The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast

AI is changing Software Engineering: What Tech Recruiters Have Got To Know It should come as no surprise that the sector that is most exposed to the implications of generative artificial intelligence is the sector that built it. Software engineers were amongst the first to see a mainstreaming of this new class of technologies (GitHub Copilot) and were amongst the first to realise the Janus-like fu...

How TA Leaders Use ChatGPT and Generative Artificial Intelligence?   My observations on ChatGPT / Generative AI is that the most advanced users in our industry have been individual contributors operating on their own initiative in to get more efficiency in their personal work. This has been amazing to see, but something is clearly missing - where are the strategic initiatives, what are TA leaders,...

How Google's AI Search Changes Recruitment Marketing Google's response to the gauntlet thrown own by Open AI has been belated, but increasingly impressive. AI Search promises to be as big if not bigger than semantic search, with Google generating content from a user prompt a la ChatGPT rather than just presenting a list of blue links for the user to further investigate. The implications of this ch...

Life & Times of a Portfolio Recruiter in VC   One of the most promising developments of the tech scale up era has been the recognition by Venture Capital firms that Talent is one of the critical components for success of the companies they invest in. The formation of the 'recruiter in residence' or 'Head of People' who work across the portfolio is one of the most interesting developments of the re...

How to Measure the Impact of Employer Brand?   Few people in recruiting would doubt the importance of Employer Brand, especially when hiring for the highly skilled, in-demand. In the world where the candidate retains high level expectations and has the research skills to unearth information about an employers reputation, it is more important than ever to make sure that companies have EB at the for...

Moving to Skills Based Hiring (SBH)   We've heard a great deal about Skills Based Hiring but what is it and what does it actually look like in practice? The movement away from hiring on bio / experience is welcome, as we know correlation is very weak before prior experience and job performance, but how exactly are we meant to identify people who can / want to do the job?   - What is SBH? - Are cer...

How To Measure Quality of Hire   Quality of Hire is without doubt the most important metric that CEO's care about. They want to hire the best people for the business and make sure that they are quickly up to productivity and adding competitive value to the business. And yet, Quality of Hire remains the metric is which least monitored by TA - why is this?   We're going to explore the context behind...

How to set up an Elite Talent Analytics Function   We can't have a workable recruitment strategy if we don't have access to accurate, current and relevant information. Talent intelligence (external labour market) and Talent analytics (internal people analytics) are two halves of one of the most important functions leading recruitment teams are building in order to make data driven decisions on hir...

Recruitment Leadership in a Mega Scale Organisation   Most of us have had experience of SME and Corp size organisations, but few of us might have had the chance to work at truly mega scale organisations. What is it like to be working for an organisation with tens of thousands of employees? How do you do TA leadership in an environment like this - what are the things you have to do which differ fro...

Prompt Engineering for Sourcing We can already predict that 'prompt' is going to be the Word of the Year 2023. The idea that we can get good at asking and contextualising questions has probably never come up before, but now that the outputs we want from generative AI is dependent on how skilfully we communicate what we want to the LLM that powers the AI, it has become a skill that we must develop....

Supercharge your Recruitment Marketing with AI Recruiters have been going crazy about the AI revolution but most of what we have been doing has been focused on direct candidate acquisition. What are other adjacent disciplines doing with Generative AI? I'm finding that recruitment marketers are doing some crazy things with AI, short circuiting processes which in usual case would take days and weeks...

Tech Layoffs & the Tech Job Market: From the Developers POV   There's probably no bigger story in the world of recruitment that the Big Tech Winter - led by VC backed scale ups who started make big staffing cuts, followed by the FAANG who have all made unprecedented cuts to staffing. What does this mean for the tech labour market? What indeed, do the engineers themselves think of the situation?  ...

Mental Challenge of the Neurodiverse: Real Talk from Recruiter Heroes   Important change of pace to Brainfood Live today. I was approached by Balazs, Michael and Vanessa to do a show on the topic of neurodiversity within our OWN community, and especially on the value from confessionals which can help others understand the different types of neurodiversity, how they can be manifested and expressed,...

Hiring in South Africa in 2023   Brainfood World Tour continues and this time we go to one of my favourite countries, who have one of my favourite recruiting communities - South Africa. There are challenges and problems with every country and region of the world, but I think fair to say that Africa in general and perhaps South Africa in particular, were early examples of what we can now see as 'di...

Impact of Generative AI on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion   One of the most telling things about output from Generative AI is the inevitable stereotyping that is produced. Go to Mid Journey and ask it to generate images of doctors, and guess what type of images come up? Now try the same with nurses. Or hunter gatherers. Or Fireman. Or Jesus for that matter. The point is that GAI is trained on his...

Recruiter Use Cases for ChatGPT - Part 3 - Ethics & Concerns   We have to keep going with ChatGPT, because whilst we are getting the hang of how it works for us, we are also beginning to see the outline of the challenges ahead of us. From AI hallucinations, overly authoritative single answers, political ideology baked into responses, crazy outputs from jailbreaks, as well as a host of legal and et...

State of the Recruiter Job Market 2023   Let's face it head on folks - this is turning out to the a tough year for recruiters! We all know that the big tech winter is going to impact us in recruiting and it's essential we have a good gauge as to how far and deep the winter is going to be. We've got some numbers and analysis to get through this week, as we go in real time on Horsefly Analytics prop...

Hiring in Saudi Arabia & the Gulf States   Brainfood World Tour is restarting, with a visit to a region where countries are in the middle of vast transformation. We hear a great deal about Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, but always from the Western lens. What do local recruiters and HR people say and do, on the ground? We're going to learn from locals, ex-pats and partners alike in this week's 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 an old friend of Brainfood - the one and only Mark Chaffey, CEO of  hackajob   - What is the original story of hackajob? - As an unusually young CEO, what challenges have you found growing the business? - Were you always going to go on the entrepreneur track?...

Recruiter Use Cases for ChatGPT, Part 2!   Alright folks, we are going to have to do this again - after an amazing first event where we had 1000+ people attending, the demand for more was overwhelming, so here it is! We are going to repeat the format - so expect recruiter use cases presented by practitioners, followed by product demo's from founders and concluding with some wise takes from industr...

Personalised or Standardised?   What is the base philosophy for Candidate Experience - do you attempt to give everyone the same branded experience, or do you vary it according to the individual and the individual circumstance? And if we do 'both' (I know you will say this!), then what are the circumstances when one approach makes sense and not the other?   We will discuss   - Types of Candidate -...

State of Global Mobility in 2023   Does anyone here have a plan for hiring globally this year?   Candidate shortages are persistent in many sectors, in many countries (see the UK and the NHS...) and for many employers there is no option other than to hire from overseas and relocate.   - What are the challenges of doing this at scale? - Where do you even start? - What territories have got an excess...

We have not seen a technology breakthrough like ChatGPT for a long time. Only released last December, it has already racked up millions of users attracted to its almost magical outputs to queries made by human users. The application for business has been obvious - and every day we are seeing new ideas to produce outputs which can be immediately put into production, saving workers hundreds of hours...

I don't know about you but I've been consuming TikTok videos like a billion other people on the planet and been amazed at the creativity, community and controversy that you find on there. It's also been pretty clear that the opportunity for potentially massive reach is there to be explored!   Conspicuously missing though, has been any sense of how recruiters can use TikTok. 2022 was the year when...

Welcome back to Brainfood Live 2023!   I hope everyone has had a great holiday break and are refreshed for the challenges and opportunities of the year ahead. So what exactly IS ahead for us in 2023? We're going to talk to industry experts from recruiting agency, recruiting tech investment, in-house recruiter, LinkedIn, Sourcing, Web3 and everything else we care about in this wonderful industry of...