Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 317

It's recruiting brainfood for your week ahead.

Nov 06, 2022

This week’s brainfood is supported by our buddies, Join Talent

Have you heard about Join Talent's amazing Talent Acquisition Insights project? They are a series of how-to guides on topics such as Using Assessments in Talent Acquisition, Market Mapping, Benchmarking, Building KPI's and Using Data and more. It's some of the most pragmatic recruiter centric guides I've seen - and all freely downloadable in the Join Talent Resources Hub. All free to download, so get to it!

So all new with Recruiting Brainfood - we are going to run things from SubStack from now on. For those of you who did not get my note on Friday, due to the dramatic changes occurring at Twitter, I’ve decided to migrate from Revue in order to ensure continuation of service. Order of business will remain the same - brainfood will still be delivered every Sunday, 7.30 am GMT - we’re just using a different non-Musk newsletter provider (love you really Elon but seriously…)

Please note, that you will all initially be receiving this from a new domain (recruitingbrainfood.substack.com), so I ask you whitelist this email and interact with it some way - comment, like, share - as we may need to retrain your email filters that Recruiting Brainfood is a wanted email. If you find this in sp8m, promotions or some other secondary inbox, drag it back to your primary inbox!

I’m going to miss Revue and will have to change my workflow to accommodate but I’m bullish about the future of this platform. I’m especially impressed by the community features here which I want to point out to you and for you to make most of:

Comments - you can now comment directly on the newsletter, and therefore have conversations with me and other community members here. The threads themselves might eventually become valuable supplementary reading to the brainfood, in the manner like Reddit or perhaps Hacker News.
Chat - it appears that there is way we can talk to each other here also. It works on mobile so for download it here on IOS and Android. Chat on SubStack might actually be the natural place for us to review the newsletter, so switch on notifications if you want to join in those conversations.
Polls - there is a polls feature which I think will come in super handy to figure out what stuff we should be doing here. I’ll be making sure to poll after each newsletter so that you can give a one click verdict on future direction.

There’s loads more besides and I’m excited to be here. I’m even more excited about the health of the Brainfood community and I’m honoured to have you all here with me on this next phase of the brainfood journey. So with that said, let’s get to it!

Share Recruiting Brainfood, Rebooted

The Brainfood

1. CEO Patrick Collison's Email to Stripe Employees

Massive wave of layoffs in a depressing week for tech, led of course by Elon Musk’s brutal guillotining of half of the Twitter workforce. This is a tough part of business but you can do it another way. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison predictably plants a signpost in that direction and it’s well worth reading his letter to employees for the empathetic tone and unambiguous generosity of the severance. Different CEO’s, very different company culture.

CULTURE

2. 2022 Kleiner Perkins People Report

Let's look ahead to 2023: Presuming the tech winter continues to bite hard through next year, what does this mean for us People People? This is the question Kleiner Perkins is trying to answer with this Coda - compensation, trends, DEIB, team structure, tools and more. Everyone will get some value from this outstanding resource - read it and bookmark it folks. H/T to brainfooder Matt Bradburn for the share

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

3. Good Interviews vs Great Interviews

I've said it before and I’ll say it again - some of the best thinking about recruitment comes from non-specialists who have nonetheless done a lot of recruiting. This simple framework reminds interviewers on how to get the balance right between pitch and assessment, moving your interviews from good to great - have a read.

ASSESSMENT

4. 84M+ People Can’t Be Found on LinkedIn

Fascinating exploration by brainfooder Marcel van der Meer of how various accounts on LinkedIn can fail to find real profiles on platform. Apparently, there are 84 million+ who do not come up on search because of a discrepancy on the location pickup. Must read for two reasons - firstly, for a lesson on not always trusting the results the machine gives you and secondly, because this might actually have an immediate way of finding candidates that have been entirely untapped.

