Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #302

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Caveat being that what is actually crashing is ‘TC’ or ‘total compensation’ in startup speak. The fact that annual equity grants can form a significant portion of an employees total compensation will seem alien for many outside of tech startup, so this insiders view is a fascinating introduction to the topic, and how variable compensation of this type can be dependent on external factors unrelated to job performance. Loads of jargon here but get past that and you get a glimpse of the candidate / employee psychology.

H/T brainfooder Randy Bailey for the share in the fb group

Interesting research from our buddies Phenom People, who audited 100 top European company career sites against attraction, engagement and conversion measures. Employers are named and ranked, (rather politely on page20 🙂), after the methodology and aggregate commentary. Worth benching your career site against this to identify areas of improvement folks. Read here. H/T to brainfooder Jana Tepe for the permission to share

Anecdotally, I would have to agree. Most of you will have received some sort of follow up email from me after sign up to check in on delivery and to take feedback if you want to give it - and I put [Firstname] in subject line to get around 45-50% OR. Have a read here, give this a go if you’re not already doing it.

So this website looks like some sort of ‘multi-search’ tool, which auto populates a search term across a huge number of searchable sites. Obvious application for sourcing, so sourcers get to it, here

Brainfooder Andy Foote is my favourite commentator on LinkedIn, because he combines communication with community. Posts like this is are the reason why he is a regular guest on Brainfood Live, which reminds me Andy about time to get you back on in August?

The directional of causality is unproven here, but the findings ring true - high performing companies have HR at C-level advisory. Interestingly, recruiting not correlated, though this may be because of specialisation (high performing companies separate TA vs HR?) and maybe seniority. Worth a read.

Fascinating account of said Ph.D candidate on his job search, where he reflects on topics such as credentialism, speed of response, value of back channelling and the inconsistency of job titles. A superb read, recruiters will get a lot of out of this, especially on insight on CX.

This post is about product management but really you could apply a great deal of OP’s 20 lessons to recruitment, process re-engineering, change management, technology implementation and the rest. The insight is often novel, free from cliche and you feel the lessons were hard earned. Excellent read, gonna say it is a must read.

Pretty big news last week that Glassdoor lost its case against Zuru, an employer who demanded the identity of a former employee who had written what it had claimed was a slanderous review of the company. Litigation risk was always the main reason why review sites never work in the end. Good news for employer brand folks? I think so, though I am probably in the minority (again 🤣). H/T brainfooder Steven Brand for the share in the fb group

Even asking the question feels tense but we have to do it because as far as I can tell there is no guidance on how to do this. ‘Culture war’ is a conflict of values, and values are human artefacts do not have external reality from human culture. Should employers stay neutral then? Brainfooder Jim Stroud with context and argument to make the case.

…and yet failure to take a stand might not only be morally reprehensible but also have real impact on your viability as an employer. It didn’t take long for the US anti-abortion policies to have an effect, especially as the implications differ state by state.

We are getting better at understanding the challenges of remote work - the loss of osmotic information transfer requires constant ‘synching up’ (a.k.a meeting overload) to keep everyone on the same page. What if we had a class of person to do this? Outstanding read. H/T brainfooder Colin Donnery for the share in the fb group

In software development - and in many contexts in recruitment & HR - it has become consensus that monolithic thinking does not produce fast or even adequate solutions. So why do we think of the economy that way? Exciting new research of applying network and systems theory to national economies. Accessible read, it’s barely recruitment, but it’s definitely brainfood…

The requirement of Starbucks, Morton Williams and other US food retailers to hire security and limit hours in order to keep operating is not only a sad statement of affairs but also a futile gesture when underlying issues producing societal collapse remain unaddressed. In the interim, expect workforce automation to be one of the ways for food businesses to stay viable.

Do you struggle to remember people’s faces? You may have prosopagnosia, or face blindness and it affects more people than you think, including Brad Pitt, who you sense is glad to have been diagnosed after spending too much time being accused of conceit. And interesting phenomena, I wonder how many recruiters have this and whether it impacts our job in some way…

I had the pleasure of chatting with Chris on his Purpose Led Leadership podcast two weeks ago, and it is fascinating now to hear him from the other side, as the guest. His story is remarkable and wellworth a listen.

Who is watching the watchers is the a question of infinite regression which might ultimately lie at our concern on issues such as censorship, algorithmic bias and narrative control. AI probably is the answer but as this podcast outlines, we don’t know where down the line. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share.

Chad and Cheese are back with a great conversation on assessment with Caitlin MacGregor, which dives into history, sociology and foundational tenets of assessments - it’s fundamentally an assessment for an individual who we assess in isolation from others, when we are social and will eventually work with others. Great listen.