This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends at Ashby
Come see the next generation of AI in Ashby.
On 9 September, Ashby will be livestreaming the full opening keynote from the Ashby One main stage.
Get a deeper look at what’s next in Ashby, live from London
See how TA is shifting from AI experimentation to AI adoption
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9 September || 9:15 AM BST / 10:15 AM CEST / 11:15 AM EEST
Link to register here
Friends,
Late summer vibes are the best. This time of the year feels like something of a cheat - we’ve had a long summer and somehow we’re still in it. Cooling down and I suspect Autumn will be here soon enough; conference season starts again soon, so I’ll be on the road again shortly - US for 10 days in SF, Chicago and NY from Aug 24th to Sep 4th - let me know if you’re around in those places, probably a meetup or two happening in those spots…
Thanks to: Colin Donnery, Kevin Green, Dave Hazlehurst, Shireen DuPreez, Ute Neher, Lauren Anderson, Olivier Vidal, Marc Hubbard, Lucinda Thomas, Bob Pulver, Rob Walker, Alisher Jafarov, Fede Grinblat, Yasin Varan, Nilhan de Mel, Darren Topping and Alex Her for your public endorsement of all things brainfood - keeping this show on the road!
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36% being energised is hugely positive in my view - we’re going to need this forward energy to get through this moment. Thanks for the 7% who were honest enough to say how they feel. In the conflicted / disorientated camp, which together form the largest cohort. Thanks for voting everyone!
Massive week ahead on Brainfood Live
Meet Ema - Your AI Agent for HR, IT and Finance - Tues 18th August, 6pm BST / 10am PT. Fresh from the announcement that the one and only Jason Averbrook is joining Ema as board advisor, I’m delighted to host CEO Surojit Chatterjee on Brainfood Live and learn more about his vision - and to see Ema in action via live demo. Register here folks.
National Interview Week - Helping 100,000 people back to Work - Wed 19th Aug, 2pm BST. The UK has one of the largest populations of ‘under employed’ - people who not looking for work yet able to do so. A great many of these simply need help, so we’re bringing it with Michael Blakely (Equitas), Angela Renfrew (FirstBus), Jennifer Hulme (BPP), Colin Donnery (FRS), Akbar Karenga (Screenloop) and Danny Heath (Imployable). Register here and learn what you can do to help the country back to work.
From Talent Acquisition to Organisational Performance - Fri 21st Aug, 2pm BST. One of the big leaps we’ve got to take in TA is expand scope beyond QoH converations and into increasing Organisational Performance or Capability. This is increasingly relevant in a moment when AI is transforming each role and increasing capacity and capability in unpredictable ways. We’re in conversation with TA pro’s on this journey - register here.
The Stanford University 2025 paper, Canaries in the Coal Mine? was one of a slew of academic papers that year which really progressed the AI impact on Jobs debate beyond the overly simplistic binaries of naive optimism vs narcissistic pessimism. The obvious follow up is no longer another academic paper, but a live dashboard fed with ADP payroll data, so we can all see the outcomes as close to real time. Findings confirmed include: in most AI-exposed jobs, employment substitution is seen conspicuously in early career. AI is indeed eating the office gophering, the training period for most white collar work. One to bookmark. H/T to brainfooder Colin Donnery for the share in the online community
WORKFORCE AUTOMATION
Few people are qualified to write the history of HR from inside out but brainfooder Gerry Crispin is one of them. Here’s a taster of the sort of knowledge and insight he can bring to bear, this time of the topic of Quality of Hire (QoH), where Gerry writes a brief history before explaining why it’s been an ongoing point of contention since the idea first formalised into something we thought we could measure…brilliant read. H/T to brainfooder Steven Rothberg for the share
ASSESSMENT
I would hope this is the sort of question most of us on this newsletter would be able to answer - they / we - update our LinkedIn. This post from the Head of Insights at a16z goes a step further, analysing exactly where in the profile a putative job seeker spends their time editing - it’s the work experience, even if from years ago. Interesting insight, love to see more research on this. H/T to brainfooder James Hutt for the share.
SOURCING
So this is one of those stories where the initial optics are far worse than the actual circumstances - having an alternative way into process for exceptional candidates seems like a smart strategy? That said, it could be that this has happened as a work around to the systems TA have put in place, in which case something has indeed gone very wrong. Need to see that form really - anyone seen a copy of it, feel free to send it over. H/T to brainfooder Martyn Redstone for share in the online community.
ASSESSMENT
Are mid-life / mid-to-late career women disproportionately rejected by AI screening software? This post doesn’t provide an argument but does describe the reality lived by thousands of workers who find themselves grinding in a job market which simply isn’t giving any hope. UK needs job creating economic growth, or some other smart way to connect talented and experienced people with the work that does need to done. I’m reminded of brainfooder Andrew Marritt’s outstanding essay featured last week, on the nature of ‘the job market’. It’s not a market at all, but a network…
D&I
I love CEO’s hiring heuristics - they never fail to trigger the brainfood audience 🤣. Bupa CEO’s high touch, impressionistic, non-disclosed tests of behaviour breach a number of best practice bullet points but it’s easy to understand why a CEO would want to know more about a potential close team member - and senior company exec - than could be gained via more formalised exercises. The question for me is the balance between formal vs informal, structured vs free-flowing, controlled environment vs real world. Why is it everything TA / HR want is the former and not the latter?
ASSESSMENT
Andrew Ng with some thoughts on how technical skills will evolve. This is less of a map and rather more a taxonomy of skills and activities which he believes today’s AI-pilled software engineer will need to build capability in. Includes useful descriptors for skill, along with sample tasks, so he’s basically produced a JD for the role of AI Engineer. Useful reading for tech recruiters.
FUTURE OF WORK
LinkedIn cringe content really pre-dated the AI slop era, so we can’t really blame the machines for the ridicule that is heaped on recruiters favourite social network 🤣. It’s stimulated some creativity though, as this satirical website shows. Great satire requires the subject to be bad enough never to be taken seriously though….and I actually thought some of the output to be pretty good…
CONTENT MARKETING
Like this working paper because it doesn’t over stretch its conclusions. Tracking usage of ChatGPT Enterprise across (how many companies?), they make the following observations: companies for whom technology is general purpose enabler use AI more intensively, especially early career workers - who presumably are the lucky or more capable few who make through the assessment, and then take on the work that previously might have taken a small team of interns / 1st jobbers. One further observation I found intriguing - organisations which invested in their intangible assets (brand, culture, people etc) saw more intense use of AI also. 69pages, have a read.
AI
It’s 2026 and there are only two countries in the running for the AI frontier and both are heavily supplied by the same source of human capital. Interesting research tracking the arrival of Chinese research talent, in the form of accepted papers at the top publications worldwide. Contains University ranking lists also, as well as those publications, so interesting sourcing sites for recruiters hiring for R&D
AI
How to you build ‘talent density’? We tried to explore this issue in our own podcast a couple weeks ago but I think Lenny does a better job here in a 1-2-1 format, where dives can go deeper. Here he is with Adam Ward, Head of Talent at Cursor. Most of the advice is correct - lean on referrals, do exec search for in-demand talent, avoid ads + assessment etc - yet also pretty much exclusionary. Makes you think how much TD might just be cultural homogenisation. Lots to think about. Have a listen. H/T to brainfooders Pedro Oliveira, Srini Gundelli & friends for the share.
ASSESSMENT
Happy Independence Day to our Pakistani and Indian subscribers this weekend! The occasion got me thinking about the history of these countries and I didn’t realise the the Partition which everyone knows about was actually 1 of 5 which produced 12 modern states that we know today, almost all of whom remain in conflict. Fascinating interview with historian Sam Dalrymple on how all of this emerged, and why - from energy to immigration - it still matters for the world today. Bought his book immediately after watching this - well worth an hour of your time.
SOCIETY
The question which Ted Chiang asked in his seminal essay, Will AI become the new Mckinsey, 3 years ago is starting to be answered today. If AI is supercharging our productivity, what ends up happening to all the time we save? Its certainly not going to mean more leisure time for the workers, who are just going to have to do more. Important investigation on the outcome of AI-enablement on time distribution, mental health and the politics of productivity.
CULTURE
In TA / HR, we have a habit of adopting comforting sounding platitudes, without really examining what they mean much less imply. First, it was ‘human-in-the-loop’ and now it’s ‘human judgement / taste’ will be what remains when AI does the rest.
I’m asking…how do you assess for human judgement? Presumably, we have to just do some human judgement on that. Poll for this week folks, in case you have an idea on how to do this…
That’s it - thanks for reading
Have a great week everybody
Hung
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