Back to school
Summer's gone but I am still here
A different sort of update this month. Ostensibly this is a brain dump of the things I’ve been thinking about recently. Dig in to my dump.
Things I’ve been thinking about
We are living in strange times at the moment. If you are on LinkedIn for any amount of time you will see new faces popping up looking for work. All the while a shortage of applications in other areas. This paradox reflects the need for cost saving while desperately chasing the people who are either keeping the lights on or offer the salvation of digital revolution that creates the next thing to make money from - whether that’s a product or efficiency.
So the jobs are split between highly niche technical areas, and unfashionable manual jobs. Essentially, if the job requires manual dexterity or some sort of physicality in a natural environment, OR it’s controlling the bots in some way, then there aren’t enough people doing it or wanting to do it.
But what does this mean for us? Well, it seems to be creating a strange paradox whereby companies are cutting marketing budgets and HR budgets because they are cutting headcount. But with the need to compete in a cutthroat market for the people in highly niche jobs or needing to convince an apathetic audience that the manual job is worthwhile. Either way, it requires some sort of recruitment marketing - just with the very real need to do even more with even less. This is going to be happening for the foreseeable so I’m thinking about how companies can do that…in between imagining a future where we reach a singularity where AI and robots do everything, we get universal basic income and purposelessly drift through life until we beg to be put out of our misery under the jackboot of mechanical overlords. Yay!
Things to read
On the flip side, I also had some follow on thoughts, prompted by Ted Gioia’s article on the AI bubble. I didn’t agree with all of it but it did make me think about the fact that there are still plenty of jobs that, to me, seem immune from automation. Either because it’s too difficult for robots to do, or because the cost associated with building a robot to do that task would be prohibitive given how much money a company would spend on it. Now I spend part of my day assessing companies I see advertised on the side of vans and thinking if they will survive - This week it was office window washes that abseil down the outside.
Thought this was very interesting - looks like recruitment, for some jobs, is going back to being human.
”Contrary to the forecasts of professional recruiters, we find that AI-led interviews increase job offers by 12%, job starts by 18%, and 30-day retention by 17% among all applicants. Applicants accept job offers with a similar likelihood and rate interview, as well as recruiter quality, similarly in a customer experience survey. When offered the choice, 78% of applicants choose the AI recruiter”
Things to watch
My colleague, Tom Channell sent this to me today. System1 do some amazing stuff on advertising effectiveness. This is all about consistency. Essentially, maintaining concepts through time, including reusable brand assets (whether that’s a logo, sound, key image, character etc) brings results. For anyone who is talking about creative fatigue.
A final pic
And a good find from Lizzie Barrett
