The Jim Stroud Podcast

Your employer could be making you obsolete while paying you well. As AI reshapes work, the best employee benefit may not be salary, perks, or remote work. It may be an employer that makes you more valuable with every passing year. Listen in to hear why that matters. This episode brought to you by ProvenBase - An AI sourcing solution that finds talent others cannot. https://provenbase.com ... For s...

The Most Private Data Your Employer Will Ever Touch In clinical trials right now, people who can't move their hands are typing with their thoughts. Investors put about a billion dollars into brain-computer interfaces last year. Precision Neuroscience, Neuralink, and Synchron led the charge. Most Human Resources (HR) leaders assume none of this will ever reach their desk. It will, and it won't come...

You're qualified. You're experienced. And when a recruiter searches for your job title, your name never loads. Here's how recruiter search works and four moves to get found this week. 🎧 ... Cited in this podcast: Job Search 3.0 (jobsearch.jimstroud.com) Career Intelligence Weekly (newsletter.jimstroud.com) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A storm sits offshore, and the map shows four tracks. That's the AI labor market, according to a new Conference Board report offering four futures and no odds. So how do you write a workforce plan under a map like that? Jim borrows the answer from coastal families, who read their own gauges and write their rules before the storm season starts. In this episode, you'll get five gauges hiding in your...

AI can help almost anyone produce average work. So how do recruiters identify the people who can actually think, judge, and create beyond the machine? In this episode of The Jim Stroud Podcast, Jim talks with Bryan McAnulty about what AI fluency really looks like, how hiring assessments need to change, and why judgment, communication, workflow design, and specialized knowledge are becoming more va...

Mercer says employer health costs jump 8.2 percent in 2027, the steepest climb since 2003. That number made the headlines. A second number in the same survey decides what happens to your paycheck, and it got almost no ink. This episode follows the money from a doctor's office to a benefits meeting you will never attend, then lands on the one decision still in your hands. Brought to you by: Career...

Your candidate nailed questions one and two. Question three broke him. That's hiring now: the chatbot did the prep, and you have to find the person underneath. This episode is the fix. How to hire thinkers, keep the ones you have, and spot the moment your team stops thinking. ... This episode brought to you by Career Intelligence Weekly - Tracking the hidden job market for smarter career decisions...

What happens when AI makes you more productive—but less capable? Jim Stroud explores the hidden “cognitive debt” of outsourcing your thinking, the growing divide between AI-fluent workers and passive dependents, and why recruiters can no longer trust polished resumes as proof of real ability. The new hiring challenge: finding candidates whose brains still work when the machine steps away. Sponsore...

A model spends 300 milliseconds on your resume and the decision follows you for years. Courtrooms are fighting over whether hiring algorithms tilt toward some candidates or against others, and both sides are arguing about the wrong thing. This episode makes the case that the real scandal is not the bias setting. It is that nobody has to sign their name next to a rejection. ... Brought to you by: C...

In this episode: One in five LinkedIn users has rewritten a job they already left. A new Stanford study caught "time travelers" adding AI skills to old roles, deleting DEI, and letting chatbots ghostwrite their pasts. What the edits reveal, and why a freshly polished old job is the loudest hire-me signal nobody is watching. ... Brought to you by my newsletters: The Recruiting Life Career Intellige...

Jim Stroud speaks with Susan Anderson, Chief Services Officer for Mitratech’s HR Solutions Division, about why human judgment, accountability, and transparency still matter in an AI-powered workplace. They discuss AI-driven hiring decisions, workplace policies, employee productivity, algorithmic management, compensation, and whether AI agents should be treated like workers. Susan explains how HR c...

What does fairness at work really look like, and who is responsible for creating it? Jim Stroud speaks with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, author of Seeking Fairness at Work, about workplace expectations, manager accountability, employee engagement, unwritten rules, and when it may be time to address a problem or move on. ... Connect with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner via LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah...

Companies claim they cannot find enough talent while routinely rejecting professionals with decades of experience. This episode examines the “overqualified” trap, age bias in recruiting, and how outdated hiring systems may be creating the very talent shortages companies are struggling to solve. Brought to you by my newsletters: The Recruiting Life Career Intelligence Weekly https://newsletter.jims...

Is AI really replacing workers, or are companies using it to justify decisions they already planned to make? Jim Stroud sits down with technology equity activist and AI for Job Security Foundation President Leigh Felton to discuss AI washing, failed automation experiments, responsible AI, workplace bias, and the risks of allowing algorithms to make decisions about human potential. They also explor...

The retirement map you were handed at 25 is wrong. It told you to work hard, hit 65, and disappear. Clean ending. Simple math. It was always a lie. The labor force is aging, and companies are not ready. Artificial intelligence (AI) is eating the entry-level jobs that used to grow the next generation of leaders. And the people with the deepest knowledge, the ones who know where the bodies are burie...

What if college is no longer the only path to a meaningful, high-paying career? In this episode of The Jim Stroud Podcast, Jim sits down with Reuben Ogbonna, co-founder and executive director of the Marcy Lab School, a tuition-free, one-year alternative to college helping young adults launch careers in tech. Reuben shares why the traditional higher education model is failing too many talented stud...

AI is reshaping work, hiring, dating, leadership, and how we connect. But as technology gets smarter, are we becoming less human? Jim Stroud talks with Victor Cho, CEO and founder of Emovid and former CEO of Evite, about empathy, leadership, automation, and building AI that amplifies people instead of replacing them. Learn more at www. Emovid.com. ... Victor ChoCEO and Co-Founder Emovid Corpvictor...

After months of rejections, a 58-year-old man decides to test the system. He submits two nearly identical job applications to the same company—one with his real work history and graduation year, the other carefully scrubbed of any age clues. One gets an immediate rejection. The other gets a callback. What starts as a quiet experiment to beat the algorithm quickly turns into something much darker o...

Are there really jobs out there, or just openings nobody plans to fill? In this episode, Jim Stroud breaks down the strange, tangled reality of today’s labor market, where job postings are up, hiring feels frozen, recruiters are stuck in limbo, and job seekers are losing trust in the system. The market is not booming. It is not collapsing. It is entangled. This episode brought to you by: The Recru...

Brought to you by: The Recruiting Life Newsletter - Clarity on what's happening now and next in the world of work. https://newsletter.jimstroud.com ... AI may not take your job overnight, but the spreadsheet might decide your team needs fewer people. In this episode, we move past the sci-fi panic and look at the real workplace question: how employers will use AI to change headcount, hiring, produc...

Gartner studied 350 executives at billion-dollar companies. Eighty percent had cut staff for AI. None of it correlated with higher returns. Goldman Sachs found the stock bounce is gone. Forrester predicted half of all AI-attributed layoffs would be reversed by 2027. The data is in, and it says the same thing from every angle: the cuts were theater. This episode breaks down who knew, who stayed qui...

Jim Stroud reports from the Recruiting Innovation Summit with Ben Mones, founder and CEO of Fama, to discuss how social media background checks are changing hiring. They unpack what employers actually look for online, what job seekers should and should not worry about, and why compliance, context, and public behavior matter in today’s screening process. Our guest: Ben Mones, CEO at Fama web: https...

What Your Face Is Worth at Work What if your career isn’t just shaped by your skills—but by your appearance? This episode dives into the rise of “looksmaxxing” and the uncomfortable truth about lookism in hiring and workplace success. As Gen Z responds to what gets rewarded, we’re forced to ask: Is this extreme behavior… or a logical reaction to a biased system? Because if merit isn’t the only fac...

It's 11:47 PM. You hit submit on another application and watch it dissolve into the void. You did everything right — the degree, the internship, the certifications squeezed between finals — and still, silence. That low ache behind your sternum? It's not anxiety. It's intelligence responding to a system nobody explained to you. Here's the truth the career center will never say out loud: the job mar...

You're panicking about the wrong thing. While you doomscroll about AI stealing your job, the real threat is gutting the workforce behind your back. No headlines. Just math. Picture a burst pipe. Wednesday morning. Water in your drywall. You call a plumber — and wait three weeks. Because he's 61, his apprentice retired, and the new kid doesn't exist. The skilled trades shortage is already costing t...