Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 450

Cyborg, Robot or Android? A new framework to think HR organisational design, AI Execs get surveyed, OSINT for TA, global report on energy and one important progress report on Mobley vs Workday...

Hung Lee

May 25, 2025

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Friends,

Crazy week last week, so I am grateful for yet another Bank Holiday this week. UK Gov should just intermittently chuck us a few more of these - the uptick in mood would do wonders for the economy!

In any case, things pick up week following - more in-person events (well done vendors for putting these on), some big ones coming up (RECLive, Recfest, CIPD etc), as well some private engagements which will soon see light of day, not to mention SXSW in London week one in June.

As ever, I recommend you fully get involved as much as time / budget allows. Big List of Recruitment & HR events to attend in 2025 is updated - bookmark and go to at least one thing on it 👊

Thank you to: Eugène van den Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Kevin Green, Reinier Kaspar, Ivan Harrison, Nathan Burtwell, Oksana Strippentow, Rob Walker, Sam Baxendale, Ivan Harrison, Carlo Pezzuto, Laura Fine, Scott Wilson, Gita Selli-Cellei, Jessie Schofer, Ross Clennett, Blake Jackson, Jane Moors, Juliana Park, Kalpesh Baxi, Neko Sombrio, Joey Price and Manjuri Sinha - thanks for your public support of all things brainfood - your promotion is the only marketing brainfood gets. Cheers 🥂

Can you help? Share this newsletter with a friend in recruitment who needs to be better connected with community intelligence!

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

50% are AI Optimists - and we absolutely need you to stay that way! Our linear perspective of time means we often misunderstand the nature of what we mean by ‘the future’ - it’s not a fixed point that we must inevitably reach but a rhetorical construct which shapes the present. We need to stay ‘credibly optimistic’ and help make a future which works for all us. Thanks for all who voted - make sure you scroll to the bottom of the newsletter and vote on this week’s poll.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep310 - Hiring Efficiency: How Staffing Agencies, RPO and In-house are using AI?, Fri 30th May, 2pm BST

Are Staffing agencies ahead of Corporate in using AI? How do RPO’s juggle data privacy issues when using AI? What can we learn from each other in how to experiment and implement artificial intelligence into our workflows? We’re comparing how different types of recruiter use AI, this Friday 30th May, 2pm BST -register here!

The Brainfood

1. The Future of Human Resources: Organizational Engineering

AI-enablement is moving from ROI justifications to top down directives from CEO’s frustrated at the lack of pace of adoption. Important line in this exceptional piece from brainfooder Toby Culshaw is paraphrased from Josh Bersin, which I will re-paraphrase here: if we don’t AI enable, somebody is just going to cut our headcount. We need a framework that we can use and Toby has provided one here - Cyborg, Robot or Android? Must read folks.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

2. AI Leadership Survey: The New Business Blueprint 2025

What do AI / Data Executives think about where we are in 2025? Kind-of good news about this piece is that the biggest frustration is the challenging of hiring great talent into their teams - this is one of the few areas where demand still significant exceeds supply and should continue to be a place where a lot of classic recruitment work will long be needed. Great piece of research by Rebecca Hastings - this is a useful document for anyone hiring for the skills of today / tomorrow. Download the report here. H/T to brainfooder Adam Gordon for the share

3. Mobley vs Workday May 2025

Derek Mobley has a chance to go down in history. His claim of age discrimination against Workday has implications for all software vendors in the recruitment space - if he wins the case, we’re going to be looking at nerfing a great deal of the functionality of existing systems, especially on candidate sorting / filtering / ranking. Current judgement…is going Derek’s way - have a read of it here. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for sharing in the online community

ASSESSMENT

4. OSINT for HR and Recruitment Professionals

OSINT was all the rage once upon a time but its one of many topics in our industry which has been resoundingly sidelined by the transformational potential of AI. Some of the techniques here have unquestionably lost value, but I wonder whether we might come to need them again once we’re all AI-enabled. Someone who knows how to do this will likely outcompete someone who doesn’t…H/T to brainfooder Jennifer de Maria for the share in the online community

SOURCING

5. Balancing Act: Can ‘Mom Jobs’ Help China’s Women Have It All?

The default setting for jobs is single person, 25-35 years, with zero responsibilities outside of work - it has always been inherently exclusionary. Can we create jobs which better reflect the diversity of lifestyles people have? Interesting attempt to do so in China but all solutions bring with them new challenges to solve. Good read

GIG ECONOMY

6. Navigating the Evolving Landscape of Conversational AI - A Summit Recap

Brainfooder Martyn Redstone is doing some sterling work at the moment - keeping at the forefront of the industry conversation on AI, and relaying it back to us with clear and comprehensive summaries. Good person to follow for everyone here - this is his review of the Conversational AI Summit which passed just a couple weeks ago.

7. Who Shortlists? Evidence of Gender Disparities in Hiring Outcomes

Hiring Manager Self Serve is likely to be growing theme as AI enables the decentralisation of recruitment responsibilities but we should be aware of the unintended consequences of such a move; this piece of research unsurprisingly concludes that who does the shortlisting produces different candidate selections, especially on the gender of who goes forward. What we do not know, is who is right, or how those hires subsequently performed, but that data may never be realistically available to us. Lots to think about - H/T to brainfooder Clair Bush for the share.

D&I

8. The Strange Behavior of LLMs in Hiring Decisions: Systemic Gender and Positional Biases in Candidate Selection

…it seems that delegating hiring decisions to AI may also not be the solution either, as more unexpected outcomes emerge from the use of LLM’s at the hiring process. Interestingly, and perhaps counter intuitively, the research here suggests that LLM’s consistently show bias in favour of female candidates. We only thing we can be confident on is that we don’t know why. Another great read - H/T to brainfooder Petar Vujosevic for the share.

D&I

9. Ember Global Electricity Review 2025

It’s strange that renewable energy has become so connoted with cultural progressivism - there are simply unequivocal arguments in efficiency and security in expanding renewable output and generation. Not to mention the potential job creation opportunities which emerge from energy transition. Countries which spurn the opportunity can have no complaints when the world shifts to the future. Accessible report from energy consultancy Ember

ECONOMY

10. LinkedIn Interview Scams

We’ve talked a great deal about candidate fraud over the past several weeks but there as always been fraud coming from the other side. Downloading software onto your own computer is always a risk, one which is today exploited with plausible requests from crypto scammers. Hard to see what else can be done in these circumstances - the only prediction we can be confident on is that assessment and verification going to be a bigger part of the recruiters job than ever before, not inconceivably become our primary role...

ASSESSMENT

The Podcasts

11. Google I/O Keynote 2025

Last week was as good a week as its been for Google for what feels like a very long time. Real time language translate, incredible fidelity on text-to-video with Flow, Gemini live camera - a veritable blizzard of product updates. Full keynote here, and you may also wish to get Sergey Brin on the future of AI & Gemini also.

12. Why Britain is Losing Its Workers at an Alarming Rate?

Labour Party’s sop to the anti-immigrant right wing was politically necessary but covers up a fundamental crisis occurring in all countries - as they economically develop, they demographically decline - and need immigrant labour. This produced Brexit, which in the end - as predicted - produced even more immigration. Have a watch.

SOCIETY

13. Navigating the Unique Recruitment Market in Germany and Europe for Solar, Wind and Battery Projects

We need to do a Brainfood Live on green energy - not enough of us are in the sector, and nobody knows how to get into it. Have a listen if you’re keen to know more about what we know is both a growth sector and one which has a long term talent shortage, and therefore demand for recruiters. H/T to brainfooder Colin McNicol for the share in the online community

FUTURE OF WORK

End Notes

Some of you know that I do a regular video livestream every Friday, typically talking about the most interesting topics which have surfaced up in the newsletter or in the industry at large. You can follow it here on my Youtube channel, follow the Crowdcast page (where it is hosted) or follow my profile on LinkedIn and watch it there.

There is a mechanism to connect to this newsletter, which seems to enable you to receive an email when I go live on Friday, and watch it on here. So simple question for you - should I connect??

Recruiting Brainfood