Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 433
Structure of AI-enabled TA function, Open AI Operator + DeepSeek r1, Hiring Manager status seeking, WEF Economic outlook, DOGE teams and what they mean and some great essays from community members...
This week’s brainfood is supported by friends BrightHire
BrightHire's market-leading Interview Intelligence platform powers hiring for game-changing companies like Canva, Ramp, Rippling, Multiverse, Vercel, and 000s more.
Not just another notetaking tool, BrightHire's platform transforms hiring quality and efficiency with AI that builds exceptional hiring plans, automates interview notes, improves decision-making, drives interview consistency, and delivers powerful talent insights.
And they've just completed an independent 3rd party AI bias audit – a first in the Interview Intelligence category.
Find out why companies from the most disruptive AI platforms in the world to the Fortune 100 trust BrightHire to transform their hiring with powerful, responsible AI.
SPONSORS
Friends,
FiesTA 2025 was a wonderful event, put together by an amazing crew of founders, operators, workers and friends. It is such a risk to put on an event of this scale for the first time and huge credit must got to Vic, Hari, John, Saif and all the rest of the crew for putting it all on the line. There will be more updates to come from FiesTA as I collect my thoughts on the experience (sub to this, essay to come on Open Kitchen) but suffice it to say attending it reminded me of the importance of in-person connection - the knowledge shared in p2p contact must become a part of your information diet! Bookmark this and get yourself to one of these events this year.
I’m writing this now from Pondicherry having just arrived from Bengaluru. I will spend the next three days here, and then go to Chennai for my final stop in the India part of this trip. If you’re in either of those two places in this next week, let me know if you want to meet up 👊
Thanks to: Joey NK Koksal, Clair Mohammed, Eugene van den Hemel, Kevin Green, John Bersentes, Colin Donnery, Mary Kay Baldino, Victor Choudary, John Rose, Mike Daley, Shireen DuPreez, Kyle Lueken, Deepa Joshi, Rob Walker, Prem Kumar, Mitasha Singh, Ridhi Malhotra, Aadil Bandukwala, Johnny Campbell, Bhargavi D, Aalok Ajay Purohit, Hari Krishna M, Uttam Kumar Sanghi, John Mark, Ankita Sen, Susmita Gupta, Zain R, Vikram Bhardwaj, Aravind Subash, Sai Prasad, Oksana Strippentow, Swati Khanna, Rishi Banerjee, Deepa Damodaran, Achyut AK Menon, Savita Hortikar, Chanakya Veladi, Divya Chetan, Ritesh Mathur, Rupali Sharma, Daniel Joseph, Lokesh Latchiyapriyan, Joe Devasia, Shubham Rastogi, Avinash Saxena and loads of other amazing people I have not been able to mention here - thank you all for your support of all things brainfood. The community is you, not me 👊 🙏
Can you help? Share this newsletter with your team and have them subscribe. Thank you!
What Do Brainfooders Think?
Surprisingly even results from a decent sample size - Trump will definitely be bad for DEI but the blasting out of bureaucracy as a method of unleashing economic growth + heightened protectionism is a narrative which has traction with a big portion of the community. Thanks everyone for voting!
Brainfood Live On Air
We’re going to do a double header this week, because I really can’t do this APAC tour without doing a ‘How To Hire In’ episode in every country I visit 🤣. How to Hire in India in 2025 happening this Tuesday, January 28th at 12pm IST. If you are a recruiter in India or a recruiter that needs to hire in India, this show is for you - register here. On Friday, I’m going to do a deep dive with Jon Stross, Founder of Greenhouse - the CHRO report insight may not make deadline so we will talk about what’s happening with candidates, why it feels so soul sucking for TA folks and candidates alike, and what’s likely to happen or evolve in hiring processes as a result - tune in here
The Brainfood
1. AI-Enabled Talent Acquisition
Sometimes, you just got to have a visualisation to describe what you mean. Great piece of work from brainfooder Dave Owen on putting this together. Looks convincing doesn’t it? Planning to get Dave on Brainfood Live to discuss future TA team structure - follow the channel here to be updated on when that is going to be.
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
2. InMail Outreach Rose in 2024: See Who Received More Attention from Recruiters
LinkedIn Talent Blog is worth following for posts like these - some intriguing data points on both the rise of paid job adverts for recruiter positions and an increase in attention from recruiters mainly for commercial / GTM candidates. We need geographical distribution for both of these - there may indeed by a global market but it’s fragmenting like Pangea at the end of the Triassic at the moment.
ENGAGEMENT
3. The Next Big Challenge for TA Leaders
Open AI dropping Operator last Friday set off a frenzy of commentary from us brainfooders - well done the early birds who paid up to give this a go. Agentic AI is going to be the topic we’re all going to hear a lot more about this year, so this post from Verisinsights is a decent primer for it means for TA leaders. Lots of us have been putting in some very useful thinking (and now doing) on this topic, so I highly recommend you dive into this comment thread in the online community and reading all the link shares therein. Finally, we’re going to do a Brainfood Live on the topic of AI Agents - Hype or Reality next month, so that is a must attend. Register here.
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
4. Hiring Manager Status Seeking
OpenAI wasn’t the only AI organisation to cause a stir last week - even bigger news was the release of r1 by DeepSeek - which, unlike ‘Open’ AI, is in fact an open source reasoning model, which anyone can download, modify and redistribute. Its performance levels suggest you that don’t actually billions of dollars of investment into infinity GPU’s for frontier level performance. Three reasons why this is pertinent for brainfooders: 1) it points to a near future competition between expensive human labour vs inexpensive AI, 2) reveals the current AI tech boom to be a massively speculative bubble - watch NASDAQ on Monday and 3) illustrates a phenomena behind a great deal of hiring - hiring manager status seeking.
CULTURE
5. Recruiter Productivity Report 2025
Love the Talent Trends reports from Ashby - this is what all ATS’s should be doing with their data - dedicating some resource to extracting it, aggregating it and sharing it, with us! This is time series comparing 2021 vs 2024 data and we can see in the comparison the difference in market conditions, candidate behaviour and recruiter productivity. Must read folks. NB: and tune into Brainfood Live next month as brainfooder Willem Wijnans joins us to talk through this report.
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
6. WEF Chief Economists Outlook Jan 2025
Briefing document from the WEF, with survey data taken in November, though unclear whether this was before / after Donald Trump won the US Presidential election. Accessible 36 pager, worth a look to gauge the general economic sentiment. Richard Baldwin (decent follow on LinkedIn and X for the economically minded), spent some time Decoding Trump’s Trade Policy - and impact on economy; also a worth a look.
ECONOMY
7. Will AI Help or Hurt Workers? One 26-Year-Old Found an Unexpected Answer.
There are now many case studies on how AI will impact the workforce - and, I think it is a good thing that there isn’t much consensus, even though each individual study has compelling evidence. This story from the WSJ points to the theory that AI will help those who are already high performers increase their performance, and - intriguingly - actually lower the performance of those who were already weak performers pre-AI.
AI
8. DOGE Teams
It’s pretty clear what DOGE was going to be all about - a mass purge of employees from US Federal agencies. We now have some idea on how it might be implemented - the creation per agency of a hit team consisting of an automation expert, legal counsel, and HR (to do the firing). Two thoughts on this: empathy for the millions of workers who might be impacted and unwanted fascination at what is a macabre social experiment. If you are impacted by DOGE - or perhaps a HR specialist in a DOGE team, DM me
CULTURE
9. Study: Resume Photos Strongly Influence Review, Hiring Process
The results showed that men with patchy hair loss received the lowest ratings, followed by overweight women, men with dyed hair and men with birthmarks. The study also revealed a gender bias: men with dyed brown hair were rated lower than women with the same trait, and overweight women were rated lower than overweight men.
Nothing is more fascinating that human bias revealed in experiment. We all know its there - my instinct is not the obscure it, but rather to make use of knowledge. I need to lose weight, and perhaps wear my hair in a boufant…H/T brainfooder Matt Best for the share in the online community
ASSESSMENT
10. Recruiters at a Crossroads: How AI May Reshape Talent Acquisition, and Who Gets Left Behind
One of the most thought provoking posts I’ve read in a while - brainfooder Dali Chabaane with well reasoned scenarios on the future of Talent Acquisition. My travels tell me that the mosaic will be correct - it will be a mix of all three scenarios. Excellent writing and thinking - worth a read, especially for anyone currently suffering from excessive exuberance or doomerism over the arrival of AI.
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
The Podcasts
11. How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Malcolm Gladwell is a really good podcaster, who somehow is now less followed than in his heyday. This is a great interview with Rachel Botsman, author of a new book on trust. Take a ‘trust pause’, especially when you want a thing to be true. Relevant to all of us….directly for hiring, but gives us something of a map toward the human premium we need to find in the era of AI. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share.
ASSESSMENT
12. WTF Does A Board of Directors Actually Do?
I have never accepted any offer to become a member of anybody’s board. Mainly for a lot of the reasons outlined in this hilarious short video on what Board Directors actually or are meant to do 🤣. I’m sure there are great board directors out - might be a good one to do a Brainfood Live on, how to choose your BoD? Let me know in comments friends..
CULTURE
13. Confessions of a Big Tech Recruiter
Gergely Orosz has been one of the best analysts in the s/w engineering space - super credible with his own engineering background with one of the most popular substacks often covering talent related topics. Here he is now with his immediately successful podcast - and on topic with our community here - have a listen. H/T to brainfooder Pedro Oliveira for the share.
CULTURE
End Note
We have to talk about AI Agents - they seem to be coming sooner than we thought. Inevitably, every recruitment tech solution will soon by boasting their own agents - or AI that exhibits agent-like behaviours. Interested to know where the community is at with AI Agents, so this is the topic for this week’s poll - have a vote and let us know what you’re thinking:
That’s it - thanks for reading everybody
Have a great week
Hung
So many great links!! Love the InMail stats (had my team guess the top 5)
Really interesting. Thank you