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Friends,

It’s Easter week and I know a lot of you will be taking the opportunity to spend some more time off spend with family. In the UK, we are at least going to have this Good Friday and Easter Monday off, so even the parsimonious amongst us will welcome these two short weeks.

I’m going to spend the extra time to do work on business operations - there’s tons of stuff that needs to be done in and around Recruiting Brainfood which I have not had the time to do. In the main, I’m going improve how I store and retrieve contact details for panellists for Brainfood Live, review the business structure to improve tax efficiency, and audit business process to see if AI can perform it at comparable standard.

Let me know what you have planned for this Easter period - work, rest or play, it would be great to find out what the community is going to be up to!

A few points to make:

• Brainfood Talent Community - join this if you are a recruiter / HR person and looking for work

• Brainfood Online Community - join this if you want to share knowledge and join discussions on issues which are presented in this newsletter.

Finally, thanks to David Green, Eugène van den Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Steve Jacobs, John Rose, Kevin Green, Beatrice Green, Paul Daley, Sarah Ali, Bas van de Haterd, Oonagh Clarke, Donna Oshana, Richard Bradley, Jane Moors, Chris Eldridge, Naomi Paik and Richard Bradley for your public endorsement on all things brainfood last week - I see it and appreciate it 👊

Can you help? Share this newsletter with a friend in industry or ask your network on Linkedin to sign up.

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

5% have seen enough and think we’re done for, whilst a majority (56%) are looking forward to the productivity gains brought about by GAI. Finally, a decent sized 3rd of us seem pretty skeptical about the hype.

Lets keep thinking about this folks and make sure that we’re experimenting with new ideas, tools and techniques as we do so. I see us as a decent testing community, so lets embrace the new and see what it can do. Thanks everyone for voting - remember, scroll to the end of the newsletter for this week’s poll.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep200 - Supercharging Your Recruitment Marketing with AI, Thursday 6th April, 12pm

CRM, Programmatic, A/B testing, segmentation, conversion rates…marketing has often been ahead of recruiting when it comes to new technology implementations and use of data to drive decision making. Is the case the same now that we are in the era of Generative Artificial Intelligence? We’re going to find out when we speak to recruitment technology marketers to find out what they are doing with GAI to increase efficiency and effectiveness. We are on Thursday 6th April, 12pm, register here

The Brainfood

1. 2023 Workplace Trends Report

So….how is the Return to Office (RTO) going? Fascinating research from Envoy, a visitor management platform, aggregating of 31 million of customer entries to provide an overview as to who is going in, when they do it, and what they are doing when they get there. Some validation of the anecdata we already have - Tue-Wed-Thurs are the days in, free food is the biggest draw and, surprising to some, HR are the least likely to book meeting room. H/T to brainfooder Petar Vujosevic for the share.

REMOTE WORKING

2. The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth

The widely cited Goldman Sachs paper which estimates that 2/3rds of all jobs are to some degree exposed to Generative AI, which translates to as many as 300 million white collar jobs at risk of being fully replaced. Especially interesting is the insight that jobs which currently have high barrier to entry might be the ones most at risk. Query the method and the findings as you wish, but this paper will be one of those that people end up referring to do, so important you download this and have it available for reference.

AI

3. Twitter’s Recommendation Algorithm

Elon Musk’s chaotic and capricious management of Twitter constantly throws up surprises, some of which might turn out to be obliquely relevant to the work we do here. The open sourcing of Twitter’s recommendation algorithm not only lays bare the ego of the man (Elon tweets being hard coded into the recommendation algo), and the US centricity of what has become a global platform (tweets divided into ‘Republican’ vs ‘Democrat’) but also a reasonable guide book as to how to get your tweets go further, get more reads and grow a following - useful for recruitment and content marketers

PS: it is striking how similar social network recommendation algorithms are

RECRUITMENT MARKETING

4. The Future of Skills

LinkedIn have a strange position when it comes to professional data - with 800 million user profiles they are one of the few organisations which can credibly commentate on skills change, yet the data quality is dependent on user input and update, meaning we only know as much as what people are prepared or interested in saying. Bearing this mind, the Future of Skills analysis here can be best understood at sector level, where the rate of change is a reasonable measure of the dynamism in that industry. H/T to brainfooder Denys Dinkevych for the share.

SOCIETY

5. Where Have All the Laid-off Tech Workers Gone?

A consensus is beginning to emerge on the impact of the ‘Big Tech Winter’ - 200,000 workers have been laid off, yet most of these are not engineers but from business support functions such as marketing, sales, HR and TA, along with a tranche of non-coding managers. The developers that have been let go have either found jobs quickly, are starting up on their own or - as viewers of last week's brainfood live can attest - generally taking it easy.

ECONOMY

6. Banks Tried to Kill Remote Work. Now, Remote Work is Trying to Kill Banks.

In a world of complex, intertwined systems, action in one area triggers a cascade which manifests in unexpected and unpredictable ways. The outrageous provocation in this essay somehow makes sense when you connect the threads between the shift to remote, massive increase of money supply during furlough, the ‘make the money work for you’ ethos of modern fractional reserve banking and sudden flip of risk profile of assets which were previously considered rock solid. It’s persuasive analysis

ECONOMY

7. French Recruitment Leaders

Now this is the type of clever recruitment marketing I can get behind - what better way to promote a CRM to recruiters other than creating a high status public database of those recruiters? Also a great way to get to know some of our community members from France. Now please do repeat the trick with other territories. Finally, I might actually use this to organise speakers / panelists for Brainfood Live, as right now I got nothing.

COOL TOOL

8. The Future of AI in the Workplace: A Survey of American Managers

One understated reason why AI will replace jobs is executive demand. You don’t run a profit making business in a capitalist economic system without profit maximisation being your north star on how to operate. And the fact is, GAI can already outperform humans in many tasks, whilst doing ‘good enough’ on others to make a compelling case for managers to argue to bring this in. Note: this includes us in TA / HR. Nice piece of research from Beautiful.ai (an AI presentational builder..) - on the attitude to AI from 3,000 US managers.

AI

9. Real Time Charisma as a Service

Here’s a ray of hope for us human recruiters; GAI will increase the importance of in person interviews because they can be controlled for AI enhancements. We already know that any asynchronous assessment can no longer be trusted, but similar challenges are coming now for synchronous assessments also, as these two job seeker hacks demonstrate - Real Time Charisma as a Service and The Interview Breaker, both of which are able to translate speech-to-text and predict / recommend the best response. Love that these devs build this game changing stuff initially for laughs 🤣 but here we are. H/T to brainfooders Pedro Oliveira, David D’Souza and Matt Best for the shares

ASSESSMENT

10. The Age of AI Has Begun

….but it will not be uncontested. Bill Gates’s positive vision is outlined in this essay (particularly interesting for us is the near future arrival of ‘personal copilots’ trained on your own email, calendar, social network, document data) whilst others are now publicly advocating a moratorium on future releases in the Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter, to which further contestants spin the geopolitical risk of pausing and falling behind, to which yet further contestants suggest pre-emptive nuclear strikes as a solution to those who won’t stop. Italy have unexpectedly taken a lead - banning ChatGPT on what look like GDPR violations. Who knows where we will end up? The world doesn’t agree, which is the expected outcome of in the early days of a new era.

SOCIETY

The Podcasts

11. Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO on GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the Future of AI

Well he is the man of the moment so we had better listen to what he has to say. Not Fridman’s best interview as he struggles to navigate the distance between personal interest vs professional interviewer, but long enough for us to get a gauge as to how Altman sees the world and how he intends to move forward with Open AI. And going forward is what he’s going to.

AI

12. ChatGPT did NOT title this Podcast

Adam Grant is discombobulated by ChatGPT. It’s not often he’s the dumbest person in the conversation but he is here. The patient explainers by his interlocutors Allie Miller and Ethan Mollick operate as great explainers for us on how ChatGPT and GAI works and when it doesn’t. H/T to brainfooder Sean Wilkes for the share in the online community.

AI

13. MP’s for Hire

Politicians on the grift in UK style democracy pretty much par for the course these days, as this honey trap from Led by Donkeys amply demonstrates. These are job interviews though, and I was struck by the performance of these MP’s in these zoom calls - surprisingly poor A/V game, average communication skills and unconvincing negotiations on rate. Any community members offering interviewing training services might have a market here.

ASSESSMENT

End Note

We are living in interesting times. Too interesting perhaps, because we could do with a break, but I suspect that the pace of change can only accelerate from hereon in and our sense of discombobulation might be a permanent state that we have to somehow get used to. Perhaps, as the optimists hope, benevolent AI’s can help us control this future. Perhaps, as the pessimists fear, malevolent AI’s will shunt us aside and own that future for themselves. Maybe there is another future somewhere in between. It is too hard to know or guess but we might as well ask you in the community about it - is AI going to fast? Vote below and comment to us know why you voted the way you did.

Have a great week everybody

Hung

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