Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 377

Year in Brainfood - 2023 in Review

Dec 31, 2023

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Friends,

It’s New Year’s Eve and this is the last newsletter of the year.

Congratulations on making through another crazy year in recruitment & HR - and thank you for sharing it with us as part of the brainfooder community.

This issue is going to look a little different - we’re going to stats on brainfood channels, retro on what worked and what didn’t and share some thoughts on how we can improve in 2024.

Hope you enjoy it!

What Do Brainfooders Think?

I am honestly most interested in real time polling tech but I take the democratic vote of the community on board - RoboHung AI needs be emerge and there should indeed be something like an event - maybe a monthly meet-up should be a thing. I’m on it…

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep239 - Forecasting 2024 Year in Recruitment, Part One

Brainfood Live is back in the first week of the New Year with a two part mini-series forecasting the next 12 months for us in the industry. We’re going to talk tech hiring landscape, investment landscape and the state of global RPO…Friday 5th January, 2pm GMT - register here

Recruiting Brainfood - 2023 Year in Review

1. Subscriber Growth

We’re up to 34,855 subscribers, up from 28,270 a year ago, with an average net new subscriber count of 126.63 per week. Growth is by no means exponential but then, it never has been - more like always steady north-east, with the occasional acceleration based - it seems - mainly on time of year.

We didn’t miss a week, so that was 52 newsletters out on the year, something like 1,500,000 emails sent (!). Open Rate stayed steady too - never falling below 35%, occasionally up to 50% with an all time OR of 39%. Basically, every week, 10,000+ other recruiters & HR folks are reading this newsletter along with you.

2. Geographical Distribution

Most of the people who read this are recruiters & HR people who operate in large, metropolitan, English language friendly city centre. How this map changes over time would not only be pretty cool visualisation but also a useful means of tracking where growth / decline has been most significant, but I suspect it will mainly be all the bubbles growing slightly bigger rather than shifting around too much.

There are huge swathes of the globe entirely underserved by this newsletter; they also blindspots as there’s loads of recruitment going on in those places that I have little visibility on. The ‘How to Hire in [insert country]’ series needs to be something that happens in 2024.

3. When Brainfooders Read

SubStack provides some interesting information on when this newsletter is opened. It is sent on Sunday and - I was a little surprised to see - it is overwhelming read on the same day, usually 2x as popular as the next day, Monday.

I hope this doesn’t mean that I am making people work on the weekend 😀. I hope instead it means we’re amongst enthusiasts who care about this industry more than the norm. Interest declines progressively until Saturday, where thankfully very few people are reading this!

It does look like there is a reason to do something from Wednesday / Thursday - usually these have been webinars or LinkedIn posts but perhaps something more regular could happen here, just before Brainfood Live on Friday. What do you think?

4. LinkedIn Posts

Over the past 12 months, I’ve probably posted around 50-60 mid week posts on LinkedIn, which has reached nearly 5 million impressions.

This was helped by one outrageous post ‘Recruiters: Do You Measure Quality of Hire’ in April which hit 452,585 impressions by itself - basically 1/10th of the view count of the entire year, and 5 other posts that went over 100,000 impressions. Then came 20+ or some which hit 40,000+ impressions or so.

Most popular post type? Not polls as I suspected but in fact ‘report breakdowns’ where I read a PDF, summarise it into a LinkedIn post and point out the relevancies for recruiting. Basically HungGPT. Wonder whether they will continue to be interesting in 2024? I’ll keep doing them, so we will see.

5. This Week, In Recruiting

2023 was the year when the spin off newsletter overtook the original in terms of subscriber numbers. This Week, In Recruiting is where community news, events, jobs etc went, and it’s also where I do some original writing in the Open Kitchen segment.

TWIR has now got 41,431 subscribers. Are they reading it? According to ‘Article Views’ they are, with an average of 9000 reading per week. However, as you can see in the chart below, the article view count is all over the map, with sometimes with periods of random dips. Unlike this newsletter, which is despatched direct to your inbox, LinkedIn’s newsletter is subject to whatever changes LinkedIn make to their algorithm

Still, the last few issues have gone over 11K article view mark - an ‘OR’ of 25% so decent number of people must be seeing it.

6. Brainfood Live On Air Video Livestream

We hit 51 episodes in 2023 - nearly one per week with average attendance of 337 on CrowdCast, 1018 on (my) LinkedIn Live, 43 on FB and, incredibly 101 on X. So we can say 1500 recruiters tune into each episode, across the multiple channels. I don’t think anyone else actually does a regular recruitment livestream so I can confidently say we’re the best 🤣.

The most popular single episode was of course ‘Recruiter Use Cases for ChatGPT, Part One’, where we had 1500 on CrowdCast alone, with many thousands more on LinkedIn. We ended up doing 4 episodes on this one topic and no doubt could’ve done more, such was the appetite from the industry.

Two innovations this year on BLOA, one good, one not-so-good.

Good: Restream invites meant that community members could freely multi-cast Brainfood Live (as a LinkedIn Live) on their own page. I really think this has significant recruitment application and I will be encouraging more of us to do it in 2024.

Not-so-good: CrowdCast v2 looks better, but functions worse I think for engagement and signups. It’s hard to get sign ups.

7. The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast

The audio file of each episode of Brainfood Live is extracted and converted into an episode of The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast. This was a ‘might as well’ thing to do but incredibly its become a channel on its own right, probably because of the sheer volume of episodes. Consider it saturation attack on the industry podcasting landscape ;-)

We’re up to 240,000 downloads over 267 episodes, which gives us a true average of 898.8 downloads per episode, with the majority of people downloading pretty much immediately after episode publication - this is almost certainly due to those podcast fans having subscribed to the channel. That said, audio has a much longer tail than video or text - episodes continue to accumulate downloads months after publication, so I reckon 1K per episode is currently about right.

I should really do a better job at promoting it - aside from an auto-tweet on publication, there’s not much more. It’s on Apple Music, Spotify or Podbean

8. Brainfood Online Community

I’m encouraged by our Facebook group! Like everyone else I had lost enthusiasm for FB since Zuckerberg abandoned social media in favour of a retreat to the Metaverse, but despite this there have been some great organic engagements from community members in our private group all year.

1847 posts in-group over the year, an average of 5 new posts, 30 comments and 65 engagements. None of this is seeded by me or any other mods (there are no mods..). All are welcome to join, if you still have an FB account.

9. Brainfood Jobs Job board & Talent Community

Sad times on the job board. Obviously 2023 is going to go down as a year of the Great Recruiter Recession. It has been incredibly tough. From a 2021 high of 200+ new jobs per week on the job board, it more or less entirely dried up throughout 2023, with job volume barely creeping into double figures. This, despite the fact that the board has been free to use for any employer all year. Lets hope it picks up in 2024 - I will be extending the 100% discount (BTCFREE) for next 12 months. For anyone looking for work in 2024, join the Brainfood Talent Community - searchable db of community members actively looking.

10. Brainfood Tribune

It’s been great to see the return of the Brainfood Tribune. It’s more or less become 20 Questions now - it’s the easiest format to do and allows some sort of comparative reading, whilst also giving us the chance to know the author better. Going to keep doing these so if you’re interested in being profiled, reply to this email and let me know!

End Note

I was going to reflect more on wins / fails in 2023, but a modal keeps popping up telling me I am running out of space for email so I had better stop here 🤣.

Hope you enjoyed this review with me - missed out a ton of stuff, including all the live events, the custom webinars, the GPT experiments and the rest, but will cover this somewhere else.

Let me conclude by wishing you all a great day today, however you choose to spend it. Which incidentally, is the question for the last poll of the year - give it a vote / comment 👇

Recruiting Brainfood