This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 193

Sponsored by our friends Greenhouse

Greenhouse is your all-together hiring platform – built to deeply solve your hiring needs at every stage with intentional tools that support better hiring decisions and deliver better ROI.

Align recruiters, interviewers, hiring managers and candidates with scalable workflows, use smart sourcing tools to discover and engage top talent, create organised interview plans that empower your team to hire fairly, and easily track and manage the onboarding process – all within Greenhouse.

With our flexible and advanced reporting tools, you can make data-driven decisions to measurably improve your hiring. And Greenhouse is a GDPR-compliant platform that prioritises reliability, security and privacy, so you can feel confident knowing your data is safe.

Greenhouse is not just another hiring tool: we’re a strategic partner that delivers value at every step, helping you build the best teams and achieve business success.

Get everything you need to hire better, all-together with Greenhouse. Visit greenhouse.com to learn more.

Open Kitchen: What Happened in Recruiting in 2024? (Part One)

It's become annual tradition for me to review the year in recruiting in the December weeks of Open Kitchen. Recruitment is one of those industries where we quickly move into the rhythm of meeting the new year's demands, missing the opportunity to retro the year that has gone just before. Now I know there is limited value in retrospection - you can definitely spend way too much time doing it - but once a year it is probably a healthy exercise to consolidate experiences such that we have secure foundation upon which to build our thinking and our action for next year.

If you want to read the reviews for 2023, have a look at Part One, Two and Three. These are not forecasts btw, I do those rapid fire in the month of Jan (you can see how wrong I was for 2024 in Part One, Two, Three and Four) 🤣

Methodology here is straight forward: I am cross referencing Google search, ChatGPT, content from Recruiting Brainfood Issues from 378 to 425, as well as my article focus on Open Kitchen, LinkedIn, X and FB Group activities.

There are going to be 20 items I've selected, this is Part One for 1-5.

Here goes:

1. End of Naive Optimism

Recruiters are natural optimists and this is a very good thing 👊

However, it works against us if it becomes reliance on magical thinking.

2024 was Year 3 of what has been a grinding period of low-to-no economic growth, high cost of living, high cost of business, income insecurity at both company and individual levels as well as a persistent, ambient stress at the state of the world. Good news is that was also the year where we abandoned the naive optimism that the 'economy is going to recover', simply by the turning of the years. We are at a moment of profound economic, political, technological and cultural change, which is manifesting at our level in slow-and-low investment in headcount growth as employers batten down the hatches for the long haul of the Never Normal.

Confirmation that employers were slowing down their investment came in the Q1 profit warnings from publicly listed global staffing firms. Demand for staffing agency services remains one of the best barometers of job growth, so when the likes of Hays, Robert Walters, Page Group each announced profit warnings in near lock step in March / April this year, we had at least knew where we stood.

It's not as if employers have suddenly become more adept at direct hiring either; the internal recruiter job market remains anaemic and contracting. Companies are rethinking how to right size for the rest of the decade. Most of the time, rightsize means downsize. This includes commercially successful businesses, who see the opportunities provided by AI to radically increase productivity. 'Productivity' - of course - is a measure of economic output per capita.

The exceptions are the few companies who are consolidating market leadership in sectors which are guaranteed to grow. NVIDIA - the most valuable company on the planet - continues its massive expansion, converting its trillions into headcount as well as R&D, whilst the all of the old FAANG are investing in their own AI strategies, each with a different vision on how they will become a keystone players in the new economies generated by AI. China EV giant BYD continues its push to dominated EV'S - building mega scale factories which dwarf those of even Tesla, whilst the old guard of VW, Stellantis, Nissan all make desperate cut backs on infrastructure and headcount. I'll write more in a later essay on which sectors offer most promise for recruiters looking for headcount growth - these will be a mix of those employers building the future, institutions servicing social change or organisations protected by legal or cultural moats.

2. Talent Acquisition Teams Get Smaller

Smaller organisational size, means less hiring, which means smaller Talent Acquisition teams. The Talent Labs recently released their 2024 Annual Survey which covers mainly UK based organisations and it contains some really interesting data, especially on team size and capability.

