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Recruiting Future with Matt Alder – What’s Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring? — Business
Recruiting Future with Matt Alder – What’s Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?

Talent acquisition is undergoing unprecedented disruption as AI, economic uncertainty, and the ever-shortening lifespan of skills radically reshape recruiting. On Recruiting Future, Matt Alder explores this evolving landscape, using insightful interviews with transformational TA practitioners and forward-thinking experts to spark your imagination and provide the insights you need to shape the future of talent acquisition in your organization.
Each episode explores topics such as AI, recruiting automation, recruitment marketing, employer branding, skills-based hiring, assessment, candidate experience, DEI, internal mobility, and the transformation of TA teams. Recruiting Future is an essential resource for everyone involved in hiring.
Matt Alder is a globally respected talent acquisition futurist, author, and speaker with over 25 years of experience exploring what’s next in recruiting. Renowned for his expertise in strategic foresight and technology trends, Matt provides a unique perspective that empowers leaders to navigate disruption. His deep industry knowledge and ability to spark meaningful conversations make Recruiting Future a must-listen for talent acquisition and HR professionals everywhere.

Latest Episodes:

Ep 813: The Strategic Case For Sourcing Aug 05, 2026

Show notes

AI has disrupted the dynamics of hiring. Candidates can now apply to hundreds of roles in a single click, while legal and regulatory constraints limit how far recruiters can use AI to review what comes in. The result is a flood of applications that keeps growing because so little of it gets properly reviewed. With the inbound recruiting channel under this much pressure, sourcing offers a different equation; it's a channel where employers set the quality bar themselves, and AI has fundamentally changed what it can deliver. The implications reach beyond pipeline quality. New approaches to sourcing could transform the candidate experience and open career paths that traditional hiring would never have surfaced.

So what does it take to make sourcing a genuine strategic priority?

My guest this week is David Paffenholz, Co-Founder and CEO of Juicebox. In our conversation David explains what is driving the inbound challenges, how AI is transforming what sourcing can do, why every role could get the executive search treatment, and what this could all mean for candidates and their careers.

In the interview, we discuss:

The paradox of record application volumes and persistent skill shortages

Why candidates are using AI more effectively than employers

How bulk applying is creating a self-reinforcing loop that is breaking inbound

The business case for making sourcing a strategic priority

Exponentially improving the candidate experience

Treating every role like an executive search

Human judgment and the changing role of the recruiter

How skills-based matching could unlock career mobility and evidence that it is already happening

What does the future look like?

Juicebox

https://juicebox.ai/

David on LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-paffenholz/

Ep 812: Who Trains The Human In The Loop? Jul 29, 2026

Show notes

For the last few years, most corporate conversations about AI have been about efficiency, automating tasks, and reducing headcount. That conversation is now starting to change, with more attention on what constant AI use is doing to the human capabilities organizations depend on.

Judgment sits at the center of this. It develops through years of hands-on experience, often in exactly the kind of junior work AI is now taking over. With many employers also hiring fewer entry-level people, developing the leaders of the future is becoming a serious challenge.

So how do organizations use AI to amplify human capability rather than erode it?

My guest this week is Johan Roos, Professor in Strategy at Hult International Business School and author of the new book Human Magic: Leading with Wisdom in an Age of Algorithms. In our conversation, Johan shares why the AI conversation is changing, the human capabilities that now matter most, and the practical choices employers face in developing judgment for the future.

In the interview, we discuss:

The dual mood of AI anxiety and excitement

Moving the AI conversation beyond efficiency

Amplification versus erosion of human capability

The five human capabilities that matter most

Why judgment comes from experience

The risks of cutting entry-level hiring

Thinking in tasks, not people

Building an agentic workforce without cutting jobs

Early warning indicators of talent risk

Bionic collaboration and what the future looks like

https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/recruiting-future-podcast/id963756980?mt=2&ls=1

https://open.spotify.com/show/4u3Gl0l4pGBtIHOJZjLTrx?si=49641466567e44d6

https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjohanroos/

A full transcript will appear here shortly.

Ep 811: The Hiring Problems Technology Can't Fix Jul 28, 2026

Show notes

TA leaders are under real pressure to keep up with AI, new tools, and what they think other employers are doing. In that rush, a lot of functions are spending heavily on new technology without first understanding whether their existing processes are working, only to find the real problem was something no platform could have fixed. Getting this right means doing the internal work first, auditing what's already in place, and being honest about organizational readiness.

