This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 191

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Open Kitchen: Trump 2.0. Impact on Talent Acquisition & HR (Part Two)

Last week I opened up a two part essay projecting the impact of a Trump 2.0 administration on Talent Acquisition and HR. I don't really write on politics here on LinkedIn (follow me on X if you like that kind of action ...) but my position is that the second Donald Trump Presidency will be a 'high impact / high variance', meaning a high certainty of disruptive change with high uncertainty as to how good or bad the outcomes of those changes might be. For Talent Acquisition and HR, my intuition is that the chances of a 'high impact, bad outcome' is high, so I wanted to make sense of what it might look like, so that we can prepare as best as we are able.

We covered Public Sector, Energy, DEIB, Hostile de-globalisation, Industrial policy and Immigration in Part One - you can read about it in more depth here - and this week, we're going to talk about Urban Renewal, Free Cities, War, Crypto / BTC and USD. If there are any other topics that need an angle and I haven't covered in these essays, please do let me know if comments below.

NB: Sending this on the second Tuesday in a row - travelling logistics, dodgy airport wifi and a bug on LinkedIn which often prevents saving has led me to send again on Tuesday rather than Monday. Back to normal schedule next week.

7. Urban Renewal

It's not news to anyone that there is a serious homelessness problem in certain cities in the United States. I don't know the causes of this crisis, and can only guess that it is combination of heightened risk of bankruptcy, lack of social safety net, collapse of social structure and an over prescription of ostensibly therapeutic drugs leading to high chemical addiction rate. We might also include the role of policies which might've been designed to help the homeless but have instead condemned them to permanent existence on the streets.

The damage to the urban environment is self-evident with the rise of homelessness. Retail cannot survive if shoppers are afraid to walk to the street for fear of some kind of chaotic interaction with the homeless. Parents will be unwilling to allow children into urban centres where they may be exposed by dangerous and illegal behaviour. And most people anywhere would be anxious to navigate streets where there are people who are in extremely challenging personal conditions and often in disturbed states of consciousness.

Public urban decay accelerates collapse of real estate value in the places which were once premium, whilst driving costs up in places where the standard of living / quality of life is obviously higher. Over the past several years we have seem a depopulation of California and New York State as people move to Texas and Florida, with the concurrent relative rise in cost of living in the latter.

Acknowledging a problem and the failure of the current paradigm of solving it is different from having the solution yourself though, and its unclear what Trump's call to clean up the cities will involve. Presumably dismantling of the current system of support for the homeless will be a priority. Maybe a roll back of the permissiveness on drug use. Perhaps a return to the zero tolerance approach to law and order which once made Rudy Giuliani famous. However, there has to be provision of housing for the unhomed, otherwise it will be a matter shuffling people from one area to another just disperses the problem rather than dealing with it. I can't see Trump issuing an EO to build more social housing. The US is of course a Federal system so the States are going to be doing the implementing whatever the rhetorical is from the White House; chances are there won't be a huge change in current trajectory other than the expected cutting of federal funds, and whatever consequences roll out from that.

One thing the President is ostensibly in charge of is foreign policy and national security, so the use of the military and intelligence services in an urban clean up role might well happen, as much for a sense of 'doing something' as anything else. With everyone agreeing that narcotics play a huge role in the rise of homelessness and absent any other lever of action, Trump may well decide that militarily attacking the cartels which produce and traffic the drugs would be the obvious thing to do. However, a great deal of modern narcotics can be artificially manufactured with widely available and legally purchases chemicals, so suppressing external supply is unlikely to do much more than increase demand for DIY alternatives - probably not the 'Made in America' that Trump has mind. And in any case, the root cause of any drug epidemic is consumer demand for narcotics - unless this is understood and resolved, nothing get resolved.

How does this impact TA & HR? Its possible that a Public Urban Cleanup campaign might make cosmetic improvements in the public areas of major cities which currently have a conspicuous homelessness problem. This might have an impact on the relative attractiveness of these destinations for new candidates looking to relocate. Other than this, cutting Federal support for homeless will probably result in a loss of a few TA / HR roles in the not-for-profit sector focusing on this issue.

 8. Freedom Cities

If there is one policy which I am unambiguously endorsing Donald Trump, it would be that of the new charter cities. As an outsider, it is incredible to me that a coastline like the California only has 3 major cities, only one which could be considered a mega city. If this was in East Asia, there would be 10 cities of 5 million people each along that coast. United States is actually under populated - it has huge amount of space that could support a much larger population. The planning and building of new cities may have fallen out of favour in the US but lets not forget that this is still a very young country and all of the existing cities haven't in the grand scheme of things, been around all that long.

City building creates jobs, provides housing and - if you play your cards right - generates its own economic engine. Infrastructure building of mega scale may be what the country needs but the challenge as ever will be in the implementation - how to divert funds from genuine wastage (corruption in public procurement) and from the excess financialisation of the economy into the private sector organisations which can lead the build? Plenty of vested interest and bureaucratic incompetence to overcome. There is also the small matter as to how it is funded, which organ of the government allocates it and who is actually going to get involved the build. A bureaucratic system that has long since forgotten how to 'do' mega projects might struggle to take on even more mega projects.

I have a feeling we might see a Chaebolisation of the US political economy, where powerful corporate interests end up expanding to fill in the capacity vacuum left by a scelerotic state. Musk's businesses are an obvious contender here, as are perhaps companies like Amazon, which have proven track record of mega scale project builds. We can already today see a direct analogy with the Samsung in ROK and Ambani Group in India with the influence Musk might wield in a future Trump administration.

Building the cities won't be the only challenge - there is also a factor of population. Incentives have already been mooted for potential relocators (cheap housing, free public services, 'baby bonuses'? etc) but these are socialist sounding policies which will meet with resistance from the Republican / Libertarian base upon which Trump still depends. Trump - and Musk - may well be the only type of dissident who could persuade people who are ideologically hostile to central planning that 'it will be ok this time'. Even if Trump succeeds politically, it will not easy to get an already highly urbanised population to move en masse - 80% of the US population already live in cities and the rural-to-urban pipeline which has powered most of the new megacities over the past 50 years has little left to do it.

Paradoxically, Trump's Freedom Cities might be most obviously populated by the people he wants most to deport (illegal immigrants) and those who wants to remove from public view (homeless). If there are indeed 11-20 million undocumented people in the US, then this for sure would be a population which could populate 10 cities of 1 million or so each. Perhaps we end up in a 'relocate, work + pathway to citizenship' deal somewhere down the line when the mass deportation plan inevitably fails.

From a TA & HR perspective, mega infrastructure projects are fantastic hiring opportunities. Building a city requires huge amount of human labour - the largest hiring projects over the past decade have been on similar 'build the in wilderness' type projects like NEOM in Saudi Arabia, Nusantara in Indonesia and New Administrative Capital in Egypt. That each of these have run into significant problems and may in the end become 'desert follies', the interim period of trying to make it work will result in a lot of work for recruiters. No budget has been allocated for any of this though, and I suspect there is a high chance of this notion stays rhetorical rather reality.

9. War

The fact that Donald Trump had decent support from the anti-war vote is a sad indictment of the state of affairs when the ostensible part of the left is considered to be even more warmongering that the party of the right. United States has been in a state of never-ending conflict with a rotating cast of enemies since the end of WWII and despite a parallel rotation of Presidential administrations, there seems no way change to change a system doing what it is intended to do. Trump has naturally disappointed his anti-war supporters by immediately nominating explicit war enthusiasts into positions of power.

Trump seems keen to conclude the Ukraine-Russia war, despite Biden's attempt to poison pill the foreign policy direction in yesterday's green light for the use of NATO supplied and US targeted long range ballistic missiles into Russia. Trump has the domestic mandate for ending the conflict and has publicly stated he is going to do it. Additionally, his antipathy toward the Biden administration with all of its entanglements in the Ukraine conflict, his vengeance against the US Deep State which is deeply involved in the war and his personal relationship with Putin - all point to a settlement. Or perhaps a US withdrawal of interest, fully delegating to Europe the task of continuing the support for the war alone.

As for Middle East, Trump is obviously no saviour to the Palestinians. We recall that Trump was at least a co-progenator of the current crisis, agreeing with Netanyahu to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in his first term, whilst having his son-in-law Jared Kushner negotiate a grand bargain with the Saudi's to normalise relations with Israel in exchange for sharing of nuclear energy, and perhaps, to accelerate regime change in regional rivals, Iran. The Hamas attack on Oct 7th was launched in large part to sabotage such a reproachement, using the Israel's inevitable over reaction to render it politically impossible for any Arab or Muslim state to reach accommodation with Israel.

