JobBoardGeek: And so it ends…

In this episode, Jeff Dickey-Chasins of JobBoardDoctor and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter say goodbye to the JobBoardGeek podcast. You’ll have to listen to find out why it’s ending but (hint) it’s not because we didn’t have fun! We did! Occasionally, so did our guests. Jeff talks with Steven about his new podcasts – that’s right, two! – and they pull back the curtain behind creating a podcast, and why it takes a bit more time that you might think it should.

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Transcript:

[music]

 

0:00:36.5 JD: Hello everyone, and welcome to JobBoardGeek. It’s the podcast about the business of connecting candidates and employers. My name is Jeff Dickey-Chasins, I’m the job board doctor and I’m also your host, and here with me is the visionary, Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter, he used to co-host. Hey, Steven, how are you doing?

 

0:00:56.1 Steven Rothberg: I am good and I don’t have glasses on, so my vision isn’t quite as good as it would be normally, but… Okay.

 

0:01:02.9 JD: Oh, you know, I was hoping you were gonna have some visions and you know, it looks like they’re probably gonna start allowing hallucinogenic drugs in certain states, and so maybe you can visit those states to have that little chemical addition and have visions whenever you want ’em, glasses or not. It’s an idea.

 

0:01:21.6 SR: [laughter] I will take that under advisement, counselor.

 

0:01:23.8 JD: Yes. Yes, that’s right. I keep forgetting, you’re a lapsed lawyer. So that’s not a good thing to do, it’s like talking to a cop about how you can run a red light and not get caught, so…

 

[laughter]

 

0:01:37.0 JD: Anyway, so this episode of JobBoardGeek is gonna be a little bit different because it’s the last episode of JobBoardGeek. We are ending the JobBoardGeek Podcast. This will be episode number 40. It originally started back in the very first week of December of 2021, so I think it’s been a pretty good run, but I think I owe you the listener an explanation on first, why the podcast was started, and then second of all, why it’s being ended. So my thoughts when I was first thinking about the podcast, I really wanted to get into the nuts and bolts of how job boards connect candidates and employers, sort of the ins and outs, and I wanted to expose you to a lot of different types of models that are out there, because I think it’s really useful, a lot of job board owners get very siloed and unless they’re continually going out to conferences or spending all their time on LinkedIn, they probably don’t know a whole lot of other job board owners and probably don’t have a lot of visibility into how those different companies run, so that was a key goal, and we set it up in such a way that we would have different board owners come in and we would talk to ’em and they’d tell us how their revenue model worked and so on.

 

0:02:55.6 JD: You’ve heard a lot of that, and I feel that that’s worked out really well. I think we’ve been able to expose a good variety of job boards, ranging from job boards that are non-profit, B Corp job boards, for-profit job boards, diversity job boards, job boards that ask employers to pay the candidates, job boards that charge the candidate and everything in between, and of course, these job boards are just all over the world, and we also threw in just for good measure, some of the key suppliers that are out there for job boards, like JobSync and JobMount and Jobiqo and some of these… You notice they all start with Job. It’s kind of interesting, it must be a coincidence… I don’t know.

 

0:03:36.5 SR: Aspen Tech Labs doesn’t start with job.

 

0:03:37.5 JD: Oh yeah, yeah. Okay, Aspen Tech labs, JobMount, so there you go.

 

0:03:42.0 SR: Ooh.

 

0:03:43.0 JD: Yeah, yeah, so anyway. [laughter] So anyway, I feel like we put together some good content that way, and then of course, Steven and I have done a number of conversations about things like back-fill and programmatic and some of the other topics that anyone that’s in the job board industry might be interested in. But I found that I was… The podcast was really causing some issues for me in terms of my core business, which is consulting, you probably know from listening to previous issues, but if you don’t, I’m a full-time job board consultant, I have been one for the last 15 years, I’ve worked with hundreds of job boards around the world, I work with little ones, big ones, start-ups, well established and everything in between. I love it. I like getting my hands dirty. When I have to take time away from doing consulting, that’s fine, but when it continues to eat in and I’m really, really busy, that’s a little bit more challenging. And that’s been the case for a number of months now. So for me personally, it was challenging because…

 

0:04:44.1 JD: And I’ll pull back the curtain a little bit on our podcast. The preparation is that Steve and I have to find our guests, we have to find guests that actually wanna talk on the air, we have to figure out a schedule so that they can get together with us, sometimes the schedule changes, we have to make the recording, then I have done the production on all of the episodes so far, and so I have to spend some time doing the production, taking out all the bad words that Steven says that can’t go on to the podcast.

