Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #247

This weeks brainfood is supported by our buddies Workable. More than an applicant tracking system, Workable’s talent acquisition software helps teams find candidates, evaluate applicants and make the right hire, faster.

Start your free trial here

The innocuous sounding launch of GitHub Copilot belies its enormous potential. Here’s how it works: based on what you type, Copilot will predict what you are trying to do and automatically recommend code based on the aggregate of code other developers have used to solved similar problems.It will massively speed up software development, standardise a great deal of solution engineering, drastically reduce input errors - and very likely - change the nature of software engineering. Relevant to all of us here, especially advocates of ‘teaching kids to code’

HN thread here, whilst other developers have been more slightly more emphatic with the implications.

Going into the dark with brainfooder Iwan Gulenko, ex-programmer turned tech recruiter, on why the job is (or can be depressing) - and what you can do about it. Excellent reading, and a topic which perhaps is not discussed enough (i.e is it the very nature of the job which makes it so?)

The coming trauma of hybrid is at root a tension between two fundamentally opposed ways of organising work - centralised vs decentralised, or more aggressively, headed vs acephalous. Long list of companies who are doing it the acephalous way, complete with their handbooks of how they do it. Must read

H/T to brainfooder Aaron Lintz for the share in the fb group

I’ve been refocused on Twitter lately, and I think the threading feature has great potential for delivering written content. I’ll be doing more original content over there, so feel free to follow my page if you want to get this stuff first. It has got me thinking about sourcing though, as very few of us actually use the platform for candidate discovery. This post from brainfooder Alexey Geht is a great guide on how to get started.

This is about ‘collaboration intensity’ folks, and ONA is the way to figure out to what degree. Great read on how to use evidence based decision to determine who needs to return to the office.

How is competition for tech talent is changing compensation? Remote work now becoming default, with company commitment to it becoming a green or red flag for candidates. Easy reading.

56 ‘delta’s (Distinct Elements of Talent) from Mckinsey&Co, skills that you need as a citizen in a future that - lets face it - is already here. The self reported results is less interesting than the skills table themselves - a decent guide for personal / team development. Have a read

Are you guilt of using jargon in your job adverts? Canva researched over 40 million job ads to identify which industries and which states were most guilty of ‘taking it to the next level’. Fun bit of research - have a read

Will your business survive the inevitable trough of disillusionment? Excellent short thread of where we are with hybrid work, what the predictable challenges are going to be, and some speculation as to what outcomes will endure.

In the week where Tim Berners-Lee sold the source code for the World Wide Web via a $5.4 million NFT, it probably makes sense to review what the hell NFT’s are, and why they matter for the world of work. Accessible slide deck taking from the basics of Blockchain all the way up the value chain to non-fungibility. H/T brainfooder Pedro Oliveira for the share

It’s about experts leading experts. 3 key components for leadership at Apple

Long read but worth it for anyone interested in cultivating excellence in company culture.

Fascinating research from Switzerland which tracked how recruiters selected candidates on an online job platform. Discrimination (in this case, against a-typical candidate names) is worse at the end of the work day. Hypothesis? Recruiters get tired, want to log off and reduce cognitive load by relying more on bias. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share.

Outstanding essay on collaboration, feedback, office politics and ‘non-contingent advice’. Again from the world of software development (why does all the best stuff come from there?) but applicable to any field where you need to work with others. Now the question is: are you a hedgehog or are you a fox?

Promising directory by the Royal Society on cool innovations exploring the future of work. European data, useful to explore though volume of records currently is low. Take a look - if you’re doing something cool in the space, presumably you can ask to be included.

Creating league tables of anything outside of team sports is a pejorative act. But I can’t deny that MIT Sloan’s ‘Culture 500’ comparator is a great implementation of a bad idea. Cool tool to have a play with, and maybe useful as a guideline on how company cultures can be measured.

The narrative of gig workers being entirely without agency is belied by this story of workers using their own apps to figure out how to get better outcomes from the platforms. H/T brainfoder Charlie Oliver for the share

Part 4 of the series by Chad and Cheese to celebrate Pride month. Worth a listen to each of these episodes here, hosted by two of the best to do it.

Chole Valdary is a voice many more of us need to pay attention to. By re-orientating change around compassion rather than combat, she offers a way out of the culture wars currently consuming the discourse in the Western world. Follow her twitter and listen to her talk with Simon Sinek, here. H/T brainfooder Garry Turner for the share