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Some of the best news I’ve read in recent days was the announcement of the movie, The Odyssey. It’s going to be directed by Christopher Nolan, and will feature an all star cast including the likes of Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson and Charlize Theron.

We need an epic blockbuster. And what better than a retelling of one of the oldest epics we have - the journey of Odysseus as he strives to return home to Ithaca, surviving peril, temptation and the machinations of higher powers determined to thwart his way?

The ancient story of this Greek hero resonates throughout time. It is a story we all share. The way is long, the path unclear and the only certainty we have is that hard struggle will be part of our future. And that there will be moments, like Odysseus, where we will not know what to do.

How do we avoid the temptations offered by the Lotus Eaters of Recruitment Tech?

What is the best way to navigate between the Scylla (QoH) and Charybdis (TTH) of Talent Acquisition?

And how exactly do we get our recruiters back after Circe the CFO has turned them all into swine??

Friends, I feel like today we all crew members of the ship of Odysseus. We have an epic journey ahead of us. Expect to be astonished because we are going to see and do things which no Talent Acquisition or HR person has ever seen or done before. Perhaps not all of us will make it to the end, but we each will play a part in the story of getting us there.

Thanks for being with me in 2024. Look forward to sailing with you 2025! 👊

Recruiting Brainfood 2024 Year in Review

1. Recruiting Brainfood Newsletter

It’s scary to think this newsletter is heading into its 9th year. So far, we haven’t missed a week since we began all the way back in Oct 2016 - 429 week’s straight! One day it will fail - if it does, it will certainly mean something bad has happened, so call the police 🤣. Seriously though, it has and remains a highlight of my week to put this newsletter together for you. We’re up to 37,208 subscribers now with an average OR of 35% - so 10,000+ guaranteed reads. Thanks for everyone who has shared and promoted it - without you there would be no way for others to know about it. NB: One thing that has slacked off is any CRM on the subscriber base - hope to correct this in 2025 with a AI solution. Expect a digital avatar…

2. This Week, In Recruiting

We’re up to 52,027 subscribers on my LinkedIn newsletter. The origin story for TWIR was that it was a spin off from RBF as this newsletter got too long to put everything in. Never expected it to supersede in terms of subscriber numbers, but then in hindsight I shouldn’t be surprised - LinkedIn has a built in audience of 1 Billion* users so they can push to incentivise. It’s also the place where I do my original writing in the ‘Open Kitchen’ segment of the newsletter - so another guaranteed 10,000+ reads on this essay now. Follow it here, comes out Mondays.

3. International Travel

From Recruiters Unite in Cape Town in January to Christmas Dinner at MOMO in Amsterdam in December, its been an amazing year of international travel. This was intentional as I had realised the necessity to complementing my excessive consumption of digital information with the sort of stuff you can only glean from in-person interaction. So many lessons learned, including the biggest one which is things are never quite as universal as you think they may be. Pervasive trends - AI & Automation - run into local context and can divert in an entirely unexpected directions. There’s hope here for recruiters - we’re going to find friends in unlikely places….

4. LinkedIn Posts

I post a lot on LinkedIn, at least 2-3 times a week, sometimes up to 4-5. The content is a mix of report breakdowns, short essays on a dimension of hiring which needs more debate and polls to get a temp check on what the community thinks of things. Going to feed all this into RoboHung2, so hopefully the chat will be reflective of what I mean to say. Collapse of LinkedIn engagement is true also: from my POV - I am down 25% of impression numbers (4M+ in 2023). This could be down to lack of an absolute banger of a post 🤣, but I think more likely due to algorithmic changes to the mighty newsfeed. Follow me on LinkedIn if you haven’t already.

5. Community Polls

Community sentiment is one of the most interesting - and perhaps important - things that brainfood can surface. Across all channels there is probably a combined audience of upwards 100,000 recruiter types, so it would be hugely interesting to see what the community thinks of topics at large. We don’t quite have an adequate universal tool for this, so its fragmented across multiple choice polls scattered across this newsletter, LinkedIn, X and Crowdcast. We really misss Thumb, the mobile app where u can get a thumbs up / down on any question you ask. Waiting for someone to make Thumb 2.0 - the meantime, I’m going to keep asking you what you think where ever I can find you.

6. Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner

2024 has seen the rise of the business dinner party (!). Or at least, I started to get invited to them 🤣. It’s been great fun to connect with people in a more intimate setting this way - smaller groups, curated list of guests, shorter duration therefore commitment from attendees. They are all great fun, though some worked better than others. Lessons learned: social proof is important (who else is going is the most important piece of marketing information), cool venue is critical and collaboration is always more expensive than you first thought. Good for vendors though, who want to get target audience together, w/o having to battle it out at an expo.

7. Brainfood Online Community

We are really struggling for an online space in which to conduct community; LinkedIn Groups has been dead for nearly a decade, X is obviously too toxic, whilst all other options are too niche, leaving only the semi-abandoned Facebook as the place where people can still connect without first being mutuals. All groups have suffered decline in engagement, as auto-censors remove comments and posts. You’d be surprised how often I get complaints on takedowns which I never made (because I never do), only to turn out it was removed w/o any human action - either a bug or an algorithm. Still the Brainfood Online Community remains the best, flawed place we got - and I hope that the active members (some 2800 of you) are still getting value from it. Join it here if you want to engage more in 2025.

8. Founders Focus

I say it’s my favourite thing to do in the week, and it really is; we can learn so much from entrepreneurs who have been so annoyed at the challenges facing recruiting that they decided to build something to solve it. We did 10 episodes in 2024, speaking with Richard & Beverly Collins (CVWallet), Tycho van Passen (VONQ), Reiner Bruns (ScottyAI), Max Armbruster (TalkPush), Barb Hyman (Sapia), Rod Smyth (Glyde Talent), Dina Bay (PitchMe), Sam Dhesi (Popp), Steve Bartel (Gem), Maxime Legardez Coquin (Maki), Runar Reistrup (YunoJuno) and Matthijs Matzemaekers (Carv). You can watch all of these via the Brainfood YouTube channel, on this playlist

9. Brainfood Live On Air

We livestreamed 46 times on Brainfood Live in 2024 - more or less a cadence of once a per week. Thousands of recruiters watched along, with many of you add to the conversation by some amazing contributions in chat. Most popular episode? How to Set Up a Recruitment Analytics Dashboard - with a whopping 643 people on the stream. Hit shows like this helped us reach circa 200 people on stream per episode, not counting the hundreds on LinkedIn Live. It’s going to be interesting to see what episodes gain most attention in 2025 - will it still be practical how-to’s like this? Follow the channel here to be notified next time we go live.

10. Talks & Presentations

It’s been a busy year on stage; I emceed 4 events, appeared in 7 panels, managed 2 x workshops, managed 1 x stage and gave 11 x presentations. I mainly get asked to do a zoom out view of the State of Talent Acquisition, particularly how it (we) intersect with geopolitics, AI, macroeconomics, demographics and consumer behaviour, which I’m happy to do because it gives me a chance to synthesise what I’ve learned from all of the members of the community I’ve interacted with over the year. Favourite talk of the year in terms of delivery? From the Macro to the Micro: Recruitment in 2024 and Beyond at HR Embrace in Berlin. (NB: worst delivery was also the this talk, that I had to give a second time on the second day - reminder to self, never do the same talk at the same event ever again!)

End Note

The period between Christmas and New Year are really my favourite parts of the year.

It’s the only time that I feel I can do stuff around the house without thinking about opportunity cost. So far, I have rewired the lighting on the aquarium rack, started training on how to fly a FPV drone, donated half a ton of clothes I never wear and got moving on the logistics of the APAC trip which I am way behind on sorting out.

I hope everyone has also had time to relax, decompress and reset.

Thank you for all of your love and support in 2024 - see you in 2025 ❤️!

Hung