Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 457

State of Candidate Experience 2025, Bersin on AI Overhype, Zapier AI literacy Assessment Framework, Instagram posts going public and why Data Driven Decision Making may be the end of human work...

Jul 13, 2025

This week’s brainfood is sponsored by our friends Willo.

Recruiting for high-volume positions in a global, diverse workforce is increasingly challenging, especially when relying on traditional methods and the limitations of written CVs. Managing thousands of applications manually is not only exhausting and inefficient, it can also prevent you from finding the top talent your organization needs to thrive.

Enter Willo. The award-winning team is transforming the hiring process with a dynamic candidate screening solution that users love, backed by an NPS score to prove it!

Their web-based, human-centric platform enables candidates to record responses to a predefined set of questions at their convenience. With over 5,000 secure integrations, Willo makes it easy to supercharge your recruitment process, reduce bias, and support diversity, equity, and inclusion goals—all while helping you tap into a larger, more exciting pool of global candidates.

Book a demo at willo.video this month to get 10% off—just use the coupon code "brainfood”. That's W-i-l-l-o dot video.

SPONSORS

Friends,

What a spectacular week back in the UK - straight in with a fantastic internal group meet with Bouyges Group, then into RecFest 2025 which was once again a triumph by the Recruitment Events Co. So many positives emerge from an industry potlatch like this - reconnecting with old friends and colleagues (saw the one and only Gavin Tagg for the first time in two decades), meeting digital subscribers in person, sharing your thoughts on stage and peer to peer and most of all just celebrating the industry with thousands of others in like mind. As we barrel towards an increasingly volatile world where artificial intelligence will play an increasing important role, we should not forget that collective human intelligence might just be the complement which will see us alright in the end.

Big List of Recruiting & HR Events to 2025 - bookmark this and share it with your friends who need to go to more events!

Lots going on this week, not least the final of a fantastic 4 part series on High Volume Hiring I’ve been running with Adzuna. Register here if you want hear us pull it all together on Full Funnel Hiring. H/T to brainfooder Doug Monro who has taken a leap of faith to cohost this series with me. Hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have Doug!

Final point: the Live Demo with David Head of Endorsed which didn’t happen due to tech issues is now rescheduled to Tues 22nd July at 10am PST 1am EST / 6pm BST. Sign up now if you want to see an AI Recruiter in action…

Thank you to: Eugene van den Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Debbie Harrison, James Osborne, Bas van de Haterd, Rob Walker, Dave Hazelhurst, Wolfgang Brickwedde, Louise Triance, Andrew Wood, Jeremy Thornton, Jessie Schofer, Roy Baladi, Alex Hamilton, Kristjan Kristjansson, Roopal Modasia-Patel, Joanne Djebara, Michael Williams, Raj Gill, Joshua Moran, Ben Keighley, Euan Cameron, Nelya Pearson, Chance Bleu-Montgomery, Patrick Mullarkey, Ellis Seder, Yatin Agarwal, Amit Bhagria, Alice Moss, Matt Jones, Rob Walker, Paul Daley, Lisa Kagy, Milean Pieroni, Kye Lovelace, Robert Reed, Pamela Tan, Joe Morrison, Elissa Hunjan, Laura Hill, Mina Golesorkhi, Rachel Dalboth and the hundreds of other people out there who are silently supporting all things brainfood. I appreciate you ❤️

Can you help? Share this newsletter with a friend who needs a boost

Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

Not sure what I expected with this poll so showing this w/o much commentary. We’ll be going forward again in our mini series on Candidate Fraud later this month with a Brainfood Live Special w/ Daniel Chait - Candidate Fraud: Hardening the Hiring Funnel with InfoSec Techniques - register here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep319 - Whats Your Company Culture - AI First vs Human Centred? Friday 18th July, 2pm BST

When it comes to our relationship with AI, two philosophies seem to emerging in our industry discourse: AI First vs Human Centred. What does it mean when a business articulates its commitment one or the other? How does it impact the decisions which TA have to make - on candidates, tools, assessments and the like? We’re continuing the conversation this Friday, so register here

The Brainfood

1. Phenom 2025 State of Candidate Experience

Cool index by our friends at Phenom, who audit the digital candidate experience of the FTSE500 US companies and rank them on a CX scale. Some surprising results as ever, including the stat that only 16% of audited companies provide personalised job recommendations based on candidate created profile. Bookmark this website - good reference / benchmark for where you’re at with your own company’s candidate facing assets.

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

2. What Gets Measured, AI Will Automate

Important and unusual essay which presents the idea that the work which is prone to be automated must first be the work which can be first accurately defined and then measured. The breakdown of jobs into tasks (Skills Based Hiring…) lubricates the AI inevitable future, as each task then becomes ‘more automatable’ now that we have crystallised it away from the job in which it was once embedded. Politics will inevitably come into consideration here - might we see resistance to quantification, as a defence against disintermediation risk from AI? Lots to think about here in this essential post - have a read.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

3. Why AI Harm To Jobs and Humanity are Vastly Over-Hyped

Fair to say Josh Bersin is an ‘AI Optimist’ - he’s been a consistent evangeliser for more rapid and committed adoption of AI over the past 18 months. In this piece, he also reveals himself to be something of an AI Skeptic also with a strong rebuttal against the argument that mass job displacement is the inevitable outcome of ever-better AI. Where I agree with Josh - mature, organisationally complex businesses will prove more resilient to AI, though no doubt AI is having a suppressant effect on hiring demand. Well worth a read - what do you think? H/T to brainfooder Bill Boorman for the share in the online community.

SOCIETY

4. Meta’s Compensation Philosophy

Meta’s extraordinary campaign of hiring AI talent away from their competitors has drawn attention to the compensation philosophy in the business. Two themes emerge in rather speculative analysis from Levels.fyi - lower on aggregate offers, and more due diligence on capturing existing comp levels from candidates before making the final offers. The best practice dictum of not asking for candidates salary levels doesn’t apply in the Silicon Valley.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

5. Zapier AI Literacy Interview Framework

Zapier are an ‘AI First’ company, which given they are a workflow automation service, is entirely on brand. Here is their interview assessment framework - I like this particularly for the clarity in the levels, as well as segmentation by job families. The panellists in Brainfood Live on ‘How to Assess for AI-literate Job Candidates’ rightly condemned some of the measures, but for me these are details which can be tweaked according to your flavour - this is a useful template, which you can amend as you see fit.

ASSESSMENT

6. Would You Like an IDOR with that? Leaking 64 Million McDonald’s Job Applications

Automating top of the funnel is the inevitable future for high volume talent acquisition. We might say significant data security lapses would come par for the course also, but probably not as egregious as this example from McDonald’s and Paradox.ai. The investigation was inspired first by some nonsensical answers provided by AI during the applicant screen, which quickly led to a rather stunning security flaw. Wired with the article mainstreaming the story, Paradox with its own response to the scandal here. H/T to brainfooder Steven Rothberg for the share in the online community.

7. Buffered by Reflected Glory - The Effects of Star Connections on Career Outcomes 2025

We intuitively know connections matter but its a phenomena which is hard to empirically study. This effort from the American Psychological Association make a decent go of it, studying the impact of proximity to superstars on the career outcomes of lesser able pro basketball players. Results don’t surprise: the reflected glory of being on the same team as a Michael Jordan pays dividend beyond your personal performance. Relevant for DEI, but also for talent attraction / employer branding - if you get a superstar, that person becomes a talent magnet.

D&I

8. Instagram Goes Public: Your Posts Are About to Become Google-Searchable (And What You Need to Know RIGHT NOW)

Self explanatory headline which has relevance for job seekers and employers alike - your posts are now going to be indexed by search engines and displayed in search engine returns, to people who no longer need to follow your account. This excellent post not only details the rationale, the technical change, but also outlines the implications, before rounding off with recommendations on what you should be doing. My main thoughts are from the content marketing side of TA - Instagram becomes more valuable channel as a result of this shift. H/T to brainfooder Chloe Morrison for the share

CONTENT MARKETING

9. Early Career Hiring is Down 73%

As it is in software engineering that AI is having the greatest impact on changing workflow / increasing productivity, so it follows that it is tech companies which are most aggressively making changes to hiring demand. The decline in hiring volume is most clear in early entry, where doing the basic information processing / manipulation / carriage formed the basis of the training period for many a graduate role. We’re storing up trouble ahead if this trend moves into mainstream, but I am not sure anything other than government mandate would change the calculus as revenue optimisation is an ‘embedded imperative’ for all private sector businesses. Some brainfoders interviewed for this post, have a read here. H/T to brainfooder Jacob Sten Madsen for the share in the online community.

ECONOMY

10. End of the Irreplaceable COBOL contractor…

COBOL has been around since the 1960’s and still today powers many of the worlds most important systems, from finance to logistics to tax collection and utilities. The declining population of COBOL programmers have been a conspicuous example of human workers exploiting organisations dependency on their skills and know-how, but perhaps their time has finally come as AI figures out what all the code means and recompiles it into more popular programming languages.

The Podcasts

11. Silicon Valley Insider EXPOSES Cult-Like AI Companies

Karen Hao is an unusual journalist, who combines technical know-how with calm yet passionate disposition - she’s on a mission to expose the AI Optimists which are currently aiming to build something nobody else has been asking for. She’s a critic of Sam Altman, and I think we probably need more of those. Have a watch / listen to her interview here on how messianism is one of the driving motivations behind too many frontier AI labs.

12. Builder.ai - The Greatest AI Scam in History

Great 30 minute documentary on how the hype required to fundraise too easily segues into fraud. Builder.ai was the SaaS service which would allow anyone to build apps with AI ‘finished by human software engineers’. Turns out it all mostly built by human software engineers, because - as we’re discussing in group - 80% of the way there is very far away from being production ready. Have a watch.

13. Will Japan’s Collapse Trigger the End Game?

You don’t have to be that old to remember when Japan was considered World Economic Enemy No1, producing all the cool stuff at affordable prices, before mysteriously going in a different direction towards what is now a multi-decade long period of stagnation. What happened to the Japanese economy, and why might the final unwinding of decisions made 30 years ago might be the most significant grey rhino in the world today. Another great watch.