Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #315

Hung Lee

Brainfood Baked Fresh - Ep6 - we’re on tomorrow folks at Monday 23rd, 12.30pm UK time to discuss this very newsletter. Read anything that has annoyed or inspired you, or otherwise make you want to talk about it, this is the show to do it. Register here

Brainfood Jobs: Are we still hiring recruiters? Doesn’t seem so, as the Brainfood Job board declines to its lowest ever level since go live! Quite possible the subscription model is putting people off, even though it’s been crashed down to record low cost. Next steps - dunno, let me know.

Brainfood Live, Ep178: From Talent Intelligence to Talent Acquisition

Going to do this something different this week - we’re taking a deep dive into a single case study on how Citi changed its approach to talent intelligence to bake it into how they do talent acquisition. It’s a fascinating story folks and great opportunity to learn. We’re on Friday 28th, 2pm - register here

Special thanks this week to: Garry Turner, Eugène van den Hemel, Neil Carberry, Cathryn Barnard, Martyn Redstone, Joey NK Koksal, Kevin Green, Jon Hull, Richard Bradley, Vanessa Raath, Brittany King, Lars Schmidt, Clair Mohamed, Adrian McDonagh, Martin Poole, Paul Daley, Cathy Watson, Sandra Lim, Igor Brobryk for your amazing public endorsement of all things brainfood last week - essential for keeping this ramshackle show on the road.

Now check out your scores on the Brainfood Hall of Fame😉

Can you help? Simply share this link newsletters.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

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The Brainfood

Hiring in a Distributed World 2022

What can data analysis from 30 million jobs postings tell us about the state of remote work? Superb report from our friends at datapeople - who were kind enough to provide me with the un-gated version - and relevant for any conversation you have with hiring managers on flexible working, candidate pipelining and gender equality. Must read folks.

REMOTE WORKING

try.datapeople.io

Women in the Workplace 2022: The Full Report

Interesting findings, as ever, from reports of this scale. Particularly striking? Reasons women cited for leaving a company (section 2), with requirement for greater workforce flexibility being a prominent factor. You are going to lose your women workers if you do not provide flexible working. H/T to brainfooder Nathan Perrott for the share.

D&I

leanin.org

The State of US Early-Stage Venture & Startups: 3Q22

US funding data from Angelist confirms what we already know - early stage deal flow has collapsed, as confidence evaporates in the face of record, inflation, central bank counter measures and a general atmosphere of hostile de-globalisation. Interestingly, frontier tech is going well, long bets being made on the businesses that are going to rebuild the world after this. Have a read here, download the report here

ECONOMY

www.angellist.com

Why Do Teachers Give Girls Higher Marks than Boys?

The analysis also showed that when a boy and a girl were similarly competent at a subject, the girl would typically receive a higher grade.

The reflexive hostility to technology assisted assessment often discounts how biased human assessors are and might inherently be. Important research from Italy, which finds that the ‘gender grade gap’ may well come from human error, with profound implications for society, and not insignificant ones for us in recruiting. Human assessors are not a great benchmark to measure AI assessment tech.

ASSESSMENT

phys.org

Fire Your HR Marketer Because of this Freaking Text-to Image Innovation

I’ve been playing with Text-to-Image recently and been blown away by what can be achieved. Brainfooder José Kadlec is being deliberately provocative with his titling here but the central premise is not far off the mark - AI is coming for creativity - and you can prove it yourself by using it already.

RECRUITMENT MARKETING

www.linkedin.com

Zuckerberg Masters the Babel Fish

Ever since I read Douglas Adams HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a kid, the Babel fish became something of a milestone for me as a marker of scientific progress - will we ever be able to do real time translations between two beings who don’t speak the other’s language? It looks like we are very nearly there.

AI

twitter.com

The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence

The previous two posts in this newsletter were all about the amazing output we are seeing from AI; this article is a necessary counterbalance, detailing all the exploited human labour that has likely gone into it. Must read folks. btw: Noema Magazine is one of the most consistently thought provoking publications around - it’s twitter this well worth a follow.

AI

www.noemamag.com

UK Prime Minister Recruitment Ad

The undeniable dysfunction of the UK’s political system has one bright spot - fertile ground for a few laughs, because what else are you going to do? Great witticism from brainfooder Andrew Wood whose observation on the cost of this particular bad hire went viral on Linkedin, to this hilarious-but-true recruitment advert for the vacant post of Prime Minister. H/T to brainfooder Jacob Sten Madsen for the share in the fb group.

RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING

www.youtube.com

Digitaal-Werven 2022 Report English

Brainfooder Bas van de Haterd conducts an annual report on quality of career pages from top employers in the Netherlands. Love this report for the objective criteria and quantitative output. Somebody should do this on a country by country basis btw, using the same testing criteria. Great reading- and - a long way to go for CX.

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

www.dropbox.com

October 2022 Labor Market Update

Another month, another labour market update from brainfooder Dr Sarah Ali. Too many main messages to summarise here, but the persistent theme is low labour market participation and myriad reasons why. Have a read. PS: I really need to summarise the reasons for the candidate shortage in the Substack - will get on it, even if it needs a few all nighters!

ECONOMY

blog.radancy.com

Another Tech Startup Fails: How AAQUA Did Its Singapore Employees Dirty

Is culture really just runway? Been thinking about this a little while and I think I’m going to write it up at some point. Another example of another startup biting the dust, yet another one with an amazing culture before the money runs out, staff go unpaid and CEO goes off the rails…

CULTURE

www.ricemedia.co

Is Poor Health Driving a Rise in Economic Inactivity?

Got no candidates? Maybe more of them are on long term sickness or looking after those who are. Latest research from the Health Foundation claims that from the 700,000 more people in the UK are economically inactive now than before the pandemic, at least 200,000 cite long term illness as the cause. Turns out, ‘letting it rip’ has long term consequences.

SOCIETY

www.health.org.uk

Faking Online Clout via IMDB

Systemic flaws will always be exploited by those with the incentive to do so. Turns out IMDB have a weak spot, perhaps especially on non-English film productions, and through this entry point enterprising young chancers can build credibility through daisy-chaining social proof. A non-recruiting story, but when you think about, how are most ID verifications conducted, if not through similar cross referencing? Somebody is going to invoke a Web3 solution any minute now…

PS: Ep2 of our series on Candidate Fraud via Remote is up - register here

ASSESSMENT

twitter.com

Apple Contractor Fired After Her Day-in-the-Life TikTok Went Viral

Important disclaimers on this story, with both Apple and the said contractor denying the connection between her video (which given Apple’s notorious secrecy for onsite workers, was almost certainly grounds for termination) and the end of her contract. That being said, an interesting angle on what we do on unlicensed and unofficial EGC - does anyone have a protocol for this? H/T to brainfooder Mark Mansour for the share

EMPLOYER BRANDING

9to5mac.com

Common Tech Jobs Described as Cabals of Mesoamerican Wizards

I wanted to clarify the tech work landscape for myself and instead I wrote this (??)

And we are very glad that you did. Anthropologists, mythologists, fantasists and tech recruiters will enjoy this wonderful digression.

CULTURE

etiennefd.substack.com

Who's Talking?

Google Reveals Project Starline Progress (Cloud Next 2022)

Big things happening in big tech - Meta + Microsoft teaming up to move work into the Metaverse, whilst Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduces a brief update on the Project Starline video conferencing technology. Zoom’s doomed. H/T to brainfooder Nathan Perrott for the share

AR / VR

www.youtube.com

Advice from the CEO of an All-Remote Company

Sid Sijbrandij, CEO and cofounder of Gitlab, was perhaps the first prominent leader to publicly criticise hybrid as fundamentally inefficient. He should know, because he tried it before moving to full remote when no one showed up to the office. Some lessons we have to learn by ourselves. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share.

REMOTE WORKING

castbox.fm

Would You Use an Artificial Womb? (I Would)

Talk about candidate shortage is fundamentally premised on the idea that it is a fixable or cyclical problem. But what if the issue is a manifestation of longer term problem - irreversible population decline? It’s an iron rule of population dynamics that as a country develops economically, so that country slows down its birthrate. The direction of causality isn’t clear but the correlation is consistent. Is the unthinkable the answer? Don’t see why not tbh

SOCIETY

www.youtube.com

End notes

Been thinking about media a lot recently.

It’s pretty clear that our worldviews are informed by our ‘informational diet’ and it is important to understand that the stuff which gives you the sugar rush, is often the very thing which is going to be bad for you in the long run. Interaction with real people, in the real world, is almost always more positive than what we see and hear online. So I hope we all are able to balance out the data we are fed (online) vs the data we acquire for ourselves (offline).

This game from one of most understated heroes of our times explains a little bit of how I’m feeling. Give it a go and Nicky Case a follow

DM me on twitter or Instagram or TikTok if you have any comments on this!

Have a great week everybody.

Hung

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Hung Lee @hunglee

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Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #315

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