This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 127

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Open Kitchen: Recap on Remote

Two years ago I wrote what was then an early critique of hybrid working - Hybrid: A Bad Idea We're Going To Do Anyway.

I had no unique insight to offer, as it was a restatement of material that was already in public knowledge as well document the lessons given to me by others who had already experimented with different modes of working pre-pandemic. However, I wanted to articulate what I felt was plain: hybrid working was an inefficient way of running a business and our at-the-time irrational enthusiasm was best explained by a collective lack of managerial courage for more honest conversation with our people who had just been through the collective trauma of pandemic, lockdown and company restructure.

We have more courage now - or at least more experience - so this might be a good moment to recap on what we know about remote / hybrid / on-premise and all the flavours in between.

In order to do this, I am going to use the above chart taken from a Bloomberg article which surveyed the managers of service oriented businesses on how they thought remote impacted the business, and review the item in turn and attempt a verdict on each. Workplace Culture / Team Cohesiveness I am going to treat as a single item.

1. Building Workplace Culture

Proponents of remote culture will have the rejoiner ready:

'if you need to call your employees into the office to build culture, you don't have much of a culture'.

It's a powerful criticism and one with a great deal of merit.

However, this emotionally satisfying yet thought limiting cliche lands better for organisations which are remote only and remote first, pre-pandemic. These are organisations who have had the time and intent to build cultural practices aligned with a distributed way of working - a very different context compared to the majority of companies who have had to radically shift from full on-premise, to a period of working through remote / hybrid and now face serious questions on what they want to trade off in order to become an efficient business again.

Additionally, the question is about building workplace culture, not just maintaining an existing one and there is a huge amount of evidence on from social and behavioural sciences that proximity and intensity are key factors for accelerated culture building. Culture builds through repetition; when new behaviours are introduced, it requires repetition before they are accepted. Quite simply, you get more reps, at higher intensity, when you are with your colleagues day in, day out. The time it takes you all to achieve 'automaticity' - when cultural practices become so routine so that they become automatic and without conscious deliberation - is more easily achieved (a.k.a more efficiently done) this way.

Verdict: Confirmed

2. Training & Mentoring Employees

We had reasonably early signal that - contrary to received wisdom at the time - that entry talent do not want remote. iCIMS Class of 2021 Report was gave us what is obvious now in hindsight - early career / early life professionals do not want to stay and work from a home which is unlikely to be their own and one that is not adequately provisioned for home working. More importantly, there was a clear articulation that lack of on-premise meant missing out on 'osmotic knowledge transfer' - the learning you get from observing, listening and working with more experienced colleagues and managers. As such, it's a pretty easy to fully agree with the managers conclusions.

Verdict: Confirmed

3. Communication

Increase in 'cultural overhead' was the primary reason why Hybrid was a bad idea - you basically had to increase communication effort by 2 x to cater for everyone who was not in the room at the time. One of the major reasons why we had 'zoom fatigue' was because we need to 'synch up' precisely because we were not default synched up by either being fully remote or fully on-premise. I don't think anyone has the data on this, but I would wager good money that the organisations that spend more zoom minutes per capita were those that operated hybrid. Fully remote businesses aggressively commit to written communication (sometimes to the point of ideological zeal...), whilst on premise organisations can rely on over-the-desk type communications to unblock issues.

Verdict: Confirmed (caveat - for Hybrid!)

4. Employee Productivity

“early analysis of performance data” found that engineers with some in-person working time (even if they later transitioned to remote work) “performed better on average than people who joined remotely.”?

We are conflicted; employee self reports are uniformly positive, whilst leadership reports are becoming uniformly negative when it comes to employee productivity. Who to believe? Both parties have vested interests and are defending a narrative which promotes their position.

Additionally, the concept of 'productivity' has become blurred over time, moving from the simplicity of revenue generated divided by the cost it took to acquire that revenue, to now all manner of scores, updates, tangential and intangible (though perhaps no less real) contributions. We also seem to have forgotten time frame - you could indeed get a burst of productivity if you forced your team to do an all-nighter but you would surely pay the price in lower output, damaged morale and higher attrition if you extended the time frame of your analysis to more than just that weekend.

