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SPONSORS

Friends,

What a fantastic week it has been in Amsterdam - fantastic two day conference at HR Tech Europe, followed by some great off-event meetups, dinners and drinks parties 🤣. The Netherlands has one of the best recruiting communities on the planet - the talent density here might be second-to-none and I very much look forward to coming back soon.

I will be Boston tomorrow for a week, so if you’re around let me know if you’re around. Weds 8th is LinkedIn Hired Connect in Boston, so come up and say hello if you’re going, otherwise, I will try and sort out a meet up of some sort if there is enough interest!

Thanks to: Joey NK Koksal, Cornel Müller, Eugène van den Hemel, Caroline Hunter, Luke Eaton, Liz Schwerd, Jon Brooks, Jane Middleton, Marleen Korten, Reyhaan King, Matt Mee, Angelique Slob, Valeryia Kozlova, Andrea Marston, Ach Petrosyan, Alla Pavlova, Kim Lokenberg, Gordon Lokenberg and Lu Wie Hu-Peijster - your public and private support of brainfood has been immense. Thank you.

Can you help? Share the newsletter to recruiter friends you know. They should get value from this 🤣

What Do Brainfooders Think?

Looks like we have a simple majority for the most sensible option but what should those caveats be? I suspect for recruiters on the agency side, we’d still want some sort of no client poaching clause. Devil to enforce tho…

Thanks everyone for voting in last week’s poll. We do these every week, so make sure you scroll to the bottom of the screen and vote on this week’s topic 👊

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep256 - How to Build a Recruitment Analytics Dashboard, Friday 10th May, 2pm BST

After a one week hiatus, I am pleased to say Brainfood Live returns with an absolute banger of an episode. We all know we need to be ‘data driven’ these days, but how exactly do we create the tools in order to be ‘data informed’? We are going to be talking with experts who have built such dashboards and are prepared to share their know how with us. May do some screen share too, so we get visual illustration of what these things look like. Must attend folks - we’re on Friday 10th May, 2pm BST - register here

The Brainfood

1. 10 Theories for Candidate Shortage

As part of the preparation for the ‘Talent Shortage in 2024’ talk I gave at HR Tech Europe last week in Amsterdam, I did a load of research on theories on the talent shortage afflicting the blue collar / front line services. I picked out the 10 which I thought were most pertinent to us in TA / HR, so have a read a read here if you want join the discussion on why no one can hire nurses, teachers, construction workers and the rest…

ECONOMY

2. Are Recruiters Better Than A Coin Flip at Judging Resumes? Here's the Data.

Aline Lerner has a great habit of asking challenging questions. Her interviewing platform gives the opportunity to test hypothesis, so this was an interesting experiment comparing how recruiters evaluated tech candidates vs how those candidates actually progressed through CV screen / tech test. Turns out exactly as we might expect (recruiters getting as many wrong as right), but most interesting was the discordance between stated and revealed preferences - we continue correlate prestige employer brands with candidate capability, even though we say we don’t. Must read folks. H/T to brainfooders Sarah Frank and Lee Candiotti for the share in the online community.

ASSESSMENT

3. Research Shows It’s Time To Reinvent Talent Acquisition

Great to see Josh Bersin in action this past week at HR Tech Europe - here he is talking about the need for Talent Acquisition to reinvent. Companies are on a global ‘search for productivity’, which means talent optimisation rather talent acquisition. Can recruiters adapt and expand scope? We had better.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

4. I Just Got Laid Off and I’m Relieved About It (Sort of)

Fascinating introspective from a senior tech executive who shares internal dialogue on his recent redundancy. Three things stood out for me: firstly, the value of documenting feelings as an exercise in sharpening thinking; secondly, the sharing of genuine know-how which might be valuable to others experiencing the same thing and finally, the repurposing of bad news as a launching pad for the next chapter. Have a read

CONTENT MARKETING

5. Levels.fyi Gender Pay Gap Report Q1 2024

Survey data of gender composition of US tech companies. Surprised at how high some of the figures are (close to 30% in tech roles for Dropbox, LinkedIn), as well as how close the pay rates are at most levels of the organisation. Having standardised (and presumably at some point, transparent) pay according to levels closes the pay gap.

D&I

6. Migration and Employment Dynamics across European Regions

Digestible summary on the impact of immigration on employment rate on native worker populations: immigration rate correlates with lowered employment rate for native workers in the first year, before the effect is ameliorated by year two before disappearing entirely in year three. Impact also variable according to educational level of native workers - for University educated, there is zero impact, whilst lower educated native workers are most heavily impacted by imported labour. Good explainer for the who, how and why we all align differently on the issue of immigration

ECONOMY

7. Telepresence is Working Class Remote

Importing workers is one way to solve the talent shortage; the other is the push the jobs to where the workers are. Remote work has hitherto been a white collar, knowledge worker phenomena, but we are beginning to see remote work appear in other sectors which had previously required on-premise location. Telepresence is making remote work a working class phenomenon also. More to come on this phenomena has retail, security, warehousing, healthcare staff remain challenging to hire with either native or imported labour.

REMOTE WORKING

8. The Man Who Killed Google Search

Incredible polemic which fingers Prabhakar Raghavan, now Senior VP of Google, as being the man most responsible for the self evident decline of Google Search. Analogous to the decline of Boeing as discussed in Issue 393, this post paints a familiar story of prioritisation of profits over the delivery of the service, leading to the loss of irreplaceable talent and the downward spiral of the product, despite top line business profitability. It’s both unprovable thesis and rollicking read.

CULTURE

9. TikTok’s Biggest Creators Imagine What Would Happen if the App Went Away

The vulnerability of the creator economy is laid bare in this post on US TikTokers who have made a living on the soon-to-be-banned short video platform. Migration to other platforms is what most will do, but attrition from the move will be high. A warning sign for anyone hoping for the life of an influencer - you could be cancelled at the account or platform level, at any time.

CREATOR ECONOMY

10. The Unintended Consequences of Censoring Digital Technology – Evidence from Italy’s ChatGPT Ban

Important piece of research from last year which is one of the few in-production experiments we have seen on the potential impact of banning innovation. Italy’s short lived ban on ChatGPT in 2022 provides empirical evidence on the negative impact on developer productivity. Not hard to reason why - imagine what would happen to recruiter productivity if LinkedIn were banned - but good to have some research to back it up. Bookmark it.

AI

The Podcasts

11. Why the Japanese Yen is Collapsing

The ongoing collapse in value of the Japanese Yen is one of the most important trends to observe in 2024. With debt to GDP ratio at 263%, Japan cannot defend the Yen by raising interest rates because the debt service costs would be too high, and so is caught in a trap as capital flight moves money out of low interest rate economies (Japan) to high interest rate economies (US). No one knows whats going to happen. Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot of things. Succinct, digestible summary for those who want to know more.

ECONOMY

12. A Neuro-Inclusive Hiring Process

Neuro-inclusion is a term which I think will become more useful over time. Fundamentally, it is about molding the work and the team composition to the strengths of the team, rather than kettling people into a fixed template. Worth a listen

D&I

13. Practical Use Cases for Generative AI in Human Resources with Johannes Sundlo

Great to bump into brainfooder Johannes Sundlo in Amsterdam last week, and our brief conversation reminded me to listen to this conversation he recently had with Lars Schmidt - great to hear these two talk about a topic we are all interested in - practical use cases for GenAI in HR.

AI

End Note

So obviously I am now a semi-permanent event go-er and I realise that most people with a proper job can’t go to the same number of events. However, I do believe you can get to a few more than you might normally do over the course of the year, so I’m always going to encourage you to do that.

I’m also curious to know what kind of event you most prefer to attend. If you could go to only one type of event which would it be?

Leave a comment

That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everyone

Hung