This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 186

Screenloop: The Smarter ATS For Teams Looking to Do More With Less 

Alright folks, let’s talk about Screenloop. They’re not just another ATS—far from it. Screenloop is building a Talent Ops platform that’s actually useful, combining AI Notetaker, autofill scorecards, background checks, cNPS, and all that good stuff in one place.

But here’s the real kicker. First 30 people to book a demo get 16 months for the price of 12. No gimmicks. If you're looking to do more with fewer resources, this will be worth checking out.

Give it a go and book your demo.

 P.S. They’ve got an essential guide to making the transition from your current ATS painless. If you’d like a copy, write FREE GUIDE in the comments below

Open Kitchen: Applying the 4M Framework to Talent Acquisition - Part Four (Micro) - 5 x Individual Actions for Recruitment Leaders in the Era of AI

For the past 4 weeks, I've been using Open Kitchen to break down the State of Talent Acquisition using the '4M' framework. Part One (Mega) dealt with global trends, Part Two (Macro) dealt with sectoral trends, Part Three (Meso) with organisational trends and now with Part Four (Micro) we are finally down at the level of the individual actor.

I suspect this chapter is going to be the most challenging to write as variance increases as we go down in unit size. However, I'll head towards generalisations which resonate with the most people in our industry - I think will be a reasonable signal to identify which of these Mega, Macro and Meso forces are manifesting to us at the level of the Micro. As with all of ideas in the essays in this series, I welcome your thoughts - these are my speculations based on what I think is going to happen - I am of course, just a guy.

1. Personal Analytics Meets Professional Analytics in the Quest for Optimal Performance

Are you getting the feeling that we're never going to be done with drive toward efficiency?

'Doing more with less' has turned from a temporary mantra to a permanent state of being. Collapse of previous economic certainties is intersecting with the accelerating pace of technology innovation, is producing a state where the only thing we can be certain of is that adding fixed cost today is likely to be bad idea tomorrow.

The pressure for continuously improving performance can only produce two outcomes for us at individual level: either we burn out as we work ever harder to achieve ever increasing standards or we find a way to connect personal optimisation with professional optimisation to more consistently produce higher quality performance.

We're already on the case. Since the pandemic period, we have been far more conscious of the metrics on personal health; 58% of smart watch wearers do so with a health focus in mind. And if I said to you '10,000 steps', everyone will immediately know what we're talking about. Sleep, nutrition, oxygenation, exercise - the more we measure, the more we realise how much our own minds and bodies dynamically interact with the environment and are therefore subject to intentional manipulation - and optimisation.

Employee Well Being had its moment in the 'compassionate capitalism' phase of the pandemic period before dropping out of the industry discourse as organisations cut back on costs and headcount but perhaps its moment will come back again, this time for more straightforward instrumental reasons - individual employees operating at optimum capacity are going to be the only way to maintain a culture of continuous improvement whilst under relentless pressure to optimise.

2. Elimination of the AI Exposed, Expansion of the AI Insulated

Two years ago, I asked ChatGPT to list the top 100 skills that recruiters need to perform in their jobs and force rank them 1-100 in order which ones where most exposed to vs insulated from GenAI. The purpose of the exercise was to assess AI's own estimation of its capability and show us humans which parts of our jobs the machine fancies itself best being able to do. Comparing the Top 20 Most Exposed vs Top 20 Most Insulated again today was an interesting exercise.

We can see that talent acquisition as it was performed then - and probably for most of us as it is still performed now - is highly exposed to AI disintermediation. Many of the tasks where we spend a great deal of our time are in fact base case for GenAI as they are about retrieving, aggregating, disaggregating, then outputting information. If you could set GenAI to do one set of tasks it would be most comfortable doing some of this! Needless to say we need to move away from these tasks, but how do we make a decisive step towards the work on the right hand column?

No better place to start than putting a few metrics against the work you want to do.

If it is true that we 'do what we measure', then ensuring that you have metrics against the work that you want to do is one of those ideas which only becomes obvious in hindsight. Employee activation rate, conflict resolution ratio, collaboration intensity - we don't really have the terminology for most of this stuff yet; it also feels a little icky to try and formulate some, perhaps because they all describe a thing which we might not want to taxonomise and label so that it can remain pristinely beyond scrutiny. What we all want is to be part of a high performance, highly resilience, highly innovative company culture, with Talent perhaps being the cultivators of that.

