Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #250

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How do you go about recruiting in China? I spoke to employer brand consultants, career coaches, headhunters and recruitment managers based in China to find out. Needless to say, if you’re hiring in China now or in future, this twitter thread here is for you.

Our failure to predict catastrophic outcomes boils down to misunderstanding how systems actually work in the real world. Complexity Science or at least ‘complexity mindset’ is something we all have to get better at, especially when we implement policies which sound like a good idea at local level, only to have countervailing impact at a higher and broader level. This interactive guide as good as I’ve seen for an introduction - comprehensive, accessible and beautifully executed. It has got some cool games too 😊. Worth 10 minutes of your time and must read if we want to get better at making big decisions. Check it out here

Nice data visualisation of the top 100 companies by market cap. By country, US has by far the largest number, followed a distant second by China, then even further back, by everyone else. Division by industry within country is more interesting though - how big of a technology slice do you have? Original research from PwC, downloadable here

Following on from last week‘s super popular sourcing presentation by brainfooder Alla Pavlova, I’m going to repeat the trick and highlight another fantastic sourcing presentation, from one of the greats, brainfooder Irina Shamaeva. This one is on sourcing software engineers on Github. You would otherwise pay good money for this type of training, so have at it here

Few people in our business contribute more than my friend, your friend, everybody’s friend - Lars Schmidt. 300+ hand curated resources on everything you got to know on HR / TA. Must read

This is really good resource for tech recruiters who are on intake meetings with hiring managers. Written from the perspective of job seekers and they questions they should ask before joining the team. It’s a fascinating exercise in perspective, whilst also getting inside knowledge of things that really matter in a developers work environment. Must read for tech recruiters

This new tool allows you to create alerts for when your favourite influencer appears in a podcast, writes a newsletter, gets interview on TV. Neat idea, and a potentially a good way to improve our collective ‘information diet’. Be even cooler if it could be curated (imagine one of these dedicated to brainfooders….)

What do you get when you ask 500 HR folks and 2000 employees the same set of questions about how they feel about their work? Some interesting narrative divergence that’s what. Accessible survey by our buddies Personio, free to access here.

Wonderful turn of phrase in this short essay on one of the key problems of any kind of communication - how much of our intent is accurate conveyance of information vs ulterior acquisition of social capital? Too little of the former, too much of the latter. OP has the antidote: dependable candour

Internal DEI report from Glassdoor. The key figures is going to be ‘rate of change’ which hopefully we will be able to see as we go YoY. Of course, even better might be some sort of realtime service tracking workforce composition…..anyone build this?

There’s a been a lot of mobility in the labour market in 2021 - especially for TA / HR pro’s where the market seems to be white hot. Few of us actually write about the off-board though, and how to do this properly. Good job brainfooder Clive Smart has. Excellent post on what to do when you’ve decided to leave.

Extraordinary footage of avatar operators recording a music single, whilst performing the song in haptic suits. My mind is blown so I’m not even sure I’m getting the words right to describe what I’m seeing. Ready Player One? Not.At.All. But lets do it anyway

Some questionable data (digital nomad visa for Australia - say what?) and incoherent categorisation (public safety + human rights surely are separate, even antagonistic categories yet considered to be one and the same here) on this index of remote working locations, but I include here as I think it is a good example of the sort of presentation and interface we need when creating tables of any kind - rankable, sortable, easy to use. Just needed better data science at the top of the funnel. H/T to brainfooder Jo McCatty for the share in the fb group

Somewhat under-the-radar update on Google for Jobs data schema, designed to reduce the steps required for a candidate to apply for a job discovered on GfJ. Google’s own technical update here, Chad and Cheese with a podcast overview here, Search Engine Land with a good post overview and brainfooder Steve Rothberg with an excellent breakdown of what it means for job boards and employer brand experts.

Curiously under appreciated blog post, which manages to take a much discussed argument and give it a few new wrinkles, specifically that we have ingrained WFH / WFA whether we like it or not. Persuasive commentary on where we are at.

Some occupations disproportionately open up more future opportunities than others. So it would seem to make sense to create more of these ‘gateway occupations’ to enable greater social mobility for the millions of workers most vulnerable to workforce automation. Important research from McKinsey&Co

Excellent interview with Mark Zuckerberg on the future direction of what may be the most unfairly maligned tech company on the planet. It’s going to be the “metaverse,” folks - a future that imagines an internet that combines physical, augmented, and virtual realities. FB will not be the only business building toward this future, so expect this to be a booming sector(s) for hiring. Listen or read, transcription is excellent.

Sathnam Sanghera - author of the excellent EmpireLand - changes tack here to investigate how children can compete with machines for jobs in the future. Short, insightful, optimistic listen

Retail, not travel, is going to be the sector most changed by Covid-19. The pandemic has made the job more dangerous and more obviously that the workers, were always getting a raw deal. 5 minute listen, short essay is readable on its own too.