General is necessary platform accountability or just pure political theater. Finally, the hosts wrap up by throwing their support behind a massive internal worker movement at Google, analyzing whether a new 4,500-employee petition will actually force the tech giant's hand or simply stall out. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction and Episode Overview 00:33 - Travel and Cultural Observations from the World Cup 02:07 - US as a Host and International Perceptions 03:07 - Final World Cup Matches and Team Performances 04:20 - Analysis of England vs. Argentina and Paraguay vs. France 05:45 - Messi's Performance and the Final Match Insights 06:20 - Spain’s Defensive Mastery and Tournament Highlights 07:37 - Halftime Show and Cultural Impact 13:43 - History of Halftime Shows and Cultural Shifts 15:26 - Record-Breaking Mile Run and Celebrations 17:23 - Buy or Sell Segment: Signal Labs and Brass Ring 21:56 - Adzuna’s Acquisition of JobLift and Market Strategy 25:16 - Rise of Talent Marketplaces and New Funding 29:30 - Discussion on Company Buybacks, Severance, and Employee Rights 41:08 - Texas Investigation into LinkedIn Ghost Jobs 48:32 - Political Theater and Lawsuits in the Job Market 54:41 - Humor and Closing Remarks

Shredded: Signal Labs, BrassRing, Recur Software, PCRecruiter, Refer, Deel, Talentware, & More 23.07.2026 5min

The Shred is a weekly roundup of what’s making headlines in the world of employment.

AI Takes The Boring Part w/ Adam Godson 21.07.2026 30min

The TL;DR: What happens when HR tech's most prominent conversational AI platform gets swallowed by an enterprise titan? In this high-octane episode, Chad and Cheese sit down with Adam Godson—the newly crowned GM of Talent Acquisition Products at Workday—to dissect the aftermath of the Paradox acquisition. Forget standard corporate buzzwords; this is a raw look at how AI "agents" are systematically dismantling traditional software, why the SAS pricing model is officially on life support, and what it actually takes to survive the "SAS Apocalypse." The Death of the "Click-and-Scroll" ATS The "SAS Apocalypse" is Real Resumes are "Lousy" 2D Artifacts Recruiting is Splitting in Two "What you get rid of is the people that wish they were talking to candidates, but are clicking buttons in the system. And that's a good thing." — Adam Godson Why it matters: This episode serves as a blueprint for the next five years of recruitment tech. If you are still relying on legacy keywords, manual data entry, and traditional seat licenses, your strategy is already on borrowed time.

Indeed Cautionary Tales 17.07.2026 1t 3min

The boys are diving headfirst into the algorithmic trenches as LinkedIn battles a massive influx of AI-generated content that is actively derailing user feeds. This automation wave is sparking a larger debate on the future of recruitment, especially as Indeed looks to double down on automated agents to reshape how hiring works. However, this aggressive tech pivot is already causing serious friction in the real world. A major multi-unit franchisee, Hamra Enterprises, found itself locked in a high-stakes standoff with Indeed over systemic backend glitches that disrupted major brand campaigns and nearly triggered a massive spending boycott. Beyond the corporate drama, the boys lock in their predictions for a massive international soccer finale and share a wild, graphic true-crime story from overseas that you truly have to hear to believe. Plus, the HR tech landscape is shifting fast with a wave of new product drops and strategic alliances. The crew breaks down the massive legal and compliance risks hidden inside the latest Recruitics and Maki People integration, dissects the market strategy behind the newest Appcast launch, and debates whether a three-way partnership between HireEZ, Next, and Talroo is a brilliant counter-strategy to industry giants or just a culturally messy survival play. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction and Episode Overview 01:00 - Chad's Wreckfest and World Cup Adventures 04:24 - AI in Movies and the Slotbuster Phenomenon 06:20 - AI-generated Content on Social Media 08:35 - World Cup Predictions and Rivalries 11:45 - Shoutouts and Political Satire 16:30 - Moscow Penis Biting Incident and Legal Penalties 22:08 - Indeed's Disposition Data and Industry Pushback 30:27 - The Future of Job Search and AI Agents 36:40 - Sponsorships and Recruitment Tech Announcements 37:26 - Recruitics Partnership with Mackey and AI Screening 45:32 - Industry Consolidation and Strategic Moves 53:46 - Closing Remarks and Dad Jokes

Shredded: Mercor, Deeptune, Sherpa, Employ, ID.me, Warp, Pebl, & More 16.07.2026 4min

The Shred is a weekly roundup of what’s making headlines in the world of employment. The Shred is brought to you today by Jobcase.

