The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast

HOW TO ASSESS FOR HUMAN JUDGEMENT   As AI takes over more of the heavy lifting in recruitment — screening CVs, drafting interview questions, even conducting first-round interviews — the skills we hire for are shifting. Technical proficiency can increasingly be automated, augmented or verified by machines. What's becoming harder to replace, and harder to find, is human judgement: the ability to wei...

Employer Branding in the Era of AI Generated Career Sites - Who Owns the Story?   The career site is the front door to your employer brand — and until recently, building or even tweaking it meant months of agency briefs, dev tickets, and design sign-offs. Not anymore. A new wave of AI-powered platforms now lets recruiters and TA teams build entire career sites simply by typing what they want in pl...

Vibe Coding TA Tools - How Viable Is This Really?   The promise is intoxicating: describe the recruiting tool you want in plain English, and AI writes the code for you. No engineering team. No six-month procurement cycle. No budget request that dies in finance. Just you, a prompt, and a working prototype by lunchtime.   "Vibe coding" - building software through conversational AI rather than tradit...

How to Assess Skillful Use of AI   The way we assess engineering talent is undergoing a fundamental shift.   With AI now capable of generating functional code in seconds, the old evaluation playbook - whiteboard algorithms, take-home tests, "does it compile?"- is looking increasingly obsolete. The real question for hiring teams isn't whether a candidate can write syntax; it's whether they can exer...

The Future of Hiring, with Matt Wilson, CEO of Jack & Jill   Matt Wilson, CEO of Jack & Jill, joins Hung Lee live to discuss what happens when AI makes applying almost effortless, application volumes explode, and the traditional signals recruiters rely on start to disappear.   Key Themes We'll Cover:   The End of the Application? - What happens when applying becomes effectively free, and w...

Disconnected AI vs. Multi-Agent Ecosystems: Building a TA Tech Stack in the Agentic AI Era   For the past few years, talent acquisition teams have been bolting AI tools onto their existing tech stacks - an AI scheduler here, a chatbot there, a CV parser with some machine learning sprinkled on top. It's worked, sort of!   But we're now entering the agentic AI era, where autonomous AI agents don't j...

EU AI Act is Now in Force! What Recruiters Need To Do Now   The EU AI Act is no longer a future concern - it's live, enforceable, and already reshaping how organisations can use artificial intelligence in hiring. For recruiters and talent acquisition teams, this isn't just a compliance headache for the legal department. If your tech stack includes AI-powered sourcing, CV screening, video interview...

IN CONVERSATION WITH JOHN VLASTELICA   Few people have done more to shape the modern Talent Advisor than John Vlastelica. From leading recruiting at Amazon and Expedia to founding Recruiting Toolbox, John has spent the past two decades helping hundreds of organisations transform Talent Acquisition from a transactional function into a strategic business partner. His ideas around recruiter capabilit...

From Talent Acquisition to Organisational Performance   For years, Talent Acquisition has been measured by hiring metrics: time-to-fill, cost-per-hire, source-of-hire and offer acceptance rates. While these remain important, they only tell part of the story. The real question is not whether we filled the vacancy quickly, but whether hiring decisions improve business performance. As organisations b...

NATIONAL INTERVIEW WEEK - HELPING 100,000 YOUNG PEOPLE INTO THE WORKFORCE   National Interview Week is a nationwide movement designed to equip young people from state-educated schools with the confidence, skills, and professional exposure they need to succeed in interviews and access meaningful career opportunities.   Over the next five years, we aim to support 100,000 students through structured...

MEET EMA - YOUR AI EMPLOYEE FOR HR, IT & FINANCE (LIVE DEMO)   We're back with another founder chat and live demo, this time with Surojit Chatterjee, CEO of Ema. Former CPO of Coinbase and Senior Exec at Google and Flipkart, Surojit is a vastly experienced tech executive. I'm delighted to be share some time with him to learn about his vision and why the future of human-AI collaboration is goin...

The State of AI Readiness: A Framework to Gauge Your Organisation's AI Readiness   Every organisation says it's embracing AI - but very few can answer a simple question: how AI-ready are we, really?   While new tools continue to appear at breakneck speed, successful AI adoption depends on much more than buying software. It requires the right leadership, governance, skills, culture, data, processes...

