This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 142

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Open Kitchen: What Happened in Recruiting in 2023 - Part One

It's become a December tradition on this newsletter to use the Open Kitchen segment to review what happened in the year we've just had in recruiting. It's obviously been a tough year so there won't be any happy talk here, only what I aim to be fair analysis on the key themes and trends we've experienced. I think I could write it all in one go, but it will be more readable if I split into segments, so this will be a three part series to take us up to Christmas Special.

Here's Part 1 of 3 - let me know what you think!

1. AI Mainstreamed But Remained An Individual Experience

Open AI's launch of ChatGPT in Nov 2022 set the stage for 2023 to be year when AI mainstreamed into widespread public adoption and usage. Recruiters - no different from any other human beings with access to a smartphone or a laptop - got into it and many of us had great fun experimenting with AI message composition, image / video generation, AI avatar training, AI-enabled process automation and the rest.

Our enthusiasm for AI was tangible and easily measured: the industry webinars which got the most registrations were inevitably those which had 'AI' or 'GPT' in the title, the talks which scored highest at industry events were inevitably the ones which included AI + recruitment. We were hungry as an industry to learn.

Individual Experimentation

And yet despite all the enthusiasm, traditional recruiting processes remained pretty much as they were. Whilst AI was widespread in usage, it remained locked at the level of the individual experimenter and struggled to manifest at institutional, company or even team level. I don't know of a single TA department which systematically rolled out AI to optimise recruiting processes, much less one which did so as some sort of strategic plan. Perhaps this will change in 2024 but something is beginning to tell me that perhaps GAI might always be primarily a personal journey of experimentation. We are going to collaborate with AI, develop our own idiosyncratic optimisations with AI, and then bring ourselves to fully to work as AI-enabled recruiters having mainly done it for ourselves.

2. Big Tech Winter Continued... All Year

The collapse of VC investment into the tech sector from Q2 2022 lasted all the way through to the end of 2023. Record interest rate hikes, hostile de-globalisation, cost of the living crisis and perhaps more than anything, the general expiration of post lockdown optimism meant that what some thought was a temporary blip on the investment landscape turned into a what felt like a permanent reset at a lower level.

The good news was that tech lay offs seemed to have peaked; the bad news was tech was no longer hiring at scale, and the sort of hyper scaling growth which powered the careers of many of a tech recruiter was nowhere to be seen.

Companies still need software developers and software developers were still getting jobs, but suddenly the employer profiles of those developers shifted with agriculture, green tech, pharmaceuticals, logistics take labour market share from the software. Tech recruiters duly followed btw

3. Real Recruiter Recession

Remember Peak Recruiter? That was in May 2021 when LinkedIn famously published data to show that the No1 fastest growing job profile on the platform was that of a recruiter.

Of course this correlates to back when VC investment into tech was at an all time high, with over 100 Billion allocated to a massive variety of world changing tech startups. The collapse in investment directly led to a collapse in the recruiter job market and we collectively entered into what many have said is the toughest recruiter job market they have ever seen.

The evidence from every source sign posts to the same conclusion - 1000's of applications for recruiter jobs, months on the market for even the strongest candidates, downward pressure on compensation on permanent and contract markets for those who were offered, and the withdrawal of remote as an option for all bar the very few fully remote employers out there.

Recruiters are resilient though and will find a way; many set up businesses and began trading as independents; a down market always sees a surge of entrepreneurship - it's pretty much how I got started when I first set off on my own in the immediate aftermath of Great Financial Crisis of 2008/2009. Fantastic also to see personal branding become rehabilitated, as newly minted business owners sought to claim a place in the public discourse and generate inbound for their services. Its natural that some will fail and I think a great many will succeed and one of the things I am planning to do in 2024 is find a way to help more become the latter than the former, so watch this space.

Anyhoo. The global economy might have escaped recession this year, but we didn't. 2023 was a recessionary year for us recruiters.

4. Reality Check on Candidate Experience

An unwanted outcome of so many us being on the job market this year was direct experience of the absolute state of the candidate experience. Recruiters on the market reporting how bad their experience was as a job seeker seemed to be one of the most popular genres of LinkedIn post in 2023. This was painful to witness for two reasons - for the now-candidate experiencing the emotional buffeting of application blackhole, canned email rejection, long recruiting processes with no conclusion, sudden ghosting after initial progression through process and for seemingly lack of progress we have made as an industry on humanising the job application experience, especially after the commitments we collectively made in the aftermath of the pandemic layoffs. Build Back Better? We maybe didn't build back at all.

Brainfood ran two webinars in Q1 and Q4 to track the state of the recruiter job market, and also to collate advice and learning from recruiters who had successfully found work in 2023 on what job seekers can do. They were great episodes and I highly recommend anyone who is looking for work in 2024 to have a watch / listen to them to pick up insight and motivation.

Bad CX wasn't restricted to recruiters looking for work; it seemed that many sectors became oversupplied with candidates and hence saw applicant volume increase per role. Higher volume, with less staff to handle it, inevitably trades off as degradation in CX.

The CandE's - now part of ERE - produced some great reports on the state of CX. General decline across regions and industries can be seen from 2022 onward, tied of course to the macro economic conditions of rapidly inflating cost of living, coupled with anaemic economic growth.

This tells us that there is a strong relationship between the external economic conditions and how job candidates experience the job search; there are less jobs, more competition for those jobs, less leverage in negotiations and so on. It's inevitably a worse experience than 2021, leading unfortunately to rising job seeker resentment for those in the front line of the delivering the CX

Figuring out a way to reverse these big arrows will be a priority for employers in 2024. To end on some good news on CX, we can see that employers are understanding that filling in the information gaps in the recruiting process is the most impactful way in which CX can be improved, and application of technology can directly address it.

Huge progress in the implementation of chatbots on career pages took place in 2023, with data from the Dutch market showing a doubling of the number of companies which had an active chatbot to handle candidate FAQ's

We can expect this number to at least double again in 2024, with the chatbots getting smarter, and better. It's small potatoes I know but it is something

5. Demographic Crisis Mainstreamed, Connected to Hiring Crisis

The debate on the 'missing millions' of unaccounted for workers subsumed into a more generalised debate over the demographics of society. A topic long exiled to the fringes of the political right, concepts like the TFR (Total Fertility Rate) and 'Society Dependency Ratio' become more common in mainstream discourse, with economists and industry analysts alike seeking to find explanations for the incongruity between mass redundancies + persistent shortage of workers.

The pattern is clear for those who want to see it; the shortfall of labour falls primarily in front line workers - electricians, nurses, sanitation workers, construction, drivers, retail staff - all the jobs we called 'essential' during lockdown yet remained stubbornly 'unattractive' for workers already in-country. We shouldn't be surprised - tough, physical work, usually poor compensated, usually low status and of course, inherently without the benefit of remote.

The standard pro forma of society over the past few decades is to resolve the problem with one of immigration, automation or privatisation, none of which a true solutions but patches which temporarily cover a problem which at root lies in the failure of society to produce enough people to become these workers, whilst increasing standard of living on aggregate and for all. This is not a Western problem, but a global one where economic development is tightly correlated with lower birthrate.

For us recruiters, these societal conditions manifest in jobs which are extremely challenging to recruit for, which in turn leads us to push solutions internally for skills based hiring, internal mobility, improved retention, investment in training, reducing friction for immigrant relocators and promotion of off shoring or remote anywhere. These activities are all outside traditional core competence for recruiters who have been defined by hiring external resources, but I think I saw scope expansion amongst some of us who saw the wisdom of taking on more when the boss said 'do more with less'. There were Heads of TA, becoming Heads of People, a trend which I expect to accelerate in 2024.

6-10 in Part Two Next week.

Now out of the kitchen, onto the lounge ??

What's in the News?

Congratulations!

All the news in the past week has been about awards - IHR 2023, FIRM 2023 and many many others. I want to take the moment to congratulate all the participants and the winners. Mostly, lets remember that the awards ceremonies are celebrations of excellence, whilst celebrating being part of the community. See you all at one of these this week ??

If you have any news which you think the wider market needs to know about, put into comments below on this thread.

What's Going On?

Big List of Recruiter Events to Attend in 2023 & 2024

Nearly at 100 events on Big List in 2024. Keep adding to this folks - any events in Recruiting or HR you think people should know about, add to the bottom of the list. We are close to making this the one stop shop for all your event needs in 2024!

TATech Europe and The EMEA Job Board Forum, 4-6 December, Carisbrooke Hall, London, UK, 4.30pm til late

This may be my last event of 2023 - I am pretty sure that this is it as far as my on-premise attendance to things is concerned! Looking forward to the fireside chat on this, as well as speaking to the delegates who care about work tech and job boards. See you there if you fancy it! Register here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep236 - 2023 In Review: Recruitment Advertising & Employer Branding, 8th December, 2pm GMT

Part 2 of our look back of the year - today's topics are Recruitment Advertising and Employer Branding. Making no excuse of the massive ensemble cast, you can better believe that this is like peak Tarantino film period ??. We're with Alex Chukovski, Founder (Crypto Careers), Robin Stander, VP Sales (Appcast), Josh Willows, Head of Programmatic Sales (Veritone), Jeff Dickey-Chasins, (The Job Board Doctor), Steve Ward, Head of Employer Branding Solutions, (Universum) & Vicki Saunders, Founder (EVP) & Charu Malhotra, Head of Global Talent Branding (PA Consulting) - register here

HR Trends and Predictions for 2024, 12 December 3pm GMT

Excited to conclude this four part series with Cronofy with a look ahead for 2024. And who better to help us think through that we think is going to happen next year at Matt Alder, Founder, (Recruiting Futures), Celinda Farias Appleby, Global Director of Talent Acquisition (Visa) and Adam Bird, CEO of Cronofy. Register here

SOSUAI, 14th December, 12pm CET

Few people are able to pull together expertise from the sourcing community like Phil Tusing. This line up looks like the global whose who on sourcing, with a particular focus on people who have lead the way with experimentation on the use of Generative AI for recruiting. Paid for event, but if you are going to spend anything on L&D this year, this is the one to do it on. Tickets here

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

Whose Story?

Sophie Power, Talent Acquisition Lead, looking for next challenge

Sophie has been such a great contributor to the community over the years, its been a real pleasure to know to get to know her as a person. Recently relocated from London to Scotland, Sophie took the opportunity of this life change to answer 20 questions - here are her answers.

PS: if you're looking to hire for a TA lead in Scotland, this is your girl

If you want to take part in this series, comment below and volunteer your interest. Free and available for all comers

Who's Hiring?

EMEA Corporate Recruiter - Technical, ISS, London, UK

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.

Whose Available?

That's 400 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.

Who's Moving?

Travis Ousley, joins The LEGO Group as People Partner. What a fantastic, peripatetic career so far - Managed by Q, Axiom, Andela, Brazen - from US to Africa to UK and now to Denmark. This is the type of timeline I would've loved to have had if I could do over ??. Congratulations Travis, interesting to see how you get on in Billund...

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.

What Are You Doing?

Michael Talarek has a new book out Excelling at Dashboards with Google Spreadsheets: from simple habits to scalable practices (English Edition)

Chance Bleu-Montgomery, Partners Support Manager at Bridge of Hope Careers is creating a space on the 21st December to support the homeless this winter. Donate what you can here and come along if you're around Deptford and want to get to know people from the community.

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.

End Notes

I'm at the TATech and NORA's later this week, so come up and say hello if you are at those events. In the meantime, hope everyone is enjoying this run up to Christmas - great excuse to catch up with friends who I have not been able to properly see all year.

Have a great week everybody

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.