The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast

Brainfood Live Christmas Party 2024 - Open Mic   Friends, this is the last Brainfood Live of the year!   This will be our 50th show of the year, so our cadence of doing these more or less once per week, every week, remains pretty much unbroken - not even sure where the two missing weeks went!   In any case, we're going to do an Open Mic session where all the years panelists and guests can come on...

Sustainable Recruitment in Healthcare: Strategies for 2024 and Beyond   The UK healthcare sector is at a critical crossroads. Recruitment challenges are intensifying, driven by an aging population, workforce burnout, and shifting political landscapes. As we enter 2024 under a new Labour government, healthcare recruiters must brace for significant policy changes while continuing to navigate the exi...

2024 in Review: State of Talent Acquisition   It's been another challenging year for Talent Acquisition - I make it two years since the hey days of 2021/2022. What can we learn from the current market conditions for Talent Acquisition, how are companies seeing the function and what are professionals doing to ensure they are staying ahead of the competition?   - Real Talk: Is Talent Acquisition hea...

2024 in Review: State of Recruitment Job Advertising   One of the themes of 2024 has been the surge of job applicants for the job adverts employers are posting out. It's clear that the economic conditions + AI-enablement has created the conditions where traditional duration based advertising is no longer a viable hiring approach - in fact, a counter productive one, as it absorbs all the recruiters...

2024 in Review: State of Flexible Working   The rise of the 'Alternative Workforce' has been a trend since before pandemic, as organisations sort to increase agility and reduce risk by expanding the pool of non-FTE into the workforce. Workers too have been keen to explore other ways in which to commercially engage with companies rather than being full time, permanent, on site workers.   What is th...

Founders Focus is the show where we get up close and personal with the leaders of the businesses changing the way we work today.   Next up is Matthijs Metzemaekers , CEO of Carv   - Why do it the second time round? - What are you doing differently at Carv vs your previous tech startup projects? - What are you doing in a same or similar way? - When did the idea for Carv first emerge - do you rememb...

2024 in Review: State of Sourcing   Being able to find candidates for hard to hire roles - typically 'sourcing' them from the Internet - has been the backbone of the recruiter skills matrix since the early 2000's. There are thousands of people in industry who consider themselves to be 'sourcers' first rather than 'recruiters'. Yet with the rise of GenAI, sourcing products have dramatically increas...

US Presidential Election: Implications for TA / HR   Perhaps the most significant election on the planet is who our American friends choose to be the next President of the country. Will it be current VP Kamala Harris who offers a continuity programme or will be it be a remarkable return to Donald Trump for a second term?   It's an incredible moment and one which has huge implications for TA / HR p...

2024 in Review: UK Staffing Market   Recruitment has gone through another turbulent year and it's clear that the global staffing market has had one its most challenging years recent times. How has the UK fared, what are the reasons for this and how do we think the prospects will look in 2025 and beyond?   - State of UK staffing Marketing - Big agency bottom line - Contract market vs Perm Market -...

Diversify Your Talent Pipeline with Employee Referrals   Employee Referrals are often thought of as 'anti-diversity' because we inevitably recommend people who are most like us. However, are we throwing out the baby with the bathwater if we dismiss ERP as a channel for talent?   - State of Employee Referrals - how many people get hired via this method? - How many companies have a formal ERP progra...

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep278 - Hiring in the Gulf States in 2024 & Beyond   Over the past 24 months there is been no region on the planet more dynamic and exciting than the Gulf. For decades a commodity / resource economy dominated by the Oil industry, in recent years we have seen huge changes at every level of society, government and industry as the Gulf States seek to reinvest trade surplus...

Brainfood On Tour - Hiring in Hong Kong in 2024 & Beyond   I am in Hong Kong at least once every year (hi Ma) but have never done a focused show on the recruitment and job market in the Fragrant Harbour! Huge amounts of change going in HK, as elsewhere - how is the recruitment market changing and what are the prospects for the future?   - State of Hiring in Hong Kong - Demographics and populat...

Brainfood On Tour - Hiring in Australia in 2024 & Beyond   Its been two year since I was last in Australia so it is a welcome return to one of the most unique recruitment markets on the planet. Everything about Australia is simultaneously familiar yet strange and that includes everything you're going to see in recruiting. How has Australia weathered the storms of 2024?   - State of Hiring in A...

