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#89 - Hung Lee | Curator for Recruiting Brainfood
104 Plays3 months ago
Editor of leading industry newsletter Recruiting Brainfood.
Hung is a recruitment industry professional with over 15 years experience as an agency recruiter, Recruitment manager, Internal Head of Talent, recruitment trainer, founder of award winning online recruiting platform WorkShape and now Editor and Community builder at Recruiting Brainfood - the best weekly newsletter in recruitment.
Shownotes
00:00 - Intro & Context
12:30 - Recruiters' Key Skill: Adaptability.
20:45 - Yearly Predictions in Recruitment.
45:10 - Growth of the "Recruiting Brain Food" Newsletter.
Links
Guest Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunglee/
Recruiting Brainfood: https://www.recruitingbrainfood.com/
Thomas Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-kohler-pplwise/
Thomas e-mail: [email protected]
pplwise: https://pplwise.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Adaptability in Recruitment
00:00:00
Speaker
Today's guest, Han Lee, the curator of the recruiting brain food newsletter with plus 400 newsletter sent out. Well, the recruiters are always very adaptable. This is why i'm I'm fundamentally quite confident about the industry itself, even though um i'm you know there's no no point in lying about how difficult sort of these these moments are going to be. We're going to come across and continue these difficulties.
00:00:27
Speaker
But the primary skill set of any recruiter is adaptability. um like We know how to... to to to ah we We're speaking to candidates all the time, so we're very sensitive to to to to what's actually happening on the ground. um And we know where the pressure points are when there's the sales demand. And as you say, a great example of the German-speaking salespeople, um there was a period of time probably from mid-2010 onward, maybe just about 2021, where ah really ah people were just hiring for, you know, in the startup world, pretty much, you know, just needed a startup experience. um No need for the German language in large degree. Now German language requirement is coming in back and forth.
00:01:12
Speaker
um And of course then constrains the candidate pool um and it creates more demand for recruiters um so or recruiters that actually know how to recruit ah the German speakers. So ah yeah, there's going to be sort of all kinds of opportunities um in every type of market.
Annual Predictions & Technology Adoption
00:01:30
Speaker
um Exactly, completely exactly.
00:01:34
Speaker
yeah um And how do you see um the recruiting industry now um developing maybe towards the end of the year and next year? Do you have any protections? I make predictions that are always wrong, but I make 20 predictions every year. At the start of the year, at the end of every year, I make a prediction as to what's going to happen in the last 12 months. We're already rapidly approaching over the halfway stage, so we'll be able to make assessments as to how accurate I was in the predictions last year.
00:02:08
Speaker
A few things I predicted. um I predicted on a technology side, things like interview intelligence would become like a mainstream idea. ah This is the technology that essentially records um and and a video interview, transcribes the interview, and then from the transcription, um there's a lot of analysis about how that interview went, what was the interview quality of that sort of process.
00:02:33
Speaker
um So I made a prediction that would come ah from 8% adoption to something like 20% adoption. I don't know whether that can be proven or not, but I will speak to the vendors themselves to see if their sales have doubled over the course of ah the last 12 months.
Challenges with Applicant Flow & Advertising
00:02:49
Speaker
And that I think is would be good evidence for this.
00:02:51
Speaker
um I think that um a few things that got wrong. ah you know I thought programmatic would would also become very, very popular because programmatic would be the best way to control applicant flow. Like 2023, 2024 has been a period of very high applicant flow. So you post a job ad, suddenly you get loads of candidates. can be It's turned into a very difficult thing because ah you Recruiters cannot sort of manage the applicant flow. The best way to do that is to have a dynamic ad that can respond to the volume and then you deactivate automatically once it hits a certain number. so I assume that that would be more popular than it is, but I don't think so. I think programmatic has had a tough year and that's probably because we we're generally responding by not advertising as much.
00:03:38
Speaker
um So, rather than get better at ah but job advertising, companies have decided, you know, we're not going to bother advertising. We'll do our recruitment via referrals or do it via something on an advertising route. So, we've not got better at it, but we've slowed it down somewhat.
00:03:56
Speaker
um ah
Market Trends & Community Support
00:03:58
Speaker
What else? I thought and agencies will continue to struggle in terms of top-line revenue. I think that's definitely true. um ah you know We've had and the sort of ah profit warnings from all of the big players, more or less. That just tells you the same story of a general decline of ah hiring appetite um ah but compared to two years or so ago. so We're significantly rebalancing, I think.
00:04:25
Speaker
um So yeah, loads of other sort of examples. I'll need to fish out exactly what those productions were. Like I say, usually I get them completely wrong, but I'm happy to be yeah ah exposed on that. um And Hamerford is accordingly required.
00:04:46
Speaker
Hang Li, the curator of the Recruiting Brain Food newsletter with plus 400 newsletter sent out, very persistent, very consistent. We talked about community building and also about recruitment and the recruiting industry of the past and the future. So a very specific, nice episode with Hang Li.
00:05:07
Speaker
Then you can build trust and then you can spend less time communicating and more time just getting shit done. Then I went home and and thought about this sentence. We basically put it on the table. Hiring takes time. People are trained. How to objectively judge certain situations. It's very, very, very, very hard to change things. That was the learning. Entrepreneurs with empathy. To the people side. Hey, great to have you on my show and I'm really really looking forward to this episode. I'm reading your um newsletter, I think, since years already.
00:05:34
Speaker
i'm enjoying it and um now I'm really glad that we can have you. So maybe we start with a short introduction about yourselves. Yeah, thanks very much, Thomas. It's my pleasure to to be on the show. um ah So my name's Hong Li. um I still self-identify as a recruiter, I would say, um even though it has been some time since I last ah sent sent a CV and in anger. um ah But I did a recruitment agency sort of job for 10 years or so, ah moved in-house, did a lot of the early stage tech startup recruiting, um launched my own tech platform back in the day.
00:06:10
Speaker
um And now I'm doing more community related a support. So I see my role now is ecosystem support for the recruiting community. um And that basically involves ah running newsletters, doing podcasts, doing events, ah just doing what I can to help our conversation flow in the industry. It's really nice and I can also um see that you're very active and that you're connected to a lot of people and um I think close to everyone in the recruiting space in in Europe at least knows you and how how did you came up actually with the idea of um this project and what's what's the overall vision maybe?
00:06:53
Speaker
ah um ah you know what There wasn't a huge vision associated with this, Thomas. um the I think ah a lot of the times when people think about you know building an audience or a community or anything like this, they they often have like a strong agenda um and everything they do is toward such ah an agenda. um ah But the truth is with regards to recruiting brain food, um I just saw that the the industry had this fragmented a sort of experience um where lots of people were really solving problems independently um and in fact then duplicating their solutions because actually the guy down the road actually had this issue three months ago and there's a solution right there so why are you wasting your time so I had that experience myself when I was recruiting um and I just thought you know what
00:07:46
Speaker
ah wouldn't it be better if we just shared a bit more about this information would all kind of get value from from that so that was the only driving force um and you know when the newsletter started it was really just about okay here's a lot of information that i found was personally interesting and useful.
00:08:04
Speaker
um ah Best way I can get that to more people is just to set a newsletter up and and if anybody wants to subscribe to that, great. If nobody did, they're also great. you know It was not a plan. um And then obviously, you know lot lots of people had the same issues or concerns I did, so they you know started following on the newsletter. So yeah, I wouldn't say there was any strategy behind this or any huge plan, only the the focus on the problem, which is we're too fragmented and we need to get closer together.
00:08:33
Speaker
And it also evolved over time, right? Because what I really enjoyed was also the data you provide, because you you can also see a bit of m analytics on your um website and platform that you can break down the community by country, by region, even by companies that are subscribed and so on. So that's actually pretty cool.
00:08:51
Speaker
Yeah, i wish I wish I could do a better job with that um you know because data enrichment, I think just gives you a huge amount of interest interesting sort of insight as to who subscribes, who doesn't. um you know Did you know, for instance, that 65% of the subscribers who are creating brain food are actually female identifying instead of male identifying? um I did not know this. um ah you know But you you know when you do the analysis, and you think, oh, Wow, you know, why is this the case? Is this reflective of the wider ah sort of industry pattern? um So yeah, I think we could go further and deeper. And that is one of the things that I actually hope to do. um There's also now multiple channels, all of whom ah have an opportunity to do data enrichment. So I want to be able to share a lot more about, you know, who is involved in
Newsletter Insights & Audience Building
00:09:39
Speaker
this community. And and ah ah so we know who what what we're a part of, basically.
00:09:45
Speaker
And um when you just share some data about where um your community is standing, do you have numbers as well that are um describing them?
00:09:56
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we try to get, so we have absolute numbers, then we have ah ah sort of numbers that we try to rank in terms of like seniority based on job titles, um which is on a numerical scale, so one to five. ah We talked already about you tend sort of gender distribution. Also,
00:10:17
Speaker
geographical locations. so Where are they based countrywide? Where are they based citywide? um and Probably the city side is the most sort of impressive for me because it gives you a very clear ah sort of understanding as to where recruiters typically are clustered. um and Of course, um given the nature of this particular newsletter, um ah the the the clustering is is in large city centers that typically house the headquarters of big multinational companies.
00:10:47
Speaker
Like London and Amsterdam, for instance? London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona, ah Paris, New York, San Francisco. So so when people say, Hong, where are the subscribers? I prefer not to actually say countries um because I don't think that's entirely accurate. um For instance, you know if people say, Hong, how many subscribers do you have in in Germany? I could probably say, hey, probably 5,000. Do you know what? 90% of them are going to be in Berlin, maybe 5% of them are in Munich.
00:11:14
Speaker
um And then you know maybe another 2% in Hamburg but then we have smaller numbers elsewhere so it reflects very much um the distribution of multinational HQ's it seems. And how did you grow all this crew organically I guess?
00:11:32
Speaker
It kind of did. I mean, basically there's thes certain techniques to grow audience that i that I'm happy to share with people um because actually ah my preference is that more people would set up newsletters, more people would do podcasts and try and create an audience. um So so my ah and what I would love to see from the community generally is actually a mushrooming of more people claiming their voice in the discourse. ah you know I'd love to see this.
00:11:59
Speaker
So a few tips that I've learned in growing audience. ah Number one, you you kind of got to have ah like long longevity. I'm sorry to say. um you know it's like You cannot instantly grow an audience. um ah You need to basically be there and you need to be be there very consistently over time.
00:12:19
Speaker
um and I always wondered about why this is, but my theory is as follows. so ah Basically, you're asking for people to commit their attention ah to you and me maybe a bit of emotional investment as well. um ah you know If you do a newsletter or a podcast or a YouTube channel or a TikTok,
00:12:36
Speaker
You're asking something from someone who is too subscribed or follow. You're saying, um ah you know I need to take a little bit of your time every day, every week, every month, whatever the cadence is, ah you need to trust me with this. um And those people don't give that trust unless they're sure you're going to be around.
00:12:53
Speaker
um So in other words, I kind of liken it a little bit to watching a Netflix pilot, a Netflix series, you know, ah you know, when you ever you watch a series, you watch like the first three episodes, you get totally invested in it, the story, you're immersed in the universe, you love the characters, and they cancel the show. It's like you're outraged. Before they invested the time, you know, they've asked you to invest the time, you've invested the time, and now they cancel it on you, it's like outrageous.
00:13:21
Speaker
Same thing with doing any audience building, you have to be there kind of consistently with a view that, you know what, I'm always going to be there. So that is number one. You have to be very clear on your own personal commitment on this.
00:13:36
Speaker
Second thing, if you don't if you want me to keep talking, Thomas, I'm happy to hit roll. Yeah, please, please. No, no, please. I'm really interested in that. And then I have some follow-up questions, but I don't want to interrupt now. The second thing is because it is so much work and commitment from the producer, right? Because you're looking at at least a year's worth of content, let's say. Let's say you do something on a a weekly basis, like I'm doing on brain food. You know what? That's 52, no fail all the way through. If you do a YouTube channel, you've got to do it every day. I mean, a ridiculous commitment like this.
00:14:05
Speaker
so If you're going to do that level of commitment, you have to be sure you're passionate about what you're doing. Because if you're not passionate about it, there's no way you could possibly continue that but that cadence unless you have that intrinsic motivation for it. um So no one is paying you to do this, right? So I'm assuming that you're not a professional content creator for a big brand.
00:14:28
Speaker
I'm assuming you're just a person that loves to maybe share some of your thoughts. That's all great. It's most of us out there. um Well, you have to be very sure about what you're passionate about. um You have to care um because the care basically enables you to keep going when you can't be bothered.
