Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 477
LinkedIn Algorithmic Gender Bias Debate, How to Instil Performance Culture, 2025 Job Search Experience for Gen Z in 2025, Comparison of AI models and the true impact of AI on Capital vs Labour...
This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends Oleeo
AI is here: 62% of companies are now using it to support hiring. But is this rapid efficiency coming at the expense of fairness and trust?
Oleeo and Aptitude Research tackle this in their new report, Setting the Standard for Responsible AI: A Guide for Modern Recruiters.
If you haven’t met them, Oleeo are leaders in human-centric AI-powered ATS and add-ons. Their tools specialise in intelligent automation, like AI screening and conversational candidate chatbots, to eliminate bias and handle the heavy lifting, so you can focus on building genuine connections and making crucial, nuanced hiring decisions.
Here’s one of the report’s main wake-up calls: Only 20% of employers report having a fully established AI governance framework. This lack of policy opens the door to compliance risks and bias.
The solution? Keep humans in charge. A massive 85% recruiters demand final decision-making authority. AI should inform, not decide.
Download the guide to see the full risk scale, how AI can make recruiting more human, and practical steps to build a transparent and fair strategy.
P.S. Ready to see Oleeo’s human-centric AI in action? Request a demo to see how organisations like Police Scotland automate admin and keep human experts calling the shots.
SPONSORS
Happy Birthday ChatGPT!
Yes friends, it was three years ago today when OpenAI announced the launch with this rather understated post. It wasn’t the only externality that year which helped shape today’s timeline, but it was certainly one of the most important. The diffusion of AI across every digital space means that today we are unavoidably using AI even if we don’t always want to. Our task is to understand the implications as AI transforms how we connect, communicate and collaborate.
The ‘human value added’ is something I am going to be banging on about more next year. We know it is there, but we struggle to describe, measure and value it. Its important we do, because as we fully align with the need to optimise processes and increase operational efficiency, we increase the risk of it being inadvertently eliminated.
As for this newsletter, I am going to keep it 100% human. I know I talk a lot about AI here, but it will be always be Human Hung which is doing it 👊
Thanks to: Garry Turner, Joey NK Koksal, Alan Furley, Debbie Harrison, Matheos Simou, Juliana Park, Trisden Mills, Rob Walker, Kevin Ryan, Antonio Arias, Anil Aphale, Ken Collins, Ezra Chapman, Felix Wetzel, Rob Brouwer, Paul McCardle, Colin Donnery, Kevin Green and Dave Hazlehurst - your public support of this newsletter keeps the show on the road - cheers!
Can you help? Share this newsletter with your friends in industry and have them subscribe!
What Do Brainfooders Think?
We know that workforce planning has always been a challenge for Talent Acquisition, and we can actually anticipate that its going to get worse as AI destabilises our understanding of what the right size of a team might actually be. So I am not sure whether to be surprised or disappointed by this result! Thanks for all who voted - make sure you scroll to the bottom of the newsletter and vote on this week’s poll.
What is Happening This Week
Super busy week folks, so here it is all laid out. Tuesday 2nd December: Can AI Make Hiring More Human? - its, me, Madeline Laurano & Hayley Skivington on research on how TA are currently using AI. Same day, same time: VONQ announce new launch - I will be broadcasting this on my LinkedIn live feed! Wednesday 3rd December, I’m with our friends at Zinc on panel to talk 2026: AI-Augmented Hiring and the Future of People Roles.
Finally, on Brainfood Live, we’re at Part 2 of our Review of the Year 2025 in Recruitment - CX, Assessment and DEIB. Friday 5th Dec, 2pm GMT - register here
The Brainfood
1. Is LinkedIn’s Algorithm Biased on Gender?
It’s a triggering question and there have been many excellent contributions on the topic, including responses from LinkedIn themselves attempting to address the issue. First of all, well done on brainfooders Dorothy Dalton and Martyn Redstone for amplifying this discussion, which as Martyn correctly asserts, continues unabated. Richard van der Blom - how probably knows more about the mighty algo than most - has come in with his analysis here. We’ll definitely do a brainfood live on this early next year. My current view: unlikely LinkedIn has consciously designed gender bias in, but quite likely there is a disparate effect which maps along gender lines on what gets pushed through the platform. This is the same on every social network btw, though in different directions, and on different content types. Petition for greater transparency is up, if you want to add your voice.
D&I
2. The Four Touch Sequence
Great post by Steve Bartel, sharing insights from data from thousands of email outreach messages. It’s the 4 step process. I agree with Steve on his CTA in this superb post - just try it.
ENGAGEMENT
3. Replace Your Boss Before They Replace You
I think this is a joke, but these days I can no longer tell 🤣. Given that a large portion of the CEO’s role is to make executive decisions, there is no reason why AI would not be a superior decision maker - certainly would be an interesting escalation point in case of dispute - a politics free, ego-free resolver of conflicts? I can see it.
WORKFORCE AUTOMATION
4. Being a LinkedIn Top Voice has Really Changed My Life 🥹
Back to LinkedIn reach collapse and everyone is feeling it - even the Top Voices! Love this post from brainfooder Stefan Welack who can take humour in adversity. Top Voices was always an elitist move, and I suspect that we are all generally railing against what we feel is unfairness in the algorithmic distribution of value. What to do? Not sure, but I’m doing more video.
