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Friends,

The US Presidential Election is held this week and I want to wish all of our American friends a safe, clear and uncontested electoral result. Politics cannot be divorced from industry and we all have a stake in the outcome, even if we might not have a voice in it. The best we can do is recognise the moment for what it is: another major event in a cascading sequence of major events which is transforming the world as we knew it. A great many old certainties are giving way but a few will remain: to be agile, adaptable and connected is the best way to be resilient in the face of change.

As you know, I believe a huge part of our individual and collective success depends on the health of our community. A strong community can become an essential resource individual members can draw upon. Connect with others, offer your input and add your voice to the public discourse.

Big List of Recruiting & HR Events - now adding 2025. Bookmark this and add your events to it and show up to some of these!

I will be in the States from Nov 11th to 17th. Main purpose will be giving a new talk on Future Proofing Your Recruitment Career at ERE Anaheim. Grab your ticket here - the discount code HLERECA24 should still apply. Come up and say hi if you’re going.

Tec Rec Berlin is happening in 24th-26th Nov - I will be there for my 4th visit of the year to this great city this year and conducting a workshop on day 2. Discount code for tickets here.

Finally, good chance I will go from Berlin to Vienna on the 27th and then onto Bratislava on the 29th. If you’re in any of those places and want to connect, hit me up.

Lets all deepen our connections folks 👊

Thanks to: Eugene van den Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Kevin Green, Dave Hazlehurst, Alan Furley, Richard Bradley, Rob Walker, Pedro Oliveira, Ana Adams, Andy Dunne, Juliana Park, Kat Kingshott, Steven Davis and John Bersentes for your public support of all things things brainfood - keeping the show on the road! Scores updated in the Brainfood Hall of Fame 🙏

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What Do Brainfooders Want?

Pretty clear what the brainfood community wants - we’re firmly in the camp of Kamala Harris. This shouldn’t surprise us - functions have politics and TA / HR / People Ops are pretty much culturally to the left. Thanks for all who voted - one more to go at the bottom of this newsletter.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep281 - US Presidential Election Special, Friday 8th Nov, 9am ET / 2pm GMT

I don’t do political content on Brainfood Live but we in industry are not insulated from changes in government in the most consequential country in the world. We might not even find out the result by the time we go on air, but we need to discuss the ramifications of the US Presidential Election for TA / HR, regardless of the way it goes. How do we handle communication with employees? How do we ensure productivity and harmony within business? And what happens to our sector should Harris or Trump win? We’re on Friday 8th November, 9am ET / 2pm GMT - register here

1. LinkedIn Hiring Assistant

Every vendor in the recruitment tech eco-system is building AI-powered features which will transform software from being primarily systems of record and into assistants which will perform a significant percentage of the tasks we might currently be spending a lot of our time on. Hiring Assistant by LinkedIn may not have caused the immediate reaction it deserves - if it does what it says on the tin, it will be a genuinely revolutionary product for our industry. Anyone have an early look at this - let me know, we need a brainfood live on this, asap

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

2. Automatically Research Anybody with ChatGPT and Perplexity

Been a while since any sourcing content has appeared in this newsletter - I’ve kind of been waiting for posts like this. The base use case for LLM is ingesting unstructured data at scale; combine this with a prompt interface and some automation rules and we might actually have a super powered ‘centaur’ sourcer. Must read for any technically minded recruiter out there - again, brainfood live on this if you have given this a go.

SOURCING

3. State of Compensation Report 2024

There is always an element of fortune when it comes to breaking through as a true (non-pumped) unicorn. Shift to remote during pandemic gave global payroll providers a huge boost, and now cost of living / cost of business crisis is shoving those remotable jobs offshore, further boosting the relevance of companies like Deel. Global comp report is sparse but contains some cool charts, like this one on S/W engineer compensation - can we surprised that NAMER jobs are migrating to LATAM?

REMOTE WORKING

4. Headhunter Said to Use Fake Identities to Dupe Wall Street Traders

Great report from Bloomberg on the practice of ‘rusing’, where recruiters call up candidates with spurious or non-exist job opportunities in order to extract market intelligence. Civilians reading this will have crystallised their already negative opinions of recruiters, recruiters reading this would….probably accept that this is common practice in the activity of market mapping? No white collar job is entirely ethical; this is one of the areas where ours is exposed as such. H/T to brainfooder Petar Vujosevic for the share.

