CXO at Human Magic • Employer Brand & Talent Experience • Helping brands connect with Humans (properly!) • Keynote Speaker & Best-selling Author • LFC Fan
Liverpool, UK
Joined March 2009
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As always … even when he’s flying around the globe… always delivering great ‘food’ to our inbox’s 🤩
Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 526
recruitingbrainfood.substack…
Binance hack involved fake job interview, Korn Ferry 2026 Talent Trends Report, US Mid terms and impact on AI regs, LinkedIn penetration rates per country, Canva layoff announcement and much more...
Thriller of an edition this week… 👇
Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 525
recruitingbrainfood.substack…
Microsoft VEO to 60,000 employees, EU tech frontier map, a new candidate fraud model, one cool report on the state of freelancer economy and Patrick Boyle breaking down Anthropic’s IPO pitch
Dave Hazlehurst retweeted
Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 525
recruitingbrainfood.substack…
Microsoft VEO to 60,000 employees, EU tech frontier map, a new candidate fraud model, one cool report on the state of freelancer economy and Patrick Boyle breaking down Anthropic’s IPO pitch
Dave Hazlehurst retweeted
SIR PATRICK STEWART (1940-2026)
Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end. You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.
We first met as ambitious young actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company half a century ago but we weren’t in the same productions. My first strong memory was a few years later, meeting him in the street in central London when he told me about an offer to take over a leading part in 'Star Trek'. “But Patrick think of your stage career in the UK. Do you really want to risk—getting lost in Hollywood for years and years?”. Well, he took the risk and thank goodness for us all that he did for not just his devoted Trekkies but film and theatre audiences, who marvelled at his using international celebrity to star in a string of cinema successes ('X-Men' of course) and in great classical plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Arthur Miller, Peter Shaffer, Pinter and Beckett at Stratford-upon-Avon, in London’s West End and on Broadway.
America was his adopted home, where he met his adored Sunny who has cared for him through sickness and health, through thick and thin. But he never forsook his origins: and the proudest achievement of the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic, was his appointment as Chancellor of Huddersfield University in Yorkshire.
His farewell performance in 'Avengers: Doomsday' is yet to be seen.
Ian McKellen 29 October 2026
Photo: University of Huddersfield
Great lunchtime read to folks 👇👇👇
Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 524
recruitingbrainfood.substack…
Ramp / Revelio combine payments & payroll data to tell a story on AI impact on employment, Bill Boorman crunches through 40+ earning calls transcripts from global staffing firms and a whole lot more..
Back from Spain (to the cold!) and time to get my brain back into gear!!
Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 523
recruitingbrainfood.substack…
CFO’s forecasting hiring decline, Impact of AI in employment at Anthropic, great viral job marketing & talent pooling from Synthesia, Basecamp’s profit share scheme and CherryVC on Euro tech startup..
Dave Hazlehurst retweeted
The opposite of distraction isn't focus. It's traction.
Both words come from the same Latin root — trahere — meaning "to pull." Traction is any action that pulls you toward what you said you'd do. Distraction is any action that pulls you away from it.
Which means you can't actually say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from.
Here are the 4 steps to becoming Indistractable:
1. Master internal triggers.
Most distraction doesn't start with your phone. It starts with discomfort — boredom, anxiety, loneliness, uncertainty — that you're trying to escape. The phone is the cope, not the cause. Learn to sit with the feeling for 10 minutes before acting on it. Most urges pass. The ones that don't, you can honor on your own terms.
2. Make time for traction.
If it's not on your calendar, it isn't real. Timebox your values — work, relationships, your own body and mind — into a weekly schedule you actually keep. Be a schedule builder, not a to-do list maker. A to-do list tells you what you didn't finish. A calendar tells you whether you lived the day you planned.
3. Hack back external triggers.
Every ping, badge, and notification is a question your phone is asking you. Most of them don't deserve an answer. Turn off anything that doesn't serve you. The research on interruption recovery is brutal — it takes an average of 23 minutes to return to a task after a single interruption.
