Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #254

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.

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There are not many people who think as well as they do. Brainfooder John Vlastelica is one of the few and his contributions are always worth paying attention to. Outstanding how-to for TA teams, especially ones who are scaling up. H/T to brainfooder Vidhya Sivaramakrishnan for the share.

Sex work is work, and this move by OnlyFans - likely forced upon them by payments providers who are keen to avoid liability risk of facilitating potentially criminal activities - is devastating news for the many thousands of creators who have made a living on the platform. The requirement for a blockchain based successor has never been more clear.

Brainfooder Anh Tran has produced some of the most popular posts in this newsletter - intelligent essays packed full of resources. Any TA person reviewing their recruiting process can benefit from reading his posts, this one on talent pipelining, being no exception. Must read

File this one under ‘cosmetic but important’. Shaan Puri with a fun thread, reviewing people’s ‘zoom call setup’. He’s no pro, but with your own eyes you can see what is better / worse. It’s a non-trivial concern - important for personal and employer branding (think how your hiring managers look on Zoom…)

Fascinating story of the recruitment techniques practiced by sororities at the University of Alabama. There’s everything here - limited vacancies, functional assessments, demonstrations of worth. Brainfooder Marie Herlihy takes us down a TikTok rabbit hole, which begs questions at every level; the ubiquity of ‘culture fit’ assessment, power dynamics inherent in the act of application and the outcomes for diversity and inclusion in wider society as graduates of sororities (and fraternities) graduate to the world of work. Must read

Github Copilot might be the biggest news in software engineering this year - essentially an intelligent typo correcting, code predicting AI, powered by the work of the millions of human programmers who have solved similar problems. Some think it is the end of the programmer; almost all think that it will drive the evolution of programming. So this is a fun exercise - can it actually get a job on its own?

Need the right sized image for your social media posts? I assure you this tool is going to be your best friend. One for the marketers and content creators. Free to use.

EmailAnalytics is a product surfaces up how your employers are talking and collaborating with each other on Gmail / Google Workspaces. This report is a monthly aggregate across the industry, so useful to benchmark for your team. Does your team receive too many emails? Do they spend too much time on chat? I guess now you can find out…..

More data aggregation, this time from our buddies Indeed, whose Hiring Lab blog is fast becoming a must read resource. This post tracks the direction employers are going on the employee choice vs employee right to safe workplace we discussed last week. It’s becoming increasingly, ‘no jab, no job’.

Fair to say I’m a AR / VR truther having found real value in the Occulus during lockdowns but I have to say, I think this is too soon a move for fb. Headsets are to unwieldy for every day use, so Workrooms will be relegated at best to episodic special occasion use. It’s an attempt at the post zoom future though, so we can applaud them for at least moving in that direction. H/T brainfooder Martyn Redstone for the share in the fb group

PS: looks like you can dial in via laptop so if anyone is up for joining a ‘Brainfood Workroom’ in the Metaverse - let me know….

If you’re going to have a meeting in virtual reality or reality reality then I think these tips are still going to apply. Best piece of advice? Don’t record the debates, record the agreed outcomes. Must read for anyone who wants to have better meeting notes

State-by-state analysis on which ones have the highest salaries for tech jobs. It will be fascinating to see how jobs migrate as distributed working becomes the norm for technology first companies. Will we see more companies adopt Google’s heavily lambasted location adjusted compensation schemes? Of course we will. H/T brainfooder Simon McSorley for the share in the fb group

Another post on pay - do you pay by the hour or by results? Most of us would probably say by results is the better formula, but this article presents a powerful counterargument that we are never going to be able to effectively align the incentives to make it work. Very interesting read - might be a good idea to collect together various compensation models into a single place for us to review.

When you sign a contract of employment you gain the security of being paid by one employer, in exchange for your freedom of being potentially paid by anyone else. Perhaps the resistance against remote working is ultimately a recognition that workers will be able to more easily circumvent this bad idea. Some have always done this - now there is a platform to help others to it too.

Were it not for the chaotic scenes in Kabul this past week, no doubt the central news would’ve been China’s continued experiments in large scale state interventions into the free market (Rui Ma probably best commentator on this). How about this idea to improve gender diversity in the workforce? Tax companies who don’t do meet their quotas.

Well there’s no doubt I need a make over so I’m going to listen to Leela Srinivasan’s wise words on brand refresh - from SurveyMonkey to Momentive.

Confession: I think this is often a forgivable error - we can’t get everyone’s name right, every time. However, we should perhaps better understand the impact of getting it wrong. Have a listen

A big yay for Anthropologists getting into the world of HR and recruiting. There are going to be some uncomfortable truth telling as academics bring cross cultural awareness into the corporate discourse, but we’re ready for that right?