Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 452
State of Talent Report 2025, Transformation of RPO's, the Return of Phrenological Appraisals, Grievance Doctrine of Trade and why GenAI content is our Polyester...
This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends at Screenloop
Time’s tight. Teams are lean. Bad hires are expensive.
That’s why in-house talent teams at Lottie, Titanbay, and Yoti trust Screenloop to streamline hiring with AI notes, smart scheduling, and scorecards that write themselves, all in one platform.
This month only: Get 3 months free when you book a demo in May (Brainfood readers exclusive)
SPONSORS
Friends,
What an amazing week it was last week - reminded me how important it is to meet people in person, 1-2-1 and 1-2-many. More of the same this week, let me bullet point the stuff that is happening in case you want to take part, come along or watch along
Cultivate Europe 2025 - with Eightfold at the Rosewood Hotel, London 10th June
RECLive25 - with Recruitment & Employment Confederation, Kings Place, London June 10th (use RECLiveBrainfood to get in if you’re a non-member)
AI-enablement case study with Rolls-Royce - online, Weds 11th June 12pm BST
State of the Labour Market - online, Weds 11th June 2pm BST
The All in for AI Lab with SmartRecruiters at The Steel Yard, London 18th June
Sign up folks - we have to up skill on artificial and increase our access to community intelligence!
Thanks to: James Osborne, Joey NK Koksal, John Bersentes, Andrew Spence, Manjuri Sinha, Mark Deubels, Alla Pavlova, Eugene van den Hemel, Bas van de Haterd, Aleksandra Gurskaite, Daisy Ilaria, Angelique Slob, Anna Ott, Kevin Green, Paul McCardle, Dave Hazlehurst, Andrew Spence, Doeke Geertsma, Koos Wurzer, Candice de Clerck, Adam Gordon, Rob Walker, Caroline Hunter, Stephen Kerins, Lindsey Stone and Andrew Stetsenko - your public support of all things brainfood (including lunch and coffee cheers 🤣) keeps this show on the road. Thank you 🙏
Can you help? Share this newsletter with your friends in recruitment and have them subscribe - cheers!
What Do Brainfooders Think?
In combination with my LinkedIn poll with the same question, I think we can conclusively say that we recruiters are overwhelmingly at Level 1 in AI usage - we do use, but mainly on the base use cases. No shaming folks - we have to understand why and whether this is a problem. On the case, investigating…
Brainfood Live On Air - Ep312 - Leadership Lessons from Global Talent Acquisition Teams, Fri 13th June, 2pm BST
The top position in Talent Acquisition is leadership of the a global TA team - you’re managing managers, across time zones, legal jurisdictions, different cultures and different expectations. What can we learn from leaders who have been there done it / currently doing it? Make sure you tune in - we’re on this Friday, usual time. Register here
The Brainfood
1. The SignalFire State of Talent Report - 2025
Perhaps no part of ‘the economy’ has experienced such a dramatic reversal than tech - from the unprecedented exuberance of post-lockdown 2021 to now a post-ZIRP slow down, whilst AI continues to offer compelling alternatives to headcount. Entry level hit hardest with this report from SignalFire saying hiring rate is down between 30-50% compared to 2019. The chart above also pertinent for us - all support functions down, as tech companies double down on humans who know how to do AI. Good reading on what future tech looks like, though take with usual caveats on sample bias etc.
ECONOMY
2. How to Build a Vibrant Technology Industry
This open-to-view Google Doc is undisguised nationalist opportunism from Meta’s Chief Scientist Yann LeCun, who is rightly taking advantage US self defeating turn against higher education. The message is clear: Europe has the opportunity to securing elite global scientific and engineering talent who might otherwise have made the hitherto obvious choice to go the US. Good doc for anyone hiring into R&D.
EMPLOYER BRANDING
3. “We’re Setting A New Standard: 100% of New Hires Must Be Fluent in AI”
Another day, another tech CEO banging on about being an AI-first company. This time it’s Zapier CEO, who might have felt forced to make this move given the service his company provides 🤣. He’s light on the details on how to measure a job candidate’s AI fluency, so he goes with Robert Scoble’s framework here. Incidentally, brainfooder Martyn Redstone has a product which is trying to help recruiters assess for AI fluency amongst job candidates - might be worth a look.
ASSESSMENT
4. RPO Isn’t Dead. But It’s Definitely Changing.
Brainfooder Martin Burns is finding the time to think these days - and coming up with some great writing for us to follow on with. This discussion on the future of RPO is interesting - I happen to agree in part, especially in the survival of the model, as denuded TA teams are going to need scale up / scale down resources. The question is how RPO’s deal with data compliance is going to be crucial factor (Do we use your AI or our AI Mr Customer?…) - anyone got any thoughts on this, let me know…
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
5. AI Labour Index
You need to bookmark this site. It’s an interactive index of tasks, jobs groups, professions and sectors ranked by how exposed or insulated they are vs AI. The rankings we can agree / disagree with, but the taxonomies are undeniably useful for all.