Brainfood On Tour - Hiring in the Thailand in 2024 & Beyond   I've been to Thailand a number of times but never long enough to actually speak to a local recruiters on what is going on in this beautiful country. Unfortunately, I don't speak Thai so until Crowdcast manages to do auto translate on the fly, we're going to be speaking with English speaking recruiters who can say a thing or two abou...

Hiring Manager Self Serve: How To Can Empower the Line!   Centralising recruitment is the default for 'knowledge' based businesses; the opposite is true for every other type of business. If your organisation is a multi-location, moves physical items, has warehouses, and huge diversity of job roles, then chances are you will necessarily have a more de-centralised hiring approach. What can we learn...

EU AI Act: Implications for Recruiters, Talent Acquisition and HR   One of the biggest challenges we have in our industry is to stay compliant. In a world where the innovation rate of Artificial Intelligence has long since outstripped anyone's ability to keep on top of it, we're left to seek guidance from legislators which we hope know what they're doing. Let's review what the EU AI Act is and how...

Reviewing 'Do More With Less' - Recruitment Efficiency in 2024   Recruiters have been under pressure all year - maybe even longer than that - to 'do more with less'. This means either increase effort or increase efficiency. And given that we are already at 100% capacity with reduced TA teams, the latter is the only option!   How have we done - what examples have we seen of recruitment efficiency a...

Hiring Insights from 1 Million Job Interviews   Interview Intelligence is a category which has exploded into industry consciousness over the past 12 months. Employers are finally learning that in order to have hiring success, you have to ensure that your interviewing game is elite. We are finding out some incredible insights in how recruiters and hiring managers interview, many of which have been...

Founders Focus is the show where we get up close and personal with the leaders of the businesses changing the way we work today.   Next up is Maxime Legardez Coquin, CEO of Maki   - When did you know you were going to be an entrepreneur? - What are the strengths of a founder coming into a new domain? - Is there a formula for success as a CEO of a fast growing scale up? - What recruiting lessons di...

Maternity Returnees: Are Employers Doing Enough (Or Anything At All?)   Maternity Leave is a policy most employers have in place, but what about Maternity Return? Most employers seem not to have any policy at all, leaving the experience of returning mothers mainly up to the line management, with predictably variable results!   We're going to dive into an under discussed topic on what the current e...

Founders Focus is the show where we get up close and personal with the leaders of the businesses changing the way we work today.   Next up is Runar Reistrup, CEO of YunoJuno   - What are the differences leading a startup / scale up vs a mega corp? - Do the order of the most management skills change with this context? - As a leader, how do you prepare a company for every stage of its journey? - How...

NEW GOVERNMENT: WHAT CAN RECRUITERS / HR EXPECT?   We'll be over a month since the General Election, in which almost all pollsters predict the Labour Party forming the government with the largest majority since Tony Blair 1997. How radical will this new government be? Are we going to see New Labour 2.0 or as some critics contend, Tory-lite 2.0?   Whatever the flavour of personal politics, it remai...

HOW TO BUILD A JOB SCRAPER USING PYTHON (AS A NON-CODER!)   Friends, you don't need me to tell you that the job market for Talent Acquisition professionals has been in the toilet for the past 18 months. So much so that I have even had to close down the Brainfood Jobs Job Board - for lack of posted jobs! When the competition out there is as fierce as it is, you have to think about how to give yours...

REAL USE CASES IN RECRUITMENT AUTOMATION: LIVE DEMO   Friends, I'm on a mission: industry everywhere is in a race for become AI-enabled, and those that are slow to adopt are going to be outcompeted by those who can now move faster and better. What we've been lacking is real examples of how RPA (Recruitment Process Automation) and AI can really take out chunks of the work recruiters do. That change...

  HOW TO HIRE A CHIEF PEOPLE OFFICER (CPO)   It's the most senior role in the People department, one that many a recruiter eventually aspires to, but I suspect not many of us have had to try and recruit for one! We're going to dive into the world of C-level hiring, but with a twist, for the C-suite exec leading our own department!   - What are the circumstances where this role emerges? - How do we...