This week’s Brainfood is supported by our friends Datapeople.

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• The benefits of a well-designed recruiting intake process on hiring speed, cost, quality, and diversity

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• How collaborating on a job post can shave days to weeks off time to fill

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Friends,

Quick reminder for everyone to bookmark, share and add to the Big List of Recruiter & HR Events to attend in 2024. This will be a living, crowdsourced list so we can all have a single place where we can see what is happening for 2024.

In the meantime, I’m going to start planning a ‘review of the year’ series on Open Kitchen (subscribe to this here), where I’m going to try and pick out the 20 massive things which have happened in our industry in 2023, split over 4 parts, running each week from December. One of the ways in which I do this is review the most read / popular articles of this year, but I also want to source intel from the community. So please do let me know in comments, what you think the top 3 moments, events, trends etc which have had most impact in our space this year. Love to get your views on this!

Thanks to: James Osborne, Joey NK Koksal, Kevin Green, Paul Daley, Eugène van den Hemel, Oana Iordachescu, Martin Poole, Robbie Simpson, Tom Smith, James Telfer, Jan Pautsch, Dayna Cleland, Balazs Paroczay, Caroline Hunter, Juliana Park, Alexandrea Gyetvai, Rob Walker, Bob Pulver, Luke Davis, Manjuri Sinha, Olga Butko and Steven Rothberg - your support on all things brainfood helps keep this show on the road. Scores updated in the Brainfood Hall of Fame 👊

Can you help? Share this link with a recruiter friend who needs a boost.

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

What an interesting outcome for this poll - it looks like a simple majority of us would use video tech to improve how we look - and, from the comments in the newsletter, it looks like a fair few of us already do!

Of course as these settings are available and one toggle away, I suspect most of us will do the same. Our future is going to be enhanced - intelligence and aesthetics. Thanks for all who voted, it was definitely more than one of you 🤣

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep230 - How to Hire in LATAM

Super excited to bringing this show to you. One of the missions of Brainfood is to diversify and amplify voices that are often under represented. Me being in Colombia for the week (Talent Acquisition Summit - register here if you’re in Bogota on 2nd / 3rd Nov), made How to Hire in LATAM an obvious one to do. If you’re working in Latin America, hiring for or from Latin America, or just want to learn about what it is to hire in Latin America, register here and turn up to this show. We’re on Weds 1st Nov, 8.45am GMT+5 / 2.45 GMT

The Brainfood

1. Digitaal-Werven 2023 Career Site Report

This is evidence that you don’t need a huge amount of resources to conduct top quality research. Brainfooder Bas van de Haterd with his annual report of the career sites of 650 Dutch employers, tested by actually going through the application flow. Super interesting data in how employers are implementing chatbots (up from 4% to 8%), use of job alerts, visual representation of minorities and so forth. Relevant to Dutch market of course, but also a great barometer in general for everybody. Download here

EMPLOYER BRANDING

2. How to Share Negative Feedback

We lie to ourselves that ‘we all love feedback’ because in what we really love is validation not critique. However, may be we can change this if we all got better at the task of giving feedback, particularly when it is negative. Reflective post here from one of my former colleagues, on was recently given such treatment but found time to record the excellence of the delivery. Useful for anyone, in any context, but I was especially thinking of candidate / HM feedback scenarios.

ENGAGEMENT

3. AI Tools for Recruiters

Brainfooder Alla Pavlova co-hosted Brainfood Live last Friday and found the time to put together a spreadsheet of all the useful AI tools she had discovered in the past 6 months. The clamour for the spreadsheet was such that I had Alla open it up for additions. Check it out here and if you can add anything that you think is valuable, please do so.

SOURCING

4. Embeddings: What They Are and Why They Matter

I am including this technical post because I believe a) we recruiters can handle it 🤣 and b) because it provides a just-about accessible outline for one of the most significant innovations that enables a great deal of the magic that comes out of GAI applications. Embeddings, is the conversion of information (text, image, whatever) into a set of coordinates in a hypothetical multi-dimensional space, thereby improving predictive power by proximity and clustering. Not the easiest digest, but give it go

AI

5. Executive Compensation Report 2023

Compensation report for C-level, always interesting but particularly so given the breakdown per investment stage, as well as per department. Have a read. Btw: fascinating chat on AI impact on compensation last week with our friends at Figures, recommended viewing.

CULTURE

6. Latimer.ai

The concern that Generative AI will produce bias outcomes is probably the most conspicuous challenge for the wider adoption of the technology. Is the solution to train AI on intentionally different data sets? Latimer might the first to try this solution - give a shot folks, let me know how the outputs compare to ChatGPT. H/T to brainfooder Petar Vujosevic for the share.

D&I

7. Should Countries Build Their Own AI’s?

“You can actually build large language models around specific ideas…”

We’re all basically using US tech and predominantly US pre-trained data at that - is that a good idea if you want to maintain some kind of national sovereignty? This was a question asked the Tony Blair Institute back in June this year and is an intriguing and important line of thought. Related to item No6 in this newsletter, but scaled out to a higher unit of analysis…

SOCIETY

8. Confessions of a Middle Class Founder

During the boom times, I launched a start-up so I could become rich. Years later, I’m still looking for my exit.

Anonymised story a founder who might have missed his moment. It’s a Great Gatsby-esque style read, good enough to read as entertainment but also with insight as to the where we are at with VC backed tech startup: was it all just ‘ZIRP’ (zero interest rate phenomena)?

CULTURE

9. Are Sourcers Still Considered Junior Recruiters?

Brainfooder Denys Dinkevych doing his bit in formalising the work that sourcers do. Is this the first maturity model for the sourcing discipline? I have seen one for generalist TA but not one tuned for sourcers. Check it out.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

10. QOTD How Do You Have Time For Life?

Question of the Day posed by this young TikToker in her first job went viral on multiple platforms, mainly due to disbelieving older people dogpiling her not getting the ‘real world’. The counter argument is of course, that she is making a rather substantial point - we have no time for life when we spend so much time at work, when we also factor in going to and from work. What do you think - do you feel empathy or contempt for this young woman?

REMOTE WORKING

The Podcasts

11. Holy Crap! Now Candidates are using AI… we're entering the age of the Terminator…

Always a pleasure to chat with brainfooders Craig Watson and Lauren Sharp, the terrible twosome responsible for Australia’s leading talent podcast, TAPod. I’m afraid its me doing most of the talking here, talking about candidate use of AI. Have a listen here. btw: we’re doing this topic on Brainfood Live - register here.

AI

12. McKinsey & Co

Viral satire on McKinsey & Co, which is perhaps unfair yet resonant. The selection process, the groupthink, the polish and the status. In the end, it is a critique of prestige, something that we routinely underestimate. Have a laugh - and a think here

SOCIETY

13. Building Great Teams

Fans of the NFL will know that New England Patriots Head Coach is one of the most successful franchise leaders in sports history. Here he is, in a rather stilted interview with investor Ray Dalio, on how you build great teams. Can we learn anything from building a performance culture from professional sports? Of course you can.

CULTURE

End Note

It’s normal during slow growth / no growth economic periods for there to be surge of new businesses set up. I remember I first left the world of salaried employment in 2009, in exactly the same circumstances that so many of us are doing today: ‘had the good times, not willing to compromise in the bad times, might as well go it alone’. It turned out ok for me, but there were many bumps in the road, including more than a few which could’ve derailed me entirely.

Got me thinking about the future shape of an internal TA department - will employers build function with a view of accessing this growing group on indie-and-available recruiters, who won’t go permanent?

Poll for today friends, let me know what you think

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That’s it - thanks for reading.

Have a great everybody

Hung