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Friends,

It’s Easter Week and I want to give a message of goodwill for those of us who are celebrating. In the UK, it’s the start of a series of short weeks in close succession and this, along with the start of Spring, makes this period my favourite of the year. Hope you are getting some time doing what you like most to do.

I’m going to be spending these extra days planning my traveling for the next few months - looks like Athens, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Nashville and Dubai are definitely happening, with maybes for Irvine, CA and Bogota. I plan to have a good time but these are also commitments to visit as many of you in-person as I can. The more I exist in the online world, the more I realise the importance of balancing the information I consume here with information I pick up from direct experience; where those two data sources clash, go with direct. In the post truth era - where we are all subject to propaganda - this is more essential than ever. To that end folks, make sure you bookmark the Big List of Recruiting & HR Events to Attend in 2023, get yourself to some of them and talk to real people, in the real world.

Thanks to Eugène van den Hemel, Martyn Redstone, Joey NK Koksal, John Rose, Rob Walker, Bas van de Haterd, Oonagh Clarke, Gareth Hayes, Emma Gallagher and Florencia Carballeira for your public support of all things Brainfood last week - I see you and appreciate you.

Can you help? Share this newsletter with your network on LinkedIn - thank you

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What do Brainfooders Think?

The pace of innovation in AI is disorientating, so is it time to tap the brakes? The community seems to think that we should, with very small numbers wanting to abandon AI, but a small but significant percentage wanting to go faster.

I’m with the majority here, but I can’t see a brake that is going to work right now. Litigation seems the only obstacle, which usually takes years to resolve in any case, by which time any ruling might well be dissonant with the new world. Lets keep thinking and doing folks - thanks for everyone voting - scroll to the end to see the weekly poll.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep201 - Prompt Engineering for Sourcing

We’ve covered a lot of ChatGPT and Generative AI in this newsletter and in the livestreams but we have yet to come up with a decent library of prompts recruiters can use to get better at finding candidates. Our aim is to come up with something live on air in these week’s Brainfood Live. We’re bringing back the amazing Irina Shamaeva, the excellent Denys Dinkevych and the awesome Greg Hawkes. On Friday 14th April, 2pm BST - register here

The Brainfood

1. Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2023

Essential report from Stanford University (in collaboration with Open AI and Google amongst others), on the state of artificial intelligence, covering investment, policy, labour market, technological innovation, public sentiment and more. The innovation rate in the field is moving so fast at the application level that it can be overwhelming to the senses; this comprehensive and accessible report is a great load balancer for us. Must read or download here. H/T brainfooder Martyn Redstone for the share in the online community.

AI

2. Corporate Recruiter Demographics and Statistics in the USA

Fascinating article breaking down the demographics of the 220,604 corporate recruiters in the United States. Some key findings: the profession is becoming feminised and more ethnically diverse over time, tenure is averaging out at 18 months per job and unemployment rate rising and currently at 3.8%…. dig into it folks

SOCIETY

3. The Toxic Culture Gap Shows Companies Are Failing Women

Textual analysis of 3 million Glassdoor reviews reveals divergence in how men vs women report on and experience company culture, corroborating findings in the latest Women in the Workplace report by LeanIn.org from 2022. Interestingly, ‘lack of respect by managers’ was considered the single most significant reason behind the subsequent description of the company culture as being ‘toxic’. Do managers need more training, do we need to get rid of managers or what? Have a read here

CULTURE

4. Early Remote Work Impacts on Family Formation

Can remote work be the solution to the demographic crisis? Turns out, the completely-expected-outcome-in-hindsight of spending more time with your partner, through neither of you having to commute to the office, means having more sex and making more babies. The great social experiment of forced shift to remote is now literally bearing fruit, but please do note it is the professional class with jobs which are remotable, who are ones having the mini baby boom.

SOCIETY

5. 2023 Trends Report - Offer Acceptance Rates

Super interesting report from our friends at Ashby, who have analysed the number of offers created and accepted on their ATS, and have come up with a few essential benchmarks. Offer Acceptance Rate is consistently 70-75% range (regardless of offer volume), with tech roles being rejected by candidates at a higher rate than others (OAR 65%). This is the sort of content which I encourage recruitment tech vendors to produce, benchmark reports from proprietary data - it’s essential insight.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

6. Cheetah

Cheetah is an AI-powered macOS app designed to assist users during remote software engineering interviews by providing real-time, discreet coaching and live coding platform integration.

Another day, another example of how AI is destroying the viability of commonly used assessment techniques. Full steam ahead back to in-person interviewing, which is going to be mean, full steam ahead to RTO

ASSESSMENT

7. How to Meta-work and Get More Life?

Brainfooder Michael Talarek is one of those rare writers who infrequently posts, but when he does, it is the sort of deep dive which is fully deserving of setting aside specific time to read. His ‘How to Scale Your Sourcing Strategy’ from last year remains of my favourite reads. This time, Michael is tackling productivity and techniques for always getting thing done - have a read.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

8.…Don’t Share With Candidates…

Only US born citizens (White) who are local within 60 miles of Dallas, TX [Don’t share with candidates]

A snippet from an internal memo which accidentally made it’s way in a public job advert or a deliberate piece of misinformation planted to damage the reputation of the staffing firm, Arthur Grand Technologies? The recruitment firm posted a rebuttal, which has now been removed, and claim to be pursuing a legal case against what they say is an unauthorised post. My unsatisfactory take on this unsavoury issue here

D&I

9. Talent Acquisition & Marketing Strategy: An Integrated Blueprint with Technology Options (Part 1 of 2)

Brainfooder Ben Philips with the first of a promising two parter outlining the critical components and optimal sequencing of putting together a talent attraction strategy. Useful refresher for those who have been around this block and a very decent how-to for those just getting started.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

10. The Future of Work in Five Graphs

Welcome corrective of groupthink from brainfooder Andrew Spence, who contextualises the priorities dominating the discourse on the Global North with 5 charts which illustrate how much bigger the world of work is outside of said bubble. As the world continues to economically rebalance from the distortions created by the devastation of WW2, we need to better understand what is recruitment and HR challenges of the Global South. Have a read

SOCIETY

The Podcasts

11. The AI Dilemma

Is AI running out of control? The presenters in this talk certainly think so, and though they have no great prescription, they rightly want to elevate the conversation and outline the contours of concern in the building of AI. Inadvertently, they end up endorsing a centralised control of AI development, which jars with the values which opened up in the innovation in the first place. I think the brainfood community has it right (see poll result above) but we may not actually have a viable brake. H/T to Jacob Sten Madsen for the share

AI

12. What Good is College When You Can Learn Everything on the Internet for Free?

Does higher education have a future? It’s a critical debate even pre-ChatGPT, but even more acute in the days when knowledge learning and transfer can now be almost entirely delegated to AI. Universities make the case in this conversation - Nick Dirks, President of the New York Academy of Sciences leading the way

SOCIETY

13. De-dollarization Underway: Is The US Dollar Losing Its Reserve Currency Status?

The concerns we hear about in the news media today are surface manifestations of deeper changes occurring in the world. The petrodollar era is coming to an end, and with it, exorbitant privilege, ushering in a world which will be different from that which went before. We need to know more about this, it will impact us personally and professionally, sooner than we think. Who better to learn from than self interested investors who are looking to hedge for the inevitable future? Sober explanation here

ECONOMY

End Note

I’m really enjoying this 4 day weekend - we absolutely need to make this a more regular thing. Might this be a way out for our AI enabled future - 3 days on, 4 days off for humans? I think you can make a ration case for it.

I had a record breaking post on LinkedIn last week on Quality of Hire - obviously a topic which is front of mind for us in the community, with a clear interest in TA in how to actually implement it. We also had some quality pushback from members who thought it was it over reach from TA into HR. We’ll do a Brainfood Live on this, but before we do, lets gauge where we are at with QoH - vote in the poll below!

Leave a comment

Some of the conversations threads on the newsletters have been great so do leave a comment if you want to get involved.

Have a great week everybody

Hung