Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 318
It's recruiting brainfood for the week ahead
This week’s brainfood is sponsored by our friends at Tribepad
Are you one of the 7.7k mid-sized businesses in the UK struggling to hire and scale? Are you finding that manual processes and clunky systems are slowing down your time to hire, leaving you and your team stressed and burned out, hampering business growth?
Tribepad have launched Tribepad Gro - a pre-built Talent Acquisition Platform for companies with < 750 employees, that’s easy to use and ready to go. It's designed to make it easy to search for, sort, hire and onboard the best people at a greater volume, easily and effectively.
If you want no faff, no fuss and a better way to grow, find out more:
Brainfood Talent Collective
Everybody - sign up to this 👇
We’re clearly in the ‘Big Tech Winter’ and we recruiters are the first to go in any cut backs. It is critically important that we take measures now to ensure we are best positioned for any eventuality. ‘BTC’ (not bitcoin..) is something just for us, is a job seeker orientated platform for recruiters - so you sign up, set up your profile, configure your job search preferences and apply to join. You can set and change your status from immediately looking, to just browsing, to not looking now. Once approved, I will circulate the names & bio’s of those who are in immediately looking in the next edition of this newsletter. We’re at 27,395 subscribers here and growing fast, so your profile will be seen by a large and relevant audience.
I’ll write more about how this works on This Week, In Recruiting tomorrow, but suffice it say, this makes sense for any recruiter / HR person impacted by recent layoffs. It’s also probably the most useful thing I can do right now to help people out, so please support and circulate BTC to whoever you think might find it useful!
Brainfood Chat
We launched our first Brainfood Chat last week as a random experiment. It has great potential to be a way for us to have threaded conversations in community. I might tie the topic to polls, so we can together decide what might be good discuss. Mobile is where this happens, so download the app here on IOS and join the waitlist on Android here and join the conversation.
Brainfood Polls - 69% Positively Rate this Reading Experience
Thanks to everyone who voted in last week’s poll. I know you’re a warm audience 🙂 but it was great validation to see how many generally thought it was a superior reading experience here on SubStack
Shout out to the folks who rated negatively also, and indeed gave feedback as to why. I take those comments on board and will seek to improve, especially in improving the visual impact of the newsletter.
Brainfood Live On Air - EP181 - Must Have Recruitment Automation Hacks for 2023, Friday 18th Nov, 2pm GMT
Have you heard that recruiters may be asked to do ‘more with less’ in 2023? I definitely have and I suspect that there’s no way we are going to be able to do it without up levelling our skills in automation. We’ve got Sofia Broberger, Recruitment Manager (Toca boca), Ivan Stojanovic, Talent Acquisition Manager (Odyssey VC) & Greg Hawkes, Principal Sourcing Lead (M&T Bank) with the must have recruitment automation hacks for 2023. Going to be great one folks….register here
The Brainfood
1. Why is Every Layoff 10-15%?
In short, because it is big enough so you can tell your investors you’re doing something but small enough not to require a wholesale rethink your org structure. Elad Gil thinks many companies should actually cut deeper, given the decades worth of organisational bloat fuelled by cheap money, most of which got parlayed into ‘over hiring’. Bit overly long post but worth persevering with - have a read here.
ECONOMY
2. Layoff Message to Employees
Talking about layoffs, Meta took the axe to 13% of their 90,000 or so workforce last week. First time ever for Mark Zuckerberg - a fact worth noting - and credit must be due for the manner in which it was done. Read his letter to employees here. The obvious contrast is Musk era Twitter, where cruelty seems to be the point, and constant escalation, the main technique to drive culture change. H/T to brainfooder Colin McNicol for the share in the fb group
PS: above was Musk’s doomer email to all employees, casually ending the remote work policy, company wide.
CULTURE
3. How to Run an Effective Interview Debrief
You got to respect a founder who ‘eats his own dog food’. Brainfooder Siadhal Magos, CEO of our friends at Metaview, is certainly one of those. This post is his reflections on a component of the recruiting process which is often neglected - what happens immediately after the interview? Some good advice here on why you should do it in a structured way and how critical it is to explain the thinking behind the decision, rather than just deliver the outcome. Must read folks.
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
4. The Traitorous Eight & the PayPal Mafia
Ethan Mollick is maybe my favourite person to follow on Twitter. His genre is to crunch down unreadable reports in mini-threads, always ensuring to do deliver ‘bottom line, up front’ in the first tweet. This one of the influence of two networks, which have seeded both the semiconductor industry, and the software descendent in the Silicon Valley. The power of networking or the power of social proofing? Maybe facets of the same thing. Follow Ethan and have a read.
NETWORKING
5. Testing the Good Faith of NYC’s Salary Transparency Law
The most predictable response to the enforcement of salary transparency on job ads, is that employers resort to the obvious workaround - really large salary ranges Here’s a twitter thread of examples of this type of ‘bad faith transparency’. I wonder how many of these are from employers simply unprepared, do not have bandwidth to go through a proper levelling process or indeed, genuinely could pay anything for the right person. I wonder also how many simply resent the imposition and are publishing ridiculous ranges as a form of protest. Tough to police and not going to happen until transparency reaches its logical end state of ‘all numbers being public’.
