Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #314

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

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Bellingcat may well have started OSINT as a thing when founder Eliot Higgins first began covering the Syria war via forensic analysis of Youtube videos uploaded by the combatants. Whether he is a Mi6 or not is besides this particular point, because it so happens that he runs the occasional hackathon. Here’s the write up of the second event, which also includes a list of cool tools and techniques for sourcing enthusiasts to get their teeth stuck into.

The State of AI Report has become something of annual must read, a massive piece of work which is a credit to its authors, Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth. The informational density of the slides is tough reading but set aside an hour and plough through and you’ll have a much better grasp as to the AI landscape going into 2023. Read it here, download the pdf here

Great report from our buddies at Workable, comparing the data collected from 2020 to 2022 on office culture, remote working and candidate expectations of employers. Beautifully rendered website too. Must read folks.

Probably the most useful thing I’ve read for a long while - 8 HR / TA dashboards and why you need to have them. Great explanations, great illustrations, just great in general. TA leaders, especially, need to read this.

Brainfooder Tim Sackett specialises in finding wonder in the mundane. His explanation here of why spam recruiting works is simple and correct - there is no penalty and enough reward reward for it. It’s not just ‘recruiter bad’. Great read.

High profile tech layoffs has been one of the stories of the summer in our business, but what kind of people generally get laid off in these announcements? The top result might be alarming reading - it’s use, the recruiters! Nice piece of research from Interviewing.io, crunching through the data from layoffs.fyi and cross referencing back on LinkedIn

Excoriating report which condemns AI powered assessment tech as no more than a modern form of phrenology. The proof was successful attempts to game a purpose built AI assessment tool (have a go yourself here), as well as decent philosophical challenge on the current requirement to use historical training data, which replicates how human bias emerges. It’s a bit of hit job on AI which does not convincingly provide proofs, but does outline the legitimate challenges assessment tech vendors have in building tooling sophisticated enough to handle these cases. Worth a read. H/T to brainfooder Andrew Gadomski for the share in the fb group.

One for our UK readers, this is a digestible summary from our friends at Zinc onz what employers need to do before hiring a person in the UK. Love the simplicity, love the concision and the checklist. Now wouldn’t it be great to have a global per country library of these….?

Always great writing from Gergely Orosz (follow his twitter, especially tech recruiters), and a great complement to the post on Tech Layoffs earlier in this newsletter. Here we’re talking about using performance plan changes as a predictor for coming layoffs - I think a decent signal.

Really interesting case has set a precedent on the legality of certain forms of ‘bossware’ and of our relations with each other in the distributed way of working. I’m going to categorise this under People Analytics because I believe the line between employee surveillance and PA is a lot thinner than most of us might think. BBC coverage here

I suspect we don’t talk enough about motherhood in our industry - certainly, we don’t know enough about it - especially men. A few of my friends recently became mothers for the first time and this article caught my attention, especially on the enormous neurobiological changes that occur for women who become mothers. Do we cater or design for this at all in our work and organisations? A Brainfood Live topic might be useful I think.

Huge 200 pager on company culture on O.C Tanner. Bangs on a bit about the ‘talent magnet’ concept and feels like its trying a bit too hard to connect concept to consequence, but some decent ideas here. Thankfully, there is a navigable website, as well as the PDF. Worth a look. H/T to brainfooder John Rose in the fb group

Starting to become a mainstream conversation (join us, in fact, if you do want to talk about it here, on Monday), fraud at interview and hire is something we are all likely to encounter at some point. Great conversation on HN on it here, and now actually some hard evidence of the prevalence of fraud when Equifax fired several of its own employees after finding out from their own product - The Work Number - that they had been holding down second jobs. Systemic vulnerability will always be exploited. H/T to brainfooder Ivan Harrison for the share

Seems like a very decent tool, especially as Youtube commentators on work interest videos are highly likely to be practitioners in field. Free and fast, what’s not to like?

No surprises here - and perhaps no excuses - but I do wonder whether we apply middle class corporate values to working class local business a bit too readily. What do you think?

Lars Schmidt is one of the best people in our business. I’m proud to call him a friend, and I think we should listen to this monologue on living with grief, with an important message for those of us who design bereavement leave policies.

Artificial Intelligence was always going to change the world, but it takes stunts like this to really bring it home to us normal folk. An AI trained on Joe Rogan, interviews an AI trained on Steve Jobs. It’s an incredible listen.

There’s no question that Zuckerberg’s abandonment of the social web to pivot onto the Metaverse will go down as one of the biggest decisions ever made within a single business. Whether he succeeds or fails, this keynote will tell you more on the direction of travel. Have a watch.