The Employer Branding Reckoning: Authenticity vs Automation   Employer branding has entered a new era. AI can now write careers content, personalise candidate outreach, generate videos, and automate engagement at a scale that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. At the same time, candidates have never been better at spotting generic messaging, over-produced content, or a culture that...

Essential Guide for Increasing Talent Density   In an era of relentless cost optimisation, organisations face a pivotal choice: maintain headcount breadth or concentrate excellence. Talent density—the concentration of exceptional performers within a team, function, or entire company—has emerged as the decisive competitive advantage for high-performing organisations. This is not merely about hiring...

CALCULATING EMPLOYEE LIFETIME VALUE   For decades, talent acquisition has been measured by speed and cost—time-to-fill and cost-per-hire dominated the conversation while the true economic impact of every hire remained frustratingly opaque. Yet as workforce strategy matures into a board-level priority, a critical shift is underway: organisations are finally beginning to quantify what an employee is...

The Death of the Junior Recruiter: Where Is the Next Generation Coming From?   Since 2022, the talent acquisition landscape has undergone a seismic shift. Once a thriving entry point for ambitious professionals, the function has been systematically truncated as economic pressures mount, headcount budgets shrink, and AI tools increasingly optimise workflows that once demanded human intuition. Compa...

Fixing Hiring Manager vs Recruiter MIS-Alignment The recruiter-hiring manager relationship is the most consequential partnership in talent acquisition—and yet, according to Metaview's 2026 AI & Hiring Alignment Report surveying 505 recruiting and hiring leaders, it is also the most dangerously misaligned. While an overwhelming 90% of leaders describe their partnerships as "good," a staggering...

The Recfest Recap 2026   We’re unpacking the absolute best moments, groundbreaking strategies, and actionable takeaways from RecFest 2026. Whether you were dodging the summer sun at Knebworth Park or couldn't make it across the pond, this exclusive recap session distills the high-impact content from the industry's top thought leaders. Get ready to supercharge your TA strategy, embrace the human ad...

THE EVOLUTION OF TALENT CRMS (Building Talent Communities in the Agentic Era)   The recruitment technology stack is undergoing its most profound transformation since the shift from paper CVs to applicant tracking systems. Autonomous AI agents—capable of reasoning, planning, and executing complex workflows without human intervention—are now infiltrating every stage of the talent lifecycle, renderin...

HR vs People Ops: Semantic or Substantive Difference?   IsIf your organization is still running a traditional Human Resources function - policy police, form processors, compliance checkers - you are bleeding candidates before they even apply. Modern talent acquisition doesn't need more administrators; it needs a People Operations engine built for growth, experience, and competitive advantage.   •...

How Are AI-enabled Recruiters Spending Their Time?   The recruiter's day used to disappear into Boolean strings, resume scanning, and the futile pursuit of inbox zero. Now that AI has swallowed the repetitive mechanics of talent acquisition, a profound shift is underway. The question is no longer whether artificial intelligence will change recruiting—it is how the best recruiters are redeploying t...

GEO vs SEO: What Recruitment Marketers Need to Know in 2026   Everyone know's the search landscape has fundamentally shifted.   In 2026, candidates are no longer typing keywords into Google - they are asking AI assistants where to work, who pays fairly, and which cultures actually thrive. If your recruitment marketing strategy still revolves around traditional SEO alone, you are optimising for a s...

What if AI Actually Costs More Than Humans?   The headcount reduction mandate has landed on your desk: replace talent with AI and cut costs. But beneath the vendor demos and boardroom promises lies a dangerous assumption - that artificial intelligence is automatically cheaper than human expertise.   What if the token economics tell a different story?   Join us for a provocative livestream that fli...

The hiring environment has fundamentally reset—and most talent acquisition teams are still using benchmarks built for a world that no longer exists. Between 2022 and 2025, everything changed: application volumes surged 385%, recruiter teams were cut by 57%, and AI simultaneously flooded pipelines with noise while offering new efficiencies. Yet against this backdrop, Greenhouse data from 17M+ appli...

INTRODUCING NEXT GENERATION AI RECRUITING AGENTS   Juicebox have been one of the most impressive businesses in the AI recruiting space. Now with 6,000 customers, they are ready to announce a step change in how Juicebox works for recruiters to keep a competitive edge.   Juicebox agents now   REMEMBER AND SELF CORRECT. When a search isn't surfacing the right people, Agents reflect on their reasoning...