The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast

FASTER, SMARTER, MORE HUMAN: THE FUTURE OF RECRUITER ENABLEMENT.   Hiring has never been harder.   Recruiters are under pressure to move fast, personalise outreach, and tell a story candidates believe in.   But here’s the problem: recruiters don’t have the same tools that sales or marketing teams take for granted.   I’m teaming up with Vouch to show how recruiters can finally catch up — with a new...

A PSYCHOLOGISTS TAKE ON CANDIDATE FEEDBACK.   Bad feedback - or no feedback - is perhaps the most common criticism by job candidates looking for work. Why is feedback important, and why do recruiters do this so badly? We're going to take the psychologists perspective one of the most persistent problems in our industry and see whether we can learn from a field of study outside of our own!   - What...

INTERVIEWS AREN'T EVALUATING THE RIGHT SKILLS: INSIGHTS FROM ANALYSING 1,311 INTERVIEW LOOPS   What is actually happening at interviews?   It's the most critical part of any assessment process yet it is also the one which we know least about, not least because we've never had the means to really study them at scale. That is why this latest research from Harvard Business Review is so significant -...

ANNUAL BENCHMARK REPORT 2025: CORPORATE EXECUTIVE SEARCH   There probably isn't a recruitment function more shrouded in mystery than Corporate Exec Search! This is hiring for the function leaders who will make disproportionate impact on your organisations bottom line and often involves a high degree of discretion, especially as incumbent-in-place is a common scenario.   For organisations are able...

RECRUITMENT AGENCY: 2028!   It's been an incredibly challenging 3 year period for the staffing agency market. Hostile de-globalisation, End of ZIRP, and the Rise of AI has prompted employers to radically rethinking their workforce requirements - and in the case of many of the highest paying sectors - finance, technology, consultancy - reduce absolute number of heads in order to do more with less....

RECRUITERS: SAY HELLO TO YOUR NEW CO-WORKERS ARCHER, CHASE & THENA! (LIVE DEMO OF AI AGENTS)   Is your recruitment supplier talking to you about AI Agents? Well this is the show where we challenge the founders to come on screen to live demo their new AI workers to the brainfood audience!   Not content will one agent, our friends at hackajob are have launched no less than three at the same time...

FRAUD SIGNALS: AI, JOB CANDIDATES & THE CYBERSECURITY OF RECRUITMENT   The rise of AI and AI Agents will fundamentally change the way in which we discover information. We are heading into a future which will everything digital will be mediated first by AI. This has huge implications in many aspects of professional work, with job search and hiring perhaps being one of the first areas of work wh...

WHAT HAPPENS TO RECRUITMENT WHEN AI IS YOUR COPILOT?   2025 will turn out to be the year when AI Agents mainstreamed into the recruiting profession. We're going to move past the semantic conversations on what is or is not 'Agentic AI' and simply get on with working with software which is going to do a lot of the heavy lifting work for us.   I think we will be surprised in two ways: how effective t...

TALENT POOLING: LESSONS FROM TA COMMUNITY BUILDERS   We all know that it easier to get engagement from people who already know you or your brand. Have a think about how you respond to known contacts in WhatsApp vs unknown callers on your phone! As we move toward a world where AI generated communication will come to dominate, we can anticipate that the establishment of trust relationships with your...

GHOSTING: WHY THE AI JOB APPLICATION TSUNAMI IS NO EXCUSE   Diffusion of technology innovation across society is something to be celebrated. We need to be aware of the challenges to existing structures that this will inevitably bring and refactor our processes to account for the changes. One of the first ways in which employers are experiencing this challenge is in how to handle the increased volu...

NEW RECRUITMENT KPI'S FOR TOMORROW'S TALENT ACQUISITION   We are beginning to see some step change improvements in recruiter capability. The promise of AI has been overblown in many areas, but it is clear huge efficiency gains have been seen in areas such as sourcing, CV review, interview note taking, interview scheduling and more. These are areas which previously took large teams for recruiters a...

IMPACT OF AI IN THE BLUE CHIP GRADUATE CAREER   In the before times, the passport to comfortable middle class prosperity was go to a good University, get a 2.1 or above, and apply to a graduate scheme with a blue chip organisation. Most attractive were the global professional services firms - McKinsey, Accenture, PwC, KPMG, BCG and the rest. With the advent of AI replacing a great deal of the know...

REALITIES OF AI - INSIGHT & ANALYSIS FROM 1000 HEADS OF TA   Get ahead of the AI curve with exclusive first-look insights from Fosway Group’s cutting-edge ‘Realities of AI’ research. Sven Elbert unpacks the biggest trends, priorities, and pain points Talent Acquisition leaders will face in 2025. Expect sharp analysis, no-nonsense guidance, and practical, data-driven advice to help you build sm...

