This weeks brainfood is supported by our friends Metaview

Still furiously scribbling or typing interview notes? It’s time to leave note-taking in the pre-AI era and join the thousands of recruiters already using Metaview. 

With the magic of Metaview’s AI-powered recruiting notes you’ll:

• Cut hours of admin out of your week: Never waste time cleaning up notes or writing candidate reports for hiring managers again. Metaview’s AI records and transcribes your most important recruiting conversations, then crafts perfectly-structured, accurate summaries. All without you having to do anything. 

• Upgrade the candidate experience: Put 100% of your focus on the candidate in the moment. Not worrying about capturing detailed notes. 

• Supercharge your efficiency: Whether it’s automatically generated candidate TL;DRs, auto-filled scorecards, or any of our other AI-assisted features, Metaview makes every step of the interview process delightfully efficient. 

• Make more confident hiring decisions: With perfect, instantly-queryable candidate data at your fingertips, you can be sure you’re making hiring decisions based on what actually happened in interviews. 

Don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what Hung himself had to say about the power of Metaview in his 2023 recruiting roundup:

“For the employers who think seriously about talent acquisition and recruitment efficiency, interview intelligence is no longer any kind of secret.” 

The secret’s out, so don’t get left behind. 

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Friends,

Thanks for following along on Instagram and FB - its been a great way for me to document what I’m doing whilst I am in Asia. I’ve realised that I am going to be on the move in 2024 as much as I’ve ever been, so your support is a great reminder of me to take time to learn about the places and people I visit.

Next up: Vietnam. Cold spell coming to Hong Kong this week, so I am scooting off to Ho Chi Minh City for 4 days, where I may well be just catching the beginning of Tết. If you’re around from 8th to 12th Feb in HCMC, let me know I’d love to meet you and find out more about hiring in your country 🇻🇳 👊

Thank you to: Joey NK Koksal, Eugene van den Hemel, Kevin Green, Bas van de Haterd, James Osborne, Gillian Kelly, Andreea Lungulescu, Donna Oshana, Diana Gindeva, Denise Pereira, Juliana Park, Dorothy Dalton, Olga Butko, Steve Bartel, Lisa Rangel and Jay Minns for your public endorsements of all things brainfood last week - critically important to keep this newsletter going. Scores updated on the Brainfood Hall of Fame 👊

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Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

With the shockwaves of Jurgen Klopp’s announcement that he is leaving Liverpool FC starting to subside, the brainfooders were happy to cast their admiring glances towards Bayer Leverkusen’s Xavi Alonso as the next manager of the club

He’s the obviously choice - currently leading the Bundesliga ahead of perennial champions Bayern Munich. Stevie G doesn’t seem to be the answer, Jose Mourinho star now on the wane and great to see some quality troll backing for Big Sam 👊 return to elite tier football management. Back to normal industry related polls this week everyone - thanks for your patience 🤣

Founders Focus - Ep41 - Up close and personal with Richard and Beverly Collins, Co-founders, CVWallet, Wednesday

We learn a great deal from recruitment entrepreneurs but I reserve particular attention to those serial entrepreneurs who are looking for repeat success. Fresh from exiting automated job advertising platform ClickIQ to Indeed, husband and wife team Rich and Beverly Collins are back with their latest - perfectly timed - offering - CVWallet, a blockchain based skills verification service. Ideal in the era of the deepfake and AI-enabled candidates. What’s the secret formula for business success for these two? Weds 7th February, 12pm GMT. Register here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep244 - Off Boarding & How to Avoid PR Disaster, Friday 9th Feb, 2pm GMT

It’s the ugly part of business to have to let colleagues go, but does it have to be such a disaster that employees end up taking to social media tell us all about it? What we actually had built an off boarding plan ahead of the need? We’re going to talk to both employers and employees who have recently gone through process and figure out if we can come up with some recommendations. Friday 9th Feb, 2pm GMT. Register here

The Brainfood

1. The Ultimate Guide on Managing the Candidate Use of GenAI

If 2024 is going to be year of the AI-enabled job candidate, its pretty clear that employers are going to have to come with you plan on how to handle it. We have three choices - deter, detect or (re) design how we assess candidates. Well done on Arctic Shores on leading the way with this - this practical guide is an excellent complement to the research on candidate use of GenAI late last year. Download here

NB: hosting a webinar on this later this month - sign up here

ASSESSMENT

2. How Hard is it to Cheat with ChatGPT in Technical Interviews? We Ran An Experiment.

Perfectly timed post by Interviewing.io, the platform which coaches tech candidates on how to get past tech interviews. How well do candidates perform when using ChatGPT? Most interesting finding is not that AI-enabled candidates performed significantly better, but human reviewers were not able to accurately distinguish between those who did or did not use AI. Must read.

