This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 156

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Open Kitchen: Macro Trends

1. Global Search for RightSizing

'Doing more with less' has been the C-Level instruction to departmental heads ever since the US Federal Reserve started to raise interest rates almost exactly 2 years ago in March 2022. The de facto end of the decade plus long era of cheap money meant the end of hyper-scaling, daily announcements of yet another Unicorn fund raise, rocketing wage increases and crazy competition for the highly skilled, in-demand. For recruiters, it also meant the end of our mini-golden age - a short period after the lockdown era and before the end of ZIRP - where we were amongst those highly-skilled, in-demand and could command our price and conditions to companies who saw failure to acquire enough talent as the most significant constraint to competitiveness.

Two years in and everyone now knows we're in for the long haul. Companies know they cannot continue to carry the cost base as if a return to 2021 is around the corner; those that have not already undergone restructure will need to be doing so over the coming months and years, with a particular focus on rationalisation of middle management and back office administration. Workforce planning teams will no doubt also be scrutinising the degree to which different functions might be replaced by technology, with 'AI exposure' becoming a key consideration as to whether to stick or twist on the growth of this or that department.

Needless to say, any role which involves high degree of repetitive information processing, with low collaboration intensity, is going to go - first outsourced, then offshored, then finally automated.

What Does this Mean for Recruiters?

External recruiters need to be smart in choosing their domains. That companies might get smaller on aggregate doesn't mean hiring is going to stop; it simply means it will be concentrated on those functions which businesses see as core rather than peripheral. For internal recruiters, the need is to expand scope; narrow focus on hiring external headcount is great when talent hoarding was a thing, but in the era of rationalisation, we need to look beyond acquisition and think instead of talent access and deployment, becoming the function that delivers skills on-demand to business regardless of the form of contractual relationship those resources have to the business.

2. SBH-SBO

From Skills Based Hiring to Skill Based Organisation, the idea has achieved a momentum which is coming to close consensus; even the detractors best argument comes from implementation challenges rather than objecting to the concept. What is SBH / SBO? At the lowest level of maturity it is the abandonment of credentialism in favour of skills based assessment; at the highest level of maturity it is a new model of organisation where skills flow to the business need without the artificial constraints of 'jobs' or 'departments'.

Imagine the 'boundaryless' organisation from the CEO perspective; talent on-demand when you need it - this is the Uber-eats of business management, no more battling with your business to get it to what you need for it to do. Some pre-conditions exist before such a utopia can emerge; alignment of skills needed with business objectives, audit of skills per worker currently in the business, calculation of 'talent density' within critical skills required, a method of assessing those skills for internal and external resources, a method tracking 'skills fade', a mechanism for continuous skills acquisition, a matching engine which can connect active, verified skills with business need. It's nothing less than a cultural revolution.

What Does This Mean for Recruiters?

Read and React to the trend. SBH / SBO is likely to stick, especially as there is fundamental agreement from all parts of the spectrum that better understanding of the distribution of skills in the organisation is key to unlocking greater operational efficiency. External recruiters should invest in assessment tooling to upgrade the value of their service offering, especially if those assessments can be benched against the market. Internal recruiters need to take a walk down the corridor toward the L&D department. Those two functions need to work more closely together - maybe even come together formally - as the distinctions between the two departments will begin to blur in this boundaryless future.

3. Quantified Organisation

A major outcome of the decades long process of digital transformation of business processes has the massive production of operational data. To date, companies have struggled to convert this resource into useful intelligence, despite technological advances (Organisational Network Analysis) and cultural initiatives ('data driven decision making'). The reason is simply the practical challenge of collecting, collating and interpreting the data generated by the workforce couldn't be overcome with the technologies we then had to hand. Organisations suffered from 'data overload' and only the very largest of enterprises - typically those who had come from manufacturing and logistics - had any kind of system that could provide business intelligence to the C-suite.

Does AI change the game here? Suddenly, the problem of information overload can seemingly be solved by Generative Artificial Intelligence available to the masses. The infusion of GenAI into the product roadmaps of every software provider out there means that opportunity for business intelligence becomes inherent in every piece of software. Instead of a world where specialist business intelligence teams would export and aggregate data from disparate systems and to produce reports, we have a world where the users have direct access to intelligence in real time.

The shift from Reporting to Intelligence might be imperceptible but will be profound as employers who embrace the most permissive policies for the collection of data outperform those who do not or will not collect such data. The shape of those organisations will flatten, as the bureaucratic infrastructure - set up in order to provide reporting and already under pressure by the global move to rationalise - will further streamline as reporting requirements atrophy in favour of real time data analytics.

