Jan 16, 2022

Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #275

Hung Lee

Brainfood Jobs - Deepgram, Minted, On Deck, GoDaddy, MessageBird….we are starting to see the dominance of remote first recruiter jobs on the job board. Check out the live list here, and if you’re hiring, post your job here

Brainfood Live, Ep140: Setting Salary for a Remote Team. Relevant to everyone here I think, especially as knowledge work continues to shift to remote anywhere. What is the approach to setting compensation? What do we need to think about? How do we communicate with existing team members of legacy plans? Kind of a must attend folks - Friday 21st Jan, 2pm GMT / 9am ET, register here

Special thanks this week to: Stephen O'Donnell, Kevin Green, Eugène van den Hemel, Lisa Kim MacLaren, Christina Hübschen, Michael Blakley, Colin Donnery, Joey NK KoksalJoey NK Koksal, Steven Brand, Marc Jarvis, Vanessa Raath, Ross Clennet, Graham Thornton, Chris Riche-Webber, Jessica McFadden, Eva Zils, Bas Westland, Léo Bernard and Stephen O'Donnell for your public endorsement of all things brainfood. Advocacy is what keeps the subscription model at bay folks 🤣

Now check out your scores on the Brainfood Hall of Fame😉

Can you help? Simply share this link recruitingbrainfood.com on a LinkedIn status update and recommend it to your network - it’s the best way to keep the growing the brainfood community.

Thank you!

Hung

Sponsors

Oyster®

This week’s brainfood is supported by our buddies, Oyster

Oyster is on a mission to create a more equal world by making it possible for companies everywhere to hire people anywhere. Their end-to-end distributed HR platform enables companies to deliver locally compliant payroll and benefits, as well as a smooth onboarding experience to team members and contractors regardless of their location.

SPONSORS

www.oysterhr.com

The Brainfood

The Ultimate Facebook Search Engine 2022

Valuable piece of work by brainfooder Balazs Paroczay who is trying to solve the problems of searching on Facebook by building CSE’s dedicated to the task. As Balazs says, if you’re hiring for registered nurses, truck drivers or any other kind of front-line worker, you won’t be finding them on LinkedIn.

SOURCING

thesourcecode.academy

TA Tech & and the Modern Recruiter

What is our relationship with recruitment technology? Love the focus of this report from brainfooder Madeline Laurano, whose work I recommend people in this community pay close attention to (follow, basically 🤣).

Particularly interesting was what category of technology recruiters care about most (sourcing), which is another way to describe the activities upon which we are being measured.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

www.dropbox.com

LinkedIn Newsletter Report

LinkedIn Newsletters - you thinking about writing one? I wrote about why you should in TWIR last week, a post which I believe might have prompted my good friend and brainfooder Andy Foote to share this database with me last week.

It’s from Nov last year, so there are now very many more, but given that this list are early movers, and ordered in terms of subscriber size, the chances are it is a valid db on the ‘Top 2000’ LinkedIn newsletters currently around.

CONTENT MARKETING

datastudio.google.com

Glassdoor Best Places to Work 2022

Only extremists go to the effort of writing online reviews, but that does not entirely invalidate the value of websites like Glassdoor; they remain an important source of intelligence for job candidates, trying to read between the lines as to which organisational culture most appeals. It can’t hurt to place high on lists like this.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

www.glassdoor.co.uk

Five Takeaways From Looking for a New Senior Role in Tech

It is always interesting to read about recruiting from non-specialists, in this case, a senior engineering leader who found himself as a candidate late last year. Positive reviews for recruiters for a change, which got me thinking about the how much the seniority of the candidate influences our general approach to them - probably more than would be comfortable to acknowledge. Lots to learn here, especially on candidate experience. H/T brainfooder Pedro Oliveira for the share.

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

philcalcado.com

What We Can Do as TA Leaders When We’re Stretched Too Thin

Including this post principally for the idea of ‘proactively de-prioritising’ job requisitions, a concept with the assertiveness which I feel us recruiters sometimes lack. H/T to brainfooders John Vlastelica with the timely wise words, Adrian Holtham with the share in the fb group.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

blog.recruitingtoolbox.com

New York Bans Automated Employment Decision Tools

I wonder how much of our tacit endorsement of the position taken by New York City Council last week is based on a discomfort at the thought of human beings being subject to non-human actors, as opposed to sober analysis of the trade offs involved in AI to assess candidates. The direction of travel is clear though, and tech vendors have already pivoted towards recruiter enablement as a more culturally acceptable application of AI.

Scroll down to No9 to get a concise the summary of the decision (which you can actually read yourself here); H/T to brainfooder Mark Deubel for the share.

archive.is

Labor Reallocation and Remote Work During COVID-19: Real-time Evidence from GitHub

GitHub users were demonstrably more active on weekends and outside of regular work hours than they were in previous years. Concomitant with this proportional reallocation of time, COVID-19 also precipitated a jump in overall activity.

Quantitative research on how the shift to remote dispersed working time throughout the week, in some cases increasingly the absolute workload as a consequence. Abstract here, full report is technical but accessible here.

REMOTE WORKING

www.nber.org

This Change Will Mean More Placements

Smart thinking as ever from brainfooder Greg Savage, who recommends, in the light of changing candidate motivations, that agency recruiters reconsider the value of ‘big brand’ clients. Some anecdotal data that this might be true, though I wonder whether a big brand might acquire a degree of toxicity before it becomes a real problem….

EMPLOYER BRANDING

www.gregsavage.com.au

Working at Coinbase: Intense and Demanding, Balanced by Deliberate Recharge Time

Talking about toxic big (ish) brands, Coinbase have proven a dab hand at how to avoid being one - handling a bad PR crisis and in so doing showing us a framework on ‘how to get over it’. No1 factor is of course be massively successful as a business. No2 is showing leadership by articulating your case and staying true to it. No3 is cultural innovation, like this move to give everyone in the company 4 weeks off which can double up as EB or PR depending on how cynical your take might be. They are a fascinating company.

CULTURE

blog.coinbase.com

How to Research a U.S. Phone Number

For some jurisdictions - in some industry sectors - it may indeed still make sense to use the phone call as first contact with potential job candidates. This post compiles a number of sourcing techniques and tools for finding US phone numbers, so useful for our US readers who want to do this type of outreach. Also a decent training tool for cultivating the ‘sourcing mindset’. Take a look, use with care. I wonder whether it could be used in combination with Balazs post earlier in this newsletter.

SOURCING

search-ish.com

Remote OK is an Open Startup

So this is taking transparency to the next level. Remote OK’s operating data is fully on display - revenue, cashflow, no of jobs posted (they are a remote engineering job board). Not sure exactly why this is a good thing, but it feels like it is.

CULTURE

remoteok.com

Would You Forfeit Your Wage?

So here’s another look at transparency. Pimlico Plumbers, whose flamboyant boss, Charlie Mullins OBE, decides he’s switching to salary transparency in his company - and doing it on television. Like all great reality TV, it tells a story with underlying questions we have to answer - in this case, would you voluntarily reduce your salary if you knew you are being ‘overpaid’? It might actually be a question some of us one day might have to answer. H/T Giles Symonds for the share in the fb group

CULTURE

www.facebook.com

Moneyballing for Talent

A straight shooting account of what it is like to hire within the constrains of the business - and the external environment. You totally get the sense of the startup hustle with this account - it won’t be to everyone’s taste but it is an honest, practical and interesting read on hiring from another non-specialist in the field.

RECRUITING OPERATIONS

auren.substack.com

Human Centred Artificial Intelligence for HR

If you read the post about New York banning AI employment tools, then this report by World Economic Forum is the ideal follow up. Don’t be intimidated by the length - over half of it is actually a ‘fill-in-the-notes’ framework which you can print off and use when assessing technology before purchase and implementation. Lots of extra here for HR / TA but perhaps being ‘ethical guardians’ might be a future role some of our number might perform.

www.dropbox.com

How Corporations Buy—and Sell—Food Made with Prison Labor

Fascinating and disturbing story on the persistent economic value of slave labour. Turns out the not only is it legal to use prison labour in the US but there are also workarounds to move those goods across state lines. Beautiful website, telling a terrible story. Kind of a must read folks.

SOCIETY

thecounter.org

Who's Talking?

Tyler Cowen's 3 Laws & 12 Rules

You don’t have to agree with everything Tyler Cowen says but you have got to recognise him as one of the foremost public intellectuals working today. Fascinating conversation with Spencer Greenberg on the how to think, basically. Must listen.

ECONOMY

clearerthinkingpodcast.com

WorkTech 2021 Global VC Review

This is really cool - it’s brainfooder George LaRocque taking us through Worktech investment in 2021 and what to expect for 2022. Pretty sure there isn’t anyone more on-the-ball in this space that this guy. Have a watch / listen.

ECONOMY

www.youtube.com

Not Another Show About Programmatic...

I’m not sure why programmatic is not already the dominant way in which recruiters advertise. I guess a big percentage of recruiting ads might be auto-posted via ATS, and another percentage may be just episodic off ones which don’t merit further investment in better ways of working. In case lack of awareness is the problem, listen to this podcast with two veterans of the job board space - brainfooders Jeff Dickey-Chasins with Steven Rothberg. Won’t find two people who know more about it than these two - have a listen.

RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING

www.buzzsprout.com

End notes

I’m still in London folks and something happened last week which made me realise that I’d be staying around here for the foreseeable - I turned down an all expenses trip to a cool place because of the logistical implications of a potential quarantine / lockdown. In the before times, there would be no decision to make - of course I’ll go! But now, no international trip is a casual affair anymore. Reminds of traveling before mobile era (I am from the jurassic) - all the planning that you had to do in advance, because once you land, you didn’t know. It would be a shame for these practical impediments to re-emerge as a consequence of pandemic, but it looks like they are gonna 🙁

Anyways, first world problems. Other people have far more pressing concerns, which this Global Map of Poverty outlines in stark terms. DM me on twitter or Instagram or TikTok if you have any other bits of the Internet you want to me to look at.

Have a great week everybody.

Hung

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Hung Lee @hunglee

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