Latest trends: Breeding, No Bosses & Circus Mirror Recruitment

Two days MCing the main stage at HR Tech in Excel, crikey what a ride.

Up to 16,000 HR people pass through the doors, and the place is packed with suppliers, HR leaders and speakers. It’s a great shortcut to the year’s biggest trends.

Three highlights I’m still thinking about:

🐣 Breeding – The brilliant Joeli Brearley pulled no punches on how badly we treat working parents in the UK. Meanwhile, the US is considering pro-natal policies to encourage people to have more kids. Not that these have worked very well elsewhere.

❓Would anything convince you to have more children? (am assuming “free boarding school” isn’t an option...)

🏡 No Bosses – Trudie Fell shared BelleVie’s take on self-managing teams, inspired by the Dutch Buurtzorg model. It’s a radically different way to organise care work and there are surely lessons here for all sorts of businesses.

🎪 Circus Mirror Recruitment – Candidates using AI to mirror what they think employers want. Employers using AI to reflect back what they think the ideal candidate looks like. Everyone staring into a tall, fat or wobbly version of reality. Ben Eubanks of Lighthouse demonstrated how cheaply candidates are gaming the system to get around the gaming by those recruiting.

💥 And on that note, in interviews over the last fortnight, we have heard a lot of people coming to stark new realisations of what AI really means for their business, their teams and ultimately them…As Duolingo is just finding out. More on that next week.

Christine