00:14:47
Speaker
Basically and when you have a crisis of motivation like all of us do have um ah the the intrinsic motivation or passion for the work gets you to keep going so there's a second thing that's super super upon third thing i would say um is that you need to have not only consistency but regularity um and so these two things are slightly different.
00:15:09
Speaker
um So consistent meaning that you're always kind of very much predictable in terms of what what sort of your your your longevity and how long you're going to stay. Your regularity is the cadence. So when are you going to drop your content? And I mentioned already like b to do a TikTok or a short form video.
00:15:31
Speaker
um ah you ah You basically need to do it daily. It's very difficult to do it um in any other way. The newsletter, I think you need to do that weekly. um I think people can do it monthly, um but there's not many choices as to what the cadence is. And when you're doing a podcast that you're doing, you're recording the podcast. I'm also doing it weekly, even sometimes two times a week.
00:15:56
Speaker
Yeah, you can basically record it, but when you say you chump it out, it has to be every week for 10 weeks, i saying you do a season, you take a break, then you do another set of recordings, you do another 10 weeks. That's totally okay. But the way to grow the audience is to do it in that way. um So it's a huge commitment, the regularity, it needs your intrinsic motivation, um and ah you need to be super, super consistent.
00:16:21
Speaker
so So yeah, I think that's actually more important than anything else. So quality, people say, is that important? I actually don't think so. um ah It's perfectly possible to generate an audience with... Maybe not quality, but relevancy, right?
00:16:35
Speaker
Yeah, people just, they'll be an audience for whatever you do. So for instance, one of the big mistakes I see content creators make or early content creators make um is that they're overly obsessed with the quality of the production. um So they need to you know think about the thinking about the sound quality, they're thinking about the visual image, the jingles, the production, all this type of stuff.
00:16:58
Speaker
I'm thinking, you know what, you spend a lot of time doing that, um but all you're doing is basically creating a situation where your ah input um is significantly higher than your ah than your return. so So your investment becomes too much than the return.
00:17:18
Speaker
and When you're doing content or creation like this, generally speaking, you've got to almost think there's going to be no return. um You know, you've got to just have the attitude. I just want to say this. I think it's important or it's therapeutic or whatever, you know, whatever reason you want to go.
00:17:34
Speaker
and and stake your claim in this ah global discourse. um But yeah, if you're obsessed with the ROI side of it, that's not going to happen for you. um Production and stuff like this, is it wouldn't say a waste of time because at a certain level, it's worth putting it in. um But for early starts, it's usually not the right time. In case you like my show, please subscribe. I would really appreciate it. And in terms of I think the commercial side is also important at some point, right? So I can give you and example in my case. So I also just started and um never really thought about making it commercially and I also would not do it. But I have a business in the background that can benefit from it, right? It doesn't have to and it's also not the
00:18:17
Speaker
the main purpose for it. For me, the main purpose is really um one, being close to the industry and also certain, I would say, um groups in terms of executives in recruitment and by the HR people field on pan-European level at the moment, but also sometimes even in the US. And secondly, I know that through when the right people know me and I know the right people at some point, you maybe can generate some business from it because you're top of mind and so on, right? So for me, the longevity thing is part of a strategy because I'm here in my business for the long run. So it's, I would say, a simple, not calculation, but simple to believe in it, to just keep going and um just doing it
00:19:04
Speaker
for a certain period of time. And now I think I have 80, 90 episodes out, which is one and a half year of of doing it. And ah I just cannot see an end to it. yeah you But how is it for you with the
Monetizing Content Strategies
00:19:15
Speaker
commercial? Because for me, it has an overall commercial side to it. But this this is not the main driver. But it's an aspect where I say I don't even think about it to stop.
00:19:26
Speaker
yeah Yeah, I wonder whether ah people who are listening to this should pay attention to a very specific ah Tim Ferriss podcast um on on commercialization of audience. I'm going to have to try and fish it out but because he actually went through this experiment in terms of how you know to mit generate money from his voice, basically.
00:19:46
Speaker
And there's three ways to do it. um You've just described one, which is that your content is actually a marketing device or it's a brand building device to give you opportunities to then convert on consultancy services or if you're selling software, it helps you do that or whatever your service might be, but it's a it's a great bit of content marketing to do it that way. So there's one technique to generate revenue. um And these are not exclusive by the way, you can do them all together or one, but usually you lean on one ah rather than the other.
00:20:17
Speaker
The second way to do it is directly through subscribers. um so You can charge your subscribers for the content. um and Typically, you can do that as ah as a donation. so If you're a Patreon, you can use Patreon and say, listen, you know drop me some ah you know five dollars or five euro a month or something, help me keep continuing. A lot of people do that way.
00:20:38
Speaker
other people might have a like a a premium service for a particular type of people to say it's free at this tier but if you want the real good stuff you have to pay this percentage and they do it this way in substat which is the newsletter service i use.
00:20:53
Speaker
um It's actually designed in that basis and a lot of the most successful um ah newsletters are actually that way where there's a pay to actually access the the content. um And then the third way is to do it via sponsorships. um So in other words, everything is for free ah for poop to consume, um but you've generated an audience that other vendors might be interested in addressing.
00:21:19
Speaker
and then you basically sell space um within your content ah for ah those vendors to address the audience. so Recruiting brain food is almost 100% based on the sponsored ah model. so um they like I don't really do any consultancy work per se. i mean There's a few speaking opportunities and stuff like this, which you can charge for and whatnot. but It's not really significant ah in terms of the overall revenue sort of ah contribution on a yearly basis for it to be ah part of a strategy. um and There is actually a subscriber ah option on the newsletter, um even though there's no difference. and I tell people not to subscribe um because i just I wanted to create the tiers simply so I can activate some of the features. um ah A few people do actually pay. I'm not sure whether they do accidentally but um or whether they feel sorry for me in some way.
00:22:13
Speaker
um ah but But yeah, there's something there. But 99.9% is via companies that would want to say, Hong, I really want to ah sort of address the recruiter community. Can I sponsor you on each level? Makes sense, yeah. And um what audience you overall have there? What you could, let's say, market? or And also, this would be a fair qui first question. Second question would be, it at what point Have you been able to sponsor it? It was probably around about um nine months in, I think maybe first year there was some some indication, but and a very low numbers of sponsors. So something like 5,000 subscribers or something like this. um But only because there was one... ah The advantage I have is that I've got quite a narrow focus. So the audience is not like broad. um ah It's quite narrow. we We know who the audience is. It's recruiters and maybe HR people. um And ah what I found happening was that a lot of the companies that were interested in recruiting or building recruitment technology solutions were also interested in newsletter. So they were subscribers also.
00:23:27
Speaker
um So they when they received the newsletter, they thought, oh, that's quite interesting. And when they saw that it was being sponsored, they said, okay, this is actually a good idea. i should We should probably sponsor this. So it became a really quite an efficient way to um to to run it to to run it in a sense, because I don't really do any outbound sales on the the the the sponsorship.
00:23:50
Speaker
even though I probably should. you know I probably should hire a salesperson to go and speak to every recruitment technology company out there, you know get the highest price, negotiate the best deal, and so on. um ah There's no question I'm leaving money on the table, so to say, on this. um ah but ah But the approach I took was, look, I don't really want to hire anybody. I want to try and run this entire myself. And so I just became you know pretty much dependent on the idea of simply um i would sort of receiving inbound and then just ah doing it that way. so so yeah it's ah It's become a really efficient business to run um and and and it's enjoyable. that You don't have to chase it you know could because the the newsletter distribution itself or the podcast distribution itself creates the noise for sales to then convert
00:24:43
Speaker
Okay, so um main sponsor opportunities would be maybe for um recruiting technology companies and also for maybe companies that hire recruiters for job ads. I think that doesn't make sense. what What is the main sponsorship deals? They're almost all recruitment technology companies or their recruitment like providers of some type. So, RPOs, um I think some recruitment agencies have previously sponsored, but on the main, it is recruitment technology.
00:25:10
Speaker
or HR technology. um So yeah companies that basically would sell ah ah would directly sell to services to the to recruiters themselves would be the sponsor for this. um that hurt like And when you look into your um current data and what you create and um you're close to the market, how do you see the industry moving at
Post-2021 Recruitment Challenges
00:25:33
Speaker
the moment? What's happening? Well, i mean obviously, we're in a we've been kind of in a post 2021-22 type of fugues has been extremely difficult and challenging just economically um really for the last ah ah two years or so. um So we had a tremendous high obviously after the post lockdown period. ah Everyone was charging forward and 2021 was probably, um in fact, May 2021 was the peak
00:26:04
Speaker
recruitment ah month, I think. um That was the month that LinkedIn announced that ah the most popular in-demand job on their entire platform was actually a recruiter. ah and so so More so than a data engineer, more so than a software engineer, it was like companies wanted recruiters more than anybody else. May 2021, that was peak.
00:26:24
Speaker
um And we've basically been um ah you know in a different market since then. It's been very challenging. um ah there There's been a huge surge of it ah inflation um that's reset the cost of living at a higher level, probably 30% higher than it was in 2021. That also means cost of business as has increased. So if you're running a business, you'll know this. um I know a lot of people that are employees don't actually know this, but The cost of running a business is also increased around about thirty percent just part of the reason why and growing as fast as they thought they would um ah which is obviously then ah produced outcomes where you know ah talent acquisition teams are going ah ah being cut.
00:27:07
Speaker
ah hiring sort of headcounts more conservative um and we're rebalancing towards ah kind of a different type of timeline ah where it's going to be it's going to be you know a huge change and definitely not crazy hyperscaling, um much more about automation, efficiency um and focus.
00:27:30
Speaker
yep This is what I see. so I saw it when we were initially quite broad, and we were also having recruiters to rent. right and and At some point, there was no inbound coming in, and sometimes this was part of of the growth. right um and Then we had some real focus on providing German and-speaking sales recruiters um that work on German commercial roles, and suddenly we grew.
00:27:56
Speaker
Well, recruiters are always very adaptable. This is why i'm I'm fundamentally quite confident about the industry itself, even though um i'm you know there's no no point in lying about how difficult sort of these these moments are going to be. We're going to come across and continue these difficulties. But the primary skill set of any recruiter is adaptability. um like We know how to to to to ah we We're speaking to candidates all the time, so we're very sensitive to to to to what's actually happening on the ground. um and We know where the pressure points are when there's sales demand. and As you say, a great example of the German-speaking salespeople, um there was a period of time probably from
00:28:41
Speaker
you mid-2010 onward maybe just about 2021 where ah really ah people just hiring for you know in the start-up world pretty much you know just need a start-up experience um no need for the German language in large sort of degree now German language requirement is coming in back your force um And of course then constrains the candidate pool um and it creates more demand for recruiters um so or recruiters that actually know how to recruit ah the German speakers. So ah yeah, there's going to be sort of all kinds of opportunities um in every type of market. um Exactly, completely exactly.
00:29:21
Speaker
In case you have any feedback or anything you want to share with me, please send me an email on thomas at peoplewise.com or hit me up on LinkedIn. And in case you really enjoy the show, please subscribe. I would really appreciate it. um And how do you see um the recruiting industry now um developing maybe towards the end of the year and next year? Do you have any protections?
00:29:47
Speaker
I make predictions that are always wrong, but I make 20 predictions every year. At the start of the year, at the end of every year, I make a prediction as to what's going to happen in the last 12 months. We're already rapidly approaching over the halfway stage, so we'll be able to make assessments as to how accurate I was in the predictions last year.
00:30:10
Speaker
A few things I predicted. um I predicted on a technology side, things like interview intelligence would become like a mainstream idea. ah This is the technology that essentially records um and and a video interview, transcribes the interview, and then from the transcription, there's a lot of analysis about how that interview went, what was the interview quality of that sort of process.
00:30:35
Speaker
um So I made a prediction that would come ah from 8% adoption to something like 20% adoption. I don't know whether that can be proven or not, but I will speak to the vendors themselves to see if their sales have doubled over the course of ah the last 12 months. And that I think is would be good evidence for this.
00:30:53
Speaker
um I think that um a few things that got wrong. you know I thought programmatic would would also become very, very popular because programmatic would be the best way to control applicant flow. Like 2023, 2024 has been a period of very high applicant flow. So you post a job ad, suddenly you get loads of candidates. can be It's turned into a very difficult thing because ah you Recruiters cannot sort of manage the applicant flow. The best way to do that is to have a dynamic ad that can respond to the volume and then you deactivate automatically once it hits a certain number. so I assume that that would be more popular than it is, but I don't think so. I think programmatic has had a tough year and that's probably because we we're generally responding by not advertising as much.
00:31:40
Speaker
um So rather than get better at ah but job advertising, companies have decided, you know, we're not going to bother advertising. um ah We'll do our recruitment via referrals or do it via something on an advertising route. So we've not got better at it, but we've slowed it down somewhat.
00:31:58
Speaker
um and What else? I thought and agencies will continue to struggle in terms of top-line revenue. I think that's definitely true. um ah you know We've had and ah sort of ah profit warnings from all of the big players, more or less. That just tells you the same story of a general decline of ah hiring appetite um ah but compared to two years or so ago. so We're significantly rebalancing, I think.
00:32:27
Speaker
um So yeah, loads of other sort of examples. I'll need to fish out exactly what those productions were. Like I say, usually I get them completely wrong, but I'm happy to be yeah ah exposed on that. um And a hammer for it is accordingly as required. Thanks. um Any final words?
00:32:48
Speaker
Yeah, final words are I would say recruiters are in a moment where the world of work is changing.
Navigating Market Demands with Adaptability
00:32:54
Speaker
um My ah ah sort of position is that very important for recruiters to recognize ah these changes um and also then to embrace them.
00:33:05
Speaker
um because the wrong thing to do would be to hold on to sort of all the truths that are no longer relevant for today and tomorrow, um and to understand how best to compete ah in a world that isn't going to sort of do hyper growth, um in a world where increasingly we need to be more efficient um and ah AI enabled. So the way in which I would say three things I would recommend recruiters of any strike, whether you're agency, in-house, or whatever things that you should do,
00:33:33
Speaker
Number one, you should become AI enabled yourself. um So you need to carve out time in order to get good at your own optimization. This is step number one, because you can then take that optimization to your next job. And I can guarantee you, by the way, if you're in the job market, people and you're you're going for a career job,
00:33:52
Speaker
the person who couldn't use thinking in themselves okay how can this person is this person a ready. ah Is this person can this person bring additionally i skills to my tea that's what i'm just thinking so you need to basically equip yourself that way second thing i really should be doing is.
00:34:11
Speaker
Building their own personal profile and know personal branding is like no longer a a good term, but I think we can rehabilitate this um because personal branding in the a of A of AI becomes even more relevant because Human beings um are going to so going to basically start detrusting, distrusting information as default, um because we are increasingly going to be bombarded by AI-generated messaging um and AI-generated communications, and we're going to basically withdraw our attention from that.
00:34:47
Speaker
um And ah the the people who are going to win this game are the individuals that are able to create this human trust um in this complete sort of noise of AI generated ah communication. If you can do that, I think you do ah best by being very human with your personal brand. I think that is a winning ticket for you as a recruiter.
00:35:07
Speaker
Final thing, and I know coming to the end of this, I'll be very quick, Thomas, final thing is yeah we need to understand the biggest antidote to artificial intelligence is community intelligence,
Community Intelligence vs. AI
00:35:20
Speaker
right? So artificial intelligence is gonna be superior to us in many respects. um It's gonna be faster processor, it can process more information, it can calculate ah with greater speed, it can come with these, it can generate much faster speed. um However,
00:35:37
Speaker
The most important ah conversations the most important bits of information that's exchanged between human beings are almost never recorded. The most important conversations. These are the record conversations you have with your candidate. um ah This is the ah conversation you have with your boss if you go for a beer after work. These are the things that really make the difference. They're not recorded.
00:36:02
Speaker
um and ah Therefore, AI will not be trained on it, um which is why AI makes regular mistakes when it tries to understand human behavior because it's missing a lot of information. ah The only information AI gets trained on is stuff that we have written down and said, okay, we're going to push it into AI. um there with That's only a small percentage of information out there.
00:36:24
Speaker
Now recruiters have access to collective intelligence because we should have massive networks. um So we need to get closer to our network in terms of our peer group. We also need to get closer and to our network in terms of the candidates that we recruit. And then from there, we can click collect this intelligence that is basically AI proof, at least for now. um And that I think is another way in which we can stay ah competitive in this AI enabled future.
00:36:50
Speaker
great friend words so thanks Hank. I really appreciate your time and um have a great week.