So what does it take to turn the lens inward before looking outward?

My guest this week is Jalpa Trivedi, an experienced Global Head of TA who has built and centralized TA functions across more than 30 countries. In our conversation, she shares why the internal audit matters more than the technology choice, how to build TA foundations that hold across different markets, and how to approach AI adoption with the governance it requires.

In the interview, we discuss:

The questions TA leaders aren't asking about their own function.

Investing in technology that solves the wrong problem

-The 80/20 approach to centralizing TA across markets

-Building an EVP on evidence, not assumptions

-What persuades leadership to back a TA investment

-Why the biggest AI risk isn't falling behind

-Five data privacy questions to ask before signing with an AI vendor

-Where the dividing line falls between AI and human judgment

-What does the future look like?

A full transcript will appear here shortly.

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Ep 810: End-to-End Hiring Intelligence Jul 24, 2026

Show notes

AI has been applied to almost every step of the hiring process. Sourcing, screening, assessments, interviews; each has its own tools, and many of them are effective. For many organizations, though, the gains from optimizing individual stages are flattening out. Hiring quality is shaped by the entire journey, not by any single step, and most hiring technology was never built to connect those steps. The focus is shifting toward connecting the whole process so that each stage learns from the others and improves over time.

So what does it take to move from optimizing separate steps to building connected intelligence across the hiring process?

My guest this week is Ben Chino, Co-founder and CPO of Maki. In our conversation, Ben explains why improving hiring one step at a time has hit its limits, what end-to-end hiring intelligence looks like in practice, and what it means for recruiters and candidates.

In the interview, we discuss:

Why optimizing individual hiring steps with AI has hit diminishing returns
The difference between a system of record and a system of intelligence
How a connected hiring process improves decision-making at every stage
Where the ATS fits in the next generation of hiring technology
Why human judgment in hiring is less consistent than most people think
Freeing recruiters for better judgment and more time with candidates
Turning 800,000 applications into a real candidate experience
Why adopting AI in hiring is an organizational change challenge, not a technology decision
What does the future of hiring look like?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-chino/

Ep 809: The Data Foundation For AI In Hiring Jul 17, 2026

Show notes

Agentic AI is only as useful as the data it can access, and getting that foundation right is proving to be the harder half of the work. Years of mergers, acquisitions, and local decision-making have left many talent operations running on data and processes that were never meant to work together, and no amount of AI on top will fix what lies beneath. Some organizations are now rethinking their technology strategy in light of that problem.

So what does getting AI-ready actually involve, and what does it change about the decisions you make?

My guest this week is Lia Manafova, Talent Technology Strategy Lead at Sanofi, a global pharmaceutical company hiring at scale across more than 70 countries. In our conversation, Lia explains why the data foundation must come first, what an anchor product strategy looks like in practice, and what she has learned about making technology stick.

In the interview, we discuss:

Why AI readiness starts with data, not AI

Building a bridge between the business and the digital team

The challenge of constant transformation and change fatigue

What is an anchor product strategy?

How the Workday, Paradox and HiredScore acquisitions changed the options

Best-of-breed or a single source of truth?

Keeping recruiters in one system rather than three

Piloting with the people who will use it every day

The case for keeping the semi-automated option

Building an ROI story the business understands

What does the future look like?

Ep 808: The Starting Point For TA Innovation Jul 15, 2026

Show notes

Innovation in recruiting is hard. TA leaders are experts at running their operations, but improving them in a structured way is a different discipline, and the AI revolution has made it one that no one can avoid. Before any function can innovate, though, it has to know where it is starting from, and that is where benchmarking becomes critical.

Recent research from the Recruiting Excellence Foundation, which has assessed the maturity of hundreds of TA teams worldwide, reveals that TA teams are struggling to move from operational to strategic.

So how should TA leaders get started?

My guest this week is Toni de Graaf, Co-Founder of the Recruiting Excellence Foundation. In our conversation, Toni shares what the global benchmark reveals, why so many teams are stuck in operational mode, and how to prioritize the improvements that matter most.

In the interview, we discuss:

Benchmarking TA maturity across the globe

The most surprising insight from the results

The two areas where TA teams struggle most

The difference between an operational and a strategic function

The impact of AI

AI and broken processes

Resource, capacity and value

Knowing your starting point

What does the future look like?

Take the recruiting excellence assessment

Round Up June 2026 Jul 11, 2026

Show notes

If you've not listened to Round Up before, it's a short review of the episodes that I've published in the last month to make sure you don't miss out on the valuable insights that my guests are sharing.

This month Round Up returns to its live format, and this is a recording of my live conversation with Ben Chino, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Maki People, about five of the episodes published in May and June 2026

Episodes featured in this Round Up:

Ep 790: Rethinking Work In The Age Of AI

Ep 791: Making Agentic AI Work For HR & Talent

Ep 797: Hiring The Humans Behind The Robots

Ep 799: Growing the Talent You Can't Hire

Ep 800: Will AI Break Recruiting?

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Ep 807: Trust, Transparency And The AI Interview Jul 10, 2026

Show notes

Application volumes are climbing fast, and AI has made it far easier for candidates to produce a strong-looking resume. For talent teams trying to give every candidate a fair hearing, the traditional model of recruiting is starting to break down.

Some employers are now handing the first conversation to an AI voice agent, and that raises some obvious concerns. Does automating the first step strip out the human connection that recruiting depends on? The teams doing this well are finding the answer isn't what a lot of recruiters expect, and that getting it right depends as much on how openly it's done as on the technology itself.

So what does it look like in practice?

My guests this week are Jean-Baptiste Anne, Global Director of Talent Acquisition at Mirakl, and Anneliese Muscari, their Head of AMER and Global Go To Market talent acquisition. In our conversation, they share why they made the change, how candidates have responded, and what it means for the future of the recruiter role

In the interview, we discuss:

Managing unprecedented application volume
The growing limitations of resumes
How do you give every applicant a fair chance and a great candidate experience?
Handing the first conversation to an AI voice agent
Moving from skepticism to trust
Publishing AI guidelines for candidates
How candidates have responded
Keeping humans in charge of every decision
What does the future look like?

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Ep 806: The Real Trends In Talent Acquisition Jul 09, 2026

Show notes

Over the last year, I have been using AI to develop a searchable archive of the content in every episode of Recruiting Future, 3 million words from over a decade of unscripted conversations with practitioners and thought leaders across talent acquisition. James Whitelock, host of The Marketing Rules Podcast, has been doing the same thing with his own archive of more than 200 episodes over seven years.

Between us, we now have over a thousand real conversations we can interrogate for trends, and the picture that emerges is an industry caught in familiar tensions: fighting to prove its strategic value, grappling with AI that moves faster than it can be adopted, and trying to figure out which parts of hiring should stay fundamentally human.

So what do years of real conversations reveal about where talent acquisition actually stands?

In my conversation with James, we compare what our respective archives reveal about TA's shifting identity, the real pace of AI's change, and the tensions the industry keeps returning to.

In the interview, we discuss:

Using AI to turn podcast archives into industry intelligence
TA's journey from growth engine to cost center and back again
How the AI conversation has shifted over time
Adaptability as the critical skill for TA
Is TA becoming a marketing function?
Standing out when AI content all sounds the same
Ring-fencing the parts of hiring that should stay human
Bias in humans and bias in AI
What does the future look like?

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Ep 805: Hiring's Signal Problem Jul 06, 2026

Show notes

The talent market is sending mixed signals. Employers insist they can't find the people they need, while experienced, capable candidates say they are applying into a void and hearing nothing back. Both are describing the same market, so something in the middle is failing. A lot of recruiting technology was built to handle volume, to move large numbers of applicants through a process quickly. What it struggles to do is read signal, to interpret whether someone actually has the judgment and context to solve the problem a business has.

So how do we fix this problem, and will AI give us the solution?

My guest this week is James Gardner, a talent acquisition and transformation leader who has spent over twenty years building and scaling talent functions. In our conversation, he shares what his own data-driven job search revealed about the market, why volume systems and signal systems pull in opposite directions, and how AI could either fix the problem or make it considerably worse.

In the interview, we discuss:

What's really happening on both sides of the talent market
Why the market isn't short of talent; it's short of signal.
Running a job search as a data funnel
Why silence, not rejection, is the real problem
Why volume systems and signal systems contradict each other
Where AI screening still can't read potential
Applying AI to a broken process just makes it fail faster.
Moving TA from a service function to a commercial lever
Owning the outcome, not just the shortlist.
What does the future look like?

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