This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 94

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Open Kitchen: Forecasting the Year Ahead in Recruitment: Part 1

There were some great forecast posts in yesterday's Recruiting Brainfood and I thought it would be remiss of me not to stick my neck out on a few predictions myself on how our industry is going to shape up for 2023. No one really knows what is going to happen but that should not stop us to imagining some futures based on extrapolations of what we can observe in the present.

A quality measure of a predictions post is the degree of specificity that bounds them, so that they can be individually reviewed, confirmed or contradicted at the end of the year. Specificity is also a way to avoid the trap of writing about stuff that you want to see happen, not that which you think will happen. So there will be no moralising calls to action here, just my guess - along with argument - on how things are going to play out.

Below is a list of 20 items, in no particular order, ranked neither in importance nor level of confidence. They are simply topics which are separable and therefore can be appropriately used in the context of a predictions post. I'm probably going to need multiple parts to do this, so this is Part 1 of what could be 2, 3 or 4 part mini series.

I'm going to be talking about these points, along with guests in this week's Brainfood Live On Air on Friday, so make sure you join for that. Without further ado, lets get into it:

1. Influencer Marketing Comes to Talent Acquisition

Already massive in B2C consumer marketing, on-air product promotions by social media influencers is becoming the new way that brands can still target relevant audiences. GDPR and the general atmosphere on data privacy have eroded the efficacy behavioural or demographic advertising, such that consumer ad spend is being redirected toward influencer marketing - check out Hootsuites latest report on my data from this trend. Self improvement - makeup tutorials or fitness gurus - has always been the sector which this technique was obviously applied, but there is no reason to think why it couldn't be applied elsewhere, and for other use cases.

How would this work for recruitment? Get an influencer with an audience of the people you want to recruit, and pay them to take the job brief from your hiring manager in the form of a recorded or livestreamed video call. The end employer will be explaining the job to the influencer and his or her audience, which in effect is inserting a job ad directly to the audience who needs to see it. Haven't seen this technique yet - have you? It's one of the things I'm certain will happen in 2023!

2. Hybrid Gets Squeezed, 40% Go Back to On Premise, 20% Go Full Remote

Being specific here is going to be tricky because I don't know the baseline - how many organisations can be categorised as fully on premise atm? Most of those which are will still have some sort of increased flexibility, so might still imagine themselves as operating in hybrid, when the de facto situation might be closer to fully on premise with a bit of flex thrown in.

Hence, you can insert the word 'more' after the percentages in the sub header here; the main point is that both the two extremes in working mode will gain at expense of that podgy Hybrid middle, which to my mind has been generally inflated by a lack of leadership, decisiveness and a hitherto benign environment. Unintentional hybrid is not going to survive a recession - it's too hard, too inefficient and if you don't have a genuine reason for it, then it will be perceived as a luxury that you need to give up. Those that can go full remote will shift to it, those that can't might well bounce it back to the office, accept the attrition and hire younger, cheaper replacements.

3. Over 50% of FTSE 100 Abandon Minimum Degree Requirements

There has been a cultural shift in how we perceive the value of the University degree. 30 years ago, have a degree would've been an essential requirement to access the job opportunities which could lead to white collar work, upward social mobility and a comfortable middle class lifestyle. Employers have been dropping it as it becomes obvious that job performance is rarely correlated with academic achievement at university. Candidate shortage, competition for talent, DEIB imperatives, better assessment tooling and improved understanding as to what does correlate to job performance - attitude alignment, onboarding and support, training and engagement - have led to ever increasing numbers of employers moving from 'University degree required' to 'No minimum requirement'. The latest figures from the Institute of Student Employers stating that in the last year alone this position has increased from 5% to 26% of all UK employers. The flood gates have opened on this folks - we're going to go over 50% in 2023.

4. Workforce Pixellation Increases 200%

Workforce Pixellation is a rather wonderful term to describe the fragmentation of jobs into modular tasks, which can then be performed by different people, perhaps in different organisations, perhaps in different countries. We should know all about this in recruitment - think about a 360 recruiter who did everything from first contact with hiring managers to last contact with candidates, a rare beast with every passing year as the job fragments into specialists in sourcing, recruitment marketing, recruitment operations, candidate management and the rest.

An oblique way to measure this trend is to observe the rise of counter parties - individuals who supply one such 'module' of work for multiple employers. Do a LinkedIn people search right now on the term 'fractional' and count the number of 1st connections who describe themselves this way. My prediction is that if you ran that search again 365 days from now, that number will have increased by at least 200%

5. Number of LinkedIn Newsletters Grows by >200%

I strongly endorse media proliferation, in the general case. Even though the volume of recruitment / HR newsletters and podcasts will inevitably compete with brainfood channels for audience, the overall health of any informational eco-system is improved by diversification of voices having a say.

We don't have to agree with these voices or accept what they say is true; what LinkedIn (and other social media platforms) offers is a way in which claims can be contested in public - you can comment on this newsletter for example, or repost it as an example of my idiocy or better yet, make your own case with your own newsletter. I believe the latter will accelerate in 2023 for both personal and professional reasons; personal because we want more than ever to claim our voice in public spaces and professional because building opt-in audience has never been more important in the post ads era.

Apparently there are 40,000 LinkedIn newsletters as of August 2022, I don't know the rate of growth since then but I would guess that there are around 50,000 as of today - and with the pressures and incentives outlined above, I reckon by end of 2023, we will be at 150,000.

6. At Least 1 x Government Legislates Against Digital Nomadism

The competition for digital talent has been red hot as countries look to replace lost tourist revenue with a different kind of tourist - digital workers who are prepared to do their remote working in hotter climes. To date, 51 countries are offering special visas for digital workers and every time you check, more countries join the club. Gentrification concerns are already arising with prominent protests in Mexico against US immigrants (irony quite delicious) and Portugal against any-Euro types, but the logic of acquiring spending power of digital nomads who earn in home country but spend it in yours, is insuperable.....

....unless you do what the US does, and implement an income tax scheme based on worldwide income. Countries which are failing to compete for digital nomads and in fact end up losing too many of their own high value workers has a strong incentive to implement worldwide income tax, or analogous taxation rules to plug the brain and tax revenue. I don't know who will be first to follow the US, but my prediction is at least one country in 2023 will.

7. Hybrid Becomes Age Stratified

Hybrid will not only get squeezed but those that persist with it will see age stratification emerge in the workforce which generally decides to come in, generally decides to WFH. We already know that early career talent really want to work in office most of the time.

We know that managers and execs want people back in office. And finally we know that experienced individual contributors, who do not manage others (but who think they can manage themselves), much prefer to work remotely and only very occasionally come to the office, if at all. Hybrid will make offices younger with large cohorts of early career talent, overseen by mid / late career managers and executives, whose positions become conditional upon them being on premise. Mid / late career individual contributors simply migrate out to remote as non-work incentives induce the move. What's the prediction? Maybe some sort of media recognition of the phenomenon - expect a new term to be coined, and perhaps career pathing strategies to formalise the outcomes.

8. AI-to-AI Becomes New Filter for Job Discovery

We've all had a play with Generative AI by now. There is little debate that this is a game changing technological breakthrough, a culture changer in much the same way Web 1, Social media or the smartphone was. Since the release of ChatGPT only last month, the proliferation of GAI tools built on top of it has been astonishing, already too many to keep track of, many of which have direct applications for the work we do in recruiting. Perhaps the most obvious category is GAI message composers, which ingest candidate profile data and compose a close-to-sendable personalised outreach message. How long before some one automated this flow? How long before someone hooks up AI sourcing automation with AI outreach composition? Couple of weeks I'd say.

The outcome will be 'inbox inundation' with high quality spam becoming indistinguishable from hand written copy. Tech candidates - still the most in-demand - will build AI countermeasures which can identify and interact with AI generated messages first for personal use and then productise for everyone to use. AI to AI contact will be the default for first contact and usher in a new era of discovery. It will happen first in jobs and it will happen in 2023

9. Community Becomes the Cool Way To Organise A Company

Talk of a company as 'family' no longer became tenable in 2022, as the second recession in as many years, with previously esteemed family members often being summarily dismissed without further ado. In search of new analogies that more closely describe the reality of company relationships, something already here and closer to the mark will become dominant - the company as a community. Workforce pixellation, fractional working, diversification of workforce all contribute to the blurring of boundaries between who is inside or outside a business and the idea that people who collaborate together toward shared goals might be best described as a form of community takes hold, gains popularity and acquires theoreticians who begin building the ideological framework to blueprint mass replication.

It might not remain an analogy either, as community builders in parallel begin to experiment with ways in which members can collaborate to produce marketable products and services. These are not DAO's in the Web3 sense, as central authority remains in the form of 'the mods' but something in between a company and ad hoc collaboration, a commercialisation of community. Can't help but think it will feel something like a pirate navy...

10. Tech Investment ⬇️, WorkTech Investment ⬆️

Hostile de-globalisation means every company valued in the past decade is likely overvalued today because the total addressable market has shrunk from being the entire world but only a smaller regional portion of the world. VC investments have scaled down in recognition of these harder realities and the money that is now invested will additionally come through much greater scrutiny of company finances. A few categories might buck the trend though and I suspect WorkTech might well be one of them. The world of work is changing in its own way, often tangentially to global macro trends and you get the feeling that these changes will accelerate regardless of what happens in the world of economics and politics. At operational level, we are becoming increasingly aware that the rules, regulations, processes, practices and even ethics of the post industrial era no longer provide the right framework for how we want to work today and in future.

Technology is the lubricant for cultural change. Its probably the precursor of it. So Worktech companies which are building the infrastructure tools which support the future of work - cross border payroll, fractional work matching, biometric traits assessment, employee listening, worker productivity, remote communication and collaboration - all will find gamblers who want to stake a claim into the future of work. 2023 will see another decline in tech investment, but WorkTech investment will at least maintain the level of the year just gone.

OK, Part 2 next week. Let me know in comments which of 1-10 you most agree / disagree with!

Out of the kitchen, onto the lounge 👇

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What's On Offer?

Metaview charity donation - cash for time!

Everybody: email Metaview CEO Siadhal Magos at charity@metaview.ai and get a demo of the latest feature of Metaview's interview intelligence platform and give feedback. 25 minutes of your time, converts to 25 pounds / euros / dollars to a CHARITY OF YOUR CHOICE. Start the new year with a gift to those who need it most folks - and get yourself educated on a cool product also. Get to it folks!

If you are a recruitment service provider or recruitment technology vendor have any exclusive offer for the community, comment below with your offer in order to be included in next week's edition of This Week, In Recruiting. Make sure to mention me so that I see it.

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What's Going On?

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep 187 - Forecasting Recruitment in 2023, Fri 6th Jan, 2pm GMT

What does the year ahead have in store for us in recruitment? No one knows but we're going to have a go at guessing with a stellar line up of experts from every perspective of the recruitment universe. With Kate Shoesmith, Deputy CEO (Recruitment & Employers Confederation), Madeline Laurano, Founder (Aptitude Research), Andrew Spence, Founder (Glassbead), Andy Foote, Founder (LinkedInsights), Jo Avent, CPO (CrosscHQ and friends. Going to be a big one folks - register here - and see you on Friday!

Understanding Your Barriers to Candidate Entry in Volume Recruitment, Wed 11 Jan, 12pm

High volume recruitment series continues with our friends at Crooton. Next up, I'm with Marcell Edwards, Global Talent Acquisition at Adidas, who will share his case study on how to hire thousands of workers using smart processes and smarter technology. Going to learn a lot from high volume hiring I think - different type of recruitment most of us are used to, much more data driven and therefore some truer answers as to what works and what doesn't. Register here

Hiring for Potential: Getting Real Value from Reference Checking, Thurs 19th Jan, 1pm GMT / 2pm CET

Do you really get the value you should from reference checks? I suspect most of don't, mainly because we are thinking about them in a purely compliance driven manner, and not as a talent intelligence opportunity to learn about a future hire you're about to make. What is the 'readme' for the candidate, who do they want to be treated, what is the best form of communication, how do we escalate an issue? All management and performance challenges employers could mitigate by collecting the information ahead of time. With my buddy Roy Baladi, Founder (Jobs For Humanity), Emira Blomberg, Chief Strategy Officer (Refapp) and David Näsström, Founder (Refapp). Register here

How to Turbocharge your Employer Branding with Data, Thur 26 Jan, 2.30pm GMT

These are two of the smartest people in the business when it comes to EB (don't mean Danny H and I obvs), so I am excited to be co-hosting this webinar on companies can use data to make better decisions on Employer Branding. We're with Nick Thompson, Global Talent Marketing & Employer Branding Manager (IBM), Sarah Sturgess, Agency Director (SMRS) - Danny Hodgson, Founder (Foresight) and I moderating the chat. Register here

Recruiters Unite, Thurs 9th March, Lagoon Beach Hotel, Cape Town

Well one thing I know I will doing next year will be traveling to South Africa and visiting one of my favourite cities, to connect with one of my favourite communities. Sharing the stage with good friends Vanessa Raath, Founder (Talent Hunter) and Jonnathan Koch, Cofounder (Talent Genie) Thank you to Samantha-Leigh Hayward for the invitation - and friends who want to attend, super early bird tickets are now 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 @ mention me so that I see it

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Who's Moving?

Bao Le joins Onward Search as Director of Business Development. Bao has been at the forefront of market development in the staffing sector for over a decade and brings a wealth of experience to the search market. Interesting to see how the Exec Search sector will fare in 2023 - in tough times, it often moves counter cyclically. Let me know how you get on Bao!

Katie Linn joins Juniper Networks as Talent Acquisition Sr. Manager, Inclusion & Diversity, having previously worked in TA roles at Okta, AuthO, Funko and Whitepages. Some great growth stories in those businesses. Good luck with move Katie.

Jenny Hazan joins CloudZone as Global Talent Partner, having previously worked in TA roles with the likes of Intel Corporation, DustPhotonics and PerfectaHR. Interesting times for the Cloud - have we already resolved to near global oligopoly of Azure, AWS and Google Cloud? And will data security and geopolitical risk reverse the move to the cloud? Interesting space to work in.

Sandro Phan joins ZEISS Group as Technical Recruiting Lead. Is there a hotter field right now than SC? Cutting China out of the global SC supply chain will bifurcate the market, which means more companies needing to supply to different markets in effectively a hard fork of the industry. ZEISS as a leading player in optics are going to be one of the beneficiaries, if they can evade the creeping US sanctions regime. Great sector to do some recruiting!

Promotions to celebrate: Tyler DeShazer goes up to Recruiting Manager at Rapid and Kirsty Nelson goes up to Senior Talent Acquisition Manager, Early Entry Talent - congratulations both!

If you have made a senior exec appointment to your business, and feel the wider community needs to know about it, comment below with the details and see it featured in next weeks issue. Don't forget to @ mention me in it so that I see it

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End Notes

Hope you enjoyed this week's edition - a change of pace seeing as its the only time of year to do a forecast essay, and also because big chunks of community news - what you're doing, whats in the news, who's hiring or looking etc - will be more apparent as people come back from their holiday break.

If you're still on such a break - well done! If you're back in the saddle already, then Happy New Year to you and all the best for 2023!

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.