Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #305

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Bad interviews occur when we forget the ‘purpose behind the ritual’. Just one of many finely phrased insights in this outstanding, cliché-free post on the art and science of interviewing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - the best recruiting content most often comes from non-specialists who have had cause to reflect on their direct experience. Must read.

Excellent report from our buddies at Landing Jobs, who surveyed the global software engineering community on the stuff they do and stuff they want to do. Unusual geographical diversity in these results, something which will become increasingly important as more software engineering roles migrate to remote. Have a read here

We not only depend too much on LinkedIn, but we trust it too much also. Some fine research from brainfooder Marcel van de Meer on how the application of location filters can simply remove large numbers of potentially suitable candidates. Main lesson here? Never blindly trust the output of a database search.

Email newsletters are not the same as email outreach but perhaps some similar principles could be applied. And also, why aren’t more recruiters running newsletters? Got to be a low effort / high(ish) value format out there. Decent guideline on how to improve your OR if you want to give it a shot.

At what point does vulnerability segue into narcissism? Braden Wallake, CEO of HyperSphere had the opportunity to find out last week, as his LinkedIn post went viral maybe for reasons which he did not intend. The ‘crying CEO’ has now become a thing, with many of the 7000 + commentators pillorying Wallake for centring himself as the star of a painful story. There is no good way to make lay offs, but it seems that there is a plenty of bad ways to do it. Have a read, and reflection here. H/T to brainfooder Erin Mathew for the share.

And yet lay offs are a thing, especially in tech and especially in scale up tech, where VC money raised on the model of a troubled yet fundamentally globalising marketplace has been shattered by war and ‘hostile de-globalisation’. Visual Capitalist with a great if incomplete visualisation of what’s up

A great deal of our love for remote is due to the rebalancing of work / life that it provides. My argument that this could be fairly described as ‘doing less work’ has been criticised in-community but surely this is just restating what ‘rebalancing’ is. Bosses don’t like it, especially live players like the CEO’s of Meta and Alphabet. HN with a conversation thread which discernibly splits along individual contributor vs manager lines. It’s a form of (middle) class war folks.

Perhaps the slackers like Zuckerberg and Pichai want out of their business can find other forms of work more appealing - maybe like this one from bed manufacturer Casper, who really are looking to hire professional sleepers to test their mattresses. Job is still live folks, so go ahead and apply if you think you’re qualified 😂

Even as tech lay offs dominate the headlines, we simultaneously have a persistent candidate shortage in many areas of the economy, and long term illness maybe a more significant factor than we realise. US data, but I suspect the distribution of long covid to be more prevalent in particular sectors of the economy, would follow the same pattern in other countries.

Companion piece to the above report, this one from the Institute of Fiscal Studies uses data from the UK, and conclude along similar lines - long covid might be permanently removing people from the workforce, at least for the jobs they once did. Some ideas on what to do, mainly stem from reallocating to other work with different physical / mental demands. Accessible, important read.

Some changes on how the world’s most used search engine works. Worth keeping an eye on this, as Google do make announcements but they are hardly ever amplified to the consumer product. Quotation marks now have some sort of impact in search. HN thread generally is a critical screed of Google, but contains some great comments on how search improvements might work - of interest to sourcers generally I think.

Incredible story which is hard to categorise - fans of Marie Kondo might have cause to empathise with the recruiter, but I suspect most of us would side with the consensus at this outrageous request. “Massive red flag,” one user said. Probably is. H/T to brainfooder Colin McNicol for the share in the fb group

The persistent (and perhaps permanent) candidate shortage in many industry sectors will accelerate the adoption of robots. Right now the concentration is in heavy industry, but it will become real to us when it gets into pizza.

This article really should be ‘above the fold’ but well done for those of you who have made it so far - it’s a hidden treat, packed full of practical ideas with sound theoretical foundations on managing cultural change as the team and company scales. One for the culture architects and team leaders / managers

The older you get the less likely you are to learn new stuff. We intuitively know this stereotype to be true, especially as our own lived experience (this is now biography) accelerates into ‘past it’ phase. An interesting study as to why our motivation to learn declines over time, with implications on how we age diversify our workforce. Should we test for learning ability, if there are biological markers of it? Ethnical conundrum right here folks.

Perhaps the only way to not go gently into that good night, is to actively practice thinking. This cool website might be a great study aid - help you get better at thinking by introducing frameworks for analysis and problem solving. We use a lot of these anyway, but probably less fluent at them than we could be. Get raging at the dying of the light folks.

Having spent the previous decades developing ghosting into an art form, these past few years have seen us recruiters on the other end of the experience, as candidates regularly start ghosting us. It’s a traumatic experience, that does not allow closure. Perhaps it should be a criminal offence?

Is it all over for San Francisco? Perhaps the most lauded of what we used to call ‘super star’ cities, SF was the place you had to go if you were to make in the world of tech startup. But the remote work revolution, absurdly high rental costs and decreasing standard of living is reversing what was once the inexorable agglomeration effect. Great listen.

Nothing wrong with any of these rules, and refreshing to hear them stated in this way. It would be step in the right direction if we adopted more of these and put them into practice. H/T brainfooder Chaya Trevor for the share

Tyler Cowen has become one of the leading public intellectuals of the day, pontificating on all topics from war, globalisation, culture and technology. Here he is talking about talent though, so well worth a listen, especially when he talks about deviating away from the rules…