Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 482
Bill Boorman return to form, Matt Charney always on form, some raising awareness of break between capital vs labour in the era of AI and McKinsey with 10 charts on the state of the world
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Friends,
Happy New Year!
As is tradition, I’ve rolled into the new year without any resolutions - and without much of a plan to be honest - so don’t feel bad if this describes you as well 🤣. My approach is going to be to be open to opportunity and continue to do things which increase the chances of those opportunities happening. That usually resolves into a simple dictum: say yes more to stuff.
Few things I am going to do for myself though; I need to lose at least 5kgs, as all this seems to accumulate on my waistline, which is really bad for the wardrobe as increasingly none of my non-elasticated trousers fit; cheaper to lose the weight, rather than go up to 34in waist - I’m on it, so get ready 👊. Secondly, I am going to re-read some of my favourite books - the words haven’t changed, but chances are, I have, so looking to learn something about myself by doing a re-do and finally, I’m going to have an agenda free randomised conversation once-per-day with one of you lot, every day. We all need some randomness in life don’t we?
What Do Brainfooders Think?
Love this from the community - there are at least some of you who want to do more in ‘getting out there’. My view on this is that we need to discard self limiting talk about not wanting to shine a light on oneself and mindset shift into simply sharing more thoughts openly. We need less ‘thought leaders’ dominating the narrative, and much more of a polyphonic universe where as many people as possible can frame and contribution to the public discourse. Thanks for all who voted - make sure you scroll down to the bottom of the list to vote on the follow up!
Brainfood Live Double Header
We’re kicking off Brainfood Live with a bang in January - loaded up with 7 shows in 4 weeks, starting this week with two data driven shows - Hiring Intelligence Report 2026 with Willo on Weds 7th January, 2pm GMT (register here) and Hiring Benchmarks USA on Fri 9th January, 2pm GMT / 9am ET (register here).
The Brainfood
1. We Broke Hiring. Now We’re Automating the Damage
Outstanding essay from legendary brainfooder Bill Boorman, whose return to writing is as welcome as it may be necessary. How much responsibility do we - the recruitment industry - have in the collapse in trust between employers and candidates? As AI erodes trust still further, what steps can recruiters and rec tech vendors take to repair damage, or is the task today simply to plough forward faster and embrace the My AI Agents vs Your AI Agent pro forma? Lots of brainfood here - dive into it, stew on it and share your thoughts on it, as publicly as you can. More please in 2026
RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING
2. Authenticity After Abundance
Brainfooder Iwan Gulenko regularly features in my slide decks, as an example of a ‘conspicuous human’. And I don’t necessarily mean this as a complement (!), but more of an illustration of how being obviously non-AI in communication style can win you trust. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri with his thoughts on how the challenge of 2026 will be to authenticity even as AI-generated / AI-inflected content starts to dominate every platform. Must read for anyone in the creator economy or doing any content marketing or EB.
CONTENT MARKETING
3. Capital in the 22nd Century
Wealth inequality and income redistribution have long been concepts marginalised to the far left, but as AI continues to eat into the value of human labour, the penny is beginning to drop even amongst most confidently self identified free market capitalists that we may be looking at future of elite wealth polarity, where the owners of the only means of tenable production have decoupled entirely from the masses whose labour they no longer want or need. The answer must include Open Source AI, at least as a divergence of revenue / attention from Close Source AI controlled by the oligarchs, but Dwarkesh doesn’t go there, for reasons unknown.
ECONOMY
4. Jevons Paradox for Knowledge Work
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box and an early member of the ‘AI First’ CEO’s, explains why it will be alright on the night, because technology innovation will reduce the cost of the thing, therefore the thing will get much more widely used than before, leading all sorts of new, hard-to-predict roles which humans we perform to cater for these new needs. It’s a compelling argument and this is a good essay illustrating the Jevon’s Paradox. Still, the future I’m glimpsing through it is one where the jobs that do get created will go to human orchestrators with domain expertise gained pre-AI; can’t see how an early career entrant gets a shot in Jevon’s world.
SOCIETY
5. Talent Acquisition Trends to Watch in 2026
The increase in output from brainfooder Matt Charney has been one of the best things to happen in recruitment last year. His forecast post for 2026 is the best I’ve read so far - though I have to say I think they are generally been quite sparse on the ground this year?. Anyways, it’s guaranteed smart observations delivered with turn of phrase few in our sector can manage. Must read folks
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
6. AI Model Release Timeline: Complete History & Recent AI Releases
Diffusion - and therefore democratisation - of AI - is one of the most important impacts of true Open Source AI - anyone can download the model, learn from it, make amendments and republish with your own twist. It’s got to be beat Closed Source no matter how much money is pumped into the latter by investors looking to time the bubble, or by supremacists who wish to create permanent locked-in hierarchies where some people will have perpetual advantage over some other peoples. The impossibility of keeping track of them all is itself a sign of this diffusion, and therefore something to celebrate. Here’s a decent aggregator of everything being published on Huggingface and OpenRouter.
AI
7. The ONLY Hiring Advice You Need in 2026…
I love it when CEO’s give wild opinions on hiring - the recommendations are inevitably ‘anti-anything TA / HR would do’ which invariably raises the hackles of most of us in our community 🤣. Here is Gary V more or less dismissing the idea of trying to recruit effectively, because it’s a roll of the dice no matter what you do, so you might as well roll more dice. ‘Recruitment nihilism’ is absolutely a legitimate recruitment strategy.
ASSESSMENT
8. AI, HR and Governance in 2026: What has Changed and What HR Leaders Must Do Next
Brainfooder Martyn Redstone with his final newsletter published at the very end of last year, projecting forward to 2026. As TA / HR necessarily moves from piloting to implementing, one of the key areas of responsibility will be ensure that AI governance is exceeds the minimal ethical and legal requirements set in the regions where the company operates. Probably worth a couple of Brainfood Live’s next year on this topic - maybe a how-to series might be useful? Let me know in comments?
RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
9. My HR Tech Predictions for 2026
Brainfooder Alexander Chukowski with a HR Tech predictions post which gets good marks for high degree of specificity + narrowness of domain. I’m not qualified to give commentary on whether he is right or wrong on this post but I would say that Alex is a great follow on LinkedIn - always entertaining, with observations at oblique angles from the mainstream. Regular, almost daily poster too, so you not one of those who will disappear on you.
RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING
10. McKinsey Global Institute: 2025 in Charts
What is the automation potential of your work? You first need to break down ‘the job’ into tasks and figure out how much AI can do that task. Part of the reason why I am against skills based hiring is because it necessarily follows this reductionist pattern, and as it currently stands, is an accelerant to full automation. This is a drum I will be banging somewhat louder in 2026, but in the meantime, have a look at McKinsey’s state of the 2025 in 10 cool visualisations.
FUTURE OF WORK
The Podcasts
11. What 2025 Taught Us: A Year-End Special with Hung Lee
Vienna is becoming one of my favourite cities, and it is pure coincidence that it is now two years in a row that I’ve been in the city in the depths of winter. Continuing to share HR Cappuccino with brainfooder Rudi Bauer is a tempting reason to do a third this year. We’re talk the state of the recruitment in 2025, Christmas hats to add some levity.
ECONOMY
12. The 8 Trends I’m Betting My Entire Marketing Strategy On in 2026
Neil Patel has been around forever hasn’t he? One of the OG’s of the Web 2.0 era marketing, here he is giving us his marketing strategy for 2026. In-depth stuff, useful for layperson like me and expert marketeers alike. Have a watch if you’re in charge of channel, want to build an audience or otherwise want to make more contributions to the public discourse.
CONTENT MARKETING
13. What Actually Makes You Valuable in an AI World
Josh Bersin’s monologues as well as anyone in our space. He remains fundamentally an AI optimist, so a worthy person to listen as we balance the narratives on what our collective future might actually look like. 5 x pieces of advice Josh has for us in this 18 minute piece - double down on domain specificity, build confidence in skills acquisition, depth in a certain thing, building an eco-system of learning with others and finally, use the skills you’ve learnt - we need application. It’s all great advice, just follow it imo.
FUTURE OF WORK
End Note
Sharing publicly was not something that came naturally to me - it might be hard to believe, but it was over 10 years as a professional before I published so much as a tweet, attended an industry conference or gave a presentation. It goes without saying it was one of the best decisions of my professional career, because everything that has come to me, has done so as a direct outcome of simply being more visible than others.
I encourage everyone I speak to, to do the same - just externalise more - and so was highly encouraged by the poll results last week. So, am thinking - is there a way I can help get everyone moving? Poll for this week folks, let me know whether you want it…
That’s it - thanks for reading
Have a great week - and a great year everybody
Cheers!
Hung
When it comes to externalising, I think it’s important that it’s not about being heard. It’s about adding value. What I’ve noticed over the last 6 months to a year is that people are trying to get attention versus really trying to help. People repeat others instead of bringing their own thoughts.. all for likes and traction instead of adding value. But also for job security/opportunities: be visible so people know where to find you. And I get it, but I think people are mostly served by ‘finding their authentic voice’.
Personal brand and having your voice out there is important when it’s genuine, when the purpose is sharing. But when it’s about attention, it’s often very noticable..
A good example are the copy/paste posts from recruiters telling how ‘they’ do a certain thing, and everyone should do so.
Within a second you know it’s not just written by AI, but the ideation is also pure AI. Now ideation from AI can be great IF you need a topic, but have a different view and want to share that.
But when a thousand recruiters ask any LLM ‘what are 5 items every recruiter should do in 2026’ you get similar posts that do not add actual value. Why no value? Because the LLM searches the internet for data that is existing and used by everyone else.
In my opinion a solid Brainfood Live or episode about ‘finding your authentic voice and how to use that to externalise’ would be really valuable.