FUTURE OF WORK
6. Is Trump’s Trade Policy Guided by Goals or Grievance?
We’re hearing less about ‘4D chess’ these days, as its becoming undeniable that current US trade policy is incoherent, with stated objectives often in direct competition which each other. Something is driving Trump though, because it is not insensate; perhaps, misattributed grievance? Richard Baldwin with astute and persuasive psychoanalysis.
ECONOMY
7. The Automation Doom Loop: Why Layoffs Today Kill Your Customers Tomorrow
Big questions asked in this outstanding essay from brainfooder Ivan Harrison who redeploys Henry Ford’s insight from 100 years ago - you got to pay your workers well enough in order to grow the customer base for the products they are building. We don’t seem to be doing much of that today. Some good thinking here, especially on what possible solutions which we, as active humans with agency to influence the future, can all make a contribution toward. PS: growing number of voices are talking about the ‘doom loop of automation’ - worth us doing a Brainfood Live on this?
SOCIETY
8. AI Personality Extraction from Faces: Labor Market Implications
My mum has long had a phrenological approach to human morality - glad to see her intuitions backed by evidence 🤣. This piece of research is unquestionably triggering - a scrape of 96,000 LinkedIn profile photos, feeding them into AI in order to predict career outcomes based on how people look. Loads of critiques can be levelled at this, but research of this type challenges us to ask deeper questions, such as…would we ever accept phrenology, even if it were true…?
ASSESSMENT
9. How Tech Workers Really Feel about Work Right Now
You have to wonder whether we might have all been better off taking Robin Dunbar’s conclusion more seriously: we can only maintain 150 or so quality human relationships - any more than this and we end up being emotionally drained - and burned out. Just one insight in this fab piece of proprietary research from Lenny Rachitsky on how tech workers are currently feeling.
CULTURE
10. GenAI is our Polyester
I’ve been aligned with the idea that GenAI content will soon dominate digital spaces and that we humans will reject it because of its ubiquity and uniformity, leading to a search for the authentic either by retreating into Walled Cities where AI is not allowed or by tuning into conspicuously human voices in places where it is. Never came up with a metaphor as good as this one though.
CONTENT MARKETING
The Podcasts
11. The American Dream Demands Merit Not Racism
On a weekend when 13 million students register for the infamous Gaokao examination in China, the question of fair representation, discrimination and affirmative action in University admission continues to be a contested space in the United States. Y Combinator Garry Tan going in hard on a specific case where an obviously elite student is being incomprehensibly rejected by Universities despite extraordinary high achievement. Begs the question - is going gender / ethnicity blind the way to merit based assessment? Or are all assessments really code for preferred in-groups? The question of whether the identity of the person is information which should be used in assessment continues to confound. Incidentally, the Gaokao - often cited as example of merit based assessment - also has affirmative action policies…
D&I
12. Anthropic's CPO on What Comes Next
It makes sense that the companies which make most use of AI are those companies who are building AI. Just how much do they use it? Well, Anthropic’s CPO reckons 90% of code is already being written by Claude, with the human s/w engineering increasingly evolving into an orchestrator, code reviewer and trainer of AI. Promising future for some experience s/w engineers, but we can see how this is going to chop away the lower rungs of the career ladder (see first article). Good interview, Lenny again.
AI
13. How Money and Banking Work
Lyn Alden with a 30 minute narration of her work on money, banking, geopolitics, central banking and bitcoin. If you want to get a grip on the deeper economic macro which brings us Trump 2.0, global conflict, cost of living crisis and the rest - all stuff which impacts hiring - this video is a good intro on the contradictions of the monetary system we all live under.
ECONOMY
End Note
Zapier’s new policy of hiring for AI-literate candidates only got me thinking…how exactly are we going to be doing this. I think first things first is that we have to become AI-literate ourselves as first point of order - that at least gives us the ability to do some assessment at interview with candidates. Lets ask this question on this week’s poll - how do you intend to assess for AI-literate candidates?
That’s it - thanks for reading
Have a great week everyone
Hung
Re the Zapier article - this post from Bonnie Dilber seeks to add detail to how Zapier assesses the AI capabilities of candidates: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bonnie-dilber_if-youre-interviewing-with-zapier-or-are-activity-7336454428515889153-xRib?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAABc848Bx2W2t31-_lryFrU6IGyeI61jUYE
I've enjoyed having candidates screen share and actually watch them leverage AI. This could fall under your "test" category, but I feel it's more of an observation. Leave it open ended. Observe. Probe. Learn from them.
You get a real sense of how they think, what tools they use, how they use them, and how effective they are at amplifying themselves with AI.