This week’s brainfood is supported by our buddies, Join Talent

Have you heard about Join Talent's amazing Talent Acquisition Insights project? They are a series of how-to guides on topics such as Using Assessments in Talent Acquisition, Market Mapping, Benchmarking, Building KPI's and Using Data and more. It's some of the most pragmatic recruiter centric guides I've seen - and all freely downloadable in the Join Talent Resources Hub. All free to download, so get to it!

SPONSORS

Friends,

Lets keep going with the Brainfood Talent Collective folks - this is for community members who are now looking for work, or perhaps would otherwise be open to conversation. Register here as an individual, and here if you are an employer of recruiters / HR people and want to connect with other members of the community. Using this code: BTCFREE2022 will get you free access. Lets make sure as many community members find work as soon as possible!

Big List of Recruiting Events in 2023 is updated - here are 50 events you should attend if you are up for meeting industry peers in-person. Of course this list will be updated as we go, I’ll remove events which are out of date, as members add more events as they are confirmed at the bottom of the sheet. Hopefully this will operate as a decent aggregation of what is going, albeit in a somewhat crude manner!

Finally, thanks to Eugène van den Hemel, Christian Madsen, Vanessa Raath, Alia Khattab, James Osborne, Joey NK Koksal, Hannah Morgan, Dave Hazelhurst, Eva Zils, Ross Clennett, Oonagh Clarke, Rich Lewis-Jones, Clair Mohamed, Nigel Hembrow and Matthew Goddard for your public endorsements of all things brainfood - it really helps to keep the community connected and this newsletter going. Scores updated in the Brainfood Hall of Fame.

If you want to help, share this newsletter your network and have them subscribe - thanks!

What do Brainfooders Think?

It’s a surprise to see Sourcing ever lose top spot in any poll I do, but perhaps the worm is turning for us as an industry in 2023, as the big tech winter continues and the prognostications for 2023 range from ‘bad’ to ‘very bad’, our focus is switching from how to get more candidates to how to be more effective - a subtle but necessary shift.

This helps me figure out what to plan for in 2023, especially in the way on webinars and how-to’s. Thanks to all 244 of you who voted - make sure you vote for this week’s poll at the end of this newsletter.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep184 - Social Class & Accent: The Hidden Bias in Hiring

Continuing our exploration of all of the forms of diversity in recruiting, our attentions this week turn to social class and accent. Class bias is one of the most invidious and ubiquitous forms of bias, with candidates being screened out of opportunity and progression at every level of the career journey. What is our experience here and how do we mitigate against this? Important one, especially for any folks here who speak with a strong regional accent! Register here

The Brainfood

1. Management Lessons From Elon's Twitter

Can we find method in the Muskian madness? Stay Saasy makes the attempt and concludes that Musk’s approach can be understood as a speed run of a ‘standard executive transition’, albeit one played to extremes and in semi-public manner. It’s an overly generous appraisal but some useful insight here, especially on SET framework.

CULTURE

2. Will ChatGPT Kill Google?

After experimenting with it for a few days over this week, I think the right answer is ‘not entirely but…’. ChatGPT is an astonishing experience - akin to how I felt when I used the Internet for the first time saw the miracle of information being retrieved from another computer and yet somehow displayed on my screen however many miles away. With ChatGPT, we now have the ability to generate information trained on information we no longer need to retrieve and manually parse. It has profound implications for our online behaviour, including many activities related to recruiting work, from candidate identification, employer branding, lead generation and the rest. Some output examples collected here, and I recorded a short loom demo for those of us who want to see it in action here. Recommend you give it a go folks, and have a think about how this might be applied to your work.

AI

3. LinkedIn Hack: Search Past the Present Pair

As an example of work required to retrieve information from inefficient systems, this post from brainfooder Mike Santoro is both a great illustration of the problems ChatGPT is trying to solve, as well as a useful do-it-today technique find more candidates on LinkedIn. It’s about adding a filter, then taking it away, to reveal new results. Smart thinking from a smart fellow. Follow Mike, read this post here

SOURCING

4. LinkedIn Secrets of the Algorithm

Last week’s post on LinkedIn’s content algorithm proved popular, so why not underline the message with another how-to on viralising content on the platform. Some simple rules of thumb here: post frequency (1x per 18 hours), engagement velocity (first 90 minutes counts most) and optimal posting times. Must read folks. h/t to brainfooder Jan Tegze for the share in the fb group

