Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 365

Sourcing metrics, Embedded Based Retrieval, a 310 pager on the Gig Economy and one of the best straight talking blog posts on Remote Work

Oct 08, 2023

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Friends,

I’m delighted to see so many of you start up your own podcasts and newsletters. I want more of you to do the same, as I strongly believe in a polyphonic industry ecosystem where everyone has a voice in the public discourse.

Please do not be deterred from that voice in your head telling you ‘who needs another recruiting or HR podcast/newsletter’. The community will tell you whether it is interesting or not, based on whether they pay attention or not. And they won’t know how to do that, if you don’t just go ahead and get something out there.

Since I Recruiting Brainfood started 7 years ago, I have witnessed the amazing growth of this community and I am humbled to see the good it can do through connecting people together across roles, industries, regions and countries. I believe each of you has the potential to do something similarly, in your own way, in your own spaces and in your own time.

To that end I want to let you know that I am here to help; if you are a first timer and never done a podcast before, let me know if you need a guest - I’ll be first one in. If you’re setting up a newsletter or simply writing more on a place like LinkedIn, tag me in the post and I’ll support. If you fancy doing some public speaking, comment below on what you’re interested in talking about and we can see if we can get you started on Brainfood Live. Whatever you do, just get started. Everything else is prevarication 🤣

Finally, I reminded that I need to restart the Weekly Workshops on Growth again. This was derailed due to summer + busyness but may be time to restart. Let me know in comments below if you found these helpful and I will fire them back up again 👊

Thanks to Eugène van den Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Cornel Müller, Kevin Green, Dave Hazlehurst, Oana Iordachescu, Sam Merron, Hayley Reeves, Jacek Krajewski, Hilton Barbour, Bas van de Haterd, Arron Daniels, Charlie Donoghue, Romuald Restout and Taz Vaid for supporting all things brainfood - your public endorsement is what keeps this show on the road 👊. Scores updated on the Brainfood Hall of Fame

Can you help? Share this link with a friend in industry who needs a boost.

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

Great to have your thoughts on what the ‘last social network’ might be. I think it will be LinkedIn, but we were pretty evenly divided on the options

Thanks for all who voted - we’ll be doing these polls every week, so make sure you scroll to the end of the newsletter to make your opinions known.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep227 - What Works for Women (in Tech)

We’ve had over a decade of trying to get more women into tech, yet survey after survey, year after year, the ratios remain stubbornly fixed, at around 5-8% for all engineering roles. Is it time for a fundamental rethink? We’re with Fionnula O’Connor who has some interesting research to share. Register here

The Brainfood

1. Sourcing Metrics

Super valuable piece of work from brainfooders Balazs Paroczay and Alexandra Gyetvai on what sourcing metrics to use to measure the quality and efficiency of your sourcing efforts. Needless to say this is one for all of those in sourcing or recruitment operations. Download it here

SOURCING

2. How Are Consumers Using Generative AI?

Are you starting to see job candidates use AI in applications? Judging by some of the conversations we’ve seen in the online community and also more publicly on LinkedIn, we certainly seem to be, so this overview of consumer usage of GAI is timely, as it is thorough.

SOCIETY

3. How LinkedIn Is Using Embeddings to Up Its Match Game for Job Seekers

Sourcing only exists because inefficient online databases are hard to interrogate. LinkedIn have a vested interest in making it easier. Fascinating post from LinkedIn’s engineering blog which details one of the ways their recommendation system is evolving - new term for us to learn: Embedding Based Retrieval (EBR). Technical but accessible enough, and of interest to anyone who wants to know what happens when you input search terms into LinkedIn. H/T to brainfooder Ben O’Mahony for the share.

SOURCING

4. Sunday Night Exec Meetings

Most of us are going to recoil at this suggestion but having thought about it some more, I do wonder whether it has merit. We all know Monday’s are a sh1tshow - by far the least productive day of the week - and it’s mainly because we’re spending too much time preparing, updating, interrupting, contesting and delegating rather than any doing. What if Exec did their meetings on Sunday - high incentive to secure consensus when it is your time rather than company time. Reminds me a little of the Bezos meeting memo idea - prepare before you talk. What do you think, do you think this would improve operating efficiency in your business, or say, your TA department?

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

5. The Work Relationship Index 2023

Substantial piece of work from HP, who surveyed 12,000 knowledge workers worldwide on their sentiment towards work. We know already what the results are going to be, though the country and sector segmentation is particularly interesting. Can’t help but think that we are overthinking it all though - what if we’re just working too much? 3 day / 4 day weekend would solve most of this…wouldn’t it?

CULTURE

6. No White Men Policy: What You Can & Can’t Do On Diversity Hiring

I posted a LinkedIn poll on this issue a few weeks ago, and it was picked up by our friends at Workable, who wrote a great wrapper post around the results explaining what is or is not permissible when it comes to diversity hiring. US context of course, this will vary region by region, but a useful in navigating the legal guardrails when setting D & I policies. We also can’t avoid the hard questions - have we created a situation which is actively hostile to white male candidates? No bueno if so..

D&I

7. Google Helpful Content Guide 2023

It is extremely useful for our community to have the likes of brainfooder Alexander Chukovski in it, because they make observations on obscure updates on major platforms which might have significant impact on the efficacy of our tools and channels we use. Google content update penalises optimisation hacks such as date updates to re-fresh content. Worth having a read of this if you’re posting jobs or managing content in any way for your employer.

NB: Alexander will be joining us for Recruiter Use Cases For ChatGPT - Part 4 later this month. H/T to brainfooder Caroline Hunter for the share

RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING

8. Is the Talent Pipeline for Women in STEM Broken?

The decline in women's participation in STEM may be partly attributed to the broader decline in female workforce participation brought on by the pandemic.

If Covid-19 does turn out to be a mass debilitating event, we might be able to draw a dotted line from it to the regression of women in STEM. Some relationship with shift to remote also - no surprise that Electrical Engineering - a job which typically requires onsite - has the most skewed gender ratios. Zero info on methodology though, and some inevitable cherry picking of the data. Wish we could make it mandatory for raw data to be supplied along with insight. Have a read, nevertheless

PS: Brainfood Live this Friday, on this topic. Register here

D&I

9. Working Without Borders

Did you know that gig workers now constitute between 4.4 to 12.5% of the global workforce? One of many fascinating data points in this global study of platform-enabled workers from the World Bank. It’s a 310 page monster (!) but helpfully has a condensed 40 pager which summarises the main insights. As many of us enter the gig economy ourselves, it is critical for us to know the lay of this land. Download here

GIG ECONOMY

10. The Future of Remote Work

Stay Saasy may be the best ‘tell it like it is’ blogs on workplace culture. This take on remote work is concise, insightful, fair and resonant. We’re probably a little tired of another blog post speculating on the whys and wherefores of remote, but if you can muster up the enthusiasm to read one more, make it this one.

REMOTE WORKING

The Podcasts

11. What If There Was No Employment Law?

Fun speculations from People Management in the UK on whatif scenario of zero employment law. Surprisingly interesting - I mean no offence but law can be somewhat dry - recommended listening.

CULTURE

12. Broken Money w/ Lyn Alden

Crypto has been moved out of the mainstream consciousness but the big daddy of them all - Bitcoin - remains ever more relevant in this era of high interest rates, high inflation, wealth inequality and the politicisation of currency. Lyn Alden on what money is, what it could be and why that matters to everybody.

BLOCKCHAIN

13. Path to Global TA Leadership

It’s brainfooder Yasar Ahmad on the path to global TA leadership. This is a fascinating interview with a person who has self awareness to make strategic career decisions, whilst holding the fort on the business as usual. Great listen.

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

End Note

Some interesting conversations on ‘Candidate use of AI’ in job applications. It’s good news that we are talking about it, as its an inevitable outcome of the mainstreaming of AI. I’ll be writing about this some more in tomorrows Open Kitchen in TWIR (subscribe to it, its LinkedIn newsletter different from this), but wanted to do a poll on the issue with the community.

Give me your thoughts here..

Recruiting Brainfood