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Friends,

I’m writing this on Winter’s Solstice - the shortest day and longest night of the year. Human cultures throughout history and geography celebrate this day; Yuletide for the Norse, where the Yule log was burned in celebration of the return of the light; Saturnalia for the Romans, where role reversals (master / slave) broke societal norms in a celebration of equality (before reverting back to norm!) and 冬至 in China where families gather to celebrate the victory of light over darkness.

The sun is going to come up tomorrow, and it will stay in the sky a little longer than it did today. I hope you all can enjoy some downtime, relaxation and warmth over these next few days. Thank you for being with me in 2024 🙏 ❤️

Especial thank you to: Kevin Green, Joey NK Koksal, Andreea Lungulescu, Dave Hazlehurst, Dina Bay, Matthew Parker, Amanda Kop, Manjuri Sinha, Adam Posner, Damon Klotz, David Lombard, Bill Fischer, Juan Ignacio Gonzalez, Geraldine Butler-Wright, Will Sloat, Darren Bush, Ahryun Moon, Dave Haywood Smith, Mariam Matin, Dilaria Bukellal & Garry Turner - your public recommendations for brainfood is the only marketing this newsletter gets. You will get your reward, via AI, in 2025!

Can you help? Share this newsletter with that one friend in industry who really needs to get with the programme.

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

Thanks everyone for voting! The value of democracy is proven every day - we can definitively confirm its generally a bad idea run two different newsletters, on different platforms, on consecutive days 🤣. As it happens, I am going to rename it from This Week, In Recruiting to ‘Open Kitchen’ and invite you all to follow on there also. It’s a LinkedIn newsletter and an original writing essay I write every Monday.

Brainfood Live On Air - 50 Episodes in 2024

Thank you all of joining in the show this year. It’s been another incredible year of interview, conversation and debate on the issues we wrestle with in the TA / HR space. Three things I want to you do: 1) follow the channel here on Crowdcast - this gets you notified every time we go live 2) follow the profile here if you prefer to watch on LinkedIn and 3) comment below if you want to be considered for an appearance in 2024 - there are no qualifying criteria, other than you have something to say on TA / HR!

The Brainfood

1. What Happened in Recruiting in 2024?

End of naive optimism, shrinking TA team size, the job applicant flood, candidate experience crisis + ghost job mythology, quiet AI-enablement of recruitment teams, geographical dispersal of remote-able jobs, crisis in early careers hiring, maturation of the debate on Skills Based Hiring, the rebrand of A player Hiring (talent density), consolidation of recruitment tech stack, stabilisation of WFH / Remote work, rise of freelance / fractional TA, devolution and revolution of job boards into staffing agencies, Atlantic divergence on DEI, TikTok lay off livestreams, war on middle managers, mainstreaming of the discourse on demographic & immigration, verticalisation of AI and LinkedIn Copilot. Writing about all this in a series of four essays, final part to come tomorrow: read Parts One, Two and Three and follow the LinkedIn newsletter here

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

2. State of Job Hunting Report 2024

Interesting report from our friends at Greenhouse on how job seekers from across US, UK and Germany feel about the job market, especially on the confidence level felt by the candidates (seems pretty high?). Ghosting we know about but I think this is a solvable problem which AI finally put to bed. It’s certainly better than what we’re doing now. Easy reading - download it here

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

3. McKinsey Year in Review 2024

Which roles will expand to ‘absorb Gen AI skills’ and which ones will be largely replaced by them? This concept is buried halfway down the second chapter of this overview from McKinsey, but it might be the most import point made here. The mission for everyone in People functions has to be to expand scope and materialise the advantage of the productivity gains by Gen AI. Lots more here besides, especially the counter intuitive insight that though investment in tech has significantly decreased, gains from investment has increased - relevant for SaaS. Must read.

FUTURE OF WORK

4. 124+ Most OVERUSED Words By ChatGPT In 2024

GenAI outputs are festooned with caveats and disclaimers, so you’ll be familiar with a lot of words being overused here. ‘Its important to note’ is my favourite 🤣. Still, it is better to put these in rather than deliver overly confident speculations which we humans are overly inclined to uncritically accept. Which words / terms do you see most when you used Gen AI? PS: you can use the words list here to create an exclusion prompt if you’re really tired of these outputs.

