Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 447
Microsoft Skills Agent, Talent Acquisition Matrix, How to Calculate the Number of Recruiters you need, AI-geism and a cool video on the Labour Theory of Value...
This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends BrightHire.
Candidate fraud is on the rise. Remote work + mainstreaming of rapidly advancing AI + global economic insecurity has combined to product the perfect storm - an increasing volume of fraudulent candidate applications clogging up the hiring funnel.
It is the responsibility of Talent Acquisition to ensure only genuine candidates make it through the hiring funnel. As such, it is essential for us to better understand the scale of the challenge and have to hand mitigation strategies for our employers.
BrightHire have produced a comprehensive guide for Talent Acquisition / HR leaders on how best to adapt to this new era of hiring.
Download it - for free - here
Friends,
Everyone who reads this newsletter uses LinkedIn every day. It’s the most important tool that we have in our work and its critically important we are on top of product updates which come from it. Few of these are as significant as Hiring Assistant, so it is something of a coup for us to get none other than the VP of Product from LinkedIn - Hari Srinivasan - to speak with us live on Monday 12th May 6pm BST / 10am PT. This is bonus Brainfood Live - you got to register and watch this one folks. Any questions for Hari? Add them in comments below!
Thanks to: Bill Fischer, Kevin Green, Joey NK Koksal, Bennet Sung, Jacek Krajewski, Donna Svei, Jessie Schofer, Sam Smith, Pedro Oliveira, Manjuri Sinha, Martin Burns, Michelle Sumrall, Bettina Lipporazi, Joshua Kaan, Steffen Volk, Rob Walker, Adam Thurgood, Faye Weedon and Andrew Gadomski - your relentless promotion of all things Brainfood is what keeps this show on the road - thank you!
Can you help? Share this newsletter with your friends on LinkedIn and have them subscribe 👊
What Do Brainfooders Think?
Being bullish on AI note taking is probably the only guess I’ve got right over the past 5 years 🤣. Today’s sponsor BrightHire is one of the leading players - if you haven’t got yourself a solution on this part of the hiring funnel, you had better snap to it. Thanks for all those who voted - make sure you scroll down to the bottom of the newsletter to vote on this week’s topic.
Brainfood Live On Air - Ep306 - Transitioning to CV Free Hiring, Friday 9th May, 2pm BST
As we move toward a fully AI-assisted world, the role of the CV comes under question again - what is even the point when every candidate has a perfect AI generated CV? We are going learn what it looks like when company’s move away from CV based hiring and find other methods to acquire the talent they need. I suspect its a move many more of us are going to make. We’re on Friday 9th May, 2pm BST - register here
The Brainfood
1. Announcing People Skills General Availability and New Skills Agent
By far the most important item in today’s newsletter is this announcement by Microsoft. Multiple members of the brainfood massive have shared in the online community (H/T brainfooders Jacob Sten Madsen, Shiran Danoch, Srini Gundelli). Josh Bersin also has this analysis on the impact on HR tech vendor landscape. Bottom line is this: Microsoft will automatically build skills profiles from users of Microsoft 365, ultimately enabling employers to identify skills within an organisation via Skills Agent. Great for internal mobiblity but presumably soon, will operate externally also. Everybody needs to read this and watch this. We’re going to have to do a Brainfood Live on this, so follow the channel here now.
ASSESSMENT
2. Talent Acquisition Matrix
Everyone here should be following Glen Cathey already but in case you’re not, here’s another reason why you should: consistent, high value, high relevance posts on LinkedIn. This latest one shares an important visual tool to help us think about when to apply AI / Automation to the recruitment process - have a read.
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
3. Stop Guessing Recruiter Headcount: A Startup's 1-Min Calculator
Fun exercise by brainfooder Tereza Machackova on how startup’s can work out how many recruiters you might need to scale your team. The difficulty factor on hiring is the nebulous number - all kinds of stuff needs to go in here, including attractiveness of brand, condition of the market etc. Still, this is all stuff you can do yourself if you want to adapt this model. Calculator is here, and the explainer post is here.
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
4. “Self-Defense Forces”
The first rule of any form of advertising is that you must first capture the attention of your putative audience, everything else comes after. Interesting technique applied by the Japanese military - simple, stark repetition of the kanji. It is kind of intimidating…but I think might be quite effective. What do you think?
RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING
5. AI-geism
I’ve been talking about ageism a lot (Brainfood Live on this soon), in particular brainfooder Mark Dawkins seems to be a community member worth following on this, as he is tracking age-ism as it pertains to our own sector, Talent Acquisition. Matteo Cellini takes on the same question, as it applies to the tech sector and asks whether AI is an amplifier of the effect or whether it might produce unexpected secondary effects (i.e. make the workforce older, by reducing entry level jobs…). Questions unasked: is there something other than simple bias which skews hiring decisions on age cohorts? We do need to recognise senescence as real…
D&I
6. Artificial Intelligence Timeline
Simple website, that is simply useful, if only to help us get a grip on the dizzying pace of innovation in AI. Hope this gets updated on the regular. If so, it is worth a bookmark
AI
7. 5 Common Recruitment Problems & How to Fix Them: A Guide for Hard-to-Fill Vacancies
Brainfooder Jan Bernhart remains one of my favourite contributors - his posts are always operational, always advanced and I always learn something new from them. How about ‘solutions bias’? We all certainly have these. Still operating as a successful solo recruiter, I suspect Jan will be one of those whose services will continue to be in high demand regardless of how sophisticated AI becomes. Must read folks.
SOURCING
8. “The Scale of these Exaggerations could lead to Recruitment Consultants legally exposed…”
As a rule of thumb I don’t promote my own content in this newsletter (subscribe to This Week, In Recruiting for this), but I had to include this piece of marketing from insurance provider Hiscox, who sent me a fake candidate CV, along with a cover letter which explained the liability risk for recruiters who failed to detect candidate fraud. We know we have a problem when it becomes an insurable risk 🤣. Talking a lot about candidate fraud (see Mitigation Risk vs Fake Job Candidates) - I suspect it will become an expanding component of the work we do…
ASSESSMENT
9. Tidy Profit: Camera Captures the Cleaners Changing Lives
Hired a cleaner for the first time in my life last month - some young lad called Ben came round and did about 3 hours in the place, doing some basic but thorough clean up. Very interesting conversation as to why he did this job, ahead of restaurant / bar work (better pay, control over hours) as well as how tough it was to find the work he had studied for (sound engineering). AI will eat knowledge work, Automation will eat manual work, and whilst we wait for Jevon’s paradox to automagically come into being, many more of us are going to do what we can and must. This brilliant photo essay captures some essential stories of workers who have long had to make these trade offs.
GIG ECONOMY
10. Avoiding Skill Atrophy in the Age of AI
A worrying outcome of the AI-enablement of the workforce is the dis-ablement of the workers. We’re all probably already subject to this and with AI continuing to rapidly improve capability, so the risk of us becoming WALL-E like humans is increasing. Useful post on how we can avoid skills atrophy. Might also be useful for assessing candidates true capability in a can-they-do-it-the-hard-way style. H/T to brainfooder Denys Dinkevych for the share.
ASSESSMENT
The Podcasts
11. Is the Sun Setting on America’s Financial Empire?
There is no such thing as objective analysis in geopolitics because everyone is a stakeholder, but we have to do what we can to understand the current moment. Trump 2.0’s unilateral and universal trade war is founded on the conviction that US’s exhorbitant privilege is actually an exhorbitant burden. As Robert Triffin understood, it is actually both. Good conversation here on the role of the USD as global reserve, the contradictions of the global reserve simultaneously being one country’s national currency and why Trump’s actions can only accelerate the search for an alternative.
ECONOMY
12. Does Capitalism Work…Without Work?
Workforce displacement by AI / Automation is orthogonal to Trump’s motivations in launching Tariff War 2.0 - it’s the long term trend which impacts every country, but its impact is hidden from those who have not studied the global distribution of employment across sectors. This video extrapolates the trend to end state - what happens when ‘labour productivity’ actually improves via AI / Automation? It’s got to be the collapse of the entire system. What do you think? Have a watch and let me know what you think!
WORKFORCE AUTOMATION
13. Rippling vs Deel: Over the Top
The scandal in the recruiting industry is the incredible spy story between payroll providers Rippling and Deel. Of course the only way to understand this story is listen to Chad and Cheese’s sober and objective take on it… 🤣
SOURCING
End Note
As we’re going to be talking about LinkedIn Hiring Assistant a lot, I wanted to use this week’s poll to get a gauge as to how much the brainfood community currently knows about it. No shame on how you answer folks, let me know where you’re at with it!
That’s it - thanks for reading
Have a great week everybody
Hung