Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?
Talent acquisition is undergoing unprecedented disruption as AI, economic uncertainty, and the ever-shortening lifespan of skills radically reshape recruiting. On Recruiting Future, Matt Alder explores this evolving landscape, using insightful interviews with transformational TA practitioners and forward-thinking experts to spark your imagination and provide the insights you need to shape the future of talent acquisition in your organization. Each episode explores topics such as AI, recruiting automation, recruitment marketing, employer branding, skills-based hiring, assessment, candidate experience, DEI, internal mobility, and the transformation of TA teams. Recruiting Future is an essential resource for everyone involved in hiring.
Episodes
Ep 804: The Talent Pool Employers Need
As AI reshapes how work gets done, the most valuable thing a person can bring to their job isn’t recent task experience; it is the depth of judgment, sector knowledge, and decision-making that takes years to build. That is precisely what AI augments rather than replaces. However, in a cautious hiring market, recency is being given overinflated importance, and a large pool of deeply experienced pro
Ep 803: AI Native Recruiting
AI offers a genuine opportunity to reinvent talent acquisition, but not many employers have gone beyond targeting incremental improvements in speed and efficiency. The ones who are truly using AI to be transformational are doing something fundamentally different. It takes a real commitment to experimentation, a clear definition of what AI fluency means, and a willingness to redesign hiring from sc
Ep 802: How LLMs Are Redefining Job Search
The way people look for work is changing fast. A growing number of job seekers now begin by using tools like ChatGPT, asking questions in plain language about roles, salaries, and what it's actually like to work for a company. It is a very different starting point from typing a job title into a search box and scrolling through pages of aggregator links.
At a time when employers are drowning in lo
Ep 801: What Does AI-First Really Mean?
A growing number of organizations are rushing to put AI to work, often announcing themselves as AI-first before working out what that actually means. What many are finding is that AI tends to surface whatever was already underneath. Where the data is patchy, the content conflicting, and no one quite owns the end-to-end process, the technology exposes all of it rather than fixing any of it.
At t
Ep 800: Will AI Break Recruiting?
Recruiting has always had an innovation problem, and the AI revolution has brought it to a fork in the road. Will AI facilitate a revolution in hiring that drives more value than we have seen in 200 years or will it finally break recruiting as we’ve always known it.
In this special 800th episode of Recruiting Future, Matt Alder tells a story that brings together Cornish Tin miners migrating to M
Ep 799: Growing the Talent You Can't Hire
In some industries, aging workforces and deepening skill shortages mean companies can no longer rely on hiring the experienced workers they need. The only realistic option is to grow their own, and that puts apprenticeship schemes right at the centre of workforce planning.
Running a programme at that scale raises questions that go well beyond recruiting. Culture shapes whether people stay, ment
Ep 798 The Frontline of AI Recruiting
In frontline industries, if you can't hire fast enough, the operation stops. A restaurant that can't fill shifts doesn't open. A delivery company that can't onboard drivers loses customers overnight. This constant pressure has pushed frontline employers to adopt AI and automation faster and further than any other area of recruiting.
Frontline hiring is now where some of the most advanced AI-drive
Ep 797: Hiring The Humans Behind The Robots
The race to develop humanoid robots that can work alongside people in factories, warehouses and retail environments is attracting billions in investment. The talent powering this revolution is in critically short supply. Specialist AI researchers, robotics engineers, and machine learning experts are being sought by every company in the sector, from global tech giants to ambitious startups.
So, in
Ep 796: How Hiring Shapes Employee Engagement
Employee engagement remains one of the most talked-about challenges in the world of work. Year after year, the data tells the same story: levels barely shift, no matter what organizations try. The usual response is to focus on what happens once people are already in the door, but the results rarely change.
At the same time, AI is reshaping roles and expectations, making employees question their v
Ep 795: AI, Humans and Frontline Hiring
In frontline retail hiring, speed is everything. If the process is too slow, candidates take offers elsewhere, and stores are short-staffed, hurting both service and revenue. AI-powered automation is now helping some organizations close that gap, cutting hiring times, saving thousands of hours, and driving measurable financial value for the business.
The organizations seeing real results start
Ep 794: Can Automation Make Hiring More Human?
When organizations hire thousands of frontline workers, delivering a personal candidate experience becomes almost impossible. Recruiters spend all of their time answering calls, responding to messages, and running through the same screening questions over and over. There is little time left for the conversations that actually matter. Meanwhile, candidates want speed, flexibility, and a process tha
Ep 793: Conversations from HR Tech Europe (Part Two): Anna Carlsson and Nazim Ünlü
HR is at a pivotal moment. AI has shifted the conversation in a way nothing else has in years, the demands on the function are growing faster than its capacity to respond, and the questions being asked of it are bigger than they have ever been. The opportunity is significant, but so is the gap between where HR is and where it needs to be.
So what does it actually take for HR to step into this mom
Ep 792: Conversations from HR Tech Europe: Wolfgang Brickwedde and Mervyn Dinnen
Talent acquisition is sitting in a strange place right now. AI is in every conversation, but the work of actually hiring people is getting harder rather than easier. Application volumes are swinging in unpredictable ways, the workforce itself is changing shape, and the reality on the ground is some distance from the hype.
So what is actually going on in talent acquisition right now?
In this epis
Ep 791: Making Agentic AI Work For HR & Talent
The real value of AI agents in HR comes from connecting them to work across the employee lifecycle, not from deploying them on individual tasks. That's where most large organisations are getting stuck. Working in a fully agentic way means dealing with different systems and different data sources that often have no shared foundation.
The result is fragmented experiences for employees and managers
Ep 790: Rethinking Work In The Age Of AI
We're living through one of the most consequential shifts in how work gets done. AI is everywhere in headlines and vendor pitches, but the reality inside organisations is far more nuanced than the noise suggests. Personal adoption is running well ahead of how companies are embedding the technology into actual workflows. Demographic changes continue to tighten labour supply, and the HR tech vendor
Ep 789: Leading TA Through AI Acceleration
Something has shifted in AI over the last few months. The pace of AI model updates keeps increasing, and strategies that made sense a few months ago are already out of date. New tools can take on long, complex pieces of work largely on their own, changing what's possible across hiring. For TA leaders, long-term planning has become almost impossible, while the recruiter's role itself is being retho
Ep 788: Technology, Trust, and Human Connection
We live in a world where recruiters can connect with thousands of people with a single click. LinkedIn, CRMs, and AI tools all promise to manage relationships at a scale unimaginable a generation ago.
The challenge is that genuine trust doesn't scale automatically. When interactions become automated and transactional, the very thing that makes recruiting work starts to break down. People still h
Ep 787: How Belonging Transforms Talent Acquisition
Many organizations are struggling with attrition, disengagement, and costly mis-hires that quietly destroy value. The real problem isn't finding talent, it's creating conditions where people can perform.
Research suggests that when people feel they belong, organizations see significant gains in productivity, retention, and innovation. Belonging can be measured, built into how work gets done, and
Ep 785: What Is AI Fluency?
AI skills are quickly becoming a baseline expectation in hiring, with more employers adding AI fluency to their job descriptions every month. Yet when you ask those same employers what AI fluency actually looks like for the vast majority of roles that aren't deeply technical, most struggle to answer.
Universities still treat AI primarily as a cheating problem, restricting how students use it rat
Ep 785: What's Really Changing In Tech Hiring
AI is reshaping how work gets done, but the hiring process hasn't caught up. Employers are asking for AI skills they can't clearly define, while application volumes hit record levels. Resumes mean less than ever because candidates can now use AI to tailor them to any job in seconds, and traditional screening methods are struggling to keep pace.
At the same time, something more interesting is happ
Ep 784: Hiring For Team Intelligence
Talent acquisition has always been built around the individual. Find the right person for the right role. But once someone joins a team, something far more complex takes over. How people combine matters as much as who they are on their own. Every person brings a unique mix of human qualities that affect how they work with others. Factor in all those qualities across all the possible ways a team co
Ep 783: Making AI Adoption Work
Every organization knows it needs to adopt AI. Far fewer have worked out how to bring their whole workforce along for the journey. Telling employees to use new tools rarely works, and many companies are stuck with pockets of enthusiastic early adopters alongside large groups who feel the pace of change is simply too much. Getting from scattered experimentation to genuine organization-wide adoption
Round Up March 2026
Round Up March 2026
If you’ve not listened to Roundup before, it’s a short review of the episodes that I’ve published in the last month to make sure you don’t miss out on the valuable insights that my guests are sharing.
This month Round UP returns to its live format, and this is a recording of my live conversation with Rhona Barnett-Pierce , Founder Workfluencer Media, about five of the episod
Ep 782: Building Trust With Employee-Generated Content
Every platform, every feed, every channel is packed with posts and videos that increasingly look and sound like they were produced by the same machine. For employers trying to attract talent, corporate messaging already struggled to feel trustworthy, and AI-generated content has made the problem significantly worse. Candidates and consumers want to hear from real people, not polished brand account
Ep 781: The Gap Between AI Adoption and TA Transformation
Over the past year, AI features in recruiting tools have seen significant adoption. But if you ask TA Teams whether AI has changed how they actually hire, most of them will say no. Individual productivity is up, but organizational transformation hasn't followed.
At the same time, AI tools on the candidate side are flooding employers with credible applications from candidates who may not be serio
Ep 780: Cutting Through The AI Hype
I've recently returned from a long trip to Las Vegas, where I attended both the UNLEASH and Transform conferences. Unsurprisingly, AI dominated every session and every vendor booth at both events. The promise is huge, but the reality on the ground is a lot more complicated. Some teams are seeing genuine value from new tools. Others are finding that technology is creating as many problems as it sol
Ep 779: Can AI Democratize Hiring?
Application volumes have surged in recent years, and many talent acquisition teams are struggling to keep up. Candidates apply and disappear into a black hole, never hearing back, never getting a real chance to show what they can do. When volumes reach into the millions, the traditional recruiting model simply breaks. There aren't enough recruiters to give everyone a fair hearing.
Some organisati
Ep 778: What Makes Talent Acquisition Truly Strategic?
The role of talent acquisition is changing fast. AI and automation are transforming what's possible, while CFOs and CEOs are demanding a different kind of conversation. They want to understand the value talent acquisition creates for the business and how it delivers returns that directly tie to strategic goals. The old transactional language of efficiency no longer cuts it. TA leaders who can conn
Ep 777: Why AI Needs To Drive Value Not Efficiency
We’re at a fork in the road for how companies adopt AI. Some are taking shortcuts, slashing entry-level roles and chasing efficiency savings. Others are slowing down to ask a harder question: how does this technology actually create new value? The data suggests that many companies are choosing the wrong path, using AI as a scapegoat for cost-cutting that is really caused by other business challeng
Ep 776: Designing Hiring For Humans
Hiring processes are full of design choices that nobody ever questions. Requirements that sound reasonable but aren't defined. Formats that have stayed the same for decades. Onboarding systems built for one type of learner. Talented people are being screened out, not because they can't do the job, but because of how the process itself is designed.
These aren't people failures; they're design fail
Round Up February 2026
If you’ve not listened to Roundup before, it’s a short review of the episodes that I’ve published in the last month to make sure you don’t miss out on the valuable insights that my guests are sharing.
This month Round UP returns to its live format, and this is a recording of my live conversation with Ritu Mohanka, CEO at Vonq, about six of the episodes published in February 2026
Episodes feature
Ep 775: What Makes An Excellent Workplace?
Attracting talent gets all the headlines, but retention is where the real competitive advantage lives. In a market where top performers are constantly being approached by competitors and salary expectations keep rising, holding on to your best people has never been harder.
At the same time, the rapid pace of AI and automation means the skills companies need are shifting faster than ever, making
Ep 774: Will Candidate AI Use Transform Recruiting?
Many talent acquisition teams are dealing with surging application volumes right now, and AI is a major factor. Candidates are using it to apply faster, at a greater scale, and with more targeted information than ever before. The instinct has been to treat candidate AI use as noise, something to filter out or push back on. That response misses the long-term implications entirely.
AI isn't just a
Ep 773: How LLMs Are Changing Recruitment Marketing
For years, recruitment marketing strategies have been built around a familiar set of rules: optimize your career site, rank well in search results, and ensure candidates can find you. But those rules were written for a world where Google was the gateway.
That world is changing. Candidates are increasingly turning to LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude to research potential employers, asking detailed,
Ep 772: Surfing The AI Tsunami
AI transformation is accelerating, and for many organizations, the biggest risk isn't the technology itself; it's getting their strategic response wrong. Rush in without a framework, and you can destroy culture, trust, and capability. Hold back waiting for certainty, and more agile competitors will overtake you. Talent leaders are caught between these two failure modes with no clear playbook, and
Ep 771: Recruiting At The Speed Of AI
Recruiting has always been shaped by the time and resources available. Resumes are short because recruiters only have a finite amount of time to read them. Interview shortlists are small because hiring managers can only meet so many candidates. The whole funnel narrows because no team can fully evaluate everyone who applies. None of these are strategic choices, they're simply workarounds for human
Ep 770: The Science of Better Hiring
Hiring should be about finding the right person. Too often, though, the tools and methods organizations use actually work against them. Job postings filter candidates out for lacking skills they could easily and quickly learn. Competency checklists based on someone else's philosophy of what leadership looks like rather than what actually works inside their organization. Assessment tools that aren'
Ep 769: Managing AI Risk In Talent Acquisition
The pressure on talent functions right now is intense. Budgets are tight, teams are stretched, and the mandate to do more with less has pushed many organizations to automate at speed without stopping to redesign what they were automating. These automated decisions are attracting real legal and regulatory attention. Actions previously seen as simple process steps are now potentially being viewed f
Ep 768: Faster Mistakes Or Better Hiring?
AI tools are changing the pace at which organizations filter and rank candidates. However, matching someone to a job description and actually predicting whether they'll perform well in the role are two very different things. Most hiring processes have never been validated against real performance outcomes, and organizations often don't have a clear, measurable definition of what success looks like
Ep 767: Inside EY's Talent Strategy for AI and the Future
The assurance and audit profession is facing a talent crisis. Fewer graduates are choosing it as a career, and the perception of what auditors actually do hasn't kept pace with reality. At the same time, AI is fundamentally reshaping the work itself, automating repetitive tasks and opening up entirely new service areas around cyber risk and sustainability. The profession needs different skills, di
Ep 766: How TA Proves Its Business Impact
The talent market is full of contradictions right now. There are many people looking for jobs, but for many organisations, finding the right talent remains difficult. Caution dominates on both sides, with candidates asking harder questions about stability and culture while businesses are slowing down decision-making around headcount. AI is promising to transform recruiting, but most organizations
Ep 765: Evolution or Extinction? What’s the future for Job Boards
Job boards have been connecting candidates with employers for over thirty years, but the relationship that made them work is fundamentally breaking down. Candidates are getting frustrated by applying for roles that may already be filled or have been taken off the market, while employers are receiving hundreds of identical, AI-generated applications they can't meaningfully evaluate. The Job Boards
Round Up January 2026
Round Up December 2025
If you’ve not listened to Roundup before, it’s a short review of the episodes that I’ve published in the last month to make sure you don’t miss out on the valuable insights that my guests are sharing.
This month Round Up returns to its live format, and this is a recording of my live conversation with Mervyn Dinnen about six of the episodes published in January 2026
Episod
Ep 764: Rewiring Organizations For AI
There's a significant disconnect playing out in organizations right now. Leaders understand AI is probably the most transformative technology of their lifetimes. They're making bold announcements and setting ambitious targets. Yet they're not providing the structures, ownership, or vision needed to drive real change. The result? Small pilots, incremental efficiency gains, and nowhere near the tran
Ep 763: How Much Do We Actually Know About Bias In Hiring?
Bias in hiring has been a topic of discussion for decades, yet our understanding of what actually happens within recruiting processes remains surprisingly limited. Most research focuses on single types of bias in isolation, making it impossible to build a complete picture. Meanwhile, the arrival of AI tools is intensifying the scrutiny of hiring decisions, demanding a level of accountability that
Ep 762: Moving From AI Hype To AI Value
The constant noise around AI has created a strange situation in talent acquisition. On one side, relentless hype has made many TA leaders deeply skeptical, reluctant to invest in technology that feels oversold. On the other side, some employers have pushed through the fog and are getting genuine, measurable results from AI agents in their hiring processes. The gap between these two groups is widen
Ep 761: What Happens When Recruiters Embrace AI?
There are now tasks in recruiting where AI genuinely outperforms humans. Holding multiple evaluation criteria in mind while scanning hundreds of applications, spotting relevant experience described in unexpected ways, and ensuring no qualified candidate gets overlooked through fatigue, overwhelm, or shortcuts. These aren't things recruiters actually do badly, but there are things humans can’t phys
Ep 760: Co-Creating The Future Of TA
Strategic partnerships in talent acquisition can mean the difference between incremental improvement and transformational change. But what does a true strategic partnership actually look like? How do you move beyond the traditional vendor-client relationship to genuine co-creation?
My guests this week are Simon Bishop, Head of Talent Acquisition at SoftwareOne, and Ritu Mohanka, CEO at VONQ. Th
Round Up December 2025
If you’ve not listened to Roundup before, it’s a short review of the episodes that I’ve published in the last month to make sure you don’t miss out on the valuable insights that my guests are sharing.
This month, Round UP returns to its live format, and this is a recording of my live conversation with Rhona Pierce about six of the episodes published in December 2025
Episodes featured in this Rou
Ep 759: Career Sites and the Growing AI Gap
There's something paradoxical happening with corporate careers websites right now. After years of broken links, mobile application nightmares, and clunky technology implementations, organizations are finally getting the basics right. Mobile experiences are improving. ATS systems are working properly. The longstanding problems we've talked about for years are finally being addressed.
However, whil
EP 758: Extracting Real Value From AI In TA
Last year brought plenty of AI hype, but actual adoption in talent acquisition remained tentative. Some organizations ran pilots, most watched from the sidelines, and expectations stayed cautiously low. The technology advanced rapidly, yet widespread implementation lagged far behind the headlines.
Now, heading into 2026, there's a genuine opportunity to move beyond experimentation. But extracting
AI Reality Check - What It Actually Takes to Transform Recruiting
AI is the most disruptive technology we've seen in our careers, but most industry conversations stay at the surface level of use cases and future predictions. This special bonus episode goes deeper.
These four interviews, taken from a behind-the-scenes film I recently made, explore how AI recruiting products actually get built. We're talking to the people who created SmartRecruiters' AI-first pla
Ep 757: Building The Employee Experience Of the Future
The pandemic forced organizations to rethink how they engage their people, with many old rules torn up almost overnight. Five years on, AI has arrived and changed the game again.
Leaders are now facing a new set of questions. How do you design experiences that attract and retain talent while driving the performance your business needs? And how do you prepare for a future that’s increasingly impo
Ep 756: TA Trends That Matter For 2026
Hi there, welcome to Episode 756 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Recruiting Future helps Talent Acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing strategic capability in Foresight, Influence, Talent, and Technology.
This episode is about Foresight.
Making sense of talent acquisition right now feels impossible. Every week brings new technology announcements, shifting economic
Ep 755: Balancing Automation with Authenticity
We’ve been talking about automation in recruiting for a long time. The AI developments of the last two years have significantly shifted the landscape of what is possible with automation, making it a strategic imperative rather than a nice-to-have. However, the current situation is pretty problematic. Some recruiters and TA teams are doing it poorly, particularly in outreach, inundating candidates
Round Up November 2025
If you’ve not listened to Roundup before, it’s a short review of the episodes that I’ve published in the last month to make sure you don’t miss out on the valuable insights that my guests are sharing.
I hope you have been enjoying the live Round Up episodes we’ve been doing over the last few months. This month sees a brief return to the old school format, but don’t worry, Round Up Live will retur
Ep 754: Finding Clarity in Recruiting Chaos
It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the pace of change in talent acquisition. AI developments, vendor mergers and acquisitions, a confusing technology landscape, and shifting candidate behaviours are just some of the current trends making everything feel chaotic. But if we take a step back and look carefully, patterns start to emerge. There are clues everywhere to what the future will look like.
So
Ep 753: Hiring Exceptional Executive Talent
Despite the challenging economic landscape and wave of layoffs across many sectors, finding exceptional senior talent remains a challenge, and many employers are making it worse for themselves.
Trust has eroded with lengthy interview processes, poor candidate experience, and misaligned employer branding are pushing top talent away. With as many as one in four workers set to be over 55 by 2031,
Ep 752: Using Job Architecture To Drive Value From AI
Skills, tasks, jobs, activities. These terms get used interchangeably across HR and talent acquisition, but they mean fundamentally different things. Skills are attributes of people. Tasks are components of work. Jobs are bundles of activities.
Having clarity here matters more now than ever. As AI begins reshaping how work gets done, organisations need a precise understanding of their workforce
Ep 751: The Trust Problem In Recruiting
Uncertain economic times, high volumes of layoffs, and easy access to AI tools mean many employers are dealing with an unprecedented number of applications.
Recruiters are overwhelmed, candidates are getting ghosted, and trust in the recruiting process is suffering. But are TA teams doing all they can to relieve the pressure at the top of the funnel and give job seekers the clarity they need? Emp
Ep 750: Agents, Data, and the Future of Talent Acquisition
SAP's recent acquisition of SmartRecruiters has generated considerable interest across the talent acquisition community. The deal brings AI-native recruiting capabilities into a broader HR suite, creating complete visibility into data across the entire employee lifecycle. For recruiters, this means seeing what happens after a hire is made with the potential to connect talent acquisition decisions
Ep 749: Recruiting Past, Present, and Future (Live at TA Tech)
This is a special episode, recorded live on stage at TA Tech Europe in London earlier in November. It's a wide-ranging discussion about the state of our industry and where it's heading with one of recruiting's true pioneers, Jeff Taylor, the founder of Monster.com and the soon to be launched Boomband, . We debate AI's true impact on hiring, discuss why traditional tools and approaches are failing,
Ep 748: The Real Value Of AI Agents
The AI agent marketplace has become a confusing landscape full of chatbots and co-pilots that aren't agents, claiming revolutionary capabilities. But genuine AI agents represent something fundamentally different. They're digital workers that can handle complex, multi-step processes independently, making decisions and adjustments along the way.
The technology is already here and working, and the
Ep 747: Rethinking Fairness in Hiring
Many organizations treat accessibility as just a compliance checkbox, checking the box to meet legal requirements and then moving on. But this mindset misses massive opportunities. When companies design truly inclusive hiring processes, they don't just help candidates with disabilities, but also improve the experience for everyone.
Forward-thinking employers are discovering that accessibility dri
Ep 746 Building Digital Trust In Hiring
The recruitment experience is undergoing a fundamental transformation with AI and automation playing an increasingly larger role. It's essential to recognise the consequences of lost human connection. Trust is an absolutely critical element here, and employers need to ensure they aren't losing the emotional intelligence and genuine connections that build trust with candidates.
So how do you creat
Ep 745: Recruiting Excellence In Disruptive Times
Talent acquisition is being tested like never before. Teams are continually being asked to do more with less, hiring volumes remain unpredictable, and technology is evolving faster than organizations can adapt. AI promises transformation but often delivers confusion, with some vendors labeling simple automation as intelligence, while, at the same time, genuinely disruptive AI capabilities are emer
Ep 744: How Job Ads Impact Quality Of Hire
Application volumes are continuing to rise, but finding quality hires remains a challenge. The usual suspects that tend to get the blame are candidates using AI, economic uncertainty, and a continuing decline in job board effectiveness. However, research suggests a more fundamental issue that many organizations overlook.
The words in job descriptions matter more than most teams realize. Non-inclu
Round Up October 2025
Recruiting Future Round Up is back in a brand-new live format.
Round Up has always been a quick way to catch up on the most important insights from the month’s Recruiting Future interviews. Now we’re taking it further, streaming live on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube so you can join the conversation in real time.
In this recording (previously live) Matt is joined by special guest Rhona Pierce,
Ep 743: The Talent Acquisition Revolution
The recruiting technology landscape is transforming at an unprecedented speed. AI Tools that seemed like far-fetched concepts just a few years ago are hitting the market and delivering results.
But adoption is messy and uneven. Some employers are experimenting with AI-driven interviews, while others worry about bias and legal risks. High-volume recruiters are automating entire processes while e
Ep 742: Aligning Hiring with Values
Most hiring currently focuses on assessing a mix of skills and experience. However, there's a deeper layer that often gets overlooked. Companies talk endlessly about culture and values, yet few know how to genuinely assess them.
This matters especially for purpose-driven organizations. Whether it's a B Corp, a sustainability-focused business, or any company with a strong mission, finding people
Ep 741: The Competitive Advantage Of Neuro-Inclusion
As many as 1 in 7 people are neurodivergent, with brains that process information, communicate, and work differently. Many have ADHD, autism, dyslexia, or other conditions they've hidden throughout their careers, masking to fit workplace norms. But creating environments where these individuals thrive isn't about expensive accommodations or special treatment. Instead, it's about designing work that
Ep 740: Are We Really Ready For AI?
We've lived through technology revolutions before. Personal computers. The Internet. Smartphones. Social media. Each felt transformative at the time, reshaping how we work and communicate.
But something fundamentally different is happening now. AI learns from every interaction and improves with each release. Yet the signals are confusing. Some pilots are failing, and the hype levels are off the
Ep 739: TA's Challenges and Priorities for 2026
The economic, demographic, and technological forces of change are continuing to drive disruption, confusion, and chaos. Against the backdrop of this ever-shifting landscape, TA Leaders are expected to deliver greater value to their organizations than ever before. So how are they planning to do this in the next 12 months? What are the strategic priorities, how are budgets being impacted, and where
Ep 738: How to Implement AI Successfully In HR & TA
Most organizations approaching AI are struggling and running pilot projects that go nowhere. The common assumption is that the technology itself is flawed, over hyped, or too complex. However, the employers that are succeeding with AI have discovered something different. The technology isn't the problem, and the real barriers are human. Employee resistance, fear about job security, and the inertia
Ep 737: Building A Team Of Talent Partners
To survive as a function, it's clear that TA teams need to become strategic partners to their businesses rather than service providers. But what does that really mean in practice? It's easy to talk about being strategic, but the execution is where most teams struggle.
The challenge isn't just about new processes or technologies. It's about fundamentally different ways of communicating with hiring
Ep 736: Trust, Influence & The Future Of Recruitment Marketing
Something fundamental has shifted in how people find work. Job boards that dominated for decades are losing their effectiveness. Candidates are overwhelmed and skeptical. Employers are drowning in applications that are all the same. The old playbook simply isn't working anymore.
Meanwhile, the TikTokification of communication and the rise of the creator economy are reshaping the marketing lands
Round Up September 2025
Recruiting Future Round Up is back in a brand-new live format.
Round Up has always been a quick way to catch up on the most important insights from the month’s Recruiting Future interviews. Now we’re taking it further, streaming live on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube so you can join the conversation in real time.
In this recording (previously live) Matt is joined by special guest HR Analyst Mer
Ep 735: AI's Impact On Recruitment Marketing
Recruitment marketing is undergoing a fundamental shift as AI transforms the way work is done and who does it. Marketing automation is evolving at a rapid pace and will drive significant, efficient gains, but what is the impact of originality, creativity, and strategic thinking? So how are recruitment marketers evolving, and what should employers now expect from their recruitment marketing teams a
Ep 734 Why Skills Really Matter
We have been discussing skills for so long that there is a temptation to dismiss anything skills-based as just another set of buzzwords. However, if anything, we aren't talking about skills enough and certainly not in the holistic way we need to be. Forward-thinking companies are already using skills-based approaches to solve critical business problems. These aren't abstract HR initiatives but dat
Ep 733: Making Sense of HR Tech's AI Explosion
I recently returned from my annual pilgrimage to the HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas. There are a ton of conferences in our industry, but HR Tech still remains the event to come to for the most comprehensive view of innovation in talent acquisition.
It is clear that things are moving fast with technology; AI is already moving from narrow, single-use tools to orchestration layers and multipl
