Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 341

Dummies guide for AutoGPT's, Fairness in Assessment white paper, the Pity City CEO and update from LinkedIn engineering..

Apr 23, 2023

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Friends,

Great turn out last week for our impromptu and inaugural ‘Brainfood Grow’ workshop. I’m going to do a second session this week on Thursday 4pm BST, so complete this form if you want to start or grow a newsletter. I’m basically giving tips.

Some more events held in London last week - smaller invite only conferences and breakfast roundtables. There is an intimacy to these events which cannot be replicated at larger scale, and I do think they add unique value. Keep doing them folks and let me know if I can help promote it or invite a few people who might get and value to them. For stuff that is open to the public, let me remind everyone of the Big List of Recruiting & HR Events to Attend in 2023 - add to it if you are organising an in person event and it’s not on there.

Market is still hard for recruiters, especially in tech: join the Brainfood Talent Community if you are looking or open to conversation, and if you are hiring for recruiters or HR people, post jobs for free on Brainfood Jobs Job Board (BTCFREE coupon code)

Finally, thanks to Joey NK Koksal, Kevin Green, Grant Clough, Dave Hazlehurst, Elizabeth Murphy, Rob Walker, Hannah Morgan, Jamie Leonard, Tena Lyons, Euan Cameron, Shannon Douglas and Liubov Viktorenko for your support on all things brainfood last week. It makes sure we’re still going as a community. Thank you!

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

Clear majority from the readers of this newsletter - nearly 3/4 of you support LinkedIn’s real ID verification roll out. Looks like we’re as tired as everyone else on fake accounts, spammers, bad behaviour and profile embellishers 🤣

Thanks everyone for voting. These weekly pulses are great to gauge sentiment and we’re going to do them every week. Scroll down to end of the newsletter to vote on this week’s question…

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep203 - How to Set up a Talent Analytics Function

Excited to bring this conversation for you this Friday, especially as we’re bring in practitioners who have actually implemented Talent Analytics functions into their businesses. There’s no question that executive demand will drive great efficiency in recruitment operations, and the only way we’re going to get efficient is to find out how to track the data. We’re on Friday 28th April, 2pm BST. Register here

The Brainfood

1. The Complete Beginners Guide To Autonomous Agents

It’s pretty clear that soon you won’t only have the options of hiring humans as employees, you will have the ability to hire AIs in the form of autonomous agents.

The true threat of Generative Artificial Intelligence isn’t that it will replace us recruiters, but that it will replace the workers recruiters find, hire or place. Since Toran Bruce Edwards first launched his ‘experimental open source attempt to make GTP-4 fully autonomous’ only a few weeks ago, it has achieved over 100,000 stars (meaning 100K developers are watching this) and now hundreds are helping him write it. Excellent post explaining what ‘autonomous agents’ are, with demo’s and what they could do. What was science fiction 6 months ago, is a business revolution today.

2. Hiring Manager Satisfaction Benchmark Report

Cool report from our friends at Starred, who present data on something we don’t collect often enough - Hiring Manager satisfaction. Some intriguing insights here, especially interesting was the regional divergence in self reporting - North American managers being consistently more generous than EMEA counterparts. Would love see further granularity on this - important especially for multinational businesses. Non-gated web access here, or download PDF here

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

3. Why An Aging Population Might Not Doom The American Economy

Demographic decline has become a topic of conversation in this community, and likely an understated contributor to the ‘labour market paradox’. As an society ages, the dependency ratio increases, meaning fewer tax payers funding an ever greater welfare needs. Can we ‘fix’ this problem with more immigration? Will robots actually help us do the work? Will AI disintermediation we’re all worried about actually mean we can enjoy not working as much? It all depends on how innovative we can be with our social solutions. Accessible starter essay for this discussion.