4. Prevent distraction with pacts.
Pre-commit before the moment of weakness. Effort pacts (a website blocker), price pacts (money on the line), and identity pacts ("I'm the kind of person who doesn't check email before 10am") work because they make the distracted choice harder than the chosen one.
Time management is pain management. You don't need another productivity app. You need to notice what you're running from.
Dave Hazlehurst retweeted
What tasks should AI be trusted with, and when should humans remain involved? Designing those decision rights is one of the defining challenges of the AI era. Researchers at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research have developed a framework to help.
Learn more: bit.ly/4zed20M
ALT This image is an informational chart titled "The AI Decision Matrix" from MIT Sloan School of Management. It is a grid with axes labeled "Ambiguity" (vertical) and "Risk" (horizontal). The four quadrants are labeled: Exploratory (high ambiguity, low risk), Strategic (high ambiguity, high risk), Routine (low ambiguity, low risk), and Consequential (low ambiguity, high risk). Each quadrant describes an approach and decision type and includes recommended levels of human and AI involvement in decision-making. A legend at the bottom specifies decision components and participants, with icons for human and AI. Adaptation credit is given to authors and publication details at the bottom right.
Great read this week… and some ‘though provoking’ stuff from @BillBoorman2
Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 522
recruitingbrainfood.substack…
Bill Boorman Peace Out Posts, AI Overviews on 600 Job Searches, the AI Talent Divide, Notion’s onboarding walk through and why a good neighbour is important for your child’s future career path...
Dave Hazlehurst retweeted
Top CEO Priorities
1) Productivity or (should be and) Profitability
2) AI and Technology Modernization
3) Customer Experience (should be #1 with the others as enablers for delivery and relationship management)🫶
Source: @IBM Rewiring the C-suite, The fast track to 2030
As always .. Hung, bringing the goods every Sunday 👏👏👏
Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 521
recruitingbrainfood.substack…
140,000 French LinkedIn profiles analysed (for missing data), a comprised yet useful Anthropic report on embodied AI, Remote work vs RTO segmented, Lady Gaga in Japan, and a brilliant essay on CPH...
Dave Hazlehurst retweeted
We instituted an official AI Writing Policy at @Clay.
Massive thanks to @sophiebits on our engineering team who wrote this.
Originally this was just for eng, but other teams found it so helpful we expanded it company-wide.
Here are the four guiding principles:
1. You must stand behind every idea and sentence
It is your responsibility to make sure that the entire document is representative of your own thoughts before you share it.
2. Writing is thinking
Spending time on the writing process teaches you more about your topic. If you circumvent this process, you will walk away with a poorer understanding of the subject matter.
3. More time should be spent writing a document than consuming it
If you generate a document from a short prompt then ask your readers to go through the longer output, you are disrespecting their time. They can talk to ChatGPT themselves if they want to.
4. Longer is not better
AI makes it easy to generate long docs, and it loves padding them with sentences that say nothing. If you're producing docs from a short prompt, consider just sharing the prompt.
You can read (and borrow) the full policy below. Hopefully we all communicate a bit more clearly now :)
Some great, thought provoking reading this week 👌
Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 520
recruitingbrainfood.substack…
Demographic Shifts from Indeed Hiring Lab, the problem with conference talks, the overproduction of Chinese PhD’s, Gender pay gap in the gig economy and Satya Nadella on Microsoft’s new co-pilot...
Dave Hazlehurst retweeted
Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 519
recruitingbrainfood.substack…
100 Companies Winning Right Now (and How they to HR), Industrialising Humanisation, D&I proving expensive, Women vs Men on Job Growth and one poetic and poignant post from an AI kernel engineer...
Dave Hazlehurst retweeted
Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 518
recruitingbrainfood.substack…
AI Jobs Apocalypse that didn’t happen, Hiring funnel replaced by Hiring Barbels, PISA results, X-Factor for hiring and when a human doing the service is the service...
Dave Hazlehurst retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.