Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 340

Grow-your-own-newsletter, LinkedIn verified ID & some cool sourcing techniques & tools

Apr 16, 2023

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Friends,

The winners in the AI-dominated world are going to be people who have pre-built trust relationships with the communities they care about. In the same way we now routinely ignore phone calls from unknown diallers, we will soon ignore anything in the inbox from unknown senders. It is critical for us recruiters - whose business it is to do outreach - to get busy building those trust relationships at scale.

I want you all to set up a SubStack and I want you all to join SubStack Notes. I want you all to set up and activate other channels where you might be able to communicate to your audience. I’m going to help you do this, and I’m going to help you succeed.

Q1. Won’t this mean competition for Recruiting Brainfood?

A1. Yes! And I welcome it. Brainfood stands and falls on the value it provides, not because it is currently a dominant industry newsletter

Q2. What if I have got nothing to say?

A2. Everyone has a story to tell. We routinely underestimate how interesting to others what feels mundane to us. Trust me on this!

Q3. How are you going to help Hung?

A3. Don’t know yet but I’m going to figure it out - fill in this typeform and I will be touch.

I want us all to have a voice because it is important we build a polyphonic future in this industry, not one dominated by first movers who got lucky with their timing - know what I mean? Get involved everybody, I’ll be writing more about this in SubStack Notes and also in Open Kitchen in TWIR.

Thanks to Joey NK Koksal, James Osborne, Kevin Green, Heather Kitto, Oonagh Clarke, Dave Hazlehurst, Eugène van den Hemel, Andrew Hill, Paul Daley, Bas van de Haterd, Susan Tien, Kübra Babur, Andrew Packiarajah, Samantha-Leigh Hayward, Stephen O’Donnell and Lyndsey Taylor for your support on all things brainfood last week - noted and appreciated! Scores up dated in the Brainfood Hall of Fame.

Can you help? Share this newsletter with your team or a friend in industry and have them subscribe - cheers!

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

Following what was the most popularly viewed post I’ve written in the past 12 months, it seems pretty clear that the community wants to implement Quality of Hire but currently lack knowledge on how best to implement. Going to do a Brainfood Live on this next month, follow the channel here to keep updated on it.

PS: we need to examine the TA / HR relationship, failure to forge a united front here is leading to turf war, to neither sides benefit and ultimately to debilitation of the entire People department!

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep202 - Recruitment Leadership in a Mega Scale Organisation

I am tremendously excited to welcome back one of my good friends and recruitment pioneer, Andy Headworth back onto the show. Andy was one of the first real influencers in the industry, before moving into a seriously important job as Deputy Head of Talent Acquisition at HMRC - one of the largest organisations in the UK government. We’re going to be switching from our usual panel style to do a solo interview Andy on the lessons, challenges and learnings from recruitment leadership at mega scale organisations. We’re on Friday 21st April, 2pm - register here

btw: for the daring, if you want to livestream this interview from your own social channels, click on this link and follow the instructions…

The Brainfood

1. You Thought ChatGPT was Crazy? Try AutoGPT

You can’t keep up, I can’t keep up, no one can keep up. Just when we have got over the initial shock of how good ChatGPT is, we already see the next generation - AutoGPT. This software has access the the Internet and can perform actions for you based on your prompts, meaning that it connects generated information (marketing) with retrieved information (sourcing). It’s another huge milestone in the reinvention of knowledge work. Must read thread folks.

2. LinkedIn’s New Verification

Generative AI is finally pushing social networks to move to real verified ID, but whereas Twitter and Facebook seem to think we should pay for it as an account upgrade, LinkedIn correctly views it as an essential bulwark against fraud. Rolling out in the US first, verification will separate LinkedIn users into two classes - those you can trust and those that you can’t - and recruiters will have a strong professional incentive to verify. Will you do it? Scroll down the end of this newsletter and vote on the poll below. H/T to brainfooder Martyn Redstone for share in the online community.

ENGAGEMENT

3. 2023 State of Crypto Report: Introducing the State of Crypto Index

It has been a tough 12 months for Crypto - battered by bank runs and regulatory pressure, the sector has also been relegated to the back pages due the arrival of the ‘next big thing’ - Generative AI. However crypto is much more than just currency, and as trust collapses in the era of GAI, we may well return to ‘trustless blockchains’ as the remedy. State of Crypto Report from Andreesen Horowitz, with some interesting notes on numbers of Blockchain Developers (30,000).

