Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 363

Recruitment in the Era of Generative AI (2023), Tech hiring insights into the Netherlands, language bias on feedback and why influencer is a lucrative yet disparaged career choice....

Sep 24, 2023

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Friends,

It’s been fantastic to see so many of you at the in-person events over the past two weeks. I hope that you got value from them and will continue to support companies who put them on. We are heading fast into the last few months of the year, so make sure you check out the remaining events to attend in the Big List. Also if anyone is hosting anything in 2024, start adding them the bottom of that sheet, we might as well get ready for the next year 👊

Encouraging signs on the Brainfood Jobs Job Board - new jobs being added, are we beginning to see some sort of reinvestment in TA teams? Use code BTCFREE if you have a recruiter or HR job and want to post it on the board - all live jobs also get amped out on This Week, In Recruiting every Monday.

Thanks to: Joey NK Koksal, Kevin Green, Paul Daley, Ilya Fedosov, Susan Tien, Ross Clennett, Stephen Adeoye, Robert Garner, Vallerie Wasch, Holden Lager, Sarah Wardle, Lars Schmidt, Sibel Smith, Robert Newry, Tush Wijeratne, Ben O’Mahoney, Andy Headworth, Martin Poole, Louise Triance, Rob Walker, Nkosinomqhele Zulu and Eugène van den Hemel for your support on all things brainfood last week - vital to keep this community growing. Thank you! Scores updated on the Brainfood Hall of Fame!

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

The question of whether brainfooders would rejoin a former employer after a lay off produced a really diverse responses, I would personally be on the ‘No’ camp but it seems that most of us are more mature than this!

Goes to show though, that all teams need to 👊have a lay off plan in mind, particularly one centred on employee needs. I think we have all got collectively better at this but, as always, still too many examples of bad practice making bad news even worse. Thanks for voting everyone - make sure you scroll to the end of the newsletter to vote on this week’s topic

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep225 - The Psychological Impact of Candidate Assessments

Pretty sure nobody has examined this issue before - what are the psychological impacts of different candidate assessment types, are some more harmful than others and do we even factor this before we subject candidates to do them? I’m bringing in professional psychologists on panel who are going to discuss. Must attend folks…Friday 29th September, 2pm BST - register here

The Brainfood

1. Recruiting in the Era of Generative AI 2023

A lot of you have been asking for a copy of this talk so I include it here as downloadable PDF. There are some improvements to be made and I will actually try and keep this up to date as case studies, use cases, AI innovation and AI suppression legislation comes into being. Hint: if you have any examples that should be included, reply to this email and let me know.

2. Why Resumes Are Dead & How Indeed.com Keeps Killing the Job Market

Rather incredible post from a marketing exec who has been on the job market for overly long. It’s part screed, part analysis and what’s most interesting are the rational yet erroneous conclusions he makes given the experience he’s had. It’s massively long but I found myself reading to the end. Useful for anyone designing a job application process that might be a bit more human centred…

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

3. Tech Hiring Insights Netherlands 2023

This is a great example of how any one of us can do super useful market research on available public data. In fact, as we’re meant to be expert finders-of-information we should be able to produce this type of market intelligence much more regularly than we do. Brainfooder Jan Bernhart in his analysis of the tech hiring trends in the Netherlands in 2023 - just in time for our State of Hiring in the Netherlands on Tuesday - make sure you sign up and show up.

ECONOMY

4. How To Do A Company Retreat

Particularly rate the ‘Liked, Lacked, Learned’ framework of reviews - helps crystallise employee feedback into the sortable buckets which management can then turn into future actions. Great post from the Head of Remote at Doist, on how to do a company retreat. H/T to brainfooder Antonio Arias for the share.

REMOTE WORKING

5. Recruiter Enablement Maturity Model

Nice piece of work from TA Guru and PoetryHR. What is recruiter enablement? Pretty straight forward framework from the sales world - are you, as an organisation, providing your recruiters with the tools and techniques to succeed? Figure out where you stand with this downloadable maturity model.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

6. Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity

I’ve been collected research studies on the impact of AI on productivity, and this is the latest one which confirms some of the patterns which have probably already directly experienced ourselves. GAI is a skills / experience levelling - it helps less skilled knowledge workers the most. Implications of this down the road to TA strategy might be clear, might also be ominous. H/T to brainfooder Rob Dromgoole for the share in the online community.

7. Language Bias in Performance Feedback 2023 Report

An unusual piece of research Textio, who studied the textual data of employee feedback and mapped it against employee performance and retention, whilst also segmenting for race and gender categories. As always, with reports, the read the methodology first (its at the back), before diving into the outcomes. It’s brainfood for sure, so have a read here. H/T to brainfooder Caroline Hunter for the share.

D&I

8. I Speak German Now

Incredible things routinely happening on AI. Three examples last week of Ethan Mollick speaking German (when he can’t), an ultra realistic AI influencer selling make up products and an AI generated simulacra generated by simple text input. A recent poll I launched only last Friday seemed to think that video interview was pretty insulated from AI, but from the evidence here, that confidence is misplaced. We have big challenges ahead in hardening our assessments to be ‘AI proof’. Talking about this with Arctic Shores (who are sharing research from 2000 student job seekers on their use of GAI for job search) next month - register here

ASSESSMENT

9. Influencing Can Be a High-earning Career. Why Don’t We Take it Seriously?

Rare sympathetic post to the career path of the influencer from BBC Worklife. Pre-AI the creator economy was going gangbusters, but I wonder whether how new entrants will compete with AI competitors who can outproduce any human and still seemingly generate substantial followings. Authenticity is key I suspect. As well as perhaps, irrationality. Easy read, lots to think about (especially on how influencer marketing can be used for TA)

CREATOR ECONOMY

10. How People Can Create - and Destroy - Value with Generative AI

Super interesting review, by BCG themselves, of the same experimented conducted by academics mentioned in article No6 of this newsletter. Of course BCG are motivated reasoners - but hey aren’t we all? - but they do come up with some intriguing findings; again closing gap between low to high proficiency, the loss of diversity of thought (few people dissent from AI output), reduction of group creativity against improvement of individual performance, the negative impact of training in AI on user use of AI (!) and the degrading of AI output on areas it excels at, after human modification.

It’s a short post but I promise you, worth reading.

The Podcasts

11. What We Can Learn from Elon Musk

TA / HR is a tough crowd for anything associated with Elon Musk, but credit for Josh Bersin to doing a review of Walter Isaacson’s recently published biography. As Josh says, whatever your personal thoughts of the man, there’s no question that he is a kive player that is simultaneously changing the game. What lessons can we learn? Maybe some uncomfortable ones - have a listen.

CULTURE

12. Hung Lee Reveals the Secrets of Recruiting

John Mitchell might have the second most melodious voice in recruitment (first is brainfooder Marcus Edwardes), so I enjoyed listening to his questions more than my answers in this podcast about brainfood, audience building, world of work and the rest.

COMMUNITY

13. AI Capitalism Doesn’t Need Consumers…

‘AI will create more jobs’. The question is whether it will create more than it will destroy, and what happens if it is the latter. The economic system requires humans to be both producers and consumers, and if we cannot be the former, how can we become the latter? Decent overview of the ideas we need to be discussing, though decays into ‘it’ll be alright on the night’ happy talk in the end.

UBI

End Note

Interesting conversation in the pub last week about the degree of job creation / job destruction that will occur as AI continues to be adopted. It basically divides the optimists against the pessimists on how we think about technology innovation and I thought it would be a good topic to poll the community on.

Recruiting Brainfood