Hire Fast or Lose w/ Josh Secrest 14.07.2026 48min

Chad and Cheese drag Josh Secrest, Paradox’s Head of Marketing, into the hot seat. Josh’s resume boasts stints at both Abercrombie & Fitch and McDonald's. Once the guys stop badgering Josh about the Golden Arches, they get into why your current frontline application process is a flaming dumpster fire: The Velocity Deficit: The average restaurant or retail shop takes 16 painful days to lock down a frontline worker. The automated elite? They’re doing it in 3.5 days. Frontline candidates are applying to 25 jobs simultaneously; if you aren't the first to text them back, you’re just a ghost in their inbox while your remaining staff burns out. The Real Cost of "Quick Quits": Josh officially declares standard "time to hire" dead. The only metrics that actually impact the C-suite are the Break-Even Point (the magic 31-day mark where a worker finally stops costing you money) and the Retention Sticking Point (day 100, where they actually become a fixture). If your hires drop out before day 31, congratulations—you just subsidized their brief stint at your expense. Administrative Errand Boys: Your highly paid store managers are burning 10 to 12 hours a week acting as calendar secretaries, copy-pasting interview schedules and building shift templates. Paradox aims to execute that administrative trivia so managers can do the unfathomable: stand front-of-house and generate revenue. The Cold Hard Truth: Stop making people take a 45-minute personality quiz to flip a burger or stock a shelf. Automate the blocking and tackling, match their schedule instantly, or get used to looking at a red balance sheet.

Korn Ferry Swallows AMS, Handshake Grabs Uplimit 10.07.2026 1t 15min

Hide your kids and grab your bourbon, because The Chad & Cheese Podcast is back! Joel is finally home from his pretentious European tour—blaming jet lag for being completely rusty—and Emi is here to keep him from totally derailing. Together, they are tackling a corporate landscape that looks like a beautiful car crash. They're dissecting the massive corporate marriages of Korn Ferry buying AMS and Handshake grabbing Uplimit—are these brilliant strategic moves or absolute train wrecks? Next, they dive into the giant AI oopsies of the week, laughing as Ford frantically rehires 350 human engineers because their robots built junk, and Mark Zuckerberg publicly admits Meta totally misjudged the AI hype train. They also break down why The Wall Street Journal says Gen X is getting absolutely crushed by unemployment, why Scott Galloway thinks working from home is ruining America's youth, and whether a fully robot-operated hotel in China is a budget dream or a horror movie. Tune in for the travel stories, the savage HR gossip, and the brutal return of Joel's awful dad jokes! Website: https://www.chadcheese.com/ Make sure you check FREE Stuff: https://www.chadcheese.com/free Subscribe for an audio version: https://www.chadcheese.com/subscribe

Shredded: Korn Ferry, AMS, Microsoft, Uplimit, Handshake, Meta, & More 09.07.2026 4min

The Shred is a weekly roundup of what’s making headlines in the world of employment. The Shred is brought to you today by Jobcase.

Hiring Became Our Edge with Kristen Reilly 07.07.2026 29min

"We went from 34% fully staffed to 96% fully staffed" Imagine needing to hire 3,000 part-time coaches in a chaotic 6-to-8-week summer sprint. For Elevo Learning, missing that target meant operational nightmares and broken client promises. In this episode, Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman sit down with Kristen Reilly to look under the hood of an incredible hiring turnaround. By ditching manual, archaic workflows and going "all in" on conversational AI, Elevo transformed their biggest bottleneck into a massive competitive advantage. The Highlights: The 96% Turnaround: How automating candidate engagement flipped their Day One staffing rate from a stressful 34% to a near-perfect 96%. Recruiter Happiness Skyrockets: How stripping away hours of manual administrative "busy work" sent Elevo's internal Employee Net Promoter Score from a dismal 16 to a staggering 68. The Next Frontier: Kristen previews how they are tackling the next big hurdle—frictionless onboarding from the first text message to the school field. Automation is Human: Why freeing up recruiters from administrative hell actually allows them to do what they do best: build relationships and scale the business into new states. Ready to see how automation can scale your seasonal hiring? Tune in now!

Ageism in Tech: Dan Lyons on ‘Disrupted,’ Silicon Valley & Toxic Culture 03.07.2026 1t 21min

Maureen sits down with Dan Lyons — bestselling author of Disrupted, former Newsweek and Forbes journalist, and writer for HBO’s hit series Silicon Valley. At 52 years old, Dan made the jump from traditional media into a hyped tech startup… and quickly discovered he was suddenly “ancient” in an industry that worships youth. From bouncy ball chairs and candy walls to getting sized up as “someone’s parent” on day one, Dan delivers hilarious, painful, and brutally honest stories about ageism in tech. He breaks down the infamous CEO quote that sparked a company-wide controversy (“Gray hair and experience are overrated”), his wild ride writing for Silicon Valley, and what he uncovered in his follow-up book Lab Rats about toxic work culture, psychological burnout, and why so many companies treat employees like disposable kids. If you’re in recruiting, HR, or tech — and especially if you’re over 40 and wondering whether experience still has value — this conversation is equal parts laugh-out-loud funny and eye-opening. Needless to day, Dan Lyons doesn’t hold back.

