Edan Haddock - Total Talent 🇦🇺

LinkedIn was once one of the best places to make genuine professional connections. But what happens when the inbox becomes so noisy that we simply stop looking? In this episode of Edan Haddock - Total Talent , Edan tackles the growing flood of LinkedIn messages, from automated sales pitches and relentless follow-ups to the familiar “I just applied for your role and wanted to introduce myself.” Wit...

Two candidates. Two withdrawals. And the same concern: they weren’t comfortable working for an organisation that uses AI. In this episode of Edan Haddock – Total Talent , Edan explores a question we’re probably going to hear much more often: Can you boycott AI and still have a career? From legitimate concerns around creativity, the environment, privacy and job displacement, to the reality that AI...

After an unexpected two-week break following the loss of his father-in-law and a sudden trip to Scotland, Edan returns with a personal follow-up to his recent episode on capacity planning. What happens when the person spinning all the plates suddenly has to stop? Talent teams are managing interviews, candidates, hiring managers, offers, inboxes and the constant pressure to deliver a great candidat...

What if your best employee doesn’t want your job? In this episode of Edan Haddock – Total Talent , Edan challenges one of the most deeply embedded assumptions in the workplace: that ambition means moving up. What about the person who wants mastery, impact, purpose or simply a great life outside of work? And what if an exceptional candidate tells you upfront they only want to stay for a year or two...

The Talent Acquisition industry is nervous. Teams are shrinking, redundancies are happening, AI is accelerating and some of the work recruiters have traditionally owned is changing fast. So what do you do about it? In this episode, Edan Haddock argues that the answer isn’t to protect the traditional TA role. It’s to expand beyond it. Edan breaks down five capabilities internal Talent professionals...

Where does your professional brand end and your personal brand begin? In this episode, Edan Haddock explores how those lines are rapidly disappearing. Our opinions, expertise, personality, employers, online presence and professional reputation increasingly exist in the same place. But as personal branding becomes an industry of its own, have we started confusing visibility with credibility ? Edan...

In this episode Edan explores why access to information is no longer the competitive advantage it once was. In a world where AI can generate frameworks, answer questions and build strategies in seconds, the real value now lies in human experience, shared learning and professional community. Using the upcoming Startup People Summit as a real-world example, Edan reflects on the growing importance of...

For decades, organisations have been built around job descriptions, career pathways, salary bands and job architecture. But what happens when work evolves faster than we can redesign the roles themselves? In this episode, Edan Haddock explores a provocative question for the Workplace 5.0 era. What if the future isn't about hiring into predefined roles at all? As AI becomes part of our teams a...

In this episode of Edan Haddock – Total Talent , Edan introduces the concept of the Workforce Lab -  a new way of thinking about how organisations prepare for the future of work. As technology, AI and workforce expectations evolve at an unprecedented pace, Edan explores why traditional governance and annual workforce planning are no longer enough. Instead, he makes the case for creating dedicated...

Every Talent team has dashboards. Every Talent leader reports metrics. But are we measuring what really matters? In this episode, Edan Haddock explores the difference between operational recruitment metrics and true business intelligence. From Time to Hire and Cost per Hire through to succession risk, role criticality, performance, potential and workforce resilience, this episode challenges the wa...

Behavioural interviews, competency frameworks and reference checks are designed to uncover the truth. But what happens when the story itself is fiction? In this episode, Edan Haddock explores one of recruitment's most uncomfortable questions. Can candidates bluff their way through modern hiring processes? Where is the line between selling yourself and inventing achievements? And if references...

Pay transparency is one of the hottest topics in Talent today, but is listing a salary on every job ad really as simple as many people make it sound? In this episode, Edan Haddock explores the reality behind pay transparency, responding to the growing narrative that organisations not advertising remuneration are simply getting it wrong. Drawing on Movember's own journey to full pay transparen...

Talent Boards have become a familiar part of the HR and Talent landscape. But have we started mistaking governance for Talent Management itself? In this episode of Edan Haddock – Total Talent , Edan challenges one of the profession's accepted norms. He explores whether Talent Boards are simply a modern governance mechanism built on long-established Talent Management practices such as successi...

Talent Acquisition once operated under a simple assumption: pay people more and they'll join, stay and perform. But what happens when salary stops being a deciding factor? In this episode of Edan Haddock - Total Talent , Edan explores one of the biggest shifts happening in the world of work. Drawing on research, personal experience and observations from years spent in Talent Acquisition, he e...

In a world where everyone has a platform, an audience and now AI at their fingertips, has expertise become harder to recognise? In this episode, Edan Haddock explores the growing gap between visibility and credibility. Why are we increasingly mistaking confidence for competence, reach for expertise and content for capability? Has social media changed how we define experts? And what happens when op...

Everyone talks about the expanding scope of Talent. Nobody talks about the expanding reach. In this episode, Edan explores the reality of running global Talent portfolios from Australia. The early starts. The late-night calls. The 14-hour workday. The pressure to always be available across APAC, Europe and North America. As Talent evolves into Total Talent, are we creating sustainable careers or d...

LinkedIn used to be a professional networking platform.  Now? It feels more like performance art. In this episode of Edan Haddock - Total Talent, Edan unpacks the strange evolution of LinkedIn and what it’s doing to Recruitment, Talent Acquisition and leadership culture. From recruiter influencers and AI-generated thought leadership to performative vulnerability, personal branding and the rise of...

This week on Edan Haddock – Total Talent, Edan takes Talent Acquisition somewhere unexpected… Eurovision. As Australia steps onto the world stage once again, Edan explores why Australian Talent Acquisition still seems to seek permission to belong in the global conversation. From the dominance of the US and UK, to the rise of markets like Singapore and the Netherlands, this episode breaks down who...

In this episode of Edan Haddock - Total Talent , Edan Haddock explores why traditional workforce planning models are breaking in the era of AI and Workforce 5.0. As technology rapidly reshapes jobs and capability needs, Edan argues workforce planning can no longer sit solely between HR and Finance. Enter the “Workforce Triangle” - HR, Finance and Technology designing the future of work together. T...

In this episode, Edan Haddock unpacks Design Thinking through the Double Diamond model and why Talent Acquisition needs to stop jumping straight to hiring… and start designing better outcomes. Most TA teams are solving the wrong problem, just very efficiently. A role gets opened, a brief gets taken, and the machine kicks off without ever really understanding what’s broken underneath. This episode...

In this episode, Edan Haddock challenges the future of Talent Acquisition and whether it even has one. As AI, hiring managers, and access to talent reshape the hiring landscape, TA isn’t being replaced overnight… it’s being quietly stripped back. But the real tension? It’s not just external disruption. It’s that TA backed the wrong future. From the rise (and quiet stall) of skills marketplaces to...

In this episode, Edan Haddock calls out one of Talent’s biggest blind spots - EVP. For years, organisations have invested heavily in crafting the perfect Employer Value Proposition. But in a world where truth is decentralised, candidates no longer rely on what companies say… they rely on what employees share. So what happens when you don’t control the narrative anymore? Edan unpacks the shift from...

In this episode, Edan Haddock takes aim at one of the most outdated beliefs in hiring: that candidates who “move around a lot” are a problem. What if they’re not? From the collapse of traditional career paths to the rise of Workforce 5.0 and portfolio careers, Edan explores why the idea of loyalty tied to tenure no longer holds up and why Talent leaders might be filtering out exactly the people th...

In this episode, Edan Haddock challenges one of the biggest assumptions in Talent Acquisition. What if hiring isn’t a process to optimise… but a product to build? Most Talent teams are still operating like service desks. Taking briefs, filling roles, and measuring speed all while calling it strategy. But in a world shaped by AI, shifting candidate expectations, and constant organisational change,...

In this episode, Edan unpacks what happened when he was matched with a mentee through Movember’s MoMentor program - and why it made him question everything we think we know about mentoring. Drawing on a past conversation exploring Mother/Daughter relationships in the Drag world, he challenges the corporate model of mentoring as too safe, too polite, and too low impact. This episode explores a diff...