Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 444
Shopify's Reflexive use of AI, GRID Report 2025, AI Agents for Beginners, Social Job Advertising Benchmarking Report, Chief of Staff a misunderstood role and Sharie Rodriguez sending $0.02 USD...
This week’s brainfood is sponsored by our friends Willo.
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SPONSORS
Friends,
A couple of announcements:
High Volume Hiring series with Adzuna - launching this Weds with How to Handle the Tsunami of Job Applicants. I’m helping Doug and team build out their own Crowdcast channel with this mini series, follow along to capture the progress!
4 x Ways Talent Acquisition will use AI - one off episode with Kristjan Kristjansson, CEO of 50Skills, who is going unpack a thesis on how AI will evolve through how recruiters use it. Sign up and tune in folks.
The Tech Talent Summit with HackerRank is back at the Royal Society on 8th May. Come for the talks, the networking and the cream tea! Free to attend but you have to apply - link above 👊
Thanks to: Dave Hazelhurst, Joey NK Koksal, Colin Donnery, Garry Turner, Eugene van den Hemel, Tony Restell, Gareth Flynn, Lindsey Stone, Rob Shannon, Andy Headworth, Maria Ma, Xin Lin, Bill Fischer, James Lesner, Beecher Ashley-Brown and Emi Beredugo - your public endorsement of all things brainfood is essential for keeping this show on the road - thank you!
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What Do Brainfooders Think?
I had to smile at this post - the brainfood community remains tunnel visioned on the two topics we care about most - sourcing techniques and AI (probably for more sourcing optimisation!) Check out last week’s Brainfood Live for some quick tips on how to do this on DIY basis. Meanwhile, follow Brainfood Live as we continue to showcase Agentic AI workflows from vendors side. Thanks to all who voted - make sure you scroll down to the bottom of the newsletter the vote on this week’s issue.
Brainfood Live On Air - Ep302 - Agentic AI in the Wild (Live Demo), Thursday 17th April, 2pm BST
Firstly…what do we think of the VONQ’s brand makeover? Personally love the colour change, and very glad that they are staying bold rather than blue! We have the two key execs with us this Thursday to demo Agentic AI in the VONQ platform. If you watched any of Ritu and Bill before on screen, you will know that they have sort of depth of thinking about how AI Agents will operate in the real world. Live demo on screen, on Thursday 17th April, 2pm BST - register here
The Brainfood
1. Reflexive AI Usage is Now a Baseline Expectation at Shopify
Sometimes you get the feeling that a post will become socially significant. Last week Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke made sure this internal memo would go external, perhaps to acquire social capital but also to ensure the cultural change he is calling for is embedded in company by externalising the commitment to the public. Worth fully reading through but the key point for us is this: all hiring managers must first determine - and prove - that AI couldn’t first do the job before hiring the human. Companies are going to get radically smaller, especially knowledge / digital businesses. H/T to brainfooders Stanislaw Wasowicz and Bas van de Haterd for the share in the online community.
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
2. We Need Speed to Get Quality: Why Now Is Not the Time to Slow Your Hiring Process
One of the many reasons to follow brainfooder John Vlastelica is the number of stories he has to share (not saying you’re old John! 🤣). Some timeless wisdom here on the importance of speed for quality - some candidates have urgency whether through competitor or market pressures - and an organisations ability to move quickly can determine success. Question which merited more space on this post: how exactly to systemise speed of hire? Worth a brainfood live - have a read here
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
3. 10 Lessons Teaching Everything You Need to Know to Start Building AI Agents
Information dumps like this from Microsoft are a gift - and shameful for any of us not to take full advantage of it. It’s a 10 step course for beginners on AI Agents. Given that our near term future will be the creation, training and even performance managing these agents, it’s critically important that Talent Acquisition gets on top of this. Take 2 hours of your day next week and dive in. As a counter disincentive, don’t be like the US Secretary for Education on the topic of ‘A-one’…
AI
4. Chief of Staff - a Heavily Misunderstood Role
From this reading, it looks pretty much like an EA + COO type of hybrid - basically Chief Eunuch to the Emperor - a powerful position, as you will be in charge of ‘getting things done’ for the boss. Anyone worked as CoS? I have a feeling that not many people from HR / TA would’ve done this and I’m not clear on what the pathway into role might typically be. Another one for Brainfood live perhaps?
