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What Do Brainfooders Think?

We are using Generative AI but mostly on individual initiative, with only 3% of us having any kind of guidance from leadership to get on with it! It’s still early days but time is fast approaching for TA / HR leaders to…er lead on AI adoption.

AI Enablement is going to be this generations Digital Transformation. As recruitment & HR leaders, we need to a) lead by example and b) make sure that TA / HR are the most AI enabled functions within the business. As Dr J said last week, once C-suite understands the potential, they will be demanding AI adoption throughout the organisation. It would be great for us to be ahead of that demand.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep199 - Tech Layoffs & The Tech Job Market: From the Developers POV

We’ve heard and read a great deal about the tech sector these past few months and I think we are getting a pretty decent picture of the landscape. What we are missing though is the perspective of those who we are trying to recruit - what do the developers themselves say about the job market, how are they feeling about the news? We’re switching it up again on Brainfood Live this week as platform software engineers and ask them what they see in the market. We’re on Friday 31st March, 2om GMT - must attend for all tech recruiters - register here

The Brainfood

1. The Future of Recruiting 2023

The fun thing about predictions posts is that they can be used to gauge the pace of change; this recently released collection from LinkedIn already feels dated in places, even though the information was likely collected only 3-6 months prior. The first prediction is quite jarring - ‘recruiters being strategic’ - a socially popular assertion that is difficult to maintain when we still seem to be the first out of the door when the hiring stops. Don’t let that put you off the rest of the it though - there is some good stuff here, including valuable thinking on Skills Based Hiring, Internal Mobility and Employee Upskilling.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

2. Why Recruiting Has Been Hit So Hard

Is there a greater public defender of Talent Acquisition than brainfooder Kevin Wheeler? Here he is providing an explanation as to why TA functions have been proportionately harder hit than other departments, and 4 point framework on how we need to reposition to be more resilient in the future. The key is Step 3 - expand scope beyond external FTE’s and compete to be responsible for the total talent universe…

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

3. Who Becomes An Entrepreneur?

The entrepreneurial persona’s are: Teenage Vandal, Generalist Old Pro, Community builder, The Under Compensated, Survivors of Childhood Adversity, Neurodivergent and the 41.9 year olds. Entertaining post summarising research papers on the personal characteristics or background of the people most likely to follow the entrepreneurial path. Might be useful in recruitment marketing should your employer ask you to hire for ‘entrepreneurial mindset’.

RECRUITMENT MARKETING

4. GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models

Bottom line findings of this academic paper (incidentally co-authored by ChatGPT…) are intriguingly counterintuitive - those jobs with the highest barrier to entry (doctors, lawyers, accountants etc), are most directly exposed to GAI. The real risk to recruiters then is not that ‘AI will replace us’ but that ‘AI will replace a lot of the people we currently recruit, and therefore indirectly, us’. I suspect this paper will be widely cited in conversations on the future of the work, so download, read, critique and bookmark it. H/T brainfooder Matt Bradburn for the share.

AI

5. March 2023 Global Labor Market Update

Some more rune reading for you on the state of the labour market and contradictions are persistent, which tells us either our data collection is problematic or something is going on in society with is at odds with the orthodox understanding of socio-economics. Still millions of unfilled jobs, yet still millions of missing workers, something which the US Federal Reserve has perceived as too high a cost of employment and so has been jacking up interest rates in record breaking manner. It’s a crude mechanism though and we are now see weakening investment and job growth as a result. Radancy, via the sterling work of brainfooder Sarah Ali, try to make sense of it, so have a go yourself here.

ECONOMY

6. Desperate for More Male Nurses, Teachers and Cleaners

Conversations on gender equity has been focused on equalising the male domination of STEM fields, but has that led us to ignore the female domination of many other fields, such as healthcare and education? Brainfooder Laetitia Vitaud (one of the leading feminist future of work thinkers out there btw) certainly thinks so and suggests getting more men into these fields might be solution to persistent candidate shortages there. Incidentally, we should note that many fields of work currently dominated by women are likely to be more resilient than those dominated by men in an AI dis-intermediated future ( ‘future of work is female’ theory) - and this is likely to be a component as to which career paths become the most attractive for any gender to pursue.

D&I

7. Anti-recruiter Prompt Injection Attack on LinkedIn Profile

It was inevitable that recruiters would be amongst the first to use GAI for candidate outreach and equally inevitable that the most likely target of that outreach - software engineers - would be first to develop counter measures against it. New phrase for us to learn: “prompt injection attack”- a technique where you place an instruction into the data which you think the AI will ingest, in order to corrupt the output so that you, the human candidate, can readily identify a generated message. I’m sure the fellow here was just experimenting but a great illustration as to how this class of technology works, and of human ingenuity in making sure it doesn’t

CANDIDATE ENGAGEMENT

8. DEDA

If the best management is about getting out of the way of employees, then maybe we can learn something from this approach - “digitally enhanced directed autonomy,” or DEDA. The idea is straightforward - provide the resources usually bottlenecked by management - in a shared platform which employees can digitally access at any time. If the purpose of management is to translate executive direction to employee output, it made most sense when the flow of information was the problem; with these frictions removed, the purpose of the managerial class will need to be rewritten.

CULTURE

9. Which Countries have the Lowest and Highest Retirement Ages in Europe?

Emmanuel Macron’s difficult decision to raise the pension age in France has led to some of the most serious disturbances we have seen in Europe since the Yellow Vest movement of 2018. It’s a worrying precursor for all aging societies, each of whom will be looking to conduct similar politically unpopular manoeuvres as demographic decline reduces the tax base and exacerbates the dependency ratio. Some data here on where different European countries are at on pension age, by country and by gender.

SOCIETY

10. Meta Layoffs

Are remote workers really more productive? Mark Zuckerberg seems to think that maybe they are not, especially those who have not previously built trust relationships by being on-premise before. We’re all going to hate this narrative, as many of us are happily working remote right now, but we are still very early on in this experiment and we’re only now collecting the performance data of the remote workers who we newly we hired as remote in 2022. Great essay, lots to think about, have a read.

REMOTE WORKING

The Podcasts

11. OpenAI CEO, CTO on risks and how AI will reshape society

Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, is the man of the moment so it is worth paying attention to what he is going to say. ‘Make the mistakes, when the stakes are low’ is a key phrase Altman used and gives us some idea as to why the product shipping rate has been so fast so far - he’s testing in production in folks and fixing what he can as he goes…

AI

12. The Future of Work With AI

The release of Microsoft 365 Copilot - essentially the integration of ChatGPT with Office suite of products - is going to be the superspreader event for AI. Microsoft showcase video from a week ago, which is worth viewing in full to better understand how the world of work is going to change when they do it. Important one to watch in full.

AI

13. Brian Fink: Why Psychological Safety at Work is So Important

Great conversation with brainfooder Brian Fink on the topic of psychological safety in the workplace, who virtually meets the most melodious voice on recruitment podcasting, brainfooder Marcus Edwardes. Two great guys not afraid to disagree. Have a listen here

CULTURE

End Note

Fantastic couple of events last week - the always massive Recruitment Agency Expo, followed by the Whitstable RL100 Summit. Conversations in both places were dominated by GAI, and the pace at which new releases are occurring. Now there’s a good chance I’m caught in the AI hype cycle so wanted to gauge the community’s view on the matter. From what you’ve heard, seen and tried of generative artificial intelligence tools, what percentage of your job will be replaced by it in a years time?

Have a vote below folks…

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Things will be calming down a little next couple months - going to be in London, and hopefully the spring will finally arrive to coincide.

Have a good week everybody

Hung