The Chad & Cheese Podcast

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.

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/

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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.

"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!

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.