Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 483

UK Salary Trends Report 2026, Talent Trends Report 2026, 10 x sizzling TA predictions from Johnny Campbell, DEIB at C-level and... is the time right for a Blind for Recruiters?

Jan 11, 2026

This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends Ashby

2025 was a defining year for recruiting. AI accelerated, expectations rose, and teams were asked to do more with less while still delivering a great candidate experience.

In this year-end episode of Offer Accepted, host Shannon Ogborn looks back on the conversations with insightful guests from companies like Harvey, Nextdoor, PepsiCo, TaxFix, and pulls out the seven lessons that mattered most.

The themes were consistent across every conversation: Hiring works best when teams apply structure and consistency, communicate clearly, partner closely with the business, and never lose sight of the human on the other side of the process.

If you’re reflecting on the year behind us or planning for the one ahead, this episode is a grounded look at what strong hiring really looked like in 2025.

Check out Offer Accepted’s “Seven Hiring Lessons from 2025” episode. Brought to you by Ashby, the all-in-one recruiting platform.

Friends,

Busy week out and about in London this week - some prep calls / synch meetings with partners on January in person events, lunch with Rudi Bauer whose in town for brief moment, TA Tech Breakfast with Michael Blakely and a host of young UK tech founders and more. If you’re out and about in London likewise and fancy a catch up, you might as well ping me, as I reckon this week is as good as any.

Thanks to: Colin Donnery, Joey NK Koksal, Eugene van den Hemel, Dave Hazlehurst, Darren Bush, Shenny Chiu, Christopher Redmond, Alexander Chukovski, Laurent Brouat, Joe Atkinson, Cheney Hamilton, Rebecca Meek, Rucha Vankudre, Joe Atkinson, Greg Savage, Alex Burlachenko, Christina Lewis, Erin Scruggs, Chloe Smith, Quésia Nogueira, Dan Sapir, Robert Horsely, Greg Benadiba, Matt Charney and Paul McCardle

Can you help? Share this newsletter with your colleagues in the people business and have them subscribe.

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

Thanks everyone for voting for the option which requires most work 🤣. I guess I am going to have a write a how-to on increase public profile, so I’m already thinking that this is likely to start off as blog series on Open Kitchen before consolidating the best ones into a coherent tome. Thanks for all who voted - make sure you scroll to the bottom of the page for this week’s poll.

Brainfood Double Header

Another week, another double header - is Brainfood Live going twice a week on a regular now? Not every week, but we will be doing something like 60-70 shows this year, so you better get ready for some great midweek action 🤣.

Wednesday 14th Jan, 4pm GMT - Vibe Sourcing 101 - Metaview Live Demo of AI Sourcing AI (on Web and your ATS) - we’re on with Metaview CEO Siadhal Magos, who will personally take us through some dazzling sourcing technology. - register here

Friday 16th Jan, 2pm GMT - Talent Strategy - What, Why, How and When. Do you even have a Talent Strategy? If you’re unclear about this or want to know why the distinction between a Talent Strategy vs a Hiring Plan makes a crucial difference, then this show is for you. Register here

The Brainfood

1. UK Salary Trends Report 2026

One of the problems of spending too much time at the frontier, is that you can mistake the leading edge as representative of the whole. This is why this salary trends report from TotalJobs is so important - analysis of 21 million job postings over the past 5 years, to assess change over time on salary, compensation, candidate expectations, sectoral growth / decline, regional growth / decline - over the bulk of the UK job market, not just the AI bit. UK recruiters need to download this.

PS: I’m going to be interviewing Christina Langer, Fellow of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab on TotalJobs Salary Strategy Bootcamp on the 22nd January - register here as we go through the implications of the salary benchmark for recruiters.

ECONOMY

2. Ten 2026 Predictions for TA and Hiring: The Year the AI Stragglers Get Left Behind

So one thing that isn’t changing in 2026 is the thought leadership coming from Brainfooder Johnny Campbell. This predictions post pulls precisely zero punches, so be ready for bracing read on shadow AI use, TA vs HR turf wars, the roll up of point solutions and the rest. You might not agree with every prediction but each one is going to make you think.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

3. Talent Trends Report 2026

Annual report from our friends at The Talent Labs, so thanks to brainfooder Emma Mirrington for allowing me to share this outside of reg wall. Couple of key points that stood out for me - the stabilisation of TA team size, which I hope is a sign that we’ve come to the bottom of market here, the collapse of DEIB as priority and the escalation of AI / Automation to the top priority. When it comes to operationalising AI in TA, 2026 has the feel of do or die…

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

4. JPMorgan Cuts All Ties With Proxy Advisers in Industry First

JPMorgan - as one of the largest corporate investors on the planet - has voting shares across thousands of which it partly owns. How does JP Morgan know how to vote? In future, its going to rely on its proprietary AI, which will ingest the board reports & company financials, and cast the votes according. That’s an entire industry of advisors now out of work, but more pertinently, an illustration of the sort of knowledge work which AI is optimally suited to conduct - large scale information synthesis, then calculating the odds…

WORKFORCE AUTOMATION

5. The HBR Charts that Help Explain 2025

Some interesting charts in this end-of-year post from HBR - the damage AI Workslop does to professional relationships is something we all need to consider. With Gemini now fully embedded into Gmail, and Copilot baked into MS Office (now rebranded with Copilot?), it seems inevitable that we’re all going to be deluged with more of this. Wonder whether emails eventually become as unread as job applications…H/T to brainfooder Ivan Harrison for the share

6. How Functional C-Suite Roles Are Changing

Interesting post apparently based on research from Exec Search firm Spencer Stuart, which presents a couple of interesting averages for us to consider; CHRO’s have a high percentage chance of being external hires (43%) whilst also have a shorter tenure relative to other C-level positions (4.6 years). I’m not sure what this explains, so am going to wander into some speculations at some point.

D&I

7. Off the Hiring Record

Love this personal project from brainfooder Denise Pereira, maybe because I was an early fan of PostSecret, because sometimes truth can only be spoken if safety is first provided by absolute anonymity. It’s the reason why Blind is a big deal in the startup scene, so why not have our own version for recruitment? Pretty cool project Denise, I endorse…

CULTURE

8. Influencers and OnlyFans Models Dominate US ‘Extraordinary’ Artist Visas

How do we make sense of this?? Increasingly difficult to do in these demented times, but my best guess is that this can’t be policy, but rather an outcome of the aggregate of local decisions where assessors are each individually swayed by prominence / profile as proxy’s of ‘value’. Or it could really be a Trump infused re-evaluation of spectacle and debauchery. What do you think?

ASSESSMENT

9. The Cyborg Era: What AI Means for Jobs

Interesting take on the future of work, which kind of takes a position in between AI-will-take-all-our-jobs and AI-will-magically-produce-more-jobs. OP is an Engineer at DeepMind, so he’s coming at it from a s/w engineer angle but the main point translates into other forms of work - the question is not human vs AGI it is human + AGI (the Cyborg) is going to be better vs AGI alone. He thinks it will, which means people like him - the AI-enabled superworker - are going to be ok. That’s not everybody of course.

FUTURE OF WORK

10. “Hiring is Guessing”, but What Kind of Guessing?

So the Gary V article last week predictably stimulated a conversation in community, which brainfooder Darren Bush expertly help steer, resulting in this excellent blog post which does the job of fairly representing each position, and also in the end, providing a strong rebuttal to Gary V’s original provocation. My learning? Proximity matters for gut hiring, how deleterious it is depends on how far it extends beyond the founder. Going to do a brainfood live on this at some point - anyone want to join a show on ‘gut hiring’? Let me know in reply to this email!

ASSESSMENT

The Podcasts

11. Football is Becoming Boring. Here is Why!

Brentford have become famous for being able to cash in on their best player ever year, only to replace him with a total unknown who ends up being even better. Brighton seem to be doing the same with central midfielders. How do these clubs do it, and what can we in corporate TA learn about talent acquisition and performance management? 12 minutes, fun video, lots of brainfood. H/T to brainfooder Ivan Harrison for the share in the online community

PEOPLE ANALYTICS

12. “We NEED to Do 6 Days a Week”

We hear a lot of about entrepreneurs, but they are almost exclusively tech entrepreneurs making software, so it is very welcome to hear from Charlie Mullins, formerly of Pimlico Plumbers and now starting up his next business. He’s obviously always going to ‘say it as he sees it’ and - agree or not - its a voice worth paying attention to. Hard work is Charlie’s national formula - forget flexible working, UK needs to work harder - scroll to 32 min for the good stuff. What do you think? H/T to brainfooder Adam Gordon for the share in the online community

CULTURE

13. Essential AI Skills For 2026

Tina Huang has got a great communication style, ideal for this form of infotainment. The content is quite dense but the delivery cadence plus frequent on screen visuals helps even the lay person get the main points. The main point of Tina’s video here though requires you to do more: you can’t learn AI by watching video, you actually have to use it yourself. Get on it folks.

FUTURE OF WORK

End Note

One of the low hanging fruits of operational efficiency in hiring is automating the interview scheduling. But I wonder how many of us have yet picked it? This is the poll for this week folks - let me have your votes!

Recruiting Brainfood

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