Hung Lee: “A great global recruiter should have the ability to adapt to cross-cultural communication”
Hung Lee is the editor of the leading industry newsletter Recruiting Brainfood, one of the best weekly newsletters in recruitment. Moreover, he is a recruitment industry professional with over 15 years of experience as an agency recruiter, Recruitment manager, Internal Head of Talent, recruitment trainer, and founder of award-winning online recruiting platform WorkShape.io.
We had the opportunity to speak with him about its recruiting newsletter and the state and future of the recruiters and the recruitment industry.
It all started with a personal problem. The problem was that there was a lot of information out there for me to process. The internet got so big and is getting bigger every day. It is overwhelming.
I thought that what I needed was to find a way to eliminate all the noise and try to improve the signals with content that is relevant to me. Then, I started to organize and classify the content. Before you know it, I had a pretty good database with super relevant information for recruiters and HR people.
I realized that maybe there were a lot of people with the same problem as me. So I started to think of a way to open up and share this information with the public. Is at this moment that I decide to do a weekly Newsletter with ten items you need to look up.
What are the greatest insights you get from conducting this initiative?
Obviously, I learn a lot by consuming the content I curate. However, there is also a meta-learning in the sense of what I learned by doing the Newsletter itself. I find myself creating content, building a community, building an audience. How has that happened? I find these questions quite interesting.
The greatest insight that I learned is that repetition is the most important thing, being relentlessly consistent. It is not about quality, it is not about genius. I have learned this from Recruiting Brainfood but I also confirm this by looking at all the channels that have huge audiences.
You realize that maybe what some creators are doing in this or that channel is not difficult but they are consistent. This is what they do, they never change it and they post every week on the same day. This is going to attract attention, make people subscribe, and also provide comfort.
I notice that the channels that I seem to be the most addicted to are the ones that are very regular. Sometimes when the regularity is interrupted it bothers me. This makes me realize the importance of regularity and consistency through time. I have learned to trust the channel, its creator, and its content.
Trust these days is rare and very, very important. We have learned to distrust a lot of things. We are not sure what is true. We are not confident about different sources of knowledge.
One way to combat this distrust and uncertainty is with repetition and consistency. As simple as it gets. The fact of putting some content out there the same day, every week gives comfort and stability to those who reach. This is what Recruiting Brainfood gets out every Sunday exactly at the same time, no matter what.
Once you create an audience you have to always deliver to it, this creates trust. Commit to a type and a length of content that you can consistently deliver. No matter if it’s one paragraph or an article, stick to it, be consistent and get it out there.
Now that a new year is approaching. What are the trends that any Talent Acquisition professional needs to be aware of to stay on top of what’s going on?
This year will be crucial. There are so many things to be aware of that it is very difficult to pick up one thing. Let’s see some of them.
To start, we all should get used to cross-cultural international communication. One of the effects of being able to recruit remotely is that suddenly you start interacting with people with very different backgrounds and very different cultures and communications styles that you are used to.
And if you don’t adapt at navigating through this, then you are making wrong decisions deciding on who is a good or a bad candidate based on your lack of familiarity of the background and communication style this person has.
For instance, if you are recruiting someone from the far east you may find it difficult for the candidate to give you examples of their success outside of the context of the group of the team. They can be very team-focused.
This new scenario forces us to rethink and modify how we communicate and assess candidates. If not, it could be entirely possible to miss outstanding candidates due to miscommunication and cultural factors. A great global recruiter should have the ability to adapt to cross-cultural communication.
Another point that is extremely necessary for recruiters is to expand the scope of the job. Recruiters can’t just accept that their jobs increasingly shrink until they are no longer required. They have to ask what they can do for their organization irrespective of what contractual relationship this person is going to have with the company.
The third point, recruiters and we all need to step up our game in terms of audio visual communication. In 2022 we can not have audio and visual problems in our meetings and our calls. After two years of strong remote experience, we should eliminate all the frictions and problems in our calls.
Poor audio and video communication can have a bad impact on the way you appreciate your interlocutor and their message. Maybe they can be saying genius things but if you struggle to hear it well you can end up marking down this person. As a recruiter imagine how many decisions are you making when you are conducting these meetings.
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