 

[laughter]

 

0:05:14.0 JD: And some of his bad jokes, and some of the dumb things that I do like, “Ah, ah, ah,” and then I put it out into the marketing channels on my side, and Steven does on his side as well, on the YouTube channel, up on Buzzsprout, out on my newsletter, out on my blog… All in all, it’s not an overwhelming amount of time, but if you’re a consultant and you’re busy with a lot of clients, it’s like taking up a space that you might have with the client, so that was where I was coming from in terms of thinking, you know, I think this is probably a good time to end it, I feel like we’ve done a good job of exposing our audience to all these different things. I never say never, JobBoardGeek may rise again from the ashes at some point, but for right now, I think it’s gonna go in to go to sleep for a while, and you’ll just have to enjoy the archive. Like I said, we’ve got 40 there, I really appreciate you, the listener, supporting the podcast, it’s been great, Steven and I have both heard from people all over the world, and we’ve really enjoyed it, and one interesting and exciting announcement that I have is that Steven has not one but two new podcasts that I’m aware of, is that correct, Steven?

 

0:06:26.1 SR: It is, learned a ton over the past year, that was one of my goals coming into this was to better understand podcasting, Jeff did most of the heavy lifting for this. On Monday, August 22, a new podcast, the High Volume Hiring podcast, started with its first full episode…

 

0:06:47.0 JD: And it’s good. You should listen to it.

 

0:06:49.5 SR: It is without a doubt the world’s best podcast about high volume hiring, because as far as I can tell, it’s the only… I guess you could say it’s the worst one also.

 

0:07:00.0 JD: We’ll say it’s the best.

 

0:07:03.0 SR: There you go. Well, yeah, we can agree on that, and then there’s a new one that I am gonna be hosting along with a second host, Peter Zalman from AIM Group, and it is called Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces. So we’re gonna pick up where the JobBoardGeek Podcast is leaving off, and we have a really good foundation and a really good road map. I think the main thing that we’ve learned is not to do a podcast with somebody who lives in Iowa and everybody…

 

[laughter]

 

0:07:37.2 SR: I think that’s…

 

0:07:39.0 JD: And why would that be Steven? Because they’re too corny?

 

0:07:42.0 SR: Oh, snap. That’s…

 

[laughter]

 

0:07:46.0 SR: What were you saying about editing out my bad jokes?

 

0:07:51.0 JD: [laughter] You’ve rubbed off on me, it’s unfortunate.

 

0:07:53.8 SR: Well, yeah, I think monkey pox does the same sort of thing, where the rubbing off of monkey pox from one person to another, it’s just… It’s not a good thing. And so if I’m rubbing off on you, it’s not a good thing either.

 

0:08:06.8 JD: I’m glad that you’re in Minnesota, and I’m glad that I’m in Iowa. I think everything is better that way, so…

 

0:08:13.3 SR: Yeah, so the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces, I think for people who have enjoyed the JobBoardGeek Podcast, they’ll enjoy that one as well, there’ll be a substantial change just because one of the co-hosts will be different, but the approach, the frequency being weekly, the amount of time that each episode runs, 20 minutes, give or take… That’s all remaining the same. We’re gonna be talking to a lot of job board leaders and executives, there will definitely be an increased emphasis on those from overseas, in part because the AIM Group is so very global, and some of the guests that we have lined up already are not just running job boards, but they’re running online classified ad sites, AIM Group is very strong. They’re probably the world’s premier consultancy and analyst firm on online classifieds, so retail, auto, jobs, et cetera, and so we’re gonna bring some of that into it, but a lot of the discussions will be… Listeners of this podcast will be familiar with a lot of the same kinds of topics, different guests, a little bit of a different approach to it.

 

0:09:26.1 JD: And it sounds interesting, and of course, I know that you’ll have at least one subscriber, I will subscribe. [laughter]

 

0:09:33.4 SR: And our first guest.

 

0:09:34.6 JD: Oh. Yeah, well, you can’t have everything, so…

 

0:09:39.0 SR: No, you’re gonna… Yeah, we’ve got your recording schedule and we’ve got you slotted in to be the first guest, so that’ll be… That’ll be interesting. Three of us talking about job boards. I mean, I can’t think of anything else that’s more exhilarating.

 

0:09:54.6 JD: Now, I gotta tell you folks though, one key difference from JobBoardGeek is that Steven asked me to come up with my own questions, and if he uses them, I can guarantee you that that’s probably gonna sink the podcast, so hopefully he’s been woodshedding and coming out with some better questions than what I came up with, so… It’s… You don’t wanna embarrass yourself by using my questions, so… So I’m looking forward with it, so when is the actual release date of the first podcast gonna be? Do you know yet?

 

0:10:26.6 SR: We don’t yet know, there’s… When you were talking a little bit earlier in this recording about all the things that have to go into a podcast, one of the things that was a big eye-opener to me was just how labor-intensive it is, especially at the frontend, the setting up the page with getting it listed by Apple and Spotify and getting the cover art right, getting the opening music, the cadence, the scripts, all of that, it is hour upon hour upon hour, takes weeks to get that stuff in place and then you have… Are at the mercy of Apple and some of the other streaming platforms because they… Some of them just will automatically list your podcast and it becomes available from the moment that you go live, and others like Apple, somebody over in California, I guess, is actually listening to the first episode and making sure that it is suitable to be part of their ecosystem. And I would imagine they’re periodically checking in, if you get complaints, they probably are looking at that, almost like a fraud prevention kind of thing, or if somebody goes off the rails on Facebook and is promoting violence, you’re gonna have somebody at Facebook, or at least some AI spotting that, and I think Apple probably does something along the same lines, so we’re looking for the first episode to go live probably in September, and anybody that wants to have more information to be notified when it goes live, just shoot an email to podcast@collegerecruiter.com.

 

0:12:03.6 SR: And then when we have a date and a page for you to go to, we’ll just email you and let you know.

 

0:12:09.8 JD: And I gotta tell you two things, first of all, one of the things that I learned is that Apple is a little bit picky about the sound quality, so they actually… Both the recording platforms that I use for JobBoardGeek have specific tools that allow you to manipulate the sound so it meets the Apple standard in terms of what they want, they don’t want people suddenly screaming, then whispering and that sort of stuff, but…

 

0:12:33.0 SR: But they clearly don’t care about the content because they’ve been carrying our podcast right from the beginning.

 

0:12:38.0 JD: Oh yeah, absolutely. Some of their biggest shows indicate that, that they don’t care what the content is, so…

 

[laughter]

 

0:12:45.7 JD: But I’m looking forward to seeing your logo, so I’m waiting with baited breath, ’cause I am a logo freak, as my many clients will tell you, and I’m a big believer in cool logos, so…

 

0:13:00.6 SR: Well, and that’s in… That’s in the works. I can tell you with 100% complete candor that I also am waiting anxiously to see the new logo.

 

[laughter]

 

0:13:11.8 JD: Yeah, that’s always fun. The graphic artist comes back and they give you five things and you say, “I don’t like any of them,” and they’re like, “Oh, I might have to go back and start all over again,” but that’s the life of a graphic artist. Yeah, that’s just the way it is.

 

0:13:24.1 SR: My whole skill set would be so really suited to that, to be coming up with all of these ideas and running them by somebody and then for them to just shoot them all down and you gotta come back all over again, it’s… Yeah, some people don’t mind it, but yeah, that would be awful, so…

 

0:13:46.0 JD: That’s one of my marketing super skills, is that I’m very good at looking at stuff and saying… Visual stuff and saying that works, or that doesn’t work, I’m very bad at saying why it doesn’t work, all I can really do for the graphic artist is saying, “That’s good,” or, “That’s not good.” And so that’s a little frustrating for the graphic artist, but it at least gives them a nice clean, okay, this didn’t work. And I always advise my clients to show graphic artists stuff that they like and say, “This… It would be great if it was like this unless… Except if it had a little bit more of this image and a little bit more of that image,” because the ones I’ve worked with are very good at putting all that stuff together and usually coming up with something that’s great, so…

 

0:14:29.0 SR: Yeah, interesting that you say that. So we’ve gone through the same process as that, where the people who are gonna be working on the cover art that the podcast is gonna be hosted by Evergreen podcasts, which is also the host of my other podcast, the High Volume Hiring podcast. They’re the host of Matt Alder’s podcast Recruitment Flags Chat, and a whole bunch of others, and so they’ve got a real good system and process in place, their request to me for the cover art, the logo for this new podcast, for the Inside Job Boards podcast was exactly the way you’re describing it, tell us what you like, if you also wanna tell us what you don’t like, that’s gonna be really helpful. So I think I sent them four or five, six different examples of cover art that I liked for the High Volume Hiring podcast, and I did the same for the Inside Job Boards podcast, and at least with the High Volume Hiring, they came back… I think they gave me four or five options, none of which were right, but it was like, “I like this, this and this from option number one, and I like this from option number two, and I like this from option number three,” and then they put them together and we were good to go.

 

0:15:37.9 SR: College Recruiter, my day job, we’re just about to relaunch the front-end of our site, so in days it’ll have a completely new look and feel, which I was completely uninvolved in, and therefore it’s gonna be really good…

 

[laughter]

 

0:15:54.0 SR: And that was exactly the process that we followed there, the user interface designers, like, “What kind of an image are you looking for, do you want it to be funky. Do you want it to be humorous? Do you want it to be professional? Do you want it to be conservative, do you want it to be wacky?” I mean, they were just sort of all of these words and the feel, the tone that you’re looking to communicate, and then somehow these people know, this color evokes that emotion, this shape communicates that. And it’s a real gift that these designers have. I mean, for the job boarders out there that maybe you’re really good on the engineering side and just not all that talented on the design side and have never worked with a designer, that is definitely something that is worth the investment, it’s not cheap and it takes a lot of time, but the user interface really matters.

 

0:16:46.5 JD: Oh yeah, yeah, it’s huge. Well, I hope that you showed your team the JobBoardGeek logo and said, “Okay, not like this.”

 

[laughter]

 

0:16:55.0 JD: So… Well, listen, Steven, I think we ought to wrap this up, give us again that email where people can shoot over to you about how to find the podcast.

 

0:17:06.3 SR: Sure, podcast@collegerecruiter.com. And Jeff, I want to just say, personally, from the two of us that your willingness to do this podcast with me, it was about a year ago at this time when we were sort of talking about, is this something that we could collaborate on? And what would it look like and what would our roles be in whatever… I have learned a ton from you. Every single episode, I’ve looked forward to being a part of it, the guests that you selected and occasionally passed on were just tremendous, that they were… I think every single one of them added value, every single one of them contributed to the ecosystem, and I think we’ve played a bit of a part with these 40-some odd episodes in helping to make the industry even better, so thank you.

 

0:17:56.9 JD: Well, thank you, and I appreciate you being in on this podcast and sort of moving us along and bringing in some great guests, and of course, always finding the intelligent thing to say at the right time, witty thing to say at the right time, and the groaning thing to say at the right time, so… [chuckle] It’s always been entertaining. And I appreciate it, and I really enjoyed it.

 

0:18:24.3 SR: Well, from this Robin to you Batman, it’s been a pleasure.

 

[laughter]

 

0:18:29.6 JD: I had not thought of it that way. Okay, that will haunt my dreams for a long time. Well… Well folks, this is it for today’s show. Again, you should, if you’re not subscribing, you should go ahead and subscribe because there’s all sorts of great stuff in the archive, and as you know, this is Jeff Dickey-Chasins, and I’m here with my co-host, Steven Rothberg, and for the last time, you’ve been listening to JobBoardGeek, the podcast about the business of connecting candidates and employers. That’s all for now, adios.

 

[music]