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Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 332

Labour market churn, tons of remote / RTO (return to office), zapier ChatGPT workflow and a twitter thread on e-Thottery

Hung Lee

Feb 19, 2023

This week’s brainfood is sponsored by our buddies Eli Onboarding

Did you know that 60% of employers are finding talent retention more difficult compared with a year ago? Or that small improvements to your candidate experience could help you dramatically improve retention? Our friends at Eli Onboarding are running a webinar on March 15th aimed at helping you enhance your candidate experience, and they’ll be joined on their expert panel by the likes of Expedia Group, Maersk and Omni RMS. You can register for this event here.

And if you’d like to find out more about how Eli can help enhance your candidate experience (and why they recently won Best Use of Technology at the RAD Awards), why not book a discovery meeting with Eli today.

SPONSORS

Friends,

Firstly, I need to apologise for sharing an erroneous link in last week’s issue. Thankfully it wasn’t a NSFW embarrassment 🤣 but rather than an outdated report oft the Annual Global CEO Survey from PwC. The 2023 version of this, is actually here. Thank you for everyone who politely and discreetly pointed this out to me - this is why we need community 👊

Secondly, we seem to get getting new jobs on Brainfood Jobs Job Board - not many, I grant you, but some. If you’re an employer and hiring for recruiters, HR folks or anyone with a background in such, post jobs for free using this coupon code: BTCFREE. For job seekers in the community, subscribe to the board and join the Brainfood Talent Community which approved employers can access and connect with you. Doesn’t take long to do, and it’s go to help!

Thirdly, I’m not sure I’ve mentioned this before I’ll do so again here - I’m going to be running a series of workshops on newsletters / audience growth / revenue as solopreneur as I feel that many of you want to start along this journey and basically I am happy to share what I know. These are going to happen on Brainfood Discord - sign up folks.

Thanks this week goes to Izka González, Robert Newry, Dhawal Parikh, Ben Halfpenny, Dave Hazlehurst, Eugène van den Hemel, Pedro Oliveira, Christian Madsen, Joey NK Koksal, Yulia Barre, Sean Wilkes, Christian Payne, Paul Daley, Dethra Giles, Ross Clennett, Peter Wharton, Richard Bradley, Jana Sneller, Nandini Basu Phookan, Annelotte Schoot and Sarah White - your public endorsements are what keep this community growing and free at point of consumption for everyone else. Scores updated on the Brainfood Hall of Fame!

Can you help? Share this newsletter with your network on LinkedIn and have them subscribe. Thanks!

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

With Google and Microsoft charging into the GAI space, it felt a good moment to test community sentiment on which provider we felt was going to win the race. We like the underdog it seems, as ChatGPT is way out ahead of the rest of the pack.

New Bing does look interesting through, especially with its use of citations. I suspect MS might be able to see this one through in the end. We’re probably going to do a How to Use New Bing Brainfood Live at some point, so make sure you follow to channel to keep updated on this.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep194 - The State of the Recruiter Job Market in 2023, Friday 24th Feb, 12pm GMT

Time to get some real data on what is happening on the recruiter job market. I’m bringing together a multi-disciplinary panel which will tap in aggregate job posting data, community sourced intelligence, labour market economics and personal testimony to build a 3D image of what is happening out there for us in terms of jobs. We’re going to do live searches on the Horsefly Analytics dashboard so if you have any particular queries you want us to run, comment below and we’ll run the query live on air. Register here - and share this webinar with any recruiter currently on the market right now!

The Brainfood

1. The Churning US Labor Market… And Why We Need “Labor Anthropologists.”

Josh Bersin really seems to be stepping up his blogging game recently - that few posts have been exceptional and this one joins that list. The labour market is indeed churning and classical theories are losing their explanatory power, so why not introduce some anthropological analysis? Important critique of headline numbers which can mask the complexity of a world of work undergoing dynamic change.

ECONOMY

2. Startups that Have Employees In Offices Grow 3½ Times Faster

Startup heroes from yesteryear are always going to be susceptible to good ol’ days thinking, but Steve Blank’s provocation here likely has merit. The sample here is of very early stage startup, where high intensity, information flow and iteration rate are critical components to speed to market. No question it’s easier to do that when you’re all stuck in a tiny room doing the startup grind 24/7. Remote is better, but only if the work is predictable and the collaboration intensity is low…

REMOTE WORKING

3. Global Leadership Forecast 2023

10 out 10 for effort in creating this interactive report, but 2 out of 10 for execution - it’s way too difficult to navigate, and you might do better by simply downloading the PDF here. Content is great though, especially as it a leadership survey of 13K+ C-suite and HR leaders on what concerns them most in 2023. There’s a critique of hybrid in here - the manufacture of consent for the reversal of remote, incoming…

REMOTE WORKING

4. Activision Blizzard Planning to End Full Remote Work

…speaking of which, what happens when you do actually reverse your remote working policies? This is a new challenge for employers, especially as more recent employees may have well joined on the basis of the job being remote. Have we inserted the requisite waivers into employment contracts? Can an employee sue for false advertising? Somebody is going to.

