Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #311

Hung Lee

Brainfood Baked Fresh - we’re back tomorrow to review this very newsletter with you! If you want to join the conversation on anything you read here or want to get a digest on it, sign up to the event here - we’re on lunch hour Monday 12.30pm BST.

Brainfood Jobs: Looking for work, hedging your bets or just want to keep an eye on recruiter job opportunities coming up, Brainfood has a job board where you can configure your interests and get notified as soon as the jobs appear. Subscribe here, and if you’re an employer hiring for recruiters / HR folks, post here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep174 - Where Are All The Workers? - continuing our mini-series of trying to work out what is going on with the economy, we are bringing in some expert labour market economists to help us understand why there is this persistent talent shortage. Economists from Indeed, Radancy and IFS join - this is top level folks. If you want to better understand hiring conditions throughout 2022 and onto 2023, register here. We’re on Friday 30th Sep, 2pm BST

Special thanks this week to: David Green, Eugène van den Hemel, Jon Hull, James Osborne, Vanessa Raath, Kevin Green, Joey NK Koksal, Steve Jacobs, Dave Hazlehurst, Felix von Zittwitz, Rob Walker, Bas van de Haterd, Patricia Chmielowiec, Ross Clennett, Tim Sanchez, Sarah Ali, Mark Deubel and Adrian McDonagh for your public endorsement on all things brainfood! This sort of advocacy is a real motivator for me to keep going - thank you!

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.

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From hiring to retiring, Bryq is able to help companies make better, faster and stronger talent management decisions throughout the entire employee lifecycle.

Hire, grow and retain the best possible talent while creating teams that are more than just the sum of their parts with Bryq AI Talent Intelligence. Click here to book a free demo with the Bryq team today!

SPONSORS

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The Brainfood

Inside Pollen’s Collapse: $200M Raised But Staff Unpaid

Superb piece of investigative journalism by Gergely Orosz (follow on Twitter), on the rapid collapse of events startup, Pollen. Particularly interesting is the correlation between how well funded a company is vs how highly rated the company culture was…before the money ran out. How much of ‘great company culture’ is really just long runway? Lot of food for thought on this compulsive read.

CULTURE

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Hiring: Why More is Often Less

The best recruitment content often comes from non-recruiters who reflect on their direct experience of recruiting. This post is great example - the ex COO of Instacart, talking about hyper scaling, and why hiring less can often make for better business. You won’t agree with all of this (especially the reliance of profiling of A-players etc), but you will on some of it - have a read

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

rkg.blog

Candidate Lookup by CODΞ (Chrome Extension)

Love it when practitioners build tools for their own use; love it even more when that person is brainfooder Balazs Paroczay. This is cross referencing tool, to quickly find a prospects other social profiles. Needs a ‘select all’ as default I think, but hopefully that will come. Give it shot, will probably save you a load of time.

SOURCING

thesourcecode.academy

I Forced an AI Bot to Read 100 million Linkedin Profiles and Create a TV Pilot Script

Trung Phan (follow on Twitter) is some kind of satirical genius; his critiques of LinkedIn are hilariously true; his experiment here is along the same vein. Look at the most common terms of 100 million Linkedin profiles and you will indeed be humbled and honoured.

AI

twitter.com

How Does Upwork Work?

I’d be surprised if most of us haven’t made use of Upwork in some form. Part of its quality is that it provides such a smooth experience for clients that we often do not know how the platform actually works, for the workers. Rare and excellent breakdown post in case you wanted to fill that knowledge gap.

GIG ECONOMY

www.thediff.co

September 2022 Labor Market Update

Brainfooder Sarah Ali has been producing these monthly pulse reports and I’ve included every single one since I became aware of them. Superb analysis of labour economics in the US, made accessible through great writing and strong visual components. Must read for US brainfooders - and, given the dominance of the US economy - non-US brainfooders also.

ECONOMY

blog.radancy.com

A Message from Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson

As you all know, we are committed to becoming an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression company. Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens

Twilio became the latest of big tech scale ups to announce retrenchment last week, and whilst the CEO announcement struck a compassionate tone, the above rather innocuous sounding paragraph triggered an anti-woke backlash with concerns that a person’s racial identity might be a factor on their job security. An interesting conundrum - as an industry we are committed to diversifying the workforce, but might that mean using redundancies as a way of getting there? CEO Jeff Lawson full announcement here, Fortune have the story from anti-anti-racist lens, and just google Twilio redundancy racism. Uncomfortable brainfood

H/T to brainfooder Simone Missagia for the share

D&I

www.twilio.com

How I Interview Engineers to Assess Ability to Deliver Impact

Interesting retrospective from Metaview CEO and brainfooder Siadhal Magos, breaking down how he interviews engineers for impact. The analytics software provides rock solid foundation for understanding the interview style, and therefore the production of this mini-how-to.

ASSESSMENT

www.metaview.ai

Eastern European Guide to Writing Reference Letters

Sometimes you find gold in the most narrow recruitment niches. This is brilliant writing from my friend Ferenc Huszar on a specific problem he has himself encountered as both a writer and requester of academic references. It’s all about the culture of communication folks…..

