The Recruiting Future Podcast

11/09/2026

Calling it a story doesn't make it one.

The science behind how stories work on the human brain is well established, has been researched for decades, and is much harder to apply than people realize, which is why so little employer brand content qualifies. Listing benefits and values tells people what an employer offers, but it does nothing to make anyone feel that this is a place for someone like them.

My guest on Episode 814 of Recruiting Future is Susanna Rantanen, founder of employer branding agency Emine and author of the book Story-Driven Employer Branding. Her argument is that most of what employers call storytelling doesn't apply the science at all, and that when it does, it is many times more effective than any other form of communication. She makes the case for employer branding as an ongoing communication system rather than a series of recruitment campaigns, aimed at the internal audience as much as the external one, with the employee or the job seeker positioned as the hero of every piece of content.

We discuss:
• Attracting the right people through meaning, relevance and emotion
• How proper storytelling works in practice
• The current and future impact of AI
• What the future of employer branding looks like

Listen by searching for Recruiting Future wherever you get your podcasts

09/09/2026

Which hiring channel do you actually control?

Inbound is the one channel employers don't control. Application volume and quality are set by candidates using whatever AI tools are available to them. Sourcing is the channel where the TA team sets the quality bar itself, and AI has changed what it can deliver.

My guest on Episode 813 of Recruiting Future is David Paffenholz, Co-Founder and CEO of Juicebox. His argument is that every role can now get the executive search treatment, with talent mapping done on every search rather than only senior ones, and prompt-based searches that look for evidence of fit across a whole profile instead of filtering on job title. He sees thousands of hires already being made that way, which he reads as proof that skills-based hiring is happening even where nobody is calling it that.

We discuss:
• How bulk applying created a self-reinforcing loop that is breaking inbound
• Why the right candidate may no longer have the matching job title
• What a relationship-first approach means for the candidate experience
• The recruiter as an advisor to hiring managers and to candidates
• Whether anything will bring application volumes back down

Listen by searching Recruiting Future wherever you get your podcasts

08/09/2026

Zapier has defined what AI fluency actually is.

Employers are asking for AI fluency, and most do not have a clear idea of what they mean by it. Tracy St. Dic, Global Head of Talent at Zapier, explains the four areas Zapier looks for: mindset, strategy, accountability and discernment.

From Episode 803 of Recruiting Future. Hear the full conversation by searching Recruiting Future wherever you get your podcasts.

AIFluency FutureOfWork Zapier

04/09/2026

Who is training the human in the loop?

Everyone agrees that hiring decisions need a human in the loop. The difficulty is that judgment develops through years of hands-on experience, much of it the junior work of drafting reports, experimenting and being corrected, which is exactly the work AI is now taking over. With many employers also hiring fewer entry-level people, it is not clear where the next generation of leaders will get their judgment from.

My guest on Episode 812 of Recruiting Future is Johan Roos, Professor in Strategy at Hult International Business School and author of the new book Human Magic: Leading with Wisdom in an Age of Algorithms. His argument is that AI forces a choice between amplifying human capability and substituting for it, and he names curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration as the five capabilities that now matter most. His first piece of advice for leaders is to change the unit of analysis from people to tasks, illustrated by a global company that built 54,000 AI agents across every function in six months without anyone losing their job as a result.

We discuss:
• The dual mood of AI anxiety and excitement in senior HR teams
• Why the corporate AI conversation is moving beyond efficiency
• Apprenticeship models for building experience earlier in a career
• Early warning indicators that human capability is being eroded
• Bionic collaboration and working with AI agents as teammates

Listen by searching Recruiting Future wherever you get your podcasts

03/09/2026

Some hiring problems no platform can fix.

TA leaders are under real pressure to keep up with AI, new tools, and what they think other employers are doing. This week's guest has seen organizations respond by investing heavily in a new ATS or AI tool, then discover six months later that the problem was the intake process with hiring managers. No technology was ever going to solve that, which is why she argues the audit of what is already in place has to come before any decision to buy.

My guest on Episode 811 of Recruiting Future is Jalpa Trivedi, an experienced Global Head of TA who has built and centralized TA functions across more than 30 countries. Her view on AI is that the biggest risk is not adopting it too slowly but adopting it without the governance to use it responsibly. That means asking which problem it is meant to fix, whether candidates, hiring managers and the TA team are ready to work with it, and whether the level of automation fits the organization's culture and employer brand.

We discuss:
• The 80/20 approach to centralizing TA across markets
• What persuades leadership to back a TA investment
• Five data privacy questions to ask before signing with an AI vendor
• Where the dividing line falls between AI and human judgment

Listen by searching Recruiting Future wherever you get your podcasts

02/09/2026

Hiring quality is shaped by the entire journey, not by any single step.
AI has now been applied to most stages of the hiring process. Sourcing, screening, assessments and interviews each have their own tools, and many of them work well. For a lot of organisations, though, the gains from optimising individual stages are starting to flatten out. Making one step faster no longer changes the quality of the hire at the end.

Most hiring technology was never built to connect those steps. Each one runs in isolation, with its own data and its own logic, and nothing learns from what happened before or after it. The focus is now shifting towards connecting the whole process, so that every stage informs the others and the system improves over time.

My guest on Episode 810 of Recruiting Future is Ben Chino, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Maki. Maki started by trying to perfect a single step, assessments, and concluded that the step-by-step approach had reached its limit. That conclusion is the thinking behind their decision to build an end-to-end product instead, and Ben explains the philosophy behind it.

We discuss:
• Why optimising individual hiring steps with AI has hit diminishing returns
• The difference between a system of record and a system of intelligence
• How a connected hiring process improves decision-making at every stage
• Where the ATS fits in the next generation of hiring technology
• Why human judgment in hiring is less consistent than most people think
• How better information and more time with candidates improve the judgment calls recruiters make
• Why adopting AI in hiring is an organisational change challenge, not a technology decision
• What the future of hiring looks like

Listen by searching Recruiting Future wherever you get your podcasts

01/09/2026

31/08/2026

Really looking forward to speaking at RecFest USA in just over three weeks.

The CHRO panel is starting to take shape and should be a really insightful and valuable conversation

My Agent to Agent talk looks at the near future of recruiting and what will be one of the biggest shifts in the way candidates and employers engage that we have ever seen. This isn't just speculation about the future; I'm building the talk on research into how current trends are evolving, data from the hiring process, key learnings from adjacent areas of the business, and insights from the Recruiting Future Knowledge Hub database of 821 interviews.

Aiming to provoke some lively discussion and RecFest is the perfect place for it!

Looking forward to catching up with old friends and making plenty of new ones.

If you are still on the fence about getting a ticket, you should definitely jump off the fence and get one. The agenda and attendee list make it clear that RecFest USA will be an epic couple of days!

28/08/2026

Agentic AI in hiring is only as useful as the data it can reach.
In many large organizations, that data sits across multiple systems that were never designed to work together, and no amount of AI on top will fix what sits underneath.

Five years ago, a best-of-breed stack made sense. Preparing for AI changes that calculation. Some organizations are now concluding they need a trusted source of truth first, which means rethinking their technology strategy and reducing how many products they depend on before adding anything new.

My guest on Episode 809 of Recruiting Future is Lia Manafova, Talent Technology Strategy Lead at Sanofi. Sanofi hires at scale across more than 70 countries, and years of mergers, acquisitions, and local decision-making had left its talent operations running on data and processes that were never meant to act as one. Its response has been to move from a wide best-of-breed stack to an anchor-product approach, where a small number of core systems hold the data everything else flows into and out of. The conversation covers how that decision was made and how a company that size pilots AI with the recruiters who will use it every day.

We discuss:
• Why AI readiness starts with data, not AI
• Building a bridge between the business and the digital team
• Constant transformation and change fatigue
• What an anchor product strategy is
• Best-of-breed or a single source of truth
• Building an ROI story the business understands
• What the future looks like

Listen by searching Recruiting Future wherever you get your podcasts

27/08/2026

Before a TA function can transform, it has to know where it is starting from.

TA leaders have to deliver and transform at the same time. Filling jobs and rethinking how the function works are both part of the role, but with the resources most teams have, it can seem impossible to do both. The AI revolution is now forcing the question of how much capacity TA functions are actually putting into transformation, and what they are getting back for it.

This is why benchmarking matters. The Recruiting Excellence Foundation has assessed hundreds of TA teams across the globe against the same maturity model, and the research shows that many are struggling to make the move from an operational function to a strategic one. It also shows that even within the operational work, two steps in the process consistently perform worse than the rest: the job kickoff meeting and the hiring decision.

My guest on Episode 808 of Recruiting Future is Tony de Graaf, Co-Founder of the Recruiting Excellence Foundation. The benchmarking data covers 21 components of the TA function, and because every team is assessed in the same way, it shows where teams are strong, where they are stuck, which problems recur regardless of company size, and which improvements will make the biggest difference.

We discuss:
• Benchmarking TA maturity across the globe
• The most surprising insight from the results
• The difference between an operational and a strategic function
• The impact of AI, and what happens when you apply it to broken processes
• Resource, capacity and value
• Knowing your starting point
• What the future looks like

Listen by searching Recruiting Future wherever you get your podcasts