This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends at Adway

I recently spoke at Adway’s UK Summit, diving into the ever-evolving TA market. The insights and energy were phenomenal, truly a glimpse into the future of recruitment.

And speaking of the future, the brilliant Adam Gordon, has joined Adway's new advisory board. Adam's not just a remarkable figure in our field; his innovative spirit and passion for recruitment are a perfect match for Adway's mission. I've seen first-hand his impact in the industry, and I'm excited to see how he'll contribute to Adway's journey.

A key point in my talk was looking at what candidates really want: Honesty and authenticity, a sentiment that struck a chord at the event with “candidate experience” being a priority for many.

If candidate experience is forefront of your mind and you’re looking for a solution to improve yours through automation, you must check-out Adway Convert, for automated nurturing and an application journey in under 1 min!

For those keen on staying ahead in Social Recruiting, check out Adway's Social Recruiting Trends Analysis.

It's a goldmine of insights, perfect for navigating our ever-changing landscape!

SPONSORS

Friends,

I have just returned from my last international trip of the year - a fantastic industry event with AIMS International. Many thanks to Dimitris, Titti, Hendrik, Kerstin and the rest of the AIMS community for making me feel so welcome - I hope you enjoyed the talk and have had a great conference overall.

It’s been great to visit so many recruitment communities this year, and be assured that I will continue to do so in 2024. Whilst I’m going to be glad now of a few weeks of rest, I believe it to be vitally important that every recruitment community is in touch with the wider industry and I am going to do my best to help forge those relationships by seeing as many of you in person as I can. Two documents to keep updated - Big List of Recruiter Communities and Big List of Recruitment & HR Events to Attend in 2024 - please add to these and bookmark them both.

Asia-Pac happening in Q1 - Hong Kong for sure, maybe some time on the China Mainland, Vietnam needs a visit and Indonesia too. Let me know if you’re in those places, lets do at least a meetup 👊

Thanks to: Kevin Green, Joey NK Koksal, Paul Daley, James Osbourne, Paul McArdle, Carrie Corcoran, Hannah Morgan, Bas van de Haterd, Suzanne Lucas, Sebastian Schötze, Alexey Geht and Olga Butko for your public support of all things brainfood. Shout outs like this really keep my motivation high - thank you. Scores updated in the Brainfood Hall of Fame.

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Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

Pretty clear what the priority is! Brainfood Larder is going to be rebuilt as a custom GPT. Thanks again to all of you who voted. These polls have been a great innovation and I’m going to keep doing them. Make sure you scroll to the end of the newsletter to cast your vote on this week’s topic

Founders Focus - Ep40 - Aref Abedi, CEO of Jobylon

Delighted to conclude the 2023 Founder’s Focus series with Ep40 this Tuesday. With so many of us now starting on the entrepreneurial path, the timing could not be more ideal. Lets learn from Aref Abedi, on what lessons he has picked up on his entrepreneurial journey as CEO of Jobylon. I’ve opened a conversation on LinkedIn to collect questions from the community to ask Aref, and will do the same here - comment below with your question and I will bring them into the schedule when we speak in a couple days. We’re on Tuesday 21st November, 12pm GMT / 1pm CET - register here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep234 - Do Your Company Have A Menopause Plan?

What do you know about perimenopause and menopause? Turns out not many of us know much at all, including many women who have gone through this natural life change and found little in the way of information and employer support. If we are serious about building ‘inclusive’ cultures, surely we need to take into account this perfectly predictable change of life for many of our employees? Listen to the women community members of this show - and hear from a few examples of programmes of support which some progressive employers have implemented. Back on Friday 24th November, 2pm GMT. Register here

The Brainfood

1. Social Trends 2024

One of the annual must reads is Hootsuite’s Social Media trends. 5000 marketers surveyed on how they feel about the social media - packed with information on brand presence, AI and authenticity and how to build a long term relationship with your audience. Must read for EB and Content Marketers. H/T to brainfooder Martyn Redstone for the share in the online community.

CONTENT MARKETING

2. 50 Years of Gender Bias

Meta analysis of 44 field studies over the past 50 years tracking gender bias on hiring decisions. Some intriguing findings such as the progressive decline of gender bias against female candidates to male-dominated career paths, but also the stability of gender bias against male candidates to female-dominated career paths. Interpretation of the report is a fair reading of the material, which you can also access yourself here

D&I

3. Creating Batch Match GPT

So prior to Open AI’s shocking sacking of Sam Altman last Friday, the big news was the release of GPT builder, which enabled anyone to create custom GPT’s. Some excellent examples already shared in community, but I highlight this one from brainfooder David Galley, given its application to the task of sourcing and assessment in bulk, which gives inspiration on what could be done with this technology.

SOURCING

4. Measuring Success in Employer Branding

Brainfooder Ben Phillips is creating a habit of producing valuable, accessible content on the domain. Here is a 3 pager on how you measure and report on the success or failure of your employer branding initiative. Useful eh?

EMPLOYER BRANDING

5. Transparent IT Job Market Report - Switzerland 2023

Compelling, country and domain specific report by Swissdevjobs.ch. I didn’t think I’d be overly interested in learning about the software developer market in Switzerland but I was drawn in by this report, which asked great questions, provided great analysis and has super presentation. Reports don’t have to massive to be worthy or interesting - take a look here

ECONOMY

6. EF English Language Proficiency Index 2023

I have been in a mid sized city in the Netherlands for the past 3 days and have direct confirmation of the findings of the 2023 English Language Proficient Index - the Dutch are the best. But where else in the world are good English language speaker? Useful annual report, for anyone who is hiring internationally, remotely or investigating new territories to set up an office.

SOCIETY

7. State of AI in Production 2023

1500 ‘tech people’ surveyed on the state of AI ‘in production’ - in actual use, rather than in perpetual experimental demo. It’s a beautifully rendered interactive website with results which I think will resonate with a lot of us here. Dev centric, so a window into how software engineers are using AI, and where they think it will go….

AI

8. 7 Charts Which Define Employee Experience in 2023

Confidence in company leadership is the No1 factor in employee engagement. This makes obvious sense, and its revelation has a sort of braking effect on what else we (people department) can do if the leadership is lacking. Food for thought in this high impact review of EE by the leaders in the field, CultureAmp. H/T to brainfooder Ryan Grogan for the share.

CULTURE

9. Google Jobs New SERPS Feature

Two posts from brainfooder Alexander Chukovski who reports on the so far under reported changes on Google Jobs. The first one is on the information architecture of job ads (for direct employers), the second on the SERPS (for job boards, aggregators). A little bit technical but accessible to most who are posting jobs, Alex obviously worth a follow also.

RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING

10. Charted: Retirement Ages by Country

There are many explanations for the ‘talent shortage’ but maybe the biggest reason is demographic change, which is accelerating almost all countries toward a high dependency ratio. So every country also seems to be raising the age of retirement, or beginning the discourse of ending it altogether. Your starting point is going to be relevant so this chart from Visual Capitalist on your country compares is going to be useful.

SOCIETY

The Podcasts

11. What SUCKS and What's AWESOME About Starting a Podcast

Love this from Brainfooder Nix Stephens, a retrospective on what it is like to start and do a recruitment podcast. As you know, I am a believer that all of us should claim our space in the public discourse and this type of meta content is so useful for those who are thinking about it, but have yet to actually do it. 15 minutes to-the-camera, (incidentally the hardest type of content to do), great watch and learn.

CONTENT MARKETING

12. I Interviewed ChatGPT About the Future of Hiring

Surprised that no one has done this yet - interview ChatGPT on the Future of Hiring - so I was glad to hear this interaction with a text-to-voice version of ChatGPT. To be clear, I think this is the interviewer feeding in ChatGPT’s written out into text-to-voice, which is then spliced into a fascsimile of a live interaction. But it works ok - have a listen. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for share

AI

13. China’s Plans for Its Unemployed Youth: Send Them Away

What is China’s solution to a growing youth unemployment problem? Work in rural communities in what are still some of the poorest places in East Asia it seems. Xi Jinping himself famously spent 7 years ‘amongst the people’ a result of the purging of his father from a senior Party ranks during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a period of life which, counterintuitively, seems to have convinced Xi of the merits of ‘real work’. Fascinating programme, have a listen here. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd (again!) for the share.

End note

It is hard to think of a more dramatic leadership change than Open AI’s sacking of Sam Altman. Apparently Microsoft - 40% shareholder in the company, but without a board seat due to the organisation’s strange governance structure - found out only minutes before everyone else did when the company blog made the announcement. Greg Brockman, President of Open AI, resigned in protest, no doubt triggering an exit of scientific and product building expertise from what only a week ago seemed an unstoppable machine driving forward GAI.

Speculation fills the gap in information, so lets get a gauge from the community on what we think were the motivations behind this extraordinary move. Vote on the poll below and let me know in comments what you think happens next to OpenAI and GAI in general.

Leave a comment

That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung