Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #297

Hung Lee

Brainfood Jobs: How is the job market for recruiters going? With dramatic tech layoffs becoming a regular thing again, it appears that the market may have already dried up. Subscribe to Brainfood Jobs Job Board here, when the good times comes again, you’ll be the first to be notified.

Brainfood Live, Ep160: Sourcing Without LinkedIn …A 7 Day ChallengeCan you do it? Over 80% of all community members have LIR, and I suspect the rest have some other access to LinkedIn and use it every day. What would recruiters do without it? Lets find out with some sourcing tips which don’t involved it. Register here folks, 250 already signed up, 300 seat limit!

Special thanks this week to: Eugène van den Hemel, Colin Donnery,Joey NK Koksal, Vanessa Raath, Achyut Menon, Michael Williams, Kevin Green, Eva Baluchova, Matt Bradburn, John Bersentes and David Green - your public support of all things brainfood is noted and appreciated it!

Now check out your scores on the Brainfood Hall of Fame😉

Can you help? Simply share this link recruitingbrainfood.com on a LinkedIn status update and recommend it to your network - it’s the best way to keep the growing the brainfood community.

Cheers!

Hung

Sponsors

Bryq

This week’s brainfood is supported by our buddies at Bryq.

The workforce is changing at an exponential rate. Are you keeping up?

Bryq is an award-winning Talent Intelligence solution that will transform and future-proof the way you manage your talent.

Whether your goal is to eliminate bias and uncover hidden talent from the hiring process, promote internal mobility for your employees through career pathing, or to grow and cultivate your company culture through culture mapping, Bryq is able to help you create and manage teams that are more than just the sum of their parts.

Book a demo with Bryq’s Customer Success Team today to see just how much their science can accomplish for your organization.

SPONSORS

www.bryq.com

The Brainfood

The Theory of Constraints Applied to Recruiting

Some great cross disciplinary thinking from brainfooder Kevin Wheeler who applies Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints to the world of recruiting. It’s essentially the idea that incremental efficiency gains per-stage are not likely to produce significant change, because without refactoring the process, the critical bottlenecks remain. H/T to brainfooder Caroline Hunter for the share

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

fotnews.futureoftalent.org

Interviewer Training That Raises The Bar

The shift to remote work has simultaneously been a digitisation of previously analogue process. The shift from in-person to video interview, has meant we can now mine interview metadata and produce content like this, data driven recommendations on how to improve your team’s interview capability. Must read, from our friends at Metaview

ASSESSMENT

resources.metaview.ai

A New Path to COO

Great post from brainfooder Jessica Zwaan on her own journey from recruiter to COO, a atypical outcome for someone in a TA / HR role. Analysis from Jess on why this should make more sense to organisations and advice to those who may wish to pursue this path. Great insight and great writing.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

jessicamayzwaan.medium.com

Every LinkedIn Post In One Place

This is super simple but when it comes to sourcing, the best stuff usually is super simple. Brainfooder Balazs Paroczay shows us how to identify what a country is talking about on any given day on LinkedIn with this sourcing string and Ctrl+ F. Think about engagement, think network building, think about candidate identification through the conversations they engage in.

SOURCING

thesourcecode.academy

On Hiring: Seven Principles (Version 1.0)

To-the-point recommendations on how to hire for outstanding talent. Love this post because despite its brevity it manages to squeeze in concepts like ‘healthy psychological ecology’ in the DEIB recommendation. Concision like this is a valid signal of acuity. Must read

CULTURE

medium.com

People At Work 2022 - A Global Workforce Review

Report from ADP attempting to give global coverage on the topic of people’s attitude to work. Dataset is big enough (32,000+) but the cohorts are way too broad - Australia and Indonesia are vastly different countries yet are grouped together as “Asia-Pacific”. Needs to be minimum country-by-country analysis on this. Anyways, here it is anyway, you might get something from it.

SOCIETY

www.dropbox.com

The Insensitive Ruins It All: Compositional and Compilational Influences of Social Sensitivity on Collective Intelligence in Groups

We hate the term ‘culture fit’ but the underlying concept of hiring people who are compatible with the existing team is valid enough that a future rebrand of the idea is going to be inevitable. Interesting research here on how low EQ individuals lower collective intelligence, because of cognitive energy expenditure required by everyone else to align down the guy who can’t ‘read the room’.

CULTURE

www.frontiersin.org

Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers

Slave labour alive and well in the US, though now rebranded as rehabilitation for the incarcerated. It’s a billion dollar business. Did you know that 2 out of every 3 prisoners were put to work in the production of often mandatory items (i.e license plates). Stunning piece of research into an unacceptable part of the US economy. And here is a list of everyday items made by US prisoners, which might surprise you.

SOCIETY

www.aclu.org

Is LaMDA Sentient?

