Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #313

This weeks brainfood is supported by our buddies Equitas.

Equitas’ Interview intelligence software is designed to help companies make better, less biased hiring decisions. Build a more diverse workforce by hiring the best available candidates according to the data not to your bias. Want to find out more? Book a personal demo with one of our team here

There is something seriously wrong with search if a video short platform like TikTok begins to supersede it. Yet that is precisely what is happening as Gen Z reject the desktop search experience, festooned as it is with ads, SEO and irrelevant results. Google’s response may be try and copy TikTok’s visual appeal, which this article from Verge does a decent job of outlining. Implications for recruiting is significant (maybe already felt, see below) because if Google moves away from text, then sourcing will change. Have a read here

Maybe sourcing already has changed. Search aficionados have been reporting unusual results on used before searches before and - you have to wonder - whether these are not simple bugs as Irina thinks here, but a sign of a more fundamental re-architecting of how search works, leading to incomplete or erroneous results, hidden by the the sheer volume of results returned.

One of the very few reports you can trust on salary data is from Hired, whose singular innovation of paying for a copy of the hired candidates contract, means that they’ve always been able to collect information no one else can. Needless to say, this one on tech salaries is a must read.

Talking about tech job marketplace, one of the best barometers might be how active the monthly whoishiring comment thread is on HN. This operates like a grassroots job board for its 3 million or so members, most of whom are in tech. Google sheet is here, see for yourself the trend line.

Daniel Zhao is one of a number of labour market economists who are doing an amazing job of disseminating their research to the wider public. His twitter is well worth a follow, especially when he covers the monthly JOLTS update. Strangely authoritative despite lo-fi data collection methods (calling people up by phone who does that), JOLTS basically operates as a barometer to the state of the US labour market. Easy digest here.

Seems like a pertinent paragraph. MIT have the accessible story here, full directive from the European Parliament here

I hesitated to put this under EB as I didn’t want to imply any lack of authenticity on BT’s commitment to DEIB but I was struck as much by the form as by the substance of this superb piece of media. Convincing, authentic and do-able, this will inspire you more ways than one.

Useful post on an under-covered subject - the cost of employee turnover. The direct costs are approx 1/3 of salary, but the indirect costs - to team productivity, morale, cohesion - maybe as much as x 4 salary. There are no formulas in this but there is a very useful chart (see image) which is worth the click alone.

This is fascinating study, on the impact of appearance on a creators potential success on the most dynamic creator platform out there, TikTok. The answer is what we might expect, which leads us to another challenge in recruiting - how do we deal with ‘lookism’ when we seem to inherently prefer better looking people? Cameras off isn’t a solution, but we better come up with something.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been in an internet rabbit hole of candidate fraud. New ways to trick employers is emerging as shift to remote presents new opportunities. Heard of the bait and switch interview? It’s a metajob for somebody. H/T to brainfooder Warren Sukernek for the share.

btw: I’m with FloCareer CEO Mehul Bhatt later this month with a special webinar - How to Detect Candidate Fraud in Remote Interview. I’d say this is a must attend.

Two elements of remote working merging into one - the clear efficiency of having workers deliver their work from their own premises - with the logical end destination of those workers coming from the places where the labour costs are going to be lowest. Remote work revolution might be for a single generation, as the jobs migrate out.

If we can’t beat them we might as well join them eh? This list of countries which support Digital Nomadism might come in handy. The overall effect might be small but the migration of jobs will be followed by migration of people, only this time it will be from Global North to Global South. Who wants to join me in Mauritius? H/T to brainfooder Ivan Harrison for the share.

I’m waiting for the moment when I’m going to be deepfaked. In fact, we should get a deepkfake guest onto Brainfood Live one of these days and see how far we can get with it 🤣. Jokes aside though, the more we see, the more we might be able to spot them, and asking people to turn their head sideways on camera is apparently the Voight-Kampff test of the day.

This is an interesting story - Birkbeck, University of London, banning recruiters from fossil fuel companies from attending careers fairs. Whilst everyone is on board with green train these days (Gen Z more passionately than most) the implications of this approach are worth considering, particularly as we usually do not secure consensus on what a good or bad company actually is. What do you think?

We know social movements can emerge from social media - for good or ill, it is a place where an idea can take root and propagate if it achieves enough endorsement - and perhaps algorithmic boosting. Salary Transparent Street might be one of those, 850,000 followers and counting. Good report of the phenomena from the Beeb.

PS: we are going to do a How to Source on TikTok on Brainfood Live next month, follow the channel here to be notified of it!

So this is a little bit of pitch for Flexa, but the personal story is pertinent. Working in an investment banking, before life circumstances inspired a pivot to flexible working. Have a listen.

17 minutes with Andrew Ng is 17 minutes well spent. One of the leading thinkers on artificial intelligence, Ng is also a great demystifier of AI. Accessible examples of how AI can be applied. Have a watch

Hot the heels of last week’s article on movie stars resurrected at AI, this week dive deeper into the idea of ‘digital humans’ and how they can take on the roles previously occupied by humans. There are now ‘AI influencers’ who collected millions of followers, all without the drama of a real diva, existing stars who are thinking about digital immortality after biological death, and an even digital twinning doing the work of customer / fan service. Maybe time for RoboHung to make a comeback? 🤣 Future is already here folks. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share