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Friends,

Firstly, I’m looking forward to seeing you all at the Recruitment Agency Expo on Tuesday / Wednesday this week. What a tremendous line up curated by the ever amazing Louise Triance and I look forward to taking part on both days, as a roving vox pop interviewer on Day 1 and an on panel in Day 2. Make sure you come up and say hello if you’re going. It’s free, so you should…

Secondly, I’m a little behind on the marketing for the next 4 episodes of Brainfood Live - a lot of you have been asking about where the heck the schedule is! Well, the events are up and you can register on all of the shows from now here

Thanks to: Eugène van den Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Bas van de Haterd, Paul Moir, Kevin Green, Ed Han, Dave Hazlehurst, Bryan Blair, Andreea Lungulescu, Juliana Park, Colin Donnery, Janet Scarborough Civitelli and Samantha-Leigh Hayward for your public endorsement on all things brainfood last week - makes a huge difference for the continued growth of this newsletter 👊

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Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

Thanks for everyone who voted in last week’s poll - it was a fascinating conversation on this topic, one which you can catch up on here. I’m encouraged but I think we have more to do - will we be able to create the space to do it?

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep250 - What Do Developers Want? Skills & Sentiment Report 2024, Friday 22nd March, 2pm GMT

One of the great annual reports in our industry is Developer Skills report from HackerRank. I’m delighted to say that we’ve got C-suite reps Vivek Ravisankar and Juan Herrera on Brainfood Live to talk us through it. Must attend for any tech recruiters out there…I’m told there will be some goodies on offer too….We’re on Friday 22nd March, 2pm GMT. Register here

The Brainfood

1. OpenAI’s GPT is a Recruiters Dream Tool: Tests Show There is Racial Bias

Name bias on CV review is already one of the classic tests for bias, one which we had hoped technology might one day solve. Turns out, technology replicates human bias in the most predictable ways, making correlations between names, ethnic and gender identities and the preponderance of those identities into certain fields. The bias is domain specific, so the example of ‘HR Specialist’ - field dominated by women - produced results which suggested all women were advantageously treated over all men. This will be a canonical study of GenAI bias. Also a beautiful interactive website. H/T to brainfooder Michael Blakely for the share.

D&I

2. Zip, DHI, Recruit, and Freelancer Down: News of the Job Board Industry

We should collectively pay brainfooder Jeffrey Dickey-Chasins for producing summaries like this. Platform performance is a good indicator as the state of economic activity, but we need someone to pull it together for us. Jeff does a great job here with this post….now how can we get him to do it more regularly? Subscribe to Jeff’s newsletter btw, essential reading.

ECONOMY

3. Digital Etiquette: Mind the Generational Gap

How many generations are in your workplace? Apparently in 2025, it will be the first time we will have 5 generational organisations - the kind of diversity which brings both opportunity and reward. Being able to create a workplace in which people from different generations feel included, will obviously have an impact on talent attraction. Really nice piece of research here from The Adaptavist Group for anyone looking to get there, H/T to brainfooder Alexandra Stone for the share.

D&I

4. Engineer Interviews: Building a Process that Attracts Great Candidates

Cord have been consistently producing great data driven insight pieces. This latest blog post outlines tech candidates main issues when it comes to recruiting processes - it’s nothing we don’t know: overly long process, too high a demand on time, lack of interview feedback. What is interesting is why these challenges are so persistent? We clearly have a gap between employer and candidate optimums. H/T to brainfooder Tom Woods for the effort and the share.

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

5. The TikTokification of Work: Navigating the Video Revolution in the Future of Work

Fun exploration from brainfooder Andrew Spence on how short form video is transforming how we talk about work. Some of the most popular channels on TikTok are work dedicated accounts - and as brands, we are starting to understand what users want from us being there - its authentic micro-stories from employees showcasing their work. Need to do a brainfood live on this - TikTok’s short form mobile shot-and-edited video has set the expectation of how EB video is going to look.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

6. 2024 Deloitte Insights Global Human Capital Trends

Boundaryless HR, Human sustainability, Quantified organisation, Transparency paradox…this report from Deloitte Insights explores them all in 122 pages of powerful future thinking. It’s peppered with cameo case studies from the likes of IKEA, Hitachi, PayPal and more which chains down the abstract and helps us visualise how these concepts manifest in the practical world. It’s a must read folks.

FUTURE OF WORK

7. 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer

The story of the Edelman Trust Barometer has been the story of the accelerating decline of trust in government, media, science, ‘the experts’. We can only anticipate further acceleration of this trend as GenAI reshapes our realities. Relevance for recruitment? Check out where employers, bosses and CEO’s are on the trust rankings, and have a think - where are people going to go for trust? There’s opportunity there for the farsighted. Anyways, this is an essential annual, so download the PDF here.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

8. Riders in the Smog

We always need to balance the quantitative with the qualitative. The piece takes the personal stories from 3 gig economy workers in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and interweaves it with pollution data from the cities in which they work. The app delivery economy has an incredible consumer boon but I suspect we will one day have cause to reflect on the enormous sacrifice the poorest workers have had to make in order to improve our convenience. It’s a really good read, from a consistently really great blog.

GIG ECONOMY

9. Americans Now Live Farther from Their Employers

Fascinating research on from HR Payroll firm Gusto, which measured the changes in distance between employees resident post codes and their stated office location. Employees are now living much further away than they were before 2019, especially if they were hired after 2019. Moving away from 5 days on premise unlocks longer distance per employee - we’re much more likely to tolerate a longer, less frequent commutes.

REMOTE WORKING

10. The Shirky Principle: Institutions Try to Preserve the Problem to Which They Are the Solution

The Shirky Principle is the uncomfortable idea that institutions inevitably preserve the problems they were created solve. No institution voluntarily dissolves itself, once it is created it stays there forever until it is destroyed. Worth thinking about when we start initiatives in a company - maybe we should do more temporarily team assembly, rather than creating new departments? Good brainfood

CULTURE

The Podcast

11. Dynasties, Meritocracies & Succession

Samo Burja is one of the more under rated analysts working today and I’m glad he’s taken to more accessible channels to communicate his ideas. A re-habilitator of the ‘great man’ theory of history, he is also a thinker of organisational decay, turnaround and longevity. Here he tackles family firms - and a defence of dynastic succession. Interesting stuff

CULTURE

12. ZipRecruiter is Lost

Chad and Cheese remain the preeminent podcast for ‘keeping up with the news’ in the industry. This was from a week or so ago but it’s action packed with news, updates, opinion which almost everyone else will miss. Reminds you not to miss an episode of this. Transcription helps too.

ECONOMY

13. Talent Acquisition Excellence

Matt Alder with brainfooders Kevin Wheeler and Bas van de Haterd talking about the latter two’s new book, Talent Acquisition Excellence. My copy is lost in post so I will paid particular attention to this episode - really good to hear smart people knock around a few important ideas. Have a listen here.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

End Note

Supporting a ‘polyphonic’ ecosystem is my secret goal of Recruiting Brainfood. I think we are healthier, smarter and more resilient as a community if we have more voices sharing the public spaces that we create. I’ve been trying to do this in various ways but I find myself being a bottleneck more often than not!

Need your help in figuring how best to do this. Let me have your votes below!

That’s it - thanks for reading.

Have a great week everybody

Hung