Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 422

VC activity in Workforce Solutions, Lessons from 1000 days of Remote, Super Sourcing with AI web scrapers, Public list of interview guides and barely a single mention of Trump 2.0...

Nov 10, 2024

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Friends,

We can’t ignore Trump 2.0. He was voted in to effect change and - good or ill - change is what we can expect. We sketched out some talking points in Brainfood Live last Friday (see replay here) and I’m going to pull together some more thoughts as to how the US President-elect’s general policy direction might impact Talent Acquisition & HR - in the US and worldwide. This will be in the Open Kitchen section of This Week, In Recruiting tomorrow - follow here if you want to get first notice of it.

I’m actually at Heathrow Terminal 3 atm, about to board a flight to California, so I look forward to speaking with local recruiters on the ground to get a sense check. I’m there for ERE Conference 2024 where I’ll be giving a new talk ‘Future Proofing Your Recruitment Career’, and moderating a panel at the fantastic CANDE’s later that evening. Come up and say hi if you’re going to either of these two events - tickets still on (use discount code: HLERECA24), or DM if ur in Anaheim and otherwise want to meet up.

Later this month, chances are I will do a rapid 3 country tour to Germany, Austria and Slovakia. First, Tec Rec Berlin on the 23rd, HR Leaders Meetup Vienna on the 27th, and then maybe Bratislava for the weekend. Again, if you’re around, message me if you want to meet up.

Finally, word is out for January 2025 - I’m delighted to be joining the likes of Jonty Rhodes, Johnny Campbell, Aadil Bankuwala and friends at the first FiesTA Bangalore 2025. Promises to be a spectacular two day event. Early Bird on here.

Thank you to: Martyn Redstone, Joey NK Koksal, Eugène van den Hemel, Colin Donnery, Kevin Green, Dave Hazlehurst, Rob Walker, Gareth Flynn, Brian Evje, Rob Walker, James Cochrane-Dyet, Juliana Park, Beth Salas, Steven Rothberg and Bas van de Haterd - your public endorsements make the difference and is the only marketing this newsletter gets - thank you 🙏

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

Brainfooder community overwhelmingly preferred Harris but notably a larger percentage had a hunch Trump would close it out regardless, so it has so proved. Thank you all for voting on this topic everybody 👊

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep282 - 2024 in Review: State of Sourcing, Fri 15th 12pm PT

The schedule for the remaining Brainfood Live’s will be look back at different topics in recruiting. This Friday, we’re talking State of Sourcing in 2024 - what has happened, where is the innovation, what is the demand for sourcing skills, what are we doing with AI to supercharge our efforts? I’ll still be in California so we’re doing this at 12pm PT / 7pm GMT - register here

The Brainfood

1. Public Interview Guides from Google, Meta, Amazon, NVIDIA, Spotify

This is a great list of Interview Guides from US Big tech firms. The invitation to interview needs to be changed from an adversarial experience to one in which you want the candidate to win. Got to be good for CX and EB. Might also have value in sharpening up your own interview / assessment aproach - have a read here. H/T to brainfooder Randy Bailey for the share

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

2. PwC Workforce Radar 2024 Report

Is your employer a ‘talent magnet’? This report from PwC makes the attempt to benchmark what kind of employer you are (mainly either a talent factory or a talent magnet) and how to become more of the latter. Particularly like the segment on how companies use physical space.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

3. Lessons Learned - 1000 Days of Distributed at Atlassian

Great retrospective from one of the real leaders of the remote first (mini) revolution, Atlassian. The requirement for intentional relationship building was a notable insight, as was the variance of demand for in-office experience based on seniority. Lots of learning here but perhaps the most salient is the theme that the most successful shifters-to-remote were technology companies which themselves built distributed tools.

REMOTE WORKING

4. Brian Chesky on How to Hire

Love it when tech CEO’s talk hiring - I’m tempted to do a Brainfood Live series next year where we might talk ‘CEO hiring heuristics’. Of course we recruiters hate this - always full of bias, where is the standardisation, what are the KPI’s etc - but we should respect builders of businesses whose skin is entirely in the game. This is AirBnB’s CEO, Brian Chesky’s approach

ASSESSMENT

5. Venture Capital Activity in Workforce Solutions Ecosystem 2024

Love to see brainfooder George LaRoque’s research on WorkTech and compare it to this report from SIA. VC funding still anaemic, but better than it was in 2023 and seemingly some life in certain sectors of recruiting tech. Assessment / Verification tech will boost in 2025. Essential reading for everyone here I think.

ECONOMY

6. Tariffs » Taxes?

With the Trump 2.0 era only a couple months away, good time to review the thinking on one of his signature policies - to replace income tax, with tariffs. Balaji Srinivasan is consistently right earlier than most, with his accessible take on it here. For those who want a deeper dive, the NBER paper Did Tariffs Make American Manufacturing Great Again? is worth a read. Or you can download it and convert it into a 10 minute podcast on NotebookLLM, surely Google’s best product release in a years. Meanwhile, everyone else has to prepare - BBC on the potential impact on UK

ECONOMY

7. Redundancy Payouts For Losing MPs "Not Enough", Says Ousted Tory

Speaking about politicians, what happens to those who get turfed out or fail to win a seat? We’ve had reports already that some have struggled to get work after leaving politics - black balling from industry opponents seems to be a thing - now an interesting story on the difficulties of transitioning back to civilian life after leaving office. Leaving aside my view that politicians should take a lifetime vow of poverty and live out a monastic life, this does otherwise seem to be a DEIB issue. H/T to brainfooder Martyn Redstone for the share in the online community

D&I

8. Quality of Hire Cheatsheet

Brainfooder Adriano Herdman with another one of his signature business model canvass-like one pagers. This is one is about one of those aspects of recruiting which is sure to become an increasing premium - quality of hire. Download or copy the template here.

ASSESSMENT

9. OpenAI's Swarm Web Extractor

We are on the cusp of the ‘super sourcer’ - in fact, I suspect a few of our number may have already achieved the sort of synthesis with tech to be able to do amazing things when it comes to finding candidates. How about this technique / tool on automated data scraping using AI? Somebody give this a go and report back. Incidentally, we’ll be talking about the State of Sourcing in this week’s Brainfood Live - Friday 12pm PT - sign up here.

SOURCING

10. Salary increases in 2025: What to expect across European tech

Great piece of research from our friends at Ravio - this time focusing on the state of compensation in European tech. Lots to dive into here, but the main highlight was the how business maturation impacts compensation projections - pre seed still competing hard for talent, but more mature startups taking advantage of risk aversion in the already employed.

CULTURE

The Podcasts

11. EVs and Automation Will Cost over 200,000 German Auto Jobs by 2035

The Electric Viking has become one of the most compulsive channels on YouTube tracking the EV market. Car manufacturing is one of the keystone industries which directly and indirectly employer millions of workers worldwide. Failure to avoid incumbents dilemma spells huge trouble for Germany, which faces its own Kodak moment at national scale.

SOCIETY

12. India’s Youths Face Job Crisis: Can They Achieve Their Dreams?

I remember doing a big survey of global recruiters in 2017 and one of the most notable findings was how the recruiters in India reported different challenges to those of everywhere else. It was not finding candidates that was issue, but assessing and verifying them. India has always had a candidate surplus and the challenge is continuing for the youth of today. Great documentary on the issue - I’m beginning to think we have a global crisis on the graduate job market…