Brainfood Live Christmas Party 2024 - Open Mic

 

Friends, this is the last Brainfood Live of the year!

 

This will be our 50th show of the year, so our cadence of doing these more or less once per week, every week, remains pretty much unbroken - not even sure where the two missing weeks went!

 

In any case, we're going to do an Open Mic session where all the years panelists and guests can come on and say their piece to the camera on what they thought of 2024. See the great and the good join Brainfood Live one last time for 2024 - and feel welcome to join on screen if you want to say your piece.

 

What do you think about:

 

- Job market for TA

- Skill Based Hiring

- Talent Density

- Offshoring

- Automation and AI

- DEI vs Wokelash

- Pay equity

- Fractional HR / TA

- LinkedIn search / copilot

- Content and Audience building

- Network value

- Conference scene

 

All this and more on Brainfood Live On Air. We'e with the great and the good and YOU!

We're on Friday 20th Dec, 2pm GMT

 

Follow the channel here (recommended) and click on the green button to register for this show.

Sustainable Recruitment in Healthcare: Strategies for 2024 and Beyond

 

The UK healthcare sector is at a critical crossroads. Recruitment challenges are intensifying, driven by an aging population, workforce burnout, and shifting political landscapes. As we enter 2024 under a new Labour government, healthcare recruiters must brace for significant policy changes while continuing to navigate the existing talent shortages. This event will explore the current state of healthcare hiring, the impact of government reforms, and the best practices that will define success in the coming years.

 

Key Themes:

State of Healthcare Hiring in the UK: An overview of the current recruitment crisis and the key factors driving demand in the NHS and care sectors.

Impact of Labour's Government on Healthcare Recruitment: What changes to expect in workforce planning, immigration policies, pay structures, and working conditions as the Labour Party implements its healthcare reforms.

Addressing Talent Shortages: Is the candidate shortage real or a result of inefficient hiring practices? Explore insights into the availability of healthcare talent and how organisations can strengthen their candidate pools.

Role of Agency Workers & Workforce Flexibility: The growing reliance on agency staff and temporary workers in the NHS and care sectors—how can employers balance flexibility with stability?

Pay Transparency & Equity: How will Labour's push for pay transparency and fair wages reshape compensation strategies in healthcare recruitment?

Retention Strategies: The importance of retaining top talent in a high-turnover industry. Practical solutions for boosting employee engagement, reducing burnout, and creating long-term career pathways for healthcare professionals.

Recruitment Best Practices: What recruitment channels and technologies are most effective in 2024? How can data-driven insights and diversity initiatives optimise hiring outcomes?

Join us for a deep dive into the trends shaping healthcare recruitment and practical strategies to stay ahead in a transforming political and economic environment. Whether you’re a healthcare recruiter, HR leader, or agency professional, this event will equip you with the insights and tools needed to adapt and thrive.

All this and more on Brainfood Live On Air.

We're on Monday 16th December, 4pm GMT

 

Follow the channel here (recommended) and click on the green button to register for this show.

 

 

Ep283 is sponsored by our friends Popp

Put sourcing, matching & scheduling on autopilot with the world’s most powerful recruitment AI.

Deep integrations with 40+ ATS systems, including Bullhorn.

Automatically matches and ranks every candidate with explainable AI.

Automatically engages suitable candidates with human-like conversations via WhatsApp, SMS or email.

Constantly updates your database with the latest candidate data.

Popp provides support, asks screening questions, collects information, and schedules calls.

Works in 50+ languages, with less bias, and greater consistency than human teams alone.

Recruitment companies and talent teams are using Popp to place 25% more candidates 40X faster, with ROI averaging >10X.

 

"Popp is a platform every company should have, I can imagine endless possibilities in which you can use Popp and make your work run smoothly. Work smarter and not harder.”

 

Monica - Strategic Sourcing Specialist at Randstad/Philips North America

 

You can book a demo through their website at https://www.joinpopp.com/book-a-demo

 

or Contact their Founder and COO, James Cochrane-Dyet, directly at [email protected]

2024 in Review: State of Talent Acquisition

 

It's been another challenging year for Talent Acquisition - I make it two years since the hey days of 2021/2022. What can we learn from the current market conditions for Talent Acquisition, how are companies seeing the function and what are professionals doing to ensure they are staying ahead of the competition?

 

- Real Talk: Is Talent Acquisition heading toward extinction?

- How are employers viewing TA in the era of AI / Doing More With Less?

- What are the challenges to function in a candidate rich market?

- Expansion of scope - in what areas are TA moving their focus?

- Contraction of scope - in what areas are TA reducing their focus?

- AI in TA: what the current state / future states

- Hiring for TA in 2024: what type of skills are we looking for?

- How do candidates on the market distinguish themselves?

- Global dispersal of TA - are functions being offshored?

- How is this impact salary / compensation?

- Fractional TA - is this happening?

- Provisional projection for 2025 - recommendations for TA!

 

 

All this and more on Brainfood Live On Air. We're with Emma Mirrington, CEO (The Talent Labs), Becky Lee, Global Early Careers Transformation Leader (Join Talent), Andreea Lungulescu, Founder (TA Talent Crunch) & Jim Miller, Head of Talent (Ashby)

 

We're on Friday 13th Dec, 2pm GMT

 

 

Follow the channel here (recommended) and click on the green button to register for this show.

 

Ep286 is sponsored by our friends Ashby

 

Tired of spending hours on manual recruiting tasks?

 

Ashby’s responsible AI and automation has got your back.

 

With smart scheduling that turns multi-hour coordination into just a few clicks and AI-powered email outreach that boosts reply rates by 46%, recruiting has never been easier — at least when it comes to process.

 

Ashby’s AI-Assisted Application Review tool lets you fly through your inbound volume — think 1,500 resumes in just 6 hours!

 

Plus, Ashby’s AI-generated feedback summaries speed up collaboration across teams.

 

Ready for an ATS that elevates your recruiting game with thoughtful AI and automation? Book your demo here.

2024 in Review: State of Recruitment Job Advertising

 

One of the themes of 2024 has been the surge of job applicants for the job adverts employers are posting out. It's clear that the economic conditions + AI-enablement has created the conditions where traditional duration based advertising is no longer a viable hiring approach - in fact, a counter productive one, as it absorbs all the recruiters capacity to deal with the flood!

 

What is the current state of recruitment job advertising and what may be the future?

 

- Volume of job advertising in 2024 - high or low

- Volume of applications per job

- Avg duration of job adverts: global, per country, per sector

- Number of applications made per candidate

- Most effective job title (quality of applicant)

- Most effective job description (quality of applicant)

- Impact of diversity statements in job adverts

- Impact of benefits in job adverts

- Shift to programmatic: what is the penetration?

- Remote work job ads, up or down?

- What is the avg spend per job advert in 2024?

- What is the future model of job advertising?

 

All this and more on Brainfood Live On Air. We're with Yazad Dalal, Chief Growth Officer, Joveo, Alexander Chukowski, HR Tech Consultant & Peter Weddle, Founder, TATech

 

We're on Friday 6th Dec, 2pm GMT

 

 

Follow the channel here (recommended) and click on the green button to register for this show.

 

Ep285 is sponsored by our friends Joveo

 

Joveo is the unified, high-performance Recruitment Marketing platform.

 

Best-of-breed programmatic job ad tech, a proprietary CMS to create world-class career sites, and a candidate engagement platform. Eliminate patched point solutions and data silos forever.

 

Reduce job advertising spend, control applicant flow rate, increased quality of application - contact Jove today.

2024 in Review: State of Flexible Working

 

The rise of the 'Alternative Workforce' has been a trend since before pandemic, as organisations sort to increase agility and reduce risk by expanding the pool of non-FTE into the workforce. Workers too have been keen to explore other ways in which to commercially engage with companies rather than being full time, permanent, on site workers.

 

What is the state of Flexible working in 2024 - and how do we expect this to develop over the coming years? This is the topic of Brainfood Live On Air

 

- Overview: Number of freelancers / non-FTE in UK

- Organisational POV: why increase number of non-FTE?

- Worker motivations: what reason might workers wish to do this?

- Privileged vs Precarious - do we distinguish between these two?

- What are the current categories of worker in the UK?

- How does the latest budget change demand for permanent workers?

- What is the DEIB angle to flexible working?

- How does remote impact the idea of flexible working?

- What are the best practices for ensuring performance management of flexible workers?

- Culture: do we integrate or separate worker populations?

- How can TA expand scope to take on full resource delivery function?

 

All this and more on Brainfood Live On Air. We're with Sonal Bhardwaj, Head of Talent Acquisition, Financial Services, UK and Ireland, CapGemini, Runar Reistrup, CEO (YunoJuno) & friends

 

We're on Friday 29th Nov, 2pm GMT

 

 

Follow the channel here (recommended) and click on the green button to register for this show.

 

Ep284 is sponsored by our friends YunoJuno

 

Why YunoJuno?

 

Trusted by the world’s leading companies, YunoJuno is the only system you need to compliantly source, manage and pay a global contractor workforce.

 

From real-time sourcing from a pool of over 100,000 elite contractors worldwide to streamlined onboarding and automated compliance checks, YunoJuno ensures that your every step in managing a future fit flexible workforce is handled with efficiency and precision. Save time, reduce costs and mitigate risk - contact one of our friendly customer success team for a personalised demo here.

Founders Focus is the show where we get up close and personal with the leaders of the businesses changing the way we work today.

 

Next up is Matthijs Metzemaekers, CEO of Carv

 

- Why do it the second time round?

- What are you doing differently at Carv vs your previous tech startup projects?

- What are you doing in a same or similar way?

- When did the idea for Carv first emerge - do you remember the exact moment?

- What are the first steps you took, as an experienced entrepreneur are there specific events and if so what sequence?

- How do you think the recruitment landscape will change after the first big wave of automation?

- Why do you think Dutch recruitment tech startups have had success?

- How do you think values will change when the tooling does?

- What new things can customers of Carv expect in 2025?

 

All this and more as we take a deep dive into the business leaders building the technology changing the way we work today.

 

Tuesday 19th Nov, 11am CET

 

Click on the green button to save your spot and follow the channel here (recommended) for further updates

 

 

Ep52 of Founders Focus is supported by Carv

 

Carv is AI for recruiters, designed to take over your administrative tasks - so you can fully focus on what truly matters: placing candidates in jobs they love!

 

Team up with Carv so you can stop:

 

Writing job descriptions

Taking meeting notes

Drafting candidate profiles

Creating candidate write ups

Updating your ATS

 

And basically any other admin task you shouldn’t do!

 

And the best thing?

 

Carv is customized to fit your workflow and tone of voice to make sure the output is indistinguishable from yours!

 

Check out carv.com to learn more!

2024 in Review: State of Sourcing

 

Being able to find candidates for hard to hire roles - typically 'sourcing' them from the Internet - has been the backbone of the recruiter skills matrix since the early 2000's. There are thousands of people in industry who consider themselves to be 'sourcers' first rather than 'recruiters'. Yet with the rise of GenAI, sourcing products have dramatically increased their capability, such that many more people are now able to do what once only a few specialists were able to do. Where are we with sourcing and what does the future look like for this function?

 

This is the topic of Brainfood Live On Air

 

- Brief History of Sourcing

- Peak Sourcing - SourceCon, SOSU

- How many sources worldwide?

- What is the degree with which sourcing skills are still premium requirement?

- Has anyone aggregated Talent Acquisition job specs to see the mentions of sourcing?

- Is Boolean search definitely dead?

- Are we still sourcing on LinkedIn - how does that work these days?

- How does the Sourcing function evolve with the advent of new tools like PeopleGPT?

- Does engagement become the No1 skill?

- Is exec search still safe for sourcing?

 

 

All this and more on Brainfood Live On Air. We're with Randy Bailey, Principal Intelligence Advisor, (ex-Walmart), Carmen Hudson, Senior Director Talent Acquisition (ExtraHop), JT Haskell, Talent Acquisition Director (ex-Reddit), David Paffenholz, CEO, (Juicebox) & Cassie Lundquist, Senior Talent Acquisiton Specialist, Ecolab

 

We're on Friday 15th Nov, 12pm PT / 3pm ET

 

 

Follow the channel here (recommended) and click on the green button to register for this show.

 

Ep282 is sponsored by our friends PeopleGPT by Juicebox

 

PeopleGPT is the leading outbound recruiting platform built on Generative AI. Find talent across 30+ data sources, get interactive Talent Insights, and reach out with personalized AI email campaigns.

 

Key features include:

PeopleGPT (Search): the world’s first people search engine that uses natural language. Describe who you’re searching for and find the perfect match from over 30 data sources.

Talent Insights: Visualize your talent pool with 15+ interactive charts. Refine your search and dive deep into stats based on location, employers, job titles, skills, and more.

Email Outreach: Maximize candidate engagement with AI-powered email campaigns. Personalize messaging at scale using AI commands, and boost response rates by 40%.

 

Get 15% off your Juicebox subscription with code: BRAINFOOD15

 

Trusted by 400+ companies including Scale AI, Mindbloom, and Patreon. Free trial available - try it now here

US Presidential Election: Implications for TA / HR

 

Perhaps the most significant election on the planet is who our American friends choose to be the next President of the country. Will it be current VP Kamala Harris who offers a continuity programme or will be it be a remarkable return to Donald Trump for a second term?

 

It's an incredible moment and one which has huge implications for TA / HR particularly given that the two candidates represent two sides of a culture war in which our sector plays a prominent part. We will not likely know the result by the time we go on air, nor will we use the moment to stoke tension but we will be trying to anticipate what implications either a Harris or Trump win will produce for the People function

 

- Economic policy: end of taxation / increase in tariffs?

- Data privacy / data security - how do vendors react?

- DEIB: two polar opposites, what can we expect in advent of a Trump win?

- Public sector employment: do we anticipate the gutting of government (therefore thousands of jobs)

- Industrial policy: where do we expect investment to continue, increase or decrease

- Immigration: how do the two politicians differ on immigration

- Company policy: in a heated political environment, what is the best policy that employers should take?

- What to do when politics bleeds in to company chat?

- Future of TA / HR - Trump / Musk pretty much anti-HR. What can we expect in terms of policy?

- International: can we expect brain drain in advent of victory for either side?

 

All this and more on Brainfood Live On Air. We're with Jim Stroud, Editor (SourceCon), Steven Rothberg, Founder (College Recruiter), Kate Bischoff, Attorney & HR Consultant, Brian Evje, Executive Consultant (Astia) & friends

 

We're on Friday 8th Nov, 2pm GMT / 9am ET

 

 

Follow the channel here (recommended) and click on the green button to register for this show.

 

Ep281 is sponsored by our friends Metaview

 

It’s been decided: Metaview is the best Recruiting AI Note-taker on the market. The feedback is out of this world.

“Your killer product has transformed the way I work. It’s my all around product of the year…possibly decade. Metaview is a game-changer!!”

Head of Leadership Recruiting @ Trainline

“I think it’s pretty pointless trying to compete with Metaview. Overall, this is one of the best products I’ve used in my career.”

Senior TA Partner @ Sanity

It’s still free to get started, and Metaview’s team of product specialists are waiting to assist you in taking your first steps into the future of recruiting.

 

Get started for free!

2024 in Review: UK Staffing Market

 

Recruitment has gone through another turbulent year and it's clear that the global staffing market has had one its most challenging years recent times. How has the UK fared, what are the reasons for this and how do we think the prospects will look in 2025 and beyond?

 

- State of UK staffing Marketing

- Big agency bottom line

- Contract market vs Perm Market

- Growth industries where labour demand is high

- Declining industries where labour demand is low

- Avg fee / commission

- Cash collection / invoice reneges

- Technology implementation - big news in 2024 sector

- Business development in demand - how have sales techniques evolved in 2024?

- What should individual business owners do to prepare for 2025?

 

All this and more on Brainfood Live On Air. We're with Neil Carberry, CEO, (The Recruitment & Employers Confederation), Simon Bliss, Chairman (TEAM), Angela Cripps, MD (Recruiting Gym) & Darren Topping, Director of Solutions & Insight (Impellam Group)

 

We're on Friday 1st Nov, 1pm GMT

 

Follow the channel here (recommended) and click on the green button to register for this show.

 

Ep280 is sponsored by our friends Atlas

 

Imagine making 50% more placements without a second more effort. Atlas is an end-to-end recruitment platform built from the ground up with generative AI.

 

What does that mean?

 

Everything you do is covered in one single platform, including:

 

Candidate Sourcing

Candidate Pool management

Candidate GPT

End-to-end project management

AI interview scheduling

AI interview notes

Company wide LLM

Actionable analytics

Business Development platform

 

The best bit?

 

GenAI isn’t just a feature bolted on to an existing platform, It powers every single feature.

 

Out now | Learn More

Diversify Your Talent Pipeline with Employee Referrals

 

Employee Referrals are often thought of as 'anti-diversity' because we inevitably recommend people who are most like us. However, are we throwing out the baby with the bathwater if we dismiss ERP as a channel for talent?

 

- State of Employee Referrals - how many people get hired via this method?

- How many companies have a formal ERP programme?

- What are the hallmarks of the great ERP programme?

- Can you use ERP to specifically help with workforce diversification?

- What techniques can be used to do this, without being discriminatory?

- Can you give examples where this has been a success?

- What expected problems might we launch a programme like this?

- How do we build upon the success of a successful ERP campaign?

 

All this and more on Brainfood Live On Air.

 

We're with Sam Davies, CEO (Real Links), Akbar Karenga, Founder, (Maarusi), Daen Fox, Head of Talent (tbc!) & friends Friday 25th Oct, 2pm GMT

 

Follow the channel here (recommended) and click on the green button to register for this show.

 

Ep279 is sponsored by our friends Real Links

 

Real Links is an award winning technology platform dedicated to reimagining referrals and employer brand advocacy.

 

Real Links helps talent acquisition professionals meet a wide range of TA goals, putting the power back in your hands by making referrals and advocacy actively strategic. From hard to fill tech roles; early careers hiring; ED&I objectives; employer brand messaging or day-to-day hiring drives across your business, you can set up multiple campaigns dedicated to a specific business need, in just a few easy steps - all supported by our dedicated Customer Success team.

 

Hire people who are genuinely motivated by your mission and your values. Contact one of our friendly team for a personalised demo today.