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December 27 · Issue #220 · View online
It's recruiting brainfood for the week ahead
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Seasons Greetings Brainfooders! This is the final brainfood of 2020 and I want to start by thanking you all for being with me throughout this incredible year. I’m not sure you know, but writing this newsletter has become a kind of therapy for me and it has kept me on an even keel throughout the turbulence of this year. It made a difference to know that so many of you were out there and that I could connect with you every week in this week. Thank you all for reading, supporting and being part of this great community. The format of this issue is going to be different from normal. It will be split into three parts.
Part One is Brainfood Report - my update to you on the performance of the various channels I’ve been operating this year.
Part Two is Best of Brainfood 2020 - the best of the best posts from this year on the various categories we cover here: AI, Assessment, Future of Work, Remote working, and so on
Part Three is the best of the Reviews of Year - a curated look at some of the best reviews relevant to recruiting & HR that I’ve seen this year. Hope you enjoy the end of the year brainfood Cheers! Hung
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PredictiveHire
Are we using AI hiring tools ethically? As AI powered technologies enter the workplace, accountability on ethical use lies with us, in HR. We can de-risk our exposure to marketing puffery and better understand the science behind the latest AI hiring tools by reading Ethical AI in 8 Questions - PredictiveHire’s free guide for HR in navigating between fact vs fiction in AI tech. No sign up required - download it for free, here
SPONSORS
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Recruiting Brainfood Newsletter
This email should go out 23, 964 double opt in subscribers, up from 18,847 a year ago. This year has been a super interesting in terms of subscriber growth, in the sense that growth rate has maintained, but involuntary unsubs have surged, especially from around March onwards. This was early notification to me that Covid-19 was going to have a devastating impact on our professional community, as many of had to leave jobs and look for other work. I suspect 2021 is going to be equally challenging, so it is vital that we stick together, stay connected and keep communicating. Please make sure to forward the newsletter to a friend who you think might get value from it. |
Brainfood Online Community
Brainfood Online Community is going to end 2020 with 3,748 members, 95% of whom are considered ‘active’. This group has been a revelation for me this year, primarily through the exceptional discussion threads that have taken place on it. It has also become one of the most reliable places to discover new content, as members become active in sharing recruiting brainfood that discover themselves out there on the Internet. The group has only been marred by my inability to efficiently process applications - there are still 1500+ in the queue, but have figured out a way to do the newest applicants in a timely way. Open to all subscribers so apply here - just answer the questions.
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Brainfood Live On Air
Cumulative total of 11,278 registrations for 49 Brainfood Live On Air video livestreams we did this year, to an avg of 225 registrants per show - I suspect this is really good for a weekly webinar. Adding in LinkedIn Live (82,259 views), Facebook Live (12,991 views) and Perisciope (3104) views, and it’s a massive 109,632 people have watched something of Brainfood Live this year. Kind of hard to believe when this idea just emerged because Adam Gordon and I fancied a chat about brainfood! Follow the channel here if you want to join - feel free to watch, listen and come on screen |
Brainfood Hall of Fame
1005 brainfooders have signed up to the Hall of Fame! I’m not sure when we breached the 1K mark but it must have been in a last few issues. This was a member gallery which has been repurposed into a talent directory for the community, in light of the ‘Rona redundancy so many of us have been experiencing. I know several of you have got jobs through being in the Hall, which makes it worthwhile to build. If you’re looking in 2021 - you need to register on this
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Brainfood Larder
3077 manually curated articles in this searchable archive of all the posts ever curated in 4 years of this newsletter, sorted by category and searchable by keyword. It’s the most popular resource on the brainfood page- and it’s still absolutely free to use. Bookmark in your tab bar here
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RoboHung
Honestly I don’t quite know what to do with this guy. People who’ve chatted to RoboHung say they prefer him to the meat version but rarely go back to chat. Reason? You need to pin him up on WhatsApp so he’s easy to reach. Need to figure out conversational interface for 2021 that’s for sure |
Brainfood Tribune
No question the Tribune has absorbed a huge amount of my time towards the latter half of this year; it has been a great honour to work with you to bringing your stories to the community. Over 70 of you have done it so far - and it’s open for any member to get involved. Read the member stories here and get in touch by reply to this newsletter if you want to feature in 2021 |
The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast
30,000 downloads on this podcast via Podbean. I have no idea whether this is a good number or not, but I really should do a better job of promoting the brainfood podcast. Have a subscribe if you want to join on podbean, Spotify and ITunes
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The Ultimate Guide to AI Recruiting
No other post on AI better combined comprehensiveness to the discipline, with relevancy to our field, than this one from hubert.ai. It’s a thrilling journey on what AI is, where it started to have impact in recruiting and where it can be found now. Great read, for beginner and expert alike. AI
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How Your Heart Influences What You Perceive and Fear
Fabulous essay which describes how the rhythms of your heartbeat can influence what you see and how you feel. Implications for us in the assessment stages of hiring are obvious - was your heart in diastolic state when you narrowly rejected that candidate? ASSESSMENT
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I Got A Job At An Amazon Warehouse Without Talking To A Single Human
Stunning reportage from journalist Ryan Lam who saw a job ad for an Amazon warehouse worker as an opportunity to document a human free recruiting experience. He got to the job and verdict on the experience? Weirdly ok. CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE
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Everything You Need To Know To Score With Your Content
Crucial research by Richard van der Blom on the hitherto mysterious workings of the LinkedIn newsfeed algorithm. LinkedIn remains the No1 channel for the distribution and consumption of business content, so anyone producing content really needs to read this. CONTENT MARKETING
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Salaries & Benefits Dashboard 2.0
Extraordinary dataset presented in a well designed data studio - salary and benchmarking data for the leading employers in tech. One of those cool tools which should makes it to your bookmarks bar. COOL TOOL
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What’s A Manageable Span of Control?
This might be the post which brought Charthop first to my attention - a superb add value piece which manages to also be legit brainfood - the ideal combo of practical how-to allied to high level concepts. CULTURE
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How To Deconstruct Racism, One Headline At A Time
Saw this one late (was first published in 2019) but I suspect this is a TED talk which won’t ever get old. Heartbreaking, humane and humourous, Baratunde Thurston tells his story of racism in America and what we have all got to do to combat it, and any other -ism which might arise D&I
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Why Airlines, Cities, and Starbucks Need Remote Workers Back at the Office
This is the post which described the hidden trillion dollar ‘office economy’ which stands to be destroyed if the work from home trend proves persistent. If you ever wanted an explanation as to why your government will soon be urging you to return to the office, this post is it. ECONOMY
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Vague vs Vivid
In one, simple home made graphic ,Cam Barber manages to describe the difference between bad and good communication. If you’re using abstract concepts - which are new - the message isn’t going to land. Relevant to recruiters, as well as politicians in charge of public health. ENGAGEMENT
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Coronavirus: Which Shops Have Treated Workers Well?
2020 might become the year when employer brand became an existential priority to businesses. How did your company treat its workers during pandemic? Have a look at this website which is prepared to publicly shame organisations for doing less than what is required. In these febrile times, we can only expect that worker, consumer and citizen activism is here to stay EMPLOYER BRANDING
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100 Jobs of the Future
One of the first post of the year - really before we knew anything about what this year had in store for us - and it bears the re-reading extraordinarily well. Superbly researched, beautifully presented, there isn’t a single page of filler here. Must read. FUTURE OF WORK
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Time For A New Social Contract For The Gig Economy
Nicolas Colin is one of the most interesting and accessible thinkers on the future of work; he makes the case here for the need for nuance when handling the challenges of the gig economy, and warns that a singular interpretation of alternative work being inherently exploitative will inevitably lead to legislative errors which harms the population it is intended to protect GIG ECONOMY
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The Network Liquidity Map: Why Time Matters
Why networking sometimes can’t be optimised. Superb reading on the sometimes nebulous topic of networking. Relevant to us especially in this period where pandemic is still with us and in-person - in this formulation, a proxy for time - is not available to us. NETWORKING
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Microsoft "Productivity Scores"
The shift to remote is an inadvertent digitisation of previously analogue processes, and it will be prove to be a boon to the emerging discipline of People Analytics. When does it go too far though? Microsoft 365 productivity scoring dashboard was met with this outstanding tweet thread from Wolf Christie and likely triggered its hasty modification. People analytics or surveillance tech? Might well come down to who is looking at the dashboard. PEOPLE ANALYTICS
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A New Approach to People Ops That Puts Employee Experience First
Any one of FirstRound’s posts could probably have made this list Best of compilation but this post - part interview / part case study with Patreon’s Head of People Lucia Guillory is an exemplar of the form which manages to relay practical how-to information through the medium of a human story. RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
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10 Creative Job Posts and Ads That Will Inspire Yours
Some of LinkedIn’s content was really good this year. Even some of the curation 😉. This post was one of the best, picking out some great examples of creative job posts which any of us can really get on with tomorrow. As a good a listicle as there was in 2020. RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING
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42 Pricing Tricks Based on Psychology & Neuroscience
On the one hand a simple, practical listicle on how to communicate pricing online, on the other a fascinating demonstration of how to create long form online content. Brilliantly readable
RECRUITMENT MARKETING
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Quarantine Will Normalize WFH & Recession Will Denormalize Full-time Jobs
Amongst the hundreds of remote work articles posted in brainfood this year, you might be surprised that I picked this one as my favourite for the year. The early pessimism in tone was prescient, and I suspect that the OP’s conjecture on the nature of full time work might be equally so. Some of the best stuff on remote work came from remote workers working this way pre-Covid - might be an idea to pay attention to what they have already learned. REMOTE WORKING
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Inside Foxconn’s Empty Buildings, Empty Factories, & Empty Promises in Wisconsin
If 2020 has anything to teach us, one of the lessons would be that none of us can divorce the work we do from the context of wider society. This amazing portrait tells the murky story of politics, FDI, the often false promise of ‘re-shoring’ and the amazingly idiosyncratic corporate culture that emerged from it. SOCIETY
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Bellingcat's Online Investigation Toolkit
Bellingcat have had a good 2020, ending it especially well with the its astonishing investigation of the Alexey Navalny case. They are basically an investigative consultancy which bases it’s research on online sleuthing, typically using publicly available if somewhat esoteric toolkit. And they are pretty happy to tell you what that toolkit is
SOURCING
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The Future of the United States Depends on the Immediate Adoption of UBI
Scott Santens is one of the most prominent advocates of Universal Basic Income. He is loud on twitter, but perhaps even better in long form essays such as this. The moment for some sort of basic income as surely arrived - and people like Santens have a great deal to do with shifting the Overton window so that it has a chance to happen. UBI
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2020 in 20 Visualizations
Fabulous collection from one of the must follow narrative builders today; Visual Capitalist tells the story of 2020 in 2020 charts, starting with the Australia wildfires through the global vaccine development effort - and our national attitudes to taking them. Well worth a read
SOCIETY
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13 Big LinkedIn Changes: Andy Foote 2020 Review
Everybody knows that Andy Foote is my go-to consultant for all things LinkedIn. I’m delighted that he is rejoining us on Brainfood Live to give us a quarterly update (don’t miss this - sign up here). In the meantime, you need to cast your eyes across these 13 changes on LinkedIn Andy has picked out for us to be aware of. CONTENT MARKETING
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2020: A Year That Changed Everything
Superb interactive storytelling from McKinsey &Co, providing a single page scroller for those who want to timeline the year, but also modular posts, downloadable data sets and reports. If there is one ‘what happened in 2020’ post to read, this is it. SOCIETY
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Year in Search 2020
In times of uncertainty, people seek understanding and meaning. This year, the world searched “why” more than ever….. Google - and the questions we ask of it - is a better chronicler of our times than any human storyteller. Check out the video here and the search trends itself here. H/T to brainfooder Chad Sowash for the share in the fb group
SOCIETY
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Developer Survey 2020
Interesting survey that I wish had come out a little earlier in the year, as I suspect its going to be lost in the seasonality somewhat. Still, some interesting insights on how tech recruiters feel about developer hiring in 2020. H/T to brainfooder John Rose for the share in the fb group
ASSESSMENT
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2020 Interview Scheduling Statistics and Trends: A Nationwide Recruiter Survey
The shift to remote really underlined how inefficient on premise recruiting was, especially on the interviewing logistics. This recruiter survey from Yello presents some amazing statistics, such as 2/3rds of overall hiring time being spent on scheduling tasks. We’ll do better in 2021, surely. H/T brainfooder Laura Green for the share. RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS
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2020: A Year For The History Books, In Visuals
The World Economic Forum has consistently produced brainfoodable content this year, mainly through the assiduous use of visual storytelling techniques. Here’s their visual recap of 2020. SOCIETY
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The Impact Of COVID-19 In 12 charts
More data visualisations, this time from the World Bank, telling the story of 2020 in 12 charts, covering everything from the global remittance economy, shift to online education, inequalities in access to the Internet, food insecurity and - of course - massive disparities in access to healthcare ECONOMY
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The 20 Phrases That Defined 2020
Can you guess some of these? Surprisingly, ‘You’re on mute" wasn’t in there. But then this is a serious look on some of the most used phrases we heard in 2020 and a study on how cliche can have historical value, describing as they do, a ubiquity of experience with which we have become all too familiar SOCIETY
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I’m still in London folks, and tempted to go back to an early morning bike round around town, as I notice my Instagram game is pitifully domestic these days. I mean, the last one was about microbes in my fish tank FFS. So expect some spectacular footage of winter sunrises on the Thames over the coming days. DM me on twitter or Instagram, let me know if you’ve got any ideas on where I should take the bike. Have a great week everybody. Hung
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