TALENT INTELLIGENCE

5. A System of Agents Brings Service-as-Software to Life

The market opportunity in this transformation is enormous—$4.6 trillion in the next five years —as AI begins to eat into in-house salaries and outsourced services.

If you want to know what VC thinks about AI, this post is as good as you’ll find - an astonishing vision of the transformation of ‘Software-as-a-Service’ to ‘Service-as-Software’, where tools becomes workers, with the opportunity being the budget usually allocated to payroll. Huge implications for us in TA / HR - or indeed, anyone in any job. Must read

WORKFORCE AUTOMATION

6. Harnessing the Value of Generative AI 2024 CapGemini

So here’s a marginally less destructive vision of what AI is going to do to companies - mainly be used by still-existing human workers to become super productive. CapGemini with a guide book on how to accelerate adoption of AI in organisation; step 1 is creating a robust governance structure, step 2 is train the staff to use it, within those guidelines. Useful read if you find yourself blocked.

CULTURE

7. Digitaal-Werven 2024 Career Site Report

Every year brainfooder Bas van de Haterd produces his career site report on the top employers in the Dutch market. It’s a fantastic example of how a small team can conduct highly valuable research. Where are we with the deployment of chatbots on career pages? What percentage of job ads contains a video? Great benchmarking study in a highly accessible report.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

8. Where The World Wants To Move (Best Countries To Live In)

Emigration is something both the top (privileged) and bottom (precarious) of society tend to do. We’re not able to distinguish between the motivations of the people who searched for relocation options in this research, but it nevertheless provides some interesting visuals on the relative attractiveness of countries based on google search. Japan, in particular, might have a chance of reversing demographic decline based on this data.

SOCIETY

9. Lithium-ion Batteries and Fertility in Africa

Speaking of demographic crisis, here’s some research which will challenge our priors. What is the relationship between proximity of Cobalt mining with fertility rate? Turns out, villages which are closer to the mines have more children than those which don’t, leading us to the initially disturbing but then quite obvious explanation that the sooner you can convert a child from an economic liability to an economic asset, the more you’re going to have more of them. Farmers have always known this but something we in post-industrial society seem to have forgotten. Not all brainfood is easy chewing…

SOCIETY

10. Why Startups Should Hire Recruiters Much Sooner Than They Think

Title of this post seems so dated, but it would’ve been a top 10 most clicked post only a couple years ago. Still the advice here still appears sound though. I especially like the concept of ‘sharpshooter recruiting’ - that phase in early stage startup when you’re actively targeting named candidates in industry. Lots of founder time saved if you get a pro to do it or coordinate the doing of it. Incidentally, brainfooder Ludmila Tomperi has hired 9 (!) talent acquisition pros for her team at Wolt - and is still looking for more. If you’re interested, get in touch with Lumi…

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

The Podcasts

11. scalr sagecast: Hung Lee

Great podcast series with brainfooder Matt Woodard - delighted to appear on it, talking entrepreneurship, brainfood original story, ambush predation vs hunter killer and why sanitation metaphors are useful idea when it comes to curating content. Fun chat, have a listen.

CONTENT MARKETING

12. "Job-hunting Hotels" for Students: Shanghai, China

What is the state of the graduate job market these days? My conversations in the UK tell me that young people are having one of the most challenging job markets in recent times, with huge competition for fewer jobs, increased assessment load and slower decision making. Global phenomena it seems, as the world wrestles with transformation.

SOCIETY

13. Why We’re All Burning Out

Why are we are subjected to ‘personal development plans’? Isn’t doing the job enough?

Fascinating video on the theories of German-Korean philosophy Byung-Chul Han on why we are all burning out - it’s basically because we have subjected ourselves to a cult of perpetual self development. A mind bending theory which may help explain some of the modern malaise and perhaps provide rationale for the hikkimori’s who prefer to ‘lie flat’ or otherwise check out of the rat race. We need vita complementiva folks.

CULTURE

End Note

Last week’s poll was on what outcome we wanted, this week’s poll adds the nuance on what outcome we think we might get. It’s measure of how accurate our forecasting is and perhaps, how permeable our info-bubbles are. Give the poll a vote below and I’ll share the results next week.

That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung