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Friends,

I am writing this week’s brainfood from Dubai International Airport and will be in the air somewhere over the Mediterranean on the way back to sunny London 🤣 by the time most of you read it.

It’s been a fascinating 4 week sojourn to APAC with way too many highlights to mention. This last week in particular was superb education for me on the trends and nuances of hiring in UAE, KSA and the rest of the Gulf States region. I’ll probably do a write up of this in This Week, In Recruiting tomorrow, so follow along there if you want get my view of it.

In the meantime, I’m back in the UK for a week and will immediately get involved with Eightfold’s Talent Table Series with a Halloween Special: Bring Your Talent Back from the Dead on Thurs Oct 31 - register here. I will back on my travels in early November, where I will be giving a talk on Future Proofing Your Recruitment Career at ERE Anaheim on Nov 13th. If you plan to come, grab your ticket here - and don’t forget to use my speaker discount: HLERECA24 on checkout!

Thanks to: Joey NK Koksal, Elizabeth Murphy, Eugène van den Hemel, Paul Daley, John Bersentes, Dave Hazlehurst, Roy Vaz, Stefanie Wild, Lois Holland, Charlotte Turner, Myriam Dimitri, Javeed Khan, Shereen Ghaneb, Matt Hesketh, Iwan Gulenko, Juliana Park, Rob Walker, Anouk Fechner, Danny Caines, Zahia Abu Ali and everyone else who attended RL100 Middle East who were all so welcoming to me and my fellow guests from overseas - thank you! Scores updated in the Brainfood Hall of Fame.

Spread the word: if you enjoy this newsletter, share it with your friends on the Internet and have them subscribe - cheers 👊

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

1 in 5 brainfooders self identify as independent workers - so these are solopreneurs, nano RPO’s, fractional workers and the like. Given the choices outlined, I would classify myself in this group also. Interesting stats - going to rerun this in a years time and see where we’re at - what do you think, what goes up / down from this list??

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep280: 2024 in Review: UK Staffing Market, Friday 1st November, 2pm GMT

We’re starting a new series from this week, where we start our ‘Review of the Year’ - each week, we’ll focus on a specific sector of the recruiting industry and analyse how the year has gone, before making recommendations for prep for 2025. This Friday, we’re going to address the UK Staffing Agency market - what has year been like for 3rd party recruiters? Brainfooders on the agency side, especially relevant for you. Register here

The Brainfood

1. Generative AI’s Acto1

Venture Capitalists are no neutral observer on the state of AI - and they are not beyond the temptations of pumping sectors in which they already have investments. Caveats aside though, this thought provoking piece provides a great landscape wide view of the AI market today, and what it might look like in future. Particularly pertinent is what GenAI might do the entire SaaS market - enhance it, or replace it? Lots of recruiting might depend on the answer. Advanced but accessible reading.

AI

2. Staffing 100 Europe

Great to see a few familiar faces in this list by SIA - including long time brainfooder Colin Donnery and my old colleague Seb O’Connell. Congratulations to all who made it. Useful list to this community for a lot of reasons, not least for any recruitment tech vendor selling into the agency side of the market, and for everyone else to follow on LinkedIn to get market intelligence on the state of the staffing market. Incidentally, doing a Brainfood Live on this this Friday - register here.

CONTENT MARKETING

3. Death of the CV

Stifle the groan folks, because this time it might really be different. Brainfooders Andrew Spence and Matteo Cellini collaborate to write this mind bending post on the ramification of AI-enabled candidates meeting AI-enabled recruiters and how this might produce disparate outcomes such as idiosyncratic candidate profiles generated on the fly as candidates apply, and permanent talent passports which can be ported from one walled city to another. Great read. CV will indeed be dead, but they will still be around, albeit in zombiefied state.

ASSESSMENT

4. Chief Automation Officer

The ultra famous brainfooder Steph Smith came up with this speculative job description in 2023. It resurfaced to me a couple days ago and it got me thinking….shouldn’t this be a job that someone in TA / HR needs to be doing? Seems to me that many of the bullet points here fall within our remit. Be interested to know if anyone is doing some or any of this.

FUTURE OF WORK

5. StackOverflow Developer Survey 2024

One of the annual classics, Stack Overflow’s Developer survey has a new modular, interactive look which helps users get to the information which most pertinent to you. 60,000+ responses from developers worldwide, though mainly in US, UK, India, Germany and Ukraine. Must read for all tech recruiters. H/T to brainfooder Pedro Oliveira for the share.

6. Change Is Hard. Will AI Make It Easier in TA?

Brainfood John Vlastelica is pretty much of most people’s list as one of the leading thinker-doers in the community. He’s a must follow, not least because of posts like this, which accurately captures the moment a lot of us are in when it comes to AI - we know we need to change, but we’re quite able to get it done. Why is this and how we can get over the hump - have a read.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

7. bureaucracy

Firstly, respect to anyone who rejects capitalisation on blog posts. Secondly, this is an excellent critique of how bureaucratic overreach can evolve from ostensibly benign origins. Anyone who has worked at any organisation of scale or maturity will confirm that managing the bureaucracy itself becomes a task of work, sometimes requiring more resources that the thing you actually need to do. Step one is to better understand why this evolves.

CULTURE

8. The State of the AI Enabled Candidate 2024

The table above is the most valuable part of this report from our friends at Arctic Shores. The AI-enabled job applicant is a DDoS attack on traditional hiring funnels and we had better remodel our acquisition and assessment approach if we want to avoid drowning in applications. Full report here, worth downloading.

ASSESSMENT

9. Workable Hiring Pulse Report Oct 2024

Be great if every ATS provider produced pulse reports on TTH, Candidate per Opening and the like. Workable do this quarterly and it’s well worth a perusal to see if it give us any signals on the state of the market. Workable are one of many providers in a fragmented marketplace of ATS’s but with thousand’s of customers in the SMB and up segment, the data here is significant

ECONOMY

10. In Chinese Megacities, ‘Ultra-Long Commutes’ Are on the Rise

We all know that time-on-commute is one of the most wasteful things we can do, and huge economic value might come from being able to reduce it. Policies that work on one place may not work in another though. Super interesting report from Sixth Tone on rise and decline of ultra long commutes in mega cities in China.

REMOTE WORKING

The Podcasts

11. Unplugged with Kobi Ampoma

Loving this podcast series from brainfooder Doeke Geertsma, where the interview is all the person behind the image. It’s only week 2 and I’m already totally into it. This week it is brainfooder Kobi Ampoma telling his unique story - fascinating listen.

COMMUNITY

12. Flexible Shifts In Hospitality: Aimbridge Uses AI To Schedule Workers

Scheduling remains one of the tasks which is a huge time / effort sink for TA / HR. Scheduling for an ‘uberised’ workforce is another challenge altogether. Great interview on how the implementation of a centralised, AI-enabled, self serve orientated scheduling app helped change the game for this organisations 40,000+ workers.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

13. The Coming AI Startup Bust

There is no question there is ‘overcapacity’ currently in AI Startups - ‘too many’ companies chasing market dominance, with few currently making revenue much less profit, and many destined to fail. Great 13 minute discussion on the state the market, why there will be a bust, and why this is OK. One of the best YT channels out there, give it a subscribe.

AI

End Note

Voting has started in the US Presidential election and whilst 70% of us here in the community are non-US citizens, the result of course will prove to be hugely consequential for every one of us. Got me thinking about how the brainfood community would vote if could. This is the topic of this week’s brainfood - give it a vote below (its anonymous), and if you want, tell us why you voted the way you did.

Leave a comment

That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung