This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends Screenloop

Fighting for better hiring tech? Show them the data.
TA teams know bad hires are expensive—but leadership wants numbers.

A few months ago, Screenloop’s CPH Calculator helped 100s of TA leaders prove ROI. Now, they're back with something even bigger.

Introducing the"Cost Per Bad Hire" Calculator.

Bad hires cost more than just salary. Lost productivity, wasted recruiter time, extra interview costs—it all adds up fast.

And because bad hires shouldn’t happen in the first place, Screenloop helps you avoid them entirely with AI-powered hiring, autofill scorecards, real-time insights, and more.

Run the numbers. Get your cost per bad hire.

TRY IT FREE — and secure your budget.

SPONSORS

Friends,

I’m in Jakarta this week until Thursday before ending my Indonesia trip with a 3 day sojourn to Canggu in Bali. It’s deep focus time because I got to work, but if you’re around in either of those places and want to connect - let me know!

Next week, I should be in Sydney where I’ll be delivering a talk ‘From Talent Acquisition To Talent Everything’ at the NJA People & Talent Summit in Sydney on March 13th. I believe tickets are close to sold out but give it a go here - Discount code SPEAKER20

Two weeks later, I will be in Melbourne for the two day event TalentPalooza - tickets here discount code RECRUITINGBRAINFOOD.

Thanks to: Kevin Green, Joey NK Koksal, Martin Warren, Steven Davis, Eugene van den Hemel, Randy Bailey, Dave Hazlehurst, Steven Rothberg, Elizabeth Murphy, Steven Yeong, Martin Warren, Bobby Leonard, Hannah Morgan, Rob Walker, Ahryun Moon, Charles Mah, Drew Ostrem, Sital Ruparelia, Vincent Romano, Amreen Rahman, Chris Pateman, Lindsey Stone, Dave Vu, Haley Ennes, Paul Daley, Nalin Krishnan and Peter Treloar - thanks for your public endorsement of all things brainfood - essential for keeping this show on the road. Cheers!

Can you help? Share this newsletter with a friend in industry who needs to get more connected.

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

It’s very close! Nearly half of us are sanguine about deskilling but a significant minority have a concern. One of these, that time will tell? One thing is for sure is that it is common and understandable to be emotionally committed to skills we have invested time to develop. Lets see how we go. Thanks for all who voted!

Brainfood On Tour & Brainfood Live On Air

Another double header this week folks - Brainfood On Tour continues as I want to know what happens in one of the largest countries in the world - How to Hire in Indonesia in 2025 & Beyond happening on Tuesday 4th March, 11.00am WIT. Make sure you register if you’re hiring here or just curious to see how others do it.

Brainfood Live this Friday will feature one of the legends of our industry - the one and only Anoop Gupta, CEO of SeekOut, who will be showing us how Agentic the latest iteration of the SeekOut product is really is. Make sure you tune in folks or at least register for replay. We’re on 7th March, 1pm PT - register here

The Brainfood

1. Accelerating Europe (Part One) 2025

Trump 2.0 is an unwanted wake up call for European countries, who seem to have finally realised that cultural affinity is not the same as strategic interest. Expect more papers like this, calls for European re-energisation as an independent power in the global chessboard. One of the problems is lack of confidence, which Dealroom attempts to address here with exposition on real GDP comparisons & strengths of European innovation. Recruiter POV? There’s hiring to be had if Europe creates more tech unicorns.

ECONOMY

2. Anatomy of an AI o1 Prompt by Greg Brockman

If you want to get better at prompting then this simple structure by the President of (non)OpenAI is one of the most useful I’ve seen. In short: set the goal, define the output return, give warnings, then provide the context. Take a picture of this and internalise it.

AI

3. Ongoing and Worse Than We Thought: The White-Collar Downturn

Anyone working in the knowledge economy will no doubt have direct experience of what now seems to be a multi-year downturn. Analysis from Recruitonomics confirms what we mainly know already with interesting breakdown per country from US, UK, Germany and France. About 50% of the brainfooder community is working in tech - and tech hiring has been stagnant in those territories for this period of time. This not cyclical but the outcome of the end of ZIRP. Jacob Sten Madsen for the share in the online community

ECONOMY

4. How Real-World Businesses are Transforming with AI – with 50 New Stories

So all of this is advertorial for Microsoft AI products but seeing as every enterprise is the on MS stack anyway, I doubt they will acquire more customers as a result of my highlighting this resource here 🤣. Resource it is because this is a library of use cases which can help us think about how innovation can upgrade business operations. From a recruiters POV - think about how they might apply to the recruiter function, as well as how these changes shifts hiring demand in the organisation.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

5. How I Didn’t Deal with Professional Heartbreak

Have you ever had ‘professional heartbreak’? It’s got to be one of most under discussed phenomena in business.. A bad ending to a project you had emotionally invested in can have long lasting impact on personal health and later professional performance. Resonated with me (RIP WorkShape!) and I’m grateful for Brainfooder Ross Clennett for writing this post - must read, especially as many of us might now be considering the solopreneur / entrepreneur route.

