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Friends,

It’s Chinese New Year so….恭喜發財! 新年快乐!

I am wishing all of you in this community good health, good fortune and great prosperity in the Year of the Dragon🧧! I’m still in Vietnam, another country which celebrates the Spring Festival, where it is called Tết or Tết Nguyên Đán and its a national holiday for all of the people here. Got a day or two to explore after I send this newsletter, so I’m looking forward to seeing what I can of the city formerly known as Saigon renamed since 1975, as Ho Chi Minh City 👊 - anyone any tips, let me know!

Thanks to: Eugène van den Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Colin Donnery, Kevin Green, Steven Davis, Paul Daley, Sonia Douspis and Pawel Adrjan for your public endorsement for all things brainfood last week - vital to keep this community growing. Scores updated in the Brainfood Hall of Fame

Can you help? Share this newsletter with a friend who could do with a New Years boost.

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

The power of Zuckerberg is such that even as his main social platform wanes (via neglect!), two of his other properties remain highly popular especially amongst us in this community

I hesitated to include WhatsApp in here as it’s not really a true social network but then, it might be true to say that the era of such true social networks are over, and what we will have will be either closed networks or algorithm fed video entertainment. Thanks for all who voted - more polling on a related topic this week at the end of today’s newsletter, make sure you vote today also.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep245 - LinkedIn X-Ray Dead, Dying or What?

The revelation that LinkedIn is now restricting search engines from indexing many aspects of user profiles hit the industry like the ice bucket challenge, as it renders ‘X-raying’ potentially redundant as a sourcing technique. We’re gathering all the sourcing hero’s together for this one, in a global sourcers ‘townhall’ where we are going to better understand what is truly the state of play - and what the heck we are going to do about it. Already the most registered show of the 2024, grab your seat now and join - we are at Friday 16th Feb, 2pm GMT. Register here

The Brainfood

1. Major Feature Change on LinkedIn Recruiter?

Remarkable post and comment thread on yet another sourcer-damaging product update from LinkedIn, this time impacting Recruiter. Three reasons to share this here 1) Great video by brainfooder Gabi Preston-Phypers describing the nature of the problem 2) Fantastic response from Dan Reid, Director of Product Engineering at LinkedIn and 3) a fantastic comment with some of the smartest sourcers in our industry commentating. It turns out that it might have just been a bug, but it tells us how even inadvertent changes on LinkedIn might have industry wide impact. Make sure to connect with Dan btw, and thank him for being so responsive - useful to have a recruiter advocate in LinkedIn Product engineering…

HT to brainfooder Irina Shamaeva for the share

SOURCING

2. UK Job Postings Failed To Deliver the Usual Bounce in January

Sobering reading from Indeed on the state of UK job posting in January - we’re having an anaemic start to the hiring year with not even the traditional January bounce in much evidence. Job search behaviour in the same period is up also, which gives a pretty clear picture on what team UK is right now.

ECONOMY

3. How to Make Your Own AI Avatar Online

The world of politics went full cyberpunk last week when, following the hotly contested and highly controversial parliamentary elections in Pakistan, the imprisoned Imran Khan delivered his victory speech via AI generated avatar. Perfectly timing then, for brainfooder Jan Tegze to produce his how-to guide on how we recruiters can do the same. Now I would hope you would need to be falsely imprisoned on spurious charges to make use of this technique, but having a digital you be available to deliver a video message on-demand, seems like a pretty useful thing for a recruiter to have at their disposal.

ENGAGEMENT

4. Size Matters

Short post with some interesting yet expected trends analysis; the higher the body fat percentage, the lower the chance of candidates succeeding in the US Navy Seals Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALS test. Got me thinking about at what point correlation is strong enough for assessment filters to be applied a priori, similar to how astronaut trainees get weeded out long before ever going into space. Could we ever do such things in the corporate world? Should we? H/T to brainfooder Simon McSorley for the share in the online community

ASSESSMENT

5. Best Global Universities for Artificial Intelligence

Found this useful website when writing up the How to Hire for AI essay. As mentioned there, not sure about how they do the rank order, but the main Universities you need to search for are all here.

