Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 449
White Collar Job Blues, the End of Accents, Microsoft cuts 6%, a practical guide to building agents and a cool technique for sourcing using embedded language translation on LinkedIn...
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Friends,
How are you all doing?
Busy week this week - Gem Talent Summit (20th), Networking Breakfast with Spotted Zebra (21st) and Worksome WorkSummit 2025 (22nd) - let me know if you’re at any of these events, come up and say hello on the latter two 👊.
I’m a huge believer in the value of in-person events, and I strongly recommend you get to as many as you can manage. Check out the Big List of Events to Attend in 2025, bookmark it and share it!
Thanks to: Martyn Redstone, Dana Moverman, Joey NK Koksal, Michael Blakely, Dave Hazelhurst, Neil Munro, Vanessa Raath, Anna Ott, Deniz Erduran, Celeste Sirin, Charu Malhotra, Koos Wurzer, Bas van de Haterd, Matthias Schmeisser, Juliana Park, Thibault Martin and Neil Carberry - thank you for your public endorsement of all things brainfood - keeping this show on the road, cheers 🥂
Can you help? Share this newsletter with your network on LinkedIn. Important!
What Do Brainfooders Think?
Interesting breakdown on the topics we care about most when it comes to personal development - we need a management coach to come on to Brainfood Live to give us some education. I’m on it folks! Make sure you scroll to the bottom of the newsletter to vote on this week’s issue.
Brainfood Live On Air - Ep309 - Chief of Staff (wtf is this role and can TA / HR do it?), Friday 23rd May, 2pm BST
Its a high profile role, especially in government and military but we’ve seen the appearance of Chief of Staff in many private businesses too. What is this role and is it a potential option for TA / HR? We’re going to speak to CoS from Pleo, Miro, Moonhub & Continuum Industries who can share their insight. We’re on Fri 23rd May, 2pm BST - register here
The Brainfood
1. White-Collar Workers Are Getting the Blues
I think we all get the sense that we’ve been in a white collar job recession for the past 2-3 years. Job posting data from Revelio Labs shows decline of volume of all job groups, but especially so in white collar vs blue collar jobs, leading the additional effect on wages. US data, but similar things happening in UK, REC & KPMG data here. Job posts do not tell the whole story though, because it could also mean employers are shifting their hiring approach away from job advertising - we really need to corroborate with payroll data. Bottom line: external macro remains extremely tough. NB: doing State of the Labour market with Adzuna next month - register here
ECONOMY
2. A Trick to Search for Language Skills on LinkedIn (without Losing Your Mind)
Brainfooder Jan Bernhart is becoming great at sharing these micro sourcing techniques. Did you know that LinkedIn has language recognition and translation on search? This means you can search in native language terms to surface up candidates which have that term or translated equivalents in the bio. Pretty neat.
SOURCING
3. Restoring Control Over The Immigration System
Being hostile to immigration is unfortunately a political necessity in democracies today. Here is UK Governments white paper on how they are going to reduce net immigration. This is a good tweet of summarising the main points - increase employer costs to sponsor, requirement of University degree (??), increased scrutiny in sectors / employers hiring ‘too many’ immigrants. It’s obviously daft as UK has a shortfall of labour for essential workers (remember them?), but red meat needs to be thrown to the crowd, so here we are. On a practical level, this will raise the cost of employment, which will either provide more (admin) work for recruiters / HR or - perhaps more likely - further accelerate AI / Automation of services which prove too difficult to hire for (which might again be work for us, if we play our cards right)
D&I
4. Nobody Codes Here Anymore
Really interesting description of how one company is using AI in software engineering. The first order effects are productivity gains in code output, as well as enablement of previously non-coders to contribute to the code base. Second order effects - less need for junior developers (early career job search crisis) and tuning the code base for the AI. This is a form of standardisation which will eventually eliminate the human inputted intricacies in software, leading better quality software, better interoperability and reduced maintenance costs, as well as the mass production of ever more code. OpenAI launched their cloud based coding agent this - Introducing Codex - s/w engineering changing faster than we can keep up with.
FUTURE OF WORK
5. Microsoft Cuts 6,000 Employees…
In an entirely unrelated move, Microsoft announced RIF of 3%, letting 6000+ employees go, including some tenured employees who have made significant contributions to the business and the wider industry at large. Tech companies are flattening their structure, and giving the continual advances of coding agents, we can expect that they may yet continue to reduce in size. Perhaps the hiring goes elsewhere? That is IBM’s claim
CULTURE
6. China Rolls Out World’s Largest Fleet of Driverless Mining Trucks Powered by Huawei tech
No commentary needed in this video showing mining and excavation work carried out by autonomous vehicles and remotely operated machines. Being ‘in-person’ provides one layer of insulation against AI disintermediation but advanced in 5G, IoT, improved sensors & AI will drastically reduce the requirement for human labour in many blue collar fields. What need to develop a theory as to what kind of human labour is going to be persistent - will start a series on this on Open Kitchen in TWIR - follow the discussion there.
WORKFORCE AUTOMATION
7. State of the Product Job Market in 2025
Maybe Product is where its at? Great breakdown from Lenny Rachitsky of data provided by brainfooder Amit Taylor’s Trueup. Main insights: Product / Engineering in AI is growing, but looking flat every other sector, with remote of course being fully in retreat. Obviously SF / Silicon Valley heavy data set given the nature of the job type - more on the state of investment in tech in Brainfood Live next month with George Larocque and Madeline Laurano - register here.
