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Friends,

It’s extremely challenging for a lot of us out there and I am looking at ways in which we can better mobilise the community to help those recruiters currently out of work.

I am going to repeat a few suggestions I made in a LinkedIn post last week, as practical do-it-today actions which can be helpful for job seeking recruiters. None of these are miracle solutions but I hope that they will be avenues of investigation which might be worth investing some of your time toward. Applying for jobs is a must but we need to understand employers are being overwhelmed by job applicants for recruiter vacancies and if all you are doing is applying, your chances are mathematically low.

5 things to do

1. Sign up to the Brainfood Talent Community - this is a searchable database for approved employers who can directly contact you for the opportunities they have. Zero cost to use this either side.

2. Complete the What Do Recruiters Want 2023 Survey - tell the community directly what it is you’re looking for and share it with your network and get them to do it also.

3. Apply (leave a comment below saying you want to do it) to the Brainfood Tribune - these a personal profiles, the completed ones of which I signal boost to the online community and via This Week, In Recruiting newsletter. It will increase your profile!

4. Show up to Adway After Work this Thursday at The Folly in London. This is an after work party thrown by our friends Adway, and its a great opportunity to meet and connect with other members of the community. Networking is critical folks.

5. Register for Recfest Knebworth - the largest Talent Acquisition focused event on the planet. The legend that is brainfooder Jamie Leonard is offering a FREE ticket to any recruiter who is currently out of work and looking. All you got to do is comment RECFESTFREE below and one of the team will DM you a free ticket.

More ideas coming on this, I have a feeling that this is going to be my mission for the next few months at the very least.

Thanks to Dave Hazlehurst, Joey NK Koksal, Colin Donnery, Kevin Green, Eugène van den Hemel, Nix Stephens, Cathryn Barnard and Oonagh Clarke and many more, who have taken it upon themselves to publicly endorse the brainfood. This is what is keeping the show on the road folks - thank you!

Can you help? Share this newsletter with a friend who could do with reading it!

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

The theory that AI will help those with least skill and competence to up level comports with common sense but the implications have yet to percolate up to strategic talent acquisition!

It would be worth running this poll again in 12 months to see where we are at with it - it makes too much sense for that 14% percentage to stay where it is. Thanks for all who voted, this is turning out to be one of the most fun parts of the newsletter to write. Make sure you scroll down to the bottom to answer this week’s question to the community.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep209 - Search & Sourcing on LinkedIn: Conversations with LinkedIn Engineering

Unbeknownst to most people in the community, one of our number - the mighty brainfooder Irina Shamaeva - has been in contact with LinkedIn’s engineering team who have commented on her blog to explain the design and build decisions on LinkedIn search over the past several months. If you have been wondering why certain techniques no longer work, or how to get better results from your sourcing efforts on LinkedIn, then this Brainfood Live is for you. We’re on Friday 9th June, 2pm BST. Register here

The Brainfood

1. 3000+ Most Popular AI Websites Sorted By Monthly Traffic

Do I read that right? 9.9 billion visits to Openai.com, presumably the vast majority to the breakthrough app of the year, ChatGPT. Useful and beautifully presented website, ranking the 3000 most visited AI websites. Also included a ‘just listed’ tab, as well as browse & filter options. You’ll find something useful in here.

AI

2. Global Hybrid Working Report 2023

Nice to see Hybrid get its own report, though I rather hoped that we would have been able to crystallise the significant distinction between those who have the option to going in vs those who must do so on set times / dates by now. Still, this is an interesting report on where we’re at with some notable regional differences. The results of this will be interesting to compare from our own What Do Recruiters Want 2023 research. Worth a look at this folks. H/T to brainfooder Paul Moir for the share.

REMOTE WORKING

3. My Role was Made Redundant. Here's 5 Helpful Things I Did About It

Firstly, congratulations to brainfooder Ben Philips for finding a new role - we look forward to the official announcement shortly. Secondly, well done on posting this retro - some valuable insight on the mindset, approach and actions that help any recruitment professional involuntarily made redundant. All these tips are outstanding, especially 2 and 3. Must read for anyone on the market.

PERSONAL BRANDING

3. Why are Red States Hiring so Much Faster than Blue States?

“It’s churn,” he said. Those red states weren’t creating jobs faster. They were just hiring more often because folks were bouncing around more. Red states don’t have more layoffs or job openings than blue ones, they just have more quits and hires.

I should imagine there might also be significant sectoral differences also - plenty of lumberjacks in Alaska, not so much in New York / New Jersey. Fascinating dive into some labour market economics in the US.

SOCIETY

4. GPT4-Powered Live Transcription Tool

AI innovation is spinning so fast that we recruiters might be dis-intermediated then re-intermediated without ever realising it. This demonstration of a real time question and answer transcriber invalidates any interview conducted over Zoom, which means that we’re going to have to do in-person interviews again. Who else is going to do that, but us? It’s going to mean end of remote though…

ASSESSMENT

5. Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers, and Industrial Control

Extraordinary essay which draws out a direct lineage from slavery, industrialisation, algorithms to today’s OKR’s and KPI’s. The idea that Charles Babbage first came up with dividing labour in order to more efficiently coerce and control newly emancipated plantation workers really hadn’t occurred to me before. It’s crazy stuff but what else is people analytics but a system of control…?

PEOPLE ANALYTICS

6. LinkedIn has a Fake Commentator Problem

Have you encountered a fake LinkedIn commentator? I must confess that I have not but given that the barriers to entry are entirely practical rather than technical, we should soon start seeing many more of them once those practical challenges of creating and growing of fake accounts becomes resolved through AI. LinkedIn are going to have to roll out true verified ID soon rather than later.

ASSESSMENT

7. As Major Cities Struggle to Rebound, Remote Work Continues to Shift Population Growth

Pandemic rewrote the economic geography worldwide; seasonal workers returned home and didn’t come back; metropolitan workers shifted to remote to relocated to cheaper and better places to live. The effects seems to have stabilised in 2023, with internal migration now being further suppressed by a mortgage market locked by high interest rates and dwindling housing supply. Have we now settled down? That is the question asked by this excellent post from EIG

ECONOMY

8. Meet the Chinese College Grads Who Took Up Blue-Collar Jobs

The massive expansion of university education in the 1990’s-2010’s was once meant to produce the highly educated workforce which would power national economies based on knowledge work and ‘intangible value’. But with hostile de-globalisation slowing down and reversing economic growth, along with the new risk of AI displacing those very same knowledge workers, elevated expectations may now need a reset. Fascinating set of stories coming out of China of graduates now doing gig and blue collar work; worth reading alongside comparable stories everywhere else.

FUTURE OF WORK

9. About Google’s AI-Powered Search Generative Experience

Sell out crowd for last Friday’s Brainfood Live on this topic, and I thought that it would be timely to share some official documentation from Google on what we can expect when ‘Search Generative Experience’ (SGE) gets rolled out to the rest of us over the next few weeks. The tl;dr is this: Google’s generated content will be above the fold dominating the screen ahead of retrieved content. Big implications for web traffic, SEO, content marketing, and probably, sourcing.

SOURCING

10. How Some People Get Away with Doing Nothing at Work

We all know someone who has a gig like this - knowledge worker in a some sort of non-critical role, with poor managerial oversight, who ends up doing very little and being quite alright with it. One of my good friends is in this situation and she, like many of the interviewees here, is conflicted between guilt at not doing enough and satisfaction for having a pretty good life. What to do? Don’t ask the question so you don’t have to answer.

CULTURE

The Podcasts

11. Tesla AI is Actually Very Advanced..

Lightning rod that he is, Elon Musk is unquestionably - in Samo Burja language - a live player - a person capable of influencing systems rather than just following the script of a pre-existing system. This is as good an opportunity to find out what he thinks, and why he does the things he does.

CULTURE

12. Unleashing the Power of AI Tools for LinkedIn Success!

OK some practical know-how for you here from brainfooder José Kadlec, who runs through all the AI tools you need to know in order to power up for LinkedIn. Not easy to do a 1 hour monologue to the screen, but Jose does this better than most. One for the sourcers at the coalface.

SOURCING

13. Making the Successful Jump from Agency to Inhouse Recruiter

It’s the journey most of us have made and I suspect a great many of us would do many things differently if we could run it through it again. I’m actually doing this topic later this month also, on the 20th June (so you can register here) but you can get a very decent hors d'oeuvre here.

CULTURE

End Note

Thank you everybody for your birthday wishes last week.

I generally don’t make a big deal of out it (more so the older I get…) but its undeniably great to get so many nice messages from you all. Reminds me, I should’ve done the 'One Tree Planted’ thing again and get some more trees planted for the Brainfood Forest - one for next year 🤣

In the meantime, had an interesting observation from an out-of-work in-house recruiter who was considering setting up agency side, after not being able to find a suitable job end employer side. Got me wondering whether we might see a kind of ‘reverse immigration’ with experienced, well remunerated candidates not being prepared to come back to the office, for less-than-expected pay and go back to 3rd party.

This is the poll for this week, if you are in in-house recruiter, vote and comment below, let me know how you feel about it going back agency side!

Leave a comment

OK that’s it for another week.

Have a great week and thanks for reading

Cheers

Hung