Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 408

ZipRecruiter Job Seeker Sentiment Survey, Free ATS evaluation tool, Summer & Winter of AI and the multi-variant causes of the phenomenon of 'Ghost Jobs'

This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends at Zinc

Zinc conducted research with over 100 HR leaders to gain insights into the evolving trends and biggest challenges in recruitment and employee background checks for 2024.

What you'll learn in this report:

• The major challenges in attracting and hiring quality candidates and effective strategies to address them.

• The significance of streamlined HR technology integrations for efficient and thorough background check processes.

• How leading teams are adapting background checks to suit modern work environments.

Download the report here

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Friends,

I’ve had a fantastic week doing very little - I have to say, the sun was out and I took full advantage of getting some rays, re-connecting with a lot of friends which I haven’t seen for too long, eating ice cream and generally chilling out. If the weather continues this week, I may well do the same!

Thanks to: Dave Hazlehurst, Eugène van den Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Colin Donnery, Kevin Green, Hannah Morgan, Rachel Bradman, Ibtehal Hussein, Annie Jackson, Emily Bode, Adam Gellert, Rachel Bradman and Chantelle Jones - thanks for your public support of all things brainfood last week - this is the only way this newsletter can continue to grow - thanks!

Can you help? Share this newsletter with a friend in recruiting or HR who could get value from reading it - cheers 🥂

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

1/4 of this voting sample are currently active users of X, which is a lot more than I thought. It still remains a fantastic source for brainfood items, so I will stay on it, but I do understand the 38% who have bailed out! Thanks for your votes everyone - really interesting. Make sure you scroll down to the end of the newsletter and vote on this week’s topic.

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Brainfood Live On Air - Ep267 - Real Use Cases in Recruitment Automation (Live Demos), Fri 9th August, 2pm BST

So we’ve had plenty of time to play around with AI, but we’re still struggling to operationalise it. I though live demo’s from recruitment tech CEO’s would help - always fun to see the founder pitch the product, especially if they are brave enough do a live demo! Expect: demo’s of AI sourcing candidates, ranking in applicants, messaging / relationship management automation, AI interviewing via audio, text, WhatsApp and video. We’ve heard the hype - now lets see it in action. We’re on Friday 9th August, 2pm BST - register here

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The Brainfood

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1. The ZipRecruiter Job Seeker Confidence Survey

With the last weeks news that Intel are going make 15,000 layoffs, US stock market crashing following the news, as well as grim reading on the latest JOLTS report, this ZipRecruiter job seeker sentiment data from a few months ago turns out to be prescient. Job seekers are the data and so we would do well to listen to them more, rather than rely on spreadsheet wonks constantly telling us to ‘look at the data’. Great interactive, especially on the segmentation on the demographics. Job market is bad and getting worse.

ECONOMY

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2. ATS Vendor Evaluation Scorecard

‘What ATS are you using?’

Probably the most often asked question in any recruiter community that you’re in. What we need a reasonable score card to evaluate from the thousands (no exaggeration) options out there. Got a look at this ATS evaluation tool from our friends at Screenloop and I think it is more than pretty good. Free to use and copy, no registration wall - have at it here

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

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3. People & Talent Game Changers

Brainfooder Adriano Herdman has put together this Notion page of People & Talent 'LinkedIn Influencers’. Useful collection for anyone who wants to build presence on LinkedIn (connect or follow these people, interactive with them, see if you can get them to interact back…) or if you’re selling something, these folks should be decent amplifiers.

CONTENT MARKETING

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4. The AI Summer

Ben Evans is one of the most astute readers of tech trends, and it’s shame that X has become so toxic that he’s decided to leave the platform. His commentary is now confined mainly to his website and newsletter and I would recommend any members here interested in the future of work / AI to subscribe. This essay on the state of AI is an example of his erudition - AI is here, but transformation is messy and we might not be able to skip the painful process of finding product / market fit.

AI

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5. The Winds of AI Winter

This post should be read along with the Ben Evan’s post above, as well as Goldman Sach’s Top of Mind GenAI critique, which arguably sparked the discussion on the potential overvaluation of AI stocks. This post picks out a thread which is resonant for me - AI is not overhyped, we’re not seeing transformation because switching costs are too high for most workers, who are currently maxed out. What we need - are AI implementors. It’s notable too that the main beneficiaries of the AI revolution so far as the professional implementors in big consultancies. Don’t see any reason why a few of us in this community don’t grab some of this market..

AI

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6. The Founder's Hype Cycle

I really like this post from brainfooder Martyn Redstone. The template is Gartner’s famous hype cycle, but applied to the tech founders, perhaps especially the AI recruitment tech vendors who charging out with game changing products. I think its also applicable to us users too - and a good reminder that we might need to go through the ups and downs before we get the gains from AI. Have a read.

CULTURE

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7. Gen AI Is Coming for Remote Workers First

Do you use your body in your work? Most knowledge workers don’t, because we’ve long since accepted that our bodies are merely a means of transportation for our brains, as all of the work was done ‘up there’. Knowledge work overlaps with remote work which overlaps with AI-exposure - some hard realities we are going to have to recognise at some point. Essay from HBR on the three factors which make this era of disruption, different from any other.

REMOTE WORKING

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8. How Thousands of Middlemen Are Gaming the H-1B Program

Outsourcing providers and recruitment agencies are the ones which know the immigration system best, so have adapted their approach to optimise getting the best value from it. Excellent interactive long read from Bloomberg on how these companies exploit the weaknesses in the system, which I cannot condemn given how inadequate the lottery system for H-1B’s really is. Good read - and a good example of how poorly designed legislation guarantees unwanted outcomes.

SOCIETY

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9. I’m a Data Driven Recruiter

Interesting thread which rationalises Nike’s decline in performance as being due to a shift from story telling / brand building to purely ‘performance’ based marketing. Whilst there are probably other factors involved (not least a collapse in Nike’s China business), the story itself is worth retelling; the problem with be data driven is that you end up doing the most easily measured thing, which may not be the most important thing.

RECRUITMENT MARKETING

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10. Did Sam Altman's Basic Income Experiment Succeed or Fail?

Last week’s brainfood featured Open AI’s research on UBI, which produced the conclusion that UBI had a negative impact on the recipients employment status, and therefore was a failure. UBI evangelist Scott Santens with a rebuttal but I think even he misses the main point, which is that employment is not the objective of UBI; the opposite might actually be the case.

UBI

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The Podcasts

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11. Rachel Reeves Announces Public Spending Cuts in Commons Statement

So the new Labour government in the UK wasted no time in doing Austerity 2.0 - though this time perhaps more reasonably given the anaemic growth overseen by 14 years of Conservative government. Still, where is the growth plan? Worth bearing in mind the power of the Bank of England Chair, Andrew Bailey whose comments seemingly constrain what the Chancellor of the Exchequer can do. We’re doing a Brainfood Live on the implications of the new govt policy on Recruitment and HR - up now, so register for it here.

ECONOMY

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12. Neuralink and the Future of Humanity

So this is Elon Musk on the Lex Fridman podcast talking about Neuralink - and everything else it seems, as it is an astounding 8 hours long(!). I won’t pretend to have listened to all this but I am going to pick my way through (the YouTube video version has helpful timestamps). Like him or not, Musk is a live player who is forcing change in various aspects of many people’s lives - we had better get to know who he is.

FUTURE OF WORK

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13. Ghost Jobs Are Haunting the Labor Market

The idea of ‘ghost jobs’ is gaining traction as frustrated job seekers seek to explain the incongruity between the apparent demand for labour vs the extremely tough job search many of them are experiencing - could it be that a lot of the data are based on jobs which don’t exist? Really interesting podcast on two levels - firstly, it does a reasonable job of covering the various explanations of ghost job adverts and secondly, always a great reminder to us insiders how outsiders see the recruitment industry. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share.

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

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End Note

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So the last podcast really did get me thinking about the Ghost Job phenomenon, so much so that it has a good chance of being the essay in Open Kitchen on TWIR on Monday. Help me out with your thoughts on this, as it is becoming a mainstream topic for industry outsiders: what do you think is the main cause of this phenomena?

That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung