Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 480

Levels.fyi 2025 Compensation Report, No Data is Data by John Sumser, Zuckerberg (rightly) rails against the epidemic of over delegation, Quality of Hire Paradox and Job Application Optimisation

Dec 21, 2025

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Friends,

Big news is that the Big List of Recruiting & HR Events to Attend in 2026 is already up to 250+ unique events, from all across the globe. Giving the spreadsheet a quick scan, it does look like most of the biggies are in there, but please do add more niche events if you know of them, and especially from different parts of the world - mega dominated atm by US, UK and Mainland European events, in English language. Love to see this being properly global so please share this spreadsheet around your networks and have people add to it!

Finally, no Brainfood Live this week - nor will there be until Jan 7th (that’s Weds) - because we’re taking a two week break! We’ll be kicking off next year with Hiring Intelligence Report breakdown with our friends Willo. The event is up, so register already on it here and the full January schedule should be up some time next few days so follow the channel here to be notified when these get added. Thanks to everyone who has been watching along with these - 3000+ followers now on the Crowdcast channel 👊

Thanks to: Martyn Redstone, Kevin Green, Joey NK Koksal, Paul McCardle, Michelle Flynn, Eva Zils, Daisy Ilaria, Juliana Park, Marie Chaproniere, Neil Carberry, Sofia Chebotareva, Monika Evje, Guy Frederick, Juliana Park, Will Dempsey, Virgina Tirado, Eva Zils, Ken Collins, Milena Le Manq, Dave Hazlehurst and Jan Tegze - your public support of all things brainfood keeps this show on the road. Cheers!

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

Love to see that AI has indeed been freeing up some of our community to do ‘higher value work’. Might be a good topic for Brainfood Live to think about what this higher value work is and why it is indeed of greater worth - more direct ROI to the business? Thanks for everyone who voted! Make sure you scroll down to the end of this newsletter and vote on this week’s question.

The Brainfood

1. 2025 Levels.fyi Annual Compensation Report

Levels.fyi started off with a very simple mission - to anonymously share verified compensation information for s/w engineering roles in the US. It’s still pretty much doing just that only now with much larger dataset, up and down seniority levels which it has help standardise in product tech companies and across all roles in tech startup / scale up. This is all just data, in a simple interactive website, refreshing free of analysis. Must read of course, especially for tech recruiters.

CULTURE

2. “I Don’t Believe in Delegating”

There has been an epidemic of over delegation in white collar work, where managers seek to offload the work to junior members of staff, whilst failing to empower them to own the problem, solution or outcomes. All it does is increase the overall amount of effort required, only feeling more efficient because the over-delegator has now insulated themselves from the consequences of their actions. Mark Zuckerberg has his say on the matter - I think he is bang on with this take.

CULTURE

3. There is No Data in Data

Brilliant post by brainfooder John Sumser who remains one of the most astute thinkers in our business. Here he is talking about negative spaces and how the lack of information can itself be informative. As data hungry AI infuses into our day-to-day workflows, we will be under huge pressure to improve data quality and build AI into workflows where the data quality - such as we currently understand it - is highest. That is classic mistaking Map for the Territory, the sort of thing which leads to catastrophe’s of KPI-ing like the Great Leap Forward. Brainfooder Richard Claydon illustrates the same idea with useful vignettes in another brilliant post, The Dashboard Isn’t the Work. Must read, both folks.
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

4. Mercor Careers: An In-Depth 2025 Guide to AI-Powered Jobs

I’ve been uncovering a lot more interesting Mercor related content since I started taking a proper interest in the company a couple months ago. This post is from the job seeker perspective - how to set up a profile, how to get through the assessment process, how the work is meant to be done. Fascinating POV on a company that was once a high-end freelancer talent marketplace challenging the likes of Toptal, to now provider of human domain experts to train AI. Somehow, everyone in the entire recruitment industry entirely missed this opportunity.

FUTURE OF WORK

5. From Tool to Teammate: The AI Usage Framework for Talent Acquisition

We’ve probably had enough of posts about ‘AI maturity models’ in 2025 but this one by brainfooder Soeren Winter merits further attention. Two particularly good things about this - summarisation of 6 of the main maturity model templates that commonly appear in industry discourse, then the application of these into the Talent Acquisition space. We’re talking about this more in Brainfood Live on 30th January, featuring Soeren himself as guest, so register here to be notified when we go live.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

6. AI Killed My Job

Poignant project where OP collects stories from workers who describe how AI displaced them from their work, including some rather direct examples where they have actually been the ones training their digital replacements. This one, focuses on one occupation which perhaps we can all agree is the first to be definitively crushed by AI - copywriting. Very human stories, very much worth it to read.

FUTURE OF WORK

7. The Application Factory - The Human Consequences of the Automated Job Hunt

The system is not selecting for the people it claims to want. It is selecting for the people best able to navigate its dysfunction.

Some brilliant writing by brainfooder James Hutt, who spoke to a job candidate named “Dhruba” and learned of the intense pressure on job seekers who are forced to automate the job search, to cope with employers automating the talent acquisition. Is it a broken system or just one undergoing profound, unmanaged transformation, due to evolutionary pressure on both sides of the market? Whichever the case, one of the understated points James makes rings absolutely true: the best options exist outside the optimisation game.

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

8. On China Speed

Hard to find nuanced takes on China these days, so this somewhat uncharitable post struck a welcome tone. China has become renown for moving at fast pace, regular delivering under projected timelines, but is that always a good thing? OP reckons there’s two types of ‘China Speed’, one of which is not good at all. Interesting read that left you wanting more.

CULTURE

9. The Quality of Hire Paradox

Bit of a scrappy post by brainfooder Bas van de Haterd but one which really gets you thinking. We talk about ‘quality of hire’ a lot in TA / HR but how do we actually measure this, and why is that thing more important than the things we didn’t measure? The analogy of the pilot is an excellent one - do we prefer the pilot who is excellent under extremely rare emergency situations, or the pilot who ensures great flying experience 99.9% of the time? There are no answers in this post only more questions, but that is exactly what makes it brainfood…

ASSESSMENT

10. Capturing the Next Big Arenas of Competition in Ten Charts

No single business have a better understanding of the value of narrative formation than McKinsey. By coining the terms, they set the framework of the debate that follows and inevitably find themselves positioned as the leading advisor for the environments they helped shape. I guess this is what ‘thought leadership’ is though, and its not all bad, cos someone has got to do it. Here they are talking about future industries, now reformulated as ‘arenas’. Have a read.

ECONOMY

The Podcasts

11. The 996 Debate

996 is short for 9 to 9, 6 days per week - a work hard trend which was popular in the late 2010’s tech scene in China before the CPC ruled such overwork illegal. Yet now, 996 has become a term familiar on the other side of the world, in the post-woke tech scenes in SF and NY, where it is seen as the pathway to high performance culture. Fun conversation I had with US founders at different stages of maturation. On LinkedIn, so free to watch, do it here.

CULTURE

12. Knowledge is Cooked!

Love the Peter Diamandis Moonshot’s podcast - one of the smartest panel discussion types around, which despite covering tech, economy and geopolitics, manages to stay optimistic in tone. Maybe its’ because everyone whose on the show is already in the oligarchical elite who is going to make it regardless 🤣. Today is the forecast episode and once again there are confident predictions that knowledge work is over. 800 million people currently work in the knowledge economy, which when you do think about it, seems like a lot of duplication going on…

FUTURE OF WORK

13. Japanese Peril Created the Internet

Asianometry is unquestionably one of the best Youtube documentary channels - a one man operation taking niche deep dives on history of specific companies and institutions which inevitably give you additional context on things you thought you knew about. This is one, is about the birth of the Internet, and the hidden history of the perceived threat Japanese supercomputers posed to US economic dominance. Have a watch

ECONOMY

End Note

It’s the Winter Solstice - the darkest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere - and day when the sun deprived all celebrate as the days get lighter from here on in 😎. It’s also the last chance I’m going to get to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a great holiday break over the next week. Thank you being reading along with me as I put this newsletter together - it genuinely is my pleasure and privilege doing this every week with you lot!

Final poll of the year - lets talk Christmas Dinner…

Recruiting Brainfood

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