CULTURE
5. 2025 Social Job Advertising Benchmark Report
Nice report from our friends Wonderkind on the state of Social Job Advertising. Anyone who is interested in future workforce needs to understand the migration of GenZ from laptop to smartphone, and how dominant infotainment social media sites are in terms of attention share. Great report, must read for anyone in TA / EB - download it here.
RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING
6. Anthropic Education Report: How University Students Use Claude
Another fascinating breakdown from Anthropic on who is using AI, how they are using it and what for. This is not specifically gendered post but I am categorising it under D&I because of the clear implications for gender - the most advanced users of AI at undergraduate level are STEM students, the least are in the Humanities. What does this look like couple years down the line when employers are all adopting Shopify’s memo to hire only the AI-enabled? Lots to think about - have dive in here.
D&I
7. Interview Questions Which Will Make You Think
Bad interviewing is when it becomes a box checking exercise; Great interviewing is when you give the candidate the opportunity to show you who they are. Some fantastic examples here in this screencap - there are a dozen questions and each one could be my favourite. Worth dropping at least one of these into your next interview.
ASSESSMENT
8. GRID 2025 Industry Trends Report
I was delighted to host a webinar with our friends Bullhorn last week where we detailed their 2025 GRID report for UK Recruitment Agencies. Digital transformation is underway in the agency sector as many time intensive elements of the recruiters work - lead generation, prospecting, business development - become delegated to bots which can do it 24/7. I have a feeling third party recruiters are going to outpace internal TA in AI/Automation - the Darwinian principles of survival are tested in the open market. Have a read here - and also take not of Adecco’s major move in N10.
ECONOMY
9. Sharie Rodriguez Sent You $0.02 USD
How creative is this cold outreach? You have to smile when you read the first sentence 😀. Be interesting to get an update from Sharie on what her conversion rates are for the technique of ‘sending my two cents’ to target prospects. You have to think that response rates have gone through the roof. Lesson her for us all: possible to be creative in these micro actions.
ENGAGEMENT
10. The Adecco Group Launches a New Company
Incumbents or Innovators Dilemma is the theory which explains why Blockbuster couldn’t do Netflix, Blackberry couldn’t do Iphone and VW / Toyota couldn’t become a Tesla or BYD - when short term profit maximisation is the goal, it does not make sense to invest in longer turnaround innovations which cannibalise that short horizon profit. The Adecco Group not waiting around though - setting up what is in effect an anti-recruitment agency platform. This is like Tobi Lutke’s memo at corporate scale. TA has to expand scope beyond the human. H/T to brainfooder Adam Gordon for the share in the online community.
FUTURE OF WORK
The Podcasts
11. Special: Can Tariffs Make You Rich? with Ha-Joon Chang
Gary Stevenson has had his critics in recent days but so far no one is coming for Ha-Joon Chang, maybe because the affable Korean continues to be a sober, non-partisan and indefatigably cheerful commentator on the disastrous state of the world. Great to see these two in conversation on the topic of the day.
ECONOMY
12. The Tariff Paradoxes of Latin America and Asia
How does this guy keep these Youtube videos going? Quality of these mini-documentaries is superb. Tariffs are the talk of the day, so this historical journey on how very different tariff policies have had variable impact on different regions in the world. tl;dr is: context is king. Have a watch
ECONOMY
13. How Tariffs Will Transform U.S. Dollar Capital Flows Worldwide
First 5 minutes of this podcast and Lyn Alden describes the Triffin Dilemma in laypersons terms that even Trump might understand. Must watch if you want to know more about trade ‘imbalance’, de-industrialisation, financialisation and the USD as a GRC
ECONOMY
End Note
I’m on record as saying Trump 2.0 is unequivocally bad for our profession because businesses cannot invest under conditions of uncertainty. Two things we should see as early second order consequences of Trump Tariff War 2.0 is hiring freezes, RIF and layoffs as businesses adopt an even more conservative posture to investment, and an acceleration of AI / Automation as those very same businesses seek to replace human capacity with more scalable, lower risk robot capacity. The risk / opportunity for us in TA / HR is stark - we either get smaller as the payroll shrinks, or get bigger as our scope expands to encompass non-human workers.
Anyways, lets see what brainfooders think about this latest episode - welcome to disagree with my takes, please do so publicly in comments!
That’s it - thanks for reading everyone
Have a great week
Hung