BLOCKCHAIN

4. X-raying LinkedIn with Google Sheets

This an excellent example of how a little knowledge of Excel / Google Sheets, combined with free data scraping tools and basic search engine know-how can produce outstanding efficiencies in sourcing. Get good at this folks and then supercharge it even further with AI and Automation. Excellent post by brainfooder Katinka Fekete, thanks to Alexey Geht for the share.

SOURCING

5. Sadly Giving Up On Retirement And Going Back To Work

Preventing or reversing early retirement is implicit goal of governments suffering from a shortage of workers - and therefore tax payers. This deeply personal account of a recent retiree forced to return to the labour market describes the emotional journey that many of the recently retired might have to undertake as cost of living rise and the value of investment falls. An outstanding essay written with humour, humility and poignancy.

SOCIETY

6. People first? Not for SHRM CEO Johnny Taylor

The legendary Suzanne Lucas takes SHRM CEO Johnny Taylor to task with this take down of his interview with the Wall Street Journal where his response to an employee request to WFH was to offshore the job to India. So many things to think about here - does HR have a particular responsibility to place people-above-profit, is the CEO really a performance artist expert at trolling the industry and….might he actually be right that remote is an milestone toward the inevitable destination of offshoring? All three might be right.

REMOTE WORKING

7. AI is Already Taking Video Game Illustrators’ Jobs in China

Artists were amongst the first to warn of the potential for labour market disruption presented by the adoption of GAI. Turns out, it was for good reason, because they are indeed amongst the first category of workers to be disrupted. Drawing and animating used to take time and skill, yet now comparable output can be achieved with neither. And for those artists who are adapting to the new world? The work is far from satisfying.

8. Should You Post That You’re #OpenToWork? A Tale of Two Labor Markets

Short answer: Yes. Some interesting research from Interviewing.io who studied whether successful candidates on their platform had previously used the OpenToWork badge feature on their LinkedIn profiles. Turns out that those that did, seemed to have more success vs those who didn’t, but only during downturns. Study seems a bit sparse but the findings are thought provoking and for recruiters currently out of work, potentially useful

PERSONAL BRANDING

9. Multi-Platform Search Extension

For those of you who saw Brainfood Live last Friday, you will have seen brainfooder Enrico Heidelberg running through the process of how he interacted with one piece of software (ChatGPT) to create another (Chrome Extension). It’s was a superb illustration of the democratisation of app building provided by GAI (Enrico is not a programmer), and also now a very useful lookup tool which anyone can use.

SOURCING

10. Talent Acquisition & Marketing strategy: An Integrated Blueprint with Technology Options (Part 2)

Second in an excellent series by brainfooder Ben Phillips who lays out the next sequence of steps, focusing on content marketing, organic vs paid, and the tools you can use to manage the media. Good to see more content on content marketing - looking forward to Part 3. Have a read here

CONTENT MARKETING

The Podcasts

11. How AI is Disrupting the HR Tech Marketplace

Josh Bersin’s summary of 20 conversations he’s had with HR Tech vendors on the impact of AI in their product roadmaps. In case you didn’t notice, it’s all change, with intelligent, conversational interfaces resetting the board on what good looks like for the HR tech consumer. Bersin’s a greater synthesiser and a superb to-the-camera communicator - have a watch.

12. Generative AI Tech Announcements

Super useful conversation between brainfooders Madeline Laurano, Kyle Lagunas and Tim Sackett on the recent wave of AI tech announcements from HR Tech vendors rerouting their product roadmaps in the advent of GAI. We need updates like this, have a watch. Also a great companion piece to the Bersin monologue above

13. Artificial Intelligence and Women

It’s always interesting exercise to dive into non-recruiting communities to see how they are discussing topics which are important to us. Here we have BBC’s Women’s Hour, discussing latest trends including threat of AI to work, and in particular, the jobs in which women currently dominate. Interesting on multiple levels.

End Note

Real ID verification has been a nettle very few Western social networks have been happy to grasp, preferring instead to allow anyone on and deal with the output later. However, the advent of Generative AI, Deepfakes and the rest are going to make this policy untenable if digital spaces are to remain safe in anyway. There are plenty reasons to have problems with real ID verification to platforms which we do not have oversight, but what else are we going to do?

It’s a question I’m asking you, in this week’s Brainfood Poll.

Recruiting Brainfood