This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends Willo

In 2025, we know that High Volume and Early Careers hiring cannot be effectively done without recruiters having access to the right tools. Manually dealing with hundreds of applications is exhausting, inefficient, incredibly poor for candidate experience and quality of hire and will lead to you failing to hire the people your company needs to succeed.

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If you are struggling with a manual interview process, you have to look at Willo.

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Friends,

Happy New Year!

I hope you’ve all had a good break and are coming back recharged for the year ahead. We’ve spent a decent amount of time reviewing what happened in recruiting last year, so now it is time to forecast what we think is going to happen in the next 12 months.

I’m going to write about each of these in more depth in Open Kitchen on LinkedIn, starting tomorrow, so you click on this here and follow along there.

I’d love to know what your predictions are for 2025 - what’s the one thing you’re most confident on going into the year, and what is the unjustified long shot you have a sneaking suspicion might happen?

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep288 - Forecasting 2025 Year in Recruitment - Friday 10th Jan, 2025.

Season 5 of Brainfood Live On Air this Friday and as per traditional, we’re going to be forecasting recruiting in 2025 from the angles of VC investment in HR tech, DEIB, assessment and candidate usage of AI, non-FTE vs FTE and sectors we think are going to grow and decline. Don’t miss this folks - register here.

PS: additionally click on this link and connect your LinkedIn - this should enable you to go LinkedIn Live when we go live on Friday.

The Brainfood

1. Global Economic Outlook 2025

Lets start the year with a projection from Allianz Research - an information dense yet accessible 60 page slide deck. Covers geopolitical risk, impact of looming tariff war & central bank policy. Global economic growth projected by 2.8%, the 4th year of sub 3% growth. However, attempts to blast down wage inflation seem to have ‘worked’ - we’re all now poorer therefore much more motivated to work a.k.a ‘labour market tightness easing’. Happy New Year everybody 🤣. Still, we know that the world isn’t going to magically get better, so we have no choice but to get tougher 👊. Worth a read for everyone here - download.

ECONOMY

2. Top 5 Hiring Trends You Need To Know for 2025

So how does all this manifest for us in TA / HR? Good job we have people like brainfooder Johnny Campbell to share perspective. If we are indeed past ‘peak recruiter’, we might also be past peak centralisation of TA. Perhaps the future is to become master automators of hiring processes and push more recruiting work into the line? Most companies outside of the tech SaaS bubble have always recruited this way - a theme we’ll explore in depth in Brainfood Live this year.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

3. 25 Things We Think Will Happen in 2025

I rarely share mass media publications here but making an exception for this forecast post from Vox - it’s one of the best I’ve read. Extra credit for assessing each forecast on a likelihood percentage. Most of it is political economy, but we should know that recruiting tends to be immediately downstream of this by now.

ECONOMY

4. Generative AI Agents - Architecture, Tools & Applications 2025

Generative AI agent can be defined as an application that attempts to achieve a goal by observing the world and acting upon it using the tools that it has at its disposal. Agents are autonomous and can act independently of human intervention, especially when provided with proper goals or objectives they are meant to achieve.

If 2025 is going to be the year of ‘Agentic AI’, then we best better have an understanding of what we mean by the term. Whitepaper from Google which outlines their vision of it. I think we’re at least 12 months away from seeing Agentic AI in recruiting…if I’m wrong, let me know otherwise….

AI

5. 7 Ways HR Will Look Different in 2025

Tough love from brainfooder Lars Schmidt, whose forecast here includes such challenging ideas such as the existential risk to entry level jobs at AI eats away at the work that had previously been reserved for juniors learning the job. Related to this will be the necessary shift to L&D as job disruption renders retraining a top priority. Question unanswered is who is going to lead it, because employers are currently not incentivised to do so. Lots of thought leaders write fluff - Lars isn’t one of them. Must read.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

6. McKinsey Global Institute: 2024 in Charts

This is NOT the same McKinsey 2024 piece which appeared in issue 428. Turns out McKinsey Global Institute has it’s own department and produced its own banger of a review post.

‘Occupational transition rate’ is an interesting metric; as the world spins on transition to new trading patterns, new energy infrastructure and new distribution of human labour, doing this well is going to be an essential measure of successful societies. It’s all charts + decent explainers, so easy reading.

SOCIETY

7. The Evolution of SEO for Recruiting: From Search Engine to AI Optimization

“SEaLLMO” a.k.a Search Engine and Large Language Model Optimisation has got to be one of the worst acronyms I’ve seen in the industry 🤣. It’s my only quibble on this otherwise excellent post by our friends Radancy, who chart the history of SEO and how content has successively been optimised in reaction to changing user behaviours, which have themselves been changed by how publishers architect information delivery systems. There is an implicit question in all of this: do you want to be in the training data? Anybody with anything to sell is going to have to say yes.

RECRUITMENT MARKETING

8. Gary Vee’s Top 5 Predictions for Marketing in 2025

…so speaking to marketing, I thought I’d drop in on Gary Vaynerchuk and see what he’s got to say. As always - like him or not - it’s always interesting. X thread on what Gary Vee’s marketing predictions, which double up as recommendations. The upshot of it is: the TikTokification of social media (follower count mean less, anyone can go viral, marketing teams need to aligned to platform). Incidentally, TikTok open sourced their algorithm Monolith a couple weeks ago, so expect more real time recommendation engines changing content you see as you scroll….

CONTENT MARKETING

9. Redefining Talent Acquisition in 2025: From Cost Center to Value Driver

Johnny Campbell again? I promise he has not paid me for this double inclusion, which I believe may be a brainfood first. But this second essay really does need to be widely read, especially on the need for TA / HR to cleave closer (much closer) to Finance. Defending headcount is the wrong frame - we need a mindset shift to business impact. CFO’s know about trade offs - its about time we learnt this language also. Must read

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

10. How to Increase Your Luck Surface Area (Ultimate Guide)

Not only do we need to get tougher in 2025, how about also getting luckier? Good news is, it seems that anyone can do it! Comprehensive how-to guide on how to increase your luck surface area. It’s ultimately about networking, action-neering (making this a word) and storytelling. Wonderfully written post, one which has relevance to all of us here in whatever content. Have a read.

NETWORKING

The Podcasts

11. 2025 Hiring Outlook: More Signal, Less Noise: Hung Lee

Real pleasure recording this conversation with brainfooder Adam Posner at ERE Anaheim last year. We ended up talking about the future of TA, especially in the cultural context of 2025. We also end up talking about why bot-to-bot communication is not a dystopia but the expected evolution of information discovery…

CULTURE

12. The Amazing, But Unsettling Future of Technology...

Fireship is one of the best YT channels out there - manages to be funny, self deprecating, comprehensive yet succinct. This one does an amazing job of sunmarising the tech innovations in 2024 (including why Rust is the language of the future…) and then casting a future look at what’s down the pipe for us in 2025. Includes some coverage of the tech job market, citing brainfooder Amit Taylor’s work at TrueUp. Have a watch.

AI

13. Why 2025 Will Be The WORST Year Ever

The US remains undefeated for great YT 🤣. This type of high pace, high quality production mixes in the challenges we are facing in this period of transition with the kind of levity of narration which somehow makes you come out of it with a smile on your face, with optimism for the future. Great watch - make sure you do it.

SOCIETY

End Note

Lets talk briefly about Agentic AI.

Many commentators have been talking about 2025 as being the year of the Agentic AI - where are AI which have access to external knowledge and are capable to delivering to objectives without human supervision. Instead of AI being a cool tool, it becomes a capable colleague. If you want a deeper dive into what Agentic AI means, then take a look at the Google Whitepaper shared above or follow this lady on TikTok.

This is the topic of the first poll of the year. Answers below folks!

Thats it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung

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