ASSESSMENT

3. Google Spent Billions of Dollars to Lay People Off

Reduction in Force is a cost cutting measure but it is also a costly exercise, especially if you have already have upper quartile market comp and a strong employer brand to protect (remember Google was No1 employer in Universum’s 2023 report). How much cost exactly? $2.1 billion in 2023 alone. Talking about Offboarding in Brainfood Live this Friday - join the discussion on how we need to do it the right way by employees and employer.

CULTURE

4. Automattic’s Big Re-Org

Another company, another re-org, but a totally different culture and vibe. Automattic are the software company behind Wordpress, still the dominant website builder worldwide, make a short announcement that CEO Matt Mullenweg is going to take a 6 month sabbatical, and that everyone can now apply for different roles in the organisation and gather resources to achieve self directed goals. It’s totally left field decentralisation. Compare to the many posts of Xooglers who lament the bureaucratisation of a once rapid, innovation first business - Ian Hickson’s Reflecting on 18 years at Google is probably the pick of the bunch

CULTURE

5. 2024 Freelancer Rates Report

What is happening in the freelancer marketplace, in terms of contract length and day rate? Superb piece of work from YunoJuno who pull data from their platform, segment out per discipline and package it up in a wonderful interactive website. My interest was primarily in looking at job families which declined in rate over the past twelve months - significant if we additionally factor in cost of living crisis + impact of GenAI. Bookmark this.

GIG ECONOMY

6. Office Mandates Don’t Help Companies Make More Money

Does RTO make a difference to the bottom line? Apparently, ‘no impact’ is the verdict from this sample of 457 firms of S&P500 from June 2019 and January 2023. We know that correlation ≠ causation, nor do we know the direction of causality even if we could prove the relationship but research is nevertheless useful ammunition in the contest between employers vs employees. Good summary by the WP, download full report here and ChatGPT it. H/T brainfooder Colin Donnery for the share in the online community.

REMOTE WORKING

7. The Complete Guide to Equity Compensation for Startups

We are having a bonanza week for vendors producing content from their proprietary data, without sticking it behind an email registration wall. This is how you get into brainfood folks, for free. This week, it’s Ravio with a guide for Equity Comp. UK centred data but really useful for anyone working or thinking about working for a business where equity is part of the picture. Must read

CULTURE

8. Digital 2024: 5 Billion Social Media Users

One of the annual must reads, this report from We Are Social tracks global social media usage, using data from a host of other social media monitoring sites. The surprising revelations stand out: Facebook growing is MAU, LinkedIn reaching 1 Billion users and the globalisation of TikTok, despite being unavailable in both India and China. H/T to brainfooder Vicki Saunders for the share.

CONTENT MARKETING

9. Worldwide Mobile Data Pricing

Doing a multi-country trip in Asia has got me interested in mobile data pricing. It’s obviously a factor in anyone’s remote working experience, especially in places where Wifi is spotty, slow or archaic. This interactive website was super interesting - good use for digital nomads, and also pretty good nurture content for your candidate database who might want to do some nomadism.

REMOTE WORKING

10. Putting Skills First: World Economic Forum 2024 Report

Skills Based Hiring will obviously become a thing, and even though I have my doubts about its post GenAI relevance, it’s definitely still a progressive move to reduce reliance of academic qualifications for jobs which clearly don’t need them. WEF with a highly readable overview, particularly good is the expanded ‘LightHouse’ section which covers dozens of case studies of employers who have moved toward SBH approach. H/T to brainfooder Richard Bradley for the share in the online community.

ASSESSMENT

The Podcasts

11. Science of Success: The Nvidia CEO’s Lessons in Building a $1T Company

Jenson Huang’s gamble that AI chips was the future will go down in history as one of the best exec decisions made. Longer interview with Huang is well worth a read, but this short summary from WSJ is a decent introduction to one of the live players in the world today. What lessons can we learn from Nvidia’s success? Well worth a listen. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share.

CULTURE

12. How Microfactories Could Be the Manufacturing Strategy of the Future

Last week’s video of Huawei’s EV factory turned out to be a hit - and guess what? Every country and company are doing the same - roboticising manufacturing as much as they can. One inadvertent outcome of workforce automation is the shrinking of the physical footprint of the factory - turns out, if you get rid of the human workers, you can condense the space to create ‘microfactories’. Fascinating video

WORKFORCE AUTOMATION

13. Google's AI Makes Stunning Progress with Logical Reasoning

Sabine Hossenfelder has one of the best popular science channels on YT, combining crystal clear analysis with wry delivery which includes the lay person viewer. Here she is on a significant advance on Google’s AI, AlphaGeometry. Whilst we’re busy with trivia like improving engagement rates on email outreach, AI’s true value will be in tackling mathematic problems which lead to scientific breakthrough. Scientists to be disintermediated? No reason why not. Have a watch

AI

End Note

The We Are Social 2024 Report got me thinking about how we’re using social media these days. Obviously brainfooders are human beings but we’re also fairly weird in being the only habitually daily active users of LinkedIn 🤣. What social network do we overlap with the most?

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That’s it - thanks for reading everybody

Have a great week

Hung