Your Best Hire Already Left w/ Gustavo Serbia 30.06.2026 36min

Next on Chad & Cheese: Hired to Chair in 3 Days ✂️🔥 Chad and Joel are punching the recruiting industry right where it hurts with Gustavo Serbia, CHRO at Hair Cuttery Family of Brands. They dive into the wild, hyper-competitive world of managing 6,000 stylists where the barriers to entry are zero and the drama is real. Quick Cuts: Slashing Time-to-Hire: How they used Paradox to ditch their sluggish legacy ATS and compress a 17-day hiring process down to just 3 days. Gamifying Commission: Inside the custom app that shows stylists exactly what they make in real time to incentivize higher earnings. The "Polite Poach": Why recruiting in a fragmented industry means ditching traditional applications, hunting state board lists, and walking straight to the talent. AI & Raw Data: How Gustavo bypassed pivot tables to build an entire funnel analysis in minutes using AI—and what's next on his tech wishlist. "In this industry, you know to a tee when someone leaves. My CEO knows exactly what it's costing us right then and there." — Gustavo Serbia, CHRO Want to know how to manage high-turnover talent, build a booming rehire pipeline, and make tech work for a fiercely human business? Hit play on the AI series now.

The Snapchat & Anthropic Hype Machines 26.06.2026 54min

On this week's episode: The Football Flops: Portugal woke up, while England was lulled to sleep and Emi is losing her mind over corporate "hydration breaks". The Hype Block: The hosts rip into Snapchat’s new $2,300 glasses (a chunky, $3 billion boat anchor that makes a good-looking CEO completely unfuckable). Meanwhile, Anthropic's CEO is treating his LLM like a "superweapon" that practically needs a gun license just to drive up valuation. Who’d You Rather?: Emi tries to take home three startups (Sloneek, HeyMilo, and Orbio) for an HR foursome. The New Indoor Malls: Oracle is slashing 21,000 jobs to build data centers, and Google is training blue-collar workers for $166 a pop. Chad serves a history lesson: we are overbuilding data centers just like 1980s indoor malls. Ghostbusters in NY: New York is passing a bill to fine companies $2,500 for posting fake "ghost jobs" used for resume harvesting. Emi wants more guidance; Chad says stop making excuses. Tune in, skip the scams, and Go Portugal!

Shredded: LinkedIn, Adzuna, Autodesk, Microsoft, Deel, Oracle, Fika Jobs, & More 25.06.2026 6min

The Shred is a weekly roundup of what’s making headlines in the world of employment. The Shred is brought to you today by Jobcase.

Startup Debate: Skills-Based Hiring w/ Maya Huber & Phuong Vu 23.06.2026 31min

Face it, "The Resumes" is officially dead, and generative AI just blew it to pieces. With 86% of hiring managers admitting that AI makes it too easy to fake skills on paper, corporate hiring is facing a massive identity crisis. The old way is broken—so what comes next? The Face-Off: In this fast-paced episode of HR's most dangerous podcast, host Chad Sowash moderates a high-stakes debate between two tech founders reshaping talent acquisition: Phuong Vu (CEO of Telexa): The advocate for the "skills-first" organization. Phuong argues that true skills-based hiring means moving away from static keyword libraries and focusing on real-world evidence, human adaptability, and transferable capabilities. Dr. Maya Huber (CEO of Tadio): The champion of performance intelligence. Maya warns that "skills hiring" will become an empty buzzword if we keep relying on old, text-based data. Her radical fix? Ditch applications entirely and have candidates try out the job through live simulations before they ever talk to a recruiter. Inside the Episode: Are companies treating employees like "disposable heroes" instead of upskilling them? Has "culture fit" just become a lazy excuse to hire people exactly like ourselves? How do you screen for technical skills when the technology changes faster than the workforce? The Bottom Line: Stop asking candidates what they claim they can do. Learn how to evaluate how they actually think, adapt, and execute. Listen now to find out who wins the duel.

Indeed's AI Bias Machine 19.06.2026 48min

If you’ve been wondering why the modern job market feels like a dystopian simulation, the latest episode of The Chad and Cheese Podcast is here to validate your existential dread. Chad, JT, and Lieven are back to dissect the tech industry's latest "innovations" with their usual cocktail of empathy, candor, and plenty of well-deserved swearing. Indeed’s Blind Faith in AI Sourcing The Stanford Study: Proof You're Being Blacklisted Teaching Your Humanoid Replacement Zuckerberg Says "My Bad" (Sort Of) "Generating assumptive qualifications or requirements is a hiring decision... If AI's doing that for you... it's the most stupid fucking non-scalable thing." — Chad Sowash "No job seeker should be required to give their data, not know where it's going, and not know how it's being used. And this is what got exposed." — JT O'Donnell Are we heading toward JT's utopian dream of golfing all day while robots do the laundry, or are we just funding our own automation? Stop screaming into the ATS void. Hit play, get educated, and subscribe to HR’s most dangerous podcast right now.

Shredded: Stepful, Google, Orbio, iCIMS, NewCore, ZRG, Fortium, & More 18.06.2026 5min

The Shred is a weekly roundup of what’s making headlines in the world of employment. The Shred is brought to you today by Jobcase.