PERSONAL BRANDING
5. Trust but Measure: What Founders and HR Get Wrong About Performance Culture
‘Best post of the week’ award goes to brainfooder Anna Ott who brilliantly summarises the panel discussion with Rebekah Fox (Chief People Officer at Upvest, formerly of Meta) and Anja Popp (Chief People Officer at the the CoachHub) on how to instil ‘performance culture’. Lots of myth busting here, then some practical tips to get you on your way. Missing though was one thing we can’t seem to talk about - employee equity / revenue share - which might do all the alignment work for you, really.
CULTURE
6. 2025 Recruiting Experience Report (RTC)
Times have perhaps never been tougher for graduate job seekers. Cost of living crisis, anaemic economic growth and rise of AI is leading to hyper competition for job opportunities. What does that world look like from the job seeker POV? Nice piece of research from Rewriting the Code, on the job experience and decision making process for tech graduates entering today’s market.
SOCIETY
7. Why Not Everything is Automated in Manufacturing (Yet)
Interesting post from a tech accelerationist angle which ponders the challenges to full factory automation. It’s about manufacturing but the lessons might seem to apply in any domain: automation works when the output is uniform, low variance, needed at massive scale, and where labour costs are high enough to justify the switch - hence why it may be (counter intuitively) easier to automate car production, than the production of sneakers.
WORKFORCE AUTOMATION
8. The Math of Why You Can’t Focus at Work
Wonderfully technical post which tries to explain - with mathematics - why no one can focus on work. It’s actually pretty straightforward - we get interrupted a lot, and our recovery time after each interrupt event is too long, which produces that common scenario of hitting 4pm in the afternoon with the feeling that you’ve achieved nothing. This is also the reason why experienced IC’s felt remote was more productive, because interrupt rate was far lower.
personal top tip: don’t look at email or Slack / Teams before 10.00am - do at least one piece of work in the hours in the morning. Then try a few days at 11.00am and so on..
CULTURE
9. Work Has Changed. Your EVP Hasn’t. Introducing the Augmented Value Proposition (AVP)
Bit of a scrappy post but nonetheless some interesting thinking here from brainfooder Ivan Harrison who makes the point that EVP’s will soon need to include clear statements on how workers interact with digital colleagues, what the decision making is when it comes to which types work work get automated or retained by humans, how the candidates career can expect to evolve as innovation changes the work. Has anyone made any advances on their EVP / EB along these lines? Let me know in comments in you have…
EMPLOYER BRANDING
10. Comparison of Models: Intelligence, Performance & Price Analysis
The cycle of new frontier AI models busting through the latest performance evaluations has become so routine, that it may becoming relevant only the nerds. That said, we serve nerds here on brainfood also, so here’s a cool website which tracks those models and presents the data in a series of comparison tables.
AI
The Podcasts
11. The Godmother of AI on Jobs, Robots & Why World Models are Next
Great to see the return to prominence to Dr Fei-fei Li, whose criticism of LLM’s as the route to AGI were founded on what we are now coming to see is clear common sense - language is not ‘in’ the physical world, but an abstraction that we use to describe that physical world. AGI doesn’t happen without sensors basically. I hope she is right! H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share
AI
12. Inside Spotify’s AI Transformation - Spotify CHRO Anna Lundström
Can a name change make the difference? Anna Lundstöm, CHRO of Spotify thinks it can, as she describes the renaming of C-level from ‘executives’ to ‘executors’. Fascinating case study on how labelling can help orientate mindset shift, which can then manifest into behavioural change - have a listen.
CULTURE
13. What Jobs Will be Most Affected by AI?
The scripted intro is all the evidence you need as to why you shouldn’t do scripted intro’s on podcasts 🤣. Anyways, skip past that part and start listening from 3.05mins onwards. One of the key insights is the concentration of tasks in your job which are exposed to AI disintermediation; below a certain level, your chances increase of become a Bersinian AI augmented ‘superworker’. Above a certain level, your chances increase of being entirely displaced. Worth everyone doing an audit on where we spend our time…
WORKFORCE AUTOMATION
End Note
Let’s talk about ChatGPT folks.
It’s been three years and we’ve all had a play. How much has AI improved your own productivity since that time, how much more capable are you today, than you were in 2022?
Thats it - thanks for reading
Have a great week everybody
Hung
Ai productivity. I think the % in the poll already shows how limited the impact of AI is on actual work (especially in our field).
I believe AI can have a much bigger impact once we move beyond the LLM.
I’ve also seen it in teams that are focussing on brand, marketing, and artwork… take a logo or mascotte. AI is not able to perfectly reproduce the same quality (yet).
I think developers have seen the biggest impact, and even there it’s very clear it will not take their job.
The question is… what will happen with the next phase (beyond LLM’s)
True, EVP is no longer a statement on a slide, it is turning into a multi-modal model.
When text, images, video, behaviour and feedback sit in the same embedding space, you finally see how people actually experience your company. Not how you wish they would.
This is EB gold, I think.
1) You can compare how employees talk versus how candidates talk.
2) You can read cultural signals across text and image at scale.
3) You can map the gap between internal reality and external perception.
4) You can speak to people based on behavioural patterns, not personas.
This is where EVP starts to move with the organisation instead of freezing it.
Anyone still treating EVP as a static promise will miss the shift. Anyone treating it as a measurable model will win the next era of employer branding.