Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 396

Microsoft / LinkedIn Work Trend Index, Venture funding in AI, Impact of Pronoun Disclosure on CV review and a very cool, very large Basque Cooperative. All this & more sensations in today's brainfood.

May 12, 2024

This week’s brainfood is sponsored by our friend Ashby

Ashby is what an ATS should be: sourcing automation, AI-supported workflows, searchable CRM, advanced analytics, and powerful scheduling. Chosen by over a thousand companies, including Quora, Docker, Ironclad, and Multiverse, Ashby stands out as the top-rated ATS on G2.

Just recently, Ashby introduced Scheduling 2.0. Working seamlessly across the ATS, Ashby Scheduling 2.0 includes:

Automations that save you hours and deliver on candidate experience
Scheduling links for both availability requests and direct booking with interviewers
Interview reminders customizable to candidates and interviewers
AI-powered interview feedback debriefs

See it in action in their recently recorded webinar, or join a Live Product Demo ran by seasoned Ashby TA professionals.

As a special offer, Recruiting Brainfood readers will receive an exclusive 10% discount for their first year with Ashby. Book your demo here:

SPONSORS

Friends,

Thanks to everyone who attended Boston Hiring Connect last week - fabulous time chatting with you all - I hope you got as much out of the event as I did! Great to see folks in and around those days too, makes all the traveling so worthwhile. I’m back in the UK now for the next few weeks, so looking forward to reconnecting with people at HQ - let me know what’s going on and I’ll see if I can swing by.

In the meantime…

Thanks to: Eugène van den Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Garry Turner, Kevin Green, John Bersentes, Dave Hazlehurst, Oonagh Clarke, Kata Törő, Matthew Parker, Hannah Raju, Dinah Alobeied, Madeline Laurano, Clair Mohamed, Ross Clennett, Jill Barth, Rob Walker, Chloe Morrison, Jeremy Thornton, Mike Manzi, Randy Bailey, Warren Sukernek, Keith McKenzie, Heather van Werkhooven and Mike Wood

Can you help? Share this newsletter your team and have them subscribe.

What Do Brainfooders Think?

Looks like we generally like to go to events, of any description 🤣. Love this, remember Big List is here - bookmark it, update it and share it. Thanks for voting everyone.

Founders Focus - Ep42 - Up close and personal with Tycho van Paassen, Co-founder of VONQ, Wed 15th May, 12pm BST / 1pm CEST

Excited to bring back Founders Focus for May - so much can be learned from recruitment technology entrepreneurs who are building the tech changing the world of work today. This Wednesday, I am with VONQ founder, Tycho van Paassen on lessons on leadership, future of recruitment advertising and how to make C-level decisions. We’re on Wednesday 15th May, 12pm BST. Register here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep257 - Recruitment Automation Tips You Can Do Right Away, Friday 17th May, 2pm BST

Last two Brainfood Live’s has been some of the best shows we’ve done, and I fully expect us to hit the hat trick this week as we dive into specific examples of recruitment automation. Get ready to be inspired and equipped with efficiency tips we can implement right away. We’re on Friday 17th May, 2pm BST. Register here

The Brainfood

1. 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report from Microsoft & LinkedIn

Where are we with AI? Few organisations on the planet can claim to give us an accurate view, so this collaborative effort between Microsoft and LinkedIn might be as good as it gets. Survey data from 31,000 people across 31 countries, combined with behavioural data from users of Microsoft 365. Main takeaway: both employee and employer are prioritising AI implementation. No one can afford to be left behind on this, so download this report here, read it and find the time to move from AI experimentation to business transformation.

2. The Collapse of the News Industry Is Taking Its Soul Down With It

Journalism is perhaps one of the first industries to record its own visible decline. With big tech eating it’s ad revenue, old media has also been losing the competition for attention to indie influencers more able to deliver to audience expectations and less encumbered by editorial lines. This is a fine lament which manages to also be a rallying cry for the industry to get back it’s mojo. Great read on how an industry describes its own final chapter.

FUTURE OF WORK

3. Will AI Usher in An Era of Inefficiency in Recruiting?

Brainfooder John Vlastelica is one of the most compelling figures in our industry - a thinker / do-er who is able to extract profound insight from operational realities, as well as ask stimulating questions such as what happens when everyone is AI-enabled? One possible answer is an inefficient process might become a positive differentiator if high level human touch was the reason for it. In a same way we prefer an artisanal coffee, will hard-to-hire, passive candidates prefer ‘artisanal recruitment’? Intriguing brainfood.