CONTENT MARKETING

5. A Guide To Inclusive Recruitment for Employers

Excellent and accessible guide on Inclusive Recruitment from the CIPD. I particularly like the combination of ‘more information’ (targeted ads for under represented groups), with ‘less information’ (anonymised applications) at different moments in the recruiting process. Local legislative constraints aside, I suspect this is the way to do it. H/T to brainfooder David D’Souza for the share. Website here, download the pdf here

D&I

6. World Inequality Report 2022

If competition for resources is the root cause of social and geopolitical tensions, then we could do well to learn more about it. Huge report coming out of the World Inequality Lab (pls note the funders) on the state of wealth and income inequality across the world. It’s a very good website and an accessible (if massive) PDF.

ECONOMY

7. We Asked 250k UK Candidates What They Want from a New Job in Tech: Here's What They Said

Delighted to contribute to this blog post from our friends at Otta, whose mini-questionnaire of every tech candidate onboarded on platform might give us some insights as to the relative priorities of the highly skilled in-demand. No huge surprises here - tech workers want flexibility, great team members and professional growth - all three should be inherent in job design and high visibility in your EB. Have a read.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

8. Earning Over $1Million at Coinbase

Interesting feature of H1B visa applications in the US is that salary data of offered jobs is publicly available (see for yourself here), a roundabout way toward some idea national salary transparency, albeit only with data on immigrant workers. This post crunched the numbers in the crypto market, with some interesting insights and recommendations for engineers and engineering managers, specifically that Coinbase are (were?) offering the best rates

BLOCKCHAIN

9. How to Have Better Meetings

So you know already that Ethan Mollick is one of my must follow recommendations on Twitter, and so his Substack is now a must subscribe. This post collects together research on how to have better meetings, complete with a concise and hard-to-argue with framework. And as a it of fun, a historical CIA memo on how to disrupt your enemies by having bad meetings, which is disturbing given how much we might recognise from our own corporate experience….

CULTURE

10. The Big Bad State of EX 2022

As we started this newsletter with a CEO who clearly does not care at all about Employee Experience (EX), lets end it with a survey from CEO’s and HR leaders who do. Don’t be perturbed by the small sample size (161 respondents), the value of this report lies in how the conversations might be framed internally, giving insight into which groups might be strongest partners for any drive to improve EX. H/T to brainfooder Vicki Saunders for the share.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

The Podcasts

11. Overemployed Software Engineers

What was initially dismissed as a scaremongering tactic by CEO’s who wanted employees back in the office, the phenomenon of fraudulently working for more than one employer is real; indeed it is growing to such an extent that an online eco-system is developing to cater for those who want to do more of it. The response from employers has so far been to increase investment in bossware, which might not be as unreasonable as we might to believe. Nice video on the phenomenon with some additional resources in case you want to find out more…

REMOTE WORKING

12. Is Google Getting Worse?

Kind of perfectly timed podcast by Freakonomics, the complaints about the efficacy of Google are pretty much in the mainstream. Great discussion as usual on this excellent podcast, maybe worthwhile pairing this listen with giving ChatGPT a go.

SOURCING

13. The Psychology of Recruiter Redundancy

I rarely promote (actually never!) my own podcast on here, but I am making an exception this week, as we had a really valuable conversation on the psychological impact on redundancy in our community. If this is you or someone you know, give this a listen.

COMMUNITY

End Note

Every time I send this newsletter, it becomes a milestones on the road to the end of the year. Of course the ‘brainfood cadence’ won’t change, but there is still a symbolism involved when year changes from 2022 to 2023. As we cast our thoughts forward to the next year, I thought I would set this week’s poll towards the priority problem areas you think you be taking on in recruiting next year - what do you think they will be? Vote on the poll below, and if your option is not there, please do comment and let me know what it will be.

Leave a comment

Ok friends, that’s about it.

Good luck everybody working through this next month. I know it can be tough to concentrate when it’s holiday season so using sound to zone out and zone in is one of the methods I like to use. Usually it has be some sort of sound where I don’t understand that lyrics or - better yet - if there are no words to understand. Like the sound of an Olivetti typewriter for example - cool website for those of you who want to work to the background of obsolete sounds…

Have a great week everybody

Hung