Stunning interview transcription from a Google Engineer who had a conversation with LaMDA over chat. The machine outputted answers where it appeared not convincingly human but convincingly intelligent. Plenty of critical voices here but I do wonder whether it will become a moot to ponder whether or not sentience has been achieved so long as the impression of it has….. have a read of the whole transcript, and make up for own views. H/T to brainfooder Jan Tegze for the share

AI

cajundiscordian.medium.com

Shawn Barnes on LinkedIn: 🚨BOMBSHELL!!!🚨 The Conversation Between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard

They used to call this ‘hashtag hijacking’ and whilst its generally fallen out of fashion, I couldn’t help but like this attempt given the inappropriateness of platform and cleverness of punchline. Throwaway stuff but a good technical example of the approach.

CONTENT MARKETING

www.linkedin.com

When Innovation Has No Border, Culture Is Key

We often mean different things when we talk about ‘diversity’ so it is refreshing to see the development of the concept ‘global diversity’ - an organisation that is not only ethnically diverse in country but culturally, ethnically and linguistically diverse at international scale. H/T to brainfooder Johann Harnoss for his leadership in the production of this report.

D&I

www.dropbox.com

The Real People Behind China’s Virtual Idols

The worlds of online fantasy and in-person reality are merging into something we’ve never seen before. From virtualised ABBA doing live shows, to haptic suit wearing Twitch streamers to virtual pop bands in China, there’s usually human beings doing the what seems to be very much a possible future of work.

FUTURE OF WORK

www.sixthtone.com

Just Being Exposed to New Things Makes People ‘Ready to Learn’

Routines produce efficiency (and perhaps mental health) but they can concurrently reduce learning capability. Turns out that simply being exposed to new things helps the brain prepare to learn, so with the learnings of this post in mind, you can start preparing your team for the chaos ahead by introducing it in a controlled manner…

CULTURE

news.osu.edu

In Defense of Coding Interviews

This post starts off a a defence of the now derided whiteboard exercise (which I suspect OP does indeed have some sympathy for) but then produces a number of other coding assessment styles which can complement or replace the idea. Reading code, Debugging code, Sharing code…all pretty good ways to see where a developer might be at in terms of coding chops. Have a read here

ASSESSMENT

biggestfish.substack.com

The 'Working' Job Interviews That Go Too Far

More on assessment; it is generally accepted that the closer we can get to ‘real world’ the more we can trust the assessment. So, I’m a fan of work trials, especially if they are small in scope, and compensated. But sometimes, some employers go too far. More good stuff from BBC Worklife

ASSESSMENT

www.bbc.com

Making It Easier to Ask for Help

Being effective at asking for help is actually a professional skill worth developing. Jean Hsu with some outstanding practical tips on to get more value from your colleagues and the communities you belong to. Plenty of us on the brainfood online community and I think all of us could do with reading this post.

PS: feel free to join the community btw, free for all members of the newsletter

COMMUNITY

jeanhsu.substack.com

Who's Talking?

Exponential Organizations

Sometimes it’s fun to watch classic old talks (now meaning anything before 2019) and see how people thought about the future. This one from Salim Ismail remains one of the best, and as he talks about organisations fit for this future, relevant for us here.

CULTURE

www.youtube.com

Can a Hedge Fund Win the World Series?

This is fun - the application of techniques, technologies and some cases, human resources, from one field (Hedge Funds) to something entirely unrelated (Pro Sports). Perhaps, not entirely unrelated. Great listen, do it here. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share.

PEOPLE ANALYTICS

castbox.fm

The Impact of Talent Scarcity on The Future of Work

I haven’t watched this yet, but it has been a highly rated panel discussion on the future of work with some big hitters from the field of economics, digitisation and labour market theory. 50 minutes, give it a blast, let me know what you think

ECONOMICS

www.adeccogroup.com

End notes

I’m back in London after an amazing 10 day, two conference, way-too-many-late-nights stay in Barcelona. Got to say, it’s a pretty special city. Thanks for everybody for making me so welcome, especially the good folks at NPA Worldwide and Hired!BCN for inviting me to take part in their superb events and for the awesome Ebony James for giving a homeless dog a roof over my head in between!

Also managed to sneak in some Weird DALL-E generations into the talk, which I am going to now do for every talk going forward 🤣

Might start traveling more seriously for a bit and keep doing the brainfood on the road. What do you reckon, where else should I go? So DM me on twitter or Instagram or TikTok….

Have a great week everybody.

Hung

Did you enjoy this issue? Yes No

Hung Lee @hunglee

It's recruiting brainfood for the week ahead

In order to unsubscribe, click here.

If you were forwarded this newsletter and you like it, you can subscribe here.

Created with Revue by Twitter.

Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #297

Older messages

Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #296

Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #295

Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #294

Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #293

Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #292

You Might Also Like

‘We found the thing that gives us joy’: Microchild on the microverse, music, and shared language

🦅 Reminder: Masterclass with Jesse Pujji

[Webinar tomorrow] Canadian? How to Grow Your Amazon FBA Business as a Canuck

The state of ad serving for brands and agencies

♟️ OpenAI's smart chess move!

March Madness is here: Tap into the hype with these marketing plays

ET: March 11th 2025

If SEO is dead…

Niche = $$$

The Founder Institute targets first VC fund