SOCIETY

4. Part 3 - Talent Acquisition & Marketing Strategy: An Integrated Blueprint with Technology Options

Popular series from brainfooder Ben Phillips, who is outlining exactly what you need to do it when you go-to-market with the TA marketing strategy. If you’re in the business of posting jobs or making content marketing work, there is a good chance this series is going to help you. Give it a read

RECRUITMENT MARKETING

5. LinkedIn Engineering Compromises

I’m not sure how many people know but there is a fascinating ongoing conversation between one of our most celebrated members (Irina Shamaeva) and figures within LinkedIn’s product engineering team. Reproductions of these conversations can help us understand the real reasons why LinkedIn is behaving in the way it does. Obvious value to anyone using LinkedIn to find candidates…

SOURCING

6. The Pity City CEO

Another week, another CEO, another PR disaster. A few things to note in this latest episode of business leaders behaving badly: treat all internal communications as if they are going leaked and never do a zoom call when angry. btw: doxxing has become a business risk - is anyone part of a business which has had to mitigate PR damage from it? Be an interesting one to do for Brainfood Live.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

7. How Big Companies Choose Who Is Laid Off

Interesting article from WSJ, which via a series of edited interviews, outlines the process of how large enterprise businesses conduct ‘restructuring’, in the main locating the decision with the hiring managers, with HR having to do the ‘clean up’ to make sure that no demographic groups are disproportionately impacted. Does this resonate with you? Love to hear your thoughts once you’ve read this article and whether it comports to your experience.

CULTURE

8. Fair Assessment: A Evidence Review

Excellent, accessible paper on the fairness in assessment from UK’s Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). We’re going to do a better job of ensuring fairness in assessment if we have a better idea what we mean by it. Complete with recommendations - download here. H/T to brainfooder David D’Souza for the share.

ASSESSMENT

9. Georgia National Guard Will Use Geolocation To Recruit High School Children

I suspect recruitment to the military might be one of the oldest forms of mass hiring in human history. Modern examples tend to stir up a mix of emotions and reading this article from the Intercept got me thinking - was it just the political framing that causes the disquiet or was there something inherently predatory about this example? The technical example of geo-locating ads was at least inspired. Have a read, have a think.

RECRUITMENT MARKETING

10. India Population: The Job Crisis Driving Millions to Big Cities

India’s journey towards being the largest country in the world by population may be one of the most significant trends over the next century; will India become the next great driver of economic growth for the global economy? The path trodden by others may not be as clear as we may think, as the era of winning via cheap labour might meet its end advanced robotics, generative AI and 3D printing, not to mention the process of global fragmentation which can only drive mutual self sufficiencies ultimately reducing interest in trade. Whatever the outcome, it will be one of the stories which makes the next century, so have a read, here

SOCIETY

The Podcasts

11. The Inside Story of ChatGPT’s Astonishing Potential

OpenAI Co-founder Greg Brockman with a 18 minute Ted Talk on why it’s being built and how, outlining some underlying design principles for the build and demo-ing some use cases for plug-ins. Important talk for anyone tracking the progress of GPT’s, related to the autonomous agent piece at the start of this newsletter. H/T to brainfooder Stanislaw Wasowicz for the share

12. How Technology, Well Being and Freedom of Movement is Changing the Industry

Interview with brainfooder Neil Carberry, the MD of the REC and Sarah O’Connor Columnist at the FT. Main interest for me is the discussion of the UK immigration, Brexit having actually increased the rate of immigration, simply replacing EU with non-EU workers. Decent conversation. Probably not the Brexit people voted for…

ECONOMY

13. The Decline of Supermarkets - A Sector in Crisis

Fascinating documentary on a sectors which traditionally has been one of the big employers in modern economies - the supermarkets. Supply chain disruption, hyper competition, changing customer behaviours and changing job seeker interests leading to the whole sector going into crisis. Well worth a watch.

WORKFORCE AUTOMATION

End Note

I am beginning to feel sorry for CEO’s (!). Andi Owen - who will probably now forever be known as ‘the Pity City CEO’ - might well have shown a lack of empathy, but she was also a victim of doxxing, the sharing of what was meant to be private communications into public. It reminded me that we might all have to regard all messaging as only ever temporarily private. Does that change our behaviour and will it be for the best?

Question for this week’s poll folks…

Recruiting Brainfood