The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast

Unconscious bias is now at least a topic that we are conscious of! But what to do about it is another matter.  As recruiters in the business of hiring the best people we can for the businesses we work for, reducing the degree of unconscious bias at every stage of the recruiting process is a critical measure of how well we are doing our jobs.  But how?  What are the techniques to reduce bias that w...

How do you make the business case for more budget during times of Covid-19? Moving the against the market is often the toughest, yet smartest thing that companies can do; leaders are made through being able to see the opportunity amid the emergency. The question is: what are the tactics & techniques to get there? In this episode of Brainfood Live On Air, you will learn how to speak the language of...

As companies experiment with the complexity of hybrid remote working styles, the pressure to simplify by adopting remote or onsite only approach will continue to build.  What can we learn from companies which have never had a central location?  Distributed companies are nothing new but their early experimentation in this new way of working can give insight to all those thinking or struggling to ma...

Perhaps one subconscious human bias we can all have experience of is....'the beauty bias'.  Good looking people - regardless of gender identity - on balance get better treatment than people not so well blessed with good looks. From career progression, performance assessment, even moral character, the good looking ones amongst us have it good. Or do they? What is the beauty bias - and is it myth? W...

What is the job search and candidate experience like for  Heads of TA at the moment? The moment is of course dominated by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the necessary public health response and the cratering of the global economy as a consequence.  Job search has never been easy, but perhaps now more than ever the challenge is acute.  We are speaking to Heads of TA who are themselves on the job se...

There has never been a more important time to be strategically valuable to your customers.  If you are a recruiter or a recruitment business owner and you're thinking about how you can secure  your share of what looks to be  a shrinking market for recruitment, it is vital that you move away from the 'supplier' mindset and into one of 'strategic partner'.  - What are the steps required to making th...

The best recruiters are those who are most efficient with their time. Modern tech has given us the opportunity to automate a lot of time intensive, repetitive work freeing us to move up the value chain to business.  Our focus in this week's Brainfood Live On Air will be examining the opportunities to automate at different stages of the hiring funnel, including actual examples of automation by expe...

Diversifying our workforce starts with diversify our talent pools.  What are the techniques which deliver actual results?  In this week's Brainfood Live On Air, we are going to be discussing practical ideas to get better diversity outcomes from job ads, sourcing, assessment, process engineering and the rest.  We'll be joined by Recruitment Marketing expert Jelmer Kopplemans, Copy Writing Extraordi...

What are the best questions to really get to know someone? I asked this question (very meta) on LinkedIn last month and it spawned. a whole avalanche of amazing responses, many of which I hope to share with you all in this show.  As recruiters & HR people, we are often asking people questions - at interview, at briefing meetings, at disciplinaries, at performance reviews.  Do we know what are the...

Andy Foote - author of the amazing LinkedInsights blog - and a leading authority on how to get better on LinkedIn is going to come on screen and deliver a custom presentation and Q&A on how to up your LinkedIn Game.  Expect:  Latest product / feature updates from Q2 Audience / Follower growth tips Boosting post view count LinkedIn Company page optimisation Community management  Newsfeed Algorithm...

Politics in the Workplace is a tough topic which most folks try to avoid; isn't there actually a saying to that effect? And yet, as social tensions rise throughout the world, it is increasingly obvious that we cannot compartmentalise our professional from our political selves.  Which brings a set of challenges for HR / TA which we may be ill equipped or trained to handle.  In this episode, we are...

SThree are the 1.258 billion GBP revenue staffing business - and one of the most well known businesses in the space.  If you're in recruiting, you're going to know SThree! Who better than CEO Mark Dorman to take us through the evolution of the business and what is coming next for staffing agencies in the post Covid-19 era? Here about Balance between Contract / Permanent businesses Future of RPO /...

One of the second order effects of a default to 'remote first' culture is a massively expanded pool of available candidates. After all, once you take off the location requirements, the world becomes your market.  Combined with worldwide economic retrenchment, we will shockingly have a labour market entirely the reverse of what was the case 3 months ago - candidate & applicant rich.  What to do whe...

Is the 'new normal' here yet? We are certainly beginning to see glimpses of it.  Whilst some employers have frozen hiring in anticipation of a return to normalcy which may never happen, others have forged ahead with new processes fit for the remote first / remote only world.  Questions we will seek to answer:  How do you hire and onboard new candidates, having never met them in person? What happen...

Know who  Glen Cathey  is? If you're a sourcer, you really should,  because Glen played a pivotal role in defining the discipline as being different from the traditional recruiter, and in doing so opened the way for much greater diversity of people and skillsets to enter the recruitment industry.  Glen is making is debut on Brainfood Live in this episode, and you can expect that we'll be discussin...

Every business wants to improve their ability to directly source premium candidates. This need has become even more acute during Covid-19, as talent attraction techniques inevitably leads to a flood of often unsuitable candidates.  Being able to target, identify and engage the highly skilled, in-demand is itself a highly skilled, in-demand skill! I'll be speaking with Sourcer & Sourcing Training e...

With a change to scheduled programming, we are going to be talking why BAD  VIDEO IS BAD BUSINESS on Brainfood Live On Air Ep60! Lets face it folks - not only are we doing too many video calls, too many of these are a terrible experience, mainly due to correctable mistakes that we routinely make which makes the experience harder than it should be for the viewers & participants. I AM NO DIFFERENT!...

The growth of recruiter communities has been one of the great developments in the industry, particularly over the past decade.  Now in the Covid world, community has never been more important for people in the people business.  DBR, RL100, HROS, Growth Hacking Recruiters, Trumunity - which are the best communities to belong to, and what makes them good? Fanny Comba and I will get the admins and ma...

Job and income insecurity has become real for us in the recruitment industry. It's now everyone's problem as hiring freezes continue, investment plans cut back and growth plans go into reverse. What should recruiters be doing right now? This is the topic of Brainfood Live On Air this Friday - we're doing a special webinar focusing for the first time ON US. - Key Resources for Recruiters during Cov...

The end of 'hyper growth' has given TA teams an unprecedented opportunity to do something which they never previously had the time to do - to review, remove & renew inherited process.  The world renowned recruiting expert,  John Vlastelica , will be giving us 1 hour of his time to impart insights on what world class Talent Acquisition teams are doing in times of hiring standstill.  This show is go...

In a change to scheduled programming, we've got an awesome surprise for you: its  Andy Foote , founder of LinkedIn Insights coaching business, with his annual update on all the important changes to LinkedIn in 2020.  You can't miss this folks - full presentation on screen share with the legend himself.  Episode 56 of Brainfood Live On Air is supported by our buddies at Stack Overflow Talent. Talk...

It is become clear that Covid-19 will be a world changing event.  Economies, political systems, values, social behaviours, workplace culture - all are poised to be radically altered by a pandemic which has devastated the planet.  With new realities of the post-Covid world beginning to emerge, what opportunities do we have to creating better systems than the ones that went before. If the world is g...

Covid-19 has enforced the radical virtualisation of the recruitment process. Events which previously were in-person have now shifted online and there is a scramble for tools and techniques on how to do it.  This episode we are going to explore one of these techniques - the Online Hiring Hackathon,  I'll be joined by recruiting pioneer  Eva Zils , whose HR Hackathon in 2016 was one of the first tru...

Mental health has never been a more important topic, especially in the light of the shocking phase shift we have all experienced during this enduring pandemic.  We all need to learn to recognise the symptoms of stress behaviour - in our colleagues, as well as a amongst ourselves.. Importantly, as we adjust to our new realities, we need to quickly learn strategies for dealing with mental health cha...

The most popular content categories in Recruiting Brainfood every week are 'SOURCING' and 'COOL TOOLS'. That tells me one thing: recruiters are always looking for a edge to get to the best candidates more effectively. Who better than the Wizard Sourcer himself - Jonathan Kidder Tech Recruiter at Amazon - to help us navigate the world of chrome extensions, free tools, sourcing channels and the rest...