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Friends,

One of my favourite parts to this newsletter has been the polling you lot every week on a question of the week. Seems that Substack have understood the value in surveys of this type and are rolling out an expanded survey tool, which I now have access. It looks like a Typeform killer - especially as it now combines very similar functionality with the distribution of the subscriber base.

I have a strong feeling how I am going to use this, but I am still thinking through how best. It may take the form of a mid week newsletter - maybe something on Thursday when most people have already finished reading the weeks content. In the meantime, we’re going to keep polling in-newsletter, so this is just a heads up in advance.

Thanks to: Jan Tegze, Eugene van de Hemel, Shireen DuPreez, Katie Sedgwick, Leslie Kivit, Rob Walker, Carolina Hunter, Juliana Park, Willem Wijnans, Mike Santoro, Marcel van der Meer, Alexandra Gyetvai, Bob Pulver, Jose Kadlec, Isaac Marks, Huruy Tewelde and Helen Firth - your public endorsement is critical to keeping this community growing. Scores updated in the Brainfood Hall of Fame. News coming on why this matters ;-)

Can you help? Share this newsletter link with your network on LinkedIn and have them subscribe 👊

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

Interesting to see where Brainfooders are when it comes to X. I’ve noticed that many of the mutuals have gone silent on the platform and no we know why - simple majority have stopped using it.

13% still currently active though, so feel free to follow me on there if you want - generally tweet future work, football, obscura, space tech, latterly EV tech and dinosaurs. Thanks for all who voted, make sure you give your opinion on this week’s poll - end of the newsletter.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep246 - The State of Background Compliance Screening 2024, Friday 1pm PT

Change of pace this week for Brainfood Live folks - we’re going to switch to US Pacific time as we’re reviewing a super interesting report from our friends at Checkr - the State of Background Compliance with none other than the Head of Litigation and Compliance at Checkr, Su-Han Wang. All US based friends - we’re on Friday 23rd 1pt - register here

The Brainfood

1. The Coming Work Transformation (Talent Leaders Optional)

TA / HR is far behind the conversation on how AI will transform work, and the entire function is at existential risk if we don’t collectively step up to how C-level demands. It’s tough love from brainfooder Jason Seiden but this is an essay which needed to be written - it is concise, advanced and persuasive. Important read, please do so here

PS: the question of what to do about it is open to comments - how do we elevate our thinking / doing on AI-enabled for TA/HR?

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

2. Mercer: The State of US Talent Acquisition Study 2023

Mercer survey of 457 organisations, conducted in June / July 2023. Some of this already feels dated - which underlines the increasing inadequacy of surveying as a method of data collection - but there are still some really good bits of insight from the benchmarking charts here, like for example the configuration of In-house Recruitment teams based on employee size seen above. H/T to brainfooder Donna Svei for the share

ECONOMY

3. Skills Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncement to Practice

Are we all on board with Skill Based Hiring? I think we’re pretty much close to consensus in industry, with only people like me playing the role of marginalised skeptic 🤣. But whilst we are conceptually onboard, we have major challenges in operationalising SBH, and may just end up redacting experience from CV’s and call it done. This report from Burning Glass outlines the challenge with greater maturity than I can muster, so I encourage you download it here.

ASSESSMENT

4. The New Developer: AI Skill Threat & Developer Thriving in the Transition to AI-Assisted Coding

That software engineering is one of the most AI exposed disciplines is an irony not lost on anyone, not least the engineers themselves. This is an advanced piece of research on how engineers think about ‘AI Skill Threat’, seen through the lens of both gender and ethnic diversity. The findings are intriguing - under represented groups feel most threatened by AI and (perhaps therefore), rate AI generated code as least valuable in their work. We can sympathise with the fear, but it is head-in-sand stuff that we have to resist, because denialism has significant implications for the future workforce diversity in an AI-enabled world. Very interesting reading - download the full report here

D&I

5. Peak Office

I don’t know about peak office but I think we have reached ‘peak cynicism’ when it comes to RTO - almost none of us believe the C-level when they talk about ‘culture’, ‘creativity’ or ‘productivity as the primary motivator of going back to the office do we? A popular theory as to the real driver is the need to shore up commercial real estate valuations, a point which brainfooder Andrew Spence makes in this essay. Whatever the case, we are once again finding that global financial institutions are overexposed to US commercial real estate markets, and somebody - at some point - is going to be left holding the bag.

REMOTE WORKING

6. Starred Candidate Experience Benchmark Report 2023

One of the great annual surveys, which I am glad is going to continue even after the Starred / Talenthub get together last year. What’s great about this report on Candidate Experience? Provision of economic context, benchmarking by recruitment stage, segmentation by country, company size, company type. It’s the high water mark for CX reporting - download it here. H/T to brainfooder Lars van Wieren for the share.

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

7. The Great GPT Firewall

So you should have all watched Brainfood Live last Friday on the death of LinkedIn X-ray - if not, please do so here. A few commentators mentioned that there are more to ‘sourcing than just LinkedIn’ which is true but …got me thinking about what other sites are beginning to also block Google from crawling their pages, essentially sacrificing SEO in exchange for protecting IP for a future AI trained on proprietary data. Turns out, it’s getting to be quite some list. Future of the Internet will become a series of walled gardens, with attendant implications for recruiters.

SOURCING

8. Why Are Companies So Big?

An apt question, which is seemingly one which is now seriously being asked by investors and CEO’s everywhere, leading to 2024 being another year of lay offs as organisations seek to rationalise down the bloat. They need to be careful though, because - just like ‘junk DNA’ in cellular biology - we might only find out the necessary work what certain people and functions really do after they are gone. Dan Luu as ever with sharpest of takes. Follow up Luu’s take with another excellent essay on Why do companies hire people to be idle a lot of the time? The push for efficiency makes sense, but no system is designed to run at 100% utilisation for long.

CULTURE

9. The Surreal Life of a Professional Bridesmaid

With OpenAI’s release of text-to-video Sora last week was a stunning demonstration of the accelerating innovation rate of AI, with some very obvious implications for the media and entertainment industries. We have to beg the question: what type of work is going to be insulated from successive waves of disruption? Anything with high collaboration intensity, novel configurations and where context is more important than the content: professional bridesmaid

FUTURE OF WORK

10. Reshaping The Tree: Rebuilding Organisations for AI

Ethan Mollick has been a pioneer in the use of GenAI, integrating it into his own work as a University lecturer whilst also writing about the best methodology to follow when rebuilding a process with AI-enablement baked into the flow. He describes the task with characteristically evocative terms: “how to cut down the organisational tree, and regrow it”. Important long read.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

The Podcasts

11. Is AI Changing Jobseeker Behaviour?

Great to hear brainfooder Richard Collins lead the conversation on the risk to conventional recruiting practices posed by AI-enabled candidates. Here he is in conversation with Matt Alder on the topic, watch also Founders Focus Ep41 with Richard here. The conversation continues - I’m with Arctic Shores later this month discussing practical steps on how TA can future-fit their assessment to the AI-enabled job candidate. Join us here.

ASSESSMENT

12. Sovereign AI is the Future

Jenson Huang, CEO of Nvidia, on why it is important for all only countries to own the production of their own Artificial Intelligence. It’s essential to preservation of your sovereignty. Now apply that to company, and individual level. 25 minutes with one of the architects of this future we are barrelling toward. Must watch.

AI

13. Broken Money

Lyn Alden has been one of the most intelligent commentators of economics, money supply, inflation and Bitcoin. Fiat money, end of Zero Interest Rate Policy, the export of inflation and instability from the Imperial core to the Imperial periphery, the disconnect between conventional financial reporting (we’re richer than ever before!) vs our lived experience and how maintenance of a failing system leads to conflict. One hour, good watch.

ECONOMY

End Note

Final day in Bali today. It’s been great to combine some poolside chill out with some beachside beers and some in-town explorations. Plenty more to see in this island of 4 million people, definitely will be back.

It’s Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Guangzhou next week - taking madre on the High Speed Rail, as well as visiting the city once known as ‘Canton’ - the inland port which was the gateway into Qing Dynasty China, and now a megacity of 15 million people. Doubt any brainfooders are out there, but if you are, give me a shout if you want to meet up.

Poll for today: with LinkedIn X-ray going, lets do a quick poll on what LinkedIn plan we tend to have in the community:

Leave a comment

That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung