Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 484

LinkedIn Jobs on the Rise, Gallup Annual Survey on Employee Engagement, Dear Isaac from Steve Levy, the return of blitz scaling only this time with ICE, plus Reddit, McKinsey and the more

Jan 18, 2026

This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends Maki

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What Do Brainfooders Think?

This low hanging fruit is still there to be picked - 30% of us still doing it manually (no shame, I do this myself too…), only 12% have a best of breed point solution, whilst the majority of us unsurprisingly want to stay in the ATS. Fascinating results - thanks to all who voted on this! Make sure you scroll to the end of the newsletter to vote on this week’s poll.

What’s Happening This Week?

Tons happening this week, so I got to add more than the Brainfood Lives which are going on here. Here’s a few things which you might want to get involved with this week:

Wednesday 21st Jan, 12pm GMT - we’re talking How Police Forces in the UK use AI to Hire.
Thursday 22nd Jan, 10am GMT - Salary Strategy Bootcamp. I’m onsite with Totaljobs all day, so livestream + Q&A at different points in the day
Friday 23rd Jan, 2pm GMT - Why You Need RecOps to Accelerate AI in TA

All free to attend, so sign up and see you there!

The Brainfood

1. Jobs On The Rise

To be ranked, a job title needed to see positive growth across our membership base and sufficient job postings in the past year, as well as have grown to a meaningful size by 2025.

Ideally want to see some numbers against some of these nebulous terms (what is a ‘sufficient’ number of job postings?) but methodological quibbles aside, this is undeniably interesting reveal by LinkedIn. Lot of ‘Strategic Advisors’ about, whilst Clinical Psychologist makes a the Top 25. Employment Consultant and Employee Relations Specialist are the only People type jobs which appear, in the UK list at least. You can also check out the Jobs on the Rise in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, and the US - so have at it.

FUTURE OF WORK

2. The Anthropic Economic Index Report

Credit Anthropic for coming out with these Economic Index reports on a bi-annual basis; some trends remain on course - Claude is primarily used by technical people (s/w engineers), on augmentation rather than automation tasks (i.e code generation) and usage clusters around technology hubs, though ‘task coverage’ is expanding. With the release of Claude Cowork - which some members of the Brainfood AI Braintrust are testing right now - we can expect this to dramatically increase.

3. Dear Isaac

Lettet from the future from brainfooder Steve Levy, whose author tells the story of how humanity lost it all to the machines, not through conflict but through convenience. It all resonates and I have no critique but I will add one observation. The very avoidance human accountability will become more of the perverse incentives will propel overuse of AI. It wasn’t me boss, it was AI recommendation….have a read.

WORKFORCE AUTOMATION

4. Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2025

Gallup do an annual survey of the global workplace, mainly measuring employee engagement. It’s no surprise that employee engagement has decline for the third year in a row, another correlation to the narrative that our collective timeline split in 2022, pivoting us down a loony tunes era where quite frankly anything can happen. Not good for the stress levels, as the data clearly shows. What is a surprise though, is that management is feeling it most. My theory: AI eroding the hierarchical organisational pyramid, to which most managers owe their jobs.

CULTURE

5. The Five Traits That Actually Separate “A Players” from Everyone Else

We’ve all been around exceptional people - folks who you know will get the thing done - but what separates them from everyone else? Brainfooder Glen Cathey shares his theory in a typically thoughtful post, which comes with the substantial bonus of converting the theory into a how-to-guide for identifying and assessing for candidates with these qualities. A final thumbs up? This is traits based hiring, not skills based hiring, which is probably what we’ve been really after all along.

ASSESSMENT

6. The Culture Document That Every a16z New Hire Signs

Ben Horowitz wrote this culture doc for that ever new hire has to literally sign onto. It’s a values document that I think everyone reading this would be familiar with, only amped up to the point where some of us might reasonably say is too much 🤣. Main point is though, is that these documents exist and ..are they valuable? Does your company have one, who wrote it, who polices it?

CULTURE

7. You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof.

Immigration and Customs Enforce Agency - a.k.a ICE - anyone here have any experience hiring for this agency? It’s blitz scaling for sure, because thousands of people have been hired and deployed in short order. Maybe not with best practice though, as this investigative reporters bid to better understand the hiring processes ended up them being offered the job, despite non-completion of what appeared to be mandatory employment screens. Maybe the misuse of AI has something to do with it.

ASSESSMENT

8. Reddit Dominates Google Search Results: Analysis of 1,300+ Keywords Across 26 Industries

The data confirms Reddit has become essential infrastructure for product discovery — both in traditional search and AI systems. For most industries, absence from Reddit means invisibility to the majority of product-related searches. Marketers should prioritize authentic Reddit presence as a core visibility strategy.

Does your firm have a ‘Reddit strategy’ as part of your Talent Strategy? Since 2024’s partnership with Reddit, Google seems to be prioritising Reddit as a primary source - which is quite amazing - and with obvious implications for SEO / GEO / EB and the rest…

EMPLOYER BRANDING

9. McKinsey Challenges Graduates to Use AI Chatbot in Recruitment Overhaul

Lilli - McKinsey’s AI, trained on millions of data points from McKinsey’s vast workforce and asset base, is the internal AI used by consultants. How graduates job applicants interact with Lilli is in pilot for potential global rollout in how McKinsey hire future talent. We’ve talked about integrating AI usage into the candidate assessment before in the online community, and this looks like the first of what is likely to be many future examples. Is this something your business is planning to do?

ASSESSMENT

10. Global AI Adoption in 2025 - A Widening Digital Divide

Microsoft are so dominant a technology company that they are one of the few companies which could look at internal user data and plausibly make commentary on how people worldwide are using AI. Two most interesting parts of this post are the country case studies: Both the Republic of Korea and United Arab Emirates accelerated AI adoption through national policy initiatives

The Podcasts

11. Hiring in 2026: Guardrails, Trust and the New TA Role

Delighted to back on brainfooder Konstanty Sliwowski excellent podcast, School of Hiring podcast. It’s all my takes, so if you want to understand what I really think about AI impact on employment, state of AI in TA and why we need to get political about AI, have a listen here.

ECONOMY

12. Career Sites and the Growing AI Gap

Brainfooder Bas van de Haterd has been conducting maybe the longest running piece of research on career sites in our industry, a fascinating project which involves hiring a team of interns to click through the career sites of 500+ leading employers in the Netherlands. Some interesting, counter intuitive findings in here, so have a listen.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

13. UK is Heading to Net Zero Migration

This guy is turning into my favourite economic Youtuber - lo-fi, maximally British, attempting to be optimistic and happy to grasp at whatever straws are available 🤣. A revolution is coming to the UK labour market, because all political parties are unified behind the idea that net zero immigration is will the people, which it largely is. We are not of course, prepared for the implications, so lets understand what they may be. Essential watch for UK recruiters.

SOCIETY

End Notes

The McKinsey story really caught my attention this week. Got me thinking about a topic we’ve been talking about for a while (mainly brainfooder Martyn Redstone tbf) - are we testing a candidates AI fluency, by having them interact with an AI during interview? That’s the topic of weeks poll folks - lets have your votes!

Recruiting Brainfood

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