Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #270

This weeks brainfood is supported by our buddies Workable. More than an applicant tracking system, Workable’s talent acquisition software helps teams find candidates, evaluate applicants and make the right hire, faster.

Start your free trial here

We’re going to see a lot of these posts in the coming days and this collection from LinkedIn is one of the most relevant to us. Will the 4 day week become a hiring competitive advantage? Surely will for the experienced hires. Have a read here.

Wonderful post on seniority labels and why - most of the time - they are there for stoking ego’s rather than as descriptors of actual at-work responsibility. OP is a developer criticising other developers, but could be equally applied to recruiters or anyone else I think. Also can be read as an assessment guide for tech recruiters, so I am categorising it there for now.

Massive piece of research from BuzzSumo on what headlines work best for engagement, on what channels. How long should your headline on a social media post be? [Spoiler] its 11 words, 65 characters. All this and loads more, here. Essential reading for anyone publishing on the Internet.

Fascinating article on the ethical conundrum confronting data scientists on what data should be collected and how it should be used to support better decision making. In the end, I suspect we are going to need to couple People Analytics with a constrained application of AI in order to produce the better business outcomes but also to avoid decision making paralysis. Must read.

Atomico and Slush are a pretty powerful combination, and each year they produce the definitive report on the state of European Tech. It’s a been a massive boom year, especially for Worktech with several European unicorns being made in 2021. Essential research, beautifully presented.

Definitely tongue-in-cheek but I found this post to be useful reminder that a lot of the on-trend concepts in HR and TA need to be frequently and rigorously checked. Particularly enjoyed the criticism of authenticity 🤣 - those people are intolerable!

This is 200+ pages so I don’t expect anyone to read through this in one go, but if you care about macro trends which ultimately manifest at operational level as labour shortages, pay inequity, diversity and inclusion, remote work and the rest, you need to download this report.

Another cool report, this time super focused on Internal Recruiting Managers, in the UK. From the FIRM, this is a members survey and provides useful benchmarks on all the things we are meant to care about. Download here. H/T to brainfooder and FIRM founder, Emma Mirrington for freely sharing this members report.

Straightforward how-to on launching a CSR, but I think the framework is portable to any project launch. Surprisingly missing the most important element IMO - building in public and therefore inviting contribution and buy-in from the entire workforce population.

Akira Kurosawa’s 1950’s classic is the inspiration for this timely post on how team mates can share the same moment, but experience very different things. True enough when in-person, the ‘Rashomon effect’ is exacerbated in the world of distributed teams. Essential reading for anyone who cares about ‘synching up’. Watch the movie too - its timeless.

So for the 60(count ‘em!) brainfooders who are in Greece, this piece of research by Sanne Goslinga must read for you. It is also super interesting to everybody though, especially to get a feeling for salary levels outside of home country. How does this compare and what is the downstream impact for immigration, emigration and remote distributed workforce? Fascinating brainfood.

The story of the striking workers at Kellogg is emblematic of a clash of eras; Kellogg attempt to replace the strikers draws widespread condemnation, including from no less a figure than the President of the United States, and Redditors rally to write bots to auto apply to the careers page and crash the site with a DOS attack. This is what worker solidarity looks like in the 21st century comrades. H/T to brainfooder Aaron Lintz for the share in the fb group.

Love this mashup of the creator economy + AR / VR. There is actually no reason why a human being is a more compelling digital presence than a fully digital being in digital spaces. Fascinating account of the virtual youtube stars of Japan.

The discourse around Web3 seems to have tribalised early into cult-like evangelists who think it will change the world and die-hard naysayers who have seen it all before. This post is the antidote; comprehensive, accessible, balanced and thoughtful. If you read anything about Web3 or Blockchain, read this.

With SpaceX and Blue Origin commercialising space travel, the cost-per-seat on a flight to space is going down so rapidly that its become accessible as a PR stunt for recruiting. Hats off to New York Pizza founder, Philippe Vorst, who says “in 2023 we will deliver the first pizza to space”.

Apply to deliver it, here.

Structuralism is going to win in the end. Exciting and portentous new research on mapping the brains connections and using those maps to make accurate predictions on behaviour. Do we use this information if we have it? And if not, why not? Brainfood conundrum of the near future - have a read

Some new DEI terms for us to learn - ‘negative intensification bias’ - which is more acute as digital communication has reduced ‘social presence’ enabling us to more easily dehumanise the sender as an exemplar of the group identity we have had problems with. I probably haven’t summarised this very well, so have a read of this post yourself - super accessible, super useful.

It’s brainfooder Mark Deubel on a topic we probably take for granted - how do we interview recruiters? Do we even have a system? Chances are we don’t. Good chat here, though there will be resistance on some of the assessment techniques! Have a listen, here.

We are worse at reading other people than we think we are. This is a problem, because recruitment is all about trying to do this. Fascinating conversation on on human psychology and social interaction with plenty of implications for us in recruiting. Have a listen here. H/T to Bas van de Haterd for the share in the fb group.

I’m in this and falsely set up with a 🌽⭐️ meme, so thanks Joel. Anyways, we talk about European tech and generally all the exciting things that are happening in our space, on this side of the Atlantic. Had fun. Have a listen.