Brainfood Online Community

We are really struggling for an online space in which to conduct community; LinkedIn Groups has been dead for nearly a decade, X is obviously too toxic, whilst all other options are too niche, leaving only the semi-abandoned Facebook as the place where people can still connect without first being mutuals. All groups have suffered decline in engagement, as auto-censors remove comments and posts. You’d be surprised how often I get complaints on takedowns which I never made (because I never do), only to turn out it was removed w/o any human action - either a bug or an algorithm. Still the Brainfood Online Community remains the best, flawed place we got - and I hope that the active members (some 2800 of you) are still getting value from it. Join it here if you want to engage more in 2025.

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8. Founders FocusI say it’s my favourite thing to do in the week, and it really is; we can learn so much from entrepreneurs who have been so annoyed at the challenges facing recruiting that they decided to build something to solve it. We did 10 episodes in 2024, speaking with Richard & Beverly Collins (CVWallet), Tycho van Passen (VONQ), Reiner Bruns (ScottyAI), Max Armbruster (TalkPush), Barb Hyman (Sapia), Rod Smyth (Glyde Talent), Dina Bay (PitchMe), Sam Dhesi (Popp), Steve Bartel (Gem), Maxime Legardez Coquin (Maki), Runar Reistrup (YunoJuno) and Matthijs Matzemaekers (Carv). You can watch all of these via the Brainfood YouTube channel, on this playlist

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9. Brainfood Live On Air We livestreamed 46 times on Brainfood Live in 2024 - more or less a cadence of once a per week. Thousands of recruiters watched along, with many of you add to the conversation by some amazing contributions in chat. Most popular episode? How to Set Up a Recruitment Analytics Dashboard - with a whopping 643 people on the stream. Hit shows like this helped us reach circa 200 people on stream per episode, not counting the hundreds on LinkedIn Live. It’s going to be interesting to see what episodes gain most attention in 2025 - will it still be practical how-to’s like this? Follow the channel here to be notified next time we go live.

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10. Talks & PresentationsIt’s been a busy year on stage; I emceed 4 events, appeared in 7 panels, managed 2 x workshops, managed 1 x stage and gave 11 x presentations. I mainly get asked to do a zoom out view of the State of Talent Acquisition, particularly how it (we) intersect with geopolitics, AI, macroeconomics, demographics and consumer behaviour, which I’m happy to do because it gives me a chance to synthesise what I’ve learned from all of the members of the community I’ve interacted with over the year. Favourite talk of the year in terms of delivery? From the Macro to the Micro: Recruitment in 2024 and Beyond at HR Embrace in Berlin. (NB: worst delivery was also the this talk, that I had to give a second time on the second day - reminder to self, never do the same talk at the same event ever again!)

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End Note

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The period between Christmas and New Year are really my favourite parts of the year. It’s the only time that I feel I can do stuff around the house without thinking about opportunity cost. So far, I have rewired the lighting on the aquarium rack, started training on how to fly a FPV drone, donated half a ton of clothes I never wear and got moving on the logistics of the APAC trip which I am way behind on sorting out. I hope everyone has also had time to relax, decompress and reset. Thank you for all of your love and support in 2024 - see you in 2025 ❤️!Hung