The Changing State of Talent Acquisition

This week we welcome Chandan Golla to the podcast. Chandan is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer for Included.ai, a DEI-first people analytics platform. Prior to co-founding Included.ai, Chandan spent more than 20 years delivering compelling experiences powered by data, having led product teams at eBay, OneTrust, and Integris Software. Topics include: the “touchy feely” nature of DEI efforts his...

This week we welcome Adam Jackson to the podcast. Adam is a serial entrepreneur (Dr. On Demand, DriverSide.com, MarketSquare.com), startup advisor, and technology investor (Cambrian Asset Management). Adam’s most recent venture, Braintrust, is the first and largest decentralized talent network completely controlled by its users. Topics include: the distinction between user-owned networks and corpo...

This week we welcome Delfina Stabile and Xavi Martinez Salcedo to the podcast. Delfina began her career in Buenos Aires, where she worked as a Recruiting Analyst for Michael Page, before joining Uber—first out of Mexico City, and currently out of San Francisco, where she serves as Talent Attraction Manager. Prior to joining Uber, where he currently serves as Head of Global Strategic Initiatives, T...

This week we welcome Amit Parmar to the podcast. With more than 16 years of experience in technology and human capital management, Amit spent time at IBM, Deloitte, and Unisys before founding Cliquify, an AI-powered content marketing platform that drives equity in recruitment. Topics include: the fourth industrial revolution, how AI makes the current revolution more “sophisticated” than previous i...

Episode Description This week we welcome Jeffrey Spector to the podcast. Jeffrey spent more than six years at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he served as Chief of Staff to Melinda Gates, before co-founding Karat, a service that helps CTO’s and CHRO’s make technical interviewing a customer-centric experience.  Topics include: the surging demand for software engineers, the parallels...

This week we welcome Lindsay Witcher to the podcast. As a member of Randstad RiseSmart's global leadership team, Lindsay guides the development of solutions that empower talent leaders to successfully manage mobility within their organizations. We sat down to discuss her recent article, “DeBunking 4 Myths About Reskilling Your Workforce.” Topics include: the connection between the current lab...

This week we welcome Ali Hackett to the podcast. After starting her career in the agency world, Ali spent more than 15 years as a talent acquisition and employer brand consultant before co-founding Meet & Engage, an award winning candidate experience technology. We sat down to discuss virtual hiring events in a post-pandemic recruiting landscape. Topics include: how the pandemic has accelerate...

This week we welcome Bryan Adams to the podcast. As Founder and CEO of Ph. Creative, a leading employer branding and talent attraction agency, Bryan has spent more than 17 years helping organizations build world-class employer brands. His creative, unconventional and even controversial methodologies have changed the way people think about employer branding and EVP’s. We sat down to discuss the sta...

This week we welcome Raghav Singh to the podcast. Raghav’s career in talent acquisition spans more than 30 years, including chapters at Taleo (where he served as Product Manager from 2000-2004), UnitedHealthGroup, KornFerry, and Salesforce, where he currently serves as Director of Product leading a team building HR and talent acquisition products. Raghav also regularly appears as an author in note...

This week we welcome Scott MacGregor to the podcast. Prior to entering the world of talent acquisition, Scott spent 17 years as Chief Revenue Officer for Flo-Tech, where he saw the company grow from five employees to more than 300. Along the way, his experiences with recruiting systems and processes led him to believe that talent acquisition is fundamentally broken, which inspired him to start his...

This week we welcome Lindsay Pedersen to the podcast. Lindsay spent her early career as a brand manager at Clorox before starting her own brand strategy consulting firm, Ironclad Brand Strategy. Her recent book, “Forging an Ironclad Brand: A Leader’s Guide” provides an accessible overview of what branding is (and isn’t) and offers a multitude of real world examples to demonstrate how strong brands...

This week we welcome Hung Lee to the podcast. With more than 20 years of recruiting experience, Hung is the creator and curator of the wildly popular “Recruiting Brainfood” newsletter and community, and Founder of Workshape.io, a next generation matching service for tech talent. Topics include: the origin and growth of Recruiting Brainfood, the historical nature of resumes, alternative approaches...

This week we welcome Aaron Kraljev to the podcast. Aaron began his career at Wells Fargo, where he served as VP - Marketing Program Manager for the Student Banking Program, before transitioning in 2009 to lead the organization’s employer brand and candidate advocacy program. At the time, the concept of employer branding was still in its infancy, uniquely positioning Aaron to watch the industry evo...

