Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #311

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

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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…..

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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