AI

5. Metaview Interview Trends 2024

What a fantastic piece of work this is from our friends Metaview. This interactive trends tool lets anybody explore interview trends based on transcriptions of hundreds of thousands of interviews taken on the platform. Fascinating on its own, its also an valuable research tool for sentiment analysis across industry, plus a useful training tool for interviewers and hiring managers. And candidates also tbc. Bookmark it.

ASSESSMENT

6. Lightcast 2024 Wrapped

Nice wrap up blog post from Labour Market Analytics firm, Lightcast. Most of the activity on their platform confirms our priors - most searched skills are AI related, most searched companies are US big tech. Some interesting tidbits at the end - most common job posting? Registered Nurse. Least common - Contact Tracer (19 in 2024). I think about the top 5 most common jobs and I think 4 are going to be gone soon enough. UBI going to return as a topic in 2025.

TALENT INTELLIGENCE

7. Cloudflare 2024 Year in Review

What has actually happened on the Internet in 2024? Cloudflare might be one of the few organisations that might be able to tell you. Some interesting tidbits for recruiters; Meta properties - Instagram, WhatsApp and yes, still Facebook - all still placed in the top 10 most visited websites. Google remain dominant on search and on browser - it will be very interesting to see how the GenAI battle changes this order, and transforms these services. Massive blog post but really worth your time, especially if you’re thinking about consumer / candidate behaviour.

SOCIETY

8. 2024 at Google

Oddly brief overview, but perhaps the good stuff is buried in a UX innovation which I didn’t get. The best part is the ‘Best AI tips of 2024’; although most of this looks like a disguised advert for Gemini AI, they look like tips which would transpose into any other AI you might want to interface with. NB: I was right in missing the UX innovation - trending searches is here

SOCIETY

9. 2024 Year in Charts

McKinsey again, but this time they really do deserve a second mention in the newsletter. Superb collection of visualisations on all the stuff that matters to us - AI’s disruption of the software market, incongruity between declining labour market participation (bad?) vs increasing risk of unemployment (also bad?), diversity and equity and the rest. Worth a ponder folks.

SOCIETY

10. Coolest Video of the Year 2024

No contest for the video of the year - a vlog from a young girl in Portugal in June this year inadvertently caught a comet streaking across the sky directly overhead, illuminating the night sky with an other worldly glow. It’s an incredible moment

CONTENT MARKETING

The Podcasts

11. 2024 in Review: State of Talent Acquisition

Rarely post Brainfood Live’s onto this segment but our conversation reviewing the State of Talent Acquisition in 2024 was one of the better ones we’ve done this year, and maybe one of the better ones covering the industry (as much as that might be possible in 1 and half hours). Give it a watch / listen and let me know what you think. PS: thats the YouTube channel btw - subscribe to it, more stuff happening here in 2025.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

12. Behind the Tech: Year in Review 2024

One of those podcasts which was (obviously) longer but for the needs of the algorithm decided to aggressively edit. Some decent overview of the progress of technology innovation this year. The segment featuring Salman Khan of Khan Academy inadvertently letting slip that knowledge workers had better get with the program and become super elite AI-enabled performers or be disintermediated by AI was actually quite funny (..but there’s no need to panic!’) 🤣

WORKFORCE AUTOMATION

13. NotebookLLM

Final link on podcast segment ….isn’t actually a podcast. It’s actually the most impressive AI tool which I’ve come across in 2024, and I’ve been using it mainly to create audio versions of research papers - essentially, a podcast from any material you feed it with. It’s been great to listen stuff that you would otherwise never really read. Free and I highly recommend it, especially if you are one of those who does indeed download a 200 page PDF fully with honest intent to read it!

AI

End Notes

I think I am now going to be off for Christmas. Got a drone (cheers DJI!), which I am going to show to my nephew - good way to show the world from a different perspective. Brainfood Live is on break now til 10th January, but the newsletters will keep going - it’s like exercise for me now, not sure what to do if I stop. New Year’s special next week - might be a recommender edition for all the people and resources I recommend you follow for 2025.

Anyways, last poll of the year. What are your favourite foods for this holiday?

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That’s it - thanks for reading everybody

Have a great week

Hung