Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 359

Strikes, Immigration, Gender in Tech, Harry Kane and hiring managers lying to candidates. All this and more folks...

Aug 27, 2023

This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends Greenhouse

Earlier this month, Greenhouse hosted a webinar focused on Inclusive Hiring in an AI World.

Mona Khalil, Manager, Data Science- Engineering at Greenhouse and other experts discuss how your team can harness the power of AI correctly to find and retain top talent efficiently- and equitably.

In this webinar, you'll learn:

How AI is changing the way we hire
How to make the most of your hiring tech stack
How AI and DE&I can work together to shape the future of hiring.

The webinar is available on demand, here.

SPONSORS

Friends,

I’ve been encouraged by seeing a few requests from community members asking for hiring in hiring TA / HR people. This hasn’t happened for a long while, so even small signals like this are encouraging. For companies looking to hire TA / HR, apply for an account on Brainfood Jobs Job Board and post jobs for free with the coupon BTCFREE. Jobs will appear on the board, as well be amplified out on This Week, In Recruiting every week until it comes off the board.

Thanks to: Eugène van den Hemel, Richard Bradley, Joey NK Koksal, Bas van de Haterd, Kevin Green, Mark Deubel, Michael Crowder, Christian Payne, Angela Cripps, Jake Leslie, Manjuri Sinha, Matt McFarlane, Donna Svei, Robbie Jones, Erin Long, Rob Walker, Alexandra Gyetvai and Carly Poulson - your public endorsement means more than you think!

Can you help? Share this newsletter with a friend who needs a boost. Thanks

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

It looks like we are pretty evenly distributed across the options here - what do you think the factors might be that decide the ‘right size’ for TA / HR? Type, shape, maturity of business likely all factors. Maybe even health of business too.

Thank you all for voting in last week’s poll. Make sure to scroll to the end of the newsletter and give me your opinion on this weeks!

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep221 - Career Progression Tips for TA Leaders

How to accelerate your career in TA? We’re introducing the PIE framework, why you cannot just rely on performance and how to make sure you increase profile without being a self aggrandiser. Important for all of us here - register here

PS: link for those who want to broadcast the show on your own social channels here

The Brainfood

1. Labour Market Outlook Q2 2023

On a Bank Holiday weekend once again disrupted by industrial action, it is worth taking a look at two important precursors - the decade long decline in real terms of public sector sector pay and the importance of unionisation in getting fairer pay deals. As ever with neo-liberal socio-economic order, what is good for the consumer, is bad for the worker.

ECONOMY

2. Creator Economy 2.0: What We’ve Learned, Why it’s Hard, and What’s Next

Andrew Chen is an infrequent writer, but when he puts something together, it is always a must read. This high level review of the creator economy from the platform perspective gives us new language and concepts to think about should we attempt a similar play, or become a player within such a platform ourselves. Power law we knew about, but ‘graduation rate’ was a new idea for me. Kind of annoying wants to you sign up (which you should) but you can avoid by browser refresh

CREATOR ECONOMY

3. Using LinkedIn Data to Help Understand the HR Tech Ecosystem

Rather fascinating illustration of organisational network analytics firm Polinode, who used LinkedIn’s ‘People Also Viewed’ data to map the connections between the HR Tech exhibitors of Unleash America earlier this year. This is mainly useful as an example of how ONA works - it’s a tracking relationship data rather than data from the node - and you could probably surmise how well positioned a company is based on density of network and how central it might in the overall ecosystem. More scientific that Gartner’s Magic Quadrant…

ONA

4. Terrible Recruitment Experience…Employer Responds

Lots of things to think about in this online conversation between a disaffected candidate who took to LinkedIn to describe in exhaustive detail how bad TestGorilla’s recruiting experience was and TestGorilla’s rather exceptional response by Loom video. All of it is worth a read / watch for three reasons: as an example of CX, a description of TestGorilla’s assessment methodology and finally, as an reputation recovery technique. H/T to brainfooder Oscar Mager for the share in the online community

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

5. Navigating Gender Diversity in Tech

Our friends at cord have got into the valuable habit of sharing proprietary platform data from tech job matching marketplace, leading to fascinating insights such as this piece of gender diversity in tech. Did you know that women both send and receive less messages per capita than men on the platform? I didn’t but it does tell you that perhaps pro-active outreach from recruiters is an important method in building more gender diverse pipelines. All this and more here. H/T to brainfooder Tom Wood for the share.

D&I

6. What Future of Work in a Warmer World?

Brainfooder Laetitia Vitaud (sign up her newsletter btw, it’s excellent) on the impact of climate change on how we work. Particularly interesting idea is to separate workers between those who can avoid heat (cool collar) and those who cannot (hot collar). As ever, it is the essential workers (remember them?) who are in the front line to suffer the most. Great essay, important and under discussed topic. Further reading here

FUTURE OF WORK

7. UK Home Office Immigration Statistics

One way to avoid climate change is to relocate to a more temperate country, especially one which is desperate for your labour, such as the UK. Interesting, the need is highest in many sectors whose importance to the functioning of society is de-coupled from the pay people get for doing the work. As predicted pre-Brexit, UK immigration is on the up, difference is we are sourcing labour from different, non-EU sources.

SOCIETY

8. 4 in 10 Hiring Managers Admit they Lie to Candidates in the Hiring Process

Interesting provocation from Resumebuilder, who conducted a survey of hiring managers to come out with these results. We need to establish precisely what constitutes ‘a lie’ but if we expand the definition to include exaggeration or diminution, then I think the assertion is basically fair. How realistic is to be 100% factually accurate? Maybe AI is the solution if that this is the problem.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

9. ‘Will Harry Kane be a Good Signing for Bayern?’: The Rise of Generative AI in Football Scouting

The answer is ‘yes’ because he is the only obvious choice to take on the No9 role Lewandoski vacated over a year ago, but why not back up intuition with ScoutGPT, a new data analytics tool increasingly used by football clubs to analyse actual performance data on the pitch? Professional sports is the obvious example where the Moneyball strategy might work best, but how far might we be away from doing similar performance analytics in the workplace? For some types of work, it might already be here…

ASSESSMENT

10. Deconstructing the SCOTUS Decision and its Impact on Diversity Hiring

Is affirmative action over in the US? Not so fast, says brainfooder Gerry Crispin who points out the recent Supreme Court decision is narrow scope for only two academic institutions and that it does not necessarily follow for other institutions much less corporate America. Interesting times for DEIB in the US - whatever your position on the impact of this case, an audit and adjustment makes good sense, so good news that Gerry has provided recommendations

D&I

The Podcasts

11. Audience Building through Relentless Consistency and Daily Plusses

Delighted to appear on the Loxo podcast. Thanks to brainfooder Sam Kuehnle for the invitation - this one is about brainfood so if you wanted to learn about building audiences, conversations over content, and how to be a +1 to the universe. Have a listen here

CONTENT MARKETING

12. Rethinking Leadership for the Future of Work (Interview with Heather McGowan)

Heather McGowan is one of the best communicators in business management today. Here she is, reviewing her new book The Empathy Advantage with David Green. Great conversation, predominantly in the defence of remote / flexible working. Have a listen here

CULTURE

13. Tips for Reducing Student Reneges

I have been admonished for not covering early career hiring enough, and I think that is 100% correct critique. As part of a corrective on this, have a look at this excellent and pragmatic talk on how to reduce student reneges. H/T to brainfooder Vicki Saunders for the share.