This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends Pillar

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Any of this sound familiar? If so, schedule a demo with the Pillar team today to learn more. Those who book a demo this week can try Pillar for free on 5 virtual interviews.

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Friends,

Another week, another great series of events: EMBRACE HR in Berlin was the of recruiting festival we need to see more of, whilst TEAM 30th anniversary was a celebration of community in UK agency. Thanks to everyone who attended - wonderful to meet so many of you last week.

More happening next week - good luck to everyone at HiredBCN in Barcelona, Future of Work in Stockholm and TRN Retreat in Windsor - I’d love to have attended each of these but need to take a break from traveling for the next 4 weeks at least! Will be at Cultivate in London on Tuesday though, so see you there if you’re coming.

In the meantime, Big List of Recruiting & HR Events to Attend in 2024 - bookmark it, add to it, share it and go to some of these!

Thanks to: Garry Turner, Eugène van den Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Michael Blakley, Nina Schein, Dave Hazlehurst, Colin Donnery, Ivan Harrison, Caroline Hunter, Hannah Morgan, Gautam Ghosh, Jeremy Snell, Jodi Jefferson, Rick Maré, Philippa Hart, Dries De Coster, Kim Grocott, Julia Reis and Sergej Zimpel - your endorsement of all things brainfood keeps this show on the road 👊

Can you help? Share this newsletter with your recruiter & HR friends and have them subscribe - cheers!

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

Interesting results on last week’s poll - it looks like Talent Acquisition want to get closer to Workforce Planning significantly more than any other avenue. Good news for Danny Hodgson and friends I think??

Thanks for all who voted; make sure you scroll to the bottom of the newsletter and vote on this week’s question to the community 🙏

Founders Focus - Ep44 - Up close and personal with Max Armbruster, CEO of Talkpush

We’re going into a run of Founder’s Focus interviews and I’m excited to get Max Armbruster involved. A real renaissance man of an entrepreneur, Max is forthright with his views and visionary with his understanding of the future of work. We’re on Wednesday 12th June, 10.30am BST. Register here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep260 - Future of Job Boards & Job Advertising (Part Deux),

One of the best - if not the best conversations we’ve had on Brainfood Live this year was when we got a load of job board tech specialists on screen to speculate on the future of job boards and job board advertising. We’re doing a round 2, because we now need to talk about alternative revenue models, charging the candidate, and what happens when you AI all that candidate data. Friday 14th June, 2pm BST. Register here

The Brainfood

1. The State of AI in Early 2024

Interesting snapshot from McKinsey on the rate of AI adoption, segmented mainly by function. Some interesting trends: avg of 4 months from decision to productivity, adoption rate correlating tightly with immediacy of impact and the above chart showing HR having some of the most significant report efficiency gains. Good reading. H/T to brainfooder Brian Evje for the share.

AI

2. Online Job Ad Revenue Shrinks and Other News of the Job Board Industry

Brainfooder Jeff Dickey-Chasins - better and rightly known as ‘the Job Board Doctor’ writes a fantastic newsletter covering the job board side of the industry. This summary post is a good example of what you’re going to get. I read this on the regular, recommend you do too.

RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING

3. How AI Personalization Fuels Groupthink and Uniformity

As AI begins to get rolled out on every app we use, we are going to encounter a very interesting phenomena - increasing standardising of communication in both style and substance, as we unthinkingly accept AI generated recommendations, which will inherently ‘lean toward the mean’. Once we arrive at Total GroupThink, we can definitely be removed entirely from the loop. Have a read of this, and have a think before you next push ‘AI compose’ on your next essay, message or post.

ENGAGEMENT

4. Bias Busters: Next in line? A Structured Approach to Succession Planning

Short article focusing on a rather profound question: what is the best way to hire for a replacement for the retiring CEO? The two scenarios presented at a) personalised - CEO anoints successor in dynastic fashion or b) de-personalised - structured hiring approach defining requirements before external / internal search. b) is presented as always better, but I am not sure of the empirical evidence either way. What do you think?

ASSESSMENT

5. State of Skill Based Hiring in 2024

It’s always interesting to see vendors produce reports from proprietary data. This post from TestGorilla outlines the adoption of SBH from the vendor side, with some growth in most assessment types, but especially on cognitive ability. This is the SBH which most are uncomfortable with, because we might well be talking about inherent traits rather than trainable skills. Have a read here

Furthermore, I’ll be speaking with brainfooder and Social Talent CEO, Johnny Campbell, from a skeptics lens - on the topic later this month. We’re going to surface up some of the critiques, define them and test them in debate, so if you’re interested in finding out more, register on this here

ASSESSMENT

6. IKEA Is Opening A New Store On Roblox… And You Could Be Paid To Work There!

We’ve seen some work related experiments in the Metaverse, most of which have been L&D related, but also are assessment and employer branding exercise. I think IKEA on Roblox probably falls into the EB as a category. Looks like a fun experiment, love to know who is in charge of this initiative - let me know if you know who.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

7. How Buffett and Munger Set Incentives:

Misaligned incentives guarantee negative behaviour because at some stage in the decision making process, someone benefits from the outcomes of that behaviour. This is a very handy summary of how Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger’s set incentives for their own company, and no doubt encourage amongst those they invest in. Good culture stuff here, relevant for anyone interested in the business of business building.

CULTURE

8. Do Grant Proposal Texts Matter for Funding Decisions? A Field Experiment

The fact we already know the answer to this question should give us pause before we condemn the use of AI in reviewing & assessment text based applications - human beings are no better, and in fact, tend to be fixated on status markers when making Y/N decisions. The experiment is on funding grants for research but the process, bias and outcomes are closely analogous for how we review job candidates. Academic but worth a read here, download the full paper here.

ASSESSMENT

9. Two Puzzles: Recent UK Labour Market Dynamics

Bit of a wonkish post from a presentation by Megan Green, member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, where she theorises that ‘labour hoarding’ might be a factor in persistent low unemployment figures, despite subdued economic growth. This is almost certainly bollox as no employer is interested in holding onto excess labour capacity, but I wanted to include it here as it a) is a legitimate theory of behaviour, b) helps us understand how real influencers think and c) because major policy decisions are still made based on survey data with sub 20% response rate.

ECONOMY

10. The Limits of Data

Lets finish off this week with their perfect antidote to the data freaks out there. It also happens to be one the most important things I’ve read all year. This is an essay on the politics of classification, who decides what gets counted and why ‘data driven decision making’ can be powerful, seductive and wrong. Must read folks.

AI

The Podcasts

11. ChatGPT: Who’s Adopting, Who’s Abstaining, and Why?

Great interview with a labour market economist looking at Danish population on the use of GenAI, across 11 selected occupations. Some really interesting findings: occupations which text input is key are high adopters (i.e. software developers), there is gender variation (women adopt 20% less vs men, even in same occupation) and it is possible to propagandise about the value of ChatGPT (people change their minds when told it is good), but this does not translate into actual usage. Really interesting interview, have a listen. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share

D&I

12. Should Companies Be Owned by their Workers?

All the heresies are being challenged here but we can expect no less when persistent exploitation over decades produces the same results for the many and for the few. Freakonomics talking about alternatives to private equity, including having the workers own the means of production….

CULTURE

13. No One is being Truthful about the State of UK Economy

As wise man once observed, there no such things as ‘solutions’ only trade offs. We need real talk more than ever, as this overview of the state of the UK economy starkly outlines. Lots in here for UK brainfooders, especially on labour shortage, cost of living crisis, demographic shortfall and declining public investment. Not easy listening but I think we got to do it. Have a watch here

ECONOMY

End Note

Had a great chat with some long time subscribers earlier this week and they were giving me some really interesting insights in their behaviour with this newsletter. It prompted me to set a meta question for this week’s poll - namely, how many articles do you typically open per brainfood newsletter - answer below and let me know!

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That’s it everyone - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung