This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends PitchMe

PitchMe is a data intelligence partner for recruiters who want to improve their performance. PitchMe delivers data intelligence for agencies and in-house teams, streamlining talent discovery with efficient tools. Our end-to-end AI-driven automated hiring solutions cut time and effort, empowering recruiters to prioritize strategic tasks.

The PitchMe suite of tools centralizes, streamlines, and simplifies the end-to-end hiring process, offering a seamless journey from crafting precise and compelling resumes to sourcing top-tier talent and maintaining an up-to-date talent database. Fully automated. Fully integrated. No need to switch between tools or leave your ATS. That means valuable time can be redirected towards more important tasks, such as building new relationships or enhancing those with existing clients and candidates.

Contact one of PitchMe's core team for a personal demo today!

SPONSORS

Friends,

It’s Easter Sunday and I hope everyone has been enjoying a few extra days off on what I hope is a long weekend for you. I attended another great event last week - LinkedIn Talent Connect in London - and came away thinking about what happens when new connections are made and old ones are renewed. I encourage you all to attend more events (!) - Big List for 2024 - bookmark it and go!

Update on Guest Cook: We have our first member essay coming up in This Week, In Recruiting (👈 you need to additionally subscribe to this) next week. I’m going to publish ‘Bias in the Six Stages of Recruitment’ by brainfooder Bas van de Haterd on Tuesday (as it’s Easter Monday tomorrow) - it’s a fantastic overview on how to think about bias when putting together an assessment process. If you want to contribute and add your voice to the public discourse via Guest Cook, I am happy to amplify you: contact me via email and let me know your essay idea and we can work on it together.

Thank you to: Gautam Ghosh, Andrew Spence, Joey NK Koksal, Eugène van den Hemel, Kevin Green, Hannah Morgan, Kelsey Sorensen, Vanessa Gilardi, Steven Rothberg, Alan Brophy, Jodi Jefferson and Tania Ray for your support of all things Brainfood last week - essential to keep this show on the road. Scores updated in the Brainfood Hall of Fame 👊

Can you help? Share this newsletter with a friend in recruiting or HR who needs a boost. Cheers!

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

Very pleased to see nearly half of us are treating these extra days as holidays. My favourite time of year - two weeks of 4 week work weeks - what is not to love! I am in the 6% sadly, but I am treating it as therapy so all good 🤣.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep252 - How to Pull Off a Global TA Restructure, Fri 5th April, 2pm

The world is undergoing a ‘global search for productivity’ and that inevitably means restructuring. For Global TA teams, this also means restructure - and the opportunity to rethink team, technologies and processes. How to pull of a global TA restructure? We speak to TA directors who have been there and done it. On Friday 5th April, 2pm GMT - must attend for an aspiring TA leader. Register here

The Brainfood

1. The Complete List of BlackListed LinkedIn Plugins 2024

Brainfooder José Kadlec has been one of the great contributors to the sourcing community over the past decade. It was a pleasure to receive a copy of his book HR Robo Sapiens, a tremendously illustrative piece of work which outlines the real applications of GenAI to recruitment specific use cases. No less value is this updated list of Blacklisted LinkedIn Plugins - use any of these to boost your LinkedIn game at your own risk.

SOURCING

2. How Microsoft Copilot Can Be Used for Recruiting

Nice video how-to on Microsoft Copilot use cases for recruiting. We kind of know these already, but excellent to see job description generation, candidate ranking, interview generation and the rest effectively demo’d on screen. H/T to brainfooder Colin McNicol for sharing in the online community. I’m no reclassifying this type of content from ‘AI’ to ‘RecOps’ because it’s become table stakes.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

3. Responsible AI in Recruitment

Nice piece of work from CIPD, with help from recruitment industry bodies like APSCO and REC and others, in producing an easy-to-read framework for the responsible assessment and selection of recruitment technology with a significant AI component. UK specific but the framework I think is portable. We should all download a copy - do it here. H/T to brainfooder Richard Hillier for the share.

AI

4. Data Science Salary

There probably isn’t anyone reading this newsletter who isn’t interested in the Data Science labour market. This analysis draws on data from Kaggle 2022 survey of 20,000+ data scientists on their bio and their comp, and models out it to show who gets paid most and where. Important resource for you’re currently hiring for this skillset.