SOURCING

6. Gym or Boardroom? How a Gen Z's Workout Rebellion is Shaking Up Workplace Norms

“Sorry, I have a gym class” incident proved to be an entertaining contest of the generational culture war last week with Millennials and Boomers condemning the lack of company commitment, whilst the Gen Z’ers claiming the right to adhere to boundaries agreed on contract. Where do you land on this debate? Might be a good one to do on Brainfood Live. Brainfooder Maren Hogan writes a well argued defense here, and you can get involved in the conversation yourself here. H/T Bas van de Haterd for the share in the online community

CULTURE

7. European Remote Worker Index

Whilst we are clearly past ‘peak remote’, the idea of continuing to work in your job in a geographically looser way is going to remain a feature of modern knowledge work, at least until employers figure out a way to train the AI to replace the work performed by digital nomads. Best make hay whilst the sun still shines then - check out this index of the best spots for remote working, in Europe.

REMOTE WORKING

8. Why Google Killed its Job Advertising Experiment

More mysteries from Google, who abandon yet another experiment on Google For Jobs, flattering to deceive since 2017. Hard to feel disappointed when the pattern of launching potentially industry impacting innovation in the jobs space, is consistently followed by…..no follow up, abrupt pivots, premature cancellations. Good piece by brainfooder Chris Russell, who along with Alexander Chukovski writing here, Steven Rothberg and Jeffrey Dickey-Chasins might be the big 4 when it comes to being on top of all things job board. Follow them all, for your health.

RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING

9. Generative Artificial Intelligence and the Workforce

The image above is an outstanding encapsulation of the projected socio-economic impact of Generative AI, from the techno-optimist POV, which is the central theme behind this report from SHRM / Burning Glass. My critique is based on the distance beween ‘lay offs occur’ and ‘demand rebounds’ - because the unemployed sensibly reduce consumption regardless of pricing. Anyways, very decent report, so have a read. H/T to brainfooder Andy Headworth for the share.

AI

10. The Economics of Fertility

A great deal of the ‘labour market paradox’ can be explained by the changing character of society. This new paper provides a history of the theories which have so far dominated the economics of fertility (quality vs quantity debate etc), and presents a new case that only an economy better shaped in centring rather than marginalising motherhood can hope to reverse the fertility crisis. Academic text, but accessible enough. Download it here

SOCIETY

The Podcasts

11. This Week in RecTech

It’s brainfooder Chris Russell again and I somehow didn’t know that he produces these 5 minute weekly summaries of the recruitment technology space. Best of its type - worth a listen and the subscribe.

ECONOMY

12. Is Employment Dead?

Been a while since we heard about Web3, an idea which had technical merit but never really achieved mainstream adoption, mainly as a consequence of the very decentralisation which is inherent component of the idea. Where is Web 3 in todays world, now that it has be culturally dislodged by Generative AI? Decent refresher via the lens of workforce futurism here.

BLOCKCHAIN

13. Why Voters Hate Biden's Booming Economy

Three theories have developed to help describe the dissonance between how the US cultural elites are describing the state of the economy (it’s f8cking great!) vs how people on the street are experiencing the economy (everything is so expensive!). Increasing wealth inequality - losses / gains realised over the past 2 years disproportionately fall on those who never had much / already had loads; media hype - people like me talking us into a ‘vibecession’ and finally, political polarisation and the geographic distribution of that polarisation. Great explainer video on the economic principles (mis)informing the debate.

ECONOMY

End Note

On the move again this week - I hadn’t intended to visit Indonesia for the first time during a hotly contested general election period - but I’ve realised there is never a good or bad time to anything and you’re better off just doing it when you have the chance. Will be in Bali for the next week, so if you’re around from 12th to the 19th, drop me a line if you want to meet up.

In the meantime, lets talk about X. Where do you stand on the Internet’s ‘last bastion of free speech’….?

Leave a comment

That’s it - thanks for reading everyone

Have a great week

Hung