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Friends,

A few things I’ve slipped on over the past week or two.

1. Brainfood Jobs - this is still on going, we just need more jobs on there. Post for free if you have recruiter / HR jobs, use the coupon code BTCFREE. If you are hiring for recruiters and HR people, get posting on this and I’ll return to promoting the job on This Week, In Recruiting - will go out to 35,000 recruiter on Monday.

2. Brainfood Grow - we’re moving this to the Discord server folks, it will be a space where we talk about growing newsletters and perhaps other workshop stuff where we can share know how. Invite link here, say hello in general and join the Livestream channel for the Grow series. Pause for the next week or two as I’m travelling, but back on it from May 15th onward.

3. Athens & Amsterdam - for those of you who will be going to TAC in Tuesday or TruAmsterdam on Thursday, I will see you there. If you’re in those two places next week, and want to catch up, let me know!

Thanks to Eugène van den Hemel, Elizabeth Murphy, Kevin Green, Emma Barry, Jonathan Stewart, Ross Clennett, Kathi May, Marija Kose, David J Brammer, Namrata Singh, Chantelle Jones, Lyndsey Taylor, Simon Sypula and Chloe Morrison for your support on all things brainfood - scores updated on the Brainfood Hall of Fame!

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Share Recruiting Brainfood

What do Brainfooders Think?

Interesting results from the poll last week, seems that if we do something on a Thursday, some sort of summary post on the week’s previous Brainfood Live panel discussion might be useful. I have to say, I am thinking immediately of some AI assisted service here - there are 200+ episodes with some of the leading thinkers in our industry, all waiting to be unlocked.

Thanks for everyone who voted. Going to keep these going - make sure you give your opinion on the poll at the end of this newsletter.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep205 - Moving to Skill Based Hiring (SBH)

Is this the solution to the candidate shortage? We are investing huge amounts of time and treasure on talent attraction, employer branding and candidate experience but still are in perpetual struggle to have a predictable way to hire the people our organisations need. What we shifted our focus away from prior experience, and toward the skills actually needed for the job? Going to be a great show folks - register here

The Brainfood

1. A Guide to Prompting AI (For What it is Worth)

Ethan Mollick on ‘prompt engineering’, which he doesn’t really believe is much of a skill; after all, you can ask ChatGPT itself on how to ask better prompts. There are valuable shortcuts though, so reading this post will speed up your learning curve, but as Ethan says, it’s mostly about practice.

AI

2. Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Report 2023

Where are we with DEI? Perhaps the No1 topic in the short boom period in the vaccination era of Covid, it seems to have fallen by the wayside in community discourse, overtaken by tech layoffs, cost of living crisis, war in Europe and rise of Generative AI. Timely report on business leader sentiment by DD - download here

D&I

3. The Power of Proximity to Coworkers

When engineers sit near their coworkers, junior engineers receive more on-the-job training, but senior engineers get less done.

There probably isn’t a more succinct explanation for the generational divide on remote working. Important study validating the anecdata which most of us are now familiar with: workers who know what they are doing already don’t want the interrupts involved with office life, but inexperienced workers need it to for knowledge transfer. Quite academic but scannable report.

PS: as an addendum read alongside Generative AI at Work from last week, where inexperienced workers bridged this gap with AI. We’re in a fascinating moment in the world of work.

REMOTE WORKING

4. Blue Checks Coming for Gmail

Whatever we think about Elon Musk he was early to reality that we needed to upgrade identity verification in the era of GAI. Whilst the implementation of Twitter Blue Checks 2.0 is a confused mess, the initiative has inspired Meta, LinkedIn and now Google to accelerate their plans for similar badges. Techcrunch has an accessible post but for Google Workspace admins this is the announcement from Google that you need to pay attention to.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

5. Everybody is the Main Character

Entertaining post which uses story telling personas to think about leadership and how to do it with different types of character. Underneath the levity there are some serious points made, including the necessity of understanding the personality and motivations of each of your team members and giving each of them attention as if they are the main character. Great read

CULTURE

6. How Medieval Accountants and AI Created the Jobless Future

Rare for brainfood to reach deep into ancient history but this post from 2017 provides a compelling argument for why AI and roboticisation will indeed mean loss of jobs - our standard accounting rules makes de-humanisation an obvious decision for business owners to make. Fascinating, portentous essay.

SOCIETY

7. LifeOS

Beginnings of AI + wearable may well save the Metaverse; not necessarily Zuckerberg’s vision of inhabiting a cartoon full time, but of AI augmented reality wearables providing people with + intelligence on how to interact in the in-person world. As ever, experiments are conducted in the wild, by individual enthusiasts.

AR / VR

8. What Would a Map of Your Career Look Like?

Very interesting exercise, something which has become easier to do with the accessibility of great tools to help you do it. Some of the example maps are excellent, especially Venkatesh Rao. How would you visualise your career, what path would it take (and which paths did you not take?)

FUTURE OF WORK

9. IBM to Pause Hiring for Jobs That AI Could Do

I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, referring to the 26,000 vacancies in back office and support functions (HR notably included among them…) now put on hold as a result of this assessment. GAI is transforming the shape of business, the future of which will be far smaller and far leaner, with the consequential reduction in organisational complexity. Real threat to recruiters is not that ‘AI will replace us’ but that AI will replace the jobs we recruit for. H/T to brainfooder Hassam Alam for the share in online community.

FUTURE OF WORK

10. PeopleGPT.io

Does this kill sourcing? I think it kills sourcing

SOURCING

The Podcast

11. Using AI for Future Recruitment with Hung Lee

So this workshop with brainfooder Jane Moors and her Outerbox Thinking cohort turned out to be an hour long monologue by me on Generative AI and the future of recruitment. It’s just me so might be difficult to watch / listen to but having heard it back I think it does fairly reflect on what I think about the moment right now. Have a watch / listen and let me know what you think.

AI

12. The AI Supertutor for Students and Teachers

There is no industry sector which is under more pressure from GAI than education so refreshing to hear from one of the leading entrepreneurs of the space lean into it and come up with a optimistic view of how AI can transform learning in a positive way. GAI is going to spawn a whole new generation of great TED talks - this one is going to be one of them.

AI

13. “We Have No Moat”

Great explainer video of an interesting internal document purportedly leaked from Google R&D, where the anonymous author claims that Google has no viable defence against open source innovation in AI - and neither to do OpenAI, which contrary to their name, are far from open. The document is readable in of itself, but this video will help those who prefer to listen rather than read. The upshot is this though, AI is out in the wild and it’s distributed innovation of solo devs who will win.

AI

End Note

I have a theory that Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) will soon overtake Human Generated Content (HGC) on the Internet; its simply easier to generate copy rather than type it by hand. The question is: when do we think is going to happen? Its the topic of today’s poll - give me your vote and comment below with your thoughts on this!

Leave a comment

OK that’s it.

See you in Athens or Amsterdam or sometime back in London next week.

Have a great week everybody

Hung