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The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast: Your weekly 60 minute dose of brilliant conversation about Recruiting & HR
Episodes
Friday Nov 28, 2025
Friday Nov 28, 2025
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 is going on the tools we rely on every day?
- Investment landscape in Worktech
- Sector breakdown...where is the VC going?
- Rise of AI sourcing tools
- Big deals, the M&A's - what does this mean?
- Linkedin Hiring Assistant
- Open AI jobs
- Monster / Career Builder Obit
- Mercor...
- Indeed, what is going on?
- Verticalised AI Agents, what are the implications for core platforms?
- ATS / HRIS combo - didn't happen?
- ATS / CRM - did happen?
- Job Candidate use of AI vs AI Assessment
- Rise of Verification / Background Checking
- What else is under-the-radar that we need to talk about?
We're with Alexander Chukovski, HR Tech Consultant, George LaRocque, Founder (WorkTech), Louise Triance, Founder (UK Recruiter) & friends on Friday 28th November, 2pm GMT
Register by click on the green button (save my spot) and follow the channel here (recommended) to be noticed when we go live.
Feeling buried under a backlog of disconnected tools, spammy applicants, and stalled workflows? This latest guide from Greenhouse shares how their innovative platform brings simplicity and control back to recruiting.
Discover how to:
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Centralize sourcing, scheduling, and reporting seamlessly
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Gain end-to-end visibility into pipeline health
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Cut through noise with fraud detection and smart automation
Friday Nov 21, 2025
Friday Nov 21, 2025
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 do we expect to see over the next 12 months?
We're going to be speaking with the C-level team at VONQ to better understand state of market.
- Recruitment Advertising 2025
- What are the available job advertising models?
- Which ones seem to be on the rise / on the decline?
- Niche vs Generalised Job Board advertising and relationship with business models
- AI-enabled Job Applications, how big an impact on job advertising?
- How does this force job advertising vendors to adapt?
- What are the mitigation strategies?
- AI Agents, verticalised vs generalised
- What can they do
- How does this impact candidate acquisition?
- What does Recruitment Advertising look like over the next 12 months?
We're with Ritu Mohanka, CEO & Bill Fischer, CTO, (VONQ) & friends on Friday 21st November, 2pm GMT. Register by clicking on the green button (save my spot) and follow the channel here (recommended) to be noticed when we go live.
Ep345 is sponsored by VONQ
Transform recruitment advertising by leveraging AI-driven technology, deep ATS integrations, and expertise to deliver high-quality candidates to the shortlist while elevating employer brands. Our solution is now available via over 100 Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and Human Capital Management (HCM) platforms, accessible to over 80% of the US and EU talent acquisition teams.
We have a +5000 global media channels network and back our solutions with reliable automation, data-driven recommendations, recruitment marketing expertise, programmatic advertising, and meaningful reporting.
Need to get more qualified, relevant and motivated job candidates at the top of the funnel? Get in touch with VONQ here
Friday Nov 14, 2025
Friday Nov 14, 2025
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 would have previously been reserved for high security roles.
What does all this mean for diversity and inclusion? That the question we're going to ask in today's Brainfood Live
- State of Candidate Fraud
- What are the potential concerns for D&I
- On premise, requires car
- More rigid work patterns is bad for primary care givers
- ID verification techniques depend on photo ID
- Bank records / Criminal records / Credit records
- Economically deprived are most likely to have disadvantage in ID verification processes
- Gender: name change for women married / divorce
- Trans: ID change, no longer recognised in some states?
- Ambiguity on legislation, concern over future direction
- How do we ensure that ID verification and candidate fraud mitigation steps do not over step into identity profiling and prejudice?
All this and more on brainfood live on air.
We're with Kyle Barry, CISO (Clear), Torin Ellis, Principal Analyst (The Torin Ellis Brand) & Daniel Chait, CEO (Greenhouse) on Friday 14th November, 2pm GMT.
Register by click on the green button (save my spot) and follow the channel here (recommended) to be noticed when we go live.
It’s tough out there for today’s recruiting teams.
The rise of AI, slashed recruiting budgets and lean teams have made candidate funnels more chaotic than ever. Take back control of your candidate pipeline with new Greenhouse features that help put an end to application overload, messy data, and disconnected tools.
Friday Nov 14, 2025
Friday Nov 14, 2025
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 hiring’ revives as employers describe deployment of AI assessment as commitment to SBH. %age of employers describing themselves as SBH increases 50%.
3. 2FA on job ads increases 400% as an attempt to suppress increased applicant flow.
4. Applications per job increase by 25% as AI-enablement mainstreams candidate side.
5. Big round of investment for AI voice interview vendors currently at Seed - $100M raised in this sector by EOY 2025.
6. Non-FTE vs FTE hiring increases by 10% in 2025.
7. Avg internal TA team goes 25% non-FTE.
8. Req load per recruiter increases 15%.
9. Percentage of solo TA function goes from 73% to 83%.
10. TA teams continue geographic dispersal - %age of TA teams with multinational component increases by 30%.
11. More companies decentralise talent acquisition - %age of employers where HM do outreach increases by 10%.
12. Candidate resentment stabilises - with 2% points either side of 2024 level.
13. ‘Chief Automation Officer’ becomes an industry talking point in 2025, same as Chief Diversity Officer in 2020.
14. Speaking of DEIB, clear Atlantic divergence in 2025 - US explicit retrench, Europe implicit progress.
15. US vs UK economic integration deepens - %age of new UK based TA jobs from US employers increases 100%.
16. Global Staffing agencies revenue / profit down another 10% (profit warning again in Q1 2025).
17. But medium sized agencies / RPO stage mini bounce back as employers push more requirements out from denuded TA teams.
18. RecOps, Talent Intelligence roles decline 20%, EB roles decline 30%. People & Culture roles increase 15%.
19. Somebody Ubersises the legions of fractional TA’s out there. Probably this is Indeed.
20. Over half of these predictions will be directionally incorrect, 20% will be absolutely incorrect.
What should the grading system be? I thinking a sliding scale A to E.
What should be the source of truth? That is where we will be bringing in experts from industry who can validate the claims.
It's going to be a good one folks.
Friday 14th November, 12pm GMT
Register by click on the green button (save my spot) and follow the channel here (recommended) to be noticed when we go live.
Ep 344 is sponsored by our friends Popp
Popp’s AI recruitment platform amplifies what your team can do by effortlessly and instantly scaling your recruiting capacity. Popp's recruitment platform sits between your ATS and your talent team, providing unprecedented hiring power at unlimited scale.
Our AI automates repetitive tasks throughout the hiring journey, intelligently and accurately. Meaning your team can focus on higher value tasks. Randstand, Robert Walters, Bloom & Wild, AMN Healthcare and more are using Popp to x10 their hiring capacity.
Want to know more?
Book a demo with one of Popp's friendly founding team
Friday Nov 07, 2025
Friday Nov 07, 2025
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 vocation is as tunnel focused as that of a professional athlete. You can imagine you cannot achieve elite performance without going all in. So what happens...when it doesn't happen and you have to switch?
We're going to bring in ex-pro athletes to help us better understand the techniques needed for transition.
- When did you know?
- What were the feelings when you knew it was time to change?
- Identity crisis: how did you handle the change of identity when changed?
- What are the internal and external challenges of switching into 'civilian' life?
- How did you choose your new path?
- What resources did you have to help guide you to a new path?
- How did you cope with the status change?
- Did you feel people treated differently now in civilian life?
- What does it feel like to work with a team / work by yourself?
- Have there been any techniques from elite sports which you have found useful in civilian life?
- What resources should be available for ex-pro athletes to more successfully transition?
- What resources should there be for other people from any other profession to transition?
- What are your top tips for successful career switch?
It's going to be a good one folks.
We're with Ben Stocken, Founder (West Peak) Charlie Mulraine, Personal Development (The Professional Cricketers Association), Agne Chmyznikova, Practice Lead (People & Transformation) on Friday 7th November, 2pm GMT
Register by click on the green button (save my spot) and follow the channel here (recommended) to be noticed when we go live.
Drive faster, more confident hiring decisions with native AI-Notetaking
Ashby’s AI Notetaker brings structured meeting data together with emails, notes, feedback, and more. It shortens time to feedback and provides rich candidate context, helping your team align quickly and make faster, more confident hiring decisions.
Spend less time typing and more time hiring with interview notes that practically write themselves.
Friday Oct 31, 2025
Friday Oct 31, 2025
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 does this mentality mean for how we allocate budget in talent acquisition? Today we're going to debate the issue with industry leaders who have experience of budget planning and have had to balance between competing priorities.
- Do we spend more on automation and less on payroll?
- Do we create a buffer to spend on RPO partners who can help us scale up capacity, whilst we retain a lean permanent staff?
- How about reducing payroll whilst maintaining headcount?
- Do we spend on hiring entry level talent and ramp up with intensive AI upskilling?
- What does the future look like in 2030 and should we start budgeting to a longer term framework?
- How much recruiting work do we expect hiring managers to be doing in 2030?
- Should we invest in diversification in related fields, adjacent to Talent Acquisition?
- Do we go large with enterprise grade master software, or continue with a core platform + point solutions?
- What about training and development?
- Do we even talk about DEIB today?
All this and more as we discuss how the changing world of work, is being reflected in the changing priorities of for the talent acquisition function,
With industry heavyweights Johnny Campbell, CEO (Social Talent), Elaine Atkinson, Leadership Coach (In Wonder Coaching), Kobi Ampoma, Head of Talent Acquisition (The HEINEKEN Company) & friends,
We are on Friday 31st October, 2pm GMT follow the channel here (recommended) and save your spotfor this demo by clicking on the green button.
It’s tough out there for today’s recruiting teams.
The rise of AI, slashed recruiting budgets and lean teams have made candidate funnels more chaotic than ever. Take back control of your candidate pipeline with new Greenhouse features that help put an end to application overload, messy data, and disconnected tools.
Thursday Oct 30, 2025
Thursday Oct 30, 2025
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 way to cut through the chaos: Recruiter Enablement.
Join us live for a demo, discussion, and Q&A on Weds 29th October, 1230PM PT / 330pm ET follow the channel here (recommended) and save your spot for this demo by clicking on the green button.
Friday Oct 24, 2025
Friday Oct 24, 2025
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 are the current theories about why feedback is needed?
- What are the stories we tell ourselves about why we need feedback?
- What is really going on?
- Why is feedback particularly challenging in recruitment?
- Are there unusual psychological conditions in the context of job search which make feedback both difficult give and difficult to give well?
- Why do candidates vary in their demands for feedback?
- Under what conditions are candidates most upset about the job search experience?
- Will increased training help, or does this require simply more capacity on behalf of the recruiters?
- Are incentives correctly aligned for good feedback to be provided?
- What technology innovations can change the dynamic behind persistence bad feedback experience?
All this and more with brainfood favourite and professional psychologist, author and coach Nikolai Mihailov.
Ep340 is sponsored by our friends BrightHire
BrightHire, the AI copilot for exceptional hiring used by hundreds of game-changing companies like Canva, Vercel, Multiverse, up to the Fortune 500.
Thursday Oct 23, 2025
Thursday Oct 23, 2025
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 - across 1300+ organisations, 50+_ organisations and tens of thousands of interviews, researchers using BrightHire proprietary data track what is actually happening in this crucial step of the process.
The insight reveals challenges to which we will in recruitment have an urgency in handling.
(a) the gap between what JDs communicate to candidates are the critical qualifications for positions vs. what's actually covered in interviews
(b) the effectiveness of interviews in the evaluation of skills
(c) the extent to which interviews are evaluating for AI skills
We're doing a Brainfood Live special with BrightHire CEO Ben Sesser and William Leeds, Head of Data Science - we're going through this research with the Harvard Business Review!
We are on Thursday 23rd October, 4pm BST / 11am ET - follow the channel here (recommended) and save your spot for this demo by clicking on the green button.
Ep334 is sponsored by our friends BrightHire
BrightHire, the AI copilot for exceptional hiring used by hundreds of game-changing companies like Canva, Vercel, Multiverse, up to the Fortune 500.
Sunday Oct 19, 2025
Sunday Oct 19, 2025
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 to tell us what this world looks like better than ESIX - the premier community of Corporate Exec Search professionals. With thousands of members, across hundreds of the top employers in the world, ESIX have access to the collective intelligence of what hiring has been like the internal headhunters.
I'm delighted to invite ESIX Chairman, Simon Mullins to do a 1-2-1 with us and share data from ESIX Annual Benchmark report on how Corp Exec Search is operating - from budget allocation, tool usage, role profile and state of the leadership job market. We might even get a glimpse of some data which is usually members only
We are on Friday 17th October, 2pm BST follow the channel here (recommended) and save your spot for this demo by clicking on the green button.
Fraudulent candidates in hiring pipelines are increasingly draining recruiting teams time and attention. In extreme cases they pose security risks. Launching this week, Ashby’s new feature automatically detects fraud signals so your team can mark candidates as fraudulent during your application review helping you focus on real candidates - all without disrupting the candidate experience.
Live Webinar: AI Notetaker in Action and see what’s next for AI at Ashby
Ashby’s All-in-One recruiting software spans ATS, Scheduling, CRM & Sourcing, and Analytics, and now they’re adding AI Notetaking to a platform already infused with useful AI.Their new AI Notetaker records, transcribes, and structures your meeting notes to help you make faster, more confident hiring decisions. In the event, you’ll also learn how Ashby is uniquely suited to help teams adopt AI responsibly while preparing for an AI and agent-oriented future.