Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #303

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Stay Saasy is one of the most insightful blogs covering business operations and company culture - and it is very well written. This post got me thinking, especially on the idea that ‘writing is thinking’ and therefore good writing skills may be a strong signal for quality management. Should we assess for this then when hiring for managers? Food for thought for sure.

Brainfooder José Kadlec has taken it upon himself to write some excellent sourcing blog posts recently. This one involves combining several search tools popular in the OSINT community to find candidate information via image search. Not sure how many hires you’ll make doing all this but you will train the ‘sourcing mindset’ - which is the most powerful tool of all. Must read folks.

Shareholder updates are a great source of information to spot trends that are actually happening in the market. This is especially the case when the company in question is at the forefront of not only the gig economy but also the remote work one. Interesting and accessible reading from Upwork

Another year, another economic conundrum - as the US tumbles into technical recession, job vacancy rate remains at a high, and competition of workers is still acute. What exactly is going on? Increasingly, it may be an unofficial, decentralised, acephalous general strike. Organisations will have to get innovative with much greater flexibility in hiring and employment or automate. Have a read. H/T brainfooder Randy Bailey for the share in the fb group

The case of the downturn being felt principally in tech is strengthened by this research from Indeed, where we see a significant slow down of tech job postings, whilst other sectors remain robust. Big tech companies are important bell weathers, but we are over probably indexing on them. Great research, must read.

It is so very important to have the right measurements, as do indeed ‘do what we measure’. The problem comes when we end up doing the things which are most conveniently recordable in Excel, rather than more intangible things which make great teams work, an important point made by brainfooder Ted Bauer in this post on ‘the spreadsheet mentality’. As a bonus, this HN thread becomes a brilliant discussion on why measuring something, can often corrupt it.

The fact that the incredibly difficult task of constructing a global index of over 100+ countries is inevitably going to be a flawed exercise doesn’t mean that the project is without value. WEF makes the effort here - try and look for comparison over time rather the league tables over countries.

Interesting research on the wealth distribution effect of remote working - as employers flex out their workforce, they are carrying higher paying jobs into regions which previously paid far less. This is a genuine levelling outcome, so long as the pay scale is ‘geo-neutral’ (evidence either side on whether remote jobs are being location adjusted)

That the development of our brains is influenced by our social environment is not a question of debate -we can now actually see the difference our neuroanatomy. Got me thinking if we can see if, would it be ethical to assess for it? And if not, why not - it really would have an impact on job performance. Furthermore, can we take this information and use it for stuff like personal development? Accessible, philosophical post, kind of meta brainfood.

With the news that Meta is going to change its newsfeed to orientate even more around engagement, and less so around social graph, it is as good a time as any to share this 2019 post from Eugene Wei on the evolution of social networks, it’s tie in with social capital and why some companies will always be bad to social media marketing. Wei is a magnificent writer, and these infrequent essays are amongst the best commentary you’ll read on the online world we inhabit and it proves prescient as we read it today. One for the content creators, recruitment marketers and anyone else who cares about the intersection between society and information technology.

Skip to the discussion if you want to get to the conclusions. Political bifurcation now seemingly discernible across state lines also, with not only a migration of talent to places more aligned to your politics but also a retrenchment of those politics by the leaders of your businesses, leading to perhaps the incredible outcome different types of company cultures, in different states in what is increasingly becoming, the disunited States of America.

The shift to remote continues to produce counterintuitive outcomes. You might have thought that the reduction of staff-on-staff interaction would reduce the frequency of bullying simply by reducing the time we spend with each other; however, it turns out, you can bully via remote, especially passively aggressively….

So last week’s post on the equity component of a tech employees ‘total compensation’ proved to be popular, so this week I am going to include this post from Levels.fyi - a guide book on how it all works. Super accessible and pretty comprehensive, this is a valuable guide to any tech recruiter selling equity as a component of the job offer. Also great nurture content for those tech candidates you said you’d keep in touch with.

It feels like pay transparency has inexorable momentum - the holdouts are the mature organisations with loads of ‘culture debt’ built up over years of variably paying employees based on decentralised 1-2-1 negotiations. I would imagine every new company starting from scratch would go pay transparent - especially if you plan to hire from Gen Z workforce. Any disagree with this projection?

Incredible story of medical malpractice which may have prematurely ended the lives of both Johan Sebastian Bach and George Handel. Why in brainfood? Because credentialism remains one of the main blights in how we assess candidates, it’s a bad habit that has been with us for a long time and the continued indulgence of which may lead to historically significant ramifications. It’s also a great read 😉.

How important is a CEO’s lifestyle to their performance in the job? And…at what point does this scrutiny segue into discrimination? Fascinating conversation on a correlation between personal behaviour and professional outcome, with serious implications on how we make assessments. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share

Really liking the TA content production coming out of Doctolib. I think this helps with EB, more effective hiring for recruiters and also, I suspect, improve retention rate. Check it out here. H/T to brainfooders Rassam Yaghmaei for the share and Paul Mouchet for being such a great interviewee!

Been meaning to listen to this one for a while, but only just now managed to catch up with it. It’s recruitment legends and long time brainfooders William Tincup and Vanessa Raath in conversation on talent sourcing. Great listening folks.