This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 99

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Open Kitchen: 5 Reasons Why You Should Publicly Document Your Recruiter Job Search

I had a conversation with a friend of mine yesterday, a recruiter who was on the market again and looking for work. Obviously the market is tougher today than it has been and we both agreed that recruiter jobseekers are going to need to step up to secure options which would have been coming rather more easily only 12 months ago. My friend is going to do exactly this with an 'open kitchen' style approach to their job search, and I thought it would be fitting to use this space to explain why I thought this was a great idea, and maybe something all recruiter jobseekers out there might consider doing.

Here are 5 Reasons Why You Should Publicly Document Your Recruiter Job Search.

1. Maintains Morale By Filling the 'Routine Gap'

One of the biggest disruptions of being involuntarily unemployed is the sharp and severe dislocation from work routine. I think we underestimate who much working for a company provides structure to our day. When we are suddenly made redundant, the initial shock soon gives way to a wide open space formerly occupied by 'being an employee of X employer'

Image: Brainfood Live On Air - Ep183 - Understanding the Psychology of Recruiter Redundancy

Now we all do need a break sometimes. And if you have the resources, it probably does make sense to take some time off and decompress from what can be an overly rigorous work schedule. However, it is likely not a good thing for this decompression to be the permanent state. Human beings need things to do and if we do no nothing, we typically end up filling the gap with consumption (i.e. vegging out on the sofa watching Netflix) and we might quickly end up in a state of torpidity from which it is difficult to emerge.

Publicly diarising your job search journey is a form of public accountability and as such, a useful motivation technique. Make your updates into a daily habit, and it can be an incredibly motivating force, with all the consequent benefits that being highly motivated often brings - increased action orientation, consistently higher energy, greater sensitivity to opportunities - vital components for increasing your chances in a competitive job market.

2. Increases Market Intelligence

Documenting the journey is also a great way of figuring out WTF is going on. I've teased a little in previous writings that there may be something of a mini Labour Market Paradox in the recruitment sector, where the surplus of qualified candidates does not entirely address the hiring challenges of employers with recruiter vacancies.

We speculate upon these mysteries but active job seekers have direct contact with reality and as such have the best chance of actually finding out what is going on. Collect the data and figure out what the situation is from your baseline behaviour - how many applications to convert to interview, how many interviews to convert to 2nd stage - you know the drill, these are the same conversion metrics we use ourselves when we are recruiting others. Applying them to our own circumstances now can give us the best idea as to how the market is going in our particular sector or region.

Furthermore, we can use the same purpose for those metrics - to identify areas where adjustments might deliver better results. Do cover letters matter any more? Do an experiment and find out. Apply for the next 10 vacancies with a well researched and prepared cover letter and then compare it with 10 more applications without any effort at a cover letter. See what happens. Document it and share it, because guess what? We want to know. Quantifying results in this way lends itself to further experimentation - you might discover new patterns which challenge existing orthodoxies, and because it was you who found it, you might well have first mover in taking advantage of it.

3. Disguised Availability Advert

One of the cleverest posts I featured recently in Recruiting Brainfood was What We Look For In A Candidate by Chip Huyen, where he broke down his thought process on hiring, exposed his assessment and decision making philosophy, as well as hinting at the candidate and employee experience an applicant might expect to receive if they were selected to go forward. I thought it was a clever disguised job advert because lots of his target audience (software engineers) were reading it and I suspect a fair few might have reached out to Chip afterward for prospects of future work.

I feel this is an example which can be mirrored by a job seeker to similar effect. By publicly sharing your job search philosophy, your data collection methodology and how your approach to closing the informational feedback loop to change behaviour and improve results, you might not only create a valuable addition to the job search corpus, but also a device which can function as a disguised 'availability' announcement. A recruiter on the open market looking for work will have no doubt made a public announcement on LinkedIn already but such announcements only tend to work once. It is not hard to imagine repeated appeals for 'anyone looking for a recruiter' quickly producing diminishing returns as friends and contacts run out of ideas and become embarrassed at their failure to be of more use. Job seekers can solve this problem by simply being more subtle in the announcements - talk about the your findings on the job search, do it as documentarian by stating the observations before adding your intuitions, and regularly update on progress. A real time public record of your job search - whether this is on Notion, Coda, Mural, Miro or whatever tool you prefer, gives you a high visibility marketing tool that advertises your availability but does so with enough camouflage for it to be repeated without it be being onerous on the audience.

4. Deepen A Technical Skill

Notion, Coda, Mural, Miro.

I mentioned the above tools because I think they are of a generation of software that have come out over the past few years which enable non-technical users to create digital applications which would have previously required strong technical knowledge to do. We should not underestimate the level of enablement that this has provided for us recruiters. Whether you want to create a web page, a multi-user access table, a community wiki or any number of use cases, you can do it yourself with these tools, where previously you would have required the support of team members from another department or even hired an external contractor to build it, both options of which immediately put you at a disadvantage, with the utility of your project contingent on suppliers who may not share (or worse, respect...) your vision, nor the same sense of urgency to get it done.

It's one of my many regrets that I yet to develop any substantive competence with any of them, but I fancy if Brainfood were suddenly to be interrupted and I was thrust into the sunlight with no newsletter to write, I'd probably dive into building something with one of these tools.

Documenting and publishing your job seeker journey with one of these tools might equally be considered an opportunity to learn new skills and improve your future capability. As it's married to a purpose - you are looking for a job - so the motivation to do it should be high and therefore the chances of developing the skill improves. Whether it helps in the immediate case or not, you can consider it a win if you emerge from the job search period with enhanced capabilities in a competitive market for skills.

5. Evidence Method / Showcase Working Style

We've reached peak CV antipathy in recruitment. No one with any klout to care about defends them anymore, you're guaranteed to go viral on LinkedIn if you lambast them and employers are all rushing to remove them from their recruiting processes. The reason is obvious - the most important information about a job candidate - how they actually work / operate - is rarely captured in a document which priorities professional biography above all else. What recruiters and hiring managers really want to know is how job candidates are going to work within my team. To figure this out, is the reason why we have so many stages of assessment!

What if we were able to provide evidence of our working style in advance? The tech world has known about this for a decade before us, where open source contributions in the software community have been so highly valued because it gave managers a window into the working style of the candidate via the code repositories, an insight otherwise unavailable in a CV.

Recruiters who publicly document their job search provides information to employers analogous to developer's open source commits. You are exposing your mental approach to solving a challenging problem, demonstrating your capability of collecting data / drawing conclusions / adjusting behaviour and showing how to present the findings and communicate them to a public audience. This is extremely rich data, far more than can be gleaned from a CV or even a comprehensive online profile. It's a different category of data - not marketing collateral like a CV, but operational data on how you work as a professional.

There's probably more reasons, but there's 5 at least which I think provide a legitimate case for the idea of Open Kitchen-ing your recruiter job search. Let me know if anyone ends up doing this, I'd be keen to know how you get on!

Out of the kitchen, onto the lounge ??

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What's in the News?

Tribepad Raise ￡12 Million

Big news in the UK ATS space - Tribepad raise ￡12 Million, and I think the first major fundraise they've made. Popular product, especially within healthcare, retail, government sectors. Look forward to seeing what they do with this investment. Thanks for Chris Cotterill , Head of Marketing (Tribepad) for keeping me in the loop - blog post on the announcement here

Recruitment Marketing startup Dalia raises $5 Million Series A

High volume hiring is where the need is most acute, and finally the sector is receiving the attention of recruitment technology providers focusing on this space. Dalia close their Series A round and great see some familiar faces leading the charge: congrats to CEO Sam Fitzroy , VP of Marketing Birch Faber and the rest of the crew. Incidentally, you can get a demo on Dalia tomorrow. Register for the webinar 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?

Dhevesh Mewawalla , Head of UK & International Expansion (Alva Labs) is offering 15% off annual an contract with recruitment assessment provider Alva Labs! for anyone who signs on before 15th March. You got 6 weeks folks!

I took part in a great webinar hosted by Dhevesh, where Linnea Bywall , Head of People at Alva Labs explained the Big 5 Personality Assessment and how we can use it for better hiring and people management. Do the personality assessment for free here - if we can get over 1,000 results, we’ll put out a joint report on?the state of recruitment personality?later this year!

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?

Big List of in-Person Recruiting / HR Events to Attend in 2023

Updated from last week, the Big List is the one place where we are gathering ALL the in-person recruiting and HR events in one spreadsheet. Make sure you bookmark or download this spreadsheet as you see fit, and feel free to share with any one who you think might benefit from it. For conference organisers, if you have doing something this year and it is NOT already on the sheet, add it to the bottom and I will merge it in. Cheers!

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep192 - Recruiter Use Cases for ChatGPT, Part2 , Fri 10th February, 12pm GMT

We had to bring this back folks - Generative AI is eating the world of work and we recruiters had better get to the bottom of it. We're running again a 90 minute special on recruiter use cases, product demo's and some good old fashioned speculation as to what it all portends. With Martyn Redstone , Founder (BotJobs), Marcel van der Meer , Sourcing Trainer (Klikwork), Christine Ng , Head of Talent & Media (Quantum Motion), Alan Walker , Founder (Udder), Alla Pavlova , Recruiter (Riot Games) & friends. 500+ already registered - don't miss this one folks - register here

Founders Focus - Ep36 - Up close and personal with Mark Chaffey, CEO hackajob

One of the most dynamic and energetic CEO's in the recruitment tech space is UK's own Mark Chaffey , CEO of hackajob and I'm delighted to be welcoming him back to Founder Focus, the show where we get up close and personal with the people making the technology which is changing the work we do today. Join if you're interested in entrepreneurship, leadership as the youngest person in the company, growing in the face of competition and how expand the business beyond the UK. register here

Recruiters Unite , Thurs 9th March, Lagoon Beach Hotel, Cape Town

Are you going to Recruiters Unite? I'm going to be there and I'm already looking forward to seeing as many of you there I can. I'm going to be giving the opening keynote in what will probably be my only public speaking engagement of the year. So make sure you grab a ticket?here ?and come up and say hello when you do!

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 & Who's Available?

Lets face it folks - when the layoffs come, it will be recruiters who get hit first and hardest! And guess what, it would be rather weird if that wasn't the case. Whilst it is important to make the case against hasty firings in any department, we should be collectively busy in expanding scope of the role beyond acquisition side of talent so that we can continue to be high value to employers when the business is contracting. On the individual side, recruiters should ALWAYS BE HEDGING - so apply to join the Brainfood Talent Community, where you can discreetly signal your status (from 'ready to interview' to 'open to conversations') to employers who are hiring for recruiters. Employers click here and use the coupon code: BTCFREE for 100% discount db search and job post.

We are up to 120 available and ready-to-interview candidates on the Brainfood Talent Community. If you're hiring for recruiters or HR staff, apply for a free company account and get access?here , using this code 'BTCFREE' for 100% usage. If you're a recruiter or HR person looking for work, you can apply?here , and increase your exposure to employers vetted by me!

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Who's Moving?

Adam Gordon leaves iCIMS having completed the task of integrating both technology and team at Candidate-ID. Looks like Adam is going to be a free radical for a period, so available as a consultant for recruitment technology firms for organisations building more effective recruitment marketing capacity. Of course, you can catch Adam regularly on Brainfood Live every Friday, where is a the resident co-pilot. Reach out to Adam if you think he can help with you with anything.

Bryan Chaney joins Crunchyroll as Vice President Internal Communications & Talent Brand, having previously worked in talent brand and comms roles with the likes of Workrise, Indeed and Twilio. Few are going to have the know-how and industry heft as Bryan - some coup here by Crunchyroll!

Steven Brand joins EY as Head of Employer Brand, boomeranging back after a decade away with other great companies such as Deloitte, Randstad SourceRight, HSBC, Mambu and AIA Worldwide. Don't think that many will have had a better view of EB from an enterprise perspective. Need to get you back o Brainfood Live hombre ??

Anna Vecher joins Wolt as Tech Talent Lead, having previously led the Talent Acquisition functions at SumUp and BitPanda. I think I first connected with Anna when she was working at GetYourGuide - some CV being built up here with some of the most significant scale ups in the Berlin scene. Congrats on the move Anna!

Pete Donaldson joins Instant Impact as Chief Growth Officer. Pete has over two decades of leadership experience from both the military and managing revenue organisations for some of the industry's leading businesses and, most recently, has headed growth in EMEA and the Americas at Resource Solutions. This looks like a high impact hire, especially intriguing to see how lessons transfer between different domains!

Some promotions to celebrate: Yasar Ahmad expands his scope by stepping up to Global Vice President - Talent, Mobility & Rewards, Maryann Lee Mathew is promoted to Head of Research & Development at Universum, the mega Rich Lewis-Jones goes up to VP Sales Asia Pacific and finally, over at?Join Talent ?we’ve seen?Annie Leach ?and?Lee Harding ?taking on promotions, with Annie taking on the role of Chief of Staff and Lee moving into the Director of Talent Acquisition, Enablement & Talent Intelligence position - congratulations all!

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?

Jay Patel has got a new soundtrack for us to listen to this week folks. Have a listen to 'After Dinner' - it's really rather good, especially for focus music.

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

For folks reading the Sunday newsletter also, I'm running a poll on which workshop topics I should be doing for folks who might be interested in learning some tips in what I've picked up from doing this for the past 5-6 years.

Poll currently looks like this, so I let me know if comments below which option you prefer me to do first.

I'm thinking that this will be a private, invite only, non-broadcast or recorded type of session, so not entertainment for the masses but a knowledge share for people who want to do a bit more creation, audience building, revenue generation from running a solo business.

Comment below folks, and have a great week

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.