This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 188

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Open Kitchen: Reflections of 4 Weeks on the Road

I read a post by fellow traveller Allyn Bailey on her experiences of traveling to different locations over the past several weeks and I was inspired to make the same reflections having now returned just yesterday from my own 4 week trip to APAC / MENA.

Needless to say my enthusiasm for travelling to different parts of the world has increased. Even though I am today pretty tired, 3kgs over weight (thanks hotel breakfast buffets!) and badly in need of a bath, the journey has been super educational, particularly in the disabusing of my preconceptions in recruiting and HR.

Some thoughts which are wandering across my mind right now....

1. Universalism Doesn't Survive Contact With Local Conditions

The biggest and most necessary lesson for me was that ideas which I had presumed to be universal, do not survive intact after contact with local realities, but instead refract in a different unexpected direction or even rebound back to fizzle out because it is irrelevant to the local people there.

One universalist position I had held to be true everywhere was that 'do more with less' was a global phenomenon and would necessarily manifest in ever increasing automation and offshoring as organisations seek to become ever more efficient in their processes. The end state for all organisations would be headcount lite / AI heavy, triggering a crisis in society as widespread job displacement would lead to millions of people w/o any economic value to add into the system. I think this vision will still occur in societies where profit maximisation is the orientating principle behind company formation, most obviously in the United States.

However, I needed to be reminded that profit is not the only motive. It was surprising to me that this lesson was drawn from my time in United Arab Emirates, a place which many of us who immediately associate with excess profit.

All of the Gulf States have localisation laws when it came to employment. And for recruiters in these countries, these laws are the most significant factor in the work they do - they have to hire hire local nationals to a certain percentage of headcount, ranging from 2% to 45% based on the type of organisation you are working for or else face escalating fines at company level, even leading to a suspension of the ability to trade if persistent failure to hit target headcount for local employees.

Localisation is obviously a countervailing force against automation and offshoring. Even though profit orientation might tell you have automating this job is possible, it will not come at the cost of reducing your localisation ratio. What we will see then is that employment is likely to be far more resilient in countries where being employed has a greater purpose than merely being a 'human resource' for a purely capitalist system.

Can we learn something from these countries? It forced me to rethink from first principles - what is the purpose of employment, and can we challenge the idea that profit maximisation must be the only orientating principle for it?

2. Global Dispersal of Function - Including Talent Acquisition

There are countries which profit maximisation is the organising principle of course. And I think Australia would count itself very much in that Anglo-Saxon world of economic thinking. Here we can see similar trends we see in US / UK / Canada - where doing more with less will continue to be the persistent future.

Pandemic taught the world to remote. End of ZIRP is powering the movement of those remote jobs offshore to cheaper locations. I spoke to one Head of Talent for whom every new job released first had to go through a 'can we offshore this job' parse. For the US, jobs are moving North to Canada, or more obviously south to Latin America. Stack Overflow recently released their Annual Developer Survey and it was no surprise that S/W Engineering remained one of those professions most committed to remote working. It is also one of those professions where it makes increasing sense to locate the jobs in to less expensive places to hire - Chile, Argentina especially seem to be places where US companies are moving those jobs.

For Australia, these jobs are moving to Philippines. High quality, high work ethic software engineers with high level of English language literacy are powering the software development of a lot of the Aussie tech companies I met whilst I was Down Under. Come to think of it, I can't remember a single one which wasn't basing the bulk of their engineering teams in Philippines. The reduced costs will enable more companies to enter the software space, and produce technology solutions. It will also reduce the s/w footprint with Australia as native developers now become conspicuously expensive resources compared to those who can work at 1/4 or 1/8 of the cost.

Talent Acquisition as a function is also being dispersed in the same way. Where are you going to put your sourcing team? In an expensive US or European metropolitan centre, or in a place in the same time zone as the centre but in the much cheaper Global South? If profit maximisation is the orientating principle for your organisation, it becomes a no brainer to move those functions south. The implications going forward are going to be interesting for us; what does it mean for talent pipelining when the entry point for careers in recruitment are offshore? We might begin to see a talent shortage again for experienced recruiters as we inadvertently sever the pipeline for our replacements.

3. Demographic Crisis Everywhere

We have all underestimated the degree to which people are stopping having children.

I had thought this was a broadly a 'Global North + East Asia' issue but it appears that this is an issue already making impact in countries further afield. Wasn't the stereotype of South Asia of a region with a huge and growing population, who had low median average wages and were on the cusp of reaping the demographic dividend of high volumes of new workers? Not so in Thailand where in a population of 71 million people, the median age is already 41 years old! In 2024, the fertility rate was 1.20 far below the replacement figure of 2.1 and below that of the European average.

