Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #291

This week’s brainfood is supported by our buddies Equitas.

Equitas interview software enables organisations to reduce bias, improve recruitment efficiency and upgrade candidate experience. Make more informed hiring decisions based on interview data rather than gut instinct.

Want to know more? Contact one of our friendly sales team and book a personalised demo here.

One of the most important pieces of research on remote working I’ve yet come across - this company basically ran an enterprise wide A/B test (with control) on WFH, tracking employee and manager sentiment, working patterns, collaboration behaviour, messaging behaviour and performance. Lots of interesting insight, include the employee driven synchronisation without management mandate. Essential reading folks - download the PDF here

Consider this a companion piece to the first article in the newsletter. Technical but accessible research paper on why video conferencing inhibits creativity - it’s about the lack of eye contact and the consequent failure to efficiently ‘coordinate conversation’. Evidence that there is indeed an innovation disadvantage for on-premise vs remote teams. Have a read here, download the paper here

Interesting post here from brainfooder Jonathan Kidder (whose blog is always worth a follow, especially for tech sourcers) on how the FAANG companies assess for recruiters. It’s probably overstating it a little - these companies are so huge that there has to be local variance on how these interviews are conducted - but the general trend of what-must-happen might well be the case. Interesting for a lot of reasons - as a comparator for how you do it, and also, as prep in case you are going for one of these jobs as a candidate.

If we are still totally up for remote (and as employees rather than employers, why wouldn’t we be?), then this site might be useful place to find new work, with the twist that every job posted has location agnostic pay.

You hope to never have to do it, but the experience of the past 2 years should have taught us that a) nothing lasts forever and b) certainly not the good times, so this Coda can be used as a ready-to-go talent database for colleagues that have been let go. Bookmark it.

Podcast discovery remains such an inexact science that we primarily still rely on recommendations made from open outcry. This amazing post breaks down how Spotify search works and….got me thinking about how useful this might be for budding podcasters and recruitment marketers wanting greater discoverability for their content….

As the world becomes more data centric, skills demand is moving from English to Maths. Pretty clear from these projections that the growth jobs of the next decade are going to be data centric. Food for thought for recruiters looking for their next vertical or indeed wanting to up-skill themselves to be future ready. Despite this being a US government website, it is easy reading.

Massively counterintuitive findings, which are potentially triggering, but well worth investigating further. In summary: women who out-earn their husbands, change behaviour to do more (not less!) housework in order to re-affirm commitment to prescribed conjugal roles, challenged by this new earning disparity. Study here, and BBC Worklife again with an outstanding post on the same report. love to know your thoughts on this, maybe worth a brainfood live.

Fun tool on the professional cant which gets you to communicate what you want to say in a plausibly deniable passive aggressive way. Obviously a satirical site made for the laughs, but as I clicked through the options, I have to say some of the recommendations I think are actually pretty useful. Click on this if you find yourself in too much conflict at work.

Excellent, accessible primer on the state of web3 or ‘the ownership economy’. Premise is this: web1 (read only) and web2 (social) both ended up aggregating control to an ever smaller group of companies (‘big tech bad’), which web3 (blockchain) will disrupt by fusing user action + ownership via tokenisation. It’s really quite simple.

Readers of my LinkedIn newsletter (👈 you need follow this on LinkedIn btw) will know that I am believer in the ‘open kitchen’ approach to business operations, as customers do indeed want to know how the sausages are made. This example from TRAFFIT is an outstanding demonstration what this looks like in practice. I’m speaking with brainfooder Mick Griffin on Salary Transparency on Brainfood Live later this month - register here to know more about this approach to. business.

With Meta freezing hiring last week, as well as a number of prominent tech companies announcing lay offs, it could be that the market has already turned to take into the account the exogenous factors of weak growth, record inflation, high energy prices and hostile de-globalisation. Or it could be that companies are just artificially pumped with VC money. Excellent post using the story of Gumroad as an example of what happens to company culture and hiring imperatives when you take a shed load of money….

So whatever you think of Elon Musk, any takeover of a social network where you have spent any amount of time represents are risk to your investment. This cool tool allows you to export your twitter bookmarks, in case you ever wanted to back that stuff up.

Carlota Perez is one of the foremost economic historians (and therefore an accidental workforce futurist…) writing these days and brainfooder Andrew Spence does an excellent job of summarising her key thesis - that breakthrough technologies predictably generate socio-economic change in a cyclical manner. Carlota is a must read, as is Andrew, read this and follow both.

Amazing story, perhaps one which can only ever be extended by Walter himself as he continues his streak for working for a single employer, ReneauxView. Someone speak to this company and figure out what the secret to employee retention might be…

There are powerful arguments for and against remote working. Call from the EU to reduce energy dependency by WFH might be an argument more obviously repurposed to mitigate climate change, as well as to oppose Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Brainfood for sure. H/T brainfooder Caroline Hunter for the share.

Fast becoming my favourite podcast, Freakonomics Radio continues to surprise with interesting angles on interesting case studies, most of which are related to the world of work. This one, on the failure of ideas to move, provides an analytical toolkit to better understand failure, and by reverse engineering, how to succeed.

Rare opportunity it see the awesome Debbie McGrath and Matt Charney shoot the breeze on all things recruiting, including the relevance of rankings and lists. Entertaining, insightful in equal measure. Have a watch here

This is actually a really good transcript so you can read here if you prefer, but I found this podcast from McKinsey on DEIB in government to be easy and interesting listening. Give it a shot here