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Friends,

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Yeah - I know - what on earth am I doing sending an email newsletter on a day when most of the readership is likely to be most concerned with presents, preparing a family feast or otherwise entirely away from a computer screen?

Truth is, I do not think overly much when it comes to brainfood other cadence is my my commitment to the community and that whatever else is going on in the world, this newsletter is going to go out on Sunday AM 7.30 GMT, every week, no fail. I’ll take a moment to offer up a prayer of thanks to the Gods of scheduling who today have played a helping hand 🤣.

Some stats to share with you on how this newsletter is doing since we moved to SubStack a month ago...

We’re up to 28,244 subscribers, avg around +130 new subs every week, which is tremendous growth. Sending out newsletters itself does not produce new subscribers (you actually lose subscribers every time you publish!) so that means that enough of you have been sharing the newsletter onwards to folks who subsequently sign. Thank you to all of you have done this, publicly and privately. Keep doing it - it’s the only way the community grows.

Share Recruiting Brainfood

This is a pretty cool chart on website visits, driven by the newsletter send out. I was surprised to see that most people actually do read the newsletter on Sunday’s, it seems that more than twice read today than on Mondays. What is also noticeable about this chart is that readership drops off entirely towards the middle of the week, so if I ever get round to doing show notes or original writing, I will be doing in on Thursdays by the looks of it.

Finally here are some open rate stats - we’re averaging around 38%, which is almost exactly what we were getting when we were still at Revue. I’d like to get this up, but I’m not sure how. Most obviously it might mean changing the headline - note the highest performing OR was the only original essay I’ve written here - way up at 64%. It’s probably the title, so I may well be experimenting with this in the new year.

Btw: is anyone else writing Substacks? I recommend you start if you have something to say. Let me know in comments below if you are and link your substack into comments.

What do Brainfooders Think?

Interesting findings in from last week’s poll on where we should be doing community. Fragmentation of social media is the likely future for all of us, so I suspect we’re going to end up having to interact in different places for different reasons. It’s not ideal for global community to not have a single obvious place to congregate - it might just have to be this email + the chat / comment features which will be most likely

In Elon Musk style, I am going to ignore the results of this poll - Brainfood Slack exists (dormant), but we don’t have a decisive enough endorsement (39% of 121 votes) for a wholesale migration of 5000+ users from where we currently at. So Brainfood Online Community will continue as a Private Facebook Group through to 2023. Feel free to join - even if you do nothing else on Facebook, this group might still probably be worth it. Hope that makes sense!

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep187 - Looking Ahead: Forecasting Recruiting in 2023

Straight into the new year on the 6th January, we are going to be making predictions for the year ahead, bringing together an elite group of talent experts from worlds of sourcing, web3, recruitment marketing, AI, recruiting operations, recruitment technology and the more. If you want to get a handle on what is going to happen in 2023, this is the show for you: Friday 6th January, 2pm GTM - register here

The Brainfood

1. What Happened in Recruiting in 2022?

Every year I try to write a review of the year in recruitment. The methodology consists of me reviewing every newsletter sent since the start of the year, looking for recurring themes, stories which appear more than once, which I take a signal of significance that something might be happening. From this entirely unscientific approach, I’ve pulled together 20 themes, which I listed here, and discuss in 3 essays in the Open Kitchen segment of This Week, In Recruiting - Part 1, Part2 already published and Part 3, coming out tomorrow - hope you find them of the some use!

SOCIETY

2. State of European Tech 2022

Wonderful report from Atomico, Slush and friends, the State of European Tech gives the definitive view of the sector a great many of us work in. Some headline figures - a total of $85 billion allocated by end of 2022, a huge figure, but a decline from $100+ billion in 2021, with the delta occurring dramatically at the second half of the year. Ripple effects on recruitment, growth projections, reshuffling of priorities all result from the shortage of expected investment. Download the report, bookmark the website, its a must read.

ECONOMY

3. 2022: The Year in Charts

McKinsey tells us the story of the US in this engaging interactive. Commodity price inflation, cost of living crisis, labour force reallocation, long covid and the impact of ill health on labour force participation and - a recurring theme across the WEIRD world, nurses not wanting to do the job anymore. PS: if you want to go down the rabbit hole, plenty more of McKinsey resources at the end of the post.

ECONOMY

4. The Most Shared Content on LinkedIn in 2022

Here’s a provocation for you: we (re)share content on LinkedIn not because of the quality (too many Forbes articles in here for that to be true 🤣) but because the story resonates - we feel that it is true or we want to be true - and so signal our commitment or desire to the premise by the re-sharing it to others. An interesting selection of content - which of these would you be motivated to signal boost?

CONTENT MARKETING

5. 10 Notable LinkedIn Recruiting Features that Rolled Out in 2022

More on LinkedIn, because lets face it, its still the most important website for the recruiting profession. LinkedIn have been rolling out a huge number of features this year, so many in fact that this list of notable ones comes in handy to make sure you haven’t missed any you need to know about. Check it out here.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

6. State of Skill Based Hiring 2022

Is 2022 the year when credentialism finally goes into irreversible retreat? A consensus seems to be building around the need to hire for skills (attitude, traits, pick-your-favourite-criteria) rather than degrees, and consequently the shift to new ways of assessing candidates will follow. Decent report from TestGorilla on the state of skills based hiring, which just about manages not be an advertorial for services.

ASSESSMENT

7. A Year in Search 2022

With the news that ChatGPT has been flagged internally as a ‘code red’ risk to Google, the relevancy of these ‘year in search’ reports may be starting what maybe become a sudden decline. Still, we recruiters are still primarily retrievers of information rather than generators of it, so website is still a fun way to understand what happened in the world in 2022. Country filter is useful, though sadly unreasonably incomplete.

SOCIETY

8. Year on TikTok: 2022, truly #ForYou

TikTok continues to be the culturally dominant app, not only amongst Gen Z, but increasingly across all demographics. Year in review lists the most popular short videos on the platform, a mix of education, entertainment and the never-seen-this-before type of content. We’ll be doing a Brainfood Live early next year in How to Use Tik Tok for Recruitment, looking at it from content creation, audience building, #hashtag tracking and ad placement angles - make sure you register for it!

RECRUITMENT MARKETING

9. End of Year 2022 Pay Report

Has Levels.fyi been the website of the year? I think for tech recruiters it is certainly up there, keeping us up to date with the latest movements in the tech market, breaking lay off news, aggregating talent directories and providing career pathing / compensation data. Here’s the annual end of year report, download it here, read it here.

SOCIETY

10. Pocket’s Best Reads of 2022

If you aren’t tired of reading yet, then why not dive into Pocket’s Best Reads of 2022?Some fantastic long essays in collection, including several which are directly relevant to us here: how about a ‘Neurologists Guide to Save Your Memory’, ‘A Simple Way to Introduce Yourself’ or ‘The Time Hack Everyone Should Know’? Some great headline writing, which for once do not mislead.

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

The Podcasts

11. 2022 in Review: A Year of Uncertainty

20 minutes to cover a crazy year, this podcast brings together both the Chief Economist of the World Bank, and the Dareen Akkad, an Egyptian baker and restaurant owner. De-globalisation, hostile or otherwise, is our new future.

ECONOMY

12. For the Record: Most Popular Podcasts on Spotify 2022

What has been your favourite podcast this year? Audio only has been a great medium for me as a consumer and I hope more of us get involved in listening and producing more podcasts in 2023. Big List is there in case you want to check out who’s talking amongst us already - feel free to add to it if you’re launching something in 2023. In the meanwhile, Joe Rogan continues to dominate on Spotify…

RECRUITMENT MARKETING

13. The Most Popular TED Talks of 2022

If you like me have been away from TED Talks for a little while, then this selection of the most popular talks might bring you back. Format - as ever - is excellent; long enough to dive deep enough into profundity but not so deep that you end up drowning in revelation. Pick your favourite here, I’m heading straight toward David Harris’s ‘The Benefits of Not Being a Jerk to Yourself’.

CULTURE

End Notes

It is Christmas Day and my mind is turning to dinner. The people who are terrified of cooking turkeys seem to have missed the very simple technique of ‘wet roasting’ the damn thing. All you need do is place a try of water into the oven below the roasting tray and you’ll effectively be steaming the bird, making sure the meat stays moist rather than dry. Turn up the temp for 10 minutes at the end to crisp up the skin and you’re done. Give it a go folks, you won’t go wrong…

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Merry Christmas everybody, and Happy New Year.

Hung