ECONOMY

5. Mining via Remote

We often think of remote working as exclusively a white collar, knowledge based work, but there is another form which involves robotics, and we’re increasingly seeing it, especially in the dangerous work. Short video of Chinese miners using remote controlled robots where once there would be human beings with pick axes. The commentator additionally mentions the possibility of connecting this with the gaming sector, an intriguing solution to labour crisis in these difficult-to-do / hard-to-sell occupations.

FUTURE OF WORK

6. Qualtrics 2024 Employee Experience Trends

Key insights: 3 days per week is best for EX, AI is good but only if employees have a say in how it is used, engagement + retention are positively correlated, and North America most suspicious about AI vs RoW. Download the full report here

CULTURE

7. Time To Rethink Retirement: Larry Fink’s 2024 Letter to Investors

BlackRock - along with fellow mega asset managers Vanguard and State Street - together own equity in over 1600 listed companies in the US - to the value of $20 trillion under management. That makes Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, one of the most powerful people in the world today, wo when he says retirement needs a rethink, time to pay to attention. Full letter to investors here.

SOCIETY

8. UK Job Market Report March 2024

Thanks to brainfooder Doug Monro for sharing this months UK jobs data from his ad aggregator platform Adzuna. These actually come out every month, so UK recruiters should independently keep an eye on these. Not fabulous news as you already know, but good to know where we are at with hiring volume, time to fill, changes over time and so on.

ECONOMY

9. TacticAI: An AI Assistant for Football Tactics

As part of our multi-year collaboration with Liverpool FC, we develop a full AI system that can advise coaches on corner kicks

Fascinating collaboration between Google DeepMind and Liverpool FC, using AI solve the ‘too much unstructured data’ problem. Now have a think about how AI might be used in the corporate setting, perhaps layered on top of existing ONA (Organisational Network Analytics) data. We’re going to come up with culture changing recommendations like ‘colleague A should speak less in Zoom calls’. Lets go with AI-enabled organisation 🤣

CULTURE

10. Software Automation and Teleworkers as Complements and Substitutes

Richard Baldwin is a labour market economists who is criminally under-the-radar. His twitter and LinkedIn are both worth a follow. Here he is introducing a paper which analyses the relationship between offshoring (he calls this ‘teleworking’) and AI/Automation. Whilst I’m still in the camp that remote —> offshore—> automated, this paper provides evidence that there is less direct substitution that we think. Academic but accessible read.

REMOTE WORKING

The Podcasts

11. How to Harness AI in Tech Recruitment ft. Hung Lee

Delighted to be guest No1 in hackajob’s new podcast / videocast series with brainfooder Sam Berthoud. I’m not sure we answered the question but we had a fun conversation that covered Mad Max, Gemini ‘no white men’ outputs, AI-enabled job candidates and the future of recruiting. Have a watch / listen here

SOCIETY

12. The True Story of America’s Supremely Messed-Up Immigration System

Immigration is a highly politicised topic in countries with a democratic system of governance, with the rhetoric often being overtly hostile. The immigration series from Freakonomics is timely, nuanced and important. Especially good on the impact of assimilated vs immigrant names (there’s none!). Have a listen here. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share.

ECONOMY

13. How to Unleash the Power of AI, with Ethan Mollick

Ethan Mollick has been a must follow on Twitter since he began doing summarising academic reports in digestible tweet threads 3 years ago. He has since become one of the foremost experimentors on the use of GenAI, implementing in personal use and also teaching and advocating for its use to his students at Wharton School. Here he is with Azeem Azhar on how to unleash the power of AI.

AI

End Note

I’m going to be at the Canadian Staffing Summit 2024 in two weeks time - I believe tickets are sold out but if you might want to get on the waitlist in case of drop out. I will also be visiting Denver for a LinkedIn event on the 24th April, so likely will be in North America for a couple weeks in April. Give me a shout if you’re in Toronto from the 14th or Denver from the 21st - be great to meet up if you’re around!

Meanwhile, lets gauge the community sentiment on the year so far….how do you feel about it?

Leave a comment

That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung