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Friends,

I was delighted to be able to complete two more interviews with community members this week. Find out more about Giles Lewis and Thomas Waldman, both of whom were brave enough to undertake the 20 Questions challenge!

This exercise is designed facilitate a sometimes rare chance for introspection, humanise the people we might think we know and amplify individuals who might otherwise be lost in the crowd. If you want to take part, please comment below and volunteer - it is open to all 👊

Thanks to: James Osborne, Colin Donnery, Kevin Green, Bas van de Haterd, Eugene van de Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, John Bersentes, Dave Hazlehurst, Andrew Spence, Gaurav Gaur, Natalie Zhukovskaya, Matthias Schmeisser, Rich Wilson, Adel Al-Kuwari, Akhilesh Nair, Gareth Flynn, Jamie Dillon, Barbara Clarke, Laurie Eckenroth White, Paul Daley, Aaltje Vincent , Louise Henry and Enmibeth de la Cruz - your public endorsement of brainfood is what keeps the show on the road! Scores updated on the Brainfood Hall of Fame

Can you help? Share this newsletter with your team in Slack and Teams and have them subscribe. Cheers!

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

Predictable results for us eh? Recruiters must make up a substantial portion of the paying members of LinkedIn, with over 50% of us on the LIR plan, I am presuming paid for by our employers. Mega shout out to the holdouts on the free account - well done on staying tough! Thanks for all those voted, make sure you vote for this weeks poll, end of the screen.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep247 - State of Hiring - UK Market Intelligence Report, Friday 1st March, 2pm GMT

We’re continuing our series of getting companies who have completed proprietary research to talk us through their findings. I want to encourage more research of this type to be conducted - we simply need more eyes / ears on the ground. This week, it is our friends from Willo, who surveyed the state of the UK agency market. Co-founders Euan Cameron and Andrew Wood joining at Friday 1st March, 2024. Register here

The Brainfood

1. Global Candidate Experience Benchmark Report 2023

CANDE’s remain one of the most valuable research institutions in our industry and their annual report on the state of CX is a must read. Huge in scale, segmented by geography, industry, company size and demography and measured against prior surveys, year by year. Also includes a brilliant 10 point action based on this context, alongside curiosities like the gender divergence on NPS scoring. Any theories as to why women generally rate higher than men? Download the full report here and H/T to brainfooder Kevin Grossman for the share outside of the registration wall. If there is a single person to follow for CX, it is Kevin - connect and follow.

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

2. How Generative Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Business & Society

25,000 workers surveyed in this report on the impact of AI in the workforce by Oliver Wyman. Love the tone of this report - balanced rather than hyperbolic, with the presentation of counter argument on areas where we just don’t know. There are also some important correctives: mass adoption of AI ≠ mass productivity with AI. H/T to brainfooder Richard Bradley in the online community

AI

3. Managers Say Working from Home is Here to Stay

Promising data for remote / flexible working evangelists - a study of 2,500 UK firms saw managers predict 2023 levels of hybrid (30%) and full remote (8%) to remain fairly stable up to 2028, meaning - for the UK at least - that calls for RTO are not broadly reflected in this sample. It would be interesting to see how this compares country by country, but a useful bit of data if you want to argue the case internally with your business…

REMOTE WORKING

4. Skill Based Hiring: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?

I think this phrase perfectly describes ROI of Skills Based Hiring - can we practically operationalise what initially seems like an obviously great idea? The Q&A format of this post makes for a strange reading experience but both the questions and answers are of high quality. The main gist is: SBH sounds great, but the evidence for its value is slim and its essential do-ability might be beyond the capacity of all but the most already-aligned organisations. Maybe the strongest counter argument I’ve yet read yet on this topic.

ASSESSMENT

5. Why Midlife Women Walk Out of Corporate Jobs

Brainfooder Laetitia Vitaud explores some reasons why women ‘disappear’ from the corporate world, especially at the 50+ bracket. Perimenopause and Menopause are woefully under discussed (does your company have a menopause policy?), but so also is the caregiving responsibilities which women continue to bear, this time typically looking after age-ing parents. My mother is, as I write, preparing dinner for Grandma. Father certainly isn’t doing this. Good awareness raising post, as well as an unstated argument for the critical importance of flexible working arrangements for inclusive company culture.

