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Friends,
What a brilliant event Recfest 2026 was!
I’m going to doing a write up on this tomorrow on my other newsletter which I hope you’ll enjoy but the gist of it is that we all need to go to more events and better connect with each other in community. It’s collective intelligence which we can tap into, which I think is the perfect complement to intelligence of the artificial sort, so get to it here.
Thanks to: Kevin Green, Steven Davis, David Green, Joey NK Koksal, Colin Donnery, Oonagh Clarke, Dave Hazelhurst, Bas van de Haterd, Guillaume Alexandre, Iveta Degulyte, Maddy Roberts, Zoe Taylor, Heidi Wassini, Vikram Modgil, Matt Robinson, Michael Blakely, Tim Sackett, Jamie Bradley, Michelle Flynn, Matt Jones, Jim Berrisford, Gita Selli-Cellei, Hannah Worthing, Mark Harman, Sheena Nagar, Freddy Cleveley, Keith Rosser, Kye Lovelace, Alastair Ball, Tara O’Brien, Eldon Davis and everyone else who was kind enough to share a selfie with me at Recfest - cheers!
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SBH had it’s moment but I think the juice might not be worth the squeeze. There are also implications on whether we should really be breaking jobs down this way - how extractable are those skills from each other? Thanks for all who voted!
The Recfest Recap - it’s the annual potlatch for Talent Acquisition and is one of incredible events which is routinely brilliant. We’re going to retro it with some of the speakers and delegates of the event - this Weds 8th July, 2pm BST. Register here
We Are DevelopersWorld Congress Berlin - it’s Europe’s biggest tech event with an expected 15,000 attendees, some of the biggest names in the tech world on stage and a real celebration of community. TA / HR are there too! I’m going to be moderating a panel and will attend all three days. 3 day ticket is 799.99 EURO - I have 5 complimentary tickets on this link - first come first serve!
Fixing Hiring Manager vs Recruiter Mis-Alignment - it’s mutual folks: recruiters and HM’s might say nice things about each other when we’re all in the room but we have different opinions in private. Super interesting research from Metaview, which we’re going to use as topic for discussion this Friday 10th July, 2pm BST - how do we fix misalignment?
Nice report from WEF which combines third party research and corporate case study to produce an actionable set of recommendations for employers to follow. Best bits for me are some examples of ‘deliberate friction’, introduced by Hitachi for their engineering graduates, so that they learn the hard way and build the fundamentals before progressing onto AI code generation. Love to hear more examples of this - has any here implemented something similar? Also: some positive angles for the future of entry level work, which kind of suggests that AI-first companies may also be the first to expand entry level work, as it may be the fastest way to increase AI literacy in the organisation by first hiring more of the AI-native. Leans on generational stereotypes, but still, I’m going to take the positivity whichever way I can get it. Have a read.
SOCIETY
The internet has no shortage of screeds from job seekers complaining about recruiting processes (and recruiters), but I’m picking this one out because I think we can draw some insight from the complaint here - mainly that job seekers don’t understand the challenge of hiring at scale, and that the fairest way to assess someone is usually outside the hiring funnel paradigm.
CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE
The real impact of AI on employment is going to be removing the coordination problem which comes from scaling capacity. Jack Dorsey’s explanation for firing 40% of this business at Block was to accelerate the shift from middle managers routing information up, down and across the organisational hierarchy and instead have AI do it, once everyone is back to being an individual contributor, permanently plugged into the company matrix. Dorsey is outlier only because he’s on the frontier - something like this what every CEO is going to want. Implications for us in TA / HR - whose function was based on growing, maintaining and developing the organisational hierarchy, should be clear.
PEOPLE ANALYTICS
Well this is welcome news isn’t it? I wonder whether the finding correlates with the idea mentioned in article No1, that employment growth follows on from AI adoption because you end up hiring more AI-pilled entry level types to increase the AI-literacy and capability of the whole organisation. Love this from Revelio Labs though my caveat is that I’m going dive in deeper into how they grouped companies based on degree of AI adoption intensity. Join me in the scrutiny folks.
AI
This is pretty cool - basically an ongoing test on the capability of frontier models by having them complete real tasks posted on gig platforms. They tested Fable 5 and reckoned it far outperformed previous models. Love how they accept the qualitative nature on this though - in the any, a great deal of the quality of GenAI output is a subjective human judgement.
GIG ECONOMY
Human beings have been practicing body modification since before recorded history, but it is still startling to learn about new ways of doing it. There are few societies in human history which don’t marginalise the overweight, but the ethical implications of now being able do side step the bias rather than confront it are now with us today. Interesting post, interesting thread, lots to think about.
D&I
Really deserves a more comprehensive report but at least the IMF have also provided the raw data for download. Anyways, some interesting tidbits in this summary post, namely that the people who work most are middle income countries - and I’m tempted to conclude that this is because of shift from poor to rich gives everyone the energy to work harder in order access the returns from growth. Couldn’t see direction of travel though - be interesting to find out whether we work less if as a whole society is regressing.
SOCIETY
So this is now 6 months out of date, which might be a lifetime when it comes to the mighty LinkedIn algorithm, but as I read it I found that the findings still hold up as we move into H2 2026. Main idea seems to be: educate in your niche. Not sure I really do that on LinkedIn, got to say. Will look into my approach over there. H/T to brainfooder Alla Pavlova for the share.
CONTENT MARKETING
Their reasoning was coldly clear. If a rival desk became too strong, they would not poach its best individual; they would lift the whole unit, because the capability lived in the group, not in any one person you could hire away from it.
Another interesting post from Andrew Marritt, who argues that we are all using the wrong unit of analysis when judging performance; its not the individual but the team. I suspect this idea is going to be one which will become more pertinent in time, as begin to put together a theory as to why AI amplifies individual outputs, which does not directly correlate to organisational performance. Must read folks.
ASSESSMENT
Teleworking was always going to be ‘remote work for blue collar’ and as communication technology improves, we might see another wave of offshoring as companies respond to the demands of operation efficiency. Work for us recruiters at least, where ever we may end up being located. PS: UK - with its fake 5G - is well insulated from this trend.
REMOTE WORKING
I didn’t have it my bingo card at Alex Karp would ever emerge as a defender of open source sovereign AI, yet here he is losing his sh1t on a CNBC interview 🤣 inadvertently doing just that. He’s wrong a lot of things but his explanation of the risks companies are exposing themselves to when they accept Open AI / Anthropic (and now Microsoft’s) Forward Deployed Engineers is that you’re losing your business which will soon be rented back to you. Have a watch (and forgive the YT description on this video).
FUTURE OF WORK
Its always great to hear from AI companies on what they think of human talent and it remains validating that almost all of them unequivocally recognise their / our value. Great interview with Adam Ward, Head of Talent at Cursor, on how they recruit. PS: we’re doing a Brainfood Live on Talent Density end of the month, so make sure to tune in.
CULTURE
I didn’t know anything about MCP’s and now I think I do after watching this 12 minute video from Google Cloud Tech. Everyone here is going to need to know about this, so upgrade your AI literacy and give this a watch.
AI
I’m thinking of skills atrophy - how overuse of AI might create a dependency on AI, to the point where we’re going to lose competence in the thing that AI has taken over. Do we worry about this and are we doing anything about it?
That’s it - thanks for reading
Have a great week everyone
Hung
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