Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 326
Company layoffs, beauty bias & 20 predictions for Recruiting in 2023
This week’s brainfood is supported by our buddies at Guide
How do you win top talent in 2023? Earn their TRUST.
Based on thousands of candidate surveys, we found that a winning candidate experience ranks high on the following 5 pillars (that spell TRUST, get it?):Â
Transparency: Does the candidate feel your organization has been sufficiently transparent?Â
Reciprocity: Does the candidate feel an equal sense of give-and-take?Â
Unity: Does the candidate feel they’ve been treated fairly and inclusively?Â
Speed: Does the candidate feel the pace of progress has been ideal?
Truthfulness: Does the candidate feel your organization has been truthful with all information shared?
Check out Guide’s Candidate TRUST Framework for best practices to implement today and a step-by-step approach to measure your Candidate Trust Score.
SPONSORS
Friends,
Two things delighted me this week - the number of OOO messages I was still receiving and the number of community members updating LinkedIn with their new job statuses. It’s great to see people take extra off from a job where there is never enough to time, and even better to see folks coming back to the new year with new work to get involved in.
Remember, if you’re on the market and looking for work, make sure to apply to the Brainfood Talent Community. I’m going to start doing these talent drops weekly from now on, so it’s a great way for you to exposure to companies who are ready to hire. If you’re an employer and looking to hire recruiters, apply here - with this coupon code: BTCFREE for free access. Lets work together to get more us who need work hired!
Thanks to all of you for supporting this newsletter and all things brainfood, especially those who’ve shared publicly. Shout out to: Joey NK Koksal, Eugène van den Hemel, Steve Jacobs, Colin Donnery, Kevin Green, Jo Avent, Garry Turner, Erin Peterson, Rob Walker, Jesse Ofner, Hannah Morgan, Lana Whiteford, Neil Carberry, Andreea Lungulescu, Bas van de Haterd, Fraser Tait, Iain Everett, David Green, Pedro Oliveira and Mark Deubels for your amazing support - the only way to keep this show on the road. Check out your scores on the Brainfood Hall of Fame, updated.
Can you help? Share the newsletter with a colleague in industry who might get some value from it. Cheers!
What Do Brainfooders Think?
Very interesting results from last week’s poll on your priorities for this year. Despite all the hype about ChatGPT, it seems that your priorities are elsewhere, mainly in boosting your profile with the community in 2023.
There are at least two obvious ways in which I can help with this - invite you to join the Brainfood Tribune and invite you to guest on Brainfood Live. Comment with either ‘Tribune’ or ‘Live’ if you want to be involved in either of these - open to all members, without fear or favour. Get to it!
Brainfood Live On Air - Ep188 - How to Recruit on TikTok
Some facts: Over 1 Billion global users, No1 most downloaded app on both IOS and Android for the past three years and the app Gen Z are increasingly turning to for informational how-to’s in preference to Google. About time we recruiters knew more about it - can you source from it, can you do inbound from it, can you do ads on it? We’re with a panel of recruiters who say yes to all three: we’re on Friday 13th January, 2pm GMT. Register here folks
The Brainfood
1. 20 Predictions for Recruitment in 2023 (pt1)
I covered the 1-10 in Open Kitchen last Monday, and I’ll do 11-20 in pt2 tomorrow. Of course no one can know the future but that shouldn’t stop us from making reasonable guesses based on observable trends. Specificity - the degree of change, and timing of it - is the measure of any forecast post, and so I’ve tried my best to quantify these predictions such that they can be confirmed or contradicted in a years time when they will have resolved or not. Hope you enjoy it - and let me know in comments which ones you agree or disagree with most 🤣
ECONOMY
2. You Must Know This If You Are Using LinkedIn Job Search
The ongoing dialogue between LinkedIn engineering and brainfooder Irina Shamaeva is fascinating and invaluable. The vital information we can glean from these exchanges tells us that a great deal of official recommendations are at best outdated. Here we look at the use of quotation marks on LinkedIn search and how LinkedIn retrieves, reorders and presents your results. Search is in the middle of a identity crisis. Must read
SOURCING
3. Microsoft plans to add ChatGPT to Bing
Which may be one of the reasons why ChatGPT has Google running scared, especially if Microsoft begin integrating GAI into Bing. Microsoft’s $1 Billion investment in Open Ai in 2019 might prove to be one of the wisest investments ever made. Hacker News comment thread on the topic is superb, covering most of the ethical and practical bases on the use of ChatGPT for ‘search’.
AI
4. The Future of Recruitment Technologies 2023
Ambitious report from HR.com, which tries to measure the efficacy of different recruitment technology categories as cited by users of those technologies. Not a massive data sample (327 ‘usable’ responses) but an interesting presentation nonetheless, with a very important call to action - utilisation rate is the most important metric - invest in recruitment technology that actually gets used by recruiters.
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
5. Hard Truths I Learned When I Got Laid Off
Exceptional essay from a software engineer who does indeed learn some hard truths. No1 - that getting laid off is a profoundly lonely experience - really struck home with me, particularly as this was a recurring theme in the Brainfood Live we hosted on psychological impact of redundancy late last year. Worth a read for all of us here - to help mentally prep for the inevitable for ourselves, but also as a primer for giving the right type of support when others in your network need it most. H/T to brainfooder Martyn Redstone for the share in the fb group
CULTURE
6. How Company’s Think About Layoffs
Written in a refreshingly vernacular style, this post from Diff lays out some critical concepts from the business POV on cost cutting. It would be an interesting experiment to layering on some of the ideas here to some of the high profile individual cases we’ve been hearing about, and identifying which approach those companies are adopting. One of those posts where you read, then re-read again.
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
7. Attractive Female Students No Longer Earned Higher Grades When Classes Moved Online During COVID-19
A fascinating consequence of a shift to remote might be the equalisation of aesthetic appeal. This study from the University of Lund tracked student grades correlated with ‘a beauty rating’ and found that positive bias for the better looking disappeared with the shift to remote. Implications for recruiting should be obvious. Accessible summary here, the full study itself is only a 5 pager and downloadable here.
D&I
8. Companies Can ‘Hire’ a Virtual Person for About $14k a Year in China
One way to ameliorate bias might be to simply not hire human beings. After all, if you can hire a virtual person to do the work, why wouldn’t you? Fascinating market developing which has some compelling use cases and which points a future which is quite frankly is already here. Better buy that haptic suit before the whole thing becomes entirely programmed…
AR / VR
9. How I Became a Hind - and What I Have Learnt from it...
The dominance of the United States in modern communications technology has transported the English language into every corner of the Internet, perhaps one of the most profound and underestimated cultural phenomena of our times. This experiment conducted by a recruiter who anglicised her name and measured the improvements in output is a small illustration of the power and privilege of being the default. A practical example to follow and a case study of bias of to be aware of! PS: interested to know of other experiments of this type - might be a good one for a Brainfood Live
D&I
10. Skilled Trades Not Catching On With Gen Z
Need a plumber, electrician, roofer to come round? 6 week waiting list for you sir, and that’s if they can remember. The shortage of skilled tradespeople is set to grow more acute with this report from NPR which suggests that Gen Z has little interest in doing the sort hands on, skilled work that needs to be done. Complete with incredible thread from actual tradesmen talking the talk, and presenting some hard truths as to why they understand.
SOCIETY
The Podcasts
11. Forecasting 2023 Year in Recruitment
I’m not going to make a habit of this but we have a great conversation last week with Kate Shoesmith, Madeline Laurano & George Larocque, Andy Spence and Jo Avent on what we think is going to happen in recruitment in 2023 and I thought I’d best let you know about it. Give it a listen here, Adam Gordon as ever in the co-pilot seat
ECONOMY
12. Do Organisations Have to Slow as They Grow?
Fascinating exploration of the organisational complexity, where the answer is basically ‘yes’, they do, the reason being that as organisations grow, they become more complex and ‘coordination headwind’ becomes the decisive factor in slowing everything down. I call this ‘cost of collaboration’ which amounts to the same thing, you need to be atomic if you want to move fast.
CULTURE
13. Can Our Surroundings Make Us Smarter?
One of my favourite TikTokers to follow is a guy called Cliff Tan, an interior design guru whose thing is to break down horrendous home arrangement according to feng shui principles. It’s not all eastern mysticism though, as this Freakonomics episode talks about classroom design, open offices, and cognitive drift. A must listen for anyone who is responding to the call back to the office….
REMOTE WORKING
End Note
One of the most interesting things I read this week was an updated discovery which explained the extraordinary endurance of Roman concrete. It turns out Roman concrete is self healing, due to the adding of quicklime (not just volcanic ash, which we already knew about) which would react to water intrusion and reset again when dry. Roman bricks would crack due to weathering and stress, but would do so along the reactive quicklime crystals first, diverting the stress away from the parts of the brick which couldn’t reform. It’s a fascinating innovation and crazy to think that stuff which we had long thought was poor quality control in the mixture turned out to be vital component for the robustness of the material.
Got me thinking…..has anyone designed organisations like this? Engineer a part of it that is designed to crack first, because you know it could reform most quickly? Seems that maybe a decent idea.
Anyways, poll of the week is going to be some feedback for brainfood, in particular, which bits of brainfood you know or don’t know about…
Vote, comment and share
Have a great week everybody
Hung
I really like your recruitment predictions trends, you were very accurate in 2022! We are already seeing large corps remove the degree requirement here in the UK and think this trend will ring true.
I really like the layout of your newsletter, links, variety of topics and handy tips! I didn’t know about ChatGPT until I started following you.
Would love to see some more UK insight. However, keep up the great content.
Rest assured I’ll certainly share and tag you. 😆
It's likely to fall along those lines but organizations will adapt quicker than the states in much the same we we adapted to other regs like "Ban the Box". So for us and others like us who are in states all over the country we'll likely adopt a uniform policy of publishing salary ranges regardless of where the job is and that is probably a good thing IMO.