ECONOMY
8. The Rhythm of People Analytics: Why Dashboards Fall Short and Rituals Drive Change
You could be sitting on a goldmine of insight, but if the data can’t be trusted or the delivery feels like homework, it’s never going to inform action.
…which itself is an outstanding insight, one of many in this fantastic post which aims to reorientate data analytics to actionable outcomes rather than pretty dashboards. The concept of rhythm is entirely missing in any discourse of Talent Acquisition / HR, which makes this post an exceptional one in more ways than one. Must read, regardless of whether People Analytics is specifically your thing…
PEOPLE ANALYTICS
9. A Practical Guide to Building Agents
We in TA / HR need to leave the semantic discussion over what is or is not an agent behind and get busy building and working with them. The moment feels very much like the early days of Web 2.0 - we have to dive in head first and figure out as we go. This guide from OpenAI is about as accessible as it gets - have a read, bookmark it and get on with it! NB: for folks in Amsterdam on June 5th, I’m doing this with brainfooder Alla Pavlova - sign up here
AI
10. Industry and Identity: How Labor Migration Reshaped Culture in 19th Century Britain
The installation of a cotton industry in the 1870s and its expansion after the 1880s all but wiped out the local dialect when country people moved into small industrial centers
Internal migration from farm to factory led to long term social impacts, tracked by the decline of the local accents as intermingling of people’s from different regions smoothed out the differences in the way people speak. Fascinating essay on how technology revolutions make profound change to society; it’s become cliche to say it, but we’re at an analogous moment today (tho I think ours will go in reverse, in a forced retreat back to the village...)
SOCIETY
The Podcasts
11. The Hidden Dangers of AI-Generated Content
My take on this is that we need to shift from a mindset of ‘content’ to that conversation - and we all need to stake our claim in the public discourse. If you’re struggling to do this, have a watch of this fantastic interview with Trent Cotton who shares perspective not only on content creation but also institutional confidence or lack thereof in HR, and what we as people leader should do about it.
CONTENT MARKETING
12. LLM Enabled Companies
As a former labour market place builder myself, this conversation featuring former Triplebyte founder Harj Taggar was super resonant. With AI now able to technically assess candidates, does the idea of a closed 3 way talent market place now come back in fashion? It looks like it might. Have a listen. H/T to brainfooder Pedro Oliveira for the share.
AI
13. These Jobs Won’t Exist in 24 Months!
Three big brains in conversation on the rise of AI and its impact on society and jobs, moderated by Steven Bartlett. Lots of positive things outlined, including medical and healthcare advances, but there remains a naive view that AI will simply create more economic value without considering who captures the value. It’s going to be wealth creation/destruction leading to intense wealth concentration. Long listen, but well worth it, NB: if you want to watch my interview with Steven, its on Tuesday 20th May, register on this link here
FUTURE OF WORK
End Note
The last podcast got me thinking about the archetypes of people who talk about AI. We have AI Optimists - people who say disruption will happen but will be a temporary moment before huge gains are unlocked by AI. Then there are the AI Pessimists, who say this time its different, we have never seen this before and the risks of disaster are high and the Skeptics, which say AI is a big deal but we should not underestimate the power of inertia and vested interest in culture which will slow down AI’s impact.
Which narrative do you prefer?
That’s it - thanks for reading
Have a great week everyone
Hung
We have autonomous trucks here in the UK too! Here at the Port of Felixstowe we have them moving containers around. We are still recruiting (many...many) port operatives, but the AO trucks help boost productivity alongside the humans. https://www.portoffelixstowe.co.uk/about/innovation/
It’s ‘funny’ how at item 4 (Nobody codes anymore) the subject of hiring/need less junior engineers comes up again.
I’ve seen this message more and more from (non technical) CEO’s… and the ‘funny’ part is;
- if you don’t hire juniors anymore, who will take the place of the senior when they leave/retire. You need the natural flow from junior-intermediate-senior.
These companies will, in a year or maybe more, struggle with replacing their workforce IF the ‘junior’ role disappears.
- if you only have seniors in the company, then what is a senior? There is no knowledge transfer, no opportunity to learn how to lead… this will affect the career of the senior as well.
- these companies are creating a shortage in a few years as AI can help code, but is not on an ‘engineering level’.
There is a MASSIVE difference between coding and engineering. An engineer does more than just write code, how will AI fix this, and how will companies keep that knowledge if there is no succession.
It’s short term thinking again..
Item 12: AI is only able to assess coding, not engineering. The difference is quite impactful. An engineer need to think about product, customers, scaling, testing (a/b, not code), impact on infra, etc.
AI is not able to assess engineers yet, it can only assess certain tasks.
AI might replace developers/coders.. but actually increases the need for Engineers
I’m aligned with rhe sceptics. Not because I doubt AI. Because I doubt people…. They are either overestimating AI or sometimes underestimating AI.
It’s too often that we yell ‘AI’ at automation, or think that something is AI. (Especially in TA tooling).
And sometimes people underestimate how fast AI is evolving.
I’m not talking about current LLM’s, but actual intelligent systems that do not need to be prompted, but learn how to ‘prompt’ themselves.
As long as we still need to ‘prompt’ AI to do what we want, and then tell it what to do next…it’s not intelligent yet.. but it won’t take long before that changes.