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Friends,

Firstly congratulations to Carlos Guillermo Lopez and all the LHR America’s crew for organising TA Summit 2023. What a superb event with a great line up for speakers both local and foreign and such an enthusiastic community with a passion to learn. It’s been humbling experience for me to visit Colombia and learn from the local recruiters here. More people should visit LATAM and I look forward to doing so more often in future.

It’s a reminder also as to how important in-person meetings are: make sure you get yourself to some of these in future: Big List of Recruiting & HR Events to Attend in 2024 - bookmark and share 👊

Thanks to: Gautam Ghosh, Joey NK Koksal, James Osborne, Kevin Green, Eugène van den Hemel, Colin Donnery, Blanka Novotna, David Green, Manjuri Sinha, Alexandra Brun, Harriet Lavender, Nikki Remke and Izka Gonzalez for your public support on all things brainfood - I see it and it makes a difference! Scores updated on the Brainfood Hall of Fame.

Can you help? Share this newsletter with a friend in industry who needs a boost.

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

When we get a spread like this, it usually means that we are as a community are not clear on the future of the freelance vs permanent component of TA. Or it could mean that are clear but are operating in company’s with different visions on the future. One that is worth repeating in 6 months time, lets see how we progress!

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep231 - Career Pathing for Talent Acquisition, Fri 10th Nov, 2pm GMT

Excited to bring this show you to - how exactly are we developing careers for Talent Acquisition? We’re speaking to recruiters who are at different stages on the journey of building career pathing for their departments. Essential watch I’d say, for any TA Leader or indeed any individual who cares about career progression. We’re on Friday 10th Nov, 2pm GMT. Register here

The Brainfood

1. Charter Playbook for AI Worker Inclusion

AI-enablement is a priority concern for any business which wants to stay competitive but we should not allow urgency to produce and reinforce demographic inequities which later become difficult to unpick. Important piece of work by the Innovation Resource Centre for Human Resources, which gives TA / HR a guidebook for an AI-inclusive future. Download it here

D&I

2. ChatGPT for People Analytics: A Practical Guide With Examples

More people should produce how-to guides like this. Pick a domain in TA / HR, and illustrate the usage of ChatGPT in that domain. People Analytics has until now been the domain of specialists, but AI seems to have a democratising effect across all people specialisms. H/T brainfooder Sajithkumar Swaminathan for the share in the online community

PEOPLE ANALYTICS

3. Sourcing Planning: Why & How it Works in Recruitment

Great to see more community members start documenting and sharing their approach to their work. Brainfooder Ach Petrosyan is one of the best sourcers around and this post on how & why to use sourcing planning gives some insight on what makes her so good. Sourcers: have a read here

SOURCING

4. What Do You Care About Most

Rarely share infographics in this newsletter but I am making an exception in this case, as Visual Capitalist has managed to pack in some really interesting survey data on cultural variance into a very decent one pager. If you’ve ever read The Culture Map by Erin Meyer and thought it good, this sort of content will meet with your approval. Useful, if you’re hiring internationally, for candidates from cultures unfamiliar to you.

ENGAGEMENT

5. The Impact of Founder Personalities on Startup Success

Interesting research on personality types, with uncomfortable conclusions which carry implications for us in recruitment. What if certain personality types did correlate to success in certain contexts? If we accept that it might, then the unavoidable conclusion would be we should explicitly hire for it, but because accusations of bias carry significant penalty, we tend to do implicitly instead. Easiest thing to do of course is the deny the validity of the research.

ASSESSMENT

6. LLM Evolutionary Tree

Nice gif on the evolution of Large Language Models, almost all of which trace dependencies on a previous LLM that went before. Needs speeding up to be honest but it is very nicely done.

AI

7. The GitHub Black Market That Helps Coders Cheat the Popularity Contest

“GitHub is no different. It’s a market of attention because there are mechanisms by which people acquire notoriety and influence and reputation through how popular or how widely used their software is.”

Tech recruiters will know all about GitHub stars, public signals of support by software developers on another developers open source project. This sort of community endorsement translates into opportunity, and exploitation inevitably follows. Fascinating story on the black market for GitHub stars.

PS: made me think actually, if LinkedIn endorsements ever had any credibility, might there have been a black market for those?

ASSESSMENT

8. A Unique Halloween Challenge

Smart, creative (and cheap!) way to use gamification + AI as both a candidate attraction and assessment filter. Cheers for Shay McIntosh for recording the loom to show it works, and H/T to brainfooder Jonny Summers for the share.

RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING

9. The AI Research Job Market Shit Show (and My Experience)

Job seeker commentary on the state of recruitment has become one of my favourite genres of literature. The author here is a highly skilled, in-demand AI researcher, which makes this piece very much a first world problem, but additionally gives great insight into the AI labour landscape, the cultural expectations of different employers and what actually makes an attractive job opportunity for this type of worker. Great read for anyone interested in candidate experience and employer branding. And of course, for any recruiters hiring for AI.

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

10. TikTok’s Finest Lobsterman

One of my favourite TikTok pages is ‘the pool guy’, mainly because he exemplifies how simple, repetitive content leads to brand reinforcement and audience building. TikTok is full of accounts like this - working class people posting short videos of the work they do. It’s harder to middle class - white collar work doesn’t lend itself as easily to compelling physical work like draining a swimming pool or opening a lobster pot. Some recruiters are on it though - brainfooder Lee Harding doing a stellar job of it. More of us should think about giving it a go…

EMPLOYER BRANDING

The Podcasts

11. Unlocking Hidden Potential with Adam Grant

Adam Grant in conversation fellow success doyen Malcom Gladwell. Why do we venerate innate characteristics rather than circumstances and context? Take a while to get going as you have to get past the matey repartee at the beginning but really gets going from the mid way point, especially on the epidemic of perfectionism, the problems with affirmative action and how self doubt leads to lower performance. Have a listen here. H/T to Bas van de Haterd for the share.

ASSESSMENT

12. How Recruiters Can Make More Money with Hung

I don’t think we ever answered the question in the title as we segued into personal territory and ended up talking about motivation, mindset, mental health and a lot of other things besides. Serious but fun conversation with brainfooder Chris O’Connell last year, now remastered as a cool looking Youtube video.

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

13. The Near Future of AI

Andrew Ng has been one of the best communicators on the topic of artificial intelligence for the past decade, doing it way before it was cool. Always great to listen to what he has to say on the impact of AI, especially on the speed of application development. Technical but accessible, so have a watch here.

AI

End Note

I’m writing this in Cartagena, a city which I first encountered via Hollywood as the place where Jack Colton arranged to meet Joan Wilder after becoming separated in the jungle in Romancing the Stone. They don’t make them like they used to 🤣. Anyways, short weekend trip here here with brainfooders Bas van de Haterd, Clair Bush and Marcel van der Meer and due to meet again with Carlos for a boat trip later today - before going to Bogota for the final two days. It’s been a wonderful trip so far.

Need to start thinking about reviewing 2023 as we’re nearly to the end of it. Vote on the poll below on what has been the most significant trend in our industry this year and comment back to add more (I need you to do this, so please do). I’ll pull all of this together in a review of the year series in Open Kitchen

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That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everyone

Hung