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Friends,

I’ve written this from Nashville International Airport, the only public place with wifi in this otherwise fine city and have scheduled it to fire out whilst I’m in the air over the Atlantic.

What a magnificent few days it has been over here. Congratulations to Jamie Leonard and crew for a superb RecfestUSA - two days worth of great content, great conversation and even better community. Feedback from delegates so far seems to suggest early bird tickets for 2024 would sell out pretty quickly…

For me, it was particularly great to reconnect to many old friends and make in person connections with so many of you are members of the brainfood community. It’s not only a real pleasure for me to meet you but also I don’t think you appreciate quite how much I learn from each one of you who comes up and says hello. Thank you, and see you next time!

Next big event for me? In-House Recruitment Live in London, where I’ll delivering the recruitment keynote. Free for delegates, so if you’re in this business and in the UK, get yourself a ticket here - come along and say hello.

Thanks to David Green, Eugène van den Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Dave Hazlehurst, Alex Her, Elena Simonova, Jo McCatty, Ludmila Tomperi, Andrew Hill, Brittany King, Mary Kay Baldino, Vicki Saunders, Pawel Adrjan and Erin Mathew - thank you for your support on all things brainfood last week. Scores updated on the Brainfood Hall of Fame!

Can you help? Share this link with a friend who you think should subscribe.

What Do Brainfooders Think?

Mega interest in the poll on estimated attrition rate if your employer forced RTO fully on premise for your organisation, with the 40% of us saying that more than half of current employees would resign if such a mandate was made - interesting, this was the same percentage as Grindr’s real life experiment!

Thanks everyone for voting the in poll friends. More polling every week - check out the poll at the end of the newsletter and make sure your voice gets heard.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep224 - Recruiter Fraud: How to Spot & Stop ‘Overworking’ Remote Recruiters

Remote evangelists have been quick to dismiss the risk of ‘overworking’ as a propaganda tactic by the RTO movement, yet the subreddit on the topic is increasing its numbers by the day and individual case studies are becoming to emerge with increasing frequency. Do you know if your remote employee is actually working more than one full time remote job? Stories from community members, who have had to find this out. We’re on Friday 22nd Sept, 2pm. Must watch folks - register here

The Brainfood

1. 2023 Executive Compensation Report

Has the Big Tech Winter impacted compensation at C-level? Fascinating piece of survey research from Riviera Partners on the cash / equity compensation of executives, segmented by state of funding. Bottom line: still super competitive to hire execs, but equity / bonus components of total compensation are lower than 12 months previous. H/T to brainfooder John Vlastelica for the share in the online community.

NB: We’re talking compensation with our friends Figures later this month - register here

ECONOMY

2. How to Understand Usage of LinkedIn Recruiter in Your Team?

Given that LinkedIn Recruiter licenses are likely to be the most expensive line item in your recruitment tech budget, it’s probably a good to understand how your team is utilising it. This brilliantly insightful post from brainfooder Michael Talarek is just what you need if you wanted to put together utilisation measures which might be more useful than those provided natively by LinkedIn.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

3. Are Remote Workers and Their Organizations Drifting Apart?

Employees care less about employer mission when working remote, an expected outcome as employers are less able to shape the cognitive environment of physically distant employees. At least, that would be my explanation of these findings from Gallup.

REMOTE WORKING

4. Return-To-Office is a $1.3 Trillion Problem Few Have Figured Out

Regional variance, cultural differences, significance of commute, standard living conditions and consistency of pandemic mitigation responses are all essential variables too often missing in discussions around RTO. Not so in this excellent article from the Seattle Times, which provides insight and nuance on the challenges to companies and countries alike in dealing with the aftermath of Covid19.

REMOTE WORKING

5. Here’s My Ranked List of ATS Experiences

Product designer writes a short post ranking ATS’s from a job applicant perspective. The most astonishing misstep the industry has made is requiring account creation for job applications - this fellow reckons he has 209 separate Workday accounts, due presumably for having set up a new one for every application he’s made. Some familiar tools in the list, read through comment thread also. H/T to brainfooder Oscar Mager for the share in the online community.

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

6. Guide to Unicorns

A unicorn is business valued at $1 Billion market cap - what can learn if we grouped these companies together and sliced up the data into industry sector, countries, cities and the like? Super interesting post from Deelroom from which we can infer the general direction of investment / market interest into different types of org

ECONOMY

7. These Prisoners Are Training AI

Reinforcement Learning by Human Feedback (RLHF) is important component of pre-training AI, particularly in the reduction of hallucinations by GPT’s. It mainly consists of humans clicking Y/N on outputs - a mind numbingly repetitive job which, in the case of Finland, is occasionally performed by prison labour. An interesting ethical conundrum - at what point does providing legal routes to economy become the exploitation of slave labour?

D&I

8. Seven Reasons To Not Be A Corporate Recruiter

Brainfooder Kevin Wheeler’s independence of thought has been of huge value to the industry for the past 3 decades. He continues to be on top of his game, with this contrarian yet realist position on the corporate or in-house recruiter. Bottom line: TA cannot defend against lay offs when all we do is hiring. Must expand scope or embrace the flexibility of contract / interim / fractional work. Love to know your thoughts on this

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

9. What is AI? An A-Z guide to Artificial Intelligence

One of the things we need to do as an industry is evolve the conversation on AI beyond semantic cliche. This excellent guide on the terminology should help in this regard. Lets put the ‘there is no such thing as AI’ phrase into the dustbin. Have a read.

AI

10. With Graduate Jobs Scarce, Young Chinese Are Becoming ‘Full-Time Kids’

Might this be solution to ageing population + youth unemployment? Fascinating vignette from China of the phenomena of families paying their (adult) kids to become home helps. In most cases, these seem to be stop gap solutions before the kid ‘graduates’ but you can imagine that some may well do this as a full time carer career.

SOCIETY

The Podcasts

11. HUNG LEE von RECRUITING BRAINFOOD im Podcast

Honoured to be guest on Saatkorn podcast, one of the most popular German language pods in the recruiting and future of work domains. Host Gero Hesse was kind enough to switch to English to accommodate and we managed to get involved a conversation on demographics, values change and digitisation.

SOCIETY

12. Discover the Human Behind Recruiting Brainfood with Hung Lee

Fun conversation with Brainfooder Nix Stephens, whose newly launched podcast is already one of the most exciting new channels in industry. Some people are just natural interviewers - I think Nix is one of them! Origin story of Recruiting Brainfood, relevant for content marketers and anyone who might be curious about growing an audience.

CONTENT MARKETING

13. When is a Superstar Just Another Employee?

With the NFL already under way, this timely podcast on Freakonomics focuses on the players union and their recent report on the working conditions players have to deal with, unapologetically (and appropriately!) adding report cards for each franchise. Fascinating glimpse into another world of work, professional sports.

CULTURE

End Note

The news that Salesforce plan to hire 8000 employees, is welcome as it is interesting; the plan is to prioritise the rehiring of employees who were let go in the most recent round of lay offs.

Three things interesting here - are we seeing the emergence of a new more flexible way that employers are interacting with employees, one made clumsy by employment contracts no longer fit the demands of the free market, do we know of any employers who have a boomerang policy specifically set up for laid off employees and finally…would you as an employee return to an employer who laid you off?

Final question is the poll for today. Have a think and give us your vote

Leave a comment

That’s it for today.

Have a great week everybody

Hung