Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #274

This week’s brainfood is supported by our buddies KANDIDATE

How can you hit your hiring targets in 2022? 

Kandidate super powers your talent team by embedding a Sourcer on a fixed fee monthly contract. The Sourcer will find the top 50-100+ passive candidates for each role by using competitor mapping, advanced search techniques (Boolean, X Ray, Social) and multiple tools and engage candidates by personalising the outreach. 

We support Talent Teams at Airwallex, ZenCargo, Kairos Aerospace, Zoomo and 50+ scaleups. Check details here and get a demo!

Outstanding example of showing rather than telling from our friends at Stories Inc. 12 types of story your business can use, illustrated with examples and insightful commentary. If you need to up your EB game (hint: you probably do…) in 2022, this post will be an essential reference resource.

I recommended Sahil has one of the ‘folks to follow in 2022’ in last week TWIR, and threads like this is the reason why. The man has mastered the ability to condense how-to guides into practical posts which are thrilling to read. The 5 component framework here on what constitutes a great cold email is a great example - it’s do-it-today advice any recruiter use. Follow on twitter here, read the post here.

Takes a while to get there, but this interview with Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, the company which makes half the websites on the Internet, is an outstanding insight into a mission led business. If you’re interested in organisational culture and values driven leadership, make time for this great read.

Significant move from LinkedIn, who finally enter the audio space after watching Clubhouse, Twitter and even Facebook blaze the trail. Don’t expect too much innovation on the product here, but none will be needed as the reach will be enough to ensure this will be a success. Not sure if Brainfood will do anything with this, though maybe we should. Any ideas on what / how? PS: Follow me on LinkedIn here if you want to be updated on this

H/T brainfooders Garry Turner and Jamie Leonard for the share in the fb group

Is this the most accurate signal we have on whether hiring is actually happening or not? It’s much better than job ad volume. Or anything else I can think of. The December insights report from LinkedIn’s Workforce Insights newsletter is interesting (hiring cooling btw, likely due to Christmas + Omicron), but I include it in here mainly to raise awareness of the LHR measurement - seems like a metric we should all be more familiar with.

Useful how-to for those of us who want to create better relationships with colleagues who are have been diagnosed with ADHD. Written for the pre-pandemic world so much of the advice addresses synchronised in-person interactions, but many of the recommendations would seem be good management practice for any team member, in any context. Have a read. Also, very good conversation thread on working with neurodiverse colleagues here

H/T brainfooder Jeroen Kneppers for the share

Pt II follow up to one of the viral posts of 2021, Why Restaurants Are So F*cked, Restauranteur Joelle Parenteau documents the challenges pandemic has brought to the food industry in the style of a latter day Anthony Bourdain. On labour cost, supply chain, perishable stock and underpaid jobs which no one wants to do anymore, it’s a scintillating read.

Do you do an Annual Review? I don’t, though I probably should. Seems to me like a reasonable exercise to do if you want to consciously work on the things in your life that you want to improve. Also thought this might be a pretty cool team building exercise to do with colleagues. Contains ‘Wheel of Life’ template, a bonus. H/T to brainfooder Deborah Caulet for the share

Magic seems to happen when non-specialists address hiring issues through the lens of their own niche expertise. Graham Duncan, VC and therefore recruiting consigliere to many a startup, weaves together parable, metaphor and science in this amazing long read on how to assess for talent.

I’m going to make a prediction that two ostensibly progressive ideas - salary transparency in job ads + location agnosticism for the work - are going to collide, and ultimately prove untenable with each other. The impact is going to be far deeper than we are currently able to imagine, including - maybe - the abandonment of adverts as a means of talent attraction.

EY conducted a pre and post (not really post as we’re still very much in pandemic, but ya know what I mean) survey on Gen Z, so have some interesting data on how their values have changed. Essential reading for anyone hiring for early career talent, which I think is going to be most of us, as the struggle to hire experience isn’t going to be alleviated any time soon

“Digital body language” is such an important concept to embed into our communication behaviour. Great deal of this advice is about being more conscientious on how we ask questions, how we respond to questions, as too often we just externalise without thinking… ‘how can this be read?’ It’s more work to do before we press send, but also great training for a skill we all have to get better at. Must read folks.

How do top tech employers structure career progression for software engineers? Here they are - some of them at least - publicly sharing how they do it. Wonder whether this type of thing might be useful for recruiters; I suspect we don’t conventionally create departments large enough to justify it. Useful for tech recruiters, in any case.

Pretty sure no one in recruiting has researched this but I like the thinking of leading with the self vs the organisation. It’s taking ownership, there’s no delegation of responsibility. Customer service insight which we might well apply to job candidates

Any job where the primary content of the work is routine diligence on specified tasks is going to be automated. This example from Vanke made me think about the elements of routine diligence recruiters / HR people have to perform - how big a percentage of our work is this type of work? We had better reduce the surface area of disintermediation and move up the value chain.

So here’s why salary transparency isn’t going to fly with location agnosticism. Employers will price remote anywhere jobs so that they can only be done in countries with lower cost-of-living. This will lead to job flight for any kind of work which can be done remotely. As OP says, ‘small, stable countries with favourable timezones’ have a once in a century opportunity. It should mean a more equitable world though - and a moral test for those of us in the global north as to whether we walk the talk when it comes to global DEI.

Been hearing a great deal about Ray Dalio’s new book Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail, so I thought I would tune into an interview with him to get the gist, and it turned into a fascinating discussion on macro trends, the relationship between internal & external tension - and the contradictions of having a sovereign currency as simultaneously the global reserve.

Jeff Dickey-Chasins runs through the state of the job board industry, from January to January. Fantastic way to catch up on all the job board / recruitment tech news that you might’ve missed last year. Have a listen here

Recently discovered Esther Perel - she has an amazing facility with language, the ability to turn a phrase which so vividly describes how we are feeling. Here she talks about techniques on management ‘ambiguous stress’. It’s really good. She is really good. Have a watch here