This weeks brainfood is supported by our friends at Lavalier by Textio
Better hires, half the time. What happens when hiring is finally structured at scale.
Every TA leader has lived with the speed-versus-quality tradeoff for too long: go faster and quality slips; raise the bar and hiring slows down.
But slow hiring and bad hiring come from the same place: a process that isn’t structured.
When hiring criteria isn’t clear and interviews are improvised, every interviewer assesses something different, candidates aren’t evaluated fairly, and teams stall and re-interview to improve decision confidence. That’s what produces both the delay and the mis-hire. Fix the structure and you fix both at once.
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SPONSORS
Friends,
Limited Offer: 4 x Free Tickets to Recfest 2026 Knebworth
I hadn’t realised until Jamie reminded me that as a speaker I have some complimentary tickets to Recfest 2026! Everyone I know is already going but I suspect some of you might be thinking about it and have yet to decide: hopefully this 100% discount can help persuade you 🤣.
Link to tickets here and use the code: brainfood@rf
Thanks to: Joey NK Koksal, Garry Turner, Gautam Ghosh, Dave Hazelhurst, Steven Brand, Chris Brown, Chantelle Jones, Adam Gordon, Rob Walker, Jessica Zwaan, Adam Horne, Darren Bush, Alla Pavlova, Anita Lettink, Ritu Mohanka, Alisher Jafarov, Colin Donnery, Dave Hazelhurst, Gautam Ghosh and Kevin Green - thanks for your public endorsements on all things brainfood - keeping this show on the road. Cheers!
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Firstly, great to see how mainstream AI note takers have become - nearly 70% of us have something in place. Still a huge market to shoot for tho, so great news for vendors competing in this space. Thanks for all who voted - make sure you scroll down to the bottom of the newsletter and vote on this week’s poll
No surprises what the big event is this week - it’s the biggest and still the best festival for recruitment - it’s Recfest 2026 at Knebworth Park. I’m going to be there with a keynote presentation the title of which I am still unsettled upon, at 10.00am on the Inspire Stage, and thereafter just roving around in the place. Make sure you come up and say hi if you’re there!
Next day, we’re doing The Evolution of Talent CRM’s - Community Building in the Agentic Era. Friday 3rd July, 2pm BST - can we do a better job of nurturing our relationships with previously acquired candidates? Tons of great chat on this - register here
This one caught me by surprise - a rather low wattage announcement that LinkedIn is going to formally create a marketplace where users can monetize their reach. Lots of things to think about here - the value of audience, decline of trust in traditional marketing channels, facebook / google both fumbling the ball when it comes to B2C social - and of course, how influencer marketing can be directly used as recruitment advertising.
CREATOR ECONOMY
There are a small number of us in the TA / HR community who are ‘frontier edge’ experimenters when it comes to AI & Automation. Brainfooder Guillaume Alexandre is one of those. He’s produced something here which I think everyone should read: a survival guide for HR, which covers not only the present but also the near future, especially on the requirement we all have to seriously investigate local, open source, on premise AI. Must read folks.
AI
One of the most underestimated ways which AI will impact employment will be to decouple capacity from labour; the aim of every CEO is now to establish ‘one person departments’ - Bersinian Superworkers who can do the work which previously might have required a full department. Yet this logic extends: if one person + ai agents can do all the work, why not step outside of the employment structure and collect more of the value? From the look of this excellent report from Stripe, it looks like its happening.
FUTURE OF WORK
Where are we with hybrid working? Analysis of 100,000+ UK and EU tech job postings, to see how hybrid is at least being advertised, and how this correlates with candidate expectations and behaviour. Some particularly interesting insights: the collapse of tolerance of long commutes from 2 to 3 days is very real. Must read folks, so have at it here. H/T to brainfooder Nathan Connolly for the work and the share. Correlates with a teaser that brainfooder Adriano Herdman posted on LinkedIn last week, also worth a read (and stop teasing Adriano 🤣!)
REMOTE WORKING
New analysis from the crew at Exponential View, who are becoming one of the leading independent researchers on the state of the AI economy. The 62 page slide deck is a triumph of concision + comprehensiveness; its quite technical economic analysis but useful for anyone here if you want to get a wide lens view of how the AI economy is structured, how the money flows through it, and how intelligence flows out of it. Must read folks.
AI
We are terrible at identifying talent, so should accept this and create a system which allows multiple routers of re-entry, whilst focusing more on developing the talent we do have in pipeline, especially via informal, unstructured play. How much of this essay on scouting football players could be applied to corporate? On the humility part, quite a lot I’d say.
ASSESSMENT
Important report from LinkedIn on the state of the UK Labour market, with the key headline that employment rate remains below pre-pandemic levels. We’re suffering from a long period of anaemic economic growth, one which has already seen off multiple PM’s. Will Andy Burnham do any better? Going to take the sort of strategic endurance which UK current system of governance does not offer….H/T to brainder Jen Gronski for the share.
ECONOMY
A question that is irresistible to every narcissist out there 🤣. Nice website, not sure how accurate it is - nor how useful it might be - but a decent symbol of where we’re at in the SEO vs GEO space. Put your name in - which model gets you right?
EMPLOYER BRANDING
Over 15 states in the US have pay transparency laws, but employers who have not spiritually bought into the idea, have a readily available workaround - massively wide salary ranges. This is useless for the job seeker, and it begs a question: how narrow does a salary range have to be in order to be useful? Interesting research from Corvi Careers, with breakdowns per metro and per sector
RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING
As interest in Chinese open source AI is at a peak moment, with individuals and companies worldwide looking to hedge their bets against single vendor lock in in order to secure token efficiency, as well as business continuity, this might be an opportune moment to increase our knowledge of the Chinese AI eco-system. What can we infer from who they are looking to hire? Key point from this excellent piece of research: far less emphasis on experience vs US AI labs.
AI
Super hot day in Amsterdam but what a fun conversation with brainfooder Alisher Jafarov of sourcing intelligence engine, Avery. 50 minutes, walking around the gardens of the Rijksmuseum, talking about everything from Ursula Le Guin to the future of work. Have a watch / listen. And shout out to Bodgan for the amazing A/V!
FUTURE OF WORK
Last week Sir Keir Starmer stepped down as leader of the Labour Party and hence ushered in yet more turnover in the role of His Majesty’s Prime Minister. Even the cheerleaders for the end of the Starmer era are circumspect as to prospects on whoever is going to follow. The UK economy is unfixable, at least not via the democratic system of governaxnce. Clear analysis from one of the best economics accounts around on UK economy.
ECONOMY
I have a feeling that the image of a worker in small town India doing manual work with an Iphone strapped to their forehead is going to become of the most symbolically significant of our current moment. We are training our replacements, and often will find ourselves with little choice but to continue to do so. Must watch mini-documentary - this is going to be relevant to us all.
WORKFORCE AUTOMATION
We’re into the second half of 2026 already and so it might be a good moment to do quick assessment on the status of some concepts in TA / HR that were once all the rage. Which ones of these have fallen most from the community discourse?
That’s it - thanks for reading
Have a great week everyone
Cheers
Hung
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