Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 407

CEO Guide to EU AI Act, UBI research from Open AI, an experiment with LazyApply and why managing a company's X account is like holding the Imperial seal...

Jul 28, 2024

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Friends,

Been great to be back in London this past week. Got to be honest, I’ve hardly left my apartment in Hoxton and found the time to actually chill. It’s great fun to travel but also necessary to take some time on the sofa now and again!

I’ll be in HQ for the next 6 weeks, before kicking off another round of travel after the summer. Looks like I will be in APAC for most of Oct so will look to set up a few meet ups when I’m over there.

In the meantime, lets enjoy the summer as best we can: Olympics and some more chill out!

Thanks to: Eugène van den Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Bas van de Haterd, Todd Raphael, Matt Warzel, Ross Clennett, Matthias Schmeisser, Ach Petrosyan, Amanda Kop, Desiree Perrot, Clair Mohammed, Caroline Hunter, Julia Vodolazska, Adam Gordon, Rob Walker, Saqib Khan, Ludmila Lumi Tomperi and Bas van de Haterd for your public support of all things brainfood - essential to keep this show on the road. Thank you.

Can you help? Share this newsletter with your network on LinkedIn and have your recruiter friends subscribe - cheers!

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

SHRM dropping the ‘E’ from DEI is a powerful signal of the zeitgeist, but I wonder whether a Kamala Harris Presidency may make it premature.

In either case, no surprise that the simple majority of the voters were against the move, though not overwhelming by any means. Worth a Brainfood Live on this I think. Thanks for everyone for voting, make sure you scroll to the bottom of the newsletter for this week’s poll 👊

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep266 - How to Hire a Chief People Officer, Fri 2nd Aug, 2pm BST

This might be the rarest of the job roles for recruiters to hire - your own boss! What recruiting strategies work best for CPO’s, an experienced pro who might already know all the tricks? We’re going to bring together exec search consultants, corporate exec search, current CPO’s and a few companies actually hiring for the open roles right now. Worth tuning in for this one folks - we’re on Friday 2nd August, 2pm BST. Register here

The Brainfood

1. CEO's Guide to EU AI Act

Loathe to start the newsletter with a post on compliance, but as we begin to seriously implement AI into our recruiting processes, it is critical that we understand the contours of the regulatory landscape. Holistic AI dumbs down the EU AI Act in a way which is actually a joy to read. We’ll be talking about the implications of this act for Recruiters, TA and HR in Brainfood Live in Sept - might as well register for it now. H/T to brainfooder Chris Raw for the share.

2. How to Win on LinkedIn

One thing I love about LinkedIn is the community of LinkdIn algorithm watchers, who routinely and regularly test content on the platform to see what travels. Now obviously LinkedIn is a social network so it will behave differently according to every person’s network, but there are some heuristics which are worth experimenting with. Here is Richard van der Blom (follow the guy) advice, in sketchnote style.

CONTENT MARKETING

3. How Does Unconditional Cash Affect Employment?

The headline for this research sponsored by OpenAI will likely disappoint advocates for UBI: recipients on ‘unearned income’ turned out to be (marginally) less likely to be in work than control, fuelling the critics argument that giving away money encourages poor work ethic. The research doesn’t cover what the recipients who did not earn income on top of UBI did - were they just couch surfing, or doing other socially important but uncompensated work - looking after loved ones, volunteering for charities and so on? The measurement of work needs to expand beyond labour market participation. Worth bookmarking this, likely to become a canonical text.

UBI

4. Running an X Account Is An Important Job

Joe Biden announced via a twitter account which most observers agree he doesn’t actually use, that he was stepping back from the Democrat Party nomination to run for President of the United States. Lulu Cheng with the accurate assessment that the person running the X account is more important than anyone realises, like the guy who had access to the Emperor’s seal thousands of years ago….

EMPLOYER BRANDING

5. Developers Want More, More, More: 2024 Results from Stack Overflow’s Annual Developer Survey

JavaScript and PostgreSQL remain most popular, Rust and Markdown remain most admired, developers are most frustrated by technical debt at work, and they don’t see AI as a threat to their jobs.

Headline paragraph from Stack Overflow’s Annual Developer Survey. 65,000 surveyed, 48,000 responded, all in an interactive website where you can dive into preferred technologies, environments, languages, frameworks, copilots and the rest. Must read for tech recruiters.

ENGAGEMENT

6. CB Insights 2024 - Generative AI Predictions

What is the State of Generative AI? This rather wrongly titled report from CB Insights actually provides greater value in its landscape outlines than it’s predictions on where we are going. Big deck but each page is a market map like the above, so highly readable. Going to say this is a must read folks - download here.

7. An Experiment with LazyApply

Nice LinkedIn summary from brainfooder Alexander Chukowski of a TikTok repost of an experiment by another TikToker of using the now notorious LazyApply. What happens when you go entirely hands free on your job search? Turns out, AI will make sh1t up. All going to be moot though, because it’s rational for job seekers to seek optimisations, especially when there they are not paying the price for any errors. Recruiters have got to remodel hiring funnel with the presumption at AI-enabled applicants will be the default - check Arctic Shores The Ultimate Guide on Managing the Candidate Use of GenAI on this.

ASSESSMENT

8. “BANANA”

One way to deal with AI-enabled applications, is to poison the data. This is the ‘detect’ method, outlined in the aforementioned Arctic Shores guide. Here is one cybersecurity company which is inserting marker words into the JD, as a method of identifying applicants who have used tools like LazyApply. A fun fishing expedition but I should imagine that its a technique which will cease to work once all applicants become AI-enabled…have a feeling employers well begin to avoid advertising altogether, and focus on less exposed methods of candidate discovery…

btw: wonderful to see brainfooder Glen Cathey back to writing, these days seemingly mostly via LinkedIn posts. Follow Glen on Linkedin, if you don’t already.

ASSESSMENT

9. Bangladesh Court Scraps Job Quotas After Deadly Unrest

The scars of history take a long time to fade. Last unrest in Bangladesh - which featured a nation wide Internet blackout so you might not have heard about it (I only knew about when one of my offshore partners did not complete a project for the first time in 5 years and told me why via text). Within the tragic story, there is a strong lesson on why quota systems always turn bad in the end.

D&I

10. Re-industrialisation of America…a Utopia?

First thing to say: what a fantastic piece of EB. This 90 second advert is a short film real movie production value, communicating homage to the US working class which have been buried in post-Reagan America. Whilst rebalancing back from an over-financialised economy is long overdue, it may be overly optimistic to infer the manufacturing is going to be way forward for good work: as global share of employment, manufacturing has been trending down for the past decade, and this will only accelerate as AI / Automation take over the assembly line. We need social innovation that matches technological innovation - the robots are already here.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

The Podcasts

11. Mark Zuckerberg on Llama 3.1 405B

Fantastic 30 minute interview with Mark Zuckerberg, who is swiftly rehabilitating his image, abandoning Facebook, pivoting to and from the Metaverse, and now towards open sourcing LLM’s. Who would have thought that Zuckerberg would actually be doing what ‘Open’AI should be doing. Great interview by Rowan Cheung. Also make sure to read Zuckerberg’s essay on why he thinks open source models are the way forward - anyone who supports democratisation of the AI future has to support him.

FUTURE OF WORK

12. Which Promise Will Get Broken?

I am getting addicted to this Youtube channel, I think it is the lo-fi production value and the presenter’s dead pan style. Educational stuff though and laying the ground work for the challenges of the new Labour government - it is a good listen.

PS: if you want to join a conversation on this topic, we’re going to be discussing the implications to recruiters, TA and HR of the new government on Brainfood Live next month - register here

13. Impact of the Gig Economy in India

What is the price of convenience? Super interesting interview on evolution of the gig economy in India - how Uber / Ola first offered an incredible opportunity for workers and a new service for consumers, but then how things decay when shareholders demand their cut. It’s a new class of worker and we need to think about how best they are protected under the law. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share

GIG ECONOMY

End Note

There are many opinions about Twitter or ‘X’. Obviously Elon Musk’s ownership and partisan participation on platform has deterred many people off the platform, probably quite a few of us in the TA / HR space. However, I can’t help thinking about Lulu Cheng’s post about how - like it or not - X has become the place to make an important announcement. From Joe Biden, to Crowdstrike CEO to Katy Perry….X is the first channel people, businesses and country’s are using to communicate to the globe.

Now the question for the poll - is it time for to return to X?

Recruiting Brainfood