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Friends,

IMPORTANT NEWS

It looks like Google will be launching a subscription manager tool, which will move email newsletters like Recruiting Brainfood into yet another tab in your email dashboard. Not sure if there is anything you can do about this but it might be a good moment to do the following:

• whitelist the email domains recruitingbrainfood.substack.com and recruitingbrainfood.com

• click on a few links here!

• follow me elsewhere, I am on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn (maxed out but you can follow), Instagram and TikTok.

• additionally, feel free to join the online community on FB

Thank you to: Eugène van den Hemel, Garry Turner, Joey NK Koksal, Bas van de Haterd, Caroline Hunter, Dave Hazlehurst, Kevin Green, Colin Donnery, Marija Kose, Matthias Schmeisser, Dan Logan, Andrew Grier, Bob Pulver, Casper Skyum Høgh, Rob Walker, Juliana Park and Mehmet Baha for your support on all things brainfood last week - critical for ensuring this community keeps growing. Scores updated in the Brainfood Hall of Fame 👊

Can you help? Share this newsletter with a friend in TA or HR. Cheers!

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

Important results here friends - I suspect we don’t endorse this, but we recognise the contribution that appearance has to hire / no hire decisions in leadership. Can we do something about this, or this is the natural injustice of human variability? We’ll probably do a Brainfood Live on this, so make sure you follow the channel if you want to be notified when we go live. Make sure you scroll down to the end of the newsletter and vote on this week’s issue.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep254 - - Data or Ads? Future of Job Board Advertising in the Era of GenAI, Friday 19th April, 2pm BST

What is the Future of Job Boards and Job Advertising? We’re in a different market than we were in 2021 with data as the new gold it has become a competition for anyone building AI-enabled software to gain access to proprietary data. Is this a future revenue for job boards? We’re with all the heroes in the industry, so make sure you join us on Friday 19th April, 2pm. Register here

The Brainfood

1. Edelman Trust Barometer 2024

Edelman Trust Barometer is always sobering reading, as we know that institutional distrust is at an all time high as the democratisation of media production fragments any shared reality we might have once had. However, on the bright the side, it seems that business and employers are the institutions seem as both most trustworthy and most competent. Something for us to think about when we do EB - the people (i.e candidates) are weighting on trust.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

2. The Death of Deloitte: AI-Enabled Services Are Opening a Whole New Market

This is a real curate’s egg of a piece - some profound ideas in here mixed in with some bad choices and startup cliches. The good: excellent 2 x 2 matrix on how to plot your service offering, very useful binary categorisation of services to ‘help you do it’ vs ‘do it for you’ and fundamentally sound idea that the professional services market is ripe for AI-assisted disruption (see McKinsey pay to quit). The bad: spyware Palantir as example to follow? Decent brainfood, regardless 🤣

FUTURE OF WORK

3. Workforce Digest: A Strong Spring Report But Workers Are Still Feeling Gloomy

The dissonance in the US job market between ‘what the data says’ vs how people actually experience continues to be one of the stories of 2024. Revelio Labs does a great of presenting the former, but a much weaker one on explaining the latter. Scrutiny of the chart which describes flow between industries might give us a clue: the sectors with the lowest paying work are the ones doing the hiring, most seem to be part time, and increasingly performed by foreign born labour. Lots to think about, not least the need to cross reference produced information with direct interactions with job seekers and recruiters on the ground.

ECONOMY

4. You're Not Guaranteed a Spot on the Team

Succinct corrective on the ‘we are a family’ mantra too often used by employers keen to motivate staff members but err by providing a false promise. OP takes it further - we are not a family because you may also be fired for poor performance - you are not guaranteed a spot on the team. Good writing, good thinking.

CULTURE

5. Unicorns Company Tracker

Are the tech unicorns making a comeback? Signs of life in the world of venture capital and tech startup as 2024 shows at least a dead cat’s bounce / maybe a mini-rally in growth and investment. Notable which category: AI

ECONOMY

6. KPMG & REC Report on UK Jobs March 2024

Grim reading for the UK as the REC Jobs report for March reports a declining number of vacancies posted, a trend which has now been on course since early 2022. Vacancy index by sector was interesting in identifying which sectors had declined the most since 2023 - Exec/Prof, IT, Retail. Worth reading folks, especially if you are on the job market and looking - this is context for the tough sledding right now.

ECONOMY

7. “Kismma D. Nhuhts”

Applying for jobs has always been a high anxiety, low trust exchange but today’s market conditions seem to be exacerbating the crisis, with social media awash with job seekers posting updates on their horrible experience. Taking advantage of the zeitgeist, this job search coach repeats a well worn experiment - sending a ridiculous CV which nevertheless succeeds in securing dozens of interviews in a demonstration that recruiters aren’t reading the document (which is true, we scan it) but pattern matching for key signals which communicate capability. Fun, stupid, cynical, worthwhile…maybe all of the above. H/T to brainfooder Robert Nunn for the share

ASSESSMENT

8. Cheat Sheet: 90 Day New Head of TA Plan 2024

Brainfooder Adriano Herdman again with a one page cheat sheet presented in such a way which makes you want to mouse over the three dots and right click ‘save’. Like we said previously, fiddle about with the content for your own needs, as the value is in the template.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

9. CEO Andy Jassy’s 2023 Letter to Shareholders

It’s that time of year when CEO and Chairpersons write letters to shareholders; last week it was Larry Fink, this week James Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan and Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon. It is no exaggeration to say that these US megacorps have more weight in the world that man most countries, and their leaders, likely influence your life more than your local politician might. All worth a read, to see how they see the world, and therefore a decent guide as to what decisions they are going to make. H/T brainfooder Colin McNicol for the share in the online community

SOCIETY

10. How Offering Remote Working Increases Your Chances of Hiring

Our friends at cord regularly pull out some great data driven content from their tech candidate matching platform. The main point in this post: the increasing dissonance between job seeker desire for remote (67%) versus the eroding commitment of employers (16%), with downstream impacts on all the conversion KPI’s we care about - offer acceptance rate etc. Very useful blog to share with hiring managers who insist on RTO

REMOTE WORKING

The Podcasts

11. Strategic Employer Branding Unplugged with Dave Hazlehurst

Great to hear brainfooder Dave Hazlehurst in conversation in People Masterminds, on the 50th episode of this excellent podcast. Covers a lot including ph.Creative’s penchant for creating new concepts to orientate EB efforts. Have a think about the 3C’s people!

EMPLOYER BRANDING

12. What Does An Increase in ‘Economically Inactive’ People Do to the Economy?

One area where the UK seems to leading the world is in the ‘economical inactive’ - people who are not on payroll (not the same as ‘not working’ incidentally) but not actively looking for work. Ill health is the No1 cause - 2.7 million people. What is going on? Peston with some typically fair analysis. NB: do check out last week’s post on the Millenials who are opting for the soft life.

ECONOMY

13. Authentic Virality, with Steph Smith

Brainfooder Steph Smith should be on TV more - super smart, able to talk on any topic, great communication style and some lived experience as a creator and distributor of products and ideas. This is a great interviewer folks - have a watch / listen.

CREATOR ECONOMY

End Note

I’m finishing this newsletter in Heathrow Airport as I board a Boeing 737 to Toronto. Looking forward to seeing as many of you as you can in the week that I’m in town. And let me know if you have any must-do’s whilst I am there 🇨🇦 😀

In the meantime, I’m lining up next months’ Brainfood Live and need some topic ideas. Share some thoughts on which topics I should cover.

Leave a comment

That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung