Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 323

ChatGPT super charged, Urban Doom Loops and the $20 trillion case for migration

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Friends,

Got a fun idea I want to try. Looking forward to 2023, we need new marketing collateral for Brainfood and I thought it would great to incorporate material from you, the community. In particular, I was thinking of creating a collage of AI generated avatars and making a cover image of them - something like an AI generated selfie wall. So if you want your AI enhanced good looks to be included, upload your Lensa AI selfie here - if we get enough I’ll pull them together into a single image which we can use on this newsletter, the brainfood homepage and in other places where brainfood exists. It should be a laugh 🤣 and a great tribute to all of you here!

Particularly those who continue to publicly support this newsletter - big shout out for Clair Mohammed, Andy Headworth, Kevin Green, Dave Hazlehurst, Joey NK Koksal, Lisa Doorly, Eugène van den Hemel, Colin Donnery, Michael Crowder, Tony Pitchford, Tim Sanchez, Karla Porter, Tuğçe Bakar, Elaine Atkinson, Garry Turner, Sarah Ali and Vicki Leonard - your public support of all things brainfood really helps grow the community - thank you. Scores updated in the Brainfood Hall of Fame.

If you want to help, just share this newsletter with your network and recommend folks subscribe - cheers.

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

Really good to see the verdict from the community on ChatGPT. I think all three of the top options might be true, and I’m excited for those of us who find a way to use it in such a way that it does change the way we work, and wary for the deluge of AI generated messages, imagery and video that will also inevitably come. Challenges ahead for us, as candidates get de-sensitised to messaging and default to ignoring all of it…

….so the priority for us is to figure out how to build the sort of trust relationships where the content of the message isn’t the most important thing but the connection between trusted actors is. I hope we have a trust relationship here and the poll at the end of this newsletter will be talking about how we can continue and expand this - make sure you go ahead and vote.

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Brainfood Live On Air - Ep185 - State of Recruitment: 2022, A Year in Review

Last Brainfood Live of the year folks, and we’re going to take the opportunity to review the key moments from all of the topics the community has cared about this year - remote working, recruitment marketing, automation, candidate experience, DEIB, company culture and of course, sourcing for candidates. We might even have a drink or two to celebrate a fantastic year’s worth of programming. Join us, Friday 23rd, 2pm GMT - register here

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1. Awesome ChatGPT Prompts

I’m pretty certain that everyone has been playing with ChatGPT by now. If you haven’t yet, you really need to get started. We’re beginning to understand that that effective prompts are the way to get the best out of this AI, so pretty handy to have a list of them in one place which we can all freely browse and use. Bookmark this one folks, we can customise the examples laid down here for more domain specific purpose.

AI

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2. Hiring Market, as seen by Hiring Managers

Gergely Orosz has been mentioned several times before in this newsletter and this post is an example of why - he’s becoming the leading citizen journalist reporting on the human side of engineering, often with relevant stories on hiring. This one is such, where he interviews engineering managers on the current state of the tech hiring market. Essential reading.

ECONOMY

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3. How a ‘Golden Era for Large Cities’ might be turning into an ‘Urban Doom Loop’

With the recent news that San Francisco is facing a budget deficit of $728 million, it is worth considering the motives politicians have for calling us ‘back to the office’ - cities might well start going bust. Remote working has eliminated the commute, which in turn eliminates the incentive to move closer to the city centre in order to reduce said commute. The result may be an ‘urban doom loop’ for metropolitan centres with profound consequences for hiring, talent intelligence, employer branding and the rest.

REMOTE WORKING

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4. Employee Experience Report 2022-23

300,000 survey responses from workers at 27,000 employers from 105 countries, taken before during and ‘after’ the pandemic on how they feel about their employers, across 6 dimensions. It’s brief document with some interesting broad strokes but - I have to say - the information architecture could stand for revision, the thing looks like a dashboard from the cockpit of a 747. Maybe ChatGPT outputs have started already to rewire my brain as to how dense information should be presented 🤣. Anyways, H/T to brainfooder Colin Donnery for the share.

CULTURE

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5. Hiring Pulse Report for December 2022

For 2023, I would like all ATS providers to produce monthly pulse reports on vacancy open / jobs closed data. Should be pretty easy report to run and would be invaluable to the community to get a consistent gauge as to what’s going on. Workable have been doing a fine job with it, as you can see with December report, with worldwide trends report on Time to Fill (TTF), Total Job Openings (TJO) and Candidates Per Hire (CPH).

ECONOMY

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6. How to Measure & Improve Quality of Hire

Short answer is ‘new hire retention’ + ‘new hire performance’. There’s a lot more to it than that of course, but if you need to start somewhere then this post from our buddies BrightHire will give you some great building blocks to construct a suitable approach. Partner with hiring managers, take responsibility for interview training, create consistent standards, get the on-boarding right and yes, use an interview analytics platform. Have a read folks

RECRUITING OPERATIONS

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7. 41 Big Ideas that will Change our World in 2023

These collections from LinkedIn are always really good - with the measure being how free it is from cliché. There are some great ideas here, at least a dozen directly relevant to us in recruiting and HR, and a dozen more which are adjacent to our work. My favourite? Got to be the one where we will be wearing mushrooms…

SOCIETY

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8. Employee Mental Health: What is Stopping us from taking Gender-Tailored approaches?

Brainfooder Petar Vujosevic does really interesting work, diving deeper into topics to uncover hidden problems, and perhaps, reveal hidden solutions. We know that there is gender variance in how we experience mental illness, so why do we have a universal approach for mental well being? Perhaps a contributing factor to disproportionately high male suicide rate is that our prescriptions suit men less than they do for women. Fascinating conjecture, some data to look deeper into it. PS:perhaps an increasingly important phenomena as it appears that psychology - for reasons unknown - is increasingly becoming feminised.

D&I

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9. A Fake Job Offer Gone Wrong

Second example I’ve seen of this type of job offer scam, which has become a successful template for fraudsters. Here is how it works: remote job advert, full interview process, professional looking offer, additional bonus of stipend to provide office supplies for the new hire for home working. A small payment is then made to the new hire’s bank account (to further increase confidence) before ‘payment problems’ occur which prevent procurement of promised office supplies. Employee needs to pay for this himself, to be reimbursed in the first pay cheque, which of course never arrives. It’s a fascinating read, and example of how remote working opens up the aperture for criminal innovation. HN thread for more discussion here

REMOTE WORKING

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10. Migration Matters: A Human Cause with a $20 Trillion Business Case

We need to change the language when it comes to migration. The economic health of a society is a function of the ratio of people working and paying tax vs people not working and in need of services. Every country in the ‘global north’ is facing in imminent crisis by having too few of the former supporting too many of the latter. Without increasing birthrate, we need to be increasing immigration. BCG and brainfooder Johan Harnoss with the business case for migration. One to download folks.

SOCIETY

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The Podcasts

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11. The Decline of Men in the Workforce

The Labour Market Paradox has been one of the core themes of the pandemic era, with many millions of workers no longer participating in the measured market economy. Aside from the folks who may be long term ill or looking after those who are, there is also a significant cohort of prime age men, who seem not to be working. Why, what does this mean, is this a problem and if so, what do we need to do about it? Plenty of food for thought in this conversation. H/T to brainfooder Cátia Sousa for the share.

SOCIETY

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12. The Future of Flexible Companies Pt1 & Pt2

This dude somehow managed to get Sahil Lavingia, founder of e-book self publishing phenomenon Gumroad, which also happens to be an organisation made up entirely of part time employees. Is is a possible future for how we organise labour? Fractional workers is going to be a thing, so why not build a company entirely of them. Pt1 and Pt2 of a great interview - both worth a watch and listen.

FUTURE OF WORK

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13. Job Search & Career Track as a Mother to Be

Final part of the ‘true inclusion’ mini series on the hidden biases in hiring; last week, Adam and I had the pleasure of speaking with Sara Dalsfelt, Carly Poulson, Rebecca Collis and Leanne Redstone sharing experience and insight on the pressures of job search and promotion as a mother-to-be, and what we as organisations must do to equalise the playing field. Have a listen

D&I

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End Notes

Have you heard of the theory that the era of social media is coming to an end? The idea is that the drive towards protecting user data will terminally undermine the ad revenue business model which has keeps social media ‘free’ at point of use for users.

Ads are already getting less relevant as advertisers are restricted from segmenting on biographical or behavioural data, and so they go back to saturation campaigns in order to generate the same results. This, of course, makes the user experience worse, until such a point people will leave the channel in search of greater relevancy or just find some peace and quiet of nothing online at all. A ‘doom loop’ of more ads, less audience then ensues, until the platform ultimately succumbs, and moves to subscription (paid) model.

Facebook is already in this loop (though I think Zuckerberg won’t charge, he is just going to let it die), and Twitter will surely follow (Musk is charging but it might still die anyway). The question is, what will replace social media? This is what I want to explore in today’s poll because Brainfood uses both these channels, and needs to find a way for members to connect with each other, should the majority of us decide to leave those channels. So the question is….where do you want to do community?

I’m at my brother’s place this morning, getting ready for my 6 year old nephew’s birthday party. I believe I am manning the bouncing castle, and so will likely miss the World Cup final, an incredible situation I can’t quite get my head around! Anyways, good luck to France and Argentina today - may the best team win.

Have a great week everybody

Hung

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