This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 196

Sponsored by our friends Metaview

Last opportunity for this amazing Christmas deal from our friends at Metaview

It's a FREE FOREVER offer for anyone signing up to the platform for the first time in the next week. Offer ends 31st December, so if you're still working today, get on it now.

You'll get:

1. AI-powered summaries for any hiring conversations (intakes, screens, interviews, debriefs, & more)

2. AI assistance to instantly recall and analyse key details across conversations

3. AI reports to understand what's going on in your hiring process like never before

You don't have to look far on the Internet to see incredible testimonials over the game changing impact for recruiters and hiring managers from Metaview's interview intelligence platform.

Sign up here to claim https://lnkd.in/e-UF4RfU - this is a no brainer folks!

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

We're finally here - the end of the year, and the end of this look back series on What Happened in Recruiting in 2024.

In Part One, I covered End of naive optimism, shrinking TA team size, the job applicant flood, candidate experience crisis + ghost job mythology and quiet AI-enablement of recruitment teams.

In Part Two, geographical dispersal of remote-able jobs, crisis in early careers hiring, maturation of the debate on Skills Based Hiring, the rebrand of A player Hiring (talent density) and consolidation of recruitment tech stack.

In Part Three, stabilisation of WFH / Remote work, rise of freelance / fractional TA, devolution and revolution of job boards into staffing agencies, Atlantic divergence on DEI and TikTok lay off livestreams

This is Part Four.

Let's go 👇

16. LinkedIn Hiring Assistant

LinkedIn Hiring Assistant arrived with the expected reception - initial astonishment at the scope (candidate generation, message composition, interview question generation), followed by the equally predictable disparagement from operating recruiters dissatisfied that it didn’t immediately do a good enough job to entirely replace them in their roles. 

The debate about the current capabilities of the Hiring Assistant vs a Human Recruiter misses the most salient point, which is software platforms which recruiters rely on, can and will roll out upgrades which have transformatory potential for the function. And we’re not going to get a say as to how quickly our roles will be transformed or in what ways they will do so. This will be determined solely by the capability of software vendors to build the functionality and of the buyers to see the value of implementing or upgrading to it. Those buyers btw, maybe not be us in Talent Acquisition but ‘the business’. And, as we know, the business has only one motivating factor, which is to improve profit margins. Consequently, TA & HR do not have the luxury of maintaining a laissez-faire approach to AI & Automation. We need to predict as accurately as we can which parts of our work are most vulnerable to disintermediation and become the active agents in that disintermediation and use the productivity gains that we secure for the business - painfully acquired though they may be - as currency for the negotiation of expansion of scope beyond that of the of acquisition of talent. This thesis is going to be the only thing I'll be talking about in 2025, so follow my profile here if you want to help me think through it.

17. War on Middle Managers

In 2024, no other segment of the workforce had it harder than middle managers. We probably should’ve paid more attention when Mark Zuckerberg extended efficiency mode in Meta to a permanent setting, with a conspicuous comment that individual contribution was to be expected from managers, and that less managers would be needed going forward. Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon communicated the same sentiment, and only last week Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet announced 10% layoffs across Google, most of which will be taken from the management tier.

What’s going on exactly?

Aside from usual corporate bloat which might be ascribed to classic empire building as described by C N Parkinson in the 1970’s, we are also seeing the de-layering of organisations driven by AI. It’s no coincidence that it has been tech companies - companies which are themselves building the foundational models of AI - which have been first to realise this impact of AI on corporate organisation. ‘Middle’ management first evolved as a practical solution to the information exchange problems which emerged when organisations grew in size and complexity. It became accepted wisdom that it was impossible to directly manage more than 8-10 people, especially if those people each have different jobs.  Everyone had limited bandwidth to understand every relevant piece of information in the subdomain, so you had to create a new tier of management in order to reduce the number of direct reports to a more ‘manageable’ 4-5. As the company grew, more management tiers were added, with each tier passing information up and down the chain of command. This was hugely inefficient, so an increasing amount of time and resources were spent in actually trying to make this structure more efficient, until you eventually created specialist functions whose only job was to manage this growing bureaucracy. 

But AI has unlimited bandwidth. AI can ingest a practically unlimited amount of data. The need for interlocutors to ingest information on a tiered basis, condense it into reports which go up chain disappears when you have a chat interface which can just tell you what’s going on from the primary data source. 

There are two implications for Talent Acquisition & HR - neither of which ‘good’. Firstly, a great many of us have striven to move up a career ladder which not only might no longer be there, but perhaps would not be a great idea to climb it even if it were. Focus is on ‘individual contributor’ - what does this mean for a talent acquisition professional? We have to know the answer for any interview, at any level. It’s probably not a bad idea to ‘always have your hand in’ in the operational work. Secondly, company structures are going to get a lot simpler - less role variety, less organisation structure to navigate through - ultimately, less roles to recruit for - at least per employer. The war of middle managers is unlikely to be an episodic surge, but likely a grinding YoY attrition, until middle managers disappear or find a new space to occupy, perhaps in performance coaching or similar. The AI will keep getting better, so organisations will keep getting simplified.

18. Vertical AI, Agentic AI & the End of SaaS?

I estimate that at least 30% of my followers are tech recruiters. This is probably a result of my own background as a tech recruiter in the Web 1.0 era, which led me to do tech startup hiring, which in turn led to the launch a tech talent marketplace (RIP Workshape!) which in its own turn led to me basically being a media type person doing Recruiting Brainfood. Which is all a long winded way of saying that B2B SaaS was my wheelhouse - I know the space, the people, the mission and the end point of businesses like these - find Product-Market-Fit in a common digital workflow which your SaaS product would be an obvious upgrade, raise several rounds of VC money and the exit the company via acquisition or IPO within 3-5 or 5-8 year period for multiple millions. 

In 2024, we began to see a new conversation. This was the idea that AI Agents - autonomous intelligences which do not automate parts of a workflow, but purportedly manage the entire workflow. They might not only replace SaaS but also the people who would use SaaS tools. Instead of providing, say, a sourcing tool for a human recruiter, you provide instead an ‘Vertical AI’ or AI Agent that would find source candidates as if they were that recruiter, with the sourcing tool. 

This is what VC’s mean when they describe Vertical AI has a $12 Trillion opportunity. The opportunity comes not only from the swallowing of the budget allocated to SaaS tools, but also from payroll - which is almost always several orders of magnitude larger than tech budget. Now before we panic right away, AFAIK we have yet to see any agentic AI fully manage a recruiting workflow. If you have, please do let me know - I’d love to know more about it. However, we do need to be aware that this type of vision is what is currently attracting almost all of the VC investment - it’s no longer going into traditional SaaS but going into Agentic AI. 

You might have guessed already, that the customer for Agentic AI, might not be us. It will be for the CEO’s directly, and maybe hiring managers. One of the reasons why specialist support functions exist (support functions here meaning those roles which support the business, but are not directly doing the work of that business) is because the technology was insufficiently accessible for generalist managers to effectively handle. You had a marketing department because the buying and managing ads was too complicated, so you hired a specialist to do that, who then needed specialist tools to do that work most effectively. All this goes away if the tools become a chat interface which anyone can prompt to produce a certain result. 

Long term, this is going to mean that company HQ’s are going to shrink. Company support services - legal, HR, marketing, TA, CS - all will probably shrink also. In smaller companies (they’ll all get smaller) these functions will be dispersed back to the line, because Agentic AI will enable the line managers to affect the results which previously required specialist support staff. 

Not saying this is going to happen. There’s always some unexpected hiccough on the way. But it’s important for us to understand that this is the vision of how VC’s want to happen, and likely the guiding north star of product makers who are dependent on that capital.

19. Mainstreaming of Immigration & Demographic Crisis

Immigration has been constantly in the news in 2024. This is mainly due to the election cycles in countries with a representative democracy as the system of governance - fully ⅓ of the world went to vote this year. Unfortunately, and especially in times of economic insecurity, hating immigrants is a reliably efficacious vote winner. The cost of living crisis  we’ve all been subjected to over the past 3 years has proved to be politically unsustainable for incumbents, all of which have been turfed out wherever general elections have been held, as the people simply voted for change (any change) to alleviate their economic immiseration. Marx got this one right over the Liberals - values flow downstream from material circumstances - not the other way round. 

The incongruity is that we need immigration to support aging populations,  a declining tax base and acute labour shortages in front line work. Ask any actuary you might know and they will be able to precisely predict the moment out pension and healthcare systems collapse as dependency ratios skews exponentially between those who pay in and those who now need to take out. Ask any labour market economist you know and they will tell you precisely what will happen if you immediately halt immigration or worse, summarily deport populations who are currently engaged in the essential work keeping modern society functioning. But all this is now moot when no one can make the pro-immigration case and still retain a political career in representative democracy.

It hasn’t helped that we haven’t until now had the rhetorical space to debate these issues; a huge part of the problems we have now with the rise of the cultural right has been the reflexive position of the cultural left to prevent uncomfortable debate by shouting down those who have other views. All this has done is build up a dam of resentment which will inevitably break one day. 

For those who work in TA & HR today, it is our fortune that it is breaking right now. Not only is the Trumpian movement explicitly anti-immigration, they are also explicitly anti-HR, who I believe they perceive as a corporate outriders of the invariably pro-immigrant ‘woke agenda’. In the great bonfire of bureaucracy we can expect of US Federal workers come January 5th 2025, you can bet a great many of those who go first will be in the People functions. 

There are other implications for us, aside from being in the political crosshairs of right wing governments. The tightening of the immigration rules (even immigration sentiment) means that we are going to need greater fluency over those immigration laws, provide strategic input on which roles should be open to immigrant workers or when targeting non-native workers makes most sense given local talent shortage. It might also mean greater attention paid to talent marketing towards workers already in-country - there may possibly be some overflow towards greater EB and compensation commitments to attract local workers (grasping at straws here). More likely though, is that there will be a natural acceleration toward further outsourcing work to remote workers (who ironically may be workers from the very countries which we had previously been keen to source immigrations from) and further automation of the work, whether that is cloud based AI for knowledge work or embodied AI for front line work. Robot installations have of course been increasing YoY for the past decade, and there are some signs that countries in East Asia - for whom immigration was never seemingly a significant option - are fast leading the way in finding workers for work that humans no longer want to do, for the salaries employers want to pay. 

Reminds me of the ‘Chief Automation Officer’ dummy job spec that Steph Smith created a couple years ago. Seems to me that this is something a lot of people in TA / HR will have the chops to do.

20. Embracing Change

2024 has been tough. I think the recollections of this series are a fair reflection of what many of us have directly experienced this year.  It’s unnecessary doomerism only if we remain overly committed to what has gone before. Talent Acquisition and HR - are going to be fundamentally transformed by this moment, because corporate organisations that we evolved to support will also be fundamentally transformed by it. Our personal responsibility to ourselves, our professional responsibilities to our colleagues, is to lean into this change, even though these changes are uncomfortable for us. To this end, I want to end this series with a few mentions of community members who have shown us how to be courageous in the moment.

Damon Klotz, Head of Community at Culture Amp, announced his departure from this game changing business last week. It’s 12 years with the business, one which Damon has seen through from the very early days to the market leading platform it is today. It’s hard to walk away from an organisation that you’ve helped grow, and in many ways become synonymous with. The strength of character to do this without the certainty of the next chapter, augurs well for a future where decision makers are going to be rewarded. Follow Damon - whatever he gets up to will no doubt also inspire. 

Lars Schmidt ends Redefining Work Podcast! I know myself how hard it is to keep going on a channel; I know how hard it is also to stop. Lars has been and will continue to be one of the great contributors to our industry, and whilst I mourn the loss of one of the great podcasts in our space, it is also a recognition that all good things must end. In an era where ‘data driven decision making’ has become an article of faith, I really respect Lars decision based on his own feeling of motivation to keep doing the pod. We are nothing if we cannot listen to our intuition - it might be the only thing which will continue to give us the human premium in an era dominated by AI

Finally, Irina Shamaeva, legendary founder of Boolean Strings, announced her retirement from sourcing training last week. I’m sure most of the people who follow me here will know Irina - she is one of the key contributors in the sourcing discipline and no question helped distinguish it as its own professional identity, enabling a much greater diversity of talent to enter the recruitment space. We had a celebration for Irina on Brainfood Live Christmas Special last Friday and her online testimonial remains open for contribution for anyone who wants to add some thoughts to one of the greats in our industry. Irina hasn’t gone away though - she moves onto the next chapter as a Digital Artist in Gen AI, converting her sourcing skills to prompt engineering remarkably consistent AI generated images. 

Three different people, three different situations. But three examples of how to take charge of your future. None of us know what is going to happen in the external world - see my predictions for recruitment from last year for evidence of this(!) - but I get the feeling that the winners from the next phase are going to be the ones who are determined to remain the main actor in their own stories. We’re living in interesting times - let's embrace it.

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.

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

I've been writing this newsletter every Monday now for the past 4 years. Its actually been something I really enjoy to do, and selfishly, it really helps me consolidate my thinking. Going to continue doing it so don't you worry about that.

Next week will be last issue of the year - I'm probably going to do a forecast for 2024, or perhaps even review last years forecast, seeing as I got nearly everything wrong. Let me know which one you prefer.

Have a Merry Christmas everybody - hope you get some time to decompress and reconnect with your loved ones.

Cheers!

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.