PERSONAL BRANDING

6. Unmasking the AI Agent Myth: A Call to Clarity for HR Leaders

Brainfooder Martyn Redstone with an excellent overview on the what is or isn’t Agentic AI. I’ve argued myself that this is not a conversation we need to be overly concerned with, but its useful nevertheless to secure a deeper understanding of the developments in AI. Btw, I’m running a kind of unofficial ‘show and tell’ for vendors who are making Agentic AI claims. Juicebox went first last week, SeekOut coming this Friday.

AI

7. DEI Conversations Have Surged Four-fold Since January 21st..

A year ago, this headline would have meant something entirely different; in 2025, it refers to candidates modifying their job application and interview approach, according to inference of the policy position of the target employer. We’re talking about DEI not because we want to promote it, but because we’re uncertain whether we should say that we care. From Daniel Zhao, Economists at Glassdoor - have a read, this is where we’re at.

D&I

8. Autistic Man to Receive £20,000 from NHS after Refusal of Job Interview Adjustments

An inclusive recruitment culture recognises that systems that are unresponsive to individual needs are inherently discriminatory. How realistic might it be to be able to offer infinitely personalised experiences for every candidate and what would be a reasonable compromise? Furthermore, absent standardised assessment process, does ‘inclusion’ not also become ‘unfair’? The latter is a primary ideological foundation of the current Trump 2.0 moment, which has obviously gained significant political support. An interesting example from the UK illustrates the dilemma - where do you stand on this? H/T to brainfooder Charlotte Steggall in the online community

ASSESSEMENT

9. AI’s Battle of the Skills: Upskilling vs Deskilling

We often think that the outcome of using AI is that we become ‘upskilled’ but in fact the opposite may be occurring as we lose the ability to operate without AI once we’ve become overly used to it. Two articles on this topic last week, and here we have a third, more philosophical treatment of the concept. Brainfooder Laetitia Vitaud, with the ‘dual concept’ plus examples, plus projections on adverse impact along age and gender lines. Great read (and a reminder of an important question - who gains from the productivity of AI)

FUTURE OF WORK

10. Fastest Rejection Email I’ve Ever Seen

Recruiters get hammered for not getting back to candidate applications but can you sometimes get back too promptly? In this case, the applicant probably failed a KO question and might have been fairly rejected but the damage to CX is an overly prompt rejection is clear. My observation is that you should probably configure a delay in auto-reject but my community response has been that this is fundamentally dishonest. What do you think - what is the best way to handle justified rejections that protect CX and EB? Might be worth a Brainfood Live on this.

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

The Podcasts

11. Indeed Lifts Walled Garden

Not everyone’s cup of tea but Chad and Cheese remains the best podcast in the business - sharp, up to date industry coverage and commentary. Don’t be fooled by the rambunctiousness - there is serious analysis just underneath. Have a listen.

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

12. The Real Impact of Tariffs

Tariffs are getting thrown around like confetti and this will inevitably increase costs, especially if they are generalised tariffs. Sometimes we need a singular examples to better understand how it means.

ECONOMY

13. They Are Lying to You - How Statistics Can be False or Misleading

One of the reasons why trust in governments in democracies is so low (see Edelman Trust Barometer last week) is that political parties feel the pressure to communicate positive messages when they are in charge - often misusing statistics to present narratives which are remote from reality. It’s generally accepted that Biden / Harris strategy was guilty of this, leading in no small part to the Trump 2.0 moment we have today. How can we incentive more honest accounting? Absent this, it is up to use information consumers to just be more statistically literate.

ECONOMY

End Note

The NHS story got me thinking about the tension between inclusive hiring policy which requires respect for difference and ideally personalisation per candidate vs universal hiring policy which ignores difference and rolls out a standardised experience for every candidate. Which, do you think, is more fair?

Leave a comment

That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung