This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 216

Sponsored by our friends Ashby

We're three weeks again from Ashby One - the conference for leading Talent and RecOps teams! Connect with TA Leaders and RecOps Experts while being first to hear Ashby's newest product announcements. Get hands-on with the Hiring Excellence Framework at Ashby Labs and learn winning strategies from industry experts.

Conference is sold out already but join the waitlist if you're in San Francisco on the May 15th. Make sure also to register the Ashby Product Keynote here

Open Kitchen: Diary of a CEO

I'll be interviewing Steven Bartlett in a fireside chat later this month. The man today is probably most famous for being the host of Diary of a CEO - one of the top 10 podcasts in the world by audience size, a series in which he has interviewed such extraordinary figures as Simon Sinek, Esther Perel, Wim Hof, Brene Brown, Mo Gawdat, Mr Beast and many others

You can watch this interview, along with some other fantastic talks and panel discussions at Gem's Talent Summit on May 20th - register here.

In the spirit of being open with my journey, I'm going to use today's Open Kitchen to share my interview preparation so that we can have the sort of conversation which will provide maximum value to the audience, whilst also being fun and pleasant to take part in.

1. Conduct Background Research

As a public figure, Steven is no mystery man - he has himself appeared as a guest on many podcasts and interviews, as well as having published books and contributed to the online discourse. So the first thing to do is to collate this material and dive into some selected portions of it.

You can learn a lot from the Diary of a CEO podcast / Youtube channel, but I found the Behind the Diary - a secondary channel to be even more insightful - less produced, more authentic. The last two videos from this channel were particularly interesting, seeing as they are directly relevant to our sector; this, a glimpse of Steven's calendar in the video, his investment in recruitment firms such as Chapter 2, indicate that the man has a deep and genuine interest in the topic of recruitment. So the first question for the interview emerges - why are you so interested in hiring?

2. Ask Artificial Intelligence to Provide Angles

The base use case for AI is online research. AI can ingest, compress and summarise huge amounts of data, such that it is already making the act of searching on the internet increasingly obsolete. You probably can't prepare for an online interview without asking AI about the subject. I didn't do much Googling on Steven Bartlett, but I did ask Deep Seek / ChatGPT to collate online information that featured him and have them provide insight on what his views were on the topics we were going to discuss: business, hiring, entrepreneurship, leadership - and on artificial intelligence itself.

As always, we need caution before accepting outputs from AI as direct instructions for action. But I think we are moving towards a maturity of usage where we can use AI as a sounding bound for ideation, giving us ideas on which angles to explore which we may not have come to on our own. At the very least, the cognitive load of covering the basics is shared now with AI - replacing the laborious, inefficient and perhaps less comprehensive 'research vs seach'

3. Activate Crowd Intelligence

One of the questions Steven likes to uncover from his guests is some version of 'what is your unfair advantage?'. This is the unique differentiator which makes the difference between a David Goggins and any-other-personal-trainer-guru. 'Unique' is probably doing a lot of work here as I'm sure high performers do share certain traits but the point is still valid - being aware of what gives you the edge is a key component of ensuring that edge remains sharp and does the damage when you need it to.

Having a decently sized and well engaged network on Linkedin is definitely one of my unfair advantages, especially when it comes to crowd sourcing intelligence. We like to offload cognitive effort to the AI, but you can also do the same with CI. In fact, if you do both, as well as apply your own cognitive effort, you're probably going to cover many more bases than the the norm.

I ask the crowd in this announcement post what questions they would like me to ask Steven - here is a selection of their responses.

Some decent ones in here which will find their way into the run-of-show. These caught my eye:

What’s one belief you’ve had to 'unlearn' in order to grow as a leader?

What’s the one hiring principle you’ve held onto no matter how big your team or business has grown, and what’s one you’ve completely changed your mind about?

What does great hiring look like from your chair as CEO—and what would you say separates a transactional recruiting team from a Talent Acquisition function that truly drives business growth?

Thanks to everyone who contributed their thoughts on this. The post is here btw, in case you wanted to continue that conversation or harvest the comments from them. As a Nota Bene this technique is a very useful way to generated information through starting online discussions, with significant secondary benefits of enriching social network and building personal brand etc. Give it a shot, next time you have a research problem.

4. Review Guidance / Debrief

Massive credit needs to go to Brandice Payne for putting together this interview and also providing the guidance on the fireside to align with the overall theme of the event. This is the brief that both Steven and I now have ahead of our conversation

The importance of 'being aligned' depends on the type of fireside chat we're having and often under what conditions the guests are placed under. Part of the reason why Diary of a CEO is such good listening is that all of the guests on Steven's show are very much their own boss, and as such as not constrained by anything other than their own sense of what is a good question to answer or not. I suspect we'll have a similar degree of candour during our fireside.

From the brief though, we can see that we're going to try and get the view of hiring from the view of the CEO. All CEO's are going to say the same thing - that people are the most important thing - but with the advent of AI and the replacement of many tasks and jobs that will come from it, are these presumptions still true? We might end up talking about 'companies as eco-systems' - an idea which I'm developing on how organisations will react differently to AI based on how dense their human interactions are with each other. Rainforests create their own weather don't you know.

5. Sketch Run-of-Show

It's important to have a general outline for where the conversation is going when doing fireside chats; they are not dissimilar at all to job interviews, though we need less of a 'seeker' mentality and more of an interlocutor one. The aim is to have a guided conversation that remains organic, authentic, informal in style and fun in tone. A run-of-show can help orientate that conversation and can be shared with the guest or otherwise be prepped before the go live / recording.

You can overcook this! Remember that most guests are not going to be remember any script, nor 'perform well' on camera; the best conversations are always those that feel less like scripted and more like conversations you have in the pub with a good friend. That's the aim of run-of-show.

Closing

There is usually some take away or CTA when it comes to these firesides. I'm not sure what this is going to be as I'm guest interviewer for this rather than it being my own show. That's said, I'll be sure to reward the guest in some way by CTAing the audience towards Diary of a CEO podcast at the least.

That's it - let me know what you think of the show when you see it on the 20th!

Now out of the kitchen, onto the lounge 👇

What's Going On?

Big List of Recruiting & HR Events to Attend in 2025

Big List for 2025 is shared every week on this newsletter! Please do me a favour and bookmark this spreadsheet and share it with the people you know in the recruitment, TA and HR fields. We all need to get into more in-person events - essential we strengthen our human bonds as AI eats away at the work we do. I think the human premium is going to key for us - so make sure you get yourself to one of these events.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep307 - Recruiting Reimagined in the AI Era, Monday 12th May, 6pm BST / 10.00am PT

LinkedIn are one of the few technology platforms which has the potential to entirely change the way we work and hire today. Its a huge honour to speak with VP of Product, Hari Srnivasan on how LinkedIn thinks the future of recruiting looks like. Going to include live demo, so I hope you have your questions ready to hand! We're on Monday 12th May, 6pm BST / 10am PT - register here

High Volume Hiring - How to Leverage Passive Candidates on Social Media, Wed 14th May, 2pm

Episode 2 of our High Volume Hiring series with Adzuna. It may be counter intuitive, but social media job advertising may be one of the ways in which we can increase signal to noise when it comes to applicant flow. Imagine being able to target your advert only to those identities who are most suited, and not exposed them to the wider world? Lets talk about it with Adzuna's Doug Monro and Seiza's Camille Consefory. Register here

How Deel, Engine, and Grow Therapy Turned Inbound Applicant Overload into Their Biggest Advantage, Thurs 15th May, 6pm BST

We've got a massive week on high volume hiring, this time we're talking with Laura Stapleton, VP People (Engine), Alan Price, Global Head of Talent Acquisition (Deel), Karishma Desai, Recruiting Manager (Growth Therapy) & Vijay Mani, CEO (Covey) on how automation can be used to convert applicant overload to qualitative advantage. Register here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep308 - How to Build Career Pages Which Actually Work, Thurs 15th May, 2pm BST

AI is going to change UX as much if not more so than mobile. What does that mean for the sort of things you have to be doing to be effective on career pages? I have a feeling we are going to need more content pre-recorded and ready to be delivered on prompt, especially if you want to be an inclusive hirer. Just a theory though 🤣. We're with Bas van de Haterd, Author (Talent Acquisition Excellence), Charu Malhotra, Head of Talent Attraction (ex-PA Consulting, McKinsey & Co, Koos Wurzer, Global Director Talent Acquisition and Employer Branding (Danone) - register here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep300 - Hiring Manager Self Serve (Redux), Fri 16th May, 2pm BST

AI might well have another effect - providing hiring managers with the capability of doing a lot more when it comes to recruitment. We know candidates much prefer to hear from Hiring Managers rather than recruiters, but pre-AI having them do the sourcing and the outreach was obviously way too much work. Yet does the same thing apply now today? W're with Martin Warren, TA Leader (ex-Grab), Lyndsey Taylor, Global Head of HR Transformation, (Brooks Automation) & friends. Register here

WorkSummit 2025: The Rise of Freelance Talent, 22 May, Museum of London

We're seeing more recruitment technology companies set up in person events, and I'm all for it. Delighted to be supporting Worksome on their inaugural event in London - The Rise of Freelance Talent. I will be moderating a panel there on 'Hire Great Talent, Keep Great Skills On-Demand' - just one of the reasons why you should be joining this event! Register here

TATech North America & Europe

One of the smartest conferences I've ever attended, I'm excited to joining TATech this year. There is something about getting in a room with recruitment tech founders which makes this a very different conference - highly technical, big business chat, great learnings from the business side of recruitment technology. Now Peter Weddle has made an incredible offer - COMBO ticket available if you go to both - huge discount on per unit value. Anyone welcome but especially for anyone building or buying recruitment tech. Register here (Get Tickets, scroll down for COMBO deal)

If you have an event, webinar or podcast going on next week and want it featured on next week's newsletter, comment below with the link and event details. Don't forget to at mention me so that I see it

End Notes

Busy af week with 5 webinars, plus two recordings, some significant home repair, two events to organise for June, as well as loads of people still to catch up with. Hope I get some space to do it next few days...!

Hung