This week we welcome Vivek Ravisankar, CEO of HackerRank, to the podcast. Vivek co-founded HackerRank in 2012 with the mission of using skills assessments to match developers with the right jobs. Since then, the company has helped more than 2,000 organizations go beyond résumés and ‘pedigree’ to find talent with proven programming skills.  Topics include: the advantages and limitations of using ré...

This week we welcome Francis Suarez, Mayor of Miami, to the podcast. Mayor Suarez made news in recent months with his Twitter activity promoting Miami as the next Silicon Valley. We sat down to discuss the tweet that went viral, how Miami is capitalizing on this “lightning in a bottle” moment, and the city’s efforts to build a workforce development pipeline for tech talent of the future.      Topi...

This week we welcome Ashutosh Garg to the podcast. Ashutosh is CEO & Co-founder of Eightfold.ai, the first Talent Intelligence Platform to address the talent gap by harnessing the power of AI and search, and Founder of Bloomreach, a leading vendor for Digital Experience Platforms. Prior to founding these enterprises, Ashutosh managed Search and Personalization efforts at both Google and IBM Re...

This week we welcome Alysha M. Campbell to the podcast. With more than a decade of experience as both a recruiter and HR business partner, Alysha is currently Founder and Principal of CultureShift HR, where she helps companies utilize and engage their best talent while creating diverse and purposeful work environments that help businesses grow and thrive. Topics include: the meaning of culture in...

This week we welcome Laurie Ruettimann to the podcast. As the face of the popular “Punk Rock HR” podcast, Laurie will need no introduction for many of our listeners. Laurie began her career working in HR operations and recruiting for such organizations as Monsanto, Alberto-Culver (now Unilever), and Pfizer, before leaving corporate America altogether to speak truth to power through her websites (T...

In our final episode of 2020, we are guest-free and share our reflections on Change State’s second year in business, the lessons we learned along the way, and the topics and trends we’ll be watching as we look ahead to the new year. Topics include: Change State’s growth during a pandemic year, the value of founder-created content for organic business growth, the challenges of starting a content en...

This week we welcome Kelly Robinson to the podcast. Kelly has founded numerous ventures in the talent acquisition space, including a staffing firm (MECS Communications), a job distribution platform (Broadbean), a marketing content sharing tool (Paiger), and most recently, RedDotMedia, a recruitment marketing agency. Topics include: the future of business travel, Graham’s beard, why many organizati...

This week we welcome Elliott Garms to the podcast. Elliott’s career in talent acquisition dates back to childhood, when he helped run his father’s executive search business out of the family basement. Much has changed since these early days of manually inputting paper resumes into a then-new-fangled system called an ATS; Elliott went on to found or co-found numerous tech recruiting ventures, inclu...

This week we welcome Mahe Bayireddi to the podcast. As a member of Forbes Technology Council, Mahe has co-founded multiple startups, including BHSP Nexus Software Consulting, BijaHealth, SnipSnap, and most recently, Phenom, where he currently leads as Chief Executive Officer. Topics include: why effective leaders must be effective recruiters, Phenom’s audacious goal of helping one billion people f...

This week we’re guest-free and discuss the nominees for Recruiting Brief’s MVP award in the category of employer branding as well as Glassdoor’s new “Review Intelligence” offering. Topics include: the impact of COVID on employer brands, the ways in which our predictions in March proved (in)accurate, whether an organization’s pandemic response is a basis for a differentiated employer brand, the ris...

This week we welcome Richard Carsley to the podcast. Rick has led talent acquisition teams at a number of well-known brands, including Farmers Insurance, Bankers Life and Casualty Company, TSYS, IKEA, and most recently, Freedom Mortgage, where he currently serves as Director of Talent Acquisition.  Topics include: the superiority of Wawa pizza subs, the FinTech recruitment landscape during the 202...

This week we welcome Morgan Llewellyn to the podcast. As a trained data scientist, Morgan shares his wealth of experience from a career spanning multiple industries, with stints at Salesforce, Predictive Partner, and eventually Jobvite, where he currently serves as Chief Data Scientist. Topics include: the history and purview of “data science,” how the explosion of available data in recent years h...