3. Search for the Human Premium

'Search for the Human Premium' is Peter Hinsen's term which I am transposing directly into the world of TA / HR. If we know that the robots are going to outperform us on the AI Exposed tasks, then what is particularly unusual about the AI Insulated work? There are appear to be some unrelated commonalities:

• Novel Configurations - AI is trained on standard configurations - the reason why ChatGPT 'knows' which words follow another is because probablelistically they would - it's a standard configuration. What GenAI struggles with more is when there is a novel configuration, a structure that wasn't designed, wasn't planned but perhaps macguyered together under conditions of constraint which produced non-standard solutions. The iconic illustration is electrical wiring - usually a mess because a previous human had to make decisions which made sense at that moment of time and space, but was not copybook formula of how-to

• Task or Problem is Ill-Defined - where the problem to be solved is not yet clear so the first task is to figure out what the problem is, to what extent it is an issue and whether the fix is worth the effort of doing it. This scenario usually takes place at the beginning of projects, initiatives, teams, businesses - or at inflection points where the previous journey is coming to a resolution and a new course needs to be charted

• Collaboration intensity is high - related to the ill definition issue, but adjacent to it, this is where the problem is best solved by highly intensive collaboration between colleagues whose outputs are essential inputs for each others work. High collaboration intensity scenarios will feature high rate of unstructured communication between stakeholders, most typically in person. Here the problem may be clear, and high collaboration intensity is the fastest way to the best solution

• Experience > Efficiency - sometimes the thing you are buying is a proxy for something else - the experience of doing it, the social capital accrued to be seen doing it, the reinforcement of identity to be choosing to do it, the reinforcement of social relationships between the stakeholders of thing being done. Seeing as I'm in Australia, I am thinking of the artisanal coffee experience, but it could be anything else where the experience is more important than the efficiency. Plenty of examples on the talent space where this would be obvious.

In the end, AI may well bring about the return of the The Labour Theory of Value - that the value of the thing is based not on the market price (Market Theory of Value) but of the quantity and quality of the labour that has gone into it. We're going to pay a premium for another otherwise full AI / Automated service that has human concierge, judgement, commentary, quality control and recommendation on top of it. As an individual in Talent, we have to think about where we can add that premium human element in the recruiting flow; it won't be everywhere, but only where there is a requirement or request for that human extra.

4. Community Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is enormously powerful but limited. It requires training data, which means that data needs to be recorded and fed into it. This amount of data is vast, but it remains only a small sliver of all the information that is out there in the universe. Most of the AI's we deal with are so far not embodied - they switch on and off at human command, effectively going dormant when the power runs out, and are only processing the information which we have fed into it. Compare this to a human being, who is absorbing information from thousands of inputs, most of which subconsciously captured so that we are not even aware of that we have received the input. Yet that data goes in, is processes somewhere in the brain, and our sense of intuition grows with it.

Nearly every human on the planet is in this mode, constantly collecting vast amounts of data which AI currently isn't. The main reason why I am on tour right now - is to connect with other embodied intelligences so that I can gain access to intuition and insight that I couldn't read about on the Internet. Being connected in community is our way to access this intelligence and I suspect collective intelligence will become an increasingly important complement to artificial intelligence as the limitation of the latter become revealed.

As community members, it is incumbent upon us to be fully intentional with our active participation in community. I share the Big List every week because I believe that attending even a single event will improve the attendees access to collective intelligence and hence do a little toward making that attendee a little more future fit than the colleague who didn't have the time to go. This will move from being a fringe concern to an expected behaviour of high value human recruiters.

5. Rehabilitation of Personal Branding

Do you 'compose with AI' when writing outbound messages?

You should, because AI is better than you at knowing - on average - which words, how many words and what order those words appear will produce the best responses on average. The same is true for job advert generation, blog post titles, social media posts and the like. But I have a theory that the edge that AI currently has over humans in digital communication will soon be blunted. As usage of AI composition becomes widespread, so the human audience will become increasing aware of the artificial generation and start to be appalled by it, no matter how technically good it is.

Already I am finding myself asking this question whenever I receive a message from an unknown source - was this written by AI? Even if the suspicion that it might have been would be enough for me to ignore the contents of the message, never mind think of responding. I don't think my disappointment at receiving generated communications is particularly unusual - I suspect most of us would feel this way. If this is true then the short interlude of AI engagement supremacy will be followed by a collapse of engagement as human beings aggressively revoke our attention from public spaces where such communication generally takes place. Instead we will retreat into private spaces - walled cities - where the humanity of the communication is guaranteed or at least where the AI generated comms is monitored and moderated. In such a world, where we become default suspicious of all things AI generated, those people who are 'Conspicuously Human' are going to end up the winners. Remember that AI will probabalistically structure sentences, adopt behaviours and so on. It will inevitably be quite vanilla as a result. The people who win in this game will be those recruiters who are so obviously human because there is no way AI would ever write or speak like that.

I introduce my friend Iwan Gulenko. Expert tech recruiter but also a conspicuously human recruiter. Vanilla communication is not what you get with Iwan! But I think in the world where becomes dominated by AI communication, someone like Iwan will thrive.

We used to call this 'Personal Branding' back in the 2010's before it become icky somewhere in the 2015's or so. But I believe that lessons valid in 2010 will become valid again 15 years after the fact, because we may not need to like every human but we will become grateful that there is at least human.

Closing this series off here. No doubt it will be revealed in time to be a nonsense spouted by someone who really should eaten more mushrooms. Thanks for reading along anyways - you've helped me think through a few ideas 👊

What's Going On?

Big List of Recruiting and HR Events to Attend in 2024

We've updated the Big List of Recruiter & HR Events for 2024 and now 2025. Make sure you add your events to this list, and we're going to get the thing updated ready to relaunch next year. Check out the events in the spreadsheet here and make sure you bookmark this as its going to be the 'forever stew' of industry events.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep277 - Hiring in Hong Kong in 2024 & Beyond, Friday 18th, 10AM HKT

I'm going to be in Hong Kong later this week and so the Brainfood On Tour series continues. We're speaking with local recruiters, agency owners, and entrepreneurs to better understand the landscape in the 'Fragrant Harbour' . We're with Tak Lo, Founder (Kedoom Technologies), Mat Gollop, MD (Connected People), Andrew Ladommatos, Founder (Aureum Partners), Rita Tsang, Team Manager, BCG Group) & friends and on Friday 18th 10am HKT. Register here

A New Era of the Hiring Experience: Empower Talent Teams and Captivate Candidates, October 24th, 2024, 1 PM ET, 10 AM PT

Excited to be hosting this conversation with our friends at GoodTime, who along with Vanessa Burnaby, VP of Global Talent Acquisition (Twilio) are going to investigate how empowered talent teams are critical to hiring success. We're on Register here

Bring Your Talent Back from the Dead, Thursday 31st Oct, 11.00am ET

Every company at any scale will have a database of candidates which has been laying dormant since they were put there. These zombie databases don't do much other than stretch compliance rules but we're close to a future where we talent can be reanimated with smart solutions that can genuinely understand the changing interests and status of candidates. We're going to explore this with our friends Eightfold on Oct 31st 11.00AM, when I will connect with Victoria Bombas, Director (PwC) and Rebecca Warren, Director of Talent-Centred Transformation (Eightfold.ai). Register here

ERE Recruiting Conference, November 12-14, Anaheim, CA, USA

Excited to be visiting Anaheim next month - I'll be joining the likes of Jim Stroud, Kevin Wheeler, Kevin Grossman and friends one of the great recruiter-centric events of the year. Looking forward to giving my talk on 'Future Proofing Your Recruitment Career' - make sure you get a copy of this deck if you can't see it live. If you're at the event, please do come up and say hello!

NB: if you want a discount code, comment "ERE" below and I will DM you the code for the discount.

Tec Rec 2024, TITANIC Chaussee Hotel, Berlin, November 24th–26th, 2024

I am back in Berlin folks, first time at Rec Tec since before Covid. Looking forward to sharing thoughts on the state of tech hiring, learning from local employers as to how the changing circumstances have impacted hiring posture, diversity and inclusion, state of remote, state of outsourcing. I have a 50% discount on tickets so make sure you get them here rather than elsewhere!

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

End Notes

I'm in Sydney today on a lightning visit and already I'm enthused about this marvellously diverse city. Not enough time this round but with a bit of luck, I will be back next year and will aim to spend more time over here.

In the meantime, make sure you have a great week as we crash through the rest of Q4.

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.