What Does This Mean For Recruiters

For External Recruiters, we might see a temporary surge in demand for data analytics / business intelligence skills; transformations take time and often require the very skills today which will be dis-intermediated tomorrow. For Internal Recruiters, the opportunity is there to be at the forefront of the Quantified Organisation. Mature TA departments might already be highly quantified when it comes to talent acquisition metrics; for those departments it is a matter of doubling down on this progress as AI and AI-infused products increasingly expand the data universe which can viewed.

4. Next Generation of HR Tech

The HR Technology landscape is undergoing its own transformation, with the outcome being significantly upgraded tools for the TA / HR community. The meteoric impact of Generative AI has enabled existing software vendors to rapidly build new functionality which have direct recruiting application - message composition, information ingestion and review, candidate sorting and matching, candidate sourcing and discovery, interview transcription and analysis and so on.

Image credit: The future of software UX: an early glimpse into AI’s impact

These 'AI-infused' vendors are joined in an increasingly fragmented marketplace by 'AI-native' providers who provide a much fundamental challenge as to how software should look and work. Usually starting from the conversational interface, these providers are unencumbered by legacy software architecture which for some more venerable market leaders is now decades old and able to more closely align their user experience to the SBH / SBO future which the majority is pointing towards. The winner will be the one which manages to actuate the boundaryless organisation of talent on-demand.

What Does This Mean For Recruiters?

The 'AI-enabled recruiter' switched archetypes from lonely individual experimenter to any-user-of-standard-ATS in the blink of an eye. We are all going to get Ai-enabled, whether we want to be or not and recruiters will objectively get better; whether we get more competitive is another question as the ubiquity of AI means that the table stakes have simply got higher for everybody. The mission for recruiters - external or internal - is simply not to get left behind. Because it will become conspicuous if you do.

5. Demographics Driving Diversity

I remain bullish on Diversity. Even though we are experiencing an unpleasant global 'Woke-lash' - which we can anticipate will become more acute as 2024 democratic elections worldwide exacerbate cultural conflict - the fact remains that there is both a hiring crisis in certain industry sectors (healthcare, constructions, retail, name-your-essential-worker-profession) and a demographic crisis for every country which has achieved economic development. We are living longer and having less kids, so are getting progressively older as a society, with the concurrent increase of the 'dependency ratio' of tax payer-to-tax-consumer.

It should not surprise us that the sectors where labour is in shortest supply are precisely the sectors which require physically able bodies to perform the work. We don't have any solutions, just trade offs which we have to make. Immigration is one, politically unpalatable though this has become in the Western world, it is still clearly the fastest way to plug gaps in the labour force. Increasing automation is another - this is the search for productivity out of necessity - as vacancies that remain unfilled for too long will inevitably be abandoned in favour of a reworked process which does not require the hiring of the worker. Embracing diversity will be inevitable in order to expand the talent pool of potential labour already in country. Entrenching workplace flexibility will be a key for attracting and retaining women in the workforce, cultivating a values first business culture will better enable a connection with Gen Z who will become the dominant generational cohort over the coming years and dynamically adapting jobs as employees age might be key to extending the working life of mature workers

What Does This Mean For Recruiters?

This means good news for recruiters, as diversity becomes less of a moral and more a practical imperative. Employers need to access more pools of talent. Society need more economically active people. For external recruiters this means an opportunity to develop a service which can supply previously untapped talent, perhaps with a skills assessment compatible with the SBH/SBO future. For Internal recruiters this means taking a walk down the corridor to OD and working closely together to design work where the template isn't a 25 year old single male but one which might be compatible for people from all kinds of circumstances and responsibilities. It's a good future, if we can free the time to grab it.

OK that's it for this week. Probably going to do a Part Two and maybe Three on this, let me know if you think it might be valuable.

Now out of the kitchen, onto the lounge ??

What's in the News?

hackajob enters India market

Congratulations to Mark Chaffey and all the hackajob crew on entry to the India market. Great challenge to take on but what a fantastic opportunity in one for the fastest growing economies in the world and one of the centres of global software engineering talent. More on this from Mark here .

