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Friends,

It’s been another amazing week of infotainment!

It’s cliche to say that every conversation is a learning opportunity but this week it really was - from Sunday lunch with Ott & Co in Berlin, to Johann Strauss Coffee in Vienna to catching up with old friends over a couple pints (fell off the wagon..) in Bratislava, you’re absorbing nuanced information which you would never get via a computer screen.

I’m thankful that I have the opportunity to connect communities worldwide. I need to figure out how to translate this value to the wider audience in a more permanent and sustainable way. Got a few ideas on how to do this, so watch this space.

In the meantime, I got to thank a ton of people:

Thank you: Rudi Bauer, Ann Ott, Linda Jonas, Anatasia Trubnikova, Milan Novak, Blake Wittman, Julia Cevokovska, Glenn Farrell, Kevin Green, Joey NK Koksal, Colin Donnery, Arnim Wahls, Matthias Wolf, John Rose, Andreea Lungulescu, Manjuri Sinha, Matthias Schmeisser, Rex Rusling & all the crew at The Rec Hub, Tamer Linden, James Shenton, Adnan Yousaf, Ivana Spiridonovic, Armina Mememdoska, Bob Pulver, Anouk Fechner, Karina Tretiak, Lisa Dahlke and Nikola Lugonja - thank you all for your kindness, welcome, inspiration and support 🙏

If you find this newsletter and other brainfood channels valuable, please do share it with your colleagues and have them subscribe.

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

This is an encouraging poll result! TA / HR have a customer service mentality (business partner etc) and have maybe developed some bad habits in agreeing too readily to demands without asking for something in return. Lets hope we can negotiate some space to do higher quality work in 2025. Thanks all who voted here 🙏

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep285 - 2024 in Review: State of Job Advertising, Friday 6th December, 2pm GMT

We’re continuing our End of Year series reviewing the state of the industry. This week, we’re focusing on Job Advertising - are we posting more jobs, less jobs, what has happened to PPC / PPA, what product innovations have we seen from the job boards, how did candidate behaviour change job advertising and everything else besides. We’re on Friday 6th December, at 2pm GTM. Register here

The Brainfood

1. The Top 100 GenAI Consumer Apps

Second anniversary of the launch of ChatGPT last week (can you believe we’ve been in the GenAI era for 2 years already?) so it might be a good moment to review the Top 100 GenAI Consumer Apps by usage. Some familiar names here, but also a huge number of new entrants, in what is a pre-Cambrian explosion of innovation in this space. It won’t be a waste of your time to play around with some of these.

AI

2. Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People

Here’s an interesting use case of interview intelligence: using interview transcripts to create digital simulacra who will then be used as a source of synthetic data. Turns out, these digital clones respond to questions with 85% fidelity to how the human original would’ve responded. Two recruitment scenario’s come to mind: 1) will candidates in future be able to deploy a digital clone to do interviews? and 2) will employers make screening decisions based on the assessment performance of such clones, potentially even ones generated w/o knowledge or consent of the human? Sci-fi is pretty much here.

ASSESSMENT

3. AI Eats The World

Benedict Evans produces only one presentation per year. Each one is meticulously researched and cross referenced, yet also accessible to the laity. It’s about tech, AI, work and always a must read.

AI

4. Collateral Damage Report: Who Gets Hurt by the Trump Tariff Bombshells?

LinkedIn is becoming an increasingly popular space for academics, researchers and entrepreneurs to post their thoughts. Richard Baldwin, an economist focusing on globalisation / de-globalisation, is one of the best. His analysis of the impact Trump Tariff plans is essential reading, somehow making potentially dry economic theory an exhilarating read. What happens in Trump 2.0 will of course have pretty quick downstream impact on what we do in TA / HR, so we need to read this.

ECONOMY

5. US Industries With the Highest Share of Immigrant Workers

According to US brainfooders, anywhere in the range of 11-20 million workers in the US are undocumented, which is something like 10-20% of the total workforce. Hostility to these people is going to have significant economic impact, especially as they dominate the sectors which ‘native’ citizens have long since vacated. Political economy in democracies is diverging - what is popular politically, is damaging economically. Unfortunately, what is damaging economically, might also be good politically - for the populists.

D&I

6. Global Robot Density in Factories Doubled in Seven Years

Perhaps robots are the answer? Agriculture, manufacturing, logistics, warehousing - are all sectors in the process of workforce transformation, becoming increasing automated with fewer human workers adding QA and oversight. Major manufacturing powerhouses in East Asia lead the way in this robot density - the number of robots per worker. UK not on this chart at least.

WORKFORCE AUTOMATION

7. Le baromètre du Recrutement (Freelance) 2024

What is the state of the recruitment market in France? Interesting research from our friends Achil, who produce this annual survey covering both state of the job market and state of the recruiters hiring for those jobs. Freelance recruiter percentage up? No surprise that it is. Download it as PDF and pipe it into Deepl for non-French speakers.

ECONOMY

8. As You Can See, I Am Currently Participating in a Zoom Call…

Stunning demonstration as to how even synchronised interviews are vulnerable to AI-enabled candidates. Now few candidates are going to find it worthwhile to deploy tech quite like this, but the point is delivered: we can’t trust what we’re seeing and hearing on a Zoom call. Which means we can’t really trust anything from the digital space at all. AI may force us to roll all the way back to analogue recruiting…which whilst frustrating, may actually be good for recruiter job security…

ASSESSMENT

9. AI Isn’t Coming for Your Job—Unless You Ignore It

Interesting and counter intuitive correlation between high degree of AI exposure and high level of compensation for those most exposed in this piece of research from Revelio Labs is best explained by those workers being quick to adopt AI and convert it into productivity and then to compensation. AI-enablement will make you richer, at the expense of those who don’t adopt - quite the motivation.

AI

10. Towards a Network-First Future of Work

Love this table from Francisco Marin, whose vision of a more fluid organisation is succinctly summarised in this short essay. It is descriptive, rather than prescriptive, so the main value here is the framework which helps you compare company culture. It’s a small step to take these 10 points, create a sliding scale scorecard, then survey your organisation on where you currently are.

CULTURE

The Podcasts

11. Will Trump Change the Global Economy?

This guy is rapidly becoming my favourite economics commentator - something about his (naturally, I think) deadpan delivery and high frequency of content makes him super accessible. Anyways, Trump 2.0 is on my mind and we need any kind of insight we can grab in advance of Jan 2025.

ECONOMY

12. How to Stop Worrying and Love the Robot Apocalypse

Robots are going to free up a huge amount of manual labour, AI is going to free up a huge amount of mental labour. The opportunity is there for a bright future where we humans can get on with the business of taking care of each and of the species. Can you find this future? We have to at least believe it is possible.

WORKFORCE AUTOMATION

13. Why AI Can’t Replace Recruiters (Yet) w/ Dean Da Costa

Always great to hear from one of the real legends of the sourcing game. Brainfooder Dean Da Costa adding sharp observations on why human recruiters can and do still outperform AI on Chad and Cheese. Have a listen.

SOURCING

End Note

Interesting conversation last week on Brainfood Live on Flexible working, followed the Achil report today on the rise of freelancing in TA, got me thinking about how we might think about the composition of the ideal TA department in 2025. Lets use this as today’s poll - let me know what you think!

Leave a comment

That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung