Headhunter Said to Use Fake Identities to Dupe Wall Street Traders

Great report from Bloomberg on the practice of ‘rusing’, where recruiters call up candidates with spurious or non-exist job opportunities in order to extract market intelligence. Civilians reading this will have crystallised their already negative opinions of recruiters, recruiters reading this would….probably accept that this is common practice in the activity of market mapping? No white collar job is entirely ethical; this is one of the areas where ours is exposed as such. H/T to brainfooder Petar Vujosevic for the share.

Selling Ollie Watkins & Winning with ZERO Budget

Fascinating podcast with former Exeter manager Paul Tisdale. Lots in here, from leadership, communication, culture - and also, how to hire talent when you’re a second rate employer. Funny, honest look at calibrate your hiring according to your status as an employer. Great all the way through, but best bits on hiring start here

The Hidden Value of Talent Acquisition: Beyond Filling Seats

Can Talent Acquisition provide another type of value to the business? Brainfooder Toby Culshaw thinks that we might be ideally placed as ‘market sensors’ due to our daily interactions with candidates in the job market. Love the thinking here - it is necessary to break out of our self imposed guard rails and figure out how else we can provide value to business.

Unlocking the Power of Talent Intelligence: My 2 Cents

The world of recruitment isn’t short of collateral damage over these past two years and Talent Intelligence - a nascent discipline which really deserved better luck - is amongst them. Brainfooder Guillaume Lhote provides a sharp, concise explainer to the function and the value it can add to strategic talent acquisition. H/T to brainfooder Ivan Harrison for the share.

Human Development Index

Human Development Index or HDI is an attempt to measure the health of a society, going beyond flawed GDP measures (inflation inflates GDP…) to include other life quality measures such as years in education, life expectancy and gross national income per capita. Three reasons why I am including it here: 1) potentially useful talent intelligence resource 2) a good lesson in how rank is determined by what you decide to count (think any league table of university, country, company etc) and 3) it’s pretty fun tool to play around with. btw: its also worth noting that the highest scoring countries are also the ones with the lowest fertility rates - we have to start talking about why.

Talent Intelligence Collective Benchmarking Survey 2023

Brilliant piece of research work from brainfooder Toby Culshaw, whose Talent Intelligence Collective group is one of the best online communities around. Here’s what that community said about the state of Talent Intelligence in 2023

Atlas: Sequoia’s Interactive Guide To Europe’s Technical Talent

Significant contribution by VC Sequoia to the tech recruitment landscape - an interactive website talent mapping the tech talent across Europe, which adds in the additional value from offering some observations of the candidate expectations such as erosion of location based pay, ubiquity of hybrid and top priorities of tech candidates. Must read, or download the PDF here. H/T to brainfooder Ruth Barnett for the share.

How Much Should You Pay for Tech Talent?

One of the consequences of the US State requirements to publish salaries advertised jobs, is that you can scrape the data and present it into a talent intelligence website. Comprehensive - an aspirational title as it is far from atm, covering only US data and then only data from states where salary transparency is law - but the idea of having a single place aggregating openly declared salaries is more than solid one. From the same folks who built Levels.fyi and promises one day to be equally valuable for US tech recruiters looking to benchmark compensation.

Developer Happiness Index 2021