REMOTE WORKING

5. Connecting Zapier Typeform to ChatGPT to Gmail: A-Step-by-Step-Guide

So brainfooder Marcel van der Meer excited everybody with his ChatGPT / Zapier message automation workflow in Brainfood Live a couple weeks ago, so here he is with the blog post outlining the process. I’m telling you now, recruiters who are able to master AI + Automation will outcompete recruiters who can’t.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

6. Hard Times for e-Thots

It’s should be clear by now that competition in the creator economy isn’t going to be fair - if you’re young, pretty and can entertain onscreen, there’s a career for you as a live streamer on some channel or other. Fascinating thread on Chinese ‘e-Thots’ livestreaming from wealthier locations in order to get higher donation rate from their fans / followers / simps. Shared by thot supreme herself, Naomi Wu who isn’t an easy follow on Twitter - controversial and ferocious in equal measure - but I think one of the most fascinating documentarians of worlds we often don’t get to see.

CREATOR ECONOMY

7. Characteristics of Homeworkers, Great Britain: September 2022 to January 2023

Let’s have something from the Office of National Statistics for a change of tone 😉. This is actually a fascinating and accessible analysis on the state of remote working in the GB, with some clear divergences on social class, age and economic region as to who actually does work from home. [Spoiler] it’s rich, highly educated, 30 somethings in London, basically.

REMOTE WORKING

8. The Maze is in the Mouse

Google has been in the headlines of late, suddenly a company that is being talked about as if on the edge of crisis. The problems are all cultural says this Xoogler, who takes inspiration from Bob Dylan lyrics whilst breaking down the 4 main problems he sees in Google culture: No Mission, No Urgency, Delusions of Exceptionalism and - Mismanagement. Brilliant essay, worth reading for anyone concerned about company culture.

CULTURE

9. The Startup Founder’s Guide to Hiring a Data Scientist

Excessively in-depth posts are what make First Round special in my view. There’s no need for this degree of comprehensiveness, but why not do it anyway and take as deep a dive as you can on a niche topic. Probably no role is more resilient in the GAI current than Data Scientist, so here’s everything you need to know on how to hire for one. H/T to brainfooder Todd Raphael for the share

SOURCING

10. Google Search's Guidance about AI-generated content

Interesting post from Google on how the search engine is going to rank AI generated content. Here’s a term for us to get familiar with: EEAT - expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. How ranks according to these measures is of course opaque but its worth noting as content marketers start prompt engineering their way to a x100 GAI production rate.

CONTENT MARKETING

The Podcasts

11. What Happens Now to All the Laid Off Tech Workers?

200,000+ tech workers laid off and the prospect of more to come, speculation has been rife as to what is going to happen to this talent suddenly on the market. Does it mean greater dispersal of top grade talent across the industry? Perhaps it means a surge of new startups as experienced engineers don’t find comparable compensation to the roles they recently left; either way the prognosis is not bad…

ECONOMY

12. Tech Founders with Sherin Mathew, Open Ethics

This conversation takes a while to get there but it once we get into the ethics, Sherin Mathew does indeed deliver some important insight. Unanswered philosophical questions which have long remained academic puzzles, become urgent topics of debate now that AI has gone mainstream. Skip 10 minutes, but listen to the rest of this. H/T to brainfooder Jacob Sten Madsen for share

13. Ron Howard on Collaborative Leadership and Career Longevity

Ron Howard is one of the great directors of our era, which is weird for the older folks here who can’t get over the fact that he was Richie Rich in Happy Days. Some wisdom here on how to build a long career, collaborate with strong heads and keep the direction as the leader. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share.

CULTURE

End Note

I had an interesting exchange with The Intercept journalist Ryan Grim on Twitter last week, on the story of Raquel Evita Saraswati and the issue of transracialism. The idea of people changing ethnic identity is often cast as unequivocally fraudulent, yet despite my instincts, I found myself defending the idea. There is a long history of people doing exactly this, usually to escape persecution or to secure some sort of social advantage. Anthropologists will know that ethnic boundaries have always been permeable, so long as certain conditions are met. Got me thinking - will transracialism become a DEIB issue for us in near future? And if so, what are your current attitudes to it? This is the topic of today’s poll folks, so cast your anonymous votes here.