Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 330

Tech Pay EU, Diversity in STEM & How to spot AI Generated Copy

Feb 5, 2023

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!

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Friends,

How is the market treating you?

Some interesting signals coming into me - of course more lay off news, more applicants coming into to Brainfood Talent Community ‘ready to interview’ (apply btw if this you) and yet…three separate enquiries from community members representing employers asking for my help in recruiting recruiters, as they weren’t getting applicants! Does the recruitment market have its own labour market paradox - plenty of recruiters on the open market but, for reasons unknown, recruiter vacancies remaining unfilled?

Comment in reply to this newsletter, let me know what you think on this!

btw: those employers, and anyone else who is hiring recruiters, can sign up for a company account here, using this coupon: BTCFREE for 100% discount on db search and job posting.

Thanks this week to Eugène van den Hemel, Kevin Green, Vanessa Raath, Colin Donnery, Bas van de Haterd, Paul McCardle, Elaine Rice, Andrea Kirby and Tim Sanchez for your amazing public endorsement of all things brainfood - vital for keeping this show on the road. Check out your updated scores on the Brainfood Hall of Fame!

Can you help? If you enjoy this newsletter, click on the share button below and share the brainfood with your network. Who knows, maybe it will help some recruiter out there 👊

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What do Brainfooders Think?

Last week we talked about digital nomadism - mainly because I imagined myself writing brainfood whilst sitting on a beach somewhere - and we ended up a rollercoaster of the vote, staying putters early dominance being eroded by those who were thinking about it, or who had already taken action and did something about it.

The job we do is probably similarly bipolar - on the one hand it can be done location agnostically, on the other, the sense of needing to see and meet people - clients, candidates, colleagues - seems a pressing concern. Interested to hear how to go-ers have gone on this - maybe a good one to do a Brainfood Live on. Thanks for your votes everyone.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep192 - Recruiter Use Cases for ChatGPT, Part 2!

Back by popular demand folks, we’re going to do Part 2! of Recruiter Use Cases for ChatGPT. Format is the same - recruiter practitioners showing us how they’ve been using the tech, product makers on screen demo, wise heads at the muttering how it’s going to end us all 🤣. I want to do the same open mic style, so if you are a recruiter with a use case you want to talk about, a product maker with something you can demo on screen, let me know in comments which is the case, and I will reserve you a spot on show. 520 already registered, we busted over 1,000 for part one - will we do it again for part two? You’d be a fool to miss it. Register here

The Brainfood

1. Top 10 Talent Acquisition Trend Predictions for 2023

I promise this is the last predictions post for 2023. Our friends at Radancy pulled together some non-mainstream ideas on what is going to happen in TA this year, so I thought this to be worth a look. My favourite? Increasing pixellation of work, leading to increasingly diffusion of the workers. Nice to see brainfood channels be referenced a few times - how on earth did we ever become a credible source 🤣? Very decent read, so have a go here.

FUTURE OF WORK

2. How to Spot AI Generated Text

Brainfooder Jan Tegze has a unique talent for viewing a common topic from an oblique angle, always yielding super interesting posts as a result. His latest writing here is actually a report on some experimentation he has been conducting on the recruiters new BFF, ChatGPT. We’re probably going to be tasked by our employers with weeding out AI Generated info, so being able to spot it in the first place is going to be a skill recruiters are to going to need to learn.

ASSESSMENT

3. Tech Pays EU

This looks like a nice project coming out of the Europe - a one stop salary comparison site, similar in purpose to the US centric Levels.fyi. As salary transparency goes mainstream, there will be winner-take-all dynamic in the compensation intelligence space, and you do wonder whether something community sourced like this might end up being the winner over the funded startup competitors. Needs more work, but useful tool as it is and worth keeping an eye on as it develops. H/T to brainfooder Denys Dinkevych 🇺🇦 for the share.

ECONOMY

4. What Job Seekers Wish Employers Knew

90,547 respondents from 160 countries, across all education types and industry sectors, makes for an outstanding report, one which is packed full of useful insight, supported by some great visualisations for an at-a-glance view of job seeker sentiment. Probably the best thing in the newsletter this week, so if you’re going to click on one thing only, click on this and read it. H/T to brainfooder Ivan Harrison for the share.

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

5. The Office Tour You’ll All Been Waiting For

We’ve been hearing that employers are going to have make the office a place worth leaving the home for, so how about just making everybody a second home? Genius level creativity from this one company who reimagined the open plan office space a mini village, where everybody has their own home. It’s undeniably cute…and you can see it having a positive effect. Great as an EB stunt also, think of the viral potential you have with this type of set up.

CULTURE

6. Diversity in STEM 2023: Women, Minorities & Persons with Disabilities

Significant report from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics which measures the composition of the US STEM workforce and its change over time. Diversification is on trend but disparities remain clear. You have to wonder what the impact of GAI will be to these numbers - will it accelerate diversification by distributing access to STEM know how, or will it reduce the absolute need for STEM workers as it absorbs increasing amounts of the knowledge work? Maybe it will be both. Worth a download, especially for our US members.

D&I

7. You’re Good at Your Job, But Are You ‘Fun’ Enough?

What is company culture? If it is just an aggregation of compatible working styles, then we shouldn’t really have that much emphasis for team bonding, company cohesion, employee well being and the like. The unstated reality is that the reason why we do value those things is because a company is first and foremost a social organisation where members needs to ‘get along’ before they are able to do any sort of job for the team. Plenty to think about in this post - maybe time to grasp the sociological reality of a being in a company?

CULTURE

8. Emergent Mind - A Community of ChatGPT and Prompt Engineering Enthusiasts

Is anyone here calling themselves a ‘Prompt Engineer’ yet? The take up and enthusiasm behind ChatGPT has been such that communities are already sprouting up around the core interest of getting better at prompting the AI. I’m on the record as saying we recruiters need to get good at this, so check out this community here and join it. AI will not replace recruiters, but recruiters with AI will likely replace those without. And oh yeah, you can now watch AI Generated Seinfeld 24/7 if you really feel like it

9. The Tight US Labor Market: Missing Hours, Missing Workers

2 years after the ‘labour market paradox’ of the missing millions of workers has first coined, I think we are getting a better idea as to an explanation. Like any complex phenomena, there are multiple reasons for why labour force participation is low, but the leading contenders seem to be directly Covid (deaths, long term illness), elevated candidate expectations and, according to this intriguing research, early retirement due to rising house prices which workers use as pension.

SOCIETY

10. The Future of Executive Compensation

Interesting angle on compensation at the exec and senior management level, where stock market volatility has increased the risk for candidates for whom equity and stock options conventionally formed a significant component of the total comp. Relevant also for startup / scale up where share options also feature prominently in the offer package. We need more content from the exec search world, so if you do know of any sources for me to check out, don’t hesitate to let me know.

ENGAGEMENT

The Podcasts

11. It’s Time for HR Teams to Bloom

Compelling conversation with two of my favourite people in the community - brainfooders Sophie Power with Ruth Penfold-Brown. It’s always fascinating to hear personal stories from people you’ve known for a little while and its inspiring to hear Ruth reflect on her life and career journey to date. Some amazing words of wisdom here, particularly on the power of coaching. It’s the questions you don’t like to ask yourself that are the ones which need to be answered!

CULTURE

12. Ep 492: AI & Automation Strategies

Great to see brainfooder Kyle Lagunas do more on podcasts - there are few who have the intimacy with the discipline and the breadth of knowledge over the market. Here he is on the Recruiting Future podcast, closing fast on Ep500. Great conversation for an important overview on AI in TA

13. Ep 212: Derren Brown: Unlock the Secret Power of Your Mind

Any excuse to promote Derren Brown, I’m generally going to do it 🤣. Few people have mainstreamed the discipline of ‘mentalism’ better than this guy and he is living example of the power of the mind to accomplish incredible feats of influence and manipulation. Yes it is dangerous, and yes it could be misused - but it is an education as to how susceptible we are to those who know how to push our buttons. Be smart on your informational diet folks, especially if balloons are in the air.

SOCIETY

End Note

So I’ve been in Hong Kong for a week now and I think I’m still in the honeymoon period. It’s been great to spend quality time with the family, feel the reconnections growing from my definitely disconnected roots and practice speaking more Canto. Most of all though, the best part is having enough time to not be on schedule all of the time.

It’s also been pretty cool continuing to work and staying connected with you all whilst I’m here. One of the interesting conversations I had last week was the possibility of setting up some sort of mini brainfood group to knowledge share on what I’ve learned doing various things with the community, whether this is building a newsletter audience, multi-casting video livestream, blasting out a podcast, growing a decent community, maybe even making it all pay its way. I’m on record as promoting the idea that we should each individually do more to claim our voice in the public space, so I encourage people to try it!

So this is the poll question this week:

I’ll do the winner of the vote, so make sure you not only vote but also comment below with your name (and how you voted) so I can invite you to this private space

Have a great week everybody

Hung