Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 360

NFL, the end of the Googleverse, AI & IP and some intriguing data shares from HR tech vendors of recruiter productivity and gender diversity...

Sep 03, 2023

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Friends,

Recruitment is a seasonal business and September is often a critical month for us, especially for those who have targets to hit and objectives to deliver on. I hope you’ve had the chance to recharge over the summer holidays and are back ready to roll 👊. Obviously, I will be doing what I can to help - but please let me know what else I can be doing to help make sure we all have a great start to the rest of the year.

A few things to immediately bear in mind:

Remember to get involved in community - here is the Big List of Recruiting & HR Communities to join. Bookmark this and share it with others. Add more if you see yours isn’t there.
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Thanks to Eugène van den Hemel, Dave Hazlehurst, Kevin Green, David Green, Thibault Martin, Evan Zils, Paul McClatchie, Joey NK Koksal, Martin Poole, Andy Dunne, Grace Carey, Ben Dale, Paul Daley, Rob Walker, Juliana Park, Viktoriia Dankevych, Jim Berrisford, Lyndsey Taylor, Virginia Tirado, Adam Gordon and Addie Rodrigues for your public support of all things brainfood - community endorsement is what makes brainfood grow - thank you. Scores updated in the Brainfood Hall of Fame.

Can you help? Share this newsletter with a friend who could do it with it. Cheers 🙏

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

So our US readers have their Labour Day tomorrow so this represents the long weekend a lot of the UK readers had last week - I wonder whether they would spend the extra day doing the same sort of thing?

Nothing wrong with life admin but pretty crap that 36% of us would be doing on a free day off! Make it a rule to get Chillax up there beyond 46% next year 👊. Thanks for all who voted, make sure you scroll to the end of the newsletter to vote for this week’s poll.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep222 - Generational Diversity: Age & Ageism in Recruitment, Fri 8th Sep, 2pm BST

As every country in the world seems to be getting older, the practical consequences of an ageing workforce are coming to recruitment’s door. How do we deal with age-ism in recruitment, one of the most invidious and perhaps most common bias’s in recruitment. We speak with recruiters have programmes tackling this, as well as from community members who have been on the wrong side of it. Must watch folks - register here

The Brainfood

1. How to Build a High-Performing Recruiting Culture by Celebrating the Team

Brainfooder John Vlastelica is one of the best do-er / thinkers in the community. I’m very pleased that he continues to do both, and externalise the learnings in posts such as this. Important nuance in this culture building case study - how much of what we promote as ‘good culture’ is actually just pandering to individual employees, as opposed to the collective good? Excellent read

CULTURE

2. How Sourcing Can Improve Gender Diversity

Following up from last week’s excellent post from cord, this is another example of the value vendors can provide by simply exposing their proprietary data. Gender variance in job search behaviour seems like a real trend - in this case, applying less / messaging less - so employers interesting in increasing gender diversity need to take the lead in initiating contact. As a logical extension, interesting ethical questions down the road - do we match gender variance in our recruiting strategies (ads for me, sourcing for women)?

D&I

3. Search Youtube Subtitles

Searching for video was one of the most fiendish challenges but with software now able to transcribe audio, the pathway to effectively searching billions of hours of Youtube is now here. Cool tool which you can use recreationally, also for content marketing (if you’re looking to make a gif) but also for sourcing, as there are going to be a load of people who have put their expertise into Youtube via talks, tutorials, webinar appearances and so on. Have at it, here

SOURCING

4. Trends in Recruiter Productivity

Why don’t more ATS’s produce content like this? Another example of the vendor nailing content marketing by the rather simple expedient of externalising anonymised, aggregated data from their platform. Some really interesting insights: application volume negatively correlates to rate-of-hire (employers with abundance mindset?), as well as important benchmark data on time-to-hire across business and technical. More of this please

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

5. Measuring Developer Productivity?

Talking about measuring productivity, can you do the same for developers? McKinsey say you can, which triggered engineers enough to produce this response, which basically says ‘you can’t really’. It’s a debate which is tangential to our work - though recruiters are cited in this as a job function where productivity can be measured - but the ideas shared here apply across disciplines. Is a recruiter productivity even if they have not made the hire? Maybe the hire was exceeding hard, or the HM never intended to make a decision or the company had a hidden EB problem. Productivity - may actually be unmeasurable.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

6. Top Programming Languages 2023

As we’re on tech, we might as well look at the top programming languages of 2023. Python now way ahead, and will likely stay there as the programming language of choice for all things AI. Worth a look if you’re hiring for tough technical skills or rather, hiring for a tech stack which engineers no longer want to train in.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

7. Generative AI and Intellectual Property

Ben Evans is a must follow - his essays have an erudition which is beyond most commentators of the Internet. He’s analysis of data privacy hysteria - which will augur in the rise of the paywalled Internet - has proved prescient, and I like his analysis here of the relationship between AI and IP. They are in contradiction and Evans wants to create the argument in defence of AI. We probably should support it, because we need to really think long and hard about who gets what value before lawyers end up shaping the society based on case law.

8. Better with Age: The Rising Importance of Older Workers

Demographics has steadily being moving from the margins to the mainstream as reality begins to hit that we really are getting older as a society, and we really not replacing ourselves at anything like the rate we need to. From the recruiters POV, this means an older workforce on aggregate, and the rise of a multi-generational workforce. How to do combat age-ism, whilst also accommodating for the realities of age? We’re talking about this on Brainfood Live this Friday, but dive into this super piece of research from Bain before you join it. H/T to brainfooder Jacob Sten Madsen for the share in the online community.

D&I

9. CJ Stroud Named Texan’s No1

The NFL kicks off this week and each needs to make decisions on who keep on roster and who to name as starters in the first team. The decision by the Houston Texans of starting first round pick CJ Stroud over the currently more capable veteran Davis Mills, got me thinking about the nature of hiring and promotion and the fact there is a time element that we don’t often consider. Do we do hire or promote based on ‘best person for the job right now’ or do we do it for the longer term benefit of the team / organisation? And does the sidelined veteran have a discriminating claim to make - after all, how do we decide someone has more or less potential?. We talked about this in the group but I think we need to talk about it here too.

ASSESSMENT

10. The End of the Googleverse

As AI transforms the digital world around us, it is worth jumping back to a bit of Internet history to better understand the chapter which is about to close. Once upon a time there was an Internet without Google, but when it demonstrated the superiority of PageRank for search relevance, it quickly took over to become not only the gateway to the Internet, but make every other website change in order to be ranked in the search. Superb essay detailing the rise and (maybe) fall of Google; relevant to anyone doing recruitment marketing, advertising, content - and sourcing.

CONTENT MARKETING

The Podcasts

11. Mastering Digital Platforms and Future-proofing Recruiter Skills for Tomorrow

Easy listening here, as we brainfooder Neil Carberry and I have a conversation about the state of the market and what recruiters really should be doing about it. So glad Neil is doing a podcast - smart people who ask great questions usually make for great conversational content. Have a listen, here

SOCIETY

12. Generative AI & the Disruption of Work with Ethan Mollick

Saw this in brainfooder David Green’s superb monthly compilation and was disappointed I had not picked up on it myself! Ethan Mollick has been a Twitter must follow for his report breakdowns and he’s added to his value by diving in deep into Generative AI. Here he does some live demo’s of GAI to the HR audience - nothing groundbreaking now, but a great intro to the topic, as well as to him. Have a watch.

13. Germany is in Trouble

With the far right AfD party continuing to gain ground in Germany, the rise of the populist right - which many may have thought had peaked in 2016 with Trump / Brexit - seems to be coming around again. The relationship between economics and politics is pretty straightforward really - inflation, cost of living crisis and hostile de-globalisation is going to lead to political manifestations which might be best described as ‘suboptimal’. Excellent interview with Wolfgang Munchau, gloomy but not without hope.

ECONOMY

End Note

I’m still in London for the next week or so - Mother is actually coming to visit this Thursday so I will be on best behaviour for the next month or so - aside from when I am in Nashville, where I fully aim to embrace the local culture whilst I am there!

Look forward to seeing everyone who will be at Recfest USA - great opportunity to meet in person 👊

In the meantime, have a look at the poll below and let me know where your organisation stands on it. Do you a policy to diversify your workforce generationally?

Recruiting Brainfood