This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends Ashby
Drive faster, more confident hiring decisions with native AI-Notetaking
Ashby’s AI Notetaker brings structured meeting data together with emails, notes, feedback, and more. It shortens time to feedback and provides rich candidate context, helping your team align quickly and make faster, more confident hiring decisions.
Spend less time typing and more time hiring with interview notes that practically write themselves.
SPONSORS
Friends,
Filing the final issue of Recruiting Brainfood from not-so-sunny Marrakech, where the plan was the try and get some winter sun, without realising that this was cold and wet season this part of the world 🤣. Still, the Riad is nice and Medina is precisely the crazy warren of alleyways, as seen on many a TikTok. Will be in Morocco until the New Year so will update on Instagram if you care to see cold Chameleons, fresh pressed pomegranates and endless haggling over Argan oil… 👊
Hope you’ve enjoyed the brainfood this year. Let me know in the comments if there’s anything I’m doing you’d like to see improve, or if there is anything I’m not doing which I should.
Final thing to say before the end of the year, is thank you all for spending a moment of your week with me, every week. It’s a real pleasure to write this newsletter for you, because I feel that I mainly doing it with you.
Cheers!
Hung
What do Brainfooders Think?
Top tip: mix in Butternut Squash or Pumpkin with your Potatoes on the roasting tray, the liquid will ensure even a bird as big as a turkey never gets dry…
Brainfood Live On Air - Week One 2026
We already have January 2026 programming up - if you’ve watched an episode of Brainfood Live before, you’ll be getting an email with what’s coming up. If you haven’t, you can follow the channel here to be notified when we go live. First two episodes of the year? Hiring Intelligence Report 2026 with our friends Willo on Weds Jan 7th, followed by a Hiring Benchmarks Breakdown of the Top 16 Most Common Job Occupations in the USA with Joveo. See you there friends!
The Brainfood
1. What Happened In Recruiting in 2025
I rarely feature my own writing on this newsletter, but making an exception for this issue. What Happened in Recruiting in 2025 is a 4 part series covering 20 things which happened in our sector this year. Part One covered LinkedIn Hiring Assistant, M&A in TA Tech, DOGE firing 300,000 US Federal Gov Workers, Zuckerberg launching the most expensive recruitment campaign in history to build Superintelligence and the retirement of the great Irina Shamaeva from active sourcing. Part Two, we talked about Trump Liberation Day Tariffs, the incredible case of corporate espionage between global payment processors Deel and Rippling, the rise of the AI First company culture, Moderna merging HR + IT and the exposure of King of Overworking, Soham Parekh, a software engineering who appeared to have been holding down up to 17 remote software jobs concurrently. Part Three, we’re talking about the Jobless Boom, $100K for H-1B visas, the Collapse of Careerbuilder and Monster, the meteoric rise of the mysterious Mercor and whether GEO is the new SEO. Finally, on Part Four, the latest on Mobley vs Workday, Indeed’s innocent sounding yet ominous play for ATS disposition data, the ‘Liporrazi Incident’ featured real life deep fake candidate, caught in the act, AI destroying the early entry career ladder and the advent of My AI vs Your AI, and why Sovereign AI is the only thing we should be supporting.
There’s much more than happened in our sector - I’m weaker than I like on the staffing / RPO side of the market, and despite my itinerant approach this year, I still have massive blind spots in mega regions and mega industries where lots of recruiting is happening. That being said, I hope that you still enjoy these essays and get something out of them. I certainly did - writing sharpens my thinking and it helped me understand what is going on our sector. Now I need to do a forecast for 2026…
ECONOMY
2. Top LinkedIn Feed Questions of 2025
Really important post which was sent on the 18th December, so I think a lot of us will have missed this. It’s Gyanda Sachdeva, VP of Product Management at LinkedIn, updating us on the mysteries of the mighty LinkedIn algorithm. If you want to make sure you follow your favourite posters, you basically have to..
…navigate to the profile, hit the bell button and then select ‘All’ (default). You can do it on my profile here if you want to be notified whenever I post - I’m usually doing long form articles, video walk and talks, report breakdowns, weekly polls and the odd conversation starter for our industry.
CONTENT MARKETING
3. 2025 LLM Year in Review
There is genre of ‘tech bro’s who are genuine nerds and who also seem like genuine people who remain steadfastly pro-human. Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum is one of those, whose brilliant essay Let a Thousands Societies Bloom is a review of his experiment with new e-countries (and contains a lot of lessons about society / community building) and so is Andrej Karpathy, whose interview with Dwarkesh Patel did as much as anything to at least tap the brakes on the runaway AI bubble. Karpathy’s review of LLM’s is typically uncompromisingly technical but intelligible enough for us normies to get a sense of where we’re at with LLM’s.
AI
4. Brainfood Shorts
Some of you might have noticed that some more videos are coming out the Recruiting Brainfood LinkedIn company page, and company Youtube channel. The former has kind of been moribund for a long while but it may be the perfect channel to share some of the highlights from Brainfood Live - we host fantastic conversations every week but have not managed to repurpose it beyond the livestream - until now. I’m posting different video shorts daily on both the channels - follow the LinkedIn company page here and the Youtube channel here.
CONTENT MARKETING
5. State of AI: An Empirical 100 Trillion Token Study with OpenRouter
OpenRouter has basically become the gateway for accessing LLM’s, and as such is able to reveal some fascinating data points on the actual state of AI. Which LLM’s are most popular, who uses them, what is the relationship between model size and usage volume? Includes a cheeky price comparison table too, which charitably calls the comparatively mega expensive OpenAI models as ‘Premium Specialists’ 🤣. Technical but you know what? These days that cannot be a deterrent for us - have a read.
AI
6. AI, Politics, and Stagflation: The Forces Driving Worker Fatigue
Do you feel like events n the news are draining your energy at work?
The obvious answer is yes, because the news leans toward to the bad and, bad becomes depressing very quickly if it is constant. Not clear what to do about this, as we’re now in the situation where producing bad news seems to be the purpose of the policy. Anyways, this Glasssdoor survey analysis underlined the problem we have if employees constantly feel overburdened by externalities they can’t control. I’m reminded of this Denzel Washington quote a decade ago, on newspapers. He’s right isn’t he?
CULTURE
7. Epistemological Fault Lines Between Human and Artificial Intelligence 2025
The money shot in this paper is really this visual, which does a direct comparison between the reasoning scenarios of humans vs LLM’s. The argument supports Fei-fei Li / Yann LeCunn / Gary Marcus camp that LLM’s are not the route to AGI because they are dependent on text, which itself is a symbolic description of the world, not the world as it is experienced. From the recruiting POV, it also supports my provocation that the rehabilitation of ‘gut feel’ based hiring will be an inevitable consequence of the rise of LLM’s driven AI’s - we’re going to need an ideological basis to veto the recommendation; what else could it be other than ‘I just don’t like that guy?’
ASSESSMENT
8. Uber for Nursing: How an AI-Powered Gig Model Is Threatening Health Care
Is the gig economy good or bad for workers? 15 years after the launch of Uber, we’re still no nearer the answer. Maybe because the answer is ‘both and neither’, as the circumstances will fit some workers, some of the time, under certain conditions, but not all of the time, under all of the conditions. Uberisation should be coming to recruitment at some point - we have a large pool of floating labour and many more non-recruiters who could probably do the odd bit of recruitment here and there, so worth learning the lessons from other sectors who are experiencing this before us.
GIG ECONOMY
9. The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI
Cory Doctorow has a useful habit of being able to coin resonant phrases which might go on to have important political impact. His characterisation of the ‘reverse centaur’ - a create with a machine head making all the decisions, which the human body simply has to ensure is executed, describes precisely the problem with ‘human-in-the-loop’ analogy - what purpose is the human if all they are going to do is rubber stamp the AI recommendation? This is the most important point made as a sidebar in this long essay on the AI vs Creative unemployment, which is also pretty good. H/T to brainfooder Gautam Ghosh for the share.
SOCIETY
10. The Agentic Organization: Contours of the Next Paradigm for the AI Era
I’ve come full circle on McKinsey; I’m now a full on McKinsey Stan, because this is how you actually do Thought Leadership - produce a high enough volume of high enough quality content that gives enough tooling for the willing masses to pick up and have a go. What does the Agentic Organisation look like? Seems to be there some work here for TA / HR pro’s, if we get ahead of the inevitable McKinsey curve
TALENT OPERATIONS
The Podcasts
11. The Chad & Cheese Holiday Show
Chad and Cheese are comfortably the leading podcast for talent acquisition, especially when it comes to breaking news. No news to break for the holiday episode, so great opportunity to review the major trends which can be seen to emerge in the industry in 2025. Not always easy on the ears, but always great fun and unfailingly educational. Have a listen.
RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING
12. The Life of Medieval Peasants in England
Human voiced, story telling style histories have been my secret vibe in 2025 and ASMR Historian has been one of my favourites. Here’s an episode from 2 weeks ago, which is relevant to us here in brainfood - a history of the life of a medieval peasant in England. Good for sleeping to, but I find myself too entranced to ever actually nod off - it’s great stuff
FUTURE OF WORK
13. America and China Are Racing to Different AI Futures
‘Chi-Merica’ was the term used to describe the 2000-2016 period of globalisation when the worlds two largest economies basically made the world turn round. Today’s relationship has become much more adversarial, so much so that reflexive presumption of bad intent may be obscuring what is really going on. AI from the China perspective - albeit with US aligned experts - tells the story of not a race to AGI but one of accelerating diffusion of AI into the tangible economy. It’s a difference race, if true.
AI
End Notes
Thoughts going forward to 2026 and I always find value in reading reflections from others. Its less the answers, than the questions which really get you thinking. So here is one which I am going to pose to you: what’s the one thing you’re going to do differently in 2026, compared to this year?
That’s it - thanks for reading
Have a great week everyone
Hung
interesting end‑of‑year newsletter story, Hung. hope Marrakech was serving more winter sun this time around!
One idea sparked in my head… what about a once a quarterly/mid-yearly “Brainfooders IRL” in‑person meet‑up in London, maybe sponsored by talent partners.. to give the Rec Brainfood community a regular space to connect, swap ideas and recharge offline?