This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 195

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

We're onto Part Three of a 4 Part Series reviewing 'What Happened in Recruiting in 2024.

I covered Part One (End of Naive Optimism, Talent Acquisition Teams Getting Smaller, The Job Applicant Flood, Candidate Resent and the Rise of Ghost Job Mythos & AI & Automaton) and Part Two (Geographical Job Dispersal, Crisis in Early Careers Hiring, Skills Based Hiring Being Worth the Squeeze, Talent Density as A Player Hiring Rebranded and Tech Consolidation) in two previous issues of this newsletter so feel free to read back on those. Any order though, as 1-20 is not listed with any degree of science.

This week, we're going to be talking about WFH becoming Stabilised as 4+1, Rise of the Freelancer Recruiter, Carcinisation of Recruitment Technology, Atlantic Divergence on DEI and End of TikTok, Day in the Life and Layoff Videos - we're going to miss them.

Let's go 👇

11. WFH Stablises

Year 2 of a depressed white collar job market enabled employers to push hard for a full return to office in 2024. Some -  like Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon - went for a decisive confrontation by announcing full RTO for the entire company as of January 2025 (though as noted in yesterday’s Recruiting Brainfood, some regions have managed to secure reasonable carve outs - go the Luxembourgers!. The majority however, decided to simply reduce the ratio of jobs which were available for remote, going for a slower approach to full RTO by the action of  role replacement. 

This tweet by Pieter Levels passes the gut check as to the state of the remote job market - something like a 90% collapse in remote-able job opportunities from peak remote in 2021-2022. 

There are many arguments for and against remote working; I find all of them convincing to some extent, which gives me the sense that remote working as a good or bad thing is a relative rather than a generalised truth. It’s good if you're an experienced IC who needs deep focus time to be productive; it’s bad if you’re a junior staff member who is out of their depth and really could do with proximity to more experienced team members. 

One thing which I think both evangelists and detractors of remote working secretly agree on -  that we all do less carceral employment when working remotely - remains unacknowledged by evangelists. For me, it is pretty clear that it is precisely because we do actually do less work that we enjoy it so much; it’s the same reason why employers or the employer-aligned (i.e. managers) that we hate it so much for others. The failure of evangelists to make the case for remote on the basis of ‘less work’ exposes the position to future attack by detractors, who now have the market conditions on their side. As such, we can expect the ambient pressure to RTO to continue to increase as we move into the new year which offers a ‘gets worse before it’s gets better’ vibe. 

There is strength in numbers though; the cities which are most resiliently pro-remote seem to be those McKinsey-labelled superstar cities which had achieved the sort of gravitational pull which made it a necessity for any serious business to put a HQ in it. These are also cities which are dominated by sectors - accountancy, finance, media, HQ support, software development - which are professions which are most amenable to remote working. 

London is one of the most resistant  - we basically are refusing to do it, and perhaps there is enough ‘talent density’ of refuseniks that prevent employers from being excessively strict on RTO. It feels like a stand off, one in which each side will look to press the other should the conditions change in one sides favour. In the meantime, a 4+1 type of compromise is an acceptable deal for most.

12. Rise of the Freelancer Recruiter

The commitment of experienced individual contributors to a more flexible way of working is part of the energy which is fuelling the continued rise of the Alt Workforce. Why come to conflict over RTO with a desired candidate or a valued employee, when you can solve the problem by offering remote and an alternative contract to FTE?

Interest in leveraging the Alt workforce was a noticeable trend in corporate organisations pre-Covid so absorption of these new post-Covid candidate demands may not be as traumatic as some RTO zealots make it. Perhaps it was the Uber, WeWork, AirBnB era of SaaS which convinced us of the superiority of utilisation vs ownership. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could access workers when we needed them, rather than go to the hassle of attracting, assessing, acquiring, managing and maintaining them?

With Covid, Shift to Remote, Hostile de-globalisation, Rise of AI, Trump 2.0 - all signalling pretty hard that existing systems are undergoing deformation - if not early stages of collapse - making organisations as agile as possible in this VUCA’d world is going to be a business priority for the People departments of 2025. In plain language, this will mean lowering the ratio of permanent FTE vs non-FTE going forward. 

The biggest shift will be in the culture of TA / HR. Remember that companies have been organised around the implicit understanding that the default mode of work for any position is 9 to 5, 5 days per week, full time and on premise. All of our systems are designed around this archetype - good luck to anyone trying to fit in a Fractional, remote worker, operating their own Ltd, into a conventional ATS or HRIS workflow. All of the People departments are generally organised around this idea also. 

Expanding scope to take on the entire Talent Universe is a huge opportunity that we must embrace in 2025. This will put internal corp directly into competition with trusted MSP’s but you know what? You’re going to need to cultivate talent communities,  build employer brand, leverage talent intelligence and network amplification from all workers which interact with your business, regardless of the precise parameters of the employment relationship you have with them. 

We’re probably going to start at home base - with our own TA / HR departments. An unfortunate outcome of the global push for operational efficiency is that People teams have been amongst those departments disproportionately impacted by job losses; this has meant a surge of experienced and talented people thrust into an unforgiving job market, many of whom are now considering different forms of working relationship, even if FTE might be their preference. Recent study from Achil in France showed that the freelance component of the French recruiter market had increased by  to . Another, rather less rigorous poll, indicated that TA leaders would go 75 / 25 FTE / non-FTE if they had the chance to reorg team in 2025.

13. Carcinisation of Rec Tech Disruptors

Ever since the very first days of the internet, there have been technology innovation attempts to disrupt the staffing agency market. Agencies seemed expensive, the service was often poor and everybody - employer to candidate - seemed dissatisfied with the middle man.

The very first job boards were sold as a direct-to-hire way of subverting the agency market. This site here - LinkedIn - was born out of the frustration too many professionals had of working with and through third party intermediaries who would determine who would get what job or who would get which hire.

Yet through it all, the staffing agency continued to be a multi-billion dollar industry, absorbing the disruptive threats by becoming the best customers of technology innovations that were designed to kill them. It all makes sense when you zoom out. Recruitment agencies aggregate the job requirements from the market, and so will always be the best buyers of job ads - and therefore the best customers of recruitment technology disruptors. What ended up being disrupted wasn’t recruitment agencies but print publishers who lost the entire white collar job ad business as analogue shifted to digital. 

We might have seen something in 2024 which finally changes this dynamic. I didn’t expect it, but it seems that tech innovators have decided that the way forward was not to disrupt the staffing agency model, but take it over. 

Indeed’s failed experiment with Pay per Application was partly poor execution, partly external market forces; the increase of job applications from a more active job seeker audience meant many customers suddenly found themselves incurring costs way in excess of expectations, leading to public outcry, massive PR damage and a swift withdrawal of the payments model. But Indeed’s ambitions were not dimmed by this failure - they are moving swiftly on to what was probably always the next obvious step - Pay Per Hire. 

The recruitment ads business is a huge market but the staffing market is 20x bigger. And if Indeed go forward with a Pay per Hire model, along with their Smart Sourcing candidate matching innovation, they will essentially become a globalised recruitment agency, one with more candidates, more employers and more jobs than all of the top 100 staffing agencies combined. Keep an eye out for Recruit Holdings Investor updates - we’ll see how far down the line Indeed have gone down this path. 

Btw: every marketplace is moving in this direction. Pay Per Post doesn’t make enough money, doesn’t consistently provide enough results; Pay Per Click / Pay Per Application are defeated by AI enabled job candidates; Pay Per Hire might really be the only game in town. Perhaps ‘twas ever thus. 

Follow people like Jonathan Kestenbaum, Bill Fischer and Alexander Chukowski if you want to razor sharp thinking on this.

14. Atlantic Divergence on DEI

Trump 2.0 was a traumatic event for many people in our industry, especially those who specialise in DEI. The return of Trump feels like a high water mark moment in the intense and ongoing culture war in the US, a war in which TA / HR have been active protagonists and now - consequently, obvious targets. Trump’s outriders in DOGE - entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswarmy are explicitly anti-HR, never mind DEI - will no doubt aim to illustrate their ideological commitments by making HR amongst the first to go in the great bonfire of red tape they are planning for government agencies. 

I suspect many CEO’s in the private sector are quietly supportive. DEI requires commitment - investment in time and resources, as well as deeply held values that employers play a significant role in social equity. The past two years have seen that those values were not that deeply held, by that many CEO’s, whose priorities are on growing the company's profits. For the US at least, we might have to say ‘fair enough’

This will lead to divergence in the discourse on DEI in the US vs Europe. Whilst the sentiment in the US shifts toward wokelashing, the EU has its DEI commitments already baked into the law making process - pay transparency, gender equity at board level and so on. These concepts - started a decade ago - only now find themselves moving through into legislation at national level. These directives will manifest into corporate governance of the member states and will likely be beyond any revision, regardless of any changes in national government of member states, even if Trumpian candidates end up winning political mandates in Western democracies in 2025. 

It will end up being a gigantic A/B test on some of the axioms that TA / HR hold dear. Does a diverse company really make a better company? Europeans are going to be the ones who will need to make that case. 

It will be a great test to see whether a diverse workforce / diverse company does indeed beat one which rejects DEI.

15. End of TikTok, Day in The Life & Layoff Lives

Conflict between employer and employee was vividly demonstrated in a TikTok phenomena which became viral earlier in the year - employees live broadcasting their lay offs as it happened. As an anthropologist of work, it was an incredible opportunity to see first hand accounts as to how companies handles lay offs; as a normie addicted to social media, it was also compulsive viewing on a car-crash-waiting-to-happen. 

We actually learned a lot about layoffs from these videos; mainly on how badly they are handled by employers - very often featuring a line manager who the employee had never met, accompanied by ‘HR’ who the employee had also never met, who usually sat in silence, presumably to act as some sort of macabre chaperone for a conversation that needed to stay on the right side of compliance. 

It was depressing to see communications handled this way. A perfunctoriness concession to the ‘human touch’ is worse than no human touch at all.  An email would’ve been better. The role of HR is also laid bare in conversations like these; we do ourselves a disserve by presenting  the image of being champions of the employees, when we are only representatives of the employer. This becomes explicit by our presence in these meetings, where our role is  to make sure severance goes quickly, smoothly and with minimum hassle - to that employer.

Despite the education - perhaps because of it - the price paid for employees posting these videos seems to be harsh. One of the most famous posted a later video lamenting at the state of the job market and it was hard to watch a young person who feels such despair at the state of the job market, especially if she comes to consider that the video which made her famous might be factor in an incredibly tough job search. 

Its impossible to make the attribution of a causal relationship between making a lay off live video and the subsequent struggles in the job market, but it’s not hard to imagine that employers might be averse to the risk of any future PR damage from an employee who has proven to do such damage to previous employers. It’s also easy for HR to veto the hire of any employee who has recorded and broadcast their firing as someone who has acted illegally in doing so.  Finally, anyone who is not the CEO of a business would be taking a huge risk to their own career in making the hire, because if it goes wrong, they would be on the hook for making what would be an obvious mistake in hindsight. 

It doesn’t stop some though, and as a person interested in candidate / employee experience, I find these episodes continuing to fascinate. The PwC consultant may be a different type of professional than Brittany though - he’s already on the entrepreneurial path and it looks like he has no intention of gaining employment any time soon, and used his lay off live as pre-marketing for this next venture. 

This may all be moot though, as TikTok being banned in the US on January 19th 2025 looks like it will go ahead and the window of opportunity we have to observe actual employee / employer relationship in action has closed. Likely CEO’s will be relieved - in order to maintain control, you have to control the information flow. 

Subscribe for final part of What Happened in Recruiting, next week.

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.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep283 - Sustainable Healthcare Recruitment: Strategies for 2024 and Beyond, Monday 16th Dec, 4pm GMT

There is no other sector which has greater need for better hiring than healthcare; aging societies have ever increasing healthcare needs and those needs can only be serviced by skilled, experienced, motivated and empathetic staff. And yet no country can say they are happy with current state. How did we get here, what the challenges and how can the recruitment community come together to solve them? We're on later this afternoon at 4pm GMT - register here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep287 - Christmas Special, Open Mic, Friday 20th Dec, 2pm GMT

Friends, we are the final Brainfood Live of the year and we're going use this Christmas Special to do an Open Mic session, where guests, panellists and commentators can come on and say their piece to the camera. If you've been a watcher of Brainfood Live this year and have enjoyed (or hated!) the show, come on screen and say hello. Only caveats are Christmas jump and some mulled wine or eggnog in hand. Thank you all for watching -see you Friday. 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

Last week 'on it' for me - it's been a massively committed year. Got to be real with you, it's been an exhausting ride and I'm looking forward to some downtime over the holidays. Big break now for Brainfood Live but RBF and TWIR will continue, as I've got to complete the What Happened in 2024 series, as well as get my forecast post out in time for the New Year.

For those of you who have shutting down for the year - thanks for reading this newsletter - have a great Christmas break 👊

Hung

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.