Geographical Distribution

Most of the people who read this are recruiters & HR people who operate in large, metropolitan, English language friendly city centre. How this map changes over time would not only be pretty cool visualisation but also a useful means of tracking where growth / decline has been most significant, but I suspect it will mainly be all the bubbles growing slightly bigger rather than shifting around too much.

There are huge swathes of the globe entirely underserved by this newsletter; they also blindspots as there’s loads of recruitment going on in those places that I have little visibility on. The ‘How to Hire in [insert country]’ series needs to be something that happens in 2024.

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3. When Brainfooders Read SubStack provides some interesting information on when this newsletter is opened. It is sent on Sunday and - I was a little surprised to see - it is overwhelming read on the same day, usually 2x as popular as the next day, Monday.

I hope this doesn’t mean that I am making people work on the weekend 😀. I hope instead it means we’re amongst enthusiasts who care about this industry more than the norm. Interest declines progressively until Saturday, where thankfully very few people are reading this! It does look like there is a reason to do something from Wednesday / Thursday - usually these have been webinars or LinkedIn posts but perhaps something more regular could happen here, just before Brainfood Live on Friday. What do you think?

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4. LinkedIn PostsOver the past 12 months, I’ve probably posted around 50-60 mid week posts on LinkedIn, which has reached nearly 5 million impressions.

This was helped by one outrageous post ‘Recruiters: Do You Measure Quality of Hire’ in April which hit 452,585 impressions by itself - basically 1/10th of the view count of the entire year, and 5 other posts that went over 100,000 impressions. Then came 20+ or some which hit 40,000+ impressions or so. Most popular post type? Not polls as I suspected but in fact ‘report breakdowns’ where I read a PDF, summarise it into a LinkedIn post and point out the relevancies for recruiting. Basically HungGPT. Wonder whether they will continue to be interesting in 2024? I’ll keep doing them, so we will see.

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5. This Week, In Recruiting2023 was the year when the spin off newsletter overtook the original in terms of subscriber numbers. This Week, In Recruiting is where community news, events, jobs etc went, and it’s also where I do some original writing in the Open Kitchen segment. TWIR has now got 41,431 subscribers. Are they reading it? According to ‘Article Views’ they are, with an average of 9000 reading per week. However, as you can see in the chart below, the article view count is all over the map, with sometimes with periods of random dips. Unlike this newsletter, which is despatched direct to your inbox, LinkedIn’s newsletter is subject to whatever changes LinkedIn make to their algorithm

Still, the last few issues have gone over 11K article view mark - an ‘OR’ of 25% so decent number of people must be seeing it.

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6. Brainfood Live On Air Video LivestreamWe hit 51 episodes in 2023 - nearly one per week with average attendance of 337 on CrowdCast, 1018 on (my) LinkedIn Live, 43 on FB and, incredibly 101 on X. So we can say 1500 recruiters tune into each episode, across the multiple channels. I don’t think anyone else actually does a regular recruitment livestream so I can confidently say we’re the best 🤣. The most popular single episode was of course ‘Recruiter Use Cases for ChatGPT, Part One’, where we had 1500 on CrowdCast alone, with many thousands more on LinkedIn. We ended up doing 4 episodes on this one topic and no doubt could’ve done more, such was the appetite from the industry. Two innovations this year on BLOA, one good, one not-so-good.