Finally, we might need to consider the argument against productivity as a measure of value, as it promotes an inevitably reductionist view where a human being can never be more than a mere instrument to the production of that value, which btw is then invariably collected by someone else.

Verdict: Not confirmed

5. Real Estate Expense

We can't argue about this one - office real estate is likely to be one of the most costly liabilities for employers who retained their offices. I suspect a great deal of the call for RTO has been from employers who have been surprised and disappointed that their provision of 'Hybrid Max' - allowing employees full freedom to decide time and place of work, has been met with a very strong preference for always-remote, leaving the office operating at 10-20% capacity.

The commercial real estate market has been held together by long term leases but as these come to term, we can expect to see more headlines such as this one from HSBC - exiting high profile, prestigious office locations in favour of smaller, more flexible and more full office environments elsewhere.

Remote only organisations - especially ones pre-pandemic - had a huge competitive advantage in never having to deal with this headache.

Verdict: Confirmed

6. Employee Retention

Another one which we can't argue too much about - many employees have reconfigured their lives to operate predominantly from home and hence would find RTO to be more than a trivial issue. In many cases, people have relocated out of city centres to more distant outskirts for a higher standard of living and - yes, more space for WFH.

We can expect any shift to return back to the office to trigger a bout of resignations, leading to a significant, albeit one off, spike in attrition. More cynical CEO's might even use the predicted attrition rates as a way to disguise a planned reduction in force. Regardless of motive and the specific percentages, we know that shift back to office will impact attrition

Verdict: Confirmed

7. Recruitment

We all know candidates prefer remote work. Even when the candidate is ok with coming into the office, the concept of having some element of workplace flexibility is naturally appealing because it offers the lowest risk - if you end up hating your new colleagues, you can at least escape half the time by not being there. For hiring, remote or flexi location jobs decisively outcompete roles which are fully on premise.

Verdict: Confirmed

8. Wage Costs

The majority of respondents reported no impact on shift to remote on wage costs; impossible to know how much is this true without having access to payroll data or indeed, without universal salary transparency. The debate on whether pay should be location agnostic or location contingent has merits and demerits either way, with both arguments typically coming apart when existing employees relocate. What we do know is that many employees would take a part cut in order to stay remote - so we can imagine that this must have a suppression effect on wage costs. That said, no one was able to anticipate the cost of living crisis which has dislocated our research and data from today's reality. The answer is 'it should but we don't know'

Verdict: Not confirmed

So...what can we learn from all this? We a few a ideas which must feed into our strategy of company formation and growth. If we are planning on building a generationally diverse, long term business, then committing to an office location to pipeline early career talent will be a must; if we are planning on building a more generationally homogenous, perhaps shorter term business, then shifting to full remote (if you are not already there) is the easiest route to efficiency

What do you think? Any of the above 8 verdicts you particularly agree or disagree with? Let me know, in comments below....

Out of the kitchen, onto the lounge ??

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What's in the News?

inploi raise ￡1.35 Million Seed Round

Promising UK startup inploi raise seed round, an easy investment given current traction, clear value prop and strong leadership. Top-of-funnel remains the critical need for high volume recruiters, inploi have found product market fit and have to now go for it. CEO Matt de la Hey on the fundraise here

Job Mobz Acquires Recruiter.com

CEO Jesse Tinsley has been on a one man mission to reverse the narrative on the state of the recruitment market - his Twitter is one of the best accounts to follow. Jesse backs up his rhetoric buy investing in recruitment assets, including this latest purchase of Recruiter.com, which might be worth it for the domain alone. Congrats guys - keep the great work!

If you are a recruitment technology vendor with some news to share, comment below and let me know your news

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What's On Offer?

Purpl are offering FREE & Discounted Training and Workshops - see below

Helping internal and embedded recruitment teams in the tech world upskill through peer-to-peer learning. We create on-demand, actionable videos with senior recruiters from the world's most innovative talent teams, covering areas such as sourcing, interviewing, using data, DEI & working with hiring managers.

Website:?www.gopurpl.io?

