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Friends,

I’m on my penultimate trip of the year: writing this from the Titanic Chausse Hotel in Berlin, preparing for the two day Tec Rec Berlin event on Monday/Tuesday, before traveling to Vienna for the HR Meetup with WeAreDevelopers, before then going on to spend a day and half at Bratislava, because why not! If you’re Berlin, Vienna or Bratislava this week and are free to meet up, DM me and we can set up something up!

A few more notes:

1. Big List of Recruiting Events 2025 - I am going to delete 2024 events after this week and relaunch this spreadsheet with the 100+ events you should attend in 2025. If you are an event organiser and want your event to feature in the launch, make sure you ADD YOUR EVENT to this spreadsheet.

2. Rec Tec Vendors - TATech North America and TATech Europe are two of the most intellectually stimulating events I’ve attended. Particularly good for integration partnerships and sales / marketing alliances. Discount of $400 on now if you go to both. Contact Peter Weddle for more info on this limited deal (peterweddle@tatech.org)!

3. FiesTA Bangalore - I guess the word is now out. I will be in Bangalore for the inaugural FiesTA 2025 in Jan 23-24 at the Ritz-Carlton. Line up incredibly includes Jonty Rhodes as keynote. Tickets here (replace EARLYBIRD discount with HUNGLEE20)!

Thanks to: Kevin Green, Dave Hazlehurst, Joey NK Koksal, Heather Kitto, Eugene van den Hemel, Steven Davis, Niklas Ekberg, Juliana Park, Sean McGuigan, Paul McArdle and John Bersentes - your public endorsement is the only thing keeping this show on the road! Scores updated on the Brainfood Hall of Fame 👊 

Can you help? Share this newsletter with your team in Slack or Teams next week and have them subscribe. Cheers!

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

I am delighted to see that 2/3rds of the community fall into the AI Optimist camp - we believe that AI will unlock productivity, enable us to do better work and maybe free us from overwork. Lets make it happen 👊

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep284 - 2024 in Review: The State of Flexible Working, Friday 29th Nov, 2pm GMT

In case you didn’t know, we are rounding out Brainfood Live in 2024 with a look back series on the year. This week, we’re going deep dive into the State of Flexible working where YunoJuno CEO Runar Reistrup will bring proprietary data on how employers are using independent workers and Sonal Bhadwarj, Head of Talent Acquisition at CapGemini with the drivers on workforce strategy at a leading consultancy. We’re on Friday 29th Nov, 2pm GMT. Register here

The Brainfood

1. What Kind of Taxes Are You Paying in Talent Acquisition?

Brainfooder John Vlastelica is writing some great material at consistent clip these day. So far in 2024, its between him and fellow recruitment legend brainfoder Glen Cathey as the authors most featured in this newsletter. This week, we see John dive into analogy of taxation in order to sell the cost of bad decisions in the recruitment process.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

2. Working from Home is Powering Productivity

WFH has stabilised to around 25% of days worked in the US - and this is concurrent with an uplift of up to 2 million differently abled workers in employment who otherwise would not be in full time work if required to work full time office. Add in the post pandemic relative increase of prime working age women in the workforce, and a powerful case can be made that remote working is having a huge, yet understated impact on economic growth. Important article on the value of remote work - worth circulating around, especially as the move to RTO seems to be gaining momentum in the other direction.

REMOTE WORKING

3. The Office is a Productivity Tool

At time when RTO is being used as a weapon in the culture war to browbeat ‘the libs’, this is a rare example of a thoughtful and reasoned argument for the use of the office: high bandwidth human conversations, encourages serendipity and intensifies creative output. I might also add increases organisational resiliency and capability via osmotic information transfer. RTO has inevitably become a front in the US culture war, but we need to be careful we don’t fall into the trap that its the only thing it is.

REMOTE WORKING

4. I Am Looking for a Chief of Staff…

So….all this turned out to be a ruse to flush out candidates who cared too much about the money, and isolate only those whose motivation was the passion for the work and awareness of the learning opportunity. Many peopled hated this idea from Deepinder Goyal, CEO of restaurant recommendations service, Zomato whose initially advertised a job as Chief of Staff as one in which the candidate was the pay for the privilege(!), but at some level I think it achieved the aim of generating a large number of candidates, as well as fair amount of market awareness for brand. Damage to EB? The price paid for an interesting experiment.

ASSESSMENT

5. What is an AI Engineer?

It’s basically a software engineer who can work with LLM’s to domain specific applications. Competitive advantage is going to come from organisations who can convert their institutional knowledge / intellectual capital into differentiated service. Interesting research from Gradient Flow aggregating text from job descriptions of AI engineering to reveal the commonalities. If you’re not recruiting for an AI Engineer yet, you probably will be in 2025 - must read.

AI

6. The Future of Talent Acquisition 2025

Survey results from a Findem and Recruiter.com collab where 1000 TA & HR decision makers completed the questionnaire on such questions as headcount projections, paid tool usage, attitude to LinkedIn Recruiter and sense of job security in the market. US respondents - have a read here

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

7. Views of DEI Have Become Slightly More Negative Among U.S. Workers

One of my predictions for 2025 is that the conversation in DEI is going to sharply diverge, retreating in the US, whilst progressing forward in the EU. The incoming Trump administration comes with vocal and explicit anti-DEI voices like Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk included. The atmosphere has transformed and the Overton Window has shifted.

D&I

8. The Growth Challenge

Labour market economists have been concerned about the decline of GDP per capita for the past two decades, especially in certain countries where the decline seems long lasting and inexorable. This paper from 2023 is a statement of the condition and a call to action for further research that might explain the phenomena on why we seem to be less economically productive with each passing year?

ECONOMY

9. 9.5% of Sofware Engineers Are GHOSTS

Strong claims made in this fun piece of research on code commits. Using this (acknowledged) flawed measure of developer productivity, the authors claim that nearly 10% of software engineers are doing pretty much nothing at all 🤣. Worth reading for a number of reasons: 1) the map is not the territory - do we know why the measurement is flawed? 2) what is productivity for problem solving work - thinking about a problem takes time, yet this would not only not be measured, but be considered ‘waste’ and 3) it’s plausible enough that there are lot of people who exploit these ambiguities and do in fact do f7ck all.

REMOTE WORKING

10. Watch Me Get Laid Off from PwC

I thought we were over the Gen Z lay off recordings, but this latest one from (presumably now ex) PwC Associate Donald King caught my attention for two reasons: why do companies do lay offs this way? It seems again a Zoom call but with two strangers - a Partner the employee has not met and of course ‘Jan from the People Team’ joined in the call - to deliver the bad news. Seems to me this not what we mean when we say we want the human touch. Anyways, Donald had a plan - looks like he’s starting up with no intention of being an employee again - so prepared to cook his career with another expose. Good luck to everyone.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

The Podcasts

11. The Failure of Economics

Economic ‘performance’ is often measured in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - variably described as the sum of the value of economic activity with a national state unit. However, the efficacy of GDP as a measure of economic health has come into strong critique. The democratic removal of incumbent governments in 2024 reveals a story of people being crushed by real economic conditions condescendingly described as a ‘vibecession’. Good explainer video on GDP - and why it is a very flawed metric of economic health.

ECONOMY

12. Alain De Botton: Why Status is Making You Miserable & Why Parents Want Their Kids to Fail

Harry Stebbins is probably the best podcaster the UK currently has - capable of securing the smartest guests, and capable of asking questions which gets that intelligence out for us to enjoy. Here he is with philosopher Alain De Botton on how status competition is destroying mental well being.

SOCIETY

13. Disrupt Yourself: Why Your Next Career Move Should Scare You a Little

It’s pretty clear where in the middle of a general transformation of society, and it’s inevitable that those transformations will begin to manifest down to the level of the individual. Brainfooder Lars Schmidt - long time favourite of the community here - is himself in the middle of a career shift and here he is talking with Angela Cheng-Cimini on how we get out of our own comfort zones and embrace the uncertain future. Some sound quality issues but one well worth persevering with.

PERSONAL BRANDING

End Notes

An interesting question came up at a dinner I had with Screenloop last week - what is the one thing you as a recruiter or recruitment leader will stop doing in 2025 that you’ve found yourself doing too much in 2024? That’s the poll for this week’s brainfood - have a vote below, and if your option is not on there, please add in comments below - lets start a conversation on this!

Leave a comment

That’s it - thanks for reading everyone

Have a great week

Hung