Hung Lee: Recruiting Brainfood and Beyond!

In this episode, Marcus Edwardes speaks with Hung Lee, who built the Recruiting Brainfood newsletter from scratch into a thriving community of over 25,000 adoring fans, with a potent and fascinating curation of content aimed to satisfy, inform, and entertain recruiting and growth professionals all over the globe.

Aside from Recruiting Brainfood, Hung is the co-founder of tech recruitment company Workshape.io and the tech startup 300 Notes.

Listen in as Hung shares the limitations of an algorithmic newsfeed like that of LinkedIn, a key strategy to getting engagement for your content on LinkedIn in spite of the algorithm, where you should put your focus if you want to build a big email list, the importance of being relentlessly consistent to build (and keep) a large audience, and the pros and cons of the hybrid workplace.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

  • [02:30] What is Recruiting Brainfood?
  • [04:32] Recruiting Brainfood’s reader avatar
  • [06:15] How Recruiting Brainfood differs from the LinkedIn newsfeed
  • [10:36] Getting your content out there even if the algorithm is “against” you
  • [13:31] Building your own custom audience with an email list
  • [18:00] Why you need to stay consistent with your content
  • [20:34] How Recruiting Brainfood makes money
  • [22:52] What Hung would change if he could start the business again
  • [27:22] How Recruiting Brainfood filters its article submissions
  • [30:14] Trends that emerged out of the pandemic in the recruiting industry
  • [32:36] Why a hybrid working environment may not work in the long run
  • [41:12] The slippery slope of measuring productivity in recruitment
  • [45:45] How entry-level positions fit into a work-from-home environment
  • [50:58] The future of designing workplace culture
  • [52:03] Hung’s plans for Recruiting Brainfood in 2021

Key quotes:

  • “Recruiting Brainfood was created to reduce the size of the internet to make it more relevant to people who are in the recruiting and HR profession.”
  • “What gets interactions is not necessarily great content. It’s usually outrageous, emotive content that generates that kind of engagement.”
  • “Yes, you should experiment in your business, but you shouldn’t experiment irresponsibly with your people’s attention.”

Resources Mentioned: