This week’s brainfood is supported by our buddies at TextRecruit - the best-of-breed software for recruiting and HR that uses text message, live chat, and artificial intelligence to help companies hire better people, faster. Request a demo before 2019 here

There has been a ton of great AI content in brainfood this year, but this write up by LinkedIn of Przemek Berendt’s talk on the subject was my favourite. Accessible to all but with enough depth to stimulate further thinking - if there’s brainfood for AI in recruiting, this is it.

There has been some superb contributions from the vendor side to brainfood this year. Perhaps the pick of the bunch is this superb interactive guide for recruiters and hiring managers on improving their interview game. H/T to Yuki Kho and all the crew at Homerun for an exceptional piece of work. Check it out here.

Stunning visual guide from Reuters on what blockchain is and how it works. The potential lies in the inherent immutability of the blocks-in-the-chain. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better presentation on a sometimes difficult technology to grasp, so take a look and have a play here

The internet is not short of tales of terrible candidate experience. Incidents of the type that Igor Kromin endured might be extreme but not unusual. It’s the result of mitigating the risk of a bad permanent hire. The answer to it, is more obvious than we might think. Have a read and see if it motivates to think of other ways of doing.

Richard Millington has been at the forefront of the thinking and practice of online community building. He’s written an online guide on how to calculate the ROI of building / growing one. It’s a superb resource folks.

So many cool tools featured in Brainfood in 2018, but in the end I’ve gone for Otter, the note taking app. Why? Because I’m convinced that most of us are still taking interview notes pen-to-paper. Let Otter record and transcribe it for you. It’s a game changer - download it here folks.

Unfiltered truth from Workable’s CEO Nikos Moraitakis on some of the biggest myths and misconceptions in the recruiting software industry. ‘Effort bias’ in particular is a term we should all know. CEO’s should blog more - don’t you think?

This is a post that affected me personally. Because I was one of those people who thought ‘if I didn’t mean offence, you shouldn’t take offence’. Kate Gregory’s insight and humane delivery taught me a lesson as I why I was wrong. Have a read, and let me know if it also affects your thinking.

Google Hire have - somewhat under the radar - been producing some top quality content about recruitment and talent management. Jeff Moore, Staffing Manager at Google, comes up with some excellent tips on how to rethink and redo the candidate rejection process. It’s a golden opportunity to create brand evangelists and future candidates for future position folks. Have a read here.

This was one of the most downloaded e-books this year - an experiment from Qualigence International who conducted textual analysis of recruiter InMails to a fake candidate profile they set up for the purpose. It’s painful reading for us because no doubt we’re guilty of all of the cliches, but a superbly useful training document for recruiters to get better at engagement. Download it here if you haven’t already done so.

Visual Capitalist must be on your must read list list by now. Perhaps the most consistent ‘visual storytelling’ site that there is. It’s the density of information that you can squeeze in a small area of screen real estate which makes the difference. Have at this trends report here.

Ethical positioning by tech workers has been one of the under reported themes of 2018. Hayden Field explains this new form of collective action which appears to be influencing the strategy of big tech. It’s an unexpected and welcome trend which we can expect to see more of in 2019.

This is quite a brilliant essay from Nicky Case, who in any case is a thinker and storyteller we should all follow. This guest post for MIT introduced me to the term ‘Centaur’ or Augmented Human Worker. It presents a path in between the dystopic v utopic, and instead suggest a model where technology will improve human workers, rather than make them - us - redundant. You won’t read a better article on the Future of Work in 2018, so do it here

Laetitia Vitaud is an infrequent publisher but quite a brilliant analyst on the future of work. This is an outstanding essay on how changing workforce demands will in term transform the responsibility of ‘HR’. Must read folks, and follow Laetitia here.

There is a way to write more effectively on the internet. Shane Melaugh has some really good, really simple tips on how to do it. He even draws it out for us, which I suspect, is also trying to make the point at another level. It’s a brilliant post on how to write brilliant posts - must read for any content creator / inbound marketer.

Fascinating breakdown of documentary maker Louis Theroux’s unique interviewing style. How exactly does Louis get neo Nazi’s, middle age swingers and gang members to open up to him, on camera and on-the-record? Recruiting tips, from the unusual places, in this entertaining and educational fan video.

Fabulous research paper from Connected Commons on the network strategies of the super successful. It’s an accessible paper which is packed full of actionable insight. In the hyper-connected era, we all need to download and read this.

It’s no secret that 2018 has been the year of where LinkedIn’s newsfeed became the goldmine for free traffic / views. Things changed late in the year, which this blog post from the engineering team at LinkedIn explains. How LinkedIn, Facebook, maybe Twitter / Instagram - are create their newsfeeds are worth paying attention to as they determine what most of us read / know.

We all know meetings are a waste of time, and yet we persist in having them. Maybe some tooling could help, which this super little web app might well do. Share it with your managers and team mates, as we all need to get out of more pointless meetings in 2019.

‘Obscura’ as been one of the most fun categories to curate this year - generally useless yet interesting content that has some angle of the world of work. This is fascinating short on the recruitment patterns of French executioners was my favourite of the year. What can we say - recruitment is weird folks!

Organisational network analytics or ‘ONA’ is the study of the social reality that underpins business organisation. Richard Santos Lalleman introduces some new concepts for us here, including the ‘3% rule’ - that a small percentage of your employees will have a disproportionate ability to influence everyone else. And often, they are not the people in official leadership positions. It’s a fascinating thesis and a must read for anyone interested in influence, change management, personal brand.

LinkedIn have produced some really outstanding content this year. This post was one of the most popular with brainfooders - heatmap on where job candidates look on job ads. Obviously a must read for anyone writing a JD

Superb piece of research from our buddies at Sprout Social, who analysed its 24,000 customers’ data to find the best times to post on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Must read for any content marketer / job poster out there.

2018 has been a fabulous year for apps which look at travel & immigration. This one from Markus Lerner is my favourite - beautifully rendered, super fast web app - which tells you how powerful your passport is. Just needs an update on rights to work / rights to reside and it will become truly useful to us here - keep an eye on it, and have a play here

Will we look back at 2018 as the year when remote work became a normal variant rather than a radical divergence? If so, this superb resource from our buddies at X-Team was the pick of the bunch as a guide for any business thinking of building a distributed workforce. Take a read here.

2018 has seen a slew of excellent reports from the likes of Deloitte, PwC, Mercer, McKinsey, MIT and others. But if you read only one, it should be this from the World Economic Forum. It’s a massive 147 page report but accessibly skimmable and covers all the bases you need to have covered. Download it here.

I made a shout out to find out how created this resource, but I’m still non the wiser for it. Beer on me for brainfooder who tells me who came up with his amazing collection. You can submit your own to it, so it grows with the community, so you might as well take a deep dive - it’s a superb resource.

As recruiters and HR folks, we tend to know a lot about what other people earn. We’re far less knowledgeable about how much we actually make so this bit of research from the awesome kids at DBR is tremendously useful for all of us. UK centric data for now, but I suspect will be more in future.

Really interesting study by our buddies at Chili Piper, who monitored the difference between suggested times vs link to calendar. Turns out, you have to suggest times. Another post which changes my operating day. Have a read, and follow the evidence.

In our uncomfortable but perhaps overdue conversations on immigration, one factor is often hidden in plain sight - immigrants - by definition - are prepared to move to the work. This is superb essay provides insight on why native workers won’t always do so. Take some time folks and read it - we needed this debate yesterday.

Irina Shamaeva has consistently been discovering things about social networks that enable other recruiters to unlock a huge amount of previously hidden data. This post was one of many throughout the year which could have featured as ‘post of the year’. Have a read and do yourself a favour in 2019 - follow Irina.

2018 was the year we sort of stopped talking about UBI, overtaken perhaps by climate change, immigration, data privacy and the rest. This essay from Simon Sarris was probably the best of the bunch featured in brainfood, where he makes the case against UBI as the panacea for tech unemployment. Long and a bit winding but he plants some interesting thought bubbles throughout.

We’re all over the map in predicting what AI + Automation will do to jobs, so how very handy of MIT to compile the relevant studies into single chart, complete with links to the primary sources. One to bookmark folks.