S4 E45 | CXR 25: Tara Amaral chats with Gerry and shares her history with CareerXroads

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Gerry Crispin 0:20So we're now recording, and I'm with Tara Amaral, from Marshall McLennan companies. And Tara and I go back, actually to just about the beginning of CareerXroads. Do you remember when we first we first got involved?

Tara Amaral, Marshall McLennan 0:39I think it was before y2k

Gerry Crispin 0:44I think it was two i think i think we met way back when I think there was some something you were doing with was a chase, I think you were were you at chase in that time

Tara Amaral, Marshall McLennan 0:56I was at Chase, we were building our first internet site. And you and I are on a Sherm panel on workforce planning,

Gerry Crispin 1:06oh, my God, boy, back to a long, long time ago, in the 1990s. And that was really before we pivoted, we were still doing consulting work. And I know Mark and I were primarily talking to people about their websites. And so we would, companies would have us come in, and we would have pretended that we were candidates. And so we would we would apply to jobs in those companies, and then compare them to similar companies, and talk to them about how screwed up their website was that sort of thing.

Tara Amaral, Marshall McLennan 1:47And yeah, Gerry, I don't know if you remember, but two things. This is when we had to convince the firm at the time that everybody needed an email address. So that's how old I am. And I want to say it was like, Tony Bada Bing was who you introduced yourself as

Gerry Crispin 2:05Yes. Yes. We then met Yes, we did mystery shopping for the hundred best companies in America to work for. And we did it under assumed names. And our first one was, what was it? I can't remember the guys name, but it was like that Bada Bing. And, and, and, and he got into the wall street journal. And we were accused by some president of the Association of Italian families of some kind of bias. And, you know, so we, we got it a little bit of trouble from that. And so after that, it was all cartoon characters, like Santa Claus, you know. So, so yeah, that was that was a lot of fun. And then I remember, when we pivoted, and we started the colloquium, you were one of the first members of the colloquium. And you were, you were with Chase, and you were working on either their first or their very first real website.

Tara Amaral, Marshall McLennan 3:10Yeah, it was it was in concert with being building website and an internal job board, which they still actually called job Connect today. I heard the other day. And it was when we were replatformming from small Lotus Notes databases to the first enterprise wide applicant tracking system. And at the time, we, they were with delay. Oh, I don't know who they're with now.

Gerry Crispin 3:35Yeah, that was, that was certainly a long time ago. And I remember, I remember how excited you were when you finally got this, this website together. And we're very proudly sharing that in in the cloak that people are going, oh, wow, look at that. I suspect that today, we probably look at it we go, Oh, my God, how primitive. But yeah, it was very cool.

Tara Amaral, Marshall McLennan 4:01It was very cool. And I can't take credit for there's a young guy Ben Lavalick I think his name was he actually spearheaded it. And it was it was quite revolutionary for the time. But again, a lot of it had to do with, will people come? You know, getting rid of paper applications, a lot of things that were kind of tried and true. And, and, you know, they're still using a lot of that we're all using a lot of those same principles today. So it was a big shift for the industry.

Gerry Crispin 4:30I think it was interesting. I think the one thing that reminds me I mean,