D&I

6. Search Engines Post-ChatGPT: How Generative Artificial Intelligence Could Make Search Less Reliable

GenAI is changing search in two ways, both of which are bad for recruiters. Firstly, GenAI content will increasing be returned as search results from standard non-GenAI searches, simply because that content will be indexed by those search engines. And we already know that GenAI can hallucinate. Secondly, search engines are themselves replacing classic search with Generative AI Search, producing results which can seem to meet the user needs, but can also produce erroneous results, or results which are value laden. This excellent post describes the overview of search in the era of GenAI, tangentially relevant to us in recruiting, especially finders-of-people. H/T to brainfooder Gavin Audagnotti for the share.

SOURCING

7. Nigerian Nurses Reject Rules Attacking Job Migration Overseas

It is politically expedient for labour importing countries denigrate immigration, even whilst increasingly relying on those immigrants to do the essential work which locally born workers can’t or don’t want to do. The story from labour exporting countries is rarely told, except for when skills retention policies are put into place to prevent braindrain, like Nigeria is doing now with healthcare workers. An ageing Europe, increasingly dependent on Africa for its future workforce - what happens if and when Africa says ‘no’?

SOCIETY

8. Two Cultures in One Company

Do you segment your analysis of employee engagement based on seniority? Data from Revelio labs really suggests that you should, as there seems to be a variance on the rating which is connected to seniority of role. It makes sense that people who have had career success might feel more job satisfaction (and also…maybe managerial jobs are …easier?), as well be more insulated from cost of living crisis due to higher income, but the metric to note is the gap between junior and senior, and can we close it? One of those posts which you really wish was longer.

CULTURE

9. Sorting in the Labor Market

Does EB even matter? We would like to think that it does seeing as we invest significant amounts into improving our ability to attract talent, but this paper suggests that perhaps it might be a futile effort as high ability employees inherently flow to high productivity businesses. Obviously we cannot know the direction of causality here, but ‘sorting’ is a well known social phenomena and no reason why it should not also apply to the labour market…

EMPLOYER BRANDING

10. Economic Surveillance of EU Economies

The title of this website gives entirely the wrong connotation for what it actually is 🤣. It’s basically a website of EU countries economic forecasts, fiscal policy etc, on a very decent one pager. Useful for economics nerds but also for recruiters relocating staff and needing a quick reference tool to gauge economic health / taxation laws. Bookmark it.

ECONOMY

The Podcasts

11. The State of A.I. + Will Perplexity Beat Google or Destroy the Web?

‘Generative AI will destroy the web’ is an idea which carries some weight, especially as there is now increased incentive for platforms to put their content behind a walled garden, sacrificing search (and ad revenue), in favour of audience (and subscription revenue). Long and winding podcast which covers some of these ideas - we need to care about this because a great deal of recruiting over the past two decades has depended on such a thing as a mainly human generated web. H/T to brainfooder Helena Turpin for the share on the online community.

SOURCING

12. Google Has the Best AI Now, But There's a Problem...

Google’s release of Gemini 1.5 last week was a triumph (10 million token context window) which rapidly became a disaster when the associated image generating tool seemingly refused to generate images of white people despite that context demanding it, and even when the prompt explicitly requested it. In what appears to be an overzealous attempt to mitigate against bias representation, it ended up exemplifying the most explicit bias by simply removing white people from the generation. It’s a serious problem for all GenAI - how to ensure fair representation but also historical accuracy and direct human commands. Fireship with a fast paced summary

D&I

13. Adam Grant: The Surprising Research of Procrastination, Perfectionism & Happiness

Adam Grant is at the peak of his powers right now, likely there isn’t a performance coach / commentator / consultant who carries more influence working today. Here he is with Steven Bartlett on Diary of a CEO. Great listen with a great populariser of academic concepts. Utterly wrong on Ronaldo though. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share. Listen here

CULTURE

End Note

I’m writing this from Chep Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong, on the final day of an amazing 6 weeks in Asia. The more I travel around, the more keenly aware I become of my over exposure to online information as the primary source for my sense making about the world. Going to keep rolling forward to corroborate digital information with direct in-person experience. South Africa next up, where I’ll be hosting the Recruiters Unite event as co-pilot to the magnificent Samatha-Leigh Hayward. Not sure if there are any tickets left but if you are in Cape Town on the 7th March, go check if they are 👊

Back in UK for a week, so will see and catch up with as many of you as I can there.

In the meantime, lets vote on this week’s topic. Skills Based Hiring, where are you at with this?

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That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week

Hung