Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring? - TopPodcast.com

View Top 200 Chart

Back to Rankings Page

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:

Round Up February 2026 Mar 12, 2026

Show notes

If you’ve not listened to Roundup 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 Ritu Mohanka, CEO at Vonq, about six of the episodes published in February 2026

Episodes featured in this Round Up:

Ep 766 How TA Proves Its Business Impact

Ep 767: Inside EY’s Talent Strategy for AI and the Future

Ep 769: Managing Risk In Talent Acquisition

Ep 770: The Science of Better Hiring

Ep 771 Recruiting At The Speed Of AI

Ep 772: Surfing The AI Tsunami

Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Follow this podcast on Spotify.

Ep 775: What Makes An Excellent Workplace? Mar 11, 2026

Show notes

Attracting talent gets all the headlines, but retention is where the real competitive advantage lives. In a market where top performers are constantly being approached by competitors and salary expectations keep rising, holding on to your best people has never been harder.

At the same time, the rapid pace of AI and automation means the skills companies need are shifting faster than ever, making internal development and mobility just as critical as external hiring.

So how do you build a workplace where people genuinely want to stay and grow?

My guests this week are Annika in der Beek, Chief People Officer, and Giovanni Di Felice, Director of Talent Acquisition at Statista. In our conversation, they share the science-backed framework behind what makes an excellent employer and explain how hiring and retention are becoming inseparable parts of the same strategy.

In the interview, we discuss:

Hiring challenges in AI and tech
Encouraging candidates to use AI
Why retention has become critical
Measuring what makes an excellent employer
Autonomy, competence, and relatedness at work
The power of honest feedback
Internal mobility and career development
TA as a strategic business partner
What does the future look like?

Learn more about The Excellent Workplace Rating.

Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Follow this podcast on Spotify.

Ep 774: Will Candidate AI Use Transform Recruiting? Mar 09, 2026

Show notes

Many talent acquisition teams are dealing with surging application volumes right now, and AI is a major factor. Candidates are using it to apply faster, at a greater scale, and with more targeted information than ever before. The instinct has been to treat candidate AI use as noise, something to filter out or push back on. That response misses the long-term implications entirely.

AI isn't just a tool for corporate hiring teams anymore. Candidates have access to the same technology, and platforms are emerging specifically to help them use it strategically. The innovation this unlocks could drive more change in recruiting than anything employers are currently investing in.

So what is candidate-side AI actually capable of, and are talent acquisition teams thinking seriously enough about where this leads?

My guest this week is Sam Wright, Head Of Career Strategy at Huntr, a data-backed job search platform. In our conversation, he shares what candidates are really doing with AI and what the data reveals about where this is heading.

In the interview, we discuss:

The job market from a candidate's perspective

How the job search is changing

Declaring a truce in the AI arms race

Candidate-driven disruption and innovation in hiring

Ethics and responsibility

The importance of human judgement

What does the future look like?

Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Follow this podcast on Spotify.

Ep 773: How LLMs Are Changing Recruitment Marketing Mar 05, 2026

Show notes

For years, recruitment marketing strategies have been built around a familiar set of rules: optimize your career site, rank well in search results, and ensure candidates can find you. But those rules were written for a world where Google was the gateway.

That world is changing. Candidates are increasingly turning to LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude to research potential employers, asking detailed, conversational questions about culture, benefits, and working environment. And the way those tools surface information is fundamentally different from traditional search. The content that performs well in Google often doesn't translate, and organizations that have invested heavily in their employer brand discovery may be largely invisible in this new landscape.

So what does it take to show up when candidates are searching in LLMs?

My guest this week is Graham Thornton, President of Consulting and Growth at Talivity. In our conversation, he explains how candidate discovery is changing, why existing SEO thinking doesn't apply, and what organizations need to do differently.

In the interview, we discuss:

How AI is disrupting recruitment marketing
The new uneven playing field
Content and context
The importance of structure and specificity
How third-party content is influencing discovery
How are job seekers now searching?
New ways of measuring ROI
What will the future look like?

Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Follow this podcast on Spotify.

Ep 772: Surfing The AI Tsunami Mar 01, 2026

Show notes

AI transformation is accelerating, and for many organizations, the biggest risk isn't the technology itself; it's getting their strategic response wrong. Rush in without a framework, and you can destroy culture, trust, and capability. Hold back waiting for certainty, and more agile competitors will overtake you. Talent leaders are caught between these two failure modes with no clear playbook, and the pressure is intensifying by the week. So what does a disciplined, structured approach to navigating AI disruption actually look like in practice, and what role should talent and HR be playing?

My guest this week is Jagrity Singh, a transformation leader who specializes in integrating AI-driven talent strategies with process excellence disciplines. In our conversation, she introduces a model for understanding where work sits between fully human and fully automated, and explains why the organizations that win will be those that learn to surf the wave rather than get crushed by it.

In the interview, we discuss:

Differences in AI approaches between Europe, the Middle East, and North America.
The impact of AI on jobs and what approach employers should be taking

AI is an HR problem, not an IT problem.
Why CHROs need to orchestrate human and AI workforces
Strategic workforce planning
What should be automated and what shouldn’t
Advice to talent leaders
What does the future look like?

Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Follow this podcast on Spotify.

Ep 771: Recruiting At The Speed Of AI Feb 27, 2026

Show notes

Recruiting has always been shaped by the time and resources available. Resumes are short because recruiters only have a finite amount of time to read them. Interview shortlists are small because hiring managers can only meet so many candidates. The whole funnel narrows because no team can fully evaluate everyone who applies. None of these are strategic choices, they're simply workarounds for human capacity.

Now AI agents can screen hundreds of candidates in a matter of hours, run outside business hours, and deliver structured evidence for recruiters to review. The data coming back is already challenging assumptions about how these processes should work, while the growing influence of AI on who progresses through the hiring process makes questions around ethics, fairness, and regulatory compliance impossible to ignore.

So how should TA leaders rearchitect their processes while keeping them responsible?

My guest this week is Sachit Kamat, Chief Product Officer at Eightfold. In our conversation, Sachit shares early data from AI interviewing at scale and explains why it's time to reimagine recruiting processes as the traditional constraints around time and resources start to fall away.

In the interview, we discuss:

Lifting capacity limitations in recruiting
The impact of AI interviewing on the candidate experience
What humans do better than technology
Radically improving the candidate experience.
Building agent scale processes
The first steps to transforming recruiting
Regulation and responsibility
Could the time to hire be reduced to less than 1 hour?
What does the future look like?

Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Follow this podcast on Spotify.

Ep 770: The Science of Better Hiring Feb 20, 2026

Show notes

Hiring should be about finding the right person. Too often, though, the tools and methods organizations use actually work against them. Job postings filter candidates out for lacking skills they could easily and quickly learn. Competency checklists based on someone else's philosophy of what leadership looks like rather than what actually works inside their organization. Assessment tools that aren't scientifically validated or that screen for average profiles when the role needs something entirely different.

The funnel narrows before employers even realize it. And when a poor fit does get through, the individual can spend months or years struggling against expectations that were never clearly defined.

So how should organizations rethink the way they assess and select talent?

My guest this week is Dr. Stephanie Puckett, founder of SynergyMind Consulting. In our conversation, she draws on 20 years of experience in organizational psychology to reveal where hiring processes quietly break down and the implications for both employers and employees when they do.

In the interview, we discuss:

The most common mistakes employers make in hiring

Unintentional restriction of talent pools

Skill and competency transfer

The danger of using tools with no scientific validation

The critical role of talent acquisition teams

Data science versus psychology

Finding confirmation bias in big datasets

The importance of realistic job previews

How will hiring develop in the next 2 to 3 years

Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Follow this podcast on Spotify.

Ep 769: Managing AI Risk In Talent Acquisition Feb 19, 2026

Show notes

The pressure on talent functions right now is intense. Budgets are tight, teams are stretched, and the mandate to do more with less has pushed many organizations to automate at speed without stopping to redesign what they were automating. These automated decisions are attracting real legal and regulatory attention. Actions previously seen as simple process steps are now potentially being viewed from a legal perspective as consequential decisions.

At the same time, there's a growing recognition that AI could be truly catalytic, forcing the kind of fundamental change that talent functions have needed for years.

So how do leaders navigate the constraints while seizing that opportunity?

My guest this week is Kyle Lagunas, Founder of Kyle and Co. In our conversation, Kyle unpacks what defensibility really means in practice, why talent teams need to shift from risk avoidance to risk readiness, and how AI is catalyzing long-overdue transformation.

In the interview, we discuss:

Credibility under constraint

Risk averse or risk avoidance?

What does defensibility look like?

The AI balance between execution and judgement

Human-in-the-loop needs to be designed, not assumed.

Are we holding machines to a higher standard than we hold humans to?

The importance of rigour in pilot programs

Building AI literacy

What does the future look like?

Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Follow this podcast on Spotify

Ep 768: Faster Mistakes Or Better Hiring? Feb 16, 2026

Show notes

AI tools are changing the pace at which organizations filter and rank candidates. However, matching someone to a job description and actually predicting whether they'll perform well in the role are two very different things. Most hiring processes have never been validated against real performance outcomes, and organizations often don't have a clear, measurable definition of what success looks like in a role. Without that foundation, even the most sophisticated AI is just automating something that was never evidence-based in the first place.

So what would it actually take to build hiring processes that genuinely predict performance?

My guest this week is Jennifer Yugo, Managing Director and owner of Corvirtus, and an organizational psychologist specializing in evidence-based hiring. In our conversation, she explains the science behind predicting job performance and why most hiring processes are far from where they need to be.

In the interview, we discuss:

Matching candidates vs predicting performance
Why most hiring lacks evidence
Defining what success really looks like and identifying performance indicators
Do some AI hiring tools stand up to scrutiny?
The risks of automating bad decisions
Questions TA leaders should ask vendors
Are we going to see a reckoning for hiring technology?
What might the future look like?

Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Follow this podcast on Spotify.

Ep 767: Inside EY's Talent Strategy for AI and the Future Feb 10, 2026

Show notes

The assurance and audit profession is facing a talent crisis. Fewer graduates are choosing it as a career, and the perception of what auditors actually do hasn't kept pace with reality. At the same time, AI is fundamentally reshaping the work itself, automating repetitive tasks and opening up entirely new service areas around cyber risk and sustainability. The profession needs different skills, different mindsets, and a completely different value proposition for the next generation of talent.

So how do you transform a workforce of over a hundred thousand people while simultaneously making the profession attractive to a generation that wants purpose, flexibility, and career agility?

My guest this week is Sandra Oliver, Global Assurance Talent Leader at EY. In our conversation, she shares how EY is reskilling auditors at scale, bridging generational divides around technology adoption, and repositioning audit careers as a launchpad for business leadership.

In the interview, we discuss:

Attracting Gen Z to the audit profession
AI's impact on day-to-day audit work
Upskilling 130,000 professionals in AI
Bridging the generational technology gap
Reverse mentoring between junior and senior staff.
Purpose and meaningful work as talent drivers
How will audit careers evolve over the next five years?

Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Follow this podcast on Spotify.

Related Podcasts