Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 358
Economics, Hunger Games and why hiring for semiconductor engineers is hard despite tech lay offs...
This week’s Brainfood is supported by our friends Datapeople.
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Friends,
I’ve been busy planning the next month of webinars - both on Brainfood Live and also on midweek collabs with friends of the channel. I have to say, I’m super excited about the conversation topics and will be releasing the schedule next week. Two things I want you to do:
Follow the Brainfood Live channel here - you’ll get notified every time we go live.
Let me know via comment below whether you want to talk part as a guest on future webinars, and what topics that is inspiring or annoying most atm.
Thanks to Eugène van den Hemel, Neil Carberry, Joey NK Koksal, Matthias Schmeißer, Liz Karsten, Nathalie Ramond, Sarah Johnston, Anna Ott, Louise Triance, Carrie Collier, Holden Lager and Iain Hamilton for your public endorsement of all things brainfood last week - keeping the show on the road with your support! Scores updated on the Brainfood Hall of Fame.
Can you help? Share the newsletter on LinkedIn or your in internal Teams / Slack channel and get your recruiter / HR friends to sign up. Thanks!
What Do Brainfooders Think?
Really great contributions in the comment thread on this contentious topic - it was really a great example of how to have a dialogue in a civilised and thoughtful way - something which is possible to do on the Internet! Thanks for demonstrating this, especially Lizzi, Heather and Christine 🙏
Thanks for everyone else who voted. End of the newsletter for this week’s observations and your opinions…
Brainfood Live On Air - Ep220 - The Business Case for Budget (When Times are Tough!), Fri 25th Aug, 2pm BST
‘Do more with less’ has been the mantra for Talent Acquisition for the past 18 months, but how exactly are we meant to do that without the support of automation and tooling? We’re going to be discussing how to build a business case for recruiting tech when times are tough - most attend folks. Friday 25th August, 2pm BST, register here.
PS: folks who want to broadcast this conversation from your own social channels, do so for free with this link.
The Brainfood
1. Want to Become a TA Leader? Here’s How 600,000 Others Got There
Self referential content is always going to be interesting for us, so I have to kick off the newsletter with this piece from LinkedIn, even though it is rather thin on analysis and also has classification issues which leads to GPT-like hallucinations on prior career pathing. The most salient insight is that external hire is a higher percentage route vs internal promotion for TA leadership. Worth a read, though we could do better ourselves, which reminds me that the What Do Recruiters Want 2023 survey (do it here if you haven’t already). will begin its second leg of data collection now that summer holiday is nearly over…
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
2. The Atlas of Economic Complexity
Stunning interactive resource from Harvard University which pulls in international trade data on goods reported to the UN and IMF and presents them country-by-country, sector-by-sector, product-by-product in a series of data visualisations which are easy for even the layperson to understand. Data is only up to 2021 which is the only downside, as obviously todays world spins faster than it once did, but it is still an essential resource for anyone wanting understand the complexity of global economics. Great for recruiters looking for growth sectors / regions too…
ECONOMY
3. State of AI in 2023
Report from McKinsey on the where we’re at with generative AI. Standard fare really but some interesting parts specific to recruitment and workforce planning, in particular the assessment of which departments are likely to see increase / decrease in size due to AI. It’s an exercise we all need to go through - how to do an ‘AI exposure’ skills audit - though I suspect not many of us know how to go about it. Will probably do a Brainfood Live on this - let me know if you think that would be useful.
AI
4. The Elite's War on Remote Work Has Nothing to Do with Productivity
An increasingly popular dissident narrative is that calls for a return to office (RTO) have very little to do with workforce productivity, and much more to do with shoring up the value of commercial real estate and the revival of the office and night economies. What do you think - is this overly cynical take or is it really the main driver behind the (obvious) manufacture of consent for RTO?
REMOTE WORK
5. UBS Global Wealth Report
Speaking about elites, UBS Global Wealth Report 2023 came out this week, one of the annuals that is worth keeping an eye on. Main message thusly: household wealth reached a high of 2021 when we were all flush with furlough + enforced saving through lockdowns, before collapsing in 2022 due to cost-of-living crisis, record interest rate hikes and a world undergoing hostile de-globalisation. Also contains some interest demographic segmentations - on gender, ethnicity etc.
ECONOMY
6. Are You Rich?
This Bloomberg piece is an ideal follow up to the UBS report - an interactive story on cost of living in different US states, with cameo portrait of people who work and live in those. The question is of course rhetorical - it is not whether you are rich, it is whether you feel rich - and that all depends on the neighours. Good one to think about when speaking with candidates, especially when selling a relocate.
EMPLOYER BRANDING
7. HR: How Much is Too Much — or Too Little?
Q: What is the right size for HR? Fascinating question asked this is article from ADP on the ‘HR staffing ratio’ in your organisation. Whatever the right percentage might, it seems that we are increasing it, with a discernible upward trend of hiring 2.3 HR people per 100 employees in 2018 to 2.6 in 2023. H/T to brainfooder Caroline Hunter for the share
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
8. Materials Science Matters: The Talent Central to China’s Tech Pivot
Despite different systems of governance, both the US and China are both trying to do the same thing - reallocate engineering talent from the trivialities of consumer tech toward the strategically critical hardware tech and material sciences. Both are encountering the same problems too - the STEM kids much prefer the former over the latter. Macro Polo remaining one of the best sources for non-hyperbolic takes on China’s economic challenges - have a read here
ECONOMY
9. The Tech Layoff Tracker
Brainfooder Amit Taylor has been doing an amazing solo job tracking tech lay offs via his superb website, Trueup. Fantastic to see that it is getting the exposure it deserves, featuring in the likes of Business Insider this week. No need to read BI though, when you just get the update from The Tech Layoff Tracker yourself. PS: is the big tech winter over? Deep cuts might be but slow growth / low growth / no growth is going to be persistent pattern in VC backed tech startup for some time yet..
ECONOMY
10. ‘It Brings Out the Worst in Everyone’
Has anyone here had to reapply for their own job? A reasonably common practice for companies aiming to rationalise or restructure, but the human cost of going through it seems under researched. This article describes the experience as a ‘Hunger Games’ like competition, where the proles audition for their jobs whilst the elites watch and judge. It was meant to be a non-biased way of selecting those whose jobs would be saved, but perhaps we cannot do de-bias without also being inhumane? Much brainfood.
ASSESSMENT
The Podcasts
11. Navigating Layoffs, Immigration & AI
Delighted to be part of the Resourcing Leaders Live, hosted by redoubtable Kirstie Kelly and with the man in Ibiza himself, Jamie Leonard. We’re taking 3 big newspaper articles this week and discussing them. Apologies in advance to readers of the Torygraph…
CULTURE
12. 6 Steps to Avoid Failure
Brainfooder Christian Payne has been one of the stalwarts of the community, and this video will show you why. Ultra transparency and value add from one of the great guys in the business. I have no doubt that success will once again find this guy. I’m still blown away by this video - I urge everyone to watch it
CULTURE
13. Super Hubs: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World: A Review
The narrator has an annoying diction but this is a very decent review of a concept which is highly relevant to our work - network power, how it is a force multiplier for kinds of power and why in-person meetings are critical to acquiring more of it. Have a watch / listen to this …and go to events folks - Big List of Recruiting / HR Events to Attend in 2023 (bookmark this)
NETWORKING
End Note
I have booked my flights / accommodation for Recfest USA next month, arriving on 12th, out on the 16th, so will do a Brainfood Live from Nashville, as well as have some time on Saturday. See you there if you’re going!
In the meantime, lets replay the ADP poll on HR staffing ratio’s. Approximately, how many ‘people people’ are in your organisation? Vote below
PS: if you are a HR / TA consultancy practice, people people means internal only folks!
That’s it
Thanks for reading
Have a great week everybody
Hung
Regarding RTO: From my vantage point there seems to be three drivers
1. Productivity: An honest belief that in-person collaboration significantly improves the results of some roles or tasks. It's arguable which roles or tasks those are, so easier to just ask everyone to come back in. Early-career professionals almost certainly benefit from in-person mentorship.
2. Management Control: A non-trivial number of managers feel somewhat powerless or ineffective if they if they can't visibly monitor their direct reports. They may honestly believe that they are pushing for RTO in the name of productivity, eg. that their team is more productive if they are in person with the manager to "lead" them. But really this one is about control.
3. Sunk Cost: Business that own or have long-term leases to buildings don't want to admit to the bad investment (and certainly executives don't want that on their performance review!). So they need some reason to bring people back in, and given #1 and #2 productivity is an easy claim to make.
The author's thesis is kind of an extreme version of #3, where "corporate landlords" have a significant amount of control over the businesses they lease to. Or maybe that "the elite" who lead business also all own commercial real estate. I don't buy that argument. It doesn't match my understanding of the current reality.
Hung, I'd be delighted to come talk about the research I've been doing with women in tech (400 women tech leaders in 60 countries) - lots of findings your community might find interesting, including some demographic surprises, the underappreciated #1 booster of tech women's success, what women in tech really want from their next job - and why they might consider leaving where they are now.