Aging society, declining fertility rate - these are significant problems for any country. However, what does it mean for countries which still have a long way to go in terms of economic development? Not wealthy enough to be an attractive country for immigration or replace workers with robots, the way forward is not clear for countries like Thailand. The hope of improved inward immigration, increased diversification of the work force, extension of retirement age, reduction of talent drain, targeted hiring for returnee Thais who have emigrated by now may consider return.

For the latter, these 'Golden Thai's' was considered to be the premium talent that employers want in Thailand - people who were native language speakers who have had the benefit of international experience and skills up levelling by exposure and training in globalised businesses. Probably some interesting recruitment angles here for innovative agencies - I remember reading about the Republic of Korea - another country with acute demographic crisis - actively targeting diaspora Koreans who may in many cases have been several generations out of country to return to their ancestral homeland.

Suffice it to say, demographic crisis will increasingly become a priority concern for every country experiencing it, and very interesting to hear of the challenges of unable to attract immigration compared to those countries which are currently complaining about there being too much immigration.

4. Startup Talent in Hong Kong

A chance invitation to attend the Startmeup HK by Jayne Chan, Head of Startups at Invest Hong Kong, led me to have one of the best experiences of the whole trip. Travel to Hong Kong for me is usually so family orientated that I usually never get the chance to see how business works there tech so this invitation was a real eye opener.

Firstly, the event was fantastic and I suspect the rest of the week long gala was a success also. Hong Kong is small enough geographically to have high talent density in in person events and it was great to see so many people - founders, developers, scientists, journalists, investors and government officials in one place talking about the economic future of Hong Kong.

Secondly, whilst it was clear the VC investment sentiment remained subdued - due to the global end of ZIRP as well as Hong Kong now being in the front line of hostile de-globalisation - the Startup scene seemed to be full of the sort of young, energetic, forward thinking entrepreneurs who saw as many opportunities as there were risks. Particularly interesting was how Hong Kong entrepreneurs had both parts of the dividing world economy to shoot for - inward to the massive Mainland China market, where their appeal as a bridge for globalisation remained intact and the RoW, especially Europe and Middle East, where the reverse was also seemed to be true.

There was also some interesting recruiting tech startup ideas being presented, the most impressive being one which sort to connect graduates to employers in a way which LinkedIn currently doesn't. In HK, careers fairs and online application direct via employers seem to be the main channel for entry level talent but it is an old formula ripe for disruption. A HK focused Handshake like service? I think that's a go-er.

5. Community Intelligence vs Artificial Intelligence

I talk a lot about the value of in person events - this entire trip was based around my attendance to events in Melbourne and Dubai. I know that this is not always possible in every occasion, particularly for community members who are geographically distant from the metropolitan centres where these events are usually held. However, I remain convinced that interacting in person is a critically important part of our AI-enabled future, principally because the information exchanged in the peer-to-peer conversations is the sort of market intelligence which is never used to train a data model. This is the 'off the record' exchanges, the undirected osmotic information transfer, the non-verbal communication that the human eye / human subconscious captures. The outcome are powerful impressions which can serve to challenge preconceptions and spark innovation which otherwise would not have emerged if we restricted our information diet purely to what we read on the Internet or see in the email inbox.

Clearly, I am privileged to be able to interact with so many communities in so many places around the world. Now I am beginning to feel the responsibility that maybe I can encourage more of these communities to emerge, such that more people can get the opportunity to connect, build social capital and increase the density of their networks. I'm not sure how exactly I can best do this but I am sure that we as an sector would benefit if we all had greater access to the collective intelligence of the whole.

Let me know if you have any ideas on how best we can do this - comment below!

Now out of the kitchen, onto the lounge 👇

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. Spreadsheet is 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

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep280 - 2024 in Review: UK Staffing Market, Friday 1st November, 1pm GMT

I'm beginning a series of '2024 in Review' on Brainfood Live, and so from this week onward we will be taking a topic or a sector we care about and reviewing what progress we have made in 2024. Already in the pipe is 2024 In Review: Sourcing, 2024 In Review: Job Advertising (coming up as events shortly) - so let me know what other topics we need to care about as we look back on the year. This Friday, we're going to kick off with UK Staffing Market in review - what has happened agency side over this past year? We're on Friday 1st Nov, 1pm (as I screwed up the time zone shift...) - 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 am back in sunny London from today, and will be in town for the next 10 days at least, so let me know if you're around and fancy a chat. Otherwise, I hope we're charging into the end of the year which as much energy as we had when we started it.

Lets do this,

Cheers!

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.