Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #280

This week’s brainfood is supported by our buddies KANDIDATE

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It’s been cool to criticise LinkedIn Inmails for inefficacy for a long while now, but what if we’ve just been using them wrong? Some excellent engagement tips here - from LinkedIn itself - on how to upgrade your game. Trust me on this one folks, this is worth your time.

One for the tech recruiters here - the annual State of JS is out. Of course it is a beautifully rendered web app and you can have joy just scrolling through and interacting with it. Some interesting learning too, especially if you want to improve your tech literacy, what is in here is what web developers are generally are talking about in 2022. Might also be a cool site to send to your tech candidates, nurture content ukwim?

For readers of TWIR, you will know that I am a proponent of ‘open kitchen’ style of working - openly share your operational thinking / working, ideally whilst you’re doing it. You crystallise thinking by writing about ‘it’, lose inhibitions which stop you from talking about it and usually create some interesting content for others to read. Hat tip Zinc for following through and sharing their experience in using market data to help create a startup headcount plan.

Really interesting report from Bain & Co, exploring the changing motivations of the workforce. Includes some fun worker archetypes, accessible demographic, regional and income analysis of those archetypes. It’s great brainfood. Download it here. H/T brainfooder Colin Donnery for the share.

Artfully written lament on the what we lose when we shift to remote. In essence, it is the loss of osmotic information transfer that comes from simply being in the physical presence of the other. We have 5 basic senses, and only use 2 of them when we Zoom. Great post, which also manages to lead with a relevant reference to Princess Leia, which you have to applaud.

Trung Phan is on a tear, not only achieving a coveted blue tick on twitter but also the second time in 3 weeks where one of his posts makes it into brainfood 🤣. This one is about former employees - do you have a strategy for cultivating them? You should, because they might be a critical fuel for your rocket ship.

Sober reading, but essential for us to understand the choices we are confronted with as we renegotiate our relationship with work. Published first in Sept 2021, this post retains relevance as we continue to puzzle over the ‘missing millions’ from the labour force. Those who cannot easily find a way back, have to do something. This is what it might be.

Gergely Orosz writes a very good blog on engineering hiring, maybe the best one around right now. This post could do with some concision but it is a high value one, dealing with one of the hard challenges in tech recruiting today - diversify the tech workforce. Have a read.

How are we using the Internet? Very few organisations would even attempt to answer this question but Hootsuite give it a go every year. Digital 2022 report is out and is a must read / download for anyone who cares about consumer behaviour, candidate experience, employer branding or recruitment marketing.

Fascinating concept from network theory, applied to social organisations. It is going to be interesting to see how super connectors will adapt to remote only; theoretically, they exist because of organisational inefficiency, which might be eliminated with a well run remote org…

Do you practice ‘DDR’ or ‘data driven recruiting’? It would be hard for any one of us to say no these days, but as we dive deep into collecting, measuring and collecting data about our people and processes, we need to be careful not to fall for into the McNamara Fallacy

Great thread from Tony Wilson of Institute of Employment Studies, summarising latest report on Labour Market Statistics. Twitter threading makes these otherwise turgid reports far more accessible. Main points here are a) lots of people are not active in the visible labour market b) long term illness a significant factor in reducing LFP. Have a read here, and Tony is great follow on Twitter if you like this sort of stuff

The question of whether more or less candidate data is best method of mitigating bias might have an answer with this research from NYU

The 4 Day week is starting to happen folks and intuitively to me, this seems like a great idea! Some people have thought deeper about it though, and raise some relevant concerns which might serve to cool down any over enthusiasm. Brainfooder Andrew Spence is one such, and he puts his argument down here in this thought provoking post.

This is a very cool resource for anyone currently working in or managing a remote team. How do you actually forge bonds with folks you only ever see on chat or VC?. Team coherence will become increasingly important as we hire more people who have never / may never meet. Some of theses playbooks might help. Great complimentary read to the Princess Leia bonus earlier.

H/T to brainfooder John Carlo Alarcon for the share.

OP lambasts the advocates of the creator economy by breaking down the public data on how much Twitch Creators actually earn, and in particular, where the vast majority of earnings are distributed. No surprises that extreme power laws apply, with the less than 1% accruing more than 80% of the pie. Unclear what else we can do though, popularity is down to the consumers as much as anything else.

Great conversation with brainfooders Lars Schmidt and Brendan Browne on Brendan’s personal journey from agent to head of TA to now portfolio support at Y Combinator. Some great advice here folks - have a listen.

I’m really pleased somebody got Mercedes Johnson’s side of the story out and I’m really glad that person was Laurie Ruettimann. I was critical of the industry over reaction to Mercedes tweet and important that someone like Laurie created to the space for another perspective to heard. We need more of this.

I often suggest that Brainfood Live co-host and long time brainfooder Adam Gordon doesn’t know what he is talking about, but one topic where I think he might, is recruitment marketing automation. So here he is on Chad and Cheese. Good listen for recruitment marketers