ASSESSMENT

www.inference.vc

Using Your Employee Survey Data to Prioritise Employee Experience Projects

Perhaps employers can use Trung Phan’s AI bot to help with processing open text responses from survey data; seems like a lot of work to process and categorise employee survey responses, yet it is clear that such data contains great insight on how employees might really feel about things. Decent manual experiment, in need of a tool.

CULTURE

www.organizationview.com

More US Employers Are Trapping Workers in a New Form of Indentured Servitude

So it seems I’ve stumbled into some sort of rabbit hole in US employment law, and the more you uncover, the more there is to know; training clawback clauses as a retention strategy seems to be a thing - I hope, a rare thing - as misguided employers wage the war on talent, rather than for talent.

CULTURE

truthout.org

Does That Remote Job Opening Really Let You Work From Home? Check the Fine Print

OK so more on fine print of the job ad and indeed the employment contract. What happens when you see a job advertised as remote, but they don’t declare all the caveats? (i.e. must be available to come into the office once per week). Indeed, what happens when the employer changes the policy after job offer - does this invalidate the contract? Remote working gets more complicated. H/T to brainfooder Denys Dinkevych 🇺🇦 👊 for the share.

REMOTE WORKING

www.wsj.com

Tracking Phone Location Data to see How People Take Vacation

So this fellow has found a way to track phone location data over time to figure out how workers in different countries take holidays. European countries conspicuously take August off, US equally conspicuously don’t at all. Fascinating research, twitter thread here, full video here

SOCIETY

twitter.com

IR35 Reform Will be Repealed from April

News in the UK has been dominated by new Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s blockbusting mini-budget, labelled the biggest tax cutting bonanza for 37 years. Whilst the return to trickle down economics will have impact on every business in the country, there are also decisions which especially impact the sector, such as the roll back of liability for IR35. Conversations on HN covers the particulars as well as any media source.

FUTURE OF WORK

news.ycombinator.com

How Your Brain Fills in the Blanks with Experience

Neurons that fire together, wire together

Catchy phrase indeed to describe the phenomenon on Hebbian learning, where experience shapes our perception of reality. And ‘experience’ btw, is itself an act of creative perception, because fantasy can count in the brain as if real. Fascinating, accessible essay on how to brain works, with profound implications on how we as recruiters make assessment decisions.

ASSESSMENT

nautil.us

The Rise of Career-Adjacent Creators

Being a content creator is super hard, and following a very aggressive power law distribution, few ever make a living doing it. However, documentarians who simply capture and stream their day-to-day activities can sometimes find themselves with enormous followings, from which revenue generating opportunities then emerge. I’ve mentioned ‘the pool guy’ before. This article covers a few more examples, calling them ‘career-adjacent’ creators. Some recruiters are starting to do this too, I notice.

CREATOR ECONOMY

simonowens.substack.com

Who's Talking?

Are Scientific Journals Just Parasites?

Fascinating conversation on a topic most of us know little about - how the scientific peer review process works. Turns out, peer reviewers are unpaid volunteers who conduct reviews on behalf of commercial publishers, incentivised primarily by career building caché of saying that you’ve reviewed for XYZ credible publisher. It’s clearly a flawed system. Must listen folks, as we increasingly lean on ‘the science’ to validate our claims.

ASSESSMENT

open.spotify.com

Underrepresented Communities of Talent

Brainfooder Roy Baladi is one of those humans who consistently makes remarkable contributions to the community. Founder of Jobs for Humanity, here he is explaining the mission of about hiring from underrepresented Communities of Talent, not least the displaced and the formerly incarcerated.

D&I

recruitingfuture.com

Measuring Long Covid's Impact on the Labor Market

In our rush to see the end of pandemic (and pandemic mitigation measures…), we might well have underestimated the aggregate impact of disability from bad cases of Covid-19. Candidate shortage we’re seeing can at least partly be explained by the millions of workers currently economically inactive due to long Covid. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share

ECONOMY

castbox.fm

End notes

Been quite cool to meet up with a few folks recently - seems like London based events are starting to happen but I think we’re all suffering a little bit from having reconfigured our lives to do not be away from laptop for long chunks of time. Hence, the opportunity cost of attending events has gone up for everybody. Hope we get some sort of rebalancing at some point.

Anyways, I usually ask people to send me cool stuff from the Internet, so how about this tribute to the Internet of a bye gone era? Complain about cookies all you like, but before tracking we generally had to enter a smorgasbord of the weird, wonderful and frequently confounding.

DM me on twitter or Instagram or TikTok….

Have a great week everybody.

Hung

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Hung Lee @hunglee

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Eugene van den Hemel Bas van de Haterd awardwinning Talent Intelligence platform stronger talent management decisions expert labour market economists Bryq AI Talent Intelligence persistent talent shortage best possible talent Joey NK Koksal Felix von Zittwitz LinkedIn status update entire employee lifecycle RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS rkg cross referencing tool other social profiles best recruitment content top level folks recruiter job opportunities objective performance data great company culture

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Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #311

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Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #310

Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #309

Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #308

Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #307

Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #306

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