This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 151

Hung Lee

More signal, less noise, with Recruiting Brainfood

Published Feb 12, 2024

Remember: Recruiting Brainfood for ever green, deep dive curated recruiting + HR content. Subscribe 👆

Open Kitchen: Off Boarding

Another great Brainfood Live last week, giving me the inspiration to again to write up the learnings from the show in today's Open Kitchen. I realise that I am beginning to like this approach, the conversation on Friday is stimulates the idea, the writing on Monday helps crystallise the thoughts. Going to keep doing it, if the content on the Brainfood Live suits it.

If you want to watch the show yourself, you can do so here and also of course I recommend you connect with and follow our superb contributors Arielle Kilroy, Bharath C, Sophie Power, Leslie Kivit and Jean-Marie Cauillaud.

Key Lessons on Off Boarding

1. Make the Decision Earlier Than You Need

This is counter intuitive as the employers always default to kicking the can down the road as far as possible in order to preserve jobs for as long as possible, but if there is a persistent problem that won't be solved by more time, then that it does nobody any good to delay the inevitable. In fact, if the business is failing, a slow failure can often be much worse than a sudden fall from grace - more time for damage to seep in, more time for ambient pressure to subvert the culture, more time for relationships to corrode.

When I speak to business leaders about redundancies, they never confess to having let people go too early; they are much more likely to say that they held off the decision too long. A few reasons why this is important: firstly, you are failing to lead if you are avoiding the business - it's actually the whole part of your job as a business leader to make this decision, not have circumstances make it for you. Secondly, you are failing your staff by delay, providing either false sense of security or false sense of optimism. Finally, by delaying the decision you are loading up pressure on yourself and the team and are thus far more likely to make errors in the off boarding process. It's a big challenge of management but it's full the job - make the decision when it needs to be made.

2. Own Who Goes or Stays

I remember a conversation I had with a TA Leader who made this the first point to make to the team, even before the decision was made as to who in the team would stay or go. Yes you can explain the calculus, look at the numbers, explain the rationale but don't disguise the fact that you are the one who is making the decision who loses their jobs.

One of the reasons why ex-Cloudflare employee Brittany Peach got so irate was the dodging of responsibility which saw two HR employees - neither of whom she had had a conversation with before - were the ones who were giving her bad news. Where was the her manager? Where was the people involved in her performance management? At no point should decisions of this magnitude be communicated by figures unknown to the employee.

3. 'You'll Have To Speak To Legal' on that...

Related to point No2 is the passing of the buck between company representatives after the decision has been made. Bharath made this point extremely clearly during the show - whilst it may be understandable that there are going to be questions which not every contact is going to answer, it is nonetheless deleterious to the employee experience to have to chase around for information only to be redirected to another point of contact.

Solutions are actually straightforward: a wiki that answers FAQ's, community spaces set up where employees and points of contact can share or resurface up information; perhaps best of all, how about an AI trained in the company policy of how lay offs are going to be managed and authorised to give guidance or share information which the employee is looking for?

4. Be Prompt with the Severance

In many cases, lay offs will be accompanied with severance. In fact, perhaps the best thing employers can do is be as generous as possible with this in order to expedite closure to acceptable separation

Not everyone can (or should!) do Google level severance, but its an example of what a company can do in getting to closure asap, rather than jockeying around for the best deal. Note: making the decision early will usually help with this, as you are not wasting time (and therefore burning yet more money). Sophie mentioned an important point - be prompt with the severance payment, no matter the amount. Similar to paying invoices to freelancers, it is important to respect the time and also the difference in impact cash flow has at different size and scale.

5. Recognise Inevitable Psycho-Social Damage

We have seen every type of off boarding technique; the 1-2-many Zoom call, the no notice email lock out, the 1-2-1 phone call. All of them seem to result in episodes of upset and angry employees. There is an element of inevitability about this - as Jean-Marie mentioned, this is a break up of a relationship and rejection of one party of another is hugely painful, so much so that relationships will suffer damage and are likely to be changed forever. This is all more reason to handle things with sensitivity, courage and honour, all whilst accepting that as the person making the decision, you are responsible for the hurt that ensues. That's management.

Of course employers can support by providing stronger management training on the techniques of communication, as well as improving the understanding of psychology so that managers can be better equipped to make the best of these tough decisions. A recent brainfood poll saw over 70% of managers have zero management training on how to conduct lay offs. Seems like one of those low hanging fruit we should be picking up.

There's loads more on this show - another one I highly recommend that we watch / listen to, which you are welcome to do here.

Now out of the kitchen, onto the lounge 👇

What's in the News?

Google Kills Google 4 Jobs Again

This is the thing with Google product rug pulls - we are excited, make the mistake of thinking how we might reconfigure our processes to maximise competitive advantage of what could be an industry altering change, only to find that the product is silently killed off without much further ado. Such it seems, is the fate of Google for Jobs, as described by Alex Chukowkski here

Textkernel Unify Brands

Textkernel bringing all the acquisitions together under a single brand. One of the more exciting challenges of a marketing team is how to do this and communicated the expanded portfolio. Expect some work on this from yours truly. Have a read of the report from OnRec here

If you have any news which you think the wider market needs to know about, put into comments below on this thread.

What's Going On?

Big List of Recruiter Events to Attend in 2024

There are 100+ events in the Big List of Recruiting and HR Events to Attend in 2024 - make sure you bookmark this spreadsheet, share it with your event organiser and event going friends and get yourself to one of these this year. If you see any that are missing and should be there, please do add to the bottom of the spreadsheet - I will merge them in weekly.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep245 - LinkedIn X-Ray: Dead, Dying or What?, Friday 16th February, 2pm GMT

We're bringing together all the heroes for this one - join Marcel van der Meer, Global Sourcing Trainer, (Klikwork), Irina Shamaeva, Partner (Brain Gain Recruiting), Alla Pavlova, Recruiter (Riot Games), Mike Santoro, Talent Sourcing, (AllSearch), Balazs Paroczay, Founder (The Source Code Agency) & friends as we have a global talent sourcer town hall on what the state of play is on LinkedIn X-Ray. Must attend folks - register here

Workforce Planning Masterclass Part 2, Foresight, Wednesday 22nd February, 14.00pm GMT

Really promising to series where Danny Hodgson and Kraig Payne take deep dives into actual case studies where employers have implemented workforce planning - and seen the results. We can need to stock the pond with as many case studies of this type that we can - eventually this is will be a body of expertise and practical know-how which will be an invaluable resource for the community. Register here

Managing Candidate Use of Gen-AI, Thursday 29th February, 12-1pm GMT

So I've been banging on about 'candidate use of gen-AI' for a while now and I'm sure that some of you will be thinking does Hung actually have any idea on what to do about it? I'm delighted to say that....I don't 🤣 ....but I intend to speak to people who do. I'm hosting a panel here with our friends Arctic Shores where we set out the options available to employers who want to move from awareness to action. Register here!

How to Recruit A Data Scientist, WeAreDevelopers, March 14th 11.0 0 CET

This has been one of the most fun things to do in a long while - getting a technical expert on screen with the technical recruiter who hires for that skill set and see if we can demystify the behaviour each has of the other. We're bring together Jodie Burchell, Data Science Developer Advocate at Jetbrains with Yves Greijn, Founder of Maven for this one, with the legend that is Rudi Bauer joining me as copilot for this conversation. Make sure to join here

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

Who's Hiring?

Have we stabilised already for the year? Not seeing much job posting or career moves of late. Let me know what you're seeing out there, right now I'm still satisfied that this aggregator remains one of the most accurate dividing rods we have on the state of the market. Check it out yourself, here

If you are hiring for recruiters or HR people, you are welcome to post jobs FOR FREE on the Brainfood Jobs Job Board. Use coupon code: BTCFREE for 100% discount.

Whose Available?

That's 427 members of the community. If you are a recruiter or HR person that is looking for work, join the Brainfood Talent Collective here. If you are an employer hiring recruiters, apply for a company account here, and use the code: BTCFREE to freely post jobs and search the db.

Who's Moving?

Alex Charraudeau makes a huge move, leaving LinkedIn after 12 years to take on a Senior Sales Management role with design collaboration unicorn, Figma. Rare to see such tenure these days - a testament to Alex's consistently outstanding performance. Awesome move to Figma too, fresh from abandoning the proposed merger with Adobe and now going full gun to take over design tooling universe. Good luck on the move Alex - let us know how you get on!

Kirsten Boyle joins HireRoad as VP of Marketing, having previously lead the marketing at PandoLogic and also worked in leading marketing exec roles at the likes of Amazon and Indeed. Another big exec hires for HireRoad following hot on the heels of hiring Hari Challapalli as Chief Product Officer in Dec last year. A recruitment tech business to keep an eye on...!

If you have made a senior exec appointment to your business, and feel the wider community needs to know about it, comment below with the details and see it featured in next weeks issue.

What Are You Doing?

Anessa Fike is launching her new book: The Revolution of Work: Fuck the Patriarchy and the Workplace It Built - no doubt some spicy takes on the past and future of the workplace. This is available for pre-Order on Amazon - make sure you grab a copy of this

End Note

Landed in Bali and its a nice 28C. Not sure what the temp is in Europe right now, but this is the about right for my temperment! Going to be keep business as usual in terms of time zoning whilst I'm in Asia-Pac - this will see me there until I get back to Europe at the end of this month.

Hope everyone is having a great week

Hung

Hung Lee is the curator of Recruiting Brainfood, and now This Week In Recruiting. Subscribe to both if you are into recruiting or HR or just interested in world of work.