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Friends,

I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between humans and AI - how do we maximise the opportunity, and mitigate the risk. Recruitment technology vendors have a massive role to play here, which is why I am going to be exploring the concept of Human-Centred AI on Tuesday this week. If you’re interested in knowing more, join us here

Thanks to: Clair Mohamed, Eugène van den Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Kevin Green, Dave Hazlehurst, Bas van de Haterd, Kelli Hrivnak, Maury Hanigan, Fem Markslag, Rob Walker, Matt Anderson, Harry Nadin, Robert Richards, Helen Firth and Clodagh Fennelly for your conspicuous support on all things brainfood last week - essential to keep this show on the road. Scores updated on the Brainfood Hall of Fame 👊

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Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

Really interesting to see these results - one of my predictions for 2025 (watch out for this on Open Kitchen Q4) is that the green numbers going to double in 12 months. You should investigate this - it’s going to be the next thing 😀

Founders Focus - Ep51 - Up close and personal with Runar Reistrup, CEO of YunoJuno, Weds 28th Aug 12.00pm

Runar probably doesn’t remember but we met super early on in the pre-DePop days. Going to be pleasure to reconnect and learn from a super experienced operator on what makes a good leader, what makes a great company culture. On Weds, midday - register here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep270 - Maternity Return: Are Employers Doing Enough (or Anything At All?), Friday 30th August, 2pm

Most of us know something about Maternity Leave, but how many have thought about Maternity Return? It's a huge blind spot for businesses and we must do a better job of understanding how to make Maternity Return a success for every party. I insist you register for this, and please share it on your network to raise awareness!

The Brainfood

1. Recruiter Time & Motion Insight Report 2024

Recruiter Time & Motion study from our friends The Talent Labs has some fascinating insights, especially when we get to segmentation by role. Key takeaway is the areas where we currently spend most time, are also those areas which are most exposed to AI / Automation, a confirmation of the claims ChatGPT itself made in an experiment I ran a year and a half a go. That’s good and bad news for us - opportunity is there to become hyper productive via AI-enablement, but it is essential we take control over the time saved so that we can expand scope beyond our current remit of work. H/T to brainfooder Adam Gordon for the share.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

2. Technical Debt? AI is Going To Clear It

Good news! - the era of software developers complaining about having to work on a legacy code base is coming to a close. Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy last week announced Amazon Q, an in-house GenAI assistant which can refactor code in seconds, saving Amazon an incredible ‘4,500 developer years of work’. Two visions on how this goes - more time freed up for new feature / product development, or smaller sized engineering teams because the codebase will self update and self maintain. Whichever the case, the work of s/w engineering with change as prompting the machine overtakes writing the script. H/T to brainfooder Stanislaw Wasowicz for the share in the online community

WORKFORCE AUTOMATION

3. The Hidden Value of Talent Acquisition: Beyond Filling Seats

Can Talent Acquisition provide another type of value to the business? Brainfooder Toby Culshaw thinks that we might be ideally placed as ‘market sensors’ due to our daily interactions with candidates in the job market. Love the thinking here - it is necessary to break out of our self imposed guard rails and figure out how else we can provide value to business.

TALENT INTELLIGENCE

4. Recruiting in AI Guide

I wrote about how ‘AI is eating Recruiting’ in Open Kitchen a couple weeks ago, which prompted brainfooder Ivan Harrison to share this excellent overview piece from Phenom on the what AI means for recruiting - a very good guide in accessible language on how AI will change the focus of our work - graphic above is a great visual of this.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

5. Real-Time IT Job Market Trends & Actionable Insights

Old school website from ITJobsWatch so I can’t deny that nostalgia plays a role in my including it here 🤣. Useful tool for UK tech recruiters though, the search and filters provide decent controls and the year-on-year change gives you a decent view of the economic macro.

ECONOMY

6. Promoting Gender Equality & Tackling Demographic Challenges 2024

This is an example of a report where we you can have all the data yet still draw the wrong conclusions. There are not two contrasting demographic trends that will be solved by further female labour force participation, rather a single universal one on a maturity curve. The trade off is increase FLFP is economic development in the short term, but increase dependency ratio in the long term as population replacement rate declines. In the Western world, this has been plugged by immigration, in East it looks like automation will be the way. Neither of which are free from problems, nor tackle root cause, which is dominance of the economy over society, when it should really be the other way round.

D&I

7. The Worst Jobs In The World

Anyways, here’s some jobs which perhaps could do with automating away. Some tough stuff here - I suspect the power line worker will be most resilient to automation, topography is going to be make skilled humans cheaper than any robot. What do you think?

SOCIETY

8. How to Think About AI

Emad Mostaque - the former CEO of Stability AI - wrote this post on the current and future state of AI. The centralised vs decentralised, closed vs open debate is one which is being had amongst tech entrepreneurs, but needs to be more widely understood by the masses. AI as a newly discovered Atlantis populated by highly capable yet currently naive graduates, is a wonderfully grokkable analogy. Lots of brainfood here, so have a read. NB: Emad’s interview with Peter Diamandis expands on this post.

AI

9. Subreddit Traffic Tracker

Know how many users are online at any given time. Currently monitoring 65+ sub-reddits.

….which seems like a very useful tool for anyone sourcing in subreddits. Remember, build personal brand by being a helpful community contributor - see ‘How to Source on Reddit’ Brainfood Live before you doing anything else!

SOURCING

10. Geopolitics and its Impact on Global Trade and the Dollar

Politics vs Economics - (some) politicians want global fragmentation, but they are swimming against the tide of consumer & industrial demand. Connector countries stand to gain, which got me thinking that they might be very decent places to play for entrepreneurs who want to de-risk from de-risking and make money doing it - anyone setting up recruitment companies in connector countries? Love to hear from you…

ECONOMY

The Podcasts

11. Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life

..I need to prompt out the naked stuff…

Just one of many down-to-earth observations from a man who has become an icon in the developer community. Pieter Levels would probably not pass the tech assessment of any of the big tech firms, yet has built a 7 figure ARR lifestyle as remote working indie hacker. NB: folks who saw my first experiments in AI generated avatars two years ago, I was using one of Pieter’s then experimental apps.

FUTURE OF WORK

12. Humanoid Robots, the Job Market & Mass Automation - The Current State of AI w/ Emad Mostaque

This is the Emad Mostaque interview - 2 hours long, but I found this to be very easy listening, as both Emad and Peter have the ability to speak on complex topics in common language, which incidentally, might be the skill to have in the AI-enabled world. Expansion on post No8, How to Think About AI, this interview dives deeper into the socio-political-economic impacts of AI. Entertaining and essential

AI

13. America's Retirement Timebomb!

It’s Patrick Doyle again with his effective yet annoying cadence 🤣. I’m all for worker’s rights, but sometimes unions can negotiate deals which are put the employers into existential risk. Good history on US pension reform, told through the story of automotive, and why the last cohort of boomers find themselves in a very different place compared to their elder siblings.

SOCIETY

End Notes

I ran a random poll on LinkedIn yesterday on ‘how many interviews a hiring manager should do a week’ - and a commentator mentioned that it depends on whether you have been able to set an interview day or whether each interview has to be individually scheduled across the week. Got me thinking - how many of us have ‘set aside’ days for HM interviews - does it work and how do you get people to do it?

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That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everyone

Hung