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Friends,

I’m writing this in Barcelona El-Prat Airport, having spent 3 superb days in this great city. Fantastic to see the recruiter community here in Barcelona and I look forward to visiting again soon.

It’s not all holiday though folks, as part of my plan to continue to travel is to make sure I stay in touch with local community members and get a sense as how market conditions are impacting us throughout the globe. I repeat my reminder from last week, that there are things we can do about it, including:

1. Getting a free ticket to Recfest to network with 5000+ peers in industry. This is free for in-house recruiters who are currently out of work and looking. Get in touch with Matt Jones for verification and tell him I sent you!

2. Sign up to Brainfood Talent Collective - I am sending new joiners to approved employers every day.

3. Do 20 Questions with me(!). Completed stories get amplified out in This Week, In Recruiting, my second newsletter which actually now has a bigger audience thatn this one. Some good reports that this works folks, so get to it - comment below in this newsletter, and let me know you want in.

4. Join the Brainfood Online Community - there are 5K+ members on this, and we’re active, welcoming and want to help. Do not be isolated in your job search - do not be isolated any time. Join and start contributing your thoughts to the group.

5. Livestream the Brainfood Live on your own LinkedIn - this gives you free page views at close-to-zero effort! If you’re struggling to stay visible on LinkedIn because of lack of content ideas, click on this link and restream this week’s show. Zero cost.

Let’s keep talking and connecting folks -

Thanks to Eugène van den Hemel, Kevin Green, Tim Sanchez, Alexey Geht, Paul Daley, Evelyn Palma, Andreea Lungulescu, Manjuri Sinha, Annemarie Penny and Charlotte Steggall for your support on all things brainfood last week - your public shout outs and shares are vital to keep this show on the road 👊. Scores updated on the Brainfood Hall of Fame.

Can you help? Share this newsletter on your LinkedIn and get your recruiter network to sign up. Thanks!

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

Fascinating response to last week’s poll on the use of AR / VR - seems that a third of us have never used any device, whilst 15% actually own one but don’t really use it! I think it will be staying in the gaming / media worlds for now, regardless of how good Vision Pro might be.

Thanks for everyone who voted folks - let me know what other questions we want to be posing to the community, and scroll down to the end of the newsletter to give your verdict on this week’s poll 👊

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep211 - AI Changes Software Engineering, What Recruiters Have Got To Know

It should be no surprise that software engineering is the first kind of work which is becoming transformed by Generative AI. What does that do to the types of skills the next-gen engineer will be using, and how does that impact what kind of skills tech recruiters will be hiring for. Lets hear it from the horses mouth - bring in software engineers, CTO’s and tech PM’s into the screen to give us their view. Friday 23rd June, 2pm BST - register here.

The Brainfood

1. The State of Candidate Experience 2023

Now into it’s 7th year, Phenom’s State of Candidate Experience report objectively measures CX of top 500 employers by testing the job application process on their company career pages. I’m encouraged by the results tbh - software is getting better, and previously niche nice-to-have’s are becoming standard parts of uplifting the job applicant experience. Plenty more work to do though. Important research, must read for any body managing a careers page.

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

2. Using No-Hire Requisitions for Data-Driven Insights

Do you use ‘no-hire’ job requisitions in your KPI’s? Fascinating angle of analysis from our friends datapeople who researched 120,000 job posts from 2021 and 2022 and found that 31% of them were never filled. How much recruiter time is spent on jobs like this is probably an important question to ask if you’re interested in recruitment operational efficiency. H/T to brainfooder Michael Talarek for the share.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

3. Searchable & Sortable H1B Salary Database

Useful looking website aggregating salary information for H1B job roles, which apparently must be publicly available due to filing requirements. Gets more interesting the further you scroll, with state by state mean averages, company comparisons and the like.

COOL TOOL

4. How Intel Tech Detects Deepfake in Real Time

Verifying the humanity of job applicants might become a core function of the role human recruiters can perform in the era of generative AI. That’s not to say the technological innovations like Intel’s ‘FakeCatcher’ won’t bubble up now and again - I just doubt whether it can ever scale to the point of practical use. Still, using high resolution imagery to detect blood circulation through a human face is an interesting application of the technology. H/T to brainfooder Jim Berrisford for the share.