SOURCING

5. Hybrid Work Is Just Work. Are We Doing It Wrong?

This is the power of Microsoft - combining survey data from 20,000 respondents, with metadata from MS360, LinkedIn and Glint to figure out what really makes a productive worker, team and company. The revelations are not revolutionary, but well worth chewing over one more time. H/T to brainfooder Martin Warren for the share

REMOTE WORKING

6. Real-Time Job Posting Data

This is a cool tool - real time job posting stats from Indeed, who have the sort of global reach which makes its data hard to ignore. Could do with more country filters really but there are sector filters, so combining both can give you some very decent views as to the state of job posting in that area - useful for trends analysis. H/T to brainfooder Josh Willows for the share.

ECONOMY

7. AI is Coming for Creativity. Learn These Tools or Get Left Behind

'AI is Coming for Creativity' - we need to get used to the term because I think we'll be hearing a lot more about it in the coming months ahead. This is simple twitter thread introducing a number of tools which we need to be aware of - an interesting sojourn for anyone into futurism and also most immediately relevant to anyone involved recruitment and / or content marketing.

8. Even Liberals Should Be Skeptical of Racial Preferences in Higher Education

Important time in the US for DEIB, as the US Supreme Court considers two cases which may bring an end to diversity targets based on ethnic background at US college and University admissions. Such practice is already prohibited in UK (and most of Europe I believe), but long held in the US as the best method to create a student body representative of the general population. Problem is, positive discrimination for one, means negative discrimination for another. BBC overview here, James Martin Center argument here

D&I

9. Should I Create a Performance Improvement Plan for My Direct Report?

Has anyone here ever been 'pipped'? One of the most annoying aspects of corporate culture is false purpose of performance improvement plans, which in too many cases are really just procedural protection for the employer who has already made the decision to fire you. This post is for the non-cynical however, because it provides a decent framework if you actually want to retain your direct report through improvement of performance. Obviously of no use to Elon Musk but probably will be for some of us here.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

10. Qatar Conscripts Civilians for World Cup Security

Ah, the value of mandatory military service - you can just use it to conscript civilians to do other work, such as maintaining security of what might still be the biggest single sporting event in the world, the World Cup. It’s interesting to speculate what conditions it would take for the state to suspend freedom of labour and take over its allocation. We all believe we’re free, until we’re not.

SOCIETY

Who’s Talking?

11. The Many Strengths of Neurodivergence

Stack Overflow have kind of fallen off the recruitment radar since they closed their recruiting business, but a community of millions of software developers doesn’t become irrelevant just because you can’t advertise to them any more. This is an example of that value - great interview with the neuro-atypical and what they can bring to the organisation. Have a listen.

D&I

12. Need Indeed? Indeed, You Don't w/ Jim Durbin

Great deep dive into the changes that has been going on with Indeed. Its Jim Durbin, the man Indeed calls "The Indeed Whisperer" complaining about the changes with Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman. Essential listening folks - do it here. H/T to brainfooder Adam Gordon for the share.

RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING

13. What TA Can Learn from Professional Sports

Fantastic conversation with brainfooder Bas van de Haterd in conversation with Kelly Robinson and Michael Dawson, about bringing in recruitment techniques from elite sports to the corporate world. Main issue is the role of specialist vs generalists and should we be more forgiving of weaknesses in favour of outstanding singular strengths? Have a listen folks

ASSESSMENT

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep180

Is Boolean Broken? Latest Update from Google on the State of Sourcing

Brainfooder Irina Shamaeva is the only person who is able to write a blog about how how broken Google search is, and then have Google’s search product team actually swing by, comment and agree 🤣. That conversation, along with Irina’s increasing conviction that major changes are apparent in how the world’s most dominant search engine. Super relevant to anyone how does X-ray sourcing. We’re on Friday 11th November, 2pm GMT - register here

End Notes

So there you have it - Recruiting Brainfood in a new place, on SubStack.

Hope you’ve enjoyed reading it here - I’ve definitely enjoyed writing it. The editor is excellent and I think I’ll find a way to get the content collected and curated. Make sure you vote in the poll below to give me your verdict on it.

Elon Musk taking a torch to Twitter prompted this change but I hope we can see this is a might be a moment of creative destruction; some new growth will emerge from the firestorm and you can assured some of those will be brainfood-y

Thank you for all your support

Hung

Recruiting Brainfood