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Friends,

We have a new resource I need to make you all aware of: Brainfood is now on Trueup, courtesy of our good friend and fellow brainfooder Amit Taylor. Trueup.io is a global aggregator of recently posted jobs from prestige employers and has been one of the most important sites tracking tech hiring / tech layoffs over the past 2 years. We’ve now got our own segment on it, so bookmark the above link and sign up to alerts if you’re on the market and looking.

Thanks to: Dorothy Dalton, Eugène van den Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Dave Hazlehurst, Juliana Park, Denise Pereira, Alexander Chukovski, Alex Her, Daniel Plesa, Harriet Lavender, Jon Stanners, Matt Smyth, Glenn Lindley, Heather Barbour, Emma Davies, Izka Gonzalez and Alan Furley for your public support of all things brainfood last week - makes a huge difference, and keeps this show on the road - thank you! Scores updated on the Brainfood Hall of Fame

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

Another week, another decisive poll - pretty clear brainfooders know what Skills Based Hiring is…the question must move onto…how exactly do we do this?

Work trials have returned to be a popular idea, but unscalable obviously, so we’re going to have to resort to a proxy of some sort, and therein lies the problem. In any case, expect this year to be one where assessment tech and tooling will get a more serious look than ever before. Thanks for all who voted, make sure you scroll down to the end of the email to vote on this week’s topic…

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep241 - State of Tech Hiring 2024, Friday 19th January, 2pm GMT

Excited to be doing this type of show - deep dive with proprietary data from a platform provider who can really give us primary source data on actual candidate and employer behaviours. Where is the growth in tech hiring? Which employers are most successful in hiring for tech, and what do they do differently from others? What should employers be doing this year in order to be attractive to in-demand talent? Must attend for any tech hirers out there - we’re on Friday 19th Jan, 2pm GMT. Register here

The Brainfood

1. Why You Need A Company Wide View on Candidate Cheating

If 2024 is going to be the year of the AI enabled job applicant, then we need to have a clear understanding at company level on what is OK to use. That is the message behind brainfooder John Vlastelica CTA here…and who can disagree? What is critically important is to have some sort of policy, so that recruiters and hiring managers are not making local decisions on what constitutes cheating. Additional reading / viewing: Brainfood Live on this late last year and research on AI-enabled candidates by Arctic Shores here

ASSESSMENT

2. Glassdoor Best Places to Work 2024

Employer ratings on review sites are inevitably influenced if not directly driven by business performance - it’s easy to score high when the market is soft and the money is rolling in. Ratings over time through various economic up and downturns might be interesting, something which Culturama seem to be trying to do. Nevertheless, this report by Glassdoor is not without value, particularly as it remains a heavily used site for job seekers seeking validation. US data, with cool drop downs and filters.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

3. Employee Records Being Lay Off Call, Goes Viral On TikTok

Viral TikTok of the week goes to Brittany Pietsch, the now former Account Exec at Cloudflare who anticipated being laid off and decided to record it for everyone to see. Lots of things to unpack on this: accusations of stealth lay off disguised as underperformance, role of HR who met the employee for the first time on that call, moral ambiguity of recording video w/o prior consent. Worth watching the video in full - it is actually educational and we are TA / HR need to have a protocol on how to handle lay offs when there seem to be no great options. Brainfood Live on this soon I think. btw: CEO response here I thought was well handle and recovered some of the damage

EMPLOYER BRANDING

4. Supply & Demand Characteristics of the AI Workforce

OECD came out with this report on the global AI workforce in Feb last year but I missed it then and wanted to correct by sharing it now. There’s not a recruiter on the planet who is not interested in hiring for AI, but what do we mean exactly by AI skills, which sectors / jobs are most ‘AI intensive’ and where in the world is this talent? 56 page document but the good stuff starts around 30 page mark. Must read folks

AI

5. Future of Recruitment Industry Report 2024

Any business with an audience can conduct primary research. Our friends at Firefish surveyed UK agency owners how they saw 2024 and ‘tempered optimism’ is the (expected) result, with no change in commission and small-to-no headcount growth. Nice to piece of work, especially on the regional segmentation. Download the report here

ECONOMY

6. We Removed Advertising Cookies, Here’s What Happened

Amongst all the changes happening in big tech over the past 12 months, we have kind of forgotten another change which in normal times would be the big news of the year - Google is getting rid of the cookie. This will unquestionably alter the advertising landscape and is going to break a lot of the processes that we currently use to track ad performance, attribution, ad retargeting and the rest. This company decided to pull the bandage off ahead of time and published this highly interesting update on what happened when they did. Must read for anyone in recruitment advertising.

RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING

7. Interviewers Cheat Sheet 2024

If you think you’re too experienced a recruiter to get any value from an interview cheat sheet, then theres a chance that you might need it more than you realise 🤣. Love this one pager from Adriano Herdman, who is making a great habit of putting together his know-how in these business model canvass-like documents. Especially the donut chart on time distribution on interview. H/T to brainfooder Darren Bush for the share.

ASSESSMENT

8. Let’s Get Back Together

Another video, another employer brand disaster. This time, the video is a well produced but ill conceived attempt by exec to get employees to ‘voluntarily’ RTO (return to office) by not only selling the business benefits of doing so, but also issuing veiled threats to those who don’t comply. Having watched the original video, I thought the opprobrium was overblown but as we are discovering the power of the backlash is not contingent on the severity of the crime. Have a watch and a read and decide for yourself.

REMOTE WORKING

9. Human Development Index

Human Development Index or HDI is an attempt to measure the health of a society, going beyond flawed GDP measures (inflation inflates GDP…) to include other life quality measures such as years in education, life expectancy and gross national income per capita. Three reasons why I am including it here: 1) potentially useful talent intelligence resource 2) a good lesson in how rank is determined by what you decide to count (think any league table of university, country, company etc) and 3) it’s pretty fun tool to play around with.

btw: its also worth noting that the highest scoring countries are also the ones with the lowest fertility rates - we have to start talking about why.

TALENT INTELLIGENCE

10. U.S. Tech Layoffs Sent Indian Workers Home to an Even Worse Job Market

An under reported characteristic of the big tech layoffs over the past 18 months has been disproportionate impact on workers on employer dependent visas. Of the 250,000 redundancies, as many as 80,000 have been workers in this category, many of whom have been unable to secure employment in time before deportation back to home country. Turns out, many home country employers become suspicious of the silicon valley returnees, believing them to be reluctant candidates who would be flight risk due to being used to better terms and higher prestige from previous employers. An interesting story, from a lot of angles.

ASSESSMENT

The Podcasts

11. Mobile Aloha: Google's New Open Source Robot

$32,000 for your own trainable semi-autonomous robot seems like a bargain to me. What’s more the fact that source code is open source, means that the distribution of embodied AI like this is much more likely spread throughout society than the walled garden approach favoured by the likes of Apple. It’s an unquestionably impressive demonstration, and a clear signal that manual, on-premise work is not safe from disintermediation either.

WORKFORCE AUTOMATION

12. Everything Announced at CES 2024 Pretty Much

Transparent TV’s, flexible phones, multi-screen laptops, domestic droids, NEV’s and more in this 10 minute rapid fire round up of the 3 day Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The biggest boys (Apple, Microsoft) tend to stay away but every else was there - fun overview, and good to keep abreast of the technology that is being made for consumers, as we’ve seen consumer led adoption has been the norm since the advent of the smartphone.

SOCIETY

13. Thierry Henry, on Diary of a CEO

This interview with Thierry Henry got me thinking about workers for whom absolute focus is a requirement for success or survival - what happens to those folks when that focus is gone? Sports people, military veterans, entrepreneurs, highly focussed people in whichever field need adaptive support. And this is not charity - employers need to tap every field of potential labour as demographic crisis increases intensity YOY. Have a listen.

SOCIETY

End Note

Going to be bouncing around Asia for a bit after this email - visiting the fam in Hong Kong first, check out some cities in Mainland China and see if I can sneak in a trip to Vietnam and maybe Indonesia whilst I am out in Asia-Pac. If you’re based in any of these places, let me know if you fancy meeting up. I am going to try and document some of this via video / photos on Instagram and TikTok, so feel free to follow me there.

On to this week’s poll, I got to talk about lay offs - to what degree have we been trained on how to do it?

Thats it - thanks for reading.

Have a great week everybody

Hung

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