It’s scary to think this newsletter is heading into its 9th year. So far, we haven’t missed a week since we began all the way back in Oct 2016 - 429 week’s straight! One day it will fail - if it does, it will certainly mean something bad has happened, so call the police 🤣. Seriously though, it has and remains a highlight of my week to put this newsletter together for you. We’re up to 37,208 subscribers now with an average OR of 35% - so 10,000+ guaranteed reads. Thanks for everyone who has shared and promoted it - without you there would be no way for others to know about it. NB: One thing that has slacked off is any CRM on the subscriber base - hope to correct this in 2025 with a AI solution. Expect a digital avatar…2. This Week, In Recruiting
We’re up to 52,027 subscribers on my LinkedIn newsletter. The origin story for TWIR was that it was a spin off from RBF as this newsletter got too long to put everything in. Never expected it to supersede in terms of subscriber numbers, but then in hindsight I shouldn’t be surprised - LinkedIn has a built in audience of 1 Billion* users so they can push to incentivise. It’s also the place where I do my original writing in the ‘Open Kitchen’ segment of the newsletter - so another guaranteed 10,000+ reads on this essay now. Follow it here, comes out Mondays.3. International TravelFrom Recruiters Unite in Cape Town in January to Christmas Dinner at MOMO in Amsterdam in December, its been an amazing year of international travel. This was intentional as I had realised the necessity to complementing my excessive consumption of digital information with the sort of stuff you can only glean from in-person interaction. So many lessons learned, including the biggest one which is things are never quite as universal as you think they may be. Pervasive trends - AI & Automation - run into local context and can divert in an entirely unexpected directions. There’s hope here for recruiters - we’re going to find friends in unlikely places….4. LinkedIn Posts
I post a lot on LinkedIn, at least 2-3 times a week, sometimes up to 4-5. The content is a mix of report breakdowns, short essays on a dimension of hiring which needs more debate and polls to get a temp check on what the community thinks of things. Going to feed all this into RoboHung2, so hopefully the chat will be reflective of what I mean to say. Collapse of LinkedIn engagement is true also: from my POV - I am down 25% of impression numbers (4M+ in 2023). This could be down to lack of an absolute banger of a post 🤣, but I think more likely due to algorithmic changes to the mighty newsfeed. Follow me on LinkedIn if you haven’t already. 5. Community PollsCommunity sentiment is one of the most interesting - and perhaps important - things that brainfood can surface. Across all channels there is probably a combined audience of upwards 100,000 recruiter types, so it would be hugely interesting to see what the community thinks of topics at large. We don’t quite have an adequate universal tool for this, so its fragmented across multiple choice polls scattered across this newsletter, LinkedIn, X and Crowdcast. We really misss Thumb, the mobile app where u can get a thumbs up / down on any question you ask. Waiting for someone to make Thumb 2.0 - the meantime, I’m going to keep asking you what you think where ever I can find you. 6. Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner
2024 has seen the rise of the business dinner party (!). Or at least, I started to get invited to them 🤣. It’s been great fun to connect with people in a more intimate setting this way - smaller groups, curated list of guests, shorter duration therefore commitment from attendees. They are all great fun, though some worked better than others. Lessons learned: social proof is important (who else is going is the most important piece of marketing information), cool venue is critical and collaboration is always more expensive than you first thought. Good for vendors though, who want to get target audience together, w/o having to battle it out at an expo.
