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Friends,

As you receive this I should be in the air en route to Sydney. The past 6 weeks in South / SE Asia has been a blast - now its time for Phase 2 of this trip - March Down Under 🦘!

Dates currently are:

Sydney: 9th -15th March (13th March, People & Talent Summit, Fishburners, Wynyard Station. Tickets here (SPEAKER20)

Melbourne: 15th - 31st March (26-27 March, TalentPalooza, Abbotsford Convent, Tickets here (RECRUITINGBRAINFOOD)

Hope to see as many of you as a I can whilst I’m in Oz - reach out if you can’t make either of these two but want to connect some other way 👊

Thanks to: Kevin Green, Joey NK Koksal, Eugene van den Hemel, Dave Hazelhurst, Paul McCardle, Hannah Morgan, Donna Svei, Joel Cheesman, Jeremy A Lyons, Manasa Rangan, David Green, Ollie Henderson, Rene Robson, Martin Warren, John Kim, Jonathan Romley, Alessandro Pizzoferato, James Mills and Paul McCardle for your public support of all things brainfood - its the only marketing this newsletter gets 👊!

Can you help? Share this publication with your network and colleagues - thank you 🙏

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

Not sure what I expected with this poll but it seems pretty decisive that brainfooders prefer standardised assessment. From a operational efficiency POV, this is the correct choice though, we have to consider how this might negatively impact the differently abled. Tough trade off to make and an important one to mitigate. Thanks to everyone who voted - make sure you scroll down to the end of the newsletter and vote on this week’s poll 👊

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep296 - Ideal Structure for AI-Enabled Talent Acquisition, Friday 14th March, 12pm PST / 3pm EST / 7pm GMT

This is one of the shows which I’ve really been looking forward to doing - how do we structure the Talent Acquisition function when everyone is AI-enabled? How do AI Agents fit into a hybridized function? Nobody can know today, but lets get some big brains in the room to help us think through the options. We’re on Friday 14th March, 12pm PST. Register here

The Brainfood

1. 50 Thoughts on DOGE

DOGE is not the only game in town but it is a fascinating experiment in organisational change. Dispassionate analysis is hard on these topics but OP seems to have achieved it here, with some credible observations on ‘the big idea’, as well as critique on the implementation. The insight that Federal RIF would require ‘last in, first out’ policy means that the most recent hires would be the ones most likely to be let go, leaving an even more densely entrenched employee base in US Fed Gov, defeating one of DOGE’s own stated objectives. A good essay if you want a mix of general theme + digestible detail.

NB: We are talking about DOGE, US Gov and Future of TA & HR in Brainfood Live - register here.

CULTURE

2. Real Time TA Jobs

This might be the best single source of TA jobs going - a simple self updating google spreadsheet set up by brainfooder Aaron Lintz. I’m not sure if I’ve shared it here before but shame on me if I haven’t (sorry Aaron!) - everyone needs to be bookmark this sheet and share it with your friends in industry.

ECONOMY

3. Why LLM-Based Agents Must Be Assessed Like a Workforce, Not Just Software

Sometimes you casually decide to read some obscure blog and it’s only halfway down that you realise that it’s a hidden gem. This post from Daniel Rodriguez is one such - starts off with an important concept (if AI Agents are co-workers, they should be measured as such), then goes on to explain exactly how he would do it, inadvertently giving us a blueprint to do the same when AI Agents come into TA (see Crowdcast demo series, they are already here). Putting this down as a must read folks…I think we are going to keep referring back to this one.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

4. ‘Let’s Start with the Easy One….Resume Screening’

Sam Altman - purportedly planning to announce a $20,000 per month (!) subscription for Specialist AI Agents - must be getting tired of being gazumped by breakthrough products from previously unknown startups doing it for a fraction of the price. Manus is the new AI Agent which can take over your browser and do stuff for you. You can even submit tasks to Manus and it’ll deliver for it* for you for free right now, as they are building case study. Somebody give it a sourcing requirement…

AI

5. How Skills-focused Hiring Could Change the Shape of the Labour Market

Skills Based Hiring seems like it’s gone out of fashion along with ‘Rules Based International Order’ these days, so good to see LinkedIn try and resurface it, this time with a refocus on original mission of SBH, which was to thicken the top-of-funnel. Report here suggests SBH would alleviate talent shortage and increase gender diversity in many talent short roles, though how the numbers were derived requires close examination - looks like its mainly skills adjacency and getting rid of degrees. Also does not account for motivations - there is strong evidence that men and women choose different career paths, especially in advanced economies.

ASSESSMENT

6. We Compared Eight AI Search Engines. They’re All Bad at Citing News.

Sourcing evolved because online systems were not able to understand human language instructions to efficiently retrieve human capital data, forcing us humans to learn the pseudo computer language of boolean operators. The advent of AI may change this, but it seems that there is still some way to do go, as this interesting piece of comparative research on 8 AI search engines demonstrates, none of which come up to par.

SOURCING

7. World Energy Employment 2024

One of the mega trends which is under covered in our the recruitment space is energy transition; This report from IEA comprehensively covers the sectors and regions which employ the most people, and which are projected to grow. Solar panels are plentiful but the bottleneck is skilled Installation Engineers. Recruitment work for somebody here, especially agency side - have a read.

ECONOMY

8. Once You're Laid Off, You'll Never Be the Same Again

I suspect we deeply underestimate the long term psychological impact of being laid off. This essay from a recently laid of software engineer is thoughtful, well reasoned and depressingly irrefutable - the decision is likely made by somebody who doesn’t even know you. His observation that ‘personal performance doesn’t matter’ particularly rings home, because it could be you’re just directed to work on a project which is later abandoned; you get tossed out with it. Question for us: how to assess psychologically injured candidates like these?

CULTURE

9. I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats

All technology innovation has a deskilling effect. What happens if the skills that are being unused, unpractised is the ability to think? University lecturer with a powerful lament on student use of AI in generating essays. It comes with an implied warning that all of this will mainly make use more stupid. On the recruitment side, this is an ongoing debate - what are we hiring for exactly? Deep, internalised knowledge or just a human operator of an AI, which is the thing which really provides the output?

ASSESSMENT

10. Returning to the Office? Focus More on Practices than Policy

Remote working is being rolled back almost as fast as DEI - identified by the Trumpian right as facets of the same liberalism which they aim to extirpate. Employers might be seeing the new political climate differently from employees - RTO is easier to argue with the President of the US endorses it. McKinsey with a report on how to at least make the most of it.

REMOTE WORKING

The Podcasts

11. Navigating Trump’s EO’s on DEI

No one better than brainfooder Heather Bussing to discuss the chaotic reversal of DEI in the US. I know this is a painful moment for many of our community, and I really appreciate people like Heather taking time to support community members with her contribution. Probably need Heather on the show on the 21st - will you join?? Anyways, have a listen here

D&I

12. Vibe Coding

It’s both ironic and perhaps no surprise that software engineering would be the first discipline to experience significant disruption to how the job is done. Software engineers are no longer doing much coding, but instead giving instructions to AI Copilots and conversing with it to produce functions. This is vibe coding - how are we meant to assess for this, when hiring for software engineers?

FUTURE OF WORK

13. Tech Talent Trends in 2024 and Beyond

The one where we talk about the carcinisation of recruitment revenue models (pay on hire is inevitable!), GoPro’s on footballers heads, bifurcation of the hiring funnels on inbound / outbound and more. Fun chat with brainfooders Sam Berthoud and Mark Chaffey, on what is fast becoming one of the best podcasts in our space - subscribe for tech hiring trends.

RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING

End Note

I have been thinking about AI and how this might impact ‘Hiring Manager Self Serve’.

AI is going to enable HM to do more of the lifting because the weight of the work will be lighter due to AI. Doing a show on this later this month (register here), but wanted to get your view on how much or little you think HM recruiting work increase due to better AI tools.

If you voted, why do you think this? Comment below, it would worth starting a conversation on this!

Leave a comment

That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung