This week's brainfood is supported by our friends Screenloop – the fastest-growing ATS in Europe. If you haven’t used them yet, you must be living under a rock.

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– Damir Latte, US & UK Talent Lead @ Reachdesk

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Friends,

It’s amazing how quick you get back into the rhythm eh?

This is good or bad depending on what habits you have! The only thing I’m doing is changing my consumption habits. I’ve been reading up on intermittent fasting and it turns out its mainly just skipping breakfast. First week in and I have to say, pretty easy, especially if you some exercise immediately after getting up. This has shifted my meals back, so what I would have had for breakfast (overnight porridge) is now lunch, and dinner is basically whatever. What do you think - any nutritionists / body builders / dieticians out there got any comments - let me know, no idea what I’m doing obviously 🤣

In the meantime, a favour to ask at the start of the year - improving email delivery.

1. Add my email to your whitelist. Add recrutingbrainfood.com domain also

2. Click on something on this newsletter

3. Give it a like / comment

4. And most importantly, if you find it in non-primary inbox, drag it out back to primary.

Thanks to: Eugène van den Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Alexandru Gotoi, Kevin Green, Mark Deubel, Grant Clough, Clair Mohamed, Oonagh Clarke, Dave Hazelhurst, Stefan Welack, Gareth Flynn, Daniel Halstead, Paul Daley, Katie Heller, Alberto Munoz, Juliana Park, Jose Marchena, Chad Madsen, Rob Walker, Adam Gordon, Jim Miller, Torin Ellis, Bob Pulver and Bas van de Haterd for your public support of all things brainfood. The show must go on and public shares from you lot are the only marketing I get 🙏

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Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

So we have some Agentic AI skepticism in the community! Thanks everyone who voted on this poll. It’s going to be super exciting to watch this race and we can expect plenty of surprises and disappointments along the way. I might also add that I will have some interesting news to share with you soon on the topic - watch this space!

No Brainfood Live On Air this week

I will be on stage delivering a talk on ‘Finding the Human Premium: TA in the Era of AI’ at the NOCA Talent Summit in Copenhagen so won’t be able to host a show with you this week. If you’re at the event, please do come and say hello. Otherwise, I land on the 15th and might do a mini-meetup on the evening - let me know if this is a good idea!

Back to business on the 24th Jan - we’re talking Req Load: How Much is Too Much per Recruiter? This linkedin poll show - over 50% think that we expect req load per recruiter to increase in 2025, so I wanted to explore how exactly AI / Automation is changing expectations of how much we can do. Register here folks.

The Brainfood

1. WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025

Macrotrend-driven creation of new jobs is estimated to amount to 170 million jobs, equivalent to 14% of today’s total employment. This growth is expected to be offset by the displacement of 92 million current jobs, or 8% of total employment, resulting in a net growth of 78 million jobs (7% of today’s total employment) by 2030

WEF Future of Jobs Report is an annual must read, and hugely encouraging that a number of community members forwarded me a copy to include in this week’s newsletter. H/T to brainfooders Jim Berrisford Chris Raw and Jacob Sten Madsen for sharing in the online community).

FUTURE OF WORK

2. Meta Ends DEI Programs

The rollback of Meta’s DEI commitments was shockingly comprehensive - gone is the Chief Diversity Officer role, gone is Diverse Slate Hiring, gone are ethnic & gender representation targets. What’s more, Mark Zuckerberg went onto the notoriously unwoke Joe Rogan podcast to tell us all about it - worth watching this in full. What does this mean for DEI? Implications are obvious for TA / HR, who have been the corporate champions for the movement. Do we quiet quit as brainfooder Torin Ellis suggested on Brainfood Live last Friday, or go-with-the-flow as Zuckerberg is clearly signalling? Running a poll on this on LinkedIn right now - let me know what you think about it there. Btw: I think this is were there will be an Atlantic divergence as UK / EU continue with representation targets, pay transparency and DEI commitments.

D&I

3. By Default, Capital Will Matter More Than Ever

To contrast with the ultimately optimistic notes from the WEF report (net gain of 78 million jobs), this amazing essay outlines another theory - AI will improve the ability of capital to buy outcomes which previously required hiring people to produce those outcomes. Moreover, the incentive for States to do well by their people diverges once the people lose the leverage they have by withholding their once valuable labour. It’s not a comforting read but important one.

AI

4. Levels.fyi Wrapped 2024

Levels.fyi came to prominence during the peak era of tech hyper scalers when understanding compensation levels for in-demand software engineers was a key component to recruiters talent attraction strategies. Here is what techies were earning in 2024.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

5. Hitting OKR’s vs Doing Your Job

One of tech startup’s major cultural influences to business was the mainstreaming of OKR’s. Yet as this superbly accessible short essay explains, Objective-Key Result’s are optimised for special projects and do not do a great job of capturing the quality of ongoing work. Question for us in TA / HR - how much of the job is BAU vs Special Projects? KPI’s for one, OKR’s for the other.

PEOPLE ANALYTICS

6. Integrating AI in Recruitment: The ICO's Perspective

Excellent write up from brainfooder Martyn Redstone on the UK ICO’s report on AI in Recruitment (download report here), with relevancy for both provider and operator of AI tools. Compliance is going to be interesting - vast majority of tools recruiters currently use are US tech (90%? amongst brainfooders?), who under Trump 2.0, may judge that its all systems go and tell hell with compliance. Responsible AI may become a local choice at employer level.

D&I

7. Upwork Projects Analysis 2024

Analysis of 5 million projects posted on gig marketplace, Upwork, over the past two years. Some things we knew already - translators and copy writers are getting crushed by AI. Some other things surprise though - networking & IT (support) has increased demand. Interactive website, so have a play…

GIG ECONOMY

8. The Do Not Work With List

What the heck do we think about this?? I discovered this website only last week - basically an industry blacklisting site which lists people who you should not work with. I think this was initially set up to avoid dodgy investors but clearly has since migrated to hiring as well. A few things here: blind references, social capital, community validation, bias and - obviously weaponisation. Somebody sign up for this and let me know what you find out!

ASSESSMENT

9. AI Can Only Automate 24% of Tasks

So here’s an interesting piece of research, especially as ‘AI Agent’ is guaranteed to become cliche of the year 2025. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon (amazing how well robber barons have retconned their legacy, but I digress…) set up a business (The Agent Company) using only software AI agents to test whether they could produce any usable software. Min Choi with the accessible tweet thread here and you can download the paper here. Bottom line is: they are capable but lack common sense. Which makes sense, actually.

WORKFORCE AUTOMATION

10. Smells Like American Spirit

Rare that mainstream media is share on this newsletter but this essay on what makes an elite sales person from Slate absolutely deserves the reading. Great evocative writing, especially resonant for those of us who remember the good ol’ days of boiler room telesales culture. Not just a great read though - some profound insight too. The main thing about a great message is the not the words you use, but how you make the other person feel.

CULTURE

The Podcasts

11. The Next Few Years of AI

David Shapiro is one of those Internet madmen whose overly confident speculations are both what make him a compelling commentator but also make you want to pause before you get fully onboard. Still, he is one of the few that talks about the need for a new economics without human labour, so for that at least he’s got my subscription

WORKFORCE AUTOMATION

12. The World in 2025 - 5 Key Trends to Watch Out For

Impact of Trump 2.0 acceleration of trade war, the risk of financial repression in heavily in-debted countries, the exponential adoption of solar panels, batteries and EV’s and more. Accessible channel on economics and some reasonable predictions on what we will see in 2025. Have a watch.

ECONOMY

13. NVDIA CEO Jenson Huang Keynote at CES 2025

I have a theory that NVIDIA CEO Jenson Huang is in a secret war against Sam Altman. He wants to decentralise AI such that individuals, companies and countries each have their own sovereign AI, whereas Altman wants to become the overlord of a Skynet/Matrix. As such, my moral support is with Huang, even though we in TA / HR may inadvertently become collateral damage of this decentralising mission. What do I mean? Watch this moment in Huang’s keynote at CES 2025…

FUTURE OF WORK

End Notes

One my predictions for 2025 (have a read here if you want) was the Talent Acquisition teams might get increasingly geographically dispersed, even as remote hiring generally retreats. What I mean by this is that we are going to move some tasks / functions to lower cost locations off shore from expensive on shore locations.

Got me thinking…that this might be a good question to ask the audience on, as well as maybe do a future Brainfood Live on (follow channel here) to be updated on this. So the question is how is your TA team set up in 2025 on a ratio of on / offshore?

That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung