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Friends,

I think we know by now that we’re in for another challenging year and it’s important to me that we are all as well set against market volatility as we can possibly be. I want to share bits of advice which was once given to me and which has stood me in good stead through at least two recessions and several significant market downturns.

1. Network - it has never been more important to both expand and deepen your connections within the industry. Your network is a safety net or a cheat code, often both. I don’t know of a better way to build network other than meet people in-person, so make sure you bookmark the Big List of Recruitment / HR events to attend in 2024 and attend some of them!

2. Profile - this came late to me, as I had for most of my recruiter career relied primarily on performance to get duereward. Thankfully I have grown out of this childishness 🤣 and now fully understand the competitive advantage increased profile can provide. I want everyone to be able to improve their profile hence, two initiatives I invite you all to take part in - Brainfood Tribune, where I am going to amp your answers to the community (and therefore you..) and Guest appearance on Brainfood Live. If you’re interested in the Tribune, comment below and simply say you wanna do it. And complete the typeform if you’re interested in being a guest in a future Brainfood Live.

3. Performance - we know this one. 1 and 2 build on top of 3, but they all end up fuelling each other in a flywheel if you get it right.

More help coming on this, it is one my commitments to you this year 👊

Thanks to: Joey NK Koksal, Eugène van den Hemel, Dave Hazlehurst, Kevin Green, James Osborne, Michael Blakely, Paul Daley, Gautam Ghosh, Alison Birch, Andreea Lungulescu, Debbie Goodman, Lucy Killerby, Colin Donnery, Alexey Geht, Lyndsey Taylor and Gianaluca Rosania for supporting all things brainfood last week - your public support makes a huge difference. Scores are updated on the Brainfood Hall of Fame, which I am glad to say, I am finally going to be able to translate into tangible value back to you soon…

Can you help? Share this newsletter with your team and have them sign up.

Cheers!

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

Surprising result from last week’s poll - managers of had not received training on how to do layoffs were the single largest cohort in this poll. Can we be surprised we consistently have PR disasters doing it?

Thanks to all who voted. Important we keep contributing to these, I am sure it aids our collective intelligence in some way 🤣

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep242 - Measuring Quality of Hire (in the Age of AI), Friday 26th Jan, 2pm GMT

My most successful post of last year was about the topic of Measuring Quality of Hire. That was a classic discussion which I think now needs an update with the advent of Generative AI - in particular, in what ways does AI change the way we make these measurements? And do we need to change what we mean by ‘quality’ given AI can enable the employees in ways we haven’t yet seen before. Practical + Philosophical this week in Brainfood Live - Friday 26th January, 2pm GMT. Register here

The Brainfood

1. LinkedIn X-Ray is Soon To Be Dead

A sensational headline by brainfooder Marcel van der Meer but one which may in this case be fully justified. Finding LinkedIn profiles via Google ‘X-ray’ is perhaps the quintessential sourcing technique and its curtailment will significantly impact the work of recruiters worldwide. As brainfooder Irina Shamaeva also noted, this is bad news for people aggregators, and anyone else doing data enrichment on people data. We’re going to get all the wise heads in sourcing together in a Brainfood Live to discus, so register here.

NB: it’s not all doom and gloom, change happens and the best recruiters always adapt. Brainfood Jan Tegze with some workarounds in his latest post on the topic.

SOURCING

2. Google Layoffs Amid Double Down On AI

Two stories in one: AI rationalisation playing out first in big tech, and also of the manner in which laid off staff members were told the news. We saw from last week’s brainfood how the insync Zoom call might be a bad idea, so now it was back to the mass email, even for staff members who were incredibly tenured in the business. As commentator Dare Obasanjo mentioned, whichever technique a company choose to break the bad news, somebody is going to have a problem with it. We’re going talking about the psychology of off boarding in Brainfood Live next month btw, to try and figure out how to make the best of a tough job. Make sure you sign up.

CULTURE

3. LinkedIn Jobs on the Rise 2024: The 25 Fastest-Growing Roles in the U.S.

Some interesting job roles for sure, but also a few surprises, including ‘Recruiter’ coming in at number 9, which had me reaching for the methodology explainer. It looks like they are calculating growth rate from 2019 to 2023, so takes into account the ‘peak recruiter’ surge of 2021, as well as some of the fall from 2022 through to 2023. Is the recruiter community still net increase in size compared to pre-pandemic levels? That’s my read I’m getting from this, though raw numbers from LinkedIn could prove it. Let me know if anyone knows how we can get this, as you can count me as intrigued…

ECONOMY

4. Does Working from Home Boost Productivity Growth?

Spoiler alert: this post was hard to read, not because of any technical complexity but because it beats about the bush failing to get to the point, then when the moment comes, fails to make any clear point. Kind of exasperating. But I include it here because it opens a discussion which is interesting across a number of dimensions: the relationship between ‘remotability’ and productivity, and the idea that reported productivity actually maps to external macro conditions, more than working mode. In words, reports of increase remote worker productivity may be a zero interest rate phenomenon (ZIRP)…

REMOTE WORKING

5. 21 Talent Acquisition Tactics Compared Using 2 Criteria

So two things have been happening here. Adriano Herdman has been regularly producing outstanding one pagers, which are diagrammatic explanations of common challenges faced by recruiters. And brainfooder Darren Bush has been tagging me in these posts to get my attention to them 🤣. I appreciate both and look for them to continue, because this is add-value snackable content for the community. Well done guys.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

6. Global Wage Growth: Slowing Down in the Euro Area, UK, and US

The slow down in wage growth seems to be a widespread phenomenon in the Western World, though growth in real terms now seems to be exceeding inflation. These are posted salaries though, not payroll, so we don’t know how much posted salary was inflated to entice applicants. Nevertheless, HiringLab is one of the must follow blogs around, get to it.

ECONOMY

7. Marissa Mayer on scaling Google and the internal black market CEO Eric Schmidt created for new hires

Interesting snippet from a Marissa Meyer (remember her?) interview in 2015. Apparently former CEO Eric Schmidt recognised that ‘blitzscaling’ would have a negative impact on culture as VP’s would simply chase headcount growth, so he created an internal currency to artificially introduce scarcity and increase competition between hiring managers for the hire that needed to be made, leading to a blackmarket trade on the “Larry & Sergey” bills now necessary to make a hire. Fine understanding from Schmidt that economic infrastructure determines the cultural superstructure. Have a read.

CULTURE

8. Introducing Bayesian Mathematics to Bias

The best content comes when ideas from one discipline crosses over to another. Here we have statistics crossing over to psychology, with an explanation as to why it is difficult to change deeply held beliefs - we are likely to ignore contradictory evidence as noise, because of the cognitive expense of revising our priors.

ASSESSMENT

9. Blockchain Dev's Wallet Emptied in "Job Interview" Using NPM Package

‘Real world assessments’ are unquestionably the best way to assess functional competence of the role, but they can become a fraud risk, especially if they involve plausible requirement for technical assessment. Sad story of a blockchain developer who had his crypto wallet emptied during one such assessment, one to think about as we reassess assessments in the era of skills based hiring.

BLOCKCHAIN

10. Post-apocalyptic Life in American Health Care

This story about a person’s navigation through the Kafka-esque bureaucracy that is the US healthcare system turns out to be a profound discussion on the nature of ‘organisational debt’, the general lack of any system despite the branding that there is a system and the social capital / institutional knowledge required to get the outcome that you need in these circumstances. I categorise this as ‘AI’ because messy reality is inadequately documented and why humans beings working in complex, inefficient organisations might in fact be the most insulated from AI disintermediation as a result. I promise you, this is worth a read.

AI

The Podcasts

11. Does AI Make Human Qualities Less Relevant Than They Were? Hung Lee on the Questions Facing TA Teams

Honoured to be part of the this series by our friends Arctic Shores, where CEO Robert Newry takes the lead in conversations about the future of Talent Acquisition. We’re talking about AI and the challenge AI-enabled candidates presents to the existing recruitment pipeline. Have a watch and let me know what you think.

ASSESSMENT

12. Mark Zuckerberg “Its Time for AGI”

“Building general intelligence and open sourcing it responsibly” - the significance of this line in Mark Zuckerberg’s 120 second announcement might initially slip your notice, but it is a shocking statement in hindsight, and the de facto announcement of Meta’s entry into race to build Artificial General Intelligence, and do so in a way which enables maximise access to most people. The wisdom of the former is debatable but the commitment to the latter is laudable. Mark, you have my support!

AI

13. Past, Present & Future of the Exponential Transition (Azeem Azhar)

Three ideas from this short presentation by Azeem Azhar: 1) “technology” means cheaper utility, 2) technology disrupts existing process and 3) markets expand given that its cheaper / better. Last point I think most significant for us recruiters, AI will disrupt, but will ultimately increase market size. 10 minutes, worth a watch.

SOCIETY

End Note

I have been in Hong Kong for two days but I have to say jet lag has been a beast to me this time round 🤣. I think today has got to be the day when I synch to local time and start being able to function as a human being. Going to emerge from the village from today and start seeing some things - will update on Instagram and TikTok.

In the meantime, lets see how much LinkedIn restriction on what profile information gets indexed has an impact on anyone in the community. Votes below please everyone…

Leave a comment

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Have a great week everybody

Hung