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Friends,

I’m writing this from sunny Berlin, where I’ve had the great privilege of attending the We Are Developers World Congress, and connecting and reconnecting with friends old and new. I bang on about it a lot but I strongly encourage all of us to expand our peer networks, access and contribute to community intelligence and increase your profile by claiming your voice in the public discourse.

Two things to do:

1. Big List of Recruiting & HR Events to Attend in 2024 - bookmark this sheet and get involved in some of these events. Want to speak or panel on some of this? Contact the event organisers who have put their email into the sheet. One thing you should know - event organisers are desperately looking for new voices, they just can’t easily see you, so go up and approach first 👊

2. Brainfood Live On Air Youtube Channel - subscribe to this, it contains all the livestreams I do every Friday. I have never promoted it because I use it more as online storage but it occurs to me that maybe some of you might prefer to watch / listen this way. Additionally, if you want to appear on a future episode of Brainfood Live, reply to this email and let me know topics you care most about.

Thanks to: Eugène van den Hemel, Clair Mohamed, Joey NK Koksal, Rob Walker, Caroline Hunter, Paul Daley, Sian Visser, Julia Vodolazska, Andreea Lungulescu, Matthias Schmeißer, Alicia Roy, Dave Hazlehurst, Gautam Ghosh, Juliana Park, Ach Petrosyan, Alla Pavlova, Manjuri Sinha and Astghik Gapoyan - thank you all for your incredible support on all things brainfood this week - essential for keeping this community growing 🙏

Can you help? Share this newsletter with your network on LinkedIn and have your recruiter friends subscribe. Cheers!

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What do Brainfooders Think?

Congratulations first for everybody who resisted posting about football on LinkedIn - I think we bucked the expectation and generally didn’t go into cringe last week 🤣. Thanks for all who voted nevertheless, I might go actively hunting for posts which mentioned team play over individualism now. Make sure to scroll to the end of the newsletter to vote on this week’s question..

Founders Focus - Ep49 - Up close and personal with Steve Bartel, CEO of Gem. Weds 24th July, 10am PT / 6pm BST

Can’t help but be excited by this conversation with Steve Bartel, CEO of Gem. One of the smartest CEO’s in our sector, I’m looking forward to learning about Steve’s founders journey, his views on the future of recruitment technology and why being a engineer is both help and hindrance to being a tech CEO. On Weds 24th July, 10am PT / 6pm BST. Register here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep265 - New Job As A Recruitment Leader: The 100 Day Plan, Friday 26th July, 2pm BST

The good news is I’ve had no trouble finding panelists for this show - which is one of the signs that perhaps the horrendous TA job market has begun to bottom out. We’re talking to recruitment leaders who have recently found work - what is the 100 day plan? Get to it folks - register here

The Brainfood

1. IMF World Economic Outlook - July 2024

IMF comes out with these quarterly forecasts on economic growth - well worth keeping an eye on in order to contextualise business performance, as well as measure the accuracy of historical forecasts. Grim reading for everybody really, especially the Global North, where cost of living crisis is a cost of business crisis. Easy reading 8 pager

ECONOMY

2. ‘We’re Going To Lead With Inclusion’

…says Johnny C Taylor, CEO of SHRM. Leading with inclusion of course means dropping the equity from the mission, aligning US largest community of HR professionals with the meritocracy arguments made most vocally the SV tech CEO’s. Lots of things to think about here - what is the value of values if they are mutable, what is the process of iteration over values and who, in the end, makes the decision to change them? HR becoming its own case study for all of these issues - have a read here

D&I

3. The Value of Values

Josh Bersin weighs in the issue of changing values, and the two main points in this post is that not only does changing values damage trust people have toward employers but also company performance are compromised in the long run. Pretty confident on the first claim, but I think Josh might have the direction of causality reversed in the second. What do you think?

CULTURE

4. Investing in our Future

We’ve significantly raised the bar on our expectations of employee performance, resulting in approximately 1,050 employees leaving the company who are not meeting expectations and who we believe will be more successful outside of Intuit.

This was the paragraph from Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi which triggered widespread criticism on the Internet. Hard to see the value of this type of communication - perhaps a signal for remaining employees to up their game? Damaging to EB for sure, but perhaps Goodarzi thought the trade off worth it.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

5. State of Talent Acquisition 2024

Great piece of work from our friends Talentful, pulling in research from the HIGHER community to better understand the State of TA in 2024. Lots to chew on here, including general hiring volume. Thanks to brainfooder Philip Blaydes for allowing this to be shared outside of the email reg wall - well worth a review

ECONOMY

6. Migrating a Job Board - Key Considerations and SEO Risks

Brainfooder Alexander Chukowski is an unusually specific contributor to the community - he’s a job specialist who specialises further in SEO for Job Boards. This is a fantastic deep dive into the SEO considerations of migrating a job board.

RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING

7. Are Job Interviews Failing Us?

The interview is like the CV - a part of the recruiting process which is easy to criticise / hard to defend, yet unexplainably persistent in our hiring process. I have a theory that we interview less to assess performance potential of the candidate, and more to ensure that team mates performance won’t be compromised by the potential incomer - it’s a ritual of in-grouping basically. Anyways, this post lays out the problems of interviews and how you get improve your hiring outcomes by diversifying away from it.

ASSESSMENT

8. Mangled Fingers, No Time Off: Why the Women who Make Samsung’s Semiconductors Are Striking

TSMC Arizona plant is turning into a hiring debacle, where 50% of the workers are imported from Taiwan as US citizens who have the required skills prefer other types of work. This story striking workers at the Samsung factory in the Republic of Korea illustrates the challenge of SC hiring from another angle. There’s a reason why this type of work was offshored in the first place - it’s hard, unforgiving work.

CULTURE

9. Panic! at the Job Market

As far as I can tell, the “behavioral interview” is essentially the same as a Scientology intake session except, you know, for capitalism instead

Just one a many brilliant lines in this epic deconstruction of the tech hiring landscape, from the POV of a candidate. Also contains a very interesting folk taxonomy of tech companies (nepo, speculation, initial growth & stable) which I think I’m going to steal. Must read for tech recruiters. H/T to brainfooder Pedro Oliveira for the share.

10. Falling Asleep at the Wheel: Human / AI Collaboration in a Field Experiment of HR Recruiters

One of the concerns about the use of AI is that we humans are going to end up overweighting AI recommendations at an increasing rate, until we get to a point when we never veto the recommendation, so make ourselves fully redundant in the name of efficiency. This research paper shows the theory in action, as recruiters ‘fall asleep at the wheel’ when reviewing job applications first processed and scored by AI.

ASSESSMENT

The Podcasts

11. Prof. Ethan Mollick on AI's Impact on Work & Future Possibilities

Ethan Mollick has become of the most important commentators on AI + future of work. He’s a great communicator in any medium (X, substack) and also on youtube, as he delivers a virtual presentation on the impact of AI and future of work. Great watch / listen.

AI

12. Why So Many Bad Bosses Still Rise to The Top

We already know the answer to this - leadership has very little to do with objective measures and much more to do with techniques of domination. Some optimists try to think of a better way. I’m not convinced but what do I know - have a listen and let me know what you think!

CULTURE

13. The Future Global Workforce

Matt Alder with the marvellous Hilda Kabushenga, CEO of The African Talent Company, on demographic crisis, the rise of African labour and what the reality looks like for companies who operate in countries where the working population is already in seemingly irreversible decline. Great listen

SOCIETY

End Note

Poll of this week is going to be on SHRM’s decision to drop ‘equity’ from it’s mission statement and instead ‘lead with inclusion’. What do you think of this move - simple vote, lets see what the brainfood community thinks about this.

Leave a comment

That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung