Recruiting Brainfood for the week ahead - Issue #286

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Fascinating research on the migration of tech workers following the pandemic and shift to remote. Superstars cities are not in decline but growth rate has slowed, as tech workers look elsewhere to live and work from. They are not diffusing evenly through out US though but clustering again in better-quality-of-life cities. A pattern we can expect globally? Essential read

Excellent tips on how to have better digital communication in shared spaces. Key points for me were - use of public over private channels, limit the DM’s (they cannot be mined or used by others) and make use of emoji’s. We need to be trained in all of this.

Exceptionally interesting report which I summarised on a LinkedIn post that went viral earlier this week. Some really interesting data on the changes to tech job listings from 2019-2022, including the collapse of soft skills being advertised(!), the sad decline in the proportion of women applicants to tech roles and the prevalence of job title inflation as recruiters get desperate to attract talent. You’re going to need to give up your email to access to this, but worth it. Have a read here

Brainfooder Jesse Tinsley with a fun game on Twitter, which quickly become a viral thread. Feel free to keep asking Jesse to give you your market rate. Like I said, fun ….and maybe useful.

One of the best ways to understand how something works is to study the arguments of those who oppose it. This diatribe against online advertising lists in laypersons terms what ad tracking is and why it’s bad. It’s a pretty good way to learn about recruitment marketing.

I joked with Metaview CEO and long time brainfooder Siadhal Magos that he should put out Founder’s Focus conversation through his conversational analytics platform and see how we (or I…) did as an interviewer. The results are in 🤣.

PS: don’t you think every podcaster should do this??

So the main idea is the shift the focus of the copy from bullet point lists of requirements, and toward skills / behaviours needed to perform well in the role. These may sound like the same thing, but this post from LinkedIn does a great job of explaining why they are not.

Problem with burnout is that we don’t know how to recognise it. Christina Maslach was a US social psychologist who came up with this simple score card to assess how burned out you might actually be. We should all probably, periodically, take a look.

Love these ReadMe exercises, especially when managers do them so that direct reports can better understand how to interact with them. The Brainfood Tribune was kind of like this, but perhaps we need someone more specific and more concise - a one pager to describe how you like to interact / collaborate. Would this be a useful thing to build?

Fascinating post summarising the research on ‘name-letter’ effect, where we subconsciously prefer things (partners, locations, candidates….) that have the same first letter as our own names, clear evidence that only robots should do interviews and assessment.

I think this is a cool website to send to your engineering candidates as a bit of nurture content - it’s a website of common tech challenges, which each solution page containing the ways different programming languages resolve the problem. Fascinating to look at, maybe useful, definitely a nice curio to share.

I think most recruiters would accept that we could not plausibly be good at assessing a candidate’s technical skills via a video interview, but most of us would probably be confident that we could judge the softer stuff like, candidate motivation. Turns out, that this confidence may well be sorely misplaced. Technical post but accessible enough, and some important findings - we need more technology, not less, to reduce bias in process.

H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share in the fb group.

There is a huge demand for livestreamers and as we’ve seen with the success of OnlyFans, an increasing supply of workers to meet that demand. Fascinating insight on how one livestream got into the work, how easy it was (click a button, start livestream..) and how that made her feel. Lots to ponder, have as read.

So as we’re getting back into doing in-person in 2022, we might as well get better at organising the most the important part of the conference scene - the before / after place for dinner! Simple post, simple answer - optimal number at table is SIX!

Famously Margaret Thatcher consciously changed the way she spoke in order to further her political career; perhaps Elizabeth Holmes baritone is another example. Seems to be though, that we associate leadership (male or female, male with obvious advantage) with lower pitched voices, which may not be something we can correct for with anti-bias training. Lots to ponder, have a read, here

Cool interview by Azeem with New York University professor of philosophy and neural science David Chalmers, on what the metaverse might offer us, the moral quandaries it could pose, and what our rights there might look like. I think it will be pretty good tbh.

So this is a 1 hour documentary from the BBC on the role technology plays in determining whether human candidates get the job. It’s a good watch, so set aside the time for it. H/T brainfooder Stephen O'Donnell for the share in the fb group

Great to speak to brainfooder Kevin Grossman on his superb podcast. We talk recruiting brainfood, how it started, what the editorial policy is, how content is gathered to build this newsletter. Hope you get something from it - have a listen here