We see an increase of solo TA teams - up from 68% to 71% in 2024 compared to 2023. This correlates with tons with anecdata collected via casual conversations this year - a great many companies have pared TA to down to the bare bones, retaining perhaps a single recruiter to do the backfill hiring. My guess is that around 7-10 news per year might justify 1 x TA specialist, so depending on industry turnover rate, most organisations of 200 or so headcount might carry 1 x recruiter for attrition based hiring.

Talent Acquisition teams are becoming more efficient. We've seen a breakthrough in tech innovation which has unambiguously improved the capabilities of recruiters, especially in interview scheduling, interview note taking, job description generation, interview question generation, scorecard generation and the like. Improvements in these areas incrementally increase recruitment efficiency, producing better hiring outcomes for employers, whilst reducing the human labour that was previously required to create the same result.

Is the future of Talent Acquisition a super AI-enabled solo recruiter, handling what seems today like an impossibly large req load, by coordinating a swarm of AI Copilots to handle most of the operations? It's a compelling vision, and one which may not be unwelcome for the experienced IC's out there currently hanging onto remote.

3. The Applicant Flood

Anyone who has published a job advert in 2024 can verify that this has been a year of applicant oversupply.

Some part of this is due to the wider economic condition described in No1 - the global economy is not growing fast enough to absorb the aspirant workers out there, especially the early entry talent where unemployment rates 12 months after graduation are ranging anywhere from 5 to 30% depending on where you are in the world.

Another part of it is the globalised internet, because where you are in the world no longer matters as far as applying for jobs is concerned. An unemployed person in Brazil is just as able to apply to a job advert for a company in Malaysia, as any native of Kuala Lumpur might. As far as I know, no job board currently allows employers to configure location of job applicants, or even whether this would be legal to do, leaving recruiters with no choice other than stipulate in advert the right to work criteria, or use local language requirements as a crude proxy to try and control the applicant flow.

AI is of course also increasing the applicant flow rate.

Our friends at Arctic Shores have been leading the conversation on the AI-enabled candidate, especially in Early Careers. It is what we can expect - YoY increase in the reported usage of AI to speed up the application process and increase ones chances of passing the filters. Most relevant to The Applicant Flood is 'AI-Personalised Mass Apply'. One of the most interesting examples occurred middle of this year when a young software developer from Italy open sourced his code for producing a small piece of software which scraped jobs from LinkedIn, ingested the data from each such that a personalised application could be automatically sent to each. From the reported 1,000 jobs scraped and applied for, 50 applications converted to interview, all through the click of a single button. Now this software developer was talented, but likely there are hundreds of thousands of coders who could produce software like his. Several tens of thousand could do so over a weekend. Hence, the era of AI-Personalised Mass Apply is here and we can be confident that the Applicant Flood will not be abating any time soon.

All this is actually good news for recruiters - employers who are hiring will increasing look for non-advertised means of doing so - room again for direct sourcing, referrals, hiring in community and the like, or use AI to meet AI with high volume screening solutions, such as Maki. Recruitment work is increasingly move away from Talent Acquisition to Talent Verification - how do we had the human quality assurance when AI meets AI?

4. Candidate Resentment & Ghost Job Mythology 

My friend Kevin Grossman, VP of Research at ERE has a really interesting measure of the state of the Candidate Experience - Candidate Resentment Score. This is the measure of what percentage of candidates are so upset at their experience that they would not have anything to do with that employer in any context, ever again.

Unsurprisingly, we hit an all time low in 2024.

Economic stress + The Applicant Flood, overwhelmed recruiters with legacy process. That means very bad candidate experience indeed. The experience of qualified candidates meeting the spec yet experiencing the 'CV blackhole' has become so common that new explanations had to be found to explain it.

One of these was the 'Ghost Job' - a purported phenomena where employers post non-existent jobs in order to harvest candidate data, measure market sentiment or lure job seekers into scams. It was heavily pumped by the legacy media in Q3, but I think the people reading this newsletter would broadly share my view that the most obvious explanation for appalling CX in 2024 is simply under resourced Talent Acquisition overwhelmed by highly motivated, globalised and increasingly AI-enabled candidates.

For me, the Ghost Job phenomena was most interesting in the way it was memed into existence, by media organisations looking for a story. Kernels of truth - yes, some job postings are fake - amplified such that it becomes the dominant explanation in a narrative that sold well to an unhappy audience ripe for venting against exposed bad actors. I was motivated to write a rebuttal on this because the misinformation was not only damaging to our industry but also potentially guiding job seekers toward unproductive behaviours on the job search. We need to be careful about the manufacture of memes.

5. AI & Automation

ChatGPT celebrated its 2nd anniversary a couple days ago. Since that time, it's clear that the world of software has been forever changed. There isn't a product you're using today which hasn't had their product roadmaps radically altered (and accelerated) by mainstreaming of AI by OpenAI. We are all 'AI-enabled' today differing only in the extent to which our capabilities have enhanced, and through which source.

In 2023, I gave a presentation at In-House Recruiters Live in Islington. In one of the slides, I tried to outline a crude taxonomy of where recruiters might 'encounter' AI. We might find them via widely availably consumer apps (ChatGPT), AI-enabled point solutions dedicated to one aspect of the recruiting workflow, self built proprietary AI which might be available only the enterprises which have a HR IT department, or individual mavericks whose self experimentation reached such levels that they were able to cobble together credible DIY solutions or through core platforms we use every day which simply upgrade us down the road to AI-enablement

In 2023, we looked like this....

In 2025, I think we're on track to look like this...

Might be an interesting question to ask the community actually - where are you getting most exposed to AI? Do let me know in comments below where you're at with it.

In the meantime, we're going to continue to optimise with AI regardless of source - though mainly via core platform delivered updates - and whilst the miracle has not occurred for most of us in the industry, quite a few of us today could not do without some of the AI-powered innovations that have changed our work. When is the last time your wrote some interview notes? Don't you miss it? Of course not.

Next week: Part Two (6-10: Offshore Ramp, Skill Based Hiring & the Juice Worth the Squeeze, Talent Density, WFH stabilisation & Tech Consolidation). Follow my account if you want to be notified when it's out, or subscribe to the LinkedIn newsletter to get it also in your inbox.

Now out of the kitchen, onto the lounge 👇

What's Going On?

Big List of Recruiting & HR Events to Attend in 2025

Ok folls, so 2024 events have been shuffled off onto another sheet - well done on everything putting on events this year - event organisers amateur or pro - I salute you! Mean while, 118 events already in the Big List for 2025 - make sure you are bookmarking this spreadsheet, and adding to it. Please also make sure event organisers locally to you know about this! Cheers.

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

TA's 2025 Blueprint: Scaling Efficiency to Build World-Class Teams, Thursday 5th December, 1pm ET

We're going to tackle four topics on this webinar: best practices for scaling TA efficiency, when and where to put AI into the flow, how candidate experiences and expectations are presenting new challenges for employers and what new hiring trends we can expect to see in 2024. Lets do it - register here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep285 - 2024 in Review: The State of Job Advertising. Friday 29th November, 2pm GMT 2024

We're continuing our review of the year series, to end the year of programming at Brainfood Live. This time, we're diving into the data with Yazad Dalal, Chief Growth Officer, Joveo, Alexander Chukowski, HR Tech Consultant & Peter Weddle, Founder, TATech on the state of job advertising. What does AI Mass Apply mean for CPC? Bet you can't wait to find out! Register here for a no holds barred deep dive in the current state of recruitment advertising.

TA Leadership Dinner at MOMO Restaurant in Amsterdam, 11th December, 5.30pm - 8.30pm CET

Friends, I am organising a TA leadership dinner with our friends GoodTime, TheTruthWorks and MatchHR. My job is the moderate a conversation on the State of Talent Acquisition in the Netherlands in 2024 and beyond with the legendary Kobi Ampoma, Head of Talent Acquisition at The HEINEKEN Company and Anastasia Pshegodskaya, Director of Talent Acqiuisition at Remote.com. Limited spaces folks so apply by sending [email protected] an email wtih your LinkedIn url!

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

Back in the UK after another amazing week visiting great cities Berlin, Vienna and Bratislava. Thanks to everyone who welcomed me to these cities - it is truly humbling to be greeted this way. I'm taking back some great memories and also new inspiration on what the task ahead for me looks like. Thank you for the inspiration folks.

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.