Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #288

This week’s brainfood is supported by our buddies HackerRank.

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This guide includes:

This is actually a remarkable statistic - for the first time ever, applications to Remote Job postings exceed 50% of the total number of applications on LinkedIn, despite making up only 20% of the total job ad volume. Lots of reasons why this is - lower cost-of-discovery for the applicant, lower cost-of-switching should the applicant take the job and ultimately lower risk to the applicant if the job turns out to be dud. On-premise cannot compete with full remote. Have a read

I dislike rankings most of the time, but this one comes from LinkedIn’s proprietary data and is an attempt to quantify company culture. For example, one of the ranking factors is ‘how long an employee stays at an employer’ used a signal to score employee care. That Amazon rank No1 should tell us a lot about how media narratives are shaped to tell stories rather than truths. H/T to brainfooder Colin McNicol in the fb group

I’m twitter a lot (follow me here, mainly for dinosaurs), but I don’t actually do a lot of searching on it. Maybe I should because there are some interesting, yet non-intuitive ways to find user profile data, as Tessa Davis here explains with an excellent short thread on the search techniques.

Magnificent essay on the ‘history of burnout’. OP reviews the literature on the topic and summarises the key tomes which connect the emergence of the condition as an available diagnosis with socio-economic trends of the post-war economy. It’s a wonderful read for anyone interested in sociology, economic history and the mythology of work and identity.

One for the ‘I hope you are well’ merchants, this list of email cliches to clean out of your writing habits is probably more important than it looks - overly using common phrases signals laziness to to receiver and is an almost anti-customisation. Probably has a negative effect on engagement, so get rid. H/T to brainfooder Denys Dinkevych 🇺🇦 for the share.

Quite a cool summary series from HBR - a collection of the most recent studies, with conclusions included as summary, as well as linking to the original material. As ever with studies on gender, the challenge the is less what is happening more why it does happen, what it means and what to do about it.

So more on Twitter, which is clearly a theme of today’s newsletter. This cool tool breaks down a users behaviour on the platform, surfacing up interesting details which can be used for a) identifying potential red flags on job candidates or b) identifying some icebreakers to use when you do outreach. H/T brainfooder Alla Pavlova for the awesome find.

Fascinating post on a cognitive bias which is under examined, particularly when it comes to candidate assessment. We all profess a commitment to ‘hiring for values’ or ‘hiring for attitude’ but our revealed preferences suggests that we too are often guilty of green lumber fallacy. Superb reading.

Employment law is changing all over the US, and for the most part, the direction of travel is increasing worker protections. That most of the these laws are happening at state rather than federal level can make it confusing even for US brainfooders to navigate, hence why this website comes in super handy.

Critique of the concept of ‘cultural fit’, which I suspect is already pretty much the ideological consensus in our industry. However, certain criticism are accepted without examination - what for instance, is so bad about ‘hiring for status quo’? For certain hires, maybe that is exactly what you need. The counter counter culture starts here.

Not sure how useful this tool is but I am a sucker for any search engine which has a map based UI. Ostensibly designed for freelancers / students to identify which companies use the technologies they practice, I’m pretty sure that the main user base of this website are going to tech recruiters looking for source sites for candidates or leads for business development. Take a look here

Is the Twitter thread the next ‘talent database’? This is a pretty good example - and I think - a superior way of doing it compared to a custom built website, especially if your manager has significant audience. See how each tweet naturally becomes a cameo portrait of the employee. Pretty cool huh?

An interesting conundrum on age-ism. It is very clear that older workers experience discrimination in the job market (see ‘dinobabies’ from IBM) and it is also clear that there are inevitable biological processes which are going to change our capabilities as workers. What if it is the case that our creativity generally peaks at 25? We need to find a way to integrate all members of our population into society and workforce; denial of biological reality is going to be hard way to do it. One to chew over the online campfire that is brainfood live.

The push / pull factor of both employers and employees wanting great flexibility is reshaping the world of work. If the 9 to 5 no longer offers security, when a great deal of the value of it disappears. A lot of people want to hedge their income streams, and whether this is misplaced confidence or not, it is the reality of the hiring landscape today. ‘Employers’ have to lean into this and design career journeys that include workers oscillating in / out of FTE with them. Have a read here

We have an evolving relationship with public shaming, a powerful tool for moderating behaviour and - depending on whether that behaviour is proscribed or endorsed - we see mobilisation of the masses to produce apps like this. Or maybe it is less about the behaviour and more about who is doing the behaving? Corporations are obviously fair game, because we have the urge to stick it to the man. One for the EB folks to look out for.

Great conversation between brainfooder Damon Klotz and Minda Harts, founder of The Memo, and author of the book by the same name. Outstanding lessons on how to create a truly inclusive company culture. Have a listen here.

Interesting podcast from Reid Hoffman, whose 1-5 recommendations are not really that surprising, but are superbly illustrated with observations from A-Listers that only someone that Hoffman could secure. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share.

Brainfooder Jessica Miller-Merrell on the awesome Workology podcast. This is an excellent conversation with Wesley Faulkner on workplace diversity and equality. Have a listen here