H/T to brainfooder Josh Willows for the share
RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING
5. Global Workforce: Hopes & Fears 2022
Most of the great reports have already been released for 2022, but I think I might have missed this one from PwC earlier in the year. Worth an overview now, especially as I think the responses were collected before the cost-of-living crisis. So two things really - how the dynamism of a hostile de-globalising world rapidly dates survey response data, and whether we can really find a better way of getting real time sentiment without a poll. Have a read.
SOCIETY
6. A Day in the Life of a Chinese Robo Taxi Driver
Remember driverless cars? Big tech has generally pulled back from the maximalist position on this (we might sooner get pilotless air taxis than those on the road) but there remain some interesting developments in the space, especially in China. Great interview here from MIT with a Liu Yang - a ‘safety operator’ who sits in the drivers seat but doesn’t drive the vehicle; particularly interesting are Liu’s reflections on how his job has impacted his behaviour when driving his own car, with the subconscious already offloading to an AI which might not be there. Accidents from ‘over automation’ is something we need to think about…..
AI
7. The GitHub Copilot Lawsuit Threatens Open Source and Human Progress
Don’t you just love hyperbole? I do, especially when it is true. GitHub were one of the first to use open source data to train a commercial AI, and it is one of the first to be subject to copyright infringement litigation from software engineers who claim ‘their code’ is being used without permission for commercial purpose. Even though the engineers are right and GitHub needs to find a way to share the value, I agree with the premise and hope they lose. Love to hear your thoughts on this - who owns the data, who captures the value - maybe one to talk about in Brainfood Chat (download the SubStack app)
AI
8. Court Sides With LinkedIn in Data Scraping Lawsuit vs. hiQ Labs
Is data scraping even legal? It’s been grey area since the social web became a thing but last week’s court case victory for LinkedIn may be bad news in the long run for us recruiters, as many of us use tools which can help us access publicly available data in an automated way. The ruling is specific to LinkedIn - hiQ Labs lost on grounds of breaching platform TOS - but it feels like another brick in the road toward a future where data scraping anywhere becomes verboten.
SOURCING
9. The Pentagon Loves First Person Shooter Video Games
Video games have been used to recruit soldiers since Doom first invented the first person shooter genre. We can see the advantages of it - optimal demographic (young men), potentially relevant skillset - and according to this critical piece - a powerful opportunity to sell the heroes story to the impressionable.
RECRUITMENT MARKETING
10. The Cultural Transmission of Tacit Knowledge
By now, we’re all familiar with the value of written communication in a remote work environment. Here is another way of understanding why - writing makes cultural information explicit when we can no longer rely on implicit transmission that takes place in person. It’s also perhaps the reason why training and personal development is much more difficult in remote only - we don’t have the implicit methods of knowledge acquisition, such as emulation. Atli Thorkelsson talks about this in Recruiting Future podcast (hear it below), worth listening to that, as well as giving this rather academic piece from the Royal Society a a review (see the discussion at the end if you don’t want to crunch through the dense copy).
REMOTE WORKING
The Podcasts
11. Would You Like a Side of Offshoring With That?
Interesting development of a new concept - the video call centre, in which customer service staff are in a different country from the customers, with the interactions taking place via a Zoom like interface. I’m a fan, even though the hosts seem to have doubts. The bottom line is restaurant work is immigrant dependent, and if we don’t want more of ‘those people’, then we better get used to a virtual service.
REMOTE WORKING
12. Laid Off and Starting Over
An oldie from Esther Perel but its timelessly relevant. Here she is giving a real time counselling session to two people who have experienced redundancy and why it is important to not use the trauma of the exit as the only shared bond they have. Important lesson for anyone undergoing redundancy. H/T brainfooder Petar Vujosevic for the share
CULTURE
13. Talent in Tech
In recruiting and in tech startup there are a lot of socially popular viewpoints which are frequently voiced and defended. So great to hear some real talk from a recruiter who is not afraid to call out founders for their overconfidence in hiring and to underline the trade offs involved in remote working. Great listen folks.
REMOTE WORKING
End Note
I’ve been consumed by crypto news this week.
It’s been a devastating year for the space with high profile collapses from 3AC, Celsius, Luna/Terra and now, FTX/Alameda. Absent consensus, we are presented with conflicting and overlapping narratives, each one worthy of a Netflix / HBO treatment.
Was it a masterful machiavellian power play to destroy a competitor? A deep state conspiracy to secure agreement for crypto regulation and perhaps finally roll out a CBDC version of the USD? Or was it just a modern wild west of hucksters who are inevitably falling down one after another?
We don’t know much other than this era of crypto is reminiscent of the early days of finance, where fortunes were made and lost on a single day and where the small time retail investor is always the one left holding the bag.
This week’s poll on crypto, lets see how the brainfooders think of this space 🙂
OK that’s it folks - hope you enjoyed the read. Remember download the app and get ready to join the chat later this week.
PS: to kick us off, which of the 1-13 topics above would make for the best discussion?