Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 479
Big List of Recruiting & HR Events to Attend in 2026, 11 x Hard Truths from Glen Cathey (via RecFest), the hidden purpose of inefficiency in process, talent density at national level and more...
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Friends,
You know I am mega evangelist for in-person events, so I am delighted to announce that the Big List for Recruiting & HR Events to Attend in 2026 is now up! It’s actually the same spreadsheet with new worksheet, so think of this as like a forever stew - nothing gets deleted, things just get added to it!
A few things I need you to do
Bookmark the spreadsheet
Add any events which are missing
Send the spreadsheet to any event organiser who needs to add their stuff to it.
Share it your network
Lets get everyone to meet more in person, next year!
Thanks to: Caroline Woolland, Elizabeth Murphy, Clair Bush, Ron Walker, Juliana Park, Bas van de Haterd, Colin Donnery, Caroline Hunter, Oana Iordachescu, Christian Wastlhuber, Rob Mailich, Richard Savva, Jessie Schofer, Geraldine Butler-Wright, Ezra Chapman and Christina Lewis - your public endorsements of all things brainfood means more than you might realise - cheers! 🥂
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What Do Brainfooders Think?
The low vote count tells me that the interest level on last week’s poll wasn’t high 🤣 and the even distribution of votes suggest that we aren’t sure whose going to win what is likely to be the most open World Cup competition ever. It’s going to be France though, isn’t it? Thanks for all who voted, make sure you vote on this week’s poll, at the end of the newsletter.
What Is Going On Final Week!
We’re on the final stretch, so lets make sure we see out the year with a bang. Two webinars to pay attention this year - I’m with Brad Rose of Chapter 2 on Wednesday 17th December, 5pm GMT / 9am PT talking The 996 Debate - is this the way toward performance culture at the frontier? On LinkedIn Live, so register here
Finally, we closing out the year on Friday 19th December 2pm GMT with Review of the Year - Economy & AI, with probably the most ennobled panellist we’ve ever had 🤣, We’re with the President of the CIPD, Rt Hon Chloe Smith and CEO of REC Neil Carberry OBE but the most impressive of all is Belinda Johnson, Research Director of Worklab - one of the smartest people in our business. Make sure you tune into this one - register here.
The Brainfood
1. Eleven Hard Truths About AI That Every TA Leader Needs to Hear
I’m late to this so I need to thank brainfooder Jamie Leonard for reposting this superb event review by Glen Cathey, who not only shows he attends the talks but also pays attention to them, drawing in lessons from the stories told before relaying it out for others who were not able to attend. This is a great blog post folks - packed full of thought provoking insights.
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
2. Recruitment Tools Hub
Look at this from brainfooder Jan Tegze - a very interesting collection of micro applications designed by recruiters, for recruiters. This should be a useful resource to bookmark and share. Which one do you find most useful? And which one do you want to see added?
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
3. Enshittification in HR: Disposition Data
Cory Doctorow was the first to coin the term ‘Enshittification’. He was referring the Internet, but it can feel like to an entirely appropriate description of the world at large today. This blog post nicely describes the process involved, using Indeed as exemplar. One of those posts which really could’ve done with more a second half - explain for us noobs what the disposition data debate is really! Going to attempt to do this in Open Kitchen on Monday, watch out for it.
RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING
4. The Burnout Trap: Why “Saving Time” with AI Might Be Breaking Your Team
Critical thinking is about challenging axioms upon which narratives are built. Brainfooder Martyn Redstone does that here in this exceptional piece which calls into the question the entire paradigm of efficiency. It echoes John Vlastelica’s term ‘intentional inefficiency’ and poses similar questions for us - what do we lose when we optimally optimise? Must read.
CULTURE
5. The Interview Scheduling Gap No One Talks About
Interesting piece, collating research from a number of software vendors to describe the current state of interview scheduling: under resources coordination teams, huge increase in job applicants per vacancy and compounding issues from edge cases which cause painful productivity drags. The need for increase scrutiny on candidates - for quality and security - means that these problems aren’t going to go away in 2026. H/T to brainfooder Darren Bush for the share, and for Chris Connors for putting this together.
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
6. Things I Want to Say to My Boss
This post is a collation of anonymised confessionals from workers who have lost faith in their respective leaders. It’s an unusual post - resonant in more ways that perhaps we’d like to acknowledge. ‘Performative leadership’ - rather than leadership in practice - stuck out for me. A criticism of the overly-visible-on-LinkedIn types? I’m generally pro visibility but this caused me think. Have a read but keep posting on LinkedIn (!)
CULTURE
7. Working to Win: Rebuilding America’s Workforce for an Age of Geopolitical Competition
Perhaps the only good thing about geopolitical conflict is the increasing recognition of the value of human capital. You can’t compete if you haven’t got the right mix of skills, capability and motivation in your working population. That’s going to take decades of commitment to education and a reordering of incentives which each person generally ends up in the ‘right’ job for them, and for society. JP Morgan will a report on what the US has to do to get there. Spoiler alert: going to take more than tariffs to ‘bring back manufacturing’. H/T to brainfooder Randy Bailey for the share.
SOCIETY
8. How HR Took Over the World
How many employees work in HR compared to the overall employee workforce? It’s a ratio which has steadily increased over the past two decades but perhaps AI is going to reverse the trend. Interesting post from the Economist - I think they are right, AI will not only automate a great deal of the processes currently requiring manual effort but also reduce the size of companies overall, thereby reducing organisational complexity and the need for more HR. What do you think?
WORKFORCE AUTOMATION
9. Quantifying Human-AI Synergy
Technical post which you probably want to pipe into NotebookLLM but it offers first-of-its-kind concept which I think will be recruitment relevant. The study assessed human workers on their problem solving ability with / without AI, additionally assessing those workers on their ability to think about others (Theory of Mind). Their conclusions were that human workers who could think about how others think, generated stronger outputs when working with AI than those who didn’t. In other words, your Bersinian Superworker may not necessarily be a technical whizz, but one with strong EQ.
AI
10. Mid-size Game Company in Japan asks Potential Recruits to Draw in Front of Them to Avoid Generative AI Fraud
I remember recruiting graphic designers as both agency and in-house recruiter and the candidates online portfolio was almost always the most important signal for suitability. No more, as nobody can distinguish AI generated, so we’re going back to basics at interview. In a weird, dissatisfying way, AI may recreate the need for recruiters, because somebody is going to have to do the in-person interviews to human-check the candidate and their output.
ASSESSMENT
The Podcasts
11. The Gig Economy is Full
How much does the gig economy absorb the unemployed? Excellent short video on how the need for gig workers to create LTD’s in order accept payment from gig platforms might inadvertently disguise the rate of entrepreneurship, as well as unemployment figures. There’s now too many of them (us?) anyway, so expect more Trumpian style policies to lock out marginalised groups and reserve this work for the natives...
GIG ECONOMY
12. The AI You Can Actually Use: Real Adoption and Results inside HR
Great to see brainfooder David Green on the other side of the fence; here he is giving us an overview on what he’s seeing on the landscape with HR + AI, as well as some bio which is always more interesting than you might initially have thought. Lucy Adams doing the interview, so this is a great role reversal between two great contributors to the UK HR scene. Have a watch.
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
13. The Art, Science, And Magic Of Recruiting In The World…
The hardest type of podcast is the monologue. Josh Bersin does this as well as anyone, probably because of his fluency as a public presenter. He goes around the houses with this 30 minute episode, essentially explaining why the ostensibly simple (hiring) is in fact the most complex function in HR. Nice shout outs to Brainfood sponsors Maki People and Findem too. Found this quite pleasant to listen to, so give it a shot here. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share.
End Note
“AI is going to do the routine work, and free up human recruiters to do higher value work”
…has this actually happened for you?
That’s it - thanks for reading
Have a great week everyone
Cheers
Hung
How can we request to have a tool added in recruitments tools hub?
Great post overall, wealth of resources, i recognize the effort that goes into your posts