Offer details

1. We have 6 different free workshops to choose from (topics ranging from Google X-Ray sourcing to writing better job ads)?linked here
2. Any TA professional currently out of work we will support to upskill them - book a call with me?here?and we will pick some workshops relevant to them & share for free (leave a note e.g 'open to work')?

20% off any annual paid licenses, can book a demo?here?(leave a note like 'Recruiting Brainfood' in the details box)

Thanks?Joe Atkinson?for the offer - let me know how you get on!

If you are a vendor and have something you want to offer the recruiting community, comment below and let me know what the offer is. It will go in next week's issue. PS: I don't accept affiliate deals, so everything you offer gets passed on entirely and directly to the community!

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What's Going On?

Big List of Recruiting & HR Events to Attend in 2023

In person events are critically important to the community folks - especially in times when the eco-system is under pressure from bosses telling us 'to do more with less'. We need to lean on each other and ensure that information continues to flow bilaterally between the nodes in the community. You can do that best by being in person. Big List is up and updated, so bookmark it?here!

Pragmatic Applications of AI in Recruiting, Tues 22nd Aug, 5pm BST

Look at this line up - we're going at it with AI in Recruiting, Ep6. Have to say each one of these panelists I've been keen to get on screen with, and I'm delighted to have them all together for this next continuation of our series on AI in Recruitment. With?Glen Cathey, SVP (Randstad),?Jane Curran, Head of TA (JLL),?Marcus Kohlein, CEO (Camyylyon) and?Mike Wolford, Director of Analytics (WilsonHCG). Register?here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep220 - Making the Case for Budget for Recruitment Tech (When Times Are Tough!), Fri 25th Aug, 2pm BST

Do more with less has been the corporate mantra for the past 12 months, but how exactly are you meant to do that unless you bring in tools to automate workflow and increase efficiency? Times are tough so there is no better time to hone your business case building skills than today. We're with Nick Thompson, Global Talent Marketing & Employer Branding Manager (IBM), Arielle Killroy, Founder (Dado) & friends to figure out how. Register here

AI & the Future of Hiring: Doing More With Less, Thur 24th Aug, 1pm ET / 5pm BST

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer science fiction; it is increasingly becoming present in everyday business. As tech unemployment hits a record low, attracting top talent requires an always-on employer brand and nurturing program. Join us to explore how AI serves as a critical tool for talent teams facing budget constraints, enabling them to stand out in a competitive market. Don’t miss this chance to optimize your HR practices and build a tech-first company brand that attracts top talent. Register now: https://bit.ly/3s2i8jq

Adway After Work, Thu 31st Aug, 4.30pm, The Folly, 41 Gracechurch Street, London, England, GB, EC3V 0BT

Everyone should come to this! Adway have started an amazing monthly drinks meet up in central London, to help the community commune. No sales, no pitches, just a load of people from all parts of the recruiting ecosystem getting together and sharing some down time. Free to attend, drinks on the house...but you got to register?here

Recfest Nashville, 13-14 Sept, Bicentennial Park, Nashville, TN, USA

Recfest comes to the USA, and I'm coming along with it! Going to give a talk on AI and whether technology can ever deliver us freedom from drudgery or will the value always be captured by the few. It's not a talk I want to give, but I think it is one I have to give. Smarter people than I will be in attendance, along with 1000+ delegates from all over the world. Tickets going fast - get them?here

In-house Recruitment London, 21st September, Islington Business Centre, London

Look at this line up here. I'm going to be there, talking about who knows what, but the chat elsewhere is likely to be worth seeing. Tickets are free, but you have to register?here

Employer Branding on a Budget, Wed 27 Sept, 2pm BST

Well this is proving to be a popular one already - a proper topic for tough times! If you are a TA leader looking to upgrade how the market perceives your employer, how do you do it with low or no budget? We're going to be talking about the DIY techniques you can use to elevate your business above the competition without spending a penny. Register?here

Gender, AI & the Global Job Market, Thurs 28 Sept, 2pm BST

We've got some superb insight for you on what actually goes in interviews. Anton Boner, Commercial Director (Screenloop) is going to present data on how candidates are behaving on platform, including insight on gender, AI and the state of the job market. It's going to be fascinating folks - register here

Candidate Expectations, Frustrations & Preferences, Thurs 28 Sept, 3pm BST

Reviewing the Cronofy report on candidate expectations - going to be deep dive on some proprietary research which tracks the changing expectations of candidates, especially on interview logistics. Register?here

Talent Acquisition Summit, 3-4 November, Bogota, Colombia

So I suppose this is happening! Good job my favourite coffee stall on Hoxton Street Market is ran by a Colombian family, I will use the opportunity to brush up on my Spanish. Or rather, learn it, as I don't have any! Looking forward to the event by my buddy Carlos Guillermo Lopez in his home town, and delighted to be bringing friends from Europe along for the ride. Tickets?here?- see you there?

If you have an event, webinar or podcast going on next week and want it featured on next week's newsletter,?comment below?with the link and event details. Don't forget to at mention me so that I see it

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Who's Hiring?

People Operations Specialist, Blinkist, Berlin, Germany

Senior Recruiter, Western Union, Vienna, Austria

If you are hiring for recruiters or HR people, you are welcome to post jobs FOR FREE on the Brainfood Jobs Job Board. Use coupon code: BTCFREE for 100% discount.

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Whose Story?

Vicki Saunders, Employer Brand Lead (ex-Currys, BAe Systems, Boots)

One of the real pleasures of doing the Brainfood Tribune is getting to know the community members. Vicki has been a subscriber for a long time but I didn't have the time to properly get to know her until recently. I asked Vicki 20 Questions - here are her superb responses.

If you want to answer 20 Questions comment below to volunteer. This is an exercise in fostering community and open to all

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Whose Available?

That's 367 members of the community. If you are a recruiter or HR person that is looking for work, join the Brainfood Talent Collective?here. If you are an employer hiring recruiters, apply for a company account?here, and use the code: BTCFREE to freely post jobs and search the db.

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Who's Moving?

Gudrun Franzen joins Miss Moneypenny Technologies as Head of People and Culture, having previously worked for UBIRCH for the past 12 months and before that as Head of P & C at ArangoDB. I think I remember using ArangoDB back in the Workshape days. Good luck with the new move Gudrun!

Adam Flockton joins Wayve as Recruiter, after 3 and half years with Meta, and having previously worked with Autonomous Intelligent Driving and Scede. The talent dispersal from TA from Meta is likely to be significant - this should mean a dispersal of Meta best practice also. Going to be interesting to see the potential up levelling of the industry we might see from this.

Adelaida Manolescu joins SystemIQ has Head of People Success having previously led the Talent Development and L&D teams at OpenClassrooms, Treatwell and Flipjet. Been thinking a lot about Talent Development or 'People Success' - its a space where a lot of TA folks mights consider diversifying into. Might be worth a Brainfood Live on this - let me know if this might be of interest!

Kirsty Paterson joins the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency as Chief People Officer. Leading the people department of a unique organisation, I think this is going to be a fascinating job to do. Another Brainfood Live topic perhaps?

Congratulations all on your career moves!

If you have made a senior exec appointment to your business,?and feel the wider community needs to know about it,?comment below?with the details and see it featured in next weeks issue.?Don't forget to @ mention me in it so that I see it

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What Are You Doing?

Will Staney has relaunched Talent Brand Alliance into Talent Alliance, this is the expansion of scope beyond EB and back into TA and HR. Fascinating to see this development, you can be sure that there will be plenty of opportunities to learn in the new structure that is being set up. Read the announcement here

If you are doing something new,?comment below?with what it is and share a link to where you want people to go. Don't forget to mention me in it so that I see it

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End Notes

3 more weeks before another trip Stateside. Been a year (two?) since I was last in the United States, and I'm looking forward to returning. There's going to be a lot of US community members I never get the chance to meet, so Recfest Nashville is going to be a great opportunity to do so.

Even better news? I'm on on the 13th, which leaves 14th, 15th and most of 16th free. Going to be great!

In the meantime, will be in London and aiming to out and about regularly, so hit me up if you're up for meeting up.

Til next week friends

Hung

Hung Lee is the curator of?Recruiting Brainfood, and now This Week In Recruiting. Subscribe to both if you are into recruiting or HR or just interested in world of work.