Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 445
The Evolution of Recruitment, Voices of Gen Z on AI, the collapse of critical thinking due to AI and why Changi Airport in Singapore is the best in the world...
This week’s brainfood is sponsored by our friends at Greenhouse.
Greenhouse is sponsoring HR Technologies on April 23–24, 2025 at ExCeL London. Swing by stand CC14 to see how an all-in-one hiring platform simplifies and streamlines every step of the hiring process. Also, don't miss an insightful speaker session on April 24 with Nkem Nwankwo from Greenhouse and Chris Lees from Monzo Bank, as they dive into how AI is shaping both recruiter efficiency and candidate experience. Finally wind down your day with Greenhouse and Lattice on 23 April at 4pm for a happy hour with refreshing drinks, great company and even better conversations.
Register here!
Friends,
Happy Easter Sunday to you all.
I am heading to Macau tomorrow for the first time in two decades and looking forward to seeing how the place has handles Easter Monday - probably by going to Church! I will then bounce back to HK for this final upcoming week where I hope to catch up with everyone who I have so far failed to see - Theresa, Andy - I mean you!
Feeling a little sad to be closing off this amazing APAC tour but time to come back to Blighty, at least for a few months and I’ll be straight into a series of cool events - will keep you updated on these next week.
Thanks to: Colin Donnery, Joey NK Koksal, Dave Hazelhurst, Eugene van den Hemel, Liz Schwerd, Raj Gill, Belinda Johnson, Ritu Mohanka, Veronica Cortizo, Juliana Park, David Green, Bas van de Haterd, Kevin Green, Tom Manuel, Ievers Shier and Paul McCardle - your public endorsement of all things brainfood keeps this show on the road 👊
Can you help? Share this newsletter with your friends in TA / HR and have them subscribe. Cheers
What Do Brainfooders Think?
Kind of a rhetorical poll because it of course economic erraticism is bad for business, bad for job growth. Still, interesting to see nearly 1/4 of the community on the fence on it, wait and see is often the wisest position, though I don’t it is in this case. Thanks for all who voted, please make sure you scroll down to the bottom of the newsletter and vote on today’s issue.
Brainfood Live On Air - Ep303 - Mitigation Strategies vs Fake Job Candidates, Fri 25th April, 2pm BST
This one of the those urban myths which has become real as technology changes practice; we have long had reports of ingenious techniques used by fraudsters to get through the job assessment but now the incidents seem to becoming mainstream. Lets discuss what these techniques are to raise awareness amongst the community and explore mitigation strategies, because guess whose responsible if fake candidates get hired in your business? That’ll be you. We’re on Friday 25th April, 2pm BST. Register here
The Brainfood
1. Recruitment —> Talent Acquisition —> Talent Engineering
Brainfooder Dave Owen is developing a habit of coming up with outstanding visualisations to communicate his ideas. This table has the sort of information density of a decent length blog post, but is so much more useful because it is not that. Follow Dave, he’s a thinker-doer who coming up some great stuff.
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
2. How to Prompt with GPT-4.1 for HR Teams in Startups & Scaleups
Confession: I’ve lost touch with where we’re at with AI versioning. No longer feel bad about it, cos I think this is obviously what we’re going to be experiencing as the new state - a blizzard of updates which only professional watchers are going to be able to keep up with, and at some point, not even them. As it is, this how to guide from brainfooder Matt Bradburn is highly useful, tuned as it is for our function. Bookmark this.
AI
3. Building Talent Intelligence Ecosystems That Work
Nice piece from brainfooder Martin Burns on the paradox of talent analytics - we’ve never had more data, yet we’re scarcely more intelligent with it. The mindset shift to ‘ecosystem’ thinking is a positive step but I wonder whether the task is still going too hard to fix - especially as AI might just sit on top of this mess and clean up the answers for you.
TALENT INTELLIGENCE
4. Effective Sourcing Strategies: How to Build a Proactive, High-Impact Talent Pipeline
Brainfooder Tony de Graaf takes us to task in failing to distinguish between operational discipline vs strategic sourcing. The Availability / Impact framework is a particularly useful tool but all of this post is worth reading if you want to up level your talent acquisition function.
SOURCING
5. A Lesson on Onboarding from Lee Kuan Yew
Almost everyone is a fan of former President of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. He’s the Asian authoritarian its ok to like in part because of his excellent command of English but also because of his acute observations on human behaviour. Here he is being meticulous about first impressions - an important lesson for anyone who is interested in CX, EX, EB and PR. And Changi Airport remains No1 airport in the world in my estimation…
CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE
6. Voices of Gen Z: How American Youth View and Use Artificial Intelligence
Survey result from 3500 13-28 year olds in the US on their thoughts and usage to and of AI. This is Gen Z, the generation which are digital natives, and who never knew the world pre-Internet. Lots of interesting insight on this, most striking for me was the above chart - Gen Z recognises that AI is useful but also notices the deskilling effect….
SOCIETY
7. 18 LinkedIn Scams I Fell For (So You Don’t Have To)
Brainfooder Jan Tegze is a unique contributor because he consistently comes up with interesting angles and then backs them up with his own research, before compiling it all in some great original writing. This one on scammers on LinkedIn, exploiting motivated job seekers by offering bogus career / job search advice.
ECONOMY
8. The Slow Collapse of Critical Thinking in OSINT due to AI
Every innovation is a deskilling event, where we trade our previous capability for a tool or service which can do it more efficiently. What is different with AI is that the capability we are trading in is actually thinking. Important post citing some significant research on heavy AI users, who essentially became ‘better outputters’ but less capable critical thinkers. Includes a corrective toward the end, something that we should all practice. Have a read
ASSESSMENT
9. Corporate DEI is an Imperfect Vehicle for Deeply Meaningful Ideas
Last week’s announcement last week by the UK Supreme Court that ‘trans women’ can’t be legally defined as women was another blow in what has been a tremendously difficult few years for DEI. Brainfooder Joanne Lockwood has a great guide for employers in respect to this verdict, and this post makes some powerful arguments for diversity and inclusion, by skewering the fallacious arguments mounted against it.
D&I
10. Stairway Porters Rise to the ‘1,000-Yuan Man’ Challenge
The world is rapidly accelerating toward automation but there are still people working on gruelling manual labour jobs. The majority of people in fact globally, are still doing this. That doesn’t mean that they are unable to activate other revenue streams though, as digital natives remain fascinated by people doing ‘real’ work. China’s Stairway Porters, making an additional living as content creators
CREATOR ECONOMY
The Podcasts
11. Why Trump Could Lose His Trade War With China
Tom Friedman and Ezra Klein in conversation about Trump Tariff War 2.0 - not all accurate, but some consciousness of how unhelpful anti-China bi-partisanship in Washington has been since Trump 1.0 initiated trade war, lubricating the way forward for Trump’s current recklessness, and maybe worse. Of course, nobody wins in trade war, but we some will lose harder than others - and we in TA / HR sector fall into the latter category. Have a watch
ECONOMY
12. Unbundling the BPO: How AI Is Disrupting Outsourced Work
Cool to see brainfooder Steph Smith doing great things in the podcast world, with always interesting conversations with smart founders building the future of work. BPO is a huge sector globally (5% GDP of India?) but it will be the first to be eaten by AI - first as supplementary (AI accent modifiers for example), then full replacement. People, companies, governments have got to pivot.
FUTURE OF WORK
13. My Unemployment Journey - Job Hunting at 45
OP is 45 and out of work. He recorded a fascinating 11 minute monologue sharing his story, his analysis of the issue and thoughts to what this might mean for him and others like him. Every second resonated. Advice for anyone in corporate - you need a Plan B for your 40’s, because the job market is not forgiving. We need realistic and non-judgemental explanations as to why we do not want to hire older candidates - brainfood live on this to come. H/T to brainfooder Toby Culshaw for the share, recommend everyone watch this one.
D&I
End Note
The last podcast really has resonated with me, especially as a person who now shares the same age bracket of what may be becoming the most unemployable demographic around. I am deeply thankful that I ended up on a different track, but believe me that this had more to do with good fortune than anything else.
Poll for you all, and I want you to be honest:
Please do comment, lets start a conversation on this
That’s it - thanks for reading
Have a great week everybody
Hung
Another reason we really need to keep pushing for merit based hiring approaches of all sorts. As it only looks if the person can do what is necessary for the job and (if applied well) ignore all other things.
Plus I think the age-ism (is that a word) may not specifically sit with recruitment but maybe more with our customers the hiring managers.
I don't think I am. However, between 2 equally qualified candidates, I'll prefer the 35 yo to the 45 yo one. Even though I'm almost 45, I've always been exposed to younger people being more driven and looking for more jobs than older people. I might have to challenge myself here!!