Hiring Excellence with Johnny Campbell

How do you build a talent acquisition function that can go from five hires at a site to 60 in two months, then back again? Johnny is joined by Patrick Grant, Head of Talent Acquisition at Watlow, a 100-year-old St. Louis engineering and manufacturing company riding the semiconductor cycle. Patrick shares how he built global TA from scratch in two years, cut 15–20 agencies down to two preferred ven...

How do you buy and implement AI in talent acquisition without making your problems worse? Johnny is joined by Eileen Kovalsky, a TA practitioner of almost 30 years who has worked in TA ops at companies including Mondelez and General Motors, worked on the vendor side at Paradox, and now consults independently. They cover why process must come before tech, defining your North Star, phasing rollouts,...

HSBC hires 40,000 to 50,000 people a year. So how do you bring AI into that without losing what matters most? In this conversation from our recent SocialTalent Live webinar, Johnny sits down with Noel Brown, Global Head of Enterprise Talent at HSBC, to unpack their guiding principle: don’t automate trust. Noel shares how HSBC uses an AI interviewer to understand the career goals of its own workfor...

Johnny sits down with Nick Vitale, Head of Global Talent Acquisition and Mobile Strategy at Kenvue, the consumer health company spun out of Johnson & Johnson. Nick walks through standing up a global TA function from a near-blank sheet: staying lean on tech at day one, using RPO for flexibility, and fixing people and process before technology. He also covers building recruiter capacity for real...

Most TA teams are using AI to cope with more volume. Fewer are asking where it belongs. This episode replays AI Native, Still Human, a conversation from our SocialTalent Live webinar in September. Johnny talks to Kyle, Director of Talent Acquisition at Grindr, and Mick, co-founder of Smart Jobs. Kyle explains how an AI chief of staff built by his own recruiters takes a role from kickoff to launch...

Most employer brand teams are small and stretched. Hannah King, Head of Employer Brand and Recruitment Operations at Straumann Group, joins Johnny to share what drives results without a big budget. They cover measuring impact beyond vanity metrics, why recycling content beats chasing new ideas, and how one recruiter with a phone turned employee stories into higher reach and engagement. A practical...

Most companies keep their high-potential lists and succession plans well away from recruiters. Merck opened both. Colleen Rush is Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt — around 11,000 hires a year across 60 countries. She joins Johnny to explain what changed when her team got access to that data, what recruiters now do with it, and the capacity, capability and internal agreeme...

Johnny sits down with Mark Smith, SVP of Global Talent Acquisition at Cargill, for a conversation unlike any other on the show. A year ago, Johnny watched Mark tell a room at RecFest about a fall from a ladder that left him with a traumatic brain injury, and how recovering from it reshaped the way he works. Mark shares the six lessons on attention, focus and notifications that came out of it, and...

https://www.socialtalent.com/resources/guides/dave-poling-modern-leadership Before 2020, a leader's job was mostly to drive performance and build culture. Dave Poling's view is that the lift has got a lot heavier since. Dave has spent 32 years inside Allegis Group and now leads a team of around 750 recruiters across the US and Canada as VP of Talent Delivery at TEKsystems. In this episode...

Everyone wants to point AI at sourcing, screening and selection. Rob Devlin, senior global programme manager for TA technology at Synopsys, started somewhere quieter: the intake meeting. He tells Johnny why it's the lowest-risk, highest-leverage place to begin — how he ranked the recruitment process by risk, why legal and privacy were his first call rather than his last, and what changed in th...

Talent intelligence started as a side effect of sourcing. Fifteen years on, it shapes location strategy, workforce planning and M&A — and increasingly sits outside TA altogether. In this episode, Johnny is joined by Toby Culshaw of ServiceNow, founder of the Talent Intelligence Collective, to trace how the discipline grew up, how the tooling changed, and where AI genuinely helps versus where i...

On this episode of Hiring Excellence, Johnny sits down with Judith Rudge, VP of Talent Acquisition at Optimum, to talk about disruption in telecom and talent acquisition, and a surprising source of insight into it: the 26 chickens she raises at home. Judith shares how watching her flock reshaped her thinking on onboarding new hires, rotating leaders before they stagnate, and why people who don&#39...

Johnny sits down with Ray Chaaya, VP of Talent and Culture at Zurich Canada, to unpack how HR's role has shifted since 2020; from crisis response to a genuine seat at the strategy table. Ray shares a three-bucket model for the modern HR function (AI-driven transactional work, HR business partners as concierges, centres of expertise), why skills-first workforce planning is replacing role-first...

Internal mobility is having a moment. Johnny sits down with Thom Staight, who spent 11 years at Microsoft, most recently as General Manager of Global Talent Acquisition for EMEA and Asia, to unpack how the company built a scaled internal mobility system from the ground up. Thom explains why the biggest barriers weren't technology but culture, how a shared skills taxonomy became the common lang...

Candidate fraud isn't a fringe problem anymore. It's organized and hitting companies of every size. Johnny talks with Stacy Zapar, longtime recruiter and founder of the Fraud Squad community, about how fake applicants, proxy interviewers, and North Korean IT operatives are slipping through hiring funnels. Stacy shares her framework for catching fraud at every stage, not just one interview,...

AI in hiring isn't a yes-or-no question, it's a risk-management one. Johnny talks with Heather Bussing, an employment attorney who's spent almost 40 years at the intersection of employment law and technology, about what's actually required under the EU AI Act and US state laws. They dig into why risk rises the closer AI gets to a hiring decision, why pre-interview sorting is the ha...

Most TA leaders lose budget battles not because their ideas are bad, but because they're making the wrong argument. Johnny sits down with David Weinstock, VP at News Story, who learned the hard way that soft costs don't move CFOs. Hard dollars do. David shares how he rebuilt his approach to business cases: finance language, benefit loads, EBITDA thinking, and using AI to stress-test pitche...

Johnny sits down with Melissa Thompson, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Ford, to talk about something the AI conversation often skips: how TA leaders — not just recruiters — should actually be using it. Melissa shares how she built Project Bengal to tackle runaway req volumes, how she uses AI to analyse quality-of-slate data, and what it took to get her team genuinely on board. Honest, practi...

Most TA teams measure where they've been. Mike Peterson, Senior Director of Talent Source Intelligence at Edwards Lifesciences, is building something different — a sourcing model driven by the workforce plan, not the req queue. Johnny talks with Mike about moving from reactive to proactive: working backwards from need dates, pressure-testing the plan, and measuring success by whether you deliv...

How is AI actually reshaping talent acquisition? Johnny sits down with Elias Albino, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Syngenta, to talk through what changes when you free up recruiter capacity — and where human judgment still has to stay. They get into the friction between TA, HR business partners and talent management, why the 360 recruiter is fading, and how to measure whether all this autom...

In Budapest for recruiTECH CEE, Johnny sat down over a beer with Hung Lee — founder of Recruiting Brainfood and one of the most-followed voices in talent. They get into how AI is reshaping recruitment: the three archetypes driving the AI debate, why the efficiency you gain rarely comes back to you unless you negotiate for it, and the risk that subsidised AI ends up costing more than the people it...

Pulled from the Hiring Excellence vault — Johnny's conversation with Pavan Kumar, recorded nine months before agentic AI became the dominant talking point in TA. At the time, Pavan was leading global talent acquisition at Eightfold, rolling out their AI Recruiter to 600+ candidates across 35 roles. The argument that only got more relevant: interviewing is more automatable than scheduling, top-...

Pulled from the Hiring Excellence vault while a new season finishes mixing, Johnny's 2023 conversation with Wendy Mayer, VP Candidate Experience at Pfizer, that only gets more relevant. Wendy came to candidate experience from strategy, CX and employee experience, and brings all of that lens to TA. A practical take on why 'perfect' is the wrong target, which moments actually matter, and...

In this Best of Hiring Excellence replay, Johnny sits down with Glen Cathey, SVP of Talent Advisory at Randstad Enterprise, to dig into what it really takes to get value from AI as a recruiter. Glen unpacks the University of Zurich Reddit study on AI persuasion, explains why AI skills are really management skills, and shares why most of us are still treating these tools like a search engine. Liste...

We're returning to one of our most popular episodes ever in this replay episode of Hiring Excellence. Johnny sat down with Kelly Jones, now Chief People Officer at Cisco, to explore what it really took to build a hiring culture where talent became everyone’s responsibility, not just TA’s. From tackling talent hoarding to improving internal mobility and creating better candidate experiences, Ke...