Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 436
LinkedIn Future of Recruiting Report, Economic tasks to which we apply AI, the War on DEI, Blunt force culture change with DOGE, and very cool freelancer rates report...
This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends Kula.
Recruiting mistakes cost more than money — they drain morale and stall growth. In 2025, the stakes are even higher.
That’s why folks at Kula hosted Lou Adler for a webinar: "How to Do Recruiting Right in 2025" and covered:
Proven frameworks to avoid costly hiring mistakes
Using AI + performance frameworks to save time and budget
Fixing hiring gaps with smarter processes & analytics
Some real gems in here → Catch the replay
Kula’s latest AI drop: Conversational Analytics built into the ATS 🪄
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Just ask “What’s my best-performing source?” “Is our offer acceptance rate improving?” and get answers instantly, whether you’re in a meeting, working on a board deck, or just curious.
Easy, powerful analytics → See it in action
SPONSORS
Friends,
It was wonderful to spend some time in Ho Chi Minh City - hadn’t intended to go there this year, but was persuaded by my buddy and avid brainfooder Timothy Wong Kon Loi and now I’m addicted to fresh pressed cane sugar juice 🤣. Seriously though, huge lessons learned, mainly how important it is to keep sensitive to opportunity, even to the stage of poking at life in order to stimulate opportunity.
I’m now in Cambodia where I am going to spend the next week: of course Angkor Wat and the study of the Khmer empire, (Fall of Civilisation podcast on it is a banger) but also deep focus alone time to restructure business ops (it’s a mess), practice what I preach when it comes to AI (got to break through on personal usage) and build the slide deck From Talent Acquisition to Talent Everything, which I will be delivering at the NJA People & Talent Summit in Sydney on March 13th. Tickets here Sydneysiders.
Thanks to: Joey NK Koksal, Kevin Green, Dave Hazelhurst, Colin Donnery, Caroline Hunter, Martin C Nee, Nikunj Verma, Debby Clement, Steven Rothberg, Rob Walker, Bob Pulver, Tony de Graaf, Gabi Sakardi, Bill Fischer, Nikunj Verma, Joakim Kalliala, Artyom Kobahidze, Jessie Schofer, Paul Moirs, Hugo Chabrouty, Juliana Park, Jose Arteaga Alvarez, Andrea Kirby and Eugene van den Hemel - your public support of all things brainfood makes the wheels go round. Thank you!
Can you help? Share this newsletter with a friend in need!
What do Brainfooders Think?
Perhaps a badly designed poll but interesting to observe the sentiment of the community on what has been and will continue to be a pressing problem for recruiting. Is it the main problem right now? Got a feeling that it might be! Thanks for voting everyone - make sure you scroll to the end of the newsletter to vote on this week’s question.
Brainfood Live On Air - Ep293 - Talent Trends Report: Recruiter Productivity 2025, Fri 21st Feb 2pm GMT
Excited to bring this episode to the community - brainfooder Willem Wijnans running through one of the best reports on recruiter productivity, drawn from aggregated and anonymised data from across the Ashby customer base. Lets find out what separates the good from the great on recruiter productivity. Panel discussion in the second half to confirm / reject the findings! Register here
The Brainfood
1. LinkedIn Future of Recruiting 2025 Report
LinkedIn Talent Solutions with their annual Future of Recruiting 2025 report. Billions of data points from which we can infer the future of our industry & function, along with interviews from 1000’s of practitioners. I’m in this but don’t let that put you off 🤣 - one of the annuals everybody should have a review and have a think about.
RECRUITING OPERATIONS
2. OmniHuman
Brainfooder Glen Cathey again (you can really pick out anything he posted on LinkedIn and it would be a worthy feature here), this time with an quick experiment on Bytedance’s Omnihuman-1’s image-to-video generator. The obvious application for content creation, recruitment marketing, outbound sales - seems very obvious to me. Anyone tried this for any recruiting use cases yet? Let me know if you have…
CONTENT MARKETING
3. 20 Jobs That OpenAI o3 Will Replace Humans.
Lets get the tough stuff out of the way: No17 is Recruiter. There is a density of repetitive information processing tasks in the work of recruiting - and its going to get automated away sooner than we think. We got to embrace this, and re-imagine our value in the work which AI does not feel it can do better than humans. For quick and dirty one pager of what these are, check out this spreadsheet. H/T to brainfooder Pedro Oliveira for the share.
SOCIETY
4. WTF, Developer used AI to Alter his Appearance during a Technical Interview with Me!
I really didn’t think that we would so quickly arrive at the point where even synchronous digital assessment would be compromised by AI. But here we are - we can alter voice, alter appearance, alter everything that appears on a screen. The only possible end point to this technology acceleration is a) a return to in-person interviewing - that’s work for recruiters and / or b) a continual breakdown of jobs into tasks which can delegated / automated because we wouldn’t really care either way. This is an uncomfortable example but I think ultimately good news for recruiters.
ASSESSMENT
5. Which Economic Tasks Are Performed with AI? Evidence from Millions of Claude Conversations
This has the look of an important paper - an examination of the tasks humans have applied AI towards and what this tells us about the future of AI-enabled work. Turns out 50% of the usage of Claude is on s/w engineering and writing tasks, with the big fat caveat that Claude has been renowned in the s/w engineering community as the best AI to support their tasks, so heavy sample bias here. Lots of interesting stuff though, including correlation on wage vs usage of AI. Quite technical but worth grinding through. H/T to brainfooder Belinda Johnson for the share
AI
6. Candidate Optionality Will Drive Efficient and Better Hiring Outcomes
Brainfooder Will Ducey makes an important point about CX - a great deal of it has to do with the lack of agency a candidate has throughout the process. Think about it: when was the last time a candidate could exercise sovereignty over schedule, manner of contact, pace of process? We’re too busy ‘pipelining’ them to notice we’ve given them zero choice. Useful reminder here, and potentially a simple solution for upgrading candidate experience.
CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE
7. Regarding the Times We Are In: The War on DEIA & What's Really at Stake
We’re only weeks into Trump 2.0 and I get the feeling that the TA / HR industry is still in a state of shock, maybe even denial at what is going on. Important cold bath from brainfooder Crystal Lay on the current situation - the attack on DEI is part of wider culture war which most likely includes the concept of HR itself - as well as a style of governance that does fully away with ‘checks and balances’. Everyone should read this, including non-US members.
D&I
8. YunoJuno 2025 Freelancer Rates Reports
Firstly, what a beautifully designed interactive website this is - a fantastic presentation of data from our friends YunoJuno. Some interesting stats also on the freelancer economy - what skills are most in-demand, which are getting hammered by AI, how has rate / duration / booking frequency changed over the past 3 years. Must read for anyone hiring freelancers, or looking into doing so.
GIG ECONOMY
9. ‘Jumping in’
Amazon has the data to know which software interns will likely do best after one week on the job: those who commit code. Jumping in and getting your hands dirty early works better than sitting back and waiting to feel fully competent.
This simple paragraph got me thinking - and intuitively agreeing with the premise. It’s not necessary about the code, but about the concept of getting hands dirty early - takes a fearlessness, a can-do approach, and a knowledge that output is important. What do you think? (also see poll at end of this newsletter!)
ASSESSMENT
10. Defragmenting with a Blunt Axe
DOGE is not a joke but a revolution disguised as a joke. The latest Whitehouse announcement on how DOGE is going to work is worth reading in full. Key points: no hire unless 4 others are fired first (!), and a DOGE team lead will operate like a Soviet era commissar to (ideologically?) vet every hire made. As Peter Hinssen writes, this is ‘defragmenting with a blunt axe’ (in Dutch, but google translate is good). This is not culture change, its culture shock. Love to talk about this if anyone is able to give insight, anonymously if you prefer. Let me know if you know someone who is in US Gov right now and can share insight.
CULTURE
The Podcasts
11. The Makana Podcast: Hung Lee with Yan Sen Lu
Delighted to take part in Ep2 of the Makana podcast! I am only disappointed that I will be missing host and brainfooder Yan Sen Lu by a day when I land in Singapore myself later this month. We’re talking here about my 20 Predictions in Recruiting for 2025 - have a listen and let me know what you think!
ECONOMY
12. Lyn Alden: What Happens Once Tariffs Destroy Economy
What I love most about Lyn Alden is her matter-of-fact delivery on the consequences of importance 🤣. Trump tariffs, especially deployed rhetorically as a ‘negotiation tactic’ suppressed business investment simply because nobody knows how to price anything. That will have downstream impact on headcount growth, accelerating the trend of hiring on-demand labour (see freelancer report) and / or automating the headache of labour away. Have a watch here
ECONOMY
13. 9 Things That AI and Robotics Will Destroy Forever! Office jobs, doctors, and more! GONE!
David Shapiro is fun Youtuber to watch - he’s 100% certain, massively prolific and has enormous range. This episode covers everything from end of aging, the end of the Hollywood and the end of the office work. A good way to cover a lot of ground quickly - have a watch / listen.
FUTURE OF WORK
End Note
It’s one of these questions when the answer we want to give isn’t the always the answer that is true. Hiring for your own team or one which is close proximate to it, when did you ‘know’ it would or wouldn’t work out?
That’s it - thanks for reading everyone
Have a great week
Hung
Yet another banger Hung, we will get inspiration from here and some of your work will also be featured in our upcoming Newsletter. Thank you for sharing this, even if some of this read is really quite scary