Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 393

AI Index Report, Indeed Hiring Lab update, Huawei Compensation Scheme, Problems with Boeing explained and the future of the EU as an offshoring hub for US tech? All this and other sensations....

If you want to embed inclusive hiring practices, hiring managers need to buy in every step of the way. Upskill on DEI best practices with Hung Lee and talent leaders from tech.

Hiring managers can be your strongest allies as you embed inclusive hiring practices. But many different factors can create disconnect between hiring managers and talent teams. These risk slowing down your progress. But they don’t have to.

Join us as Hung leads a discussion with senior leaders from Multiverse, Attest and Equitas in Otta’s upcoming masterclass “Turn hiring managers into DEI champions”. They’ll share creative tactics that have worked well and not-so-well in building DEI buy-in and engagement, and you’ll leave the session with practical tips you can bring back to your business.

Sign up to the free masterclass on April 30th at 2pm GMT+1

Otta is the hiring platform built for tech startups, scaleups and enterprises. They help you attract and hire diverse candidates across tech, product, commercial & operations in the UK, EU and US. Learn more at otta.com/employers

SPONSORS

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Friends,

I’m really enjoying my time in Canada. The 6 days in Toronto flew by and now I am on the second leg with 3 days in Montreal. I can already tell that you my hunch that you can only really know a place by going there and being amongst the local community has been justified. Going to write a little about what I’ve found out about ‘Hiring in Canada’ in tomorrow's Open Kitchen essay. Subscribe here to read that.

Thanks to: Colin Donnery, Kevin Green, Dave Hazlehurst, Joey NK Koksal, Paul Daley, Juliana Park, Jon Bersentes, Steven Rothberg, Jodi Jefferson, Brien Convery, Kim Benedict and Clair Mohammed - your public endorsement of all things brainfood really helps keep this show on the road - thank you!

Can you help? Share this newsletter with a friend who you think could do with a boost. Cheers

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

I’m kind of disappointed that ‘Style tips for leaders’ didn’t make the cut as I was hoping to get some info on improving my image, but that shall have to wait for another time! We’re doing Recruiting Dashboards and Automation in Recruiting in May, so you might as well register for those now. Thanks for voting everybody - make sure you vote again this week, at the bottom of the page.

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Brainfood Live On Air - Ep255 - No LinkedIn X-Ray, Now What?, Friday 26th April, 2pm BST

Excited for this episode, bringing the End of LinkedIn X-Ray story arc to a conclusion, at least for this season. For those of you who are at the sourcing end of this business, we know that one of our go-to mainstays has been significantly compromised by this move and hence we need to ask the question, what next? Sourcing heroes from the community get together to figure it out. On Friday 26th April, 2pm BST / 9am ET - register here

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The Brainfood

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1. Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024

Stanford University annual review of the state of AI. Everything from investment, publication rate, capability, policy and so forth. Chapters on Economy, Responsible AI, Gender and Public Opinion most relevant to us here. You won’t find a more comprehensive review of AI than this report, so download it here. H/T to brainfooder Martyn Redstone for the share in the online community.

AI

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2. Stop the Bias Report 2024

The world is full of D&I reports but this one is particularly interesting for a number of reasons: it focuses on candidate perception of bias, ranks biases according to the same perceptions, and includes nuances such as accent and appearance bias so frequently missing from the conversation. Great job from our friends at Tribepad. Ungated so download it here

D&I

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3. Indeed Hiring Lab

Very nice update from Indeed on their Hiring Lab website - we now have a Hiring Lab Data Portal looking at job posting volume over time, filtered by country, region and sector. Essential resource for anyone interesting in the recruitment advertising as a measure of the economic activity. Bookmark it here

ECONOMY

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4. IMF World Economic Outlook April 2024

A cynical explanation for unprecedented cranking up of interest rates over the past two years has been the perceived need to reduce the ‘Covid cushion’ - the savings that many of us had accumulated over the lockdown period when governments worldwide were effectively paying us not to go to work - and in so doing increase the motivation for us to apply for jobs. IMF World Economic Outlook for April 2024 gives us an overview as to where we’re at with this immiseration strategy.

ECONOMY

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5. I Scraped All of ChatGPT’s Enterprise Customers – Here’s What I Learned

More great DIY research from Henley Wing Chiu - key highlights of his analysis of the make up for ChatGPT Enterprise customers: adoption rate is low at 5% (though we don’t know what a good number is), private companies more likely to adopt vs public and ChatGPT Enterprise companies hire less AI talent vs non-customers.

AI

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6. Suicide Mission: What Boeing Did to all the Guys Who Remember How to Build a Plane

As a overly frequent flyer, you can’t help but think about the risk associated with flying Boeing. Flight booking site KAYAK are now offering an option filter the against aircraft manufacturer should you prefer to mitigate risk(!). This post is an incredible long read dissecting what went wrong with one of the greatest companies the world has ever seen - ultimately, the loss of cultural knowledge amid push for outsourcing and increasing shareholder value. Must read

CULTURE

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7. Huawei Compensation Scheme

Chinese everything-maker Huawei might be one of the comeback stories of the past few years - after being blasted out of the telecoms and phone business due to US national security concerns, they back in profit, back in the phone business and now a multi-channel player in every industry niche from EV’s to semi-conductors. Few know that they are an employee owned business whose profit share incentive scheme might a key component to their resilience. Got involved in a tweet thread on this, some interesting details emerge as to how compensation / reward is shared.

CULTURE

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8. Live in the EU. Work Remote for the US

Is the future of EU tech to be an off shoring hub for US tech employers? I’m not sure that Europe would outcompete LATAM, given time zone alignment but wage arbitrage leading to the geographical dispersal of jobs is an accelerating trend for all knowledge work. Lots to ponder.

REMOTE WORKING

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9. What The F%ck Does a CFO Do Anyway?

The Secret CFO reminds me of the great anonymous blogs once written in HR - unfiltered tell alls which disclose the inner workings of the profession. The form has now migrated to X, which despite the increase of toxicity, trolls and bots, remains a place in which you can find gold. Someone should do one of these for recruiting.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

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10. Elusive Parity: Key Gender Parity Metric Falls for First Time in 2 Decades

Interesting research from S&P Global on the state of gender parity at exec / board level in the US. 2023 had plenty of victims, and it seems women execs can be considered another group. Falls into the same pattern as wider D&I initiatives - all good when the times were good, but as soon as soon as we need to do ‘more with less’ the commitment disappears. Summary here, full research here

D&I

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The Podcasts

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11. Data or Ads? Future of Job Board Advertising in the Era of GenAI

I rarely promote my own stuff on this newsletter, but last Friday’s Brainfood Live was so good I have to let more people know about it. Here is my secret Youtube channel, which I basically use as storage for Brainfood Lives. Watch this if you want to hear about recruitment advertising, cost per application, GenAI enabled candidates, LLM’s taking over the job board space in a fascinating and cliche free discussion on the near future. Watch / listen here (scroll to 15.27) for the start of the debate.

RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING

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12. Which Companies Discriminate Most? Experimental Evidence on Callback Rates

We know there is name bias on CV review, but what is the distribution of discrimination? Are there some sectors, companies and jobs which have varying levels of name bias? And does the bias vary according to what identity your name signifies? Fascinating advancement of the conversation of name discrimination - have a listen. H/T to Bas van de Haterd for the share

D&I

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13. How AI Changes Your Workforce

Somewhat stilted conversation but packed with high impact trends - oncrease in non-FTE, the erosion of the difference between company vs market and the impact of AI on the design of work. 10 minutes - worth it, so have a watch / listen

AI

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End Note

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Delighted to catch up with fellow Canada visitor and newsletter writer Nicolas Darcis yesterday. Going to take some time and explore the city, especially the amazing street art which seems to adorn every corner in this city. Then, dinner with Sandrine and crew before regrouping for a final meetup on Monday. Got a super early flight on Tuesday so will have to figure out exactly how I am going to make this…

..in the meantime, lets have a vote on my LinkedIn posting behaviour: I reckon I am going to do more video on there, give me your thoughts on what I should do it on.

And please do leave a comment, love your thoughts on this, as chances are I am going to do it.

That’s it for this week - thanks for reading

Have a good one everyone

Hung