SEO FOR LLM'S? WHAT TALENT ACQUISITION AND EMPLOYER BRANDING HAVE TO KNOW   Generative AI is transforming the way people discover and research employers - and it’s happening faster than most Talent Acquisition teams realise.   Google’s own research reveals a 30% drop in clicks from traditional search in 2025 alone, as AI-generated summaries answer more user queries before anyone lands on your site...

HOW MUCH CAN YOUR TALENT ACQUISITION TEAM DO? CAPACITY PLANNING IN THE ERA OF AI   Working out how much capacity you have as a TA leader is pretty much critical to doing your job properly; in fact, it be one of the top three most important things a TA leader should be doing. How do we most effectively do this - does anyone have a framework? Better yet, does anyone have the experience?   We're goin...

OVERCOMING IMPOSTER SYNDROME: LEADERSHIP LESSONS FROM EXEC COACHING   'Imposter Syndrome' is perhaps one of the most well known of psychological phenomena, one which many of us are undoubtedly familiar. Why is it that we tell ourselves that we do not belong, are that we are not worthy of the role or the moment?   Let's dive into the psychology of imposter syndrome and see if we can find practical...

Automate or Augment? Quarterly Spot Check on the State of AI in TA   With ChatGPT5 round the corner, as well as the release of ChatGPT Agent by Open AI, we are soon to see mass distribution of the next generation of AI. The innovation rate is cycling too fast for any one of us to accurately keep pace so I am going to do a regular quarterly check in on AI adoption in TA / HR and Recruitment use cas...

RecOps & AI: TECHNIQUES TO ACCELERATE AI ADOPTION   Recruitment Operations developed as a distinct function with Talent Acquisition with a purpose of ensuring the entire recruiting function operated as efficiently and as resiliently as possible. This was BEFORE the advent of Artificial Intelligence, so what is the situation in 2025 when AI powered efficiency are the No1, 2 and 3 priorities for...

HUMANS REQUIRED: CRITICAL MOMENTS IN THE HIRING PROCESS   How many times have we heard the comforting phrase 'but recruitment will always need the human touch'?   Intuitively, I believe this is true at least for non-volume, permanent hiring but but do we really understand why, when, who and how? We probably need to find out because if we rely on comforting homilies, we might find the CFO won't qui...

CANDIDATE FRAUD: HARDENING THE HIRING FUNNEL WITH INFOSEC TECHNIQUES   Candidate fraud is already a problem for some today but it will soon be a huge problem for everyone tomorrow. The uncomfortable truth is that AI will undermine trust in all digital communications and we need to rethink our recruitment approaches with security much higher in the priority list. It might even be said that security...

STRATEGIC WORKFORCE PLANNING IN AN AGENTIC WORLD   Recruiters have long said that stronger SWP would solve all recruitment problems - if the business only told us with a bit more notice what they were looking for! But now with AI Agents becoming a population in the workforce, can we really know what the right size for a team is anymore?   We're taking a deep dive into the world of talent intellige...

Forget Filters: 1,000 AI Recruiters On-Demand - ENDORSED LIVE DEMO   It should go without saying that finding suitable candidates is the primary purpose of recruiting. The promise of Artificial Intelligence is enabling more companies to do that more effectively than ever before. What does next generation sourcing tech actually look like?   We're continuing our Live Demo series by challenging the f...

COMPANY CULTURE: AI FIRST VS HUMAN CENTRED?   We know the right answer is 'both' but really - when push comes to shove - what is the driving principle in how you build your business? Two emerging philosophies are driving the decision making in companies - lets use Brainfood Live to figure out which one is going to be the right one when it comes your business   - What is AI First? - What is Human C...

STATE OF TALENT ACQUISITION: THE RECFEST REVIEW 2025   Recfest is the largest in person event for Talent Acquisition professionals and the perfect barometer for the state of the market. Let's see what we learn from the 100+ talks and conversations with 1000's of delegates who will have attended the industry's premier event.   We will review   - RecFest main themes - UK Economy vs Global Macro - AI...

HOW TO ASSESS JOB CANDIDATES FOR AI LITERACY?   There is no company in the world that is not interested in becoming more AI-enabled. One of the ways to do this is directly relevant to us - recruit new people who can bring up the level of AI literacy in the workforce. In a direct analogy to the digitisation wave of the early 2000's, we now have the AI wave of the 2020's - becoming AI-enabled by hir...