The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast

THE STATE OF THE TALENT ACQUISITION & HR JOB MARKET Q 2026   The talent acquisition and HR profession is facing its own reckoning. After years of contraction, cautious hiring, automation investment, and cost discipline, the very functions built to fuel growth are now navigating scarcity themselves. In this livestream, The State of the Talent Acquisition & HR Job Market Q1 2026, we’ll unpac...

THE RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING BENCHMARK REPORT 2026   The labor market story of 2026 cannot be told through a single headline. Behind the macro narrative of cooling growth lies a structural split that is reshaping how recruiting actually works. In this livestream, we’ll break down Joveo’s Recruiting Benchmarks Report 2026 and discuss 9x surge in applicant volume for some roles to the persistent drou...

HOW TO HIRE IN SOUTH AFRICA IN 2026   Friends, I am back in South Africa, in one of my favourite cities for one of my favourite conferences, Recruiters Unite!   As has become tradition, we're going to do a Brainfood Live on the day the event, to speak to local South African recruiters and discuss the main challenges in hiring in South Africa in 2026. We hope to share knowledge between local recrui...

THE AI IN HIRING REPORT 2026   AI now shapes how candidates are discovered, evaluated, progressed, and hired. What began as productivity tooling has become a decision-making layer across the hiring funnel, influencing speed, fairness, quality, and outcomes at scale. As adoption accelerates, the focus has shifted from novelty to impact: what AI is actually doing inside hiring workflows, where it ad...

FROM TALENT ACQUISITION TO TALENT OPERATIONS is a forward-looking show for TA leaders who can feel the function changing - but need clarity on what it is becoming.     We’ll examine the rise of talent operations as a distinct capability, driven by automation across scheduling, screening, compliance, and workflow management. As logistics are increasingly handled by platforms and AI, the skills that...

REDUCTION IN FORCE: HOW TO LEAD DURING CRISIS!   This show focuses on the practical reality of TA downsizing, told by leaders who have already been through it. Not theory. Not platitudes. Real decisions, real mistakes, and hard-won lessons. We explore how leaders decide when reductions are unavoidable, who to let go, and how to do it in a way that is fair, defensible, and humane—while still protec...

THE STATE OF TALENT INTELLIGENCE 2026   As we barrel through the year 2026, labour markets are being redefined by emerging technologies, shifting skills demand, and data-driven workforce strategies. Organisations worldwide are adopting sophisticated talent intelligence tools to forecast skills gaps, optimise hiring, and build resilient workforces — but staying ahead requires deeper insight and exp...

WHAT RESPONSIBLE AI MEANS FOR RECRUITERS?   What is Responsible AI for Talent Acquisition Teams? is a practical, straight-talking podcast for recruiters who are already using AI—and now need to make sure they’re using it properly.   AI is no longer a future experiment in hiring. It’s embedded in sourcing, screening, assessment, and workforce planning. The real question facing TA leaders today is n...

6 x AI USAGE FRAMEWORKS FOR TALENT ACQUISITION   Closing the gap between proclaimed capability of AI vs the practical impact of AI is set to become one of the main stories of 2026, as function leaders in every department scramble to deliver against the expectations of an increasingly impatient C-level.   Are there any frameworks or maturity models which can help?   Brainfooder Soeren Winter has id...

WHY YOU NEED RECOPS TO ACCELERATE AI IN TA   Recruiters are the busiest people in white collar work because there is often no way to accurately forecast resource demands - you never know how long a requirement is going to take to fill or how many hours of time it is going to take to get it done. People are variable and in recruitment, there are people who will impact the state of any project, who...

TOO COMPLEX FOR AI? HOW POLICE SCOTLAND SOLVED THE UNSOLVABLE HIRING PUZZLE   Most recruiters think their organisation is too "unique" or "complex" to trust AI. Then there is Police Scotland. Operating across 13 regions, managing 22,000+ staff, and balancing the hyper-sensitive vetting requirements, their hiring process is as high-stakes as it gets. Yet, they didn't just implement AI—they used it...

TALENT STRATEGY: WHAT, WHY, HOW AND WHEN   Does your company have a talent strategy?   It's probably the right thing to say that you do, but how much do we know about what a Talent Strategy is really? I asked this question within the Brainfood community and received some outstanding observations, so much so that we have to elevate this to a full discussion on Brainfood Live.   “Talent strategy is...

VIBE SOURCING 101: LEARN TO SOURCE FROM THE WEB & YOUR ATS WITH METAVIEW AI AGENT   We are going to look back at 2025 as the year it all changed for sourcing. AI Agents entered the market and immediately began to demonstrate talent acquisition teams could become massively more efficient by leverage the increasable ability of AI Agents to ingest huge amounts of candidate data and instantly retu...

HIRING BENCHMARKS FOR THE 16 MOST COMMON OCCUPATIONS IN THE USA   We all want to be 'data driven' but most of the time the only data we have access to are those which we have recorded of ourselves and our own activity. This is vitally important for tracking your progress over time, but not the complete picture when it comes to how you are doing against the market and against the competition.   In...

Informing Happy Hiring: Signals from Willo's Hiring Intelligence Report 2026   This year, Willo didn’t just watch hiring change, they measured it.   In this episode of Brainfood Live on Air, we’ll explore what the data from Willo’s Hiring Intelligence Report 2026 reveals about how hiring teams are actually operating in the AI-era, how this compares to previous years, and what that means as we look...

REVIEW OF THE YEAR 2025 - Economy & AI   Final part of our 4 part series on the Review of the Year. The two dominant mega themes of this year has undoubtedly been the global economy and the rise of AI. The two are becoming intertwined, especially with the AI investment boom drawing down investments from other parts of the US economy, whilst Trump Trade War 2.0 hobbles global economic growth, l...

REVIEW OF THE YEAR 2025 - Sourcing, Employer Branding & RecOps   Third of our 4 part series reviewing the major events and trends of the year in Sourcing, Employer Branding & RecOps What has happened this year that we got on talk about?   - End of an Era? Irina Shamaeva - SOSU review - Is Sourcing dead or shifting toward automation of candidate discovery? - Demand for sourcing training bei...

FRAUD PROOF AI? - ENDORSED LIVE DEMO   We will look back at 2025 as the year when candidate fraud escalated into amongst the top priorities of employers looking who were still looking to hire but also now needing to securitise their companies from risk.   Huge credit goes to technology vendors for responding to the demand - and we're seeing a lot of interesting techniques deployed to identify pote...

REVIEW OF THE YEAR 2025 - CX, Assessment & DEIB   Second of our 4 part series reviewing the major events and trends of the year in CX, Assessment and DEIB. What has happened this year that we got on talk about??   - Mobley vs Workday, let's get an update on this, the quintessential CX challenge! - CX resentment rate...where are we tracking on this? - What do we know about AI and CX, can we see...

REVIEW OF THE YEAR 2025 - TALENT TECHNOLOGY   Can you believe that we're at the end of another year in Brainfood?   As is tradition, we're going to do a 4 part series to conclude the year - and I will be a 4 part series where we review the major events and trends which have occurred on all the topics which matter to us. To kick off the series, let's talk about the the talent tech landscape - what...

RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING ....WITH AI AGENTS?   We may look back at 2025 has a pivotal year in online job advertising. Economic chaos, investment uncertainty, rise of AI, has made employers change how they think about headcount and are increasingly scrutinising the ROI of traditional job distribution. The flood of irrelevant applications has more or less killed the ppc model - what other iterations...

Diversity & Inclusion in an Era of Emerging AI and Cyberthreats   The rise of candidate fraud has been a huge topic in recruitment in 2025, so much so that employers have had to take extreme steps to protect their businesses, from asking candidates to physically move on command in front of screen to come in person to attend interview on premise, to go through ID verification procedures which w...

GRADING MY RECRUITMENT FORECASTS FOR 2025   Every year I write a long post making 20 predictions for the year ahead. This year, for the first time ever, I'm going to grade my predictions and see how I have got on   20 x Predictions for Recruiting in 2025   1. AI Assessment mainstreams; 50% of high volume hirers (more than 5000 hires per year) will have a solution in place by EOY. 2. ‘Skill based h...

CAREER TRANSITION - LESSONS FROM EX-PRO ATHLETES   Changing career is never easy, especially if you've committed everything into a vocation which you might have thought to be your whole of life focus. I know well myself, having previously attempted to go down the tech entrepreneur path but now very happily but very fortuitously landing into what seems to be a media business!   Perhaps no other voc...

BUDGETING FOR AN AI-ENABLED TALENT ACQUISITION FUNCTION   We're racing toward the end of the year and inevitably attention turns to plans for the future. But today we face a future which is increasingly difficult to predict and where agility, resilience and ability to quickly pivot without loss of performance are the qualities every function needs to develop to maintain value to the business. What...