4. A Field Experiment in Pronoun Disclosure

Interesting, testable and tested proposition: does pronoun disclosure impact a candidates chances of interview, and if so how and where? It’s a readable paper but in quick summary: they/them pronouns, which signal non-binary gender identification, carried a handicap compared to he/him or she/her pronouns, which signal binary gender identification. US data and kind of the expected resulted, added twist was the geo-location in Republican dominant vs Democrat dominant demographics, again with the expected results.

D&I

5. Venture Investment in 2024

The Big Tech Winter is a story of the collapse of venture investment since the US Federal Reserve decided to raise interest rates in an effort to reduce ‘excess savings’ and motivate people to apply for jobs. Some signs that VC activity is picking up in 2023, but the interest has moved from SaaS to AI - 20% of US VC capital is now allocated to startups in this field. This means big tech winter continues, because AI startups don’t hire engineers with this investment, but buy compute with it.

ECONOMY

6. Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

Fascinating results from a Gallup survey on well being - being an owner-employer of a business is superior to both being an employee only or an owner-no-employee set up. Got to think its a combination of agency (you’re the boss) plus the company (of others) - a pretty fulfilling set up.

CULTURE

7. Report on Jobs: Permanent Staff Placements Down Again in April, But Pay Growth Accelerates

REC report on jobs came out last week and the UK staffing industry remains fully in the weeds. Yes, we can point to minor bumps in wage growth etc but the fact remains that hiring is suppressed and at worse than pre-pandemic levels. Employers are waiting for the General Election and turnover of government, so when you’re ready Mr Sunak...

ECONOMY

8. Full-Time Wanderer: My 3-Year Experiment as a Digital Nomad

Digital nomadism has faded from the public discourse but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still happening, especially for early experimenters who have continued the lifestyle, with each optimisation increasing the commitment further. This is a great post from a software engineer who is seems to be pretty close to permanently becoming an itinerant; once he trades in the Tesla for the 4x4 I think he’ll be there 🤣. Great read, and a useful taxonomy for the different types of nomadism you can do.

REMOTE WORKING

9. Stack Overflow Jobs

Lots happening with Stack Overflow in recent weeks - not only are they back in the recruiting business (having inexplicably left it in early 2022) but also found another, much more significant revenue stream by licensing their data to Open AI. Users are not happy to know that their answers to the community are now being monetised (without consultation, consent or needless to say, compensation) so are deleting their answers, to which Stack Overflow respond by banning users in order to prevent them from doing so. Is this future of social networks and community sites - a new business model throwing platform and users into conflict? We talked about this in one of the best Brainfood Live sessions a few weeks ago - highly recommend you watch/listen to this if you want to hear some smart heads think about what job boards look like in the era of GenAI

RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING

10. ‘In the US They Think We’re Communists!’

With the manifest failure over the past 2 years of ‘compassionate capitalism’ to live up to the lofty rhetoric of post pandemic period, perhaps it is time to examine structure of ownership within organisations. We talked about Huawei two weeks ago, now lets look at Mondragón Corporation, the largest industrial co-operative in the world. What happens when workers get a share of the profits, and the losses? Have a read here

CULTURE

The Podcasts

11. How Money & Banking Works

Very few of us understand how money and bank work - not even, it seems, the people who are mostly responsible for operating it. Lyn Alden has been one of the most cogent summarisers for the masses. Her accelerated 30 minute tutorial here is both fascinating and accessible, and it might just help us all better understand the macro which ultimately plays a greater role in success / failure than any individual efforts we might must.

ECONOMY

12. The AI + HI Project | Human-Centric AI Practices

Johnny C Taylor with Microsoft CHRO Kathleen Hogan and Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President, Modern Work & Business Applications on how Microsoft are bringing AI to HR. This is a relationship between these two departments is a living laboratory, and fascinating moment in the history of the industry. Have a watch. Colin McNicol for the share in the online community

13. Tony Seba Just Revealed Why Elon Musk is No Longer Interested in EVs

Elon Musk is never far from the news, and this past week has seen not only a dramatic axing of an entire department (no exceptions) and the removal of all job listings in a de facto company wide hiring freeze. The Electric Viking - an excellent youtube channel tracking the world of EV’s - suggests Musk’s attention has already shifted from cars to automatons…

WORKFORCE AUTOMATION

End Note

One scenario outlined in the excellent Microsoft fireside (see 12) caught my attention; if everyone is going to get a personal copilot, are we going to have options as to who / what it sounds like? Got me thinking about Alexa, Siri et al and particularly about gender. Imagine you could decide which gender you want your copilot to be, how would you set it?

That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung