This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 67

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Open Kitchen:?How to Write a Book on Recruiting?

I've been asked to write a book, so this a genuine question as - naturally - I have no idea what I'm doing ??

Now this is just an e-book, as committing to writing 30,000 words on anything is not something you can pay me to do, but it will be a bigger written undertaking than I usually do, so whilst not exactly terra incognita, it is still certainly terra pericolosa. I'm going to use this space to openly discuss how I am thinking of doing it and would greatly appreciate any tips or observations you might have.

So the first thing to do is....sketch it out, I think?

1. Define the Audience: In-house Recruiters / Talent Acquisition Professionals

The brainfood audience is generally wider than this, as it includes agency recruiters, HR folks, recruitment technology professionals and basically everyone who is interested in hiring, but the brief is to narrow scope and focus on the TA audience. It's probably the biggest cohort in any case.

[image: Recruiting Brainfood demographics]

The above image is a visualisation of the distribution of subscribers of the Recruiting Brainfood email newsletter; it's a different people to This Week, In Recruiting, but I suspect the cohort might split similarly. I only collect email data upon registration at RBF but do some data enrichment to try and find out more about the audience, essentially finding LinkedIn profiles and from there pulling location, employer, job title data. From Job title and Employer, you have enough to create a taxonomy on what category of subscriber they are. I use 4 categories - agency recruiter, in-house recruiter, HR or other.

As the audience for this e-book is in-house recruiter, I do a quick filter and see this:

[Image: Recruiting Brainfood demographics, by category]

The most obvious observation is an exaggeration of the existing gender imbalance in the RBF community. Agency recruiters still skew male, especially in the UK, and the loss of the big blue London bubble is the most conspicuous difference between the two charts.

So, my target audience of in-house recruiters, who are most likely to be interested in this book, mainly operate from big metropolitan centres, use English as the primary language of work, and are clear majority women. What to do with this information? Whilst all gender identities in our industry care about the same things, there is some evidence that women care more about some topics, especially issues like DEIB, pay equity and social progressivism - see the What Do Recruiters Want? survey data especially on 'Organisational Preferences'. The question might be moot though, as it presupposes that I have the technical skill to modify my writing to the audience - no evidence of this!

2. Settle On A Title: (Got To Have 'How To' In It)

I don't have any data on the most effective book titles, but for recruiting I suspect that no one is going to be enthusiastic about titles which are cryptic or attempts at intrigue. This is not literature, but practical content which might help recruiters in their work. Also, as it is an e-book, so I expect it to be read in one sitting and perhaps kept as reference until it becomes dated. It is basically a mega blog post and so presumably the same rules might apply?

Ahrefs wrote a really good post on blog post titles and they laid out 7 types of formula which seem to work. I've laid them out on a table here, so you can get it all in one view.

[Image: Ahrefs: 7 Blog Title Formulas That Get Clicks (With Examples)]

See how it all works? All of them contain enough information to help time poor / attention short audience to quickly make a decision on whether it is worth it to invest time in the content. So right now I'm leaning on Option 2. Option 1 probably is too determinative, Option 5 is too bombastic, Option 6 and 7 both likely require greater knowledge than I currently possess (or intend to ever possess ??), whilst Option 3 and 4 don't quite fit.

It's probably bad practice but I usually start title first on most things (i.e Brainfood Live, essays like this, presentations etc..) and then improv my way through it, rather than laying the foundations and then settling on the title. As such, title selection is going to be a more significant decision for me than it might be for others, as it will have more influence over the structure and content of the book.

3. Select The Chapters

I feel something is missing here - maybe this would become clear once the title is confirmed? But broadly, my thoughts on this book is that it should be modular, so that each chapter is digestible on its own, with its content not contingent on any other chapter. This will lower the production costs, which if you've followed this newsletter for any period of time, you will already know is a core and necessary principle of everything I do.

So most obviously what I should do is use the Brainfood Categories as the individual chapters and say something practical about each of these.

[Image: Brainfood Larder]

If I do 10-15 Chapters, that would roughly correspondent with the most common Brainfood categories. These will also likely be the most interesting to the defined audience. The structure within each chapter might be a) short paragraph description of the state of the market as it pertains to X, Y, Z category, b) outline what top performing recruiters / recruiting teams seem to do for X, Y, Z, c) get a quote or case study from said team and d) offer a takeaway on what practical steps you can take to upgrade your capability in this area.

What do you think - would you read this?

Anyways, I think I might have got the outline here, so some evidence that writing helps thinking ??. Let me know if you have any requests on topics you want me to cover in this book, or if you have any book writing tips yourself - got to get it done in a month.

Out of the kitchen, onto the lounge ??

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What's in the News?

Personio raise $200 Million Series E Round

Was it Personio that started the funding round craziness in HR Tech? Since the first investment in 2016, the Munich based HRIS has had 8 funding rounds of a total value of $772 Million, now with a market cap of $8.5 Billion. Look forward to seeing what they are going to do with the money. Read all about it here

JobGet raise $52 Million Series B

Hourly worker talent marketplace emerging as a leader in the category, and this significant investment might help them solidify that position. Still US market platform, likely going to need an acquisition spree to get into the RotW. Read about the plans here

TestGorilla raise $70 Million Series A Round

Getting bombarded with ads for this company, so kudos to the ad retargeting team for at least getting the cohort right ??. Good to see significant investment still going into HR Tech - assessment, along with payroll, has been the biggest beneficiary of the shift to remote as employers seek additional data points to validate candidates for hire. How do TestGorilla plan to spend the money? Find out here

If you are a recruitment service provider or technology business and have any news to share,?comment below,?this is your application to get into next week's addition of This Week, In Recruiting. Make sure to @ mention me so that I see it

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What's On Offer?

FREE Pro Plan (no credit card required) for Comparable Companies

€400 per month, discounted to zero if you use this VIP link. It's a chrome plugin which enables recruiters to find - you guessed it - comparable companies to the company you are recruiting for. Great for business development and for identifying source sites for candidates. 10 slots available on the free plan, first come, first serve....

If you are a recruitment service provider or recruitment technology vendor have any exclusive offer for the community, comment below with your offer in order to be included in next week's edition of This Week, In Recruiting. Make sure to @ mention me so that I see it.

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What's Going On?

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep161 - How to Hire for a No Name Brand, Friday 1st July, 2pm BST

Are you tired of hearing hiring advice from recruiters who work for household names? Of course it is easier to hire if you work for a company everyone recognises - at least you won't have to explain what that business does, and the candidate is already aware of the career boost they may get by acquiring that employer on the CV! So what do you need to do if you're hiring for a business no one knows? We will be with Iwan Gulenko, Founder (CoderFit), Alla Pavlova, Recruiter (Riot Games) & Wim Dammans, Recruiter (TenneT) as we discuss tips, tools and techniques for engaging with candidates when you have zero brand. Register here

The Hiring Hunger Games: Tackling the TA Transformation of 2022, 5th July, 12pm CET

The tried and trusted way to get a great webinar is to get a load of smart of people on screen together talking freely about a topic they have educated opinions on. Our friends at ACELR8 are bringing together Matthias Schmei?er, formerly Global Director of Talent (Beamery), Zoé Cho, Head of Talent Acquisition (Pollen) and Michael Varley, CEO (ACELR8) to discuss state of the market and what recruiters can do to keep ahead of it. Register here

DisruptHR London, 6 July, The Royal Institution, London, UK

It's?Tim Sackett?again (you will?not?be able to get away from this guy this summer!), hosting the incredible format that is this is DisruptHR. The perfect appetiser for Recfest the next day in Knebworth Get your ticket?here

RECFEST, 7th July, Knebworth

I am just getting my head around the fact that the biggest recruiting event of the year is going to happening in 9 days time(!). I'm not ready, but I am super excited to be taking part in it. 3500 TA professionals from all over the world are joining what should be a spectacular day of knowledge sharing, community building and entertainment. Tickets sold out but there is a waitlist - worth putting your name down for this, just in case, do it 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 @ mention me so that I see it

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Who's Hiring?

Bilingual Technical Recruiter (Contract to Hire), Distillery, Remote USA

Recruiter, Wheely, London, UK

Talent Acquisition Partner, Join Talent, Remote UK

Talent Partner - South Africa, KANDIDATE, Remote Global

Partner, Life Sciences - SE Asia, Horton International, Remote Global

Principal Consultant, Logistics - SE Asia, Horton International, Remote Global

If you want to get your job featured, post jobs on the Brainfood Jobs Job Board?here

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Who's Moving?

Dan Logan joins Beamery as Senior Director of Global Recruiting, having previously led TA in fellow VC backed scale ups Sensat and The Trade Desk. Always interesting to work for a recruitment tech business as a recruiter - be interesting to see how much dogfood is being eaten here and how it might inform product roadmap!

Glenn Gutmacher joins NVIDIA as Talent Sourcing Training Manager after leading TA and TA upskilling efforts at Huron, State Street and Avanade. Those in the know will know that this is a coup - NVIDIA's hiring capability just got better.

Nathalie Robin joins LinkedIn as Senior Technical Recruiter - EMEA, after having spent 3 years hiring for tech at Amazon Web Services. There is an elite group of companies which are hugely significant for recruitment careers. Amazon is one, LinkedIn might be another.

Martin McDermott joins IQ-EQ as Global Head of Talent Acquisition, having previously headed up TA at Reward Gateway, Philip Morris International, Walgreen Boots Alliance, PwC and many other leading global organisations.

Emmy de la Cruz joins startup incubator, Newco as Director of Talent, having previously worked at the likes of Ro, Uber and Univision Communications. Doing the people job at incubator is different type of role, somewhere in between in-house / agency - working across the portfolio for a number of different companies, brands and cultures. Need a do a Brainfood Live on this I think

Amelia Bateman joins Acacium Group as Talent Attraction Team Manager having previously worked as TA and Recruitment BP Travis Perkins, Screwfix and Müller UK & Ireland.

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?

Alan Walker and Jeremy Russon are suspending the awesome work they do at Udder, to do even more awesome work to support the people of Ukraine. Driving a van full of supplies to people in need, and using the return journey to bring refugees to safety. It's a great cause from two great guys - support the effort 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

Last week before chaos ensues week following; not only Recfest but also the pre-event logistics of friends flying in, staying over and no doubt drinking and eating way too much. Looking forward to it, though I will need to figure out how to maintain this cadence on all the brainfood channels as I go.

Til next week folks

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.