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Friends,

It’s Christmas Eve and this is the second last newsletter of the year.

For this Christmas Special, the curation will be a collection of reviews of the year, zooming out a little bit to look at the wider economic, investment, technology and consumer trends which characterise 2023. I hope these will provide a wider context for everyone who is going through the very healthy exercise of doing a personal retrospective on the year that is coming to a close.

I do need to do my own retro, in particular reviewing the ‘State of Brainfood’ and sharing with you all the successes and failures from all of the channels and projects of the year. I’m not quite sure where to put it though, so you might need to bear with me as a I figure that out 🤣

Thank you for being with me in all of those places in 2023. It is a huge privilege for me to write this newsletter and my good fortune is not something I will easily forget.

Have a great holiday break and see you in New Year Eve’s 👊

Thanks to: Eugene van de Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Gautam Ghosh, Achyut Menon, Kevin Green, Dave Hazlehurst, Stephen Phillips, Todd Raphael, Nina Schein, Martin Poole and Ben Tinker for your public support of this newsletter last week - seen and appreciated. Scores updated in the Brainfood Hall of Fame

Can you help? Send this newsletter to a friend who needs some Christmas cheers

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

What does this tell us? We are divided of course, but a decent number of think that candidates will be even more responsive to us in 2024 than they were in 2023. Will out AI-enhanced outreach lead to better engagement or is that economic conditions will motivate job seekers to keep engagement with recruiters high, regardless of technique?

Thanks everyone for voting - fun poll!

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep239 - Forecasting the Year Ahead 2024 - Part One

No show this Friday, as even I have things to do this week, but we will be back first week in the New Year to kick us with a two part series forecasting the next 12 months. We’ll be talking investment landscape, big tech hiring and the global RPO landscape…

We’re on Friday 5th January 2024, 2pm GMT - register here

The Brainfood

1. What Happened in Recruiting & HR in 2023?

Every year I review the newsletters sent in the year just gone and see if I can glean from that what actually happened in our industry over the past twelves months. Irrationally, I publish this in my other newsletter This Week, In Recruiting, as that is where the original essays go. So go have a read on what happened in recruiting in 2023 in three parts Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3

SOCIETY

2. 2023: The Year in Charts

McKinsey do a great job of visualising some of the major trends that have occurred in society in 2023, including plenty which is directly relevant to us: CEO priorities, AI disintermediation of work, state of gender equity in the boardroom and racial equity in STEM. Lots to think about, and easily digestible via the charts.

ECONOMY

3. The 25 Most Engaging Articles on LinkedIn in 2023

This is based external link shares - so what got the most views on the platform we recruiters love to hate? WFH/RTO/Remote working were the top three, which tells its own story as the how much we were invested in this debate. Top post got 100,000+ engagements btw, I think my best in 2023 was exactly 1/100th that result 🤣

REMOTE WORKING

4. Cloudflare 2023 Year in Review

How did we access the Internet in 2023? Cloudflare - perhaps the world’s pre-eminent web security provider - can give us some insight, with this extensive report on web traffic, popular technologies, most visited web sites and so on. Particularly interesting for tech recruiters is the ranking of the programming languages and frameworks, based not on survey but on detection by Cloudflare servers. Very interesting read, as was their earlier post, Ranking Top Internet Services in 2023

SOCIETY

5. Octoverse: The State of Open Source and Rise of AI in 2023

Fascinating report from Github on the state of open source. Again, particularly relevant for tech recruiters: countries with the highest growth rate for engineers, most popular languages, fastest growing languages (Rust). For the everyone else, the most remarkable part of this research is the degree with which the tech community has embraced AI, which of course is now a flywheel of innovation. 41% of code on Github was AI generated 6 months ago. Going to be 80% in 6 months time…

AI

6. Year in Search 2023

It’s been a significant year for Google, mostly for the things its unexpected competitors did in taking up market share which once looked insuperable. Yet despite the significant inroads made by TikTok and OpenAI on information discovery, Google still remain king of search for most of us. Here’s what we searched for 2023. Cool also because of geo-filters, you can check out global vs your own country vs any other country for which Google has sufficient data.

SOCIETY

7. Year on TikTok 2023

Speaking of TikTok, here’s what we got addicted to in 2023. Watching some of the food prep vids and it’s pretty clear that audio is a hugely under rated aspect of success on video - watch the Chicken Katsu tok and you’ll see (hear?) what I mean. Need to work on this for Brainfood next year. Some promising inroads too made by a few members of our community - shout out in particular to brainfooders Joel Lalgee and Lee Harding who are building up great followings on the platform. More of us show follow.

CONTENT MARKETING

8. World Energy Investment 2023

One of the difficult lessons we’ve learned over past few years is that none of us are insulated from the macro. Whether you prefer black swans to grey rhinos, high impact externalities reset the board for us in TA / HR, as in every other job category or industry sector. How did we power our societies in 2023? What can that tell us what is going to play out in 2024? The International Energy Agency has the investment review for the past 12 months

ECONOMY

9. State of Game Development Industry 2023: Job Search and Hiring Trends

The Games Development industry is massively under reported on brainfood - and it’s something I will be doing a better job of covering in 2024. Reports like this 80 Level is a suprisingly in-depth breakdown of the industry, which significant real estate dedicated to core TA / HR issues like workplace culture, hiring trends, comp & bens and the job search. We don’t have an equivalent for the TA / HR sector, somebody should really create one.

10. World Bank 2023 in Nine Charts: A Growing Inequality

I thought this chart was the most relevant of the 9 discussed in this review post by the World Bank. Working age population flatlines in direct correlation to economic development. Have we timed this perfectly, so that AI / Automation take on human work just at the moment we run out of humans to do it? Or is the talent shortfall in the exactly those sectors where robots no matter how smart can do the job? Lots to think about going into 2024

WORKFORCE AUTOMATION

The Podcasts

11. Spotify 2023 Podcast Trends

As you know, I am a big advocate of people in the community starting podcasts. We need a polyphonic ecosystem, where every community member can speak on equal terms with everyone else. Don’t let anyone gate keep you out of this - and if you need me to guest on your show to get you started, just let me know! Spotify 2023 trends on Podcasting here - particularly interesting bits toward the end when it covers (briefly) attribution and conversion rates.

CONTENT MARKETING

12. The Most Popular TED Talks of 2023

TED might have lost the cool factor somewhat, but it remains a great archive of interesting monologues, kept digestible by the 17 minute constraint. My favourite of this selection? Probably the conspiracy theory that birds are not real…

SOCIETY

13. Recruiter Use Case for ChatGPT, Pt1

By far the most popular show on Brainfood Live this year will be no surprise to anyone - recruiters and tech vendors coming on screen to demo what they have been doing with ChatGPT. We did this in Jan 20th and never had a chance of beating the attendance record for any other show. Enthusiasm was high and it remains a really watchable show. Be great to get some of these folks back early 2024 and see how / if they / we have progressed. Have a watch here.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

End Note

So…we are nearly there for 2023.

I hope that you have the opportunity to have a restful period away from work. Whether you will be spending the time with family, friends old or new, or in the comfort of your own company, I wish you well and will raise a toast to your good health!

Merry Christmas and Seasons Greetings to you all 🎄👊

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Have a great week

Hung