EU AI Act Becomes Law

The first thing to know for AI vendors and users is where exactly on the risk frame work does your implementation of AI sit. In the main, the TA / HR stuff is at Minimal and Limited Risk, but this escalates as we move AI closer to executive decision making. The EU AI Act is a union wide directive so national governments will need to interpret. A mini-industry of AI safety consultants already emerging - at least somebody will make good from this! Read more here

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 2024

There are 100+ events in the Big List of Recruiting and HR Events to Attend in 2024 - make sure you bookmark this spreadsheet, share it with your event organiser and event going friends and get yourself to one of these this year. If you see any that are missing and should be there, please do add to the bottom of the spreadsheet - I will merge them in weekly.

The Recruitment Agency Expo , 19th-20th March, London Excel

This is the largest event for Recruitment Agencies in the UK. If you are working on the third party side, providing services to recruitment agencies, or just want to learn what is going on in the agency landscape in 2024, this is the event to attend. Incredible line up, curated by Programme Director par excellence, Louise Triance. I've got a bit part, but come and see Greg Savage , Christina Robinson , James Osborne , Neil Carberry and the rest. It's going to be an amazing two days. Free to attend - grab a ticket here .

Drive Engagement with Recruitment Video in 2024 , Wednesday 20th March, 1pm EST

Join SparcStart on March 20th at 1:00 pm EST as SparcStart CEO, Maury Hanigan, hosts a panel discussion with three top recruitment marketers. These marketers generated more than 1,000 votes for their videos in the 2024 TA Week Recruitment Video contest. Learn how they generated both internal and external engagement in this 30-minute candid conversation. Maury will be joined by Jennifer Pio (Manager of Employer Branding - BluePearl), Peyton Eckman (Social Media Coordinator - Eide Bailly LLP), and Cheryl Edge (Bilingual Recruitment Manager – Make a Future). They will discuss their use of video in their recruitment marketing efforts and how they drive engagement to their content. Additionally, we will go in depth on the TA Week Recruitment Video Contest and their strategies to generate high levels of engagement to their respective video submissions. Register here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep250 - What Do Developers Want? Skills & Sentiment Report 2024 , Friday 22nd March, 2pm GMT

One of the most important tech recruiting reports of every year is Developer Skills Report by HackerRank. Who better to talk us through the insights than HackerRank VIP's Vivek Ravisankar , CEO (HackerRank) and Juan Herrera , President, Global Field Operations (HackerRank). What skills are developers prioritising? How do developers think about the future of AI in development? What are the main components of an attractive package for Software developers? Must attend for any tech recruiters out there: Register here

Candidate Psychology in the Hiring Process , Wednesday 27th March, 10.00am GMT

A lot of TA / HR leaders out there in this tough job market - do we know what it looks like for senior execs who may be unfamiliar with navigating the job search? We're going to dive into the psychology of the job search for an experienced TA / HR Leader and better understand how reformed candidate experience can make the difference. We're with Vicki Saunders , Founder (The EVP Consultancy), Helen James , Senior Talent Acquisition Operations Director (ex-Pearson), Malin Freiman Moezzi , Psychologist, (Malin Moezzi). Adam Bird , CEO (Cronofy) in the co-pilot seat. Make sure to join - register here

TA Leaders Workforce Planning Masterclass , Wednesday 27th March, 12.00pm GMT

Workforce planning has got to be one of the key responsibilities which TA need to embrace, in order to fully transition away from being a delivery function responding to requirements. Do we know how to get there, can we demonstrate the value, what are the tools which are available for us to use? We're with industry brains Yasar Ahmad , Global VP of People, HelloFresh, Kesh Ladwa , Head of Talent Acquisition (ex-BBC) and Danny Hodgson , Founder, Foresight. Register 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

Who's Hiring?

Talent Acquisition Partner - FTC 8 months , Informa, London, UK

People Operations Specialist , Blinkist, Berlin, Germany

Senior Recruiter , Western Union, Vienna, Austria

Aggregator is still up so check it out yourself, here.

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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 435 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.

What Are You Doing?

Bob Pulver is setting up the AI Exchange (AIX) - new community focusing on sharing knowledge on the evolving state of the AI regulatory environment. Plenty of mileage to be had with this community - get in and join.

Sarah White is launching the Annual Work Insights Survey . 10 minutes to do this folks, I encourage you to take part and contribute to greater intelligence we all need access to.

Alex Her, Co-founder, The EB Space, is launching the Value of Employer Brand survey. If you're in the EB business and want to get a read as to what the rest of your industry peers are thinking about the state of the function, this is the time to get your voice heard.

If you have any personal news or initiative that you want to share, make sure you comment on the this newsletter with your news.

End Note

Any one going to Recruitment Agency Expo tomorrow?

Come up and say hello if you are. See you there!

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.