Under Trump 2.0, we can expect further fulfilment of Israeli foreign policy objectives. The ethnic cleansing and truncation of Gaza, the increase of Israeli settlement of the West Bank, perhaps formal recognition of Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel. That probably triggers an Intifada with even a hitherto muzzled Fatah finally joins Hamas in an uprising. Obviously these are all disasters which all sensible hope to avoid but I suspect there is little in the way of stopping it now.

For TA & HR the main impact of Trump 2.0 on the war domain will be increase hiring demands for companies involved in war production. Trump 2.0 will certainly demand increase military spending by US client states - no doubt spent on US arms - and so the likes Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and other US arms manufacturers should stand to gain mightily from this administration. Recruiters working for them will do very well too.

10. Crypto / BTC

The fact that Trump is a late convert to Crypto & BTC does not undermine the idea that he is the most pro-crypto President ever elected in the US. There is little evidence that he has any understanding about it but his supporters certainly do and Crypto bro's overwhelmingly voted for Trump. Key opponents of cryptocurrency have already been removed from the Senate, and with Trump promising also to remove Gary Gensler, Chair of the Security & Exchanges Commission, we saw almost unanimous celebrations of the Trump victory throughout the crypto world.

The main shift may in the end be one of mood; gone is the 'lawfare' waged against crypto entrepreneurs and gone too are the obstacles to crypto legislation which have held the industry in a state of stasis. In comes a more opportunistic, even nationalistic ideas that crypto might be an opportunity for the US to convert fiat money which only it can print, into commodity money which cannot be diluted by excess production. The opportunity is there for the US to print digital gold, a competitive advantage Trump will surely recognise.

There not much TA here, but if we see the US starts converting USD into BTC, we will see an almighty bull run on the currency which will enable a decent amount of people to survive on asset value inflation rather than relying on a salary. The last Uber ride I took in Los Angeles (hey Gino!) a guy working three jobs - full time as a line engineer with an aerospace company, a microentrepreneur producing podcasts, as well as driving Uber to monetise his down time. His gains as an asset holder of Bitcoin far outweighed all of these income streams. Crypto and BTC - if they do end up going to the moon, may be a decent place for the otherwise unemployed to make some money and stay out of trouble.

11. USD as Global Financial Reserve

Trump is 'proclivity rather than policy' President.

The reason why there are so many contradictions within his own program is because what superficially sounds good in one place, actually counteracts the thing he wanted to do in another place. His commitment to the USD as the global financial reserve is an example of this - it is entirely incompatible with his endorsement of BTC. His understanding of the role of the dollar is no better than man-on-the-street, which is essentially 'Dollar Strong Good'. What Trump doesn't understand is that while the strong dollar means imports are cheap for America this also means that US exports will be expensive to others - which inevitably means trade partners will sell more and buy less from the US. You cannot run a strong dollar and complain about trading imbalancing - it is mathematic certainty of that exchange.

Another way to look at it is there actually is no imbalance of trade, as the commodity that US trade partners desire most are the very dollars that US insists everyone uses. There is no other mechanism for those dollars to be produced and distributed other than the US running trade deficits with every other trade partner, with the long term price paid by the US for the exorbitant privilege of controlling everyone else's economy is persistent trade deficits and increasing financialisation of its own economy.

All this was predicted by John Maynard Keynes in Bretton Woods in 1945, but his case for the BANCOR - a nominal currency independent of any single country whose value would be calculated on a basket of major currencies - was lost amid the receding power of British Empire and the obvious rise of in power of the American one.

This is obviously not the place for a deep dive in the history of currency regimes, or the rise of Empires, but I recommend that you read this by Lyn Alden, read this on Bretton Woods and read this on the Triffin dilemma if you want more context on how the world is how it is.

Needless to say this is all above Trump's head. And his stated defence of the USD will typically involve actions which produce the opposite outcome as intended. Threatening other countries with economic penalties for making other means to trade (in their own currencies, with another third non-dollar currency, through direct barter or a new financial vehicle designed for the purpose of eliminating exchange rate risk) only motivates those countries to further double down on ways to de-risk from US weaponisation of the dollar. Hence, Trump will likely inadvertently accelerate de-dollarisation, which in the end is the true threat to the US position as global hegemon because it will reduce the foreign demand for USD, the main factor keeping the dollar value high, despite the huge amounts of money printing the US Federal Reserve has conducted. Being able to increase in the money supply and exporting the inflation to others, is the exhorbitant privilege which we often hear about. Trump's blind defence of this legacy system will be the final irony in Trump 2.0 administration - the ultimate dissident, who ends up being the unwitting defender of the only deep state that he truly does seem to abhor but cannot recognise.

What is the impact on TA & HR on the de-dollarisation and enforced re-dollarisation? Lots of negative energy thats for sure, though growth will come from it for those smart enough to guess where that energy might be dispersed. Like I said, Trump is a high variance President.

Anyways, that's it on Trump 2.0. We're going to do recruitment look back next week then get on with forecasting what the world has in store for recruitment in 2025.

Now out of the kitchen, onto the lounge 👇

What's Going On?

Big List of Recruiting and HR Events to Attend in 2024 & 2025

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

Founders Focus - Ep52 - Up close and personal with Matthijs Metzemaekers, Founder, Carv, Tues 19th Nov, 10am GMT / 11am CET

We are back with Founders Focus - the show where we get up close and personal with the people changing the way we work and hire today. Interview intelligence and Recruitment Task Automation has been the hot categories in tech over the past 12 months and it is fantastic to see European based recruitment tech making gains in this space. I'm excited to be chatting with serial entrepreneur and recruitment tech veteran, Matthijs Metzemaekers, CEO of Carv. Register here

Mastering the Skills Economy: Freelance Operations & Technology, Nov 20th 2pm GMT

Excited to moderate this conversation on how organisations can use independent workers into a consistent, sustainable and effective function for business. Remember, the freelancers were the original skill based hires - be interesting to see how what lessons we can learn from working with them. Register here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep283 - Sustainable Recruitment in Healthcare: Strategies for 2024 & Beyond, Friday 22nd Nov, 2pm GMT

Recruitment for Healthcare workers might be the No1 challenge for countries in the OECD - aging societies create an increasing demand for healthcare services and there has never been a moment when it was 'easy' to hire skilled and experienced practitioners in the field. Lets figure out state of the healthcare market and what employers and recruiters can do about it. We're with Charles Armitage co-founder & CEO(Florence), Yaasha Hasan, Managing Director, (NHS Accelerator) & Sam Dhesi, CEO (Popp). Register here

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!

HR Meet Up with WeAreDevelopers, Thurs 27th November, 6pm CET, Schottenfeldgasse 23/D, 1070 Wien

Haven't been to Vienna for the long time, so the opportunity to jump into this community meetup was too good to give up. I'm going to be sharing a panel with Rudi Bauer, MD (WeAreDevelopers) and Eva-Maria Meyr, Global Director of Employer Brand (Dynatrace) where we'll review the year that is so rapidly coming to a close. Make sure you come up and say hello. Register here

Drive greater ROI with Efficient Hiring Practices, Thursday, December 5 at 2pm GMT

Doing More with Less? We're going to have to be ready to be 'Doing Even More With Even Less' in 2025, because the pressure to get leaner is not going to ease. Companies are undergoing a fundamental reevaluation of the it means to make a successful business and we in talent acquisition have to be in the front foot in getting our own departments in order. Delighted to be moderating this panel on then how talent leaders have been able to be move the needle on critical KPI's. Register here

FiesTA, 23-24 January 2025, Bangalore, India.

Delighted to be invited back to Bangalore for this new event to talk about the Next Decade of Recruiting. We're going to have to track long term trends in human capital formation, demographic crisis, climate change, new energy transition and more in what should be the most sci-fi talk I've ever given. It's only 2 months away, so I had better get ready in preparing it!. Tickets here - DM me if you want discount code.

NJA* People & Talent Summit, Thursday 13th March, 2025, Fishburners, Wynyard Station (Sydney)

I'm back in Sydney folks. Thanks to Pam Stevenson, Emer McCann and Anthony Enright for inviting me to come back Down Under. Brand new talk on 'From Talent Acquisition to Talent Everything' - time for the next evolution of the Talent function. Chimpanzees, culture and Ronald Coase will be in this talk. Grab a ticket here

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

Sending this back in cold and wet London. I don't mind really 🤣. Bring on the Christmas period, lets get into the mulled wine and see if we can rustle up some festive cheer.

Have a great week everybody.

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.