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Friends,

Great to see everyone this week just gone - loved the Real Links breakfast event at Groucho Club and the WeAreKeen after work fireside chat in Amsterdam. I’m going to keep rolling forward with events and I strongly encourage all of us to get involved also: make sure bookmark the Big List of Recruiting and HR Events to Attend in 2024 and get yourself to some of these!

Special thanks to: Eugène van den Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Kevin Green, Dave Hazlehurst, Charlotte Steggall, David Green, Christian Portig, Angela Cripps, Akbar Karenga, Adam Gordon, Lu Wie Hu-Peijster , Alla Pavloa, Ach Petrosyan, Daisy Ilaria, Kim Lokenberg, Gordon Lokenberg, Ruslan Halilov, Doeke Geerstma and all the crew at WeAreKeen - thanks for your public support of all things brainfood last week - vital to keep this community growing.

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Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

I reckon the once a month voters were really won’t watchers who were too polite to say so. Few up for daily, though I reckon daily might have to be way to do it if it is done at all. Also: thanks to brainfooder Serge Boudreau for confirming that this feature is indeed out for Canadian users. Thanks for the feedback everyone 🙏

RecFest Knebworth - Thursday 11th July - All Day

Vox Popping it at Recfest this Thursday, so if you’re going and want to share your insight on recruitment myths to expose, come over the Scotty AI stand from 1.30 to 3.30pm where I’ll be speed running 20 x interviews with delegates. Experience Scotty AI in real life, whilst I stick a mic in your face! See you there 🤣

The Brainfood

1. State of AI 2024

Lets kick off with a really interesting report on the State of AI, mainly because it samples the people actually building the technology - software engineers, CTO’s, chief data scientists and the like. Beautifully rendered website helps you get through the data and insights. HR just above Legal on AI adoption rate, incidentally. Must read. H/T to brainfooder Stefan Welack on the online community

AI

2. LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report 2024

L&D + IM (Internal Mobility) are natural extensions of each other, but it turns out only 1 in 5 employers have a formal IM programme. Even fewer will have created a genuine internal marketplace where employees can discover opportunities at low friction and no social cost. Opportunity for TA to move into IM pretty compelling IMO.

CULTURE

3. The Selection Quarterly

Intriguing angle of research from brainfooder Joeri Everaers - comparing the assessment scores of successfully hired applicants vs those who did not get the job. We might not be surprised to find that on average hired applicants are more intelligent(!) than those who were not, though we must exercise caution of some of the interpretations. Remote vs On-premise for example may betray employer preferences, rather applicant preferences indicating something other than their suitability. Lots of think about here, we probably need to find out more about this methodology. Have a read here, definitely brainfood..

ASSESSMENT

4. The Harsh Reality of Job Hunting After Posting Layoff Experience On TikTok

There is price to be paid for celebrity, and unfortunately for Brittany Pietsch - the sales agent who recorded her dismissal from Cloudflare in a viral TikTok earlier this year - that price appears to be very heavy. No one should be forever unemployable, especially so early in career, but it is understandable how employers might shy away from hiring candidates who now carry viral baggage. Some company might get value from the notoriety though, so hopefully Brittany can get a job soon with one of those soon.

PS: I will be chatting with brainfooder Ben Mones, CEO of FAMA, on how social media footprint maps to QoH (you read that right) - register here if you want to watch.

PERSONAL BRANDING

5. Gendered Change: 150 Years of Transformation in US hours

The entry of women into the workforce of the market economy is the single most important factor driving economic development at country level. Surging new workers into the economy means cost of employment goes down, new consumers are created, new demands from those consumers leading to new industries servicing those consumers. The price paid down the road is demographic crisis as dual income families struggle to find the time, space or material circumstances to raise future workers, hence need for the short term fix of immigration. Perhaps AI job disruption might turn out to be inadvertent saviour of humanity? I haven’t seen anyone advance this case for techno-optimism so maybe I’ll do it.

SOCIETY

6. Foxconn Rejects Married Women from India iPhone Jobs

One country where female labour force participation (in the formal, taxed economy) is conspicuously low is India. Hiring practices of this sort by Foxconn might appear to be contributing factor. Really interesting story on culture clashes (multiple), gender stereotyping and even, material incompatibility of marriage signifiers (metal toe rings) and the requirements of high end precision assembly (iPhones). Read it twice and still don’t know how to think about this - a very interesting article to chew over.

D&I

7. MagicReply on LinkedIn gets Cease and Desist…

Have you noticed a decline of the LinkedIn Auto-commentators? Faking engagement has been evolutionary battle between those who want to use AI to scale up engagement and the platform who wants engagement to the authentic, with Rd2 going to LinkedIn, as can be inferred on this tweet by one of the makers of a popular auto-responder. I’m going to miss my auto-commentators, I salute your hustle 🫡

ENGAGEMENT

8. Outsourcing Market Access Services is a Key Strategy for Firms Expanding Abroad

Global dispersal of remote-able jobs is the inevitable outcome of the growing cost of doing business in the Global North. Absent strong and real economic growth, companies are going to continue to focus on cost reduction and exploiting wage arbitrage is going to be one of the main ways to do it. This paper suggests an even stronger compounding motive - outsourcing those services also enables stronger future market penetration, because you can leverage the pre-built networks of the offshoring providers. Remote working being an unambigiuously good thing is being revealed as a luxury belief.

REMOTE WORKING

9. AI’s $600B Question

That stock prices represent investor speculation rather than fundaments about the business isn’t a lesson we should need to learn in 2024 but it seems we always forget that demand drives prices, which can drive further demand, even whilst the underlying business remains unchanged. VC’s beginning to ask the question - when will AI companies make the money to satisfy investor return? The answer is…probably never.

AI

10. Diversity Was Supposed to Make Us Rich. Not So Much.

The lifecycle of seminal McKinsey reports seems to be shortening. Much like the War for Talent in 1997, McKinsey’s culture shifting Diversity Matters report in 2015 is now under scrutiny, following a replicability crisis of its central point that the more diverse a company is, the greater the revenue it generates. Its hard to not see the emergence of this critique as part of a wider cultural conflict manifest in media, politics and society at large. Big implications for us in TA / HR - this debate requires our active participation not just our passive observation.

D&I

The Podcasts

11. Statistical Review of World Energy 2024

I’m trying to figure out whether transition to renewable energy is going to be a jobs generator and the answer so far is….not directly, but maybe indirectly. Reducing the cost of energy should enable us to do more things, and it this increase in economic activity which might produce the demand for new types of work. One hour lecture and panel discussion on the state of energy in 2024 - well worth your time for future focused recruiters

ECONOMY

12. The Real Reason 11 Million Are Not Working in UK

This is fast becoming one of my favourite Youtube channels. Somehow the low-fi production value and the hosts monotonous delivery, makes it more compelling. UK has a large number of people ‘economically inactive’ - we’d better generate some hypotheses as to why.

ECONOMY

13. Say Goodbye to "Junior" Engineering Roles

Good podcast on how software engineers think about AI-assisted code. We’re casually moving toward an end point where entry level candidates will have to cross a growing AI moat created by senior incumbents.

AI

End Note

We’re into H2 so lets do a sense check on how we’re feeling about the second half of this year. What do you think will happen July-Dec, compared to Jan-June?

Be interesting to know what segment you’re hiring in, and what country you happen to be in - give some context to your vote in the comments, lets start a conversation thread on this - might be more valuable than the poll itself!

Leave a comment

Thats it - thanks for reading everyone

Have a great week

Hung