Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #272

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So the biggest thing I did in 2021 was start This Week, In Recruiting. It was one of those gut feel decisions which made no sense at the time - who else writes two different newsletters, on consecutive days 🤣?

We are 40 issues in already (Issue No41, tomorrow), clocking in at 18,333 subscribers, with circa 150+ new subs per week. It’s not the biggest newsletter on LinkedIn - nor likely the best - but I think it fulfils a role and I’m glad I did it.

Firstly, I felt that owed it to the community to cast more of an opinion on matters which I felt were not being adequately or accurately covered by others. I am careful to maintain the curators position here - of selecting for quality rather than alignment (the two often overlap but not always) - but that can sometimes leave a gap where things that should’ve been said were left unsaid. It’s the only place where I do any original writing so if you want to check it out, the most popular posts this year were Hybrid, A Bad Idea We’re Going To Do Anyway, Performance Cages, Let’s Talk About Coasian Constraints and Why You Should Quit Your Recruiter Job.

Secondly, I wanted to use the space to publicly answer most common FAQ’s I get from the community. Most of these are actually about my work, so hence ‘Open Kitchen’ is the name of the essay segment as a reminder to me to always be open as possible about how the sausages are made in Recruiting Brainfood. I hope it helps illuminate any dark corners that may exist in RBF, and it might be useful for anyone following a similar path or using similar techniques for different ends.

Finally, I needed to do a better job amplifying the news, initiatives, stories, opportunities and offers from other members of the community. I can’t do this in RBF, as priority is always to respect the audience’s time and therefore only deliver the best of the most relevant. However, community news is important - it just needs to be in a different place. Hence, it happens next day, with This Week, In Recruiting…

Anyways, I hope you’re enjoying it, because I’m going to keep writing it. You’re welcome to subscribe here if you haven’t already.

By around Q2 this year, it became pretty obvious that the market for recruiters had performed a complete 180 degree heel turn from the year previous - everyone was hiring recruiters and nobody was having a great time doing it.

Pallet approached me to launch a job board tailored to the brainfood community and after another quarter of prevaricating, I finally decided to do it, launching Brainfood Jobs in August this year.

It’s been a resounding success; 100+ of employers have posted jobs, 700+ job seekers have subscribed and at least 7 (count ‘em!) brainfooders have found jobs with new employers via the board.

It’s cost free for job seekers (or job curious) so sign up, configure your preferences, and for employers - like everything I do at brainfood - it is super accessible pricing - post for as little as $100. If you’re growing your recruiter team for 2022, do it out here

We actually managed to do 49 Brainfood Lives in 2021 - our highest number we’ve ever done, missing only the last two weeks of the year (as they fell and fall on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve respectively), as well as one cancellation which I had to make for personal reasons.

There is a ton of people I need to thank for this, but most especially my regular co-host Adam Gordon, without whom this consistency would not have been met.

We’re up to 1726 channel followers now, which I think might make it the biggest ‘indie’ channel on Crowdcast. We’re going to do the same again for 2022 - every Friday, we’re going to gather together half a dozen recruiter / HR types to talk live on air about a topic the community cares about.

January schedule is already up, so check out the programming here, follow the channel here (recommended) and register for the shows you want to contribute to here.

PS: if you wanna guest, or have a topic suggestion, email me in reply to this newsletter!

That’s how I sell it anyway 🤣.

How brilliant it really is depends on how the Brainfood Live has gone hours before, as the podcast is the audio file from the conversation we’re having on livestream. I know a lot of you prefer audio only, especially given the length of the lives (1hr+), so it’s actually a more popular channel than Brainfood Live. I think 100,000 downloads so far on this - probably more as I only have figures that exclude Spotify and ITunes, where you can also listen to the show.

I might try and improve the production quality in 2022, but no promises. You can listen to it on Podbean, Spotify or ITunes.

I have been doing more on Twitter this year. After 10 years of being on the platform, I think I’ve finally figured out how I’m going to be useful here. Inspired by Ethan Mollick, I’m going to read recruiting reports, screenshot the interesting bits and summarise the findings in mini-tweet threads.

There is also Twitter Spaces - community audio - which is begging for a Brainfood idea. If you have any thoughts on this, reply to this newsletter and let me know.

Anyways, feel free to follow my account here if you tweet or want to get information via twitter this way.

Did you know that there is an online community for brainfooders? 4427 members are part of this private facebook group, which we use to talk about brainfood topics, crowdsource questions to the community or even share cool content that often ends up ‘making it’ to this newsletter.

Facebook is very far from cool these days, but I’m pretty certain it is still the most practically accessible channel for most of us here. If you want to get involved and connect to other members, do so here.

Most people are still amazed when they see this - not because it is a particularly amazing implementation as it’s a simple automated web scrape of the online versions of the newsletter, but because they didn’t know it even existed.

It’s up to 4667 articles now, searchable by category and keyword (title, commentary)

Bottom line, it is a searchable archive of every article ever posted in Recruiting Brainfood. If you’ve ever wanted to retrieve that article you thought you saw in a newsletter a couple weeks ago, the Brainfood Larder is your best friend - free to use, feel free to bookmark it.

So this is one of those ideas which was needed for at the time - mid 2020, when it seemed that everyone was losing their jobs and the community needed a talent directory which those employers who were hiring could use. 1364 members signed up, actually a few of confirmed jobs secured through the Brainfood Hall of Fame initiative.

Doesn’t cost me much to run, so I might just leave it up there, but its one of those ideas which needs further development or near future deprecation

The Brainfood Tribune emerged at a similar time to the Hall of Fame - in the early phase of economic lockdown, stay-at-home mandates and mass job losses. We needed a way to be more connected with each other absent the normal means of doing so, and having members tell their personal stories in this way turned out to be a great way to do it.

