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

For now: Join the best community for recruiters & talent pros.

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It's a place where you can ask your biggest questions, share your advice, build deep connections with others, and take part in exclusive events like roundtables, AMAs, and more.

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For later: Overcoming talent acquisition challenges in 2023

If your hiring process is full of friction, your ability to hire the best candidates is in jeopardy. From sourcing candidates to interviewing, and gathering scorecard feedback to checking a candidate’s background – when one small thing goes awry, it can result in a domino effect that brings your entire hiring process to a halt. 

On Feb. 22, join talent leaders from Greenhouse, Salesloft, and Checkr to learn how to remove friction from your hiring process, so you can hire the best talent.

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Friends,

There is wisdom in old tales. In times of uncertainty, I find myself increasingly drawn to the lessons we might find in them. Whether it is Aesop’s Fables, the Arabian Nights or the stories of the Jade Emperor, universal themes of the human condition are replayed through different characters and different settings, but always to the same timeless motifs.

There is adversity. There are challenges. There will be an easy way. Then there is the right way. Whether our challenges are great or small, these choices remain the same. Perhaps the reason why these stories have lasted as long as they have is because they describe this fundamental truth about our experience of life. We may not be able to control everything that happens in the external world, but we can control everything that happens in our internal world. Let us remind ourselves then, that we must make the courageous decision, not the popular one. Let us have faith, that the conflict of today, must one day give way to the peace of tomorrow. And let us always have fidelity to the humanity we all undeniably share.

恭喜髮菜; 新年快樂

Wishing you all good health, good fortune and great prosperity in the Year of the Rabbit 🙏

What Do Brainfooders Think?

With the news that Google are joining Amazon and Microsoft in making thousands of redundancies, it’s pretty clear that the Big Tech Winter has some more time to go. Tech recruiters seem to be sticking to it though, regardless, which suggests that talent dispersal into other tech firms may be happening for more for tech recruiters more than engineers.

Folks - remember, if you have found yourself out of work and want to get exposure from the dozens of employers still hiring recruiters, apply to the Brainfood Talent Community. If you’re an employer and hiring for recruiters, apply for a company account here using the code “BTCFREE” for free access to job posts and db search.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep190 - State of Global Mobility 2023

Are we globalising, de-globalising or re-globalising? Conversational topics at Davos last week, as leading thinkers try to figure out what the near future looks like for the movement of goods, services and people. The latter part we might know something about, so we’ve assembled another amazing panel of experts on global mobility to tell us what the start of the market really looks like for 2023. On Friday 27th Jan, 12pm GMT. Register here

1. Edelman Trust Barometer 2023

One of the annual classic reports, Edelman’s Trust Barometer is a must read because of its laser focus massive scale, robust and transparent methodology and relentless consistency over time. What do people in your country think of it’s institutions, do they trust government or media, what do they think businesses should be responsible for? Your CEO will have read this, so it makes sense for you to do so too. Website here, download the PDF here.

SOCIETY

2. How to use ChatGPT for Recruitment (14 Practical Examples)

Has there been ever been a hotter topic in recruitment than ChatGPT? The excitement is palpable in every conversation I have - those of you who joined us on Friday will know what I mean. Great to see how we’re sharing of what we’re discovering as we go - latest great post on the topic is from long time recruitment hero and brainfooder Jacco Valkenburg, who chains the hype to reality with some concrete examples of how to use this technology in common recruiting use cases. We better be quick too, as it looks like Open.AI will be charging month for this soon, with the likely price point to be around $42USD per month mark, something which you might be able to pay for by actually being so good a ‘prompt engineer’ that it becomes your profession.

SOURCING

3. Blinkist’s Culture Building Miro

What an interesting resource, from one of the most interesting company cultures around. If you have been following the work of the likes of brainfooders Deborah Caulet and Mertcan Uzun, Blinkist really have gone their own way, often counter consensus, following the most important dictum of all - know who you are build the culture from inside out.

CULTURE

4. WEF Global Risks Report 2023

Davos 2023 concluded last week, and so the timing is perfect to take a look at what the great and the good think are going to be the challenges affecting the globe in 2023 . The visualisation above gives a pretty good at-a-glance view, whilst the report itself is digestible 25 pages. We are all impacted by the macro trends discussed within, so take a look, because sometime we need to zoom out to understand the why, as well as the what.

ECONOMY

5. How Technology is Redrawing the Boundaries of the Firm

Any post with Ronald Coase in it is likely to feature in Brainfood as default, and this post from the Economist draws heavily on the Coasian question of why a company exists at all? Seems like technology is going to increasingly blur the lines which separate the market from the company, an observable phenomena, I think, which most of us now have some direct experience. This matters because it probably means that companies will get smaller, and we will do less recruiting, at least in the traditional sense of hiring external FTE’s. We have an urgent need to expand scope (hint: internal mobility, workforce diversification)

REMOTE WORKING

6. Boston Dynamics Atlas Picks Up New Skills

Kudos firstly to Boston Dynamics marketing team who fully understood from the very beginning the visceral impact of video. Seeing the robot ‘Atlas’ in context, supporting a man at work, effectively replacing a man at work is an unnerving experience - they are getting remarkably good a performing agile, manual work and can probably already do it better than a human if you take endurance, sleep and performance degradation due to tiredness into account. One of many companies building robots, for one of many countries increasing robot installation capacity. Revolution in white collar work, is being matched by a revolution in blue collar work.

WORKFORCE AUTOMATION

Share Recruiting Brainfood

7. Scaling Your Team From 5 to 250 Engineers: A Complete Guide

With Big Tech Winter showing no sign of coming to an end, it feels weird to include a post like this. I mean, how many of us are scaling engineer teams right now? I’m going to restart the monthly LinkedIn polls on this, see if we can get a gauge from the community as to where we’re at. Still, this post is a decent resource from the engineering manager’s POV on one of the most challenging parts of scaling fast - keeping the velocity high as you grow.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

8. Holehe OSINT - Email to Registered Accounts

This is rather clever - an app which finds social media accounts which have been registered using a particular email. Now you may ask why you would need a persons social media profile if you’ve already got the email, but you never know where a person might prefer to be contacted, or what insight you can derive from the places he or she likes to spend time. A little bit technical but these days, you can ask ChatGPT how to use it if you don’t already know.

SOURCING

9. Job Hunting in 2022

Interesting retro from a software engineer let go by Meta last year. The mindset shift is clear (‘started paying attention to recruiters’), the candidate experience still inevitably poor (‘applied online to 14 places, only heard back from 6’) and the power of the network still evident. Can be read as a qualitative evidence of the state of tech hiring, but also as insight on the candidate mindset in this period of long uncertainty. Get in touch with your candidates folks, even if you aren’t immediately hiring.

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

10. Welcome to Digital Nomadland

A superb long read from Wired, detailing the lofty ambitions for digital nomadism which often diverge from the rather more prosaic and strained reality. Particularly interesting is that this story is coming from the perspective of service providers for digital nomads - the local authorities, the community organisers, the businesses which provide accommodation and facilities. The problem at root, is the very lack of rootedness. Nomadism is a form of transience and connections with local people and place will always be more tenuous for it. It’s brilliant anthropological read - and a must read, for anyone thinking about taking off for sunnier climes. H/T to brainfooder Paul Gresia for the share.

REMOTE WORKING

The Podcasts

11. Alcohol and Evolution

Robin Dunbar - perhaps most famous for the ‘Dunbar number’ - on this super interesting podcast on the positive use of alcohol consumption by humans and primates. Reason why alcohol is socially important? It reliably triggers the endorphin systems which is the bio-chemical root of social bonding. We all know this, but sometimes it helps to have scientists explain it….have a listen

SOCIETY

12. Recruiter Use Cases for ChatGPT

Record breaking Brainfood Live last Friday - 1000+ on the Crowdcast, dozen amazing guests from practitioner, software engineer and tech C-level - on how recruiters are using ChatGPT. I’m sharing this not only for the conversation but also for the chatstream, there must be dozens of useful links shared there, as well as hundreds of connection requests for anyone looking to boost LinkedIn network reach. Click here, get to it

AI

13. Meet the Working Class

One the consequences of the ‘shift to remote’ is the increase in distance between the working and middle class; simply put, the less you need to leave your house to work, the less contact you will have with people do need to leave their house to work. We have no idea how this trend will impact our political economy, but something to keep front of mind as we see extended industrial action in UK for better pay, in France against retirement age review and elsewhere. This video documentary series on the US working class, is important viewing.

D&I

End Note

Last newsletter in the UK, as I fly to Hong Kong later this week, where I’ll be for the next 4-5 weeks. Been a while since I last saw family and I’m looking forward to getting back to the rhythm of visiting East Asia at least once a year. Give me a shout if you’re around and want to meet up!

In the meantime, we have to go back to ChatGPT, who look like they have their pricing set for the paid tier. Quick vote on the poll below folks - be honest - what would you pay and why?

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Have a great week everybody

Hung