This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends hackajob

Are you tired of spending endless hours sifting through resumes and struggling to find the perfect candidates for your open positions?

Look no further! hackajob is here to revolutionize the way you recruit top talent.

Our state-of-the-art recruitment marketplace connects you with qualified candidates in your industry, saving you time and resources in the hiring process. Plus, our advanced matching algorithm ensures that you're only presented with the most relevant candidates for your open roles.

But don't just take our word for it - book a demo with our team and see for yourself how hackajob can transform your recruiting efforts. Trust us, you won't be disappointed.

SPONSORS

Friends,

So first of all apologies for all those who registered and tuned into Brainfood Live last Friday. Some mega tech issues produced a David Cronenberg style horror on the A/V and I had to follow the advice of the viewers who were blowing up my phone with DM’s telling me something was nightmarishly wrong 🤣

I’m going to reset the show with Andy as soon as we can, and aim for mid week special - this might be as soon as this week. Second time tech issues has taken down Brainfood Live, both times we were talking about LinkedIn - I’m sure a coincidence!

Anyways, thanks all for your patience.

Special thanks this week to Clair Mohammed, Joey NK Koksal, Richard Bradley, Kevin Green, Dave Hazlehurst, Heather Kitto, Dorothy Dalton, Blanka Novotna, Ross Clennett, Matthias Schmeißer, Andreea Lungulescu, Virginia Tirado, Nix Stephens and Gregory Herbe for your public endorsement of all things brainfood - you are keeping the show on the road folks - scores updated in the Brainfood Hall of Fame.

Can you help? Share this newsletter using this link to LinkedIn and have your network subscribe. Cheers 🙏

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

This was an interesting result - a wide distribution from the community on where we are at in 2023 with regards to DEIB. I wonder how much this correlates generally with business performance - inevitably the companies doing most well will have the greatest capacity apply resources to the necessary work in DEIB.

Thank you to all who voted - going to keep doing these, so make sure you cast your vote on this week’s poll, at the bottom of the newsletter.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep218 - Turning Employers Into LinkedIn Talent Influencers

Cisco’s case study of training all 84,000 employees on how to use LinkedIn is the inspiration behind this discussion - how can we replicate the approach so that we convert our employee base into advocates for brand, and do so effectively on a platform like LinkedIn? We’re on Friday 11th Aug, 2pm BST. One for everyone I think, so register here

1. Why Transformative Artificial Intelligence is Really, Really Hard to Achieve

Superlative essay outlining the arguments against immediate AI takeover - hard technical challenges, incomplete data, economic / legal / ethical / cultural barriers, as well as the idea that a great deal of what we call ‘value’ is based intrinsically on human interaction. What is most valuable out this essay is that it doesn’t want to make you change your mind, only to present the arguments - one to bookmark folks.

SOCIETY

2. Where is the AI in HR Tech?

Excoriating post from brainfood Jonathan Duarte, who takes HR vendors to task for overselling the AI-ness of their product, which may be inadvertently expanding the scope of legal scrutiny by government authorities keen to constrain AI. It’s an interesting argument - one which I’ve not yet seen made before - and at first pass, seems to have merit. If all HR Tech becomes AI-enabled, does that mean that they must all be subject to a bias audit? You can imagine the nascent industry of AI auditors clamouring for it to be so…

PS: if you want to read what such an AI audit might look like, this study on Influences of AI Personality Scoring is a decent read. H/T to brainfooder Carl-Christoph Fellinger for the share.

AI

3. Guide for Understanding Team Effectiveness

I think this is from 2021 but not shared before on brainfood, so I thought I had better do so. Google’s People Analytics team studied team effectiveness by looking at both qualitative (team member reports) and quantitative (objects achieved vs objectives set) parameters and came up with some interesting insight on what makes an effective team. The famous five attributes are: psychological safety, dependability, structure & clarity, meaning & impact. Team leaders, have a read.

CULTURE

4. How to Effectively, and Legally Use Racial Data for DEI

Culture war in the US has become manifest in the law, with implications for DEIB practices at the corporate level. HBR with a well argued call for calm, as well as recommendations for action: an audit of existing DEIB practices in order to reduce litigation risk and a professionalisation of practice to eliminate de facto quotas. Important one for our US brainfooders - have a read here

D&I

5. Tracking HackerNews' Shifting Preferences for Remote Jobs Over 5 Years

Hacker News is a message board which quickly evolved it’s on de facto job board, essentially a monthly comment thread collecting together employers posting (usually developer) vacancies. Great thing about this is that the data is online and scrapable. The rise of remote is clear, but so also is the overall reduction in volume of all jobs in 2023.

REMOTE WORKING

6. At This Company, We Are Family

How many companies describe themselves as family? I’m sure most of us have worked for one and whilst in many cases the analogy is well meaning, it has become subject of criticism, especially as when times get tough, the family talk goes out of the window. Great satire is hard to pull off these days but this hypothetical letter to Dear Timmy, hits the mark.

CULTURE

7. Code Interpreter for Sourcing

A few of us have been dabbling with Code Interpreter and more of us need to do so. Think of it as a data analyst for your team, so feed it data you want to reorganise and combine. Brainfooder Irina Shamaeva with an illustrative use case on how to use it for cleansing large datasets. Any other examples we can share? I have a feeling a library of use cases would be useful…

SOURCING

8. How We Work

Explainer guides like this from software company Warp not only provide a centralised reference point for existing employees but also as a transparent ‘culture doc’ for candidates who might be thinking of joining. Whether you agree with the principles or not, this would be an impressive artefact to send to prospective candidates. More companies should do this. H/T to brainfooder François Gaultier for the share.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

9. US Army Adjusted Service Rating Score

This is a scorecard for US Army personnel in WWII. The credit score would determine whether the soldier would be able to conclude his service and go home, or be redeployed to the Pacific to fight the IJA. Having kids, helped.

ASSESSMENT

10. Working from Home, Worker Sorting and Development

The body of research for WFH vs RTO is beginning to build. This piece of research from India is particularly interesting because it recorded job applicant preferences for location of work but then randomly allocated them in order to measure performance vs preference. Full on challenging findings, including poorest performance coming from applicants who wanted WFH and got WFH. Brainfood for sure…

REMOTE WORKING

The Podcasts

11. How Failure Made My Stronger

Captivating talk from Ade Adepitan MBE, TV Presenter and Team GB Paralympian speaking at Recfest earlier this year. We can learn a great deal from elite sportspeople, mainly on mental resilience and response to inevitable - and in Adepitan’s case - repeated failure.

PRODUCTIVITY

12. Academia is BROKEN - Stanford President Scandal Explained

I share a lot of academic research in Brainfood but we do indeed have to maintain skepticism even for the most credible. Superb explainer of academic fraud at the highest level. The problem? Nobody checks. Perhaps here is where AI can help with what is most likely a practical problem of capacity and personal problem of motivation.

ASSESSMENT

13. What Whales Can Teach Us About Workplace Harmony

A fascinating three-part series from Freakonomics Podcast on commercial whaling, which had this segue on how racial diversity both negatively and positively impacted whalers performance. Turned out, that racially homogenous crews outperformed diverse ones, at least in the first voyages, as incidence of internecine conflict were lower, before going on to outperform them in later voyages as the crew members worked out how to get along. Education and entertaining listen.

D&I

End Note

Some huge news in the world of science last week, with some claims of sci-fi level breakthroughs in the realms of physics, biochemistry, pharmaceuticals and more, so much so that it has temporarily relegated generative AI into the background. Fun one to do for this week’s poll - cast your vote below and comment as to why 😃

Leave a comment

How many of us are actually recruiting in the hard sciences? I don’t think that many. Would love to hear from you if you are, DM me - lets chat

That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung