Round Up is the monthly show on The Recruiting Future Podcast channel that highlights episodes you may have missed and gives you my take on some of the key learnings from the guests.
Episodes mentioned in this Round Up:
Ep 666: The ROI Of Employer Branding
Ep 667: Traditional HR is Dead, Here’s What’s Next
Ep 668: Strategic Budgeting For TA Leaders
Ep 669: How L’Oréal Group is Using AI To Evolve Talent Acquisition
Ep 669: How L’Oréal Group is Using AI To Evolve Talent Acquisition
Ep 670: Jeff Taylor: Rethinking Hiring for the AI Age
Ep 671: Balancing AI & The Human Touch
Ep 672: Are Career Sites Evolving Quickly Enough?
Ep 673: The Route To Skills-Based Hiring
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Plum. Plum is a revolutionary workforce solutions provider that knows when people flourish, business thrives. With their powerful platform Plum Thrive, you can unlock science based data to help you measure and match human potential to job needs. Plum Thrive provides personalized career insights, improves quality of hire and creates high performing teams from a single simple to use platform. Want to learn more? Visit www.plum.IO and discover all the ways that Plum can help you thrive.
Matt Alder [00:00:59]:
Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to the January Roundup episode of Recruiting Future. If you’re new to Roundup, it’s a short review of the episodes that I’ve published over the last month, making sure that you don’t miss out on the valuable insights my guests are sharing. Before we start, a big thank you to Plum I.O. for their continuing support of Roundup. Their pragmatic and innovative approach to skills based thinking is continu to make waves in the industry. So check them out at Plum IO to learn more. So unbelievably 2025 is only five weeks old. The pace of the current news cycle is making it feel like six months has gone already. It’s certainly going to be another disruptive year, and Recruiting Future will be here to make sense of it at least twice a week. On top of that, I’m now collaborating with Purple Acorn to present the Alder hour live on LinkedIn and YouTube on Monday afternoons. Check it out on my LinkedIn profile. You can see live interviews and some really animated and interesting discussions on HR issues with my amazing co hosts. So let’s get stuck into Roundup and January featured a lineup of highly experienced practitioners as well as the return of an industry legend, all trying to make sense of the crazy world we now live in. We covered employer branding, the end of traditional HR, strategic budgeting for TA leaders, AI’s impact on recruiting, the evolution of career sites, and skills based hiring. The one theme that ran through most of the interviews was how TA can create more value for the business and also prove that I suspect there’s going to be a huge focus on TA’s impact this year. Listen out for more on this in the coming weeks. First up for the year was episode 666 on employer branding. Now, employer branding is often misunderstood or undervalued, especially in a landscape of shrinking budgets and rising expectations. Yet in today’s competitive environment, the ability to measure and communicate its value is more critical than ever. So how can employer brand professionals quantify their impact in ways that resonate with the C suite? What strategies can they adopt to ensure their work aligns with business goals, drives meaningful results and operates with the right level of sophistication? My guest was Ben Phillips, global employer brand Leader at Booksy. Ben explained why ROI conversations must be grounded in financial outcomes, not vanity metrics, and highlights the importance of aligning employer branding with the strategic strategic priorities of the business. Drawing from his experience across consumer marketing, recruiting and culture transformation, Ben shared practical approaches for demonstrating the tangible business value of employer branding. HR is at a crossroads. The rapid pace of change, shifting employee expectations and technological disruption have rendered traditional approaches ineffective. After years of being viewed as a department of policy and paperwork, HR must now become more agile, personalised and human centric to meet the challenges of the modern workplace. So how can HR and talent teams adapt to a world where change is constant, collaboration crosses boundaries and employees demand relevance and impact from their work experiences? What practical strategies can HR leaders adopt to build practices that are genuinely fit for the future? My guest on episode 667 was Lucy Adams, CEO of Disruptive HR. A self described recovering HR director, Lucy has first hand experience of what holds HR back and how to break free from outdated thinking. She shares her vision for transforming HR by moving away from paternalistic policies and embracing a more modern adult to adult relationship with employees. Lucy also revealed practical ways HR can harness continuous learning and AI driven insights to foster agility, collaboration and innovation to ensure that HR is an effective force in shaping organizational success. Budgeting has long been a challenge for talent acquisition teams, but the stakes have never been higher in today’s volatile economic environment. Many TA leaders find themselves stuck in a cycle of defending past decisions, managing cuts and struggling to align budgets with business strategy. Meanwhile, CFOs expect data driven proposals, ROI insights and long term planning that TA teams often aren’t equipped to deliver. So how can TA leaders transform their approach to budgeting, build trust with a C suite and position themselves as strategic business partners? My guests on episode 668 were Madeline Laurano, Founder of Aptitude Research and Josh Secrest, VP of Client Advocacy. At Paradox, we discussed Aptitude’s new report, the Talent Acquisition Budget Playbook, which contains actionable strategies to move beyond reactive spending, harness automation for efficiency and demonstrate clear ROI to unlock longer term investment. We talked about how TA leaders can speak the language of the cfo, build their credibility and develop effective business cases using longer term thinking. With over 1.5 million applications every year. L’Oreal Group’s talent acquisition team faces challenges on a scale that most organizations would never experience. Managing this volume while ensuring a high quality candidate experience demands innovation, agility and the right balance between humans and technology. AI plays a key role in L’Oreal Group’s TA evolution, helping with screening and driving quality and efficiency via automation and standardization. So how do you use AI to transform talent acquisition without losing the vital human touch? My guest on episode 669 was Michael Kienle, Global VP of Talent Acquisition at L’Oreal Group. In our conversation, Michael shared how his team is leveraging AI to improve the candidate experience and why he believes AI will help TA teams of the future to radically increase the value they create for their businesses. It feels like recruiting has come a long way since the days of help wanted ads in newspapers. But are we genuinely innovating or just consistently repackaging outdated ways of doing things? For well over a century, versions of the resume and job ad have been the foundation of hiring. But as technology and work itself move on at an ever increasing pace, it’s clear that those tools weren’t designed for the world we’re now in. So can we finally move beyond them and build a solid foundation for an AI powered approach? My guest on episode 670 was one of the original pioneers of online recruiting, Jeff Taylor, the founder of Monster.com or the Monster Board as it was known back in 1994. Jeff built Monster during the infancy of the Internet, when the rest of the industry was still faxing resumes and placing ever more expensive job ads in the newspapers. He introduced the world to online job postings and the resume database, which, very much to his surprise and increasing alarm, are still the core tenants of recruiting. Thirty years later, Jeff is now back in the industry and launching a new business called Boom Band later in the year. In our conversation, we discussed the need for innovation and reinvention in recruiting to harness AI and address the complex challenges employers now face, and also why he believes the future of hiring has people, not processes, at the center of it. Frontline hiring is more competitive than ever, with speed and efficiency now critical for success. However, the challenge doesn’t stop at making the hiring process faster. Employers also need to stand out from their competition by offering a high quality candidate experience and having a recruiting process that allows them to showcase what makes their organization unique. It’s clear that AI powered recruiting is already driving speed and efficiency in frontline hiring for many large organizations, but what’s the right balance between technology and humans to deliver exceptional candidate experience and highlight an organization’s unique culture. My guests on episode 671 were Sonja Breuer, Senior VP of Human Resources, and Aaron Einhorn, Senior HR Business Partner and at Hamra Enterprises. In our conversation they share how Hamra has successfully leveraged AI powered recruiting technology to reduce their time to hire from 13 days to just four. They also discuss how this has enabled them to better highlight the values, benefits and culture that make Hamra Enterprises a uniquely attractive employer, and why speed, experimentation and agility are critical in AI powered recruiting. Career sites still play a central role in talent acquisition, but are they evolving quickly enough? With many employers still working in career site redevelopment cycles that take years rather than months, are we keeping pace with candid expectations and rapidly advancing Technology? On episode 672 I spoke to Bas Van De Haterd, who returned to the show to give his annual update on on the career site research he’s been running for the last 18 years. The latest edition looks at 100 data points across the career sites of 550 large employers to determine key trends and just how quickly career sites are evolving. The move towards skills based strategies in organizations is still a big topic. This is unsurprising as the advantages are significant. Skills based thinking solves critical business challenges by better aligning talent strategies to to business goals and offering the skills agility that many employers badly need. Skills based hiring also widens talent pools and challenges the entrenched mental models that sometimes form barriers to companies hiring the talent they actually need. However, the road to being a skills based organization is long and complex and only a small minority of employers seem to be making real progress. So what needs to change? How can AI be harnessed? How can we anticipate future skills needs and how should TA teams be reimagined to make skills based hiring a reality? My guest on episode 673 was Jen Cunningham, VP of Global Talent Acquisition at Pearson. We discussed identifying and validating skills, how skills based people strategies drive better alignment with business strategy and the skills TA teams now need in the age of AI. So onwards into February and I’m off to Oslo next week for my first two face to face events of the year. I’m there for most of the week, so if any Norwegian listeners have got any suggestions of things to do or see, then please let me know. Recruiting Future is packed with content in February with a record breaking 12 episodes scheduled in. The best way to keep up is to subscribe to the show, so make sure you hit the follow button wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