Exactly 100 community members have done it so far - and for next year, I will be looking for more. If you want to do something challenging, vulnerable and worthwhile, reply to this newsletter and let me know how to get in touch with you

So these tableaus have been up there for a few years now, updated weekly as the subscriber base grows. They’ve held up really well, so kudos to cousin Stephen Li for hacking these together back in the day when he had no roof over his head and had to be couch rent with this work 🤣

We’re tracking geography on each of these visualisations so I’ll be very interested to see the impact of remote in our community - will we stop clustering into great metropolitan centres and become more widespread to smaller towns and villages in country, and beyond?

Unfortunately, not able to time lapse any changes of location on this, because it would be a pretty interesting video to shoot.

Check out cities, countries, gender, seniority and employer demographics.

Once the most popular resources in the brainfood portfolio, I’m afraid these Big Lists have suffered somewhat from neglect over these past two years. Covid-19 has proven to be a massive disruptor of ‘business as usual’ for a lot of businesses and thought brainfood has weathered the storm better than most, the Big Lists are definitely an element which has suffered because of it.

Confession: I’m not sure what I should do with this - crowdsourcing is amazingly effective, but there is quality of the data decays over time and I need to find a better way to maintain and update the info contained within.

Also: I’m not sure what whether it is worthwhile updating the Events Big List, as do we include virtual events (if so, the list could conceivably be too big as every webinar might qualify) or maintain hard line for in-person only (in which case the list might still be vanishingly small).

If you got any ideas on this, I’m all ears.

Having an automated version of me giving out canned responses via WhatsApp seemed like a wonderful idea at the time 🤣

And for a time, it did work pretty good, as our buddies at Talkpush (thanks Max!) hooked us up with a whitelabel version of their product to provide a usable service that community members could interrogate for information.

However: ‘RoboHung’ was not ubiquitous when he needed to be, and was only available as a WhatsApp contact, which very few people actually added and fewer still pinned to the top of their feed.

So people basically forgot about it, until I seeded engagement by sending out a mass message.

It taught me a lot about how we use chatbots and how a future implementation - RoboHung 2.0 - needs to be done.

It’s still up there if you want to have a go, but I think Twilio might have disconnected the service.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a way to pulse a question out to the community and get a thumbs up / down response from the members? We need to find a better way to understanding the sentiment of the community, one which is not dominated by the voices with the greatest social capital but where every member can have a say. I need something like an invite-only thumb - does anyone know of one?

PS: maybe this does indeed become the app that ends up getting built

I probably need to refresh the homepage. It’s a Wordpress instance which is ok, but the typeface annoys me and the time for dark mode might be here. Brainfood has never really had a brand - and I think will always be somewhat ramshackle and ‘enthusiastic amateur’ in ethos - but I basically need to make the damn thing easier to read for people who are going to spend ever more time looking at screens.

Anyone got any design recommendations, let me know

Is anyone doing this? We have a massive recruiter shortfall and we need to get more people into the industry. This is what the survey What Do Recruiters Want? was fundamentally about - how to design to recruiter jobs that the next generation of recruiters might want to do.

Here’s the idea: someone organises a load of employers who need to hire recruiters, who each stump up £X to create an Amazon Day like hiring day, where we test for aptitude, select the best to attend a full time bootcamp, the graduates of which get guaranteed jobs at employers who had contributed.

Repeat: anyone going to do this?

I basically use Occulus to play Beat Saber in order to keep warm in winter nights, so I need to expand what I am doing in VR, especially as it is clearly a place of anthropological interest. I have no idea how many of us have a VR headset - guesttimate would be less than 1% - but for those of us who have, then feel free to add me as friend on althunglee. 2022 should see the first really virtual gathering on brainfood in the metaverse

There is something of value to an audio only show, with an open audience. My early experience of Clubhouse was excellent and I think Twitter Spaces can offer similar value at much greater scale. I particularly like the idea that - as a place where speech is live, it is also a place where speech must practically be freer of constraint and moderation which asynch communication is increasing subjected to. What am I going to do Twitter Spaces which isn’t already happening in other places? You let me know

I’ve talked about Steph before on this newsletter, chances are I will do again as she is basically providing live action role play on how to generate income in the creator economy. Her innovation of e-book+live event+ongoing community building is a demonstration on how publishing is going to work in future. She may be a genius. On twitter, so follow her here.

There is nobody that writes LinkedIn posts like Richard Claydon. An organisation effectiveness consultant, Richard writes thought provoking essays within the LinkedIn 1300 character limit which always seem to present new angles to old domains. He is based in Hong Kong, so timezones prevent his name from being more widely known in Europe and US, but trust me, he deserves to be. Follow or connect.

A theoretical physicists with a gift for communication, Sabine styles her youtube channel as “science without the gobbledygook,” - no hype, no spin, no tip-toeing around inconvenient truths. If you ever wanted to learn about quantum mechanics, string theory and whether gravity is actually a force or not, then this is a channel for you. Subscribe

If you want practical, do-it-today tips on how to improve your conversions, this TikTok channel by Mike Manzi is a must follow. Had the pleasure of meeting Mike when he was VP of Sales at our buddies Workable and was amazed to discover his activity on TikTok. His chat is absolute fire - lot of recruiters will get value from the tips and techniques. Follow his page

Orphaned kid, military veteran and Ph.D candidate at the Oxford University, Rob reviews literature and research on human psychology and posts referenced excerpts on Twitter. Fascinating, challenging and worthwhile account to follow, so follow.