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Friends,

It’s September 1st and any pretence that its still summer has come to an end! I’m still going to be around in UK for the most of this month, interrupted only be a short week in Dublin mid Sep, mainly prepping for Oct / Nov when I’ll be pretty much entirely back on the road. Then we’ll be in December and it will be time review the year and forecast next - I’ll be prepping a load of content for both of these, so watch this space.

Thanks to: Eugène Van Den Hemel, Kevin Green, Gautam Ghosh, Manjuri Sinha, Steven Davis, John Bersentes, Matt Best, Sofia Pohls, Jessie Schofer, Kellie Nedelcoux, Michael Blakely, Zoe Healey and Caroline Hunter - your public endorsement on all things brainfood is what keeps this show on the road 🙏

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

Verdict is clear - ‘set aside’ days for hiring managers to do interviews is ideal end state for evergreen hires. In fact, if you are a business that consistently hires a certain type of person, then the question must turn to why you haven’t instituted it 🤣. Thanks for voting everyone - make sure you scroll to the end of the newsletter to vote on this week’s topic.

Founders Focus - Ep50 - Up close and personal with Maxime Legardez Coquin, CEO of Maki, Tuesday 2pm BST / 3pm BST

We’re rolling forward with our Founders Focus series. Next up, we’re with Maxime Legardez Coquin, CEO of assessment-everything recruitment tech firm Maki. What leadership lessons can we learn from Maxime’s entrepreneurial journey? Find out with us, on Tuesday - register here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep271 - Hiring Insights from 1 Million Interviews, Friday 6th Sept, 2pm BST

Get ready for this one folks - one of the most interesting outcomes from the mainstreaming of interview intelligence has been uncovering the treasure of information of what actually goes on in interviews. I’m with Ben Sesser, CEO of BrightHire, on what we can learn from 1 million job interviews. Register here

The Brainfood

1. The AI Workforce is Here: The Rise of a New Labour Market

There is no end of ‘future of work’ pieces out there on the Internet but this one from VC NfX is interesting on multiple levels: firstly, this is what capital thinks about AI - the fundamental value of which is displacement of human labour, because payroll is the highest expense in business. Whilst this is one article from one VC, I think it is fairly representative of the sector sentiment - hyper scaling SaaS is over, human-lite AI-enabled businesses are what is going to secure the bulk of the investment capital. H/T to brainfooder Ed Han for the share in the online community

FUTURE OF WORK

2. Mastering Reddit OSINT: The Ultimate Guide

Reddit remains one of the most visited sites in the Internet, and because it is mostly text, it is a potential goldmine for candidate sourcing. What we need is an article which collects together the tools and techniques on how to do it in one webpage, so here you go.

SOURCING

3. AUTOMATICALLY APPLIED 1000 JOBS in 24h and got 50 INTERVIEWS!

Talking about Reddit, this submission from r/Chaiplotting went viral last week. The user had built a bot ‘LinkedIn AI-Hawk’, which scraped job description data from job adverts and used AI to tailor applications to it. Comments are worth a reading - lot of push back directly on the post - but its all moot because we’ve crossed the rubicon on AI-enabled mass apply. Our current hiring funnel needs either a) AI assessment vs AI apply, b) abandonment of advertising or c) some sort of radical process redesign which presumes candidate use of AI. H/T to brainfooder Missy Lafferty in the online community.

ASSESSMENT

4. How Indeed Uses AI to Provide Better Matching Context for Job Seekers

Here is more or less the same technology, used on the platform side. Indeed’s ‘Invite to Apply’ crawls the candidate resume db, finds those most suitable to the job advertised and then messages them to tell them why. Why does this feel better coming from the platform side? Maybe because its optimising for accuracy, rather than volume. In any case, AI is blurring the lines between sourcing vs advertising - and recruiters jobs will change as a result. PS: anyone on as a candidate on Indeed and been invited to apply? Love to hear from you!

RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING

5. The Fall of StackOverflow: A Data-Driven Analysis

Nice piece of data analysis on the decline of what was once the premier online community for software developers. The decline began before release of ChatGPT, but AI has surely been an accelerant to the trend. Paradoxically, it might end up being a better site for candidate sourcing - abandoned community often have candidate information which is still current…

SOURCING

6. Have CEO’s Changed?

Interesting piece of research looking at nearly 5000 executive assessments over a 20 year period to try and figure out whether CEO’s have changed and if so, in what way. Unafraid to make bold claims, this paper asserts that CEO’s are less capable than they were before GFC, less charismatic and more analytical and data driven. Correlation is not causation…

ASSESSMENT

7. Recruitment Efficiency & Video Optimisation Model

Can’t remember if I’ve previously shared this before, but you can have at it again in case I did 🤣. Nice maturity model on use of video in your business. I think it is still a minority sport amongst us, but it really shouldn’t be. H/T to brainfooder Maury Hanigan for enabling the share outside of any gate.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

8. Future of Phone Calls Will Be AI

I’m pretty convinced by Voice AI. I think it will be the next application category to breakthrough into mainstream recruitment. The video is a great demo as to why - for specific uses cases, its a superior service and experience to a human caller. For the caller, it’s of course cheaper, vastly more scale, at significantly lower cost. Incidentally, adoption will accelerate as Voice AI scales out, increasing the cost of a having a human do it - be interesting to see which tech provider wins this race, wide open right now.

ASSESSMENT

9. UK's Elite Hardware Talent is Being Wasted.

It’s well accepted in the developer community that Electrical Engineering is the toughest of the ‘tech’ degrees - part of the reason why graduates are snapped up by finance and software, rather than go to the natural calling into hardware. It’s a misallocation of critical human resources says this UK tech CEO. He’s not wrong, but hard to see what can be done about it. NB: this is a global issue btw software simply offers better pay / benefits / career than hardware, even though the latter is arguably more important.

SOCIETY

10. The Global Semiconductor Talent Crunch: How Protectionism Backfired

These findings have profound implications for the success of initiatives like the CHIPS Act. The Semiconductor Industry Association (2023) projects a need for 115,000 new semiconductor jobs in the US by 2030. Based on our estimates, it could take approximately 16 years to fill these positions at current graduation rates.

Related to No9 - CHIPS act is massive state intervention by US government to the tune of around $40 Billion of subsidies ($2 billion of which went to Intel who just cut their workforce by 10%…), which needs to go not only into building factories, but also staffing them, which it turns not, is not so easy. Should be a good recruitment business opportunity here - anyone working this domain? Let me know, it will be worth a brainfood live…

SOCIETY

The Podcasts

11. Humans and AI Bots Blur in the World's Call Center Capital

AI modification of accent is a thing, and full of uncomfortable truths about how we assess people according to how they sound. Is technology of this type anti-bias tech or does it just shift the responsibility for ethical change? Might all be moot, as AI might well eliminate those jobs which are exposed to this bias in the first place. Super interesting podcast. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share.

D&I

12. Managing in the Era of Gen AI

The relentless search for productivity is leading to a ‘delayering’ of organisations, with middle managers - non-executives, non-individual contributors - feeling the squeeze, so it was nice to listen to a podcast in defence of the maligned middle manager. Most significant learning for me was the necessary distinction between white / blue collar managers - folks in corp HQ more likely be in the firing line than managers on site.

CULTURE

13. Is Seoul To Blame For South Korea's Population Crisis?

Urban agglomeration - counter intuitively - may be the hidden cause of demographic crisis. Republic of Korea has the world’s lowest fertility rate, and also the world’s most dominant capital city relative to the national economy. Got me thinking - maybe a federal system would be the best way to prevent the creation of these ‘superstar’ cities - witness population redistribution in the US for example.

SOCIETY

End Note

Being immersed in community is an essential aspect of professional health. I’m bias obviously but even if I weren’t running brainfood I’d like to think I’d still be heavily integrated in other recruiting & HR communities because I really value what I get out of them.

There’s a limit to how many you can actively participate in though, and it got me thinking as to what number might be. It’s the poll for this week, so let me know how many industry communities you feel you actively participate in 👇

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That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung