The People Factor Podcast | Episode #89

How to build & monetize a community with Hung Lee

Hung is a recruitment industry professional with over 15 years experience as an agency recruiter, Recruitment manager, Internal Head of Talent, recruitment trainer, founder of award winning online recruiting platform WorkShape and...

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Thomas Kohler

Founder & CEO

A Portrait of Hung Lee who is the curator for Recruiting Brainfood Newsletter. He is guest at the 89th episode of Thomas Kohler's The People Factor Podcast.
Hung Lee

Recruitment Industry Professional

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Hung is a recruitment industry professional with over 15 years experience as an agency recruiter, Recruitment manager, Internal Head of Talent, recruitment trainer, founder of award winning online recruiting platform WorkShape and now Editor and Community builder at Recruiting Brainfood – the best weekly newsletter in recruitment.
We talked about:
  • Recruiters’ Key Skill: Adaptability.
  • Yearly Predictions in Recruitment.
  • Growth of the “Recruiting Brain Food” Newsletter.

Thomas Kohler:
Today’s guest, Hung Lee, the curator of the recruiting brain food newsletter. With plus 400 newsletters sent out.

Hung Lee:
Recruiters are always very adaptable. This is why I’m fundamentally quite confident about the industry itself. Even though there’s no point in lying about how difficult these moments are going to be, we’re going to come across and continue these difficulties. But the primary skill set of any recruiter is adaptability. We know how to, we’re speaking to candidates all the time, so we’re very sensitive to what’s actually happening on the ground and we know where the pressure points are when there’s the sales demand. And as you say, Germany, great example of german speaking salespeople. There was a period of time, probably from, you know, mid 2010 onward, maybe just about 2021, where really people were just hiring for, you know, in the startup world, pretty much, you know, just need a startup experience, no need for the german language in large sort of degree. Now german language requirement is coming in back and forth and of course then constrains the candidate pool and it creates more demand for recruiters. So all recruiters that actually know how to recruit german speakers. So yeah, there’s going to be sort of all kinds of opportunities in every type of market.

Thomas Kohler:
Exactly, exactly, yeah. How do you see the recruiting industry now developing? Maybe towards the end of the year and next year? Do you have any predictions?

Hung Lee:
I make predictions that are always wrong, but I, I make 20 predictions every year. So at the start of the year, so at the end of every year I make a prediction as to what’s going to happen in the last twelve months. And we’re already rapidly approaching sort of over the halfway stage, so we’ll be able to make assessments as to how accurate I was in the predictions last year. A few things I predicted, I predicted on a technology side, things like interview intelligence would become like a mainstream idea. This is the technology essentially records a video interview, transcribes the interview, and then from the transcription does a lot of analysis about how that interview went. What was the interview quality of that sort of process. So I made a prediction that would come from what is 8% adoption to something like 20% adoption. I don’t know whether that can be proven or not, but I will speak to the vendors themselves to see if their sales have doubled over the course of the last twelve months.

And that, I think would be good evidence for us. I think that a few things I got wrong. You know, I thought programmatic would also become very, very popular because programmatic would be the best way to control applicant flow like 20, 23, 24 has been a period of very high applicant flow. So you post a job ad, suddenly you get loads of candidates can be. It’s turned into a very difficult thing because recruiters cannot sort of manage the applicant flow. Best way to do that is to have a dynamic ad that can respond to the volume and then deactivate automatically once it hits a certain number. So I assume that that would be more popular than it is. But I don’t think so.

I think programmatics had a tough year and that’s probably because we were generally responding by not advertising as much. So rather than get better at advertising, job advertising companies have decided, you know, we’re not going to bother advertising. We will do our recruitment via referrals or do it via non advertising route. So we’ve not got better at it, but we’ve slowed it down somewhat. What else? I thought agencies would continue to struggle in terms of top line revenue. I think that’s definitely true. You know, we’ve had sort of profit warnings from all of the big players, more or less. That just tells you the same story of a general decline of hiring appetite compared to two years or so ago.

So we’re significantly rebalancing. I think so, yeah. Loads of other sort of examples. I’ll need to fish out exactly what those productions were like. I say usually I get them completely wrong, but I’m happy to be exposed on that. And Hammerford is accordingly as required.

Thomas Kohler:
Hung Lee, the curator of the recruiting Brainfood newsletter with plus 400 newsletters sent out. Very persistent, very consistent. We talked about community building and also about recruitment and the recruiting industry, the past and the future. So a very specific nice episode with Hung Lee.

Thomas Kohler:
Hung, great to have you on my show and I’m really looking forward to this episode. I’m reading your newsletter, I think since years already enjoying it and now I’m really glad that we can have you. So maybe we start with a short introduction about yourself.

Hung Lee:
Yeah, thanks very much, Thomas. It’s my pleasure to be on the show. So my name’s Hung Lee. I still self identify as a recruiter, I would say even though it has been some time since I last sent a cv in anger. But I did a recruitment agency sort of job for ten years or so, moved in-house, did a lot of the early stage tech, started recruiting, launched my own tech platform back in the day, and now I’m doing more community related support. So I see my role now as ecosystem support for the recruiting community. And that basically involves writing newsletters, doing podcasts, doing events, just doing what I can to help conversation flow in the industry.

Thomas Kohler:
It’s really nice. And I can also see that you are very active and that you are connected to a lot of people. And I think close to everyone in the recruiting space in Europe at least knows you. How did you came up actually with the idea of this project and what’s the overall vision? Maybe.

Hung Lee:
You know what, there wasn’t a huge vision associated with this. Thomas. I think a lot of the times when people think about building an audience or a community or anything like this, they often have a strong agenda. And everything they do is toward such an agenda. But the truth is, with regard to, to recruit brain food, I just saw that the industry had this fragmented sort of experience where lots of people were really solving problems independently and in fact, then duplicating their solutions. Because actually the guy down the road actually had this issue three months ago, and there’s a solution right there. So why are you wasting your time? So I had that experience myself when I was recruiting, and I just thought, you know what? Wouldn’t it be better if we just shared a bit more about this information? Would all kind of get value from that. So that was the only driving force.

And, you know, when the newsletter started, it was really just about. Okay, here’s a load of information that I found was personally interesting and useful. Best way I can get that to more people is just to set a newsletter up. And if anybody wants to subscribe to that, great. If nobody did, they’re also great. You know, it was not a plan. And then obviously, you know, lots of people had the same issues or concerns I did. So they started following on the newsletter.

So, yeah, I wouldn’t say there was any strategy behind this or any huge plan, only the focus on the problem, which is we’re too fragmented and we need to get closer together.

Thomas Kohler:
And it also evolved over time. Right. Because what I really enjoyed was also the data you provide, because you can also see a bit of analytics on your website and platform that you can break down the community by country, by region, even by companies that are subscribed and so on. So that’s actually pretty cool.

Hung Lee:
Yeah, I wish we, I wish I could do a better job with that, you know, because data enrichment, I think, just gives you a huge amount of interest. Interesting sort of insight as to who subscribes, who doesn’t, you know, I did. You know, for instance, that 65% of the subscribers who are recruiting brain food are actually female identifying instead of male identifying. I did not know this, you know, but, you know, when you do the analysis and you think, oh, wow, you know, why is this the. Is this reflective of the wider sort of industry pattern? So, yeah, I think we could go further and deeper, and that is one of the things that I actually hope to do. There’s also now multiple channels, all of whom have an opportunity to do data enrichment. So I want to be able to share a lot more about, you know, who is involved in this community. And so we know who we’re a part of, basically.

Thomas Kohler:
And when you just share some data about where your community is standing, do you have numbers as well that are describing them?

Hung Lee:
Yeah, I mean, we try to get. So we have absolute numbers, then we have sort of numbers we try to rank in terms of seniority based on job titles, which is on a numerical scale. So one to five. We talked already about your potential gender distribution. Also geographical locations. So where are they based? Countrywide, where they based citywide. And probably the city side is the most impressive for me because it gives you a very clear sort of understanding as to where recruiters typically are clustered. And of course, given the nature of this particular newsletter, the clustering is in large city centres that typically house the headquarters of big multinational companies.

Thomas Kohler:
Like London and Amsterdam, for instance?

Hung Lee:
London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, New York, San Francisco. So when people say Hong, where are the subscribers? I prefer not to actually say countries because I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. For instance, if people say, Hong, how many subscribers do you have in Germany? I could probably say, hey, probably 5000. Do you know what? 90% of them are going to be in Berlin, maybe 5% of them in Munich, and then maybe another 2% in Hamburg. But then we have smaller numbers elsewhere. So it reflects very much the distribution of multinational HQs, it seems.

Thomas Kohler:
And how did you grow all this? Grew organically, I guess it kind of did.

Hung Lee:
I mean, basically there’s certain techniques to grow audience that I’m happy to share with people, because actually, my preference is that more people would set up newsletters, more people would do podcasts and try and create an audience. So what I would love to see from the community generally is actually a mushrooming of more people claiming their voice in the discourse. You know, I’d love to see this. So a few tips that I’ve learned and growing audience. Number one, you kind of got to have a, like, longevity, I’m sorry to say. You know, it’s like you cannot instantly grow an audience. You need to basically be there, and you need to be there very consistently over time. And I always wondered about why this is, but my theory is as follows.

Basically, you’re asking for people to commit their attention to you, and maybe a bit of emotional investment as well. Um, you know, if you do a newsletter or podcast or a YouTube channel or a TikTok, you’re asking something from someone who is to subscribe or follow. You’re saying, I’m gonna. You know, I need to take a little bit of your time every day, every week, every month, whatever the cadence is. You need to trust me with this. And those people don’t give that trust unless they’re sure you’re gonna be around. So, in other words, I kind of liken it a little bit to watching a Netflix pilot. Netflix series, you know? You know, when you watch a series, you watch, like, the first three episodes, you get totally invested in the story, you’re immersed in the universe, you love the characters.

Then they cancel the show. It’s like you’re outraged. Yes. All the vested, the time, you know, they’ve asked you to invest the time, you’ve invested the time, and now they cancel it on you. It’s like, outrageous. Same thing with doing any audience building. You have to be there kind of consistently with a view that, you know what? I’m always going to be there. So that is, number one, you have to be very clear on your own personal commitment on this. Second thing if you want me to keep talking, Thomas, I’m happy to hear, bro.

Thomas Kohler:
Yeah, please, please. No, no, please. I’m really interested in that. And then I have some follow up questions, but I don’t want to interrupt now.

Hung Lee:
The second thing is, because it is so much work and commitment from the producer, right? Because you’re looking at at least a year’s worth of content. Let’s say. Let’s say you do something on a weekly basis like I’m doing on Brainfood. You know what? That’s 52. No, no. Fail all the way through. If you do a YouTube channel, you got to do it every day. I mean, a ridiculous commitment like this.

So if you’re going to do that level of commitment, you have to be sure you’re passionate about what you’re doing. Because if you’re not passionate about it. There’s no way you could possibly continue that cadence unless you have that intrinsic motivation for it. So no one is paying you to do this, right? So I’m assuming that you’re not a professional content creator for big brands. I’m assuming you’re just a person that loves to maybe share some of your thoughts. That’s all great. It’s most of us out there. Well, you have to be very sure about what you’re passionate about.

You have to care because the care basically enables you to keep going when you can’t be bothered, basically. And when you have a crisis, motivation, like all of us do have, the intrinsic motivation or passion for the work, gets you to keep going. So there’s the second thing that’s super, super important. Third thing I would say is that you need to have not only consistency, but regularity. And so these two things are slightly different. So consistent, meaning that you’re always kind of very much predictable in terms of your longevity and how long you’re going to stay. Your regularity is the cadence. So when are you going to drop your content? And I mentioned already, like the, to do a TikTok or a short form video, you basically need to do it daily.

It’s very difficult to do it in any other way. The newsletter, I think you need to do that weekly. I think people can do it monthly, but there’s not many choices as to what the cadence is. And when you’re doing a podcast that you’re doing, you’re recording the podcast.

Thomas Kohler:
I’m also doing it weekly, even sometimes two times a week.

Hung Lee:
Yeah, you can basically record it, but when you say you chomp it out, it has to be every week for ten weeks, saying you do a season, you take a break, then you do another set of recordings, you do another ten weeks, that’s totally okay. But the way to grow the audience is do it in that way. So it’s a huge commitment, the regularity, it needs your intrinsic motivation, and you need to be super, super consistent. So. Yeah, and I think that’s actually more important than anything else. So quality, people say, is that important? I actually don’t think so. It’s perfectly possible to generate an audience with…

Thomas Kohler:
Maybe not quality, but relevancy, right?

Hung Lee:
Yeah, people just, there’ll be an audience for whatever you do. So, for instance, one of the big mistakes I see the content creators make, or early content creators make, is that they’re overly obsessed with the quality of the production. So they need to, you know, think about the thing about the sound quality, they think about the visual image, the jingles, the production, all this type of stuff. I’m thinking, you know what, you spend a lot of time doing that, but all you’re doing is basically creating a situation where your input is significantly higher than your, than your return. So your investment becomes 100% too much than the return. When you’re doing content or creation like this, generally speaking, you’ve got to almost think there’s going to be no return. You know, you got to just have the attitude, I just want to say this, I think it’s important or it’s therapeutic or whatever value or whatever reason you want to go and stake your claim in this global discourse. But yeah, if you’re obsessed with the ROI side of it, that’s not going to happen for you, production and stuff like this, it wouldn’t say a waste of time because at a certain level it’s worth putting it in. But for early starts, it’s usually not the right time.

Thomas Kohler:
In case you like my show, please subscribe. I would really appreciate it.

And in terms of, I think the commercial side is also important at some point, right? So I can give you an example in my case. So I also just started and I never really thought about making it commercially and I also would not do it, but I have a business in the background that can benefit from it. Right? It doesn’t have to. And it’s also not the main purpose for it. For me, the main purpose is really one being close to the industry and also certain, I would say groups in terms of executives in recruitment and Vita HR and people field on the pan european level at the moment, but also sometimes even in the US. And secondly, I know that through when the right people know me and I know the right people, at some point you maybe can generate some business from it because you’re top of mind and so on, right.

So for me, the longevity thing is part of a strategy because I’m here in my business for the long run. So it’s, I would say a simple, not calculation, but simple to believe in it, to just keep going and just doing it for a certain period of time. And now I think I have 80, 90 episodes out, which is one and a half year of doing it, and I just cannot see an end to it. But how is it for you with the commercial? Because for me, it has an overall commercial side to it, but this is not the main driver. But it’s an aspect where I say, I don’t even think about it to stop.

Hung Lee:
Yeah, I wonder whether people who are listening to this should pay attention to a very specific Tim Ferriss podcast on commercialization of audience. I’m going to have to try and fish it out because he actually went through this experiment in terms of how to generate money from his voice, basically. And there’s three ways to do it. You’ve just described one, which is that your content is actually a marketing device, or it’s a brand building device to give you opportunities to then convert on consultancy services. Or if you’re selling software, it helps you do that, or whatever your service might be. But it’s a great bit of content marketing to do it that way. So there’s one technique to generate revenue. These are not exclusive, by the way, you can do them all together, but usually you lean on one rather than the other.

The second way to do it is directly through subscribers. So you can charge your subscribers for the content, and typically you can do that as a donation. So if you’re Patreon, you can use Patreon and say, listen, drop me some $5 or five euro a month or something. Help me keep continue. A lot of people do that way. Other people might have a premium service for a particular type of people to say it’s free at this tier, but if you want the real good stuff, you have to pay this percentage. And they do it this way in substack, which is the newsletter service I use. It’s actually designed in that basis.

And a lot of the most successful newsletters are actually that way where there’s a pay to actually access the content. And then the third way is to do it via sponsorships. So in other words, everything is for free for people to consume, but you’ve generated an audience that other vendors might be interested in addressing. And then you basically sell space within your content for those vendors to address the audience. So recruiting brain food is almost 100% based on the sponsored model. So I don’t really do any consultancy work per se. I mean, there’s a few speaking opportunities and stuff like this, which you can charge for and whatnot, but it’s not really significant in terms of the overall revenue sort of contribution on a yearly basis for it to be part of a strategy. And there is actually a subscriber option on the newsletter, even though there’s no difference.

And I tell people not to subscribe because I just wanted to create the tiers simply so I can activate some of the features. And a few people do actually pay. I’m not sure they do accidentally, but, or whether they feel sorry for me in some way, but yeah, there’s something there. But 99.9% is via companies that would want to say Hong, I really want to sort of address the recruiter community. Can I sponsor your newsletter?

Thomas Kohler:
Makes sense. Yeah. And what audience you overall have there, what you could, let’s say market or, and also this would be a first question, second question would be at the, at what point have you been able to sponsor it?

Hung Lee:
It was probably around about nine months in, I think maybe first year. There was some, some indication, but at very low numbers of sponsors. So something like 5000 subscribers or something like this, but only because there was one. The advantage I have is that I’ve got quite a narrow focus. So the audience is not like broad, it’s quite narrow. We know who the audience is. It’s recruiters and maybe HR people. And what I found happening was that a lot of the companies that were interested in recruiting or building recruitment technology solutions were also interested in the newsletter.

So they were subscribers also. So they, when they received the newsletter they thought oh, that’s quite interesting. And when they saw that it was being sponsored they said okay, this is actually a good idea, we should probably sponsor this. So it became a really quite an efficient way to run it in a sense, because I don’t really do any outbound sales on the sponsorship, even though I probably should, I probably should hire a salesperson to go and speak to every recruitment technology company out there, get the highest price, negotiate the best deal and so on. And um, there’s no question I’m leaving money on the table, so to say, on this. Um, but uh, but the approach I took was, look, I don’t really want to hire anybody. I want to try and run this entire myself. And so I just became you know, pretty much dependent on the idea of simply uh, uh, sort of receiving inbound and then just doing it that way.

So, so yeah, it’s uh, it’s, it’s become a really efficient business to run and it’s enjoyable that you don’t have to chase it because the newsletter distribution itself or the podcast distribution itself creates the noise for sales that then convert.

Thomas Kohler:
Okay, so main sponsor opportunities would be maybe for recruiting technology companies and also for maybe companies that hire recruiters for job ads. I think that doesn’t make sense. Or what is the main sponsorship deals?

Hung Lee:
They’re almost all recruitment technology companies or they’re recruitment like providers of some type. So rpos, I think some recruitment agencies have previously sponsored, but on the main it is recruitment technology or HR technology. So yeah, companies that basically would sell, would directly sell services to the recruiters themselves, would be the sponsor this.

Thomas Kohler:
Definitely, and when you look into your current data and what you curate and you’re close to the market, how do you see the industry moving at the moment? What’s happening?

Hung Lee:
Well, I mean, obviously we’re in a. We’ve been kind of in a post 21, 22 type of fugue. So it’s been extremely difficult and challenging, just economically, really, for the last two years or so. So we had a tremendous high. Obviously, after the post lockdown period, everyone was charging forward and, you know, the 2021 was probably, in fact, May 2021 was the peak recruitment month. I think that was the month that LinkedIn announced that the most popular in demand job on their entire platform was actually a recruiter. And so more so than a data engineer, more so than a software engineer. It was like companies wanted recruiters more than anybody else.

May 2021, that was peak, and we’ve basically been in a different market since then. It’s been very challenging. There’s been a huge surge of inflation that’s reset the cost of living at a higher level, probably 30% higher than it was in 2021. That also means cost of business has increased. So if you’re running a business, you’ll know this. I know a lot of people that are employees don’t actually know this, but the cost of running a business has also increased around about 30%, which is part of the reason why growing as fast as they thought they would, which is obviously then produced outcomes where talent acquisition teams are being cut, hiring sort of headcounts more conservative, and we’re rebalancing towards a kind of a different type of timeline where it’s going to be a huge change and definitely not crazy. Hyperscaling, much more about automation, efficiency and focus.

Thomas Kohler:
Yeah, this is what I see. So I saw it when we were initially quite broad, and we are also having recruiters to rent, right. At some point, there was no inbound coming in, and sometimes this was part of the growth, right. And then we had some real focus on providing german speaking sales recruiters that work on german commercial roles. And suddenly we grew.

Hung Lee:
Well, recruiters are always very adaptable. This is why I’m fundamentally quite confident about the industry itself. Even though there’s no point in lying about how difficult these moments are going to be. We’re going to come across and continue these difficulties. But the primary skill set of any recruiter is adaptability. We know how to. We’re speaking to candidates all the time, so we’re very sensitive to what’s actually happening on the ground. And we know where the pressure points are when there’s the sales demand. And as you say, Germany, great example of german speaking salespeople.

There was a period of time, probably from mid 2010 onward, maybe just about 2021, where really people were just hiring for, in the startup world, pretty much just need a startup experience, no need for the german language in large sort of degree. Now german language requirement is coming in back in force and of course then constrains the candidate pool and it creates more demand for recruiters, or recruiters that actually know how to recruit the german speakers. So yeah, there’s going to be sort of all kinds of opportunities in every type of market.

Thomas Kohler:
Exactly, exactly. In case you have any feedback or anything you want to share with me, please send me an email on thomasseoplewise.com or hit me up on LinkedIn. And in case you really enjoy the show, please subscribe. I would really appreciate it. Hung, how do you see the recruiting industry now developing? Maybe towards the end of the year and next year, do you have any predictions?

Hung Lee:
I make predictions that are always wrong, but I made a, I make 20 predictions every year. So at the start of the year. So at the end of every year I make a prediction as to what’s going to happen in the last twelve months. And we’re already rapidly approaching sort of over the halfway stage, so we’ll be able to make assessments as to how accurate I was in the predictions last year. A few things I predicted. I predicted on a technology side, things like interview intelligence would become like a mainstream idea. This is the technology that essentially records a video interview, transcribes the interview, and then from the transcription does a lot of analysis about how that interview went. What was the interview quality of that sort of process.

So I made a prediction that would come from what is 8% adoption to something like 20% adoption. I don’t know whether that can be proven or not, but I will speak to the vendors themselves to see if their sales have doubled over the course of the last twelve months. And that, I think would be good evidence for this. I think that a few things I got wrong. You know, I thought programmatic would also become very, very popular because programmatic would be the best way to control applicant flow. Like 20, 23, 24 has been a period of very high application and flow. So you post a job ad, suddenly you get loads of candidates, can be, it’s turned into a very difficult thing because recruiters cannot sort of manage the applicant flow. Best way to do that is to have a dynamic ad that can respond to the volume and then you deactivate automatically once it hits a certain number.

So I assume that that would be more popular than it is. But I don’t think so. I think programmatics had a tough year, and that’s probably because we’re generally responding by not advertising as much. So rather than get better at job advertising, companies have decided, you know what, we’re not going to bother advertising. We will do our recruitment via referrals or do it via sourcing on non advertising route. So we’ve not got better at it, but we’ve slowed it down somewhat. What else? I thought agencies would continue to struggle in terms of top line revenue. I think that’s definitely true.

You know, we’ve had sort of profit warnings from all of the big players, more or less. That just tells you the same story of a general decline of hiring appetite compared to two years or so ago. So we’re significantly rebalancing. I think so, yeah. Loads of other sort of examples. I’ll need to fish out exactly what those productions were like. I say, usually I get them completely wrong, but I’m happy to be exposed on that and hammered for it is accordingly, as required.

Thomas Kohler:
Thanks, and any final words?

Hung Lee:
Yeah, final words are, I would say recruiters are in a moment where the world of work is changing. My sort of position is that very important for recruiters to recognize these changes and also then to embrace them. Because the wrong thing to do would be to hold on to sort of old truths that are no longer relevant for today and tomorrow, and to understand how best to compete in a world that isn’t going to sort of do hype growth in a world where increasingly we need to be more efficient and AI enabled. So the way in which I would say three things, I would recommend recruiters of any strike, whether your agency in house or whatever things that you should do. Number one, you should become AI enabled yourself. So you need to carve out time in order to get good at your own optimization. This step, number one, because you can then take that optimization to your next job. And I can guarantee you, by the way, if you’re on the job market, people, and you’re going for a recruited job, the person recruiting you is thinking to themselves, okay, how can this person, is this person AI ready? Can this person bring additional AI skills to my TA team? That’s what a hiring manager is thinking.

So you need to basically equip yourself that way. Second thing recruiters should be doing is building their own personal profile. I know personal branding is like no longer a good term, but I think we can rehabilitate this because personal branding in the a of AI becomes even more relevant because human beings are going to basically start distrusting information as default, because we are increasingly going to be bombarded by AI generated messaging and AI generated communications, and we’re going to basically withdraw our attention from that. And the people who are going to win this game are the individuals that are able to create this human trust in this complete sort of noise of AI generated communication. If you can do that, I think you do best by being very human with your personal brand. I think that is a winning ticket for you as a recruiter. Final thing, and I know coming to the end of this, I’ll be very quick, Thomas, final thing is we need to understand the biggest antidote to artificial intelligence is community intelligence, right? So artificial intelligence is going to be superior to us in many respects. It’s going to be faster processor, it can process more information, it can calculate with greater speed, it can come with these, it can generate much faster speed.

However, the most important conversations, the most important bits of information that’s exchanged between human beings are almost never recorded. The most important conversations, these are the record conversation you have with your candidate. This is the conversation you have with your boss if you go for a beer after work. These are the things that really make the difference. They’re not recorded and therefore AI will not be trained on it, which is why AI makes regular mistakes when it tries to understand human behavior, because it’s missing a lot of information. The only information AI gets trained on is stuff that we have written down and said, okay, we’re going to push it into AI. That’s only a small percentage of information out there. Now, recruiters have access to collective intelligence because we should have massive networks.

So we need to get closer to our network in terms of our peer group. We also need to get closer to our network in terms of the candidates that we recruit. And then from there we can collect this intelligence that is basically AI proof, at least for now. And that, I think, is another way in which we can stay competitive in this AI enabled future.

Thomas Kohler:
Great final words. So thanks, Hung. I really appreciate your time and have a great week.

A Portrait of Hung Lee who is the curator for Recruiting Brainfood Newsletter. He is guest at the 89th episode of Thomas Kohler's The People Factor Podcast.

About the guest

Hung Lee

Hung is a recruitment industry professional with over 15 years experience as an agency recruiter, Recruitment manager, Internal Head of Talent, recruitment trainer, founder of award winning online recruiting platform WorkShape and now Editor and Community builder at Recruiting Brainfood – the best weekly newsletter in recruitment.