Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 446
A Practical Guide to Building Agents, Indeed Disposition API (power move!), Clickworkers training AI and two contrasting and complementary visions for the Future of TA in an AI-enabled world...
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Friends,
I’m writing this from Chep Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong, waiting to board my flight back to the UK, and finally bringing to an end to this epic tour of APAC.
What can I say, other than what an incredible experience it has been?
I know I am extraordinarily privileged to be able to travel to different countries, learn about local cultures and connect with local recruiters in those places. We have so much to learn from each other. In particular, we need to be open to contradictions to our most cherished beliefs, not because those beliefs are wrong, but because context is what often makes them right.
London will be all action when I return!
Straight in with JLL AGM where I will do a fireside with the management team, a webinar on the 4 x Ways Recruiters Will Encounter AI on the same day with 50Skills, followed by dinner with some smart folks to talk about the impact of regulations on AI with GreenHouse at Sea Containers. Week following, Tech Talent Summit at the Royal Society on May 8th. If you’re in London and hiring for tech in 2025, apply to attend here 👊
Thanks to: Dave Hazelhurst, Joey NK Koksal, Rob Walker, Kevin Green, Ben Ritchie, Andre Martins, Andreea Lungulescu, Eugene van den Hemel, Linda Hugod, Steph Tommen, Robert Horsely, Bill Fischer, Cornel Műller, Jan Tegze, Pedro Oliveira and Paul McCardle - your public endorsements of all things brainfood keeps this show on the road - thank you!
Can you help? Share this newsletter with your friends in industry and have them subscribe 👊
What Do Brainfooders Think?
Thank you for all voting on this poll - it’s not a question I wanted to ask but sometimes you think more when challenged. I welcome the 31% who recognised that maybe age-ism is there, but beyond our self perception. I credit also the 14% who answered yes - we need to find out why, without condemnation! Remember to scroll to the bottom of the newsletter and vote on today’s poll.
Brainfood Live On Air - Ep305 - AI Regulations in TA & HR: 2025 Q2 Update!, Fri 2nd May, 2pm BST
We have a massive ensemble cast to join us on this AI Regs in TA & HR show next week. Important we get regular updates I feel, so I may run this show quarterly to keep us as close to the regs as possible - worth doing? Anyways, we got a lot of experienced commentators joining including Martyn Redstone, Bob Pulver, Nina Alag Suri and more. We’re on Fri 2nd May, 2pm BST. Register here
The Brainfood
1. A Practical Guide to Building Agents
Got to credit some of the leading AI players out there - they all seem to be producing some very useful and accessible material on the breakthrough innovations they are making. OpenAI with this guide on Agentic AI is a must read - what they are, when to use them, how to build them. I’m running a series of demo’ing Agentic AI - subscribe Youtube channel for recordings of the demo’s.
AI
2. The End of Recruiting: Why AI Won't Just Change Your Job – It Will Eliminate It
Brainfooder Kevin Wheeler does not pull any punches in this post, taking onsome of the reassuring homilies which have already become unexamined cliché in our industry. AI won’t just magically become recruiter enablement, but will undermine the very foundations of the work recruiters do by being conspicuously better at those tasks than the humans who went before them. Worth reading all of this folks, even if it discomforting to do so. Addendum from me: I believe Kevin underweights on the value of collective intelligence and also does not consider what the competitive advantage might be once AI levels up everyone in the industry. That said, we have to get busy understanding what our human premium is going to be otherwise the system will ensure Kevin becomes more right than wrong.
FUTURE OF WORK
3. Indeed Disposition API
Interesting developments in the world of job boards, especially when market shapers like Indeed make moves which extend their control of the eco-system; disposition data is information held in partner ATS’s on the status of the candidate - an API synch to Indeed will indeed provide job candidates with greater transparency on their chances of the job, but will also implicitly penalise any ATS or job board which does not play ball. Important one for anyone in job advertising - have a read. H/T brainfooder Belinda Johnson for the share.
RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING
4. Job Descriptions Built for Hiring, Performance, and Business Success
In an era where AI is dominating job ad creation, it is so refreshing to read a great post on job ad writing by brainfooder Will Ducey. Some great points made here including the need to write for the audience of one, the comparison of job ad copy vs sourcing strategy and the value of presenting the path to the candidate. Very good piece - have a read
RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING
5. 4. A Critical Juncture Amid Policy Shifts
The impact of Trump Tariff War 2.0 is profound - a scale back of global economic growth by 1-2%. That’s a lot of jobs which now will not be hired for, as companies worldwide pull back on risky investments that is adding to payroll. Trump has a chance of having a similar impact as Covid to the world of work - an accelerant to FTE to non-FTE, offshoring and automation. There’s work there for talent experts who can assist organisations in increasing agility this way. IMF with a quarterly view on what is at stake.
ECONOMY
6. Pulse Check on Candidate Application Preferences in 2025
Easy Apply or not? We’re in a conundrum folks, because job candidates definitely want less friction on apply, yet overwhelmed employers are now increasing friction in order to suppress the applicant flow. Somebody has got to work out how to square this circle. Survey results in this PDF, download here
CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE
7. Restoring Equality of Opportunity & Meritocracy
Culture War in the US has been one of the stories of the past decade; now with the conservative counter revolution fully underway, we can expect continued roll back of the ‘woke’ agenda, using via the expedient of Presidential Executive Order. Latest one to go is disparate-impact liability, where employers were under liability hiring decisions which had disparate impact on protected identity groups. What to make of this? Only that this will be the direction of travel for the foreseeable future.
D&I
8. WikiBarrio
Spain might be the European economy that is doing comparatively the best at the moment, so timely to look into this cool interactive tool which provides great visualisations on the demographics of the country - where the population is based, how much they earn in those places, how old they tend to do be in those places and so on. Be cool to have one of these for every country; obviously useful for members hiring in Spain.
TALENT INTELLIGENCE
9. Venezuelan Migrants Relied on Clickwork to Survive. Now AI is Replacing Them
It is one of the great modern ironies that the behind the miraculous outputs we get from GenAI, are the millions of human hours dedicated to manually labelling the training data, often performed by some of the poorest workers in the world. But there is a double irony in this story from Rest of the World - the AI which has been trained by these clickworkers is starting to no longer need them.
FUTURE OF WORK
10. The Recruitment Renaissance Manifesto: Sixteen Theses for the AI Revolution
Brainfooder Felix Wetzel is another outstanding - if unfortunately infrequent - commentator in our industry. This post is a rallying call for a different future for recruitment, one where the AI will ‘de-industrialise’ recruiting, restoring it to purer more humane, artisanal form. Worth reading this along with Kevin’s post at No2 - two occasionally contrasting and complementary visions.
H/T to brainfooder Jacob Sten Madsen for the share in the online community.
FUTURE OF WORK
The Podcasts
11. He’s on the Frontline of Trump’s Tariffs. Here’s What He’s Seeing
It takes around 30 days for a container ship to reach Los Angeles from Ningpo and….they are basically no longer setting off as no one knows how much the tariff is going to be, who pays it, how it is collected and how it is even calculated. Then it is up to how much inventory is already warehoused - most people think 2-3 weeks more. Then, shortages, inflation, bankruptcies and layoffs. Azeem with Ryan Petersen, CEO and founder of logistics platform Flexport, in conversation.
ECONOMY
12. Is the Future of AI ”Cheating on Everything?”
How much does it matter to have learnt the skill the hard way?
The controversy of AI use in the job search is developing into an interesting philosophical debate on what we are actually recruiting for; do we only really care about outcomes (in which case, AI-a-okay?) or are we looking for underlying attributes, somewhat decoupled from outcomes? Annoying long advert in the middle of this monologue, but interesting questions raised, not least the suggestion of an interviewing service guaranteeing ‘clean room’ proctored interview sessions. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share.
ASSESSMENT
13. Lyn Alden on Changing World Order: Reserve Currency Tradeoffs, Trade Deficits & U.S. Hegemony Shift
Lyn Alden is one of the most effective communicators in modern economics. Here she neatly describes why US trade deficit is the inevitable outcome of using the a national currency as the de facto global reserve; nobody else can make dollars, so if you insist everyone uses it, your trade partners have to gear their economies to sell more to you than they buy from you, in order to acquire those dollars. Surprisingly easy listening.
ECONOMY
End Note
My guess is that almost all of us have already had some form of AI in our workflow by now. Where is it having the most impact for you, or your team or your business?
That’s the poll for this week folks - give your vote below
That’s it - thanks for reading
Have a great week everybody
Hung
Creativity for outreach,if you know how iterate and refine and feed a good base/temlplate its a huge helper. Also huge helper on expanding ideas or help you dig it a bit more.