Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 366
Reports on AI, Tech Salary, Economic Growth, University Grade Inflation and the Best Employers of 2023.
This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends Eli Onboarding
Onboarding is too often overlooked in early careers recruitment. Much is invested in talent attraction and development, but there is frequently a gap in engagement and human connection, particularly during the all-important preboarding stage. Final year students and graduates often go months without hearing or connecting with their future employers and peers, fuelling high dropout rates, a lack of understanding of company culture or preparation for the programme they are joining.
If this sounds familiar, join Eli Onboarding’s expert panel including early career experts from Enterprise, Police Now, and Hays, on Thursday 2nd November at 12pm GMT to discover why experience-led onboarding is so important for emerging talent, and how you can deliver an inclusive onboarding experience that champions diversity and social mobility.
You can register for this webinar here.
And, if you’d like to find out more about how Eli helps enhance the early career onboarding experience for clients such as NatWest Group, Cognizant and Police Now, why not book a discovery call today?
SPONSORS
Friends,
This is a call out for all in-person events planned for 2024 - do you know of one, are you running one, do you recommend one? Please ADD them to the bottom of the Big List of Recruiting / HR Events to Attend in 2023 / 2024 and share the document with your colleagues in industry, and have them do the same. The plan is to create a single self-updating resource where we can all see what is going on in the year - I think it will be useful.
Thank you to: Eugène van den Hemel, Kevin Green, Jo McCatty, Joey NK Koksal, Tony Pitchford, Dr. Philipp Karl Seegers, Alexandra Gyetvai, Adam Gordon, Michael Blakely, Rob Walker, Juliana Park, Nadia Vatalidis and Agnieszka Widacka for your public endorsements of all things brainfood - keeping this show on the road. Scores updated on the Brainfood Hall of Fame 👊
Can you help? Share this link with a friend in industry.
What Do Brainfooders Think?
Candidate usage of GAI is going to be one of the topics of the next 12 months, and it looks like the community is exactly where we might expect it to be - divided!
Redesign of process is likely to be critical and I think that will grow in percentage very quickly. Love the 25% hold outs though - do you know something we don’t? Thanks all for voting, make sure you make your voice heard at the end of this newsletter in this week’s poll.
Brainfood Live On Air - Ep228 - How to Conduct an AI Bias Audit, Fri 20th, 2pm BST
Legislation on the use of AI is moving through to implementation and we recruiters really need to know more about it before we become examples in case law. What are the general trends on how AI can be used in hiring? How do we figure out if our current and projected usage is going to be compliant? A budding industry is developing on this, so lets speak to a few people who might be able to advise on it…we’re on Friday 20th Oct, 2pm BST. Register here
The Brainfood
1. The State of AI 2023
Nathan Benaich’s State of AI has basically become the Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends for AI - an annual must read which gives a comprehensive overview covering investment, innovation, application and regulation landscape. It’s a monstrous 163 pdf slide deck (love to see Nathan deliver this 🤣) but given that AI a force multiplier for every field we care about, it is a mandatory read for everyone here. H/T to brainfooder Martyn Redstone for the share in the online community
2. State of Tech Salaries 2023
Main themes of the annual report from Hired confirms what recruiters know on-the-ground: tech salary drop (in real terms), which only happens during recessionary periods. Also tension between remote vs RTO, expected misalignment along the threat of AI disintermediation and the continuing shift of job location to lower cost of living, in-country centres. US / UK data only but I think these themes are probably global. Must read, download here
ECONOMY
3. World’s Most Attractive Employers 2023
So the worst part about this research is actually the league table of employers which predictably aligns to global brand recognition - it would be what you would get if you asked 100 students, never mind 1,000,000. Much more interesting are the segmentations in-industry, as well as gender variance on what is important in the workplace. Download here. H/T to brainfooder Caroline Hunter for the share
EMPLOYER BRANDING
4. Cleo Talent Acquisition Career Progression Framework
Are you trying put some structure into your TA career pathing? If you have a TA department of any size then you probably should be. A community member (I forgot who - sorry!) shared Cleo’s framework in the online community and I thought it was a very decent resource. If you are a TA leader and don’t have anything, this is a good starter for ten.
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
5. IMF Growth Forecast: 2024
Record cumulative interest rate rises over the past 2 years were primarily designed to reduce ‘excess savings’ that people had accumulated during the Covid era, which had apparently reduced the motivation people had for work. Have a read of the IMF Global Outlook report, which includes this, along with other such goodies as 2024 national economic growth projections. Download here
ECONOMY
6. Talent Intelligence Collective Benchmarking Survey 2023
Brilliant piece of research work from brainfooder Toby Culshaw, whose Talent Intelligence Collective group is one of the best online communities around. Here’s what that community said about the state of Talent Intelligence in 2023
TALENT INTELLIGENCE
7. How AI Reduces the World to Stereotypes
Image generators are probably the most egregious examples bias in AI. This is brilliantly described in this post, which takes us through a visual journey of what would be generated with a basic prompt technique. We can’t just blame AI - it has been pre-trained on existing images, which have themselves been selected for by human beings wanting to confirm a stereotype. AI might indeed ‘flatten’ the world into 2D simplifications, that it is doing so on bedrock already being flattened, by us.
D&I
8. University Grade Inflation 2023
Do you think University grades are inflating? Rhetorical question of course, but this report is a good chance to see to how fast they are going up, in which subjects and in which countries. This report might be fuel to the fire to the cultural right wing I am afraid, but as we have created a system which rewards Universities for ‘successfully’ graduating students, the criticism is deserved no matter from which quarter it comes. From a recruiting side, the case against degrees continues to build..H/T to brainfooder Wolfgang Brickwedde for the share.
ASSESSMENT
9. A Case Study on Elevating Hiring Experiences - Revamping Talent Acquisition for Better cNPS
Where are we at with candidate experience? I think we have definitely improved, but these improvements have been recently overwhelmed with the increase in applicant flow + reduction in capacity due to RIF. We need more operators thinking about how we can make a difference - great post here from brainfood Andreea Lungulescu on how to step up.
CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE
10. Why Lawyers Work Where They Work, The Uncomfortable Truth
Some acerbic wit from brainfooder Ken Collins to complete the newsletter this week - what lawyers say vs what lawyers mean when talking about their employer 🤣 Someone should do one of these for recruiting….
CULTURE
The Podcasts
11. If One Side Has All The Data, It Can Do Whatever It Wants
How a court case from an Uber driver who was physically assaulted whilst on the drive, led to a claim for data access and ultimately a philosophical position on who had access to the data and why that meant power. Its basically ‘gig work bad’ but does include an addendum at the end which recognises that perhaps it was still an improvement for many workers who had it worse. Important listen, so do it here. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share
GIG ECONOMY
12. What’s in Store for 2024?
It was fun to have this conversation with brainfooder Pedro Torrecillas on what’s in store for recruiters in 2024. A bit of biography, a shout of to brainfooders Stephen O’Donnell and Bill Boorman, and some sober speculations on the year ahead
ECONOMY
13. Build An Entire AI Agent Workforce
This is an interesting channel - a guy who is basically investigating how to use AI to automate everything. Wes Roth is a great narrator and his videos are informative, maybe inspirational, maybe conspirational. This one looks at how AGI will actually evolve, and it will come from the UI of a video game. Fascinating hypothesis. H/T to Stanislaw Wasowicz for the share
AI
End Note
Two of the big events of the year - SOSU in Amsterdam and HR Tech in Las Vegas has come and gone, Unleash Paris now this week. As you know, I believe that in-person events are a must for learning, personal profile, building relationships and gaining access to the crowd intelligence you can’t get anywhere else.
So the topic of this week’s poll is going to be: which is your go to event in 2024? Answer in Comments if your preferred option isn’t there!
That’s it for this week - thanks for reading
Have a great week everybody
Hung
Job Boards Connect annual conference