ASSESSMENT

5. GPT Detectors are Biased against Non-native English Writers

One of the problems with ‘fake catching’ tech is racial / ethnicity / cultural bias. Will the Intel tech work equally well against deepfakes of different skin tones? Here is another example of fake catching tech going wrong - turns out that anti-GPT detectors penalise non-native English writers. All this stuff is really just one lawsuit away from being banned, its a non-starter folks.

ASSESSMENT

6. Global Economic Prospects

After growing 3.1 percent last year, the global economy is set to slow substantially in 2023, to 2.1 percent, amid continued monetary policy tightening to rein in high inflation, before a tepid recovery in 2024, to 2.4 percent.

Key observation from the World Bank as of June 2023 on what it thinks is going to happen in the global economy for the next 18 months. Massive 180 page PDF, it is surprisingly readable, and these days with ChatGPT on hand to condense and summarise, we could all do with getting a better understanding of the macro economic conditions - and of the impact of the policy decisions made by our friends in the US Federal Reserve Board. Want to know why the recruiter job market is tough? It’s all in here.

ECONOMY

7. Sailboats, Fishermen, and Careers

Wonderful essay on the dangers of processes becoming proxies for the end goal. This warning could be overlaid over personal career objectives and / or company culture. It’s also a soft critique of the potential risks of ‘data driven’ decision making; if we do what we measure, it’s obviously important that we’re measuring the right thing. Easy reading, hard thinking = great brainfood.

PEOPLE ANALYTICS

8. Accenture to Invest $3 Billion in AI to Accelerate Clients’ Reinvention

Apparently this huge chunk of change is going to translate into increasing the Data & AI division to 80,000 consultants, each one of whom will become an active vector for the spread of AI enablement into the corporate world. If we don’t get busy becoming AI-enabled, these friendly guys are going to do it for you.

AI

9. Expectation vs Reality: The Hard Hand Dealt Young People in 2023

Those who didn’t read Ted Chiang’s essay Will AI Become the New McKinsey really should, because it re-introduces a question we should’ve have never stopped asking - why does labour saving technology not actually lead to any labour being saved? The Keynesian vision of 15 hour work weeks seems farther away than ever, even as it is perhaps the most welcome outcome for AI disintermediation. Important essay on the what the future looks like for the generation entering work in 2023

SOCIETY

10. Isn’t that Spatial?

If you were thinking of splashing out $3500 for Apples Vision Pro, have a read of this brilliant critique from Scott Galloway first. He sees it as a ‘dead product’ primarily because we inherently don’t like putting things on our face, especially things which necessarily obscures our vision (i.e ‘immersive’). I think he’s right….AR may become a thing but actively dislocating from reality in order to achieve high fidelity might just come up against our primal evolutionary instincts.

AR / VR

The Podcasts

11. Adapting To AI: The New World Of Organizational Ingenuity

Josh Bersin previews his keynote in a 20 minute monologue, introducing his new term ‘Organisational Ingenuity’. Always worth a listen (and read, the short essay on the blog is also excellent) on the impact of AI to super human productivity. Contrast this though with No9 in this newsletter though - unasked question is, must AI inevitably be in service of capital?

AI

12. How to Position Employee Experience at the Centre of Corporate Culture

Takes a while to get going but this turns into a great in-depth interview with Aaron Falcione, CHRO at Organon, on ‘culture first’ company building. It’s now a 10,000 person organisation, so a rare example of an organisation that scaled using this approach. Have a listen.

CULTURE

13. Why More Education Is Not Always Better

Economics Explained is one of the many YouTube channels which aims to condense complex topics into digestible shorts which is more accessible to the mainstream audience. There are risks with this approach of course, but there is great value also. This one, on a concept of an over educated population is timely, relevant..and maybe right

SOCIETY

End Notes

I’m prepping the next set of Brainfood Lives (👈 follow the channel btw) for us to talk about in July and thought it was way past time that I asked you lot what topics you think we should discuss. Give the poll below a go and let me know what I should be covering.

Leave a comment

OK everybody, that’s it.

Thanks for reading, and have a great week

Hung