It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the pace of change in talent acquisition. AI developments, vendor mergers and acquisitions, a confusing technology landscape, and shifting candidate behaviours are just some of the current trends making everything feel chaotic. But if we take a step back and look carefully, patterns start to emerge. There are clues everywhere to what the future will look like.
So how do we make sense of it all?
My guest this week is Adam Godson, General Manager of Paradox at Workday. In our conversation, Adam cuts through the noise, explains how the agentic future is taking shape, discusses what Workday’s acquisition of Paradox means for the market, reviews the predictions he made on the show this time last year about 2025, and shares where he thinks things are heading in 2026
In the interview, we discuss:
• Whether Adam’s predictions from this time last year were accurate
• Workday’s acquisition of Paradox
• The power of end-to-end employee lifecycle data
• The potential power of agentic AI
• Frontline hiring and how it has evolved
• AI development
• Will candidates have their own career agents?
• The confusing TA and HR technology marketplace
• What will the future look like? Predictions for 2026
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Transcript:
Matt Alder 00:00
It’s fair to say that recruiting is currently going through a period of rapid change that feels pretty chaotic right now, but if we take a step back, there are some clear patterns emerging that tell us a lot about the future, from disruption in frontline hiring to the way candidates are using AI. We’re getting real clues about what the imminent era of agentic AI might actually look like. Keep listening to find out more. You know, I’ve recently heard some crazy success stories when it comes to hiring with AI, FedEx is sending offers to candidates within 10 minutes. General Motors saved $2 million in recruiting costs in a year. Chipotle reduced time to hire by 75% and Nestle’s global recruiting team is saving 8000 hours annually. The craziest thing all of these companies did it by leveraging the same technology paradox. Paradox is the leader in conversational hiring powered by conversational AI paradox can be your ATS, CRM and career site, or can help automate parts of the hiring process on top of Workday UKG and SAP. Their product suite is driven by a 24/7 AI assistant who can handle up to 95% of the hiring process for deskless hiring teams, or just automate specific time consuming tasks like screening, interview, scheduling and onboarding to allow recruiters to focus on recruiting. Paradox has helped hundreds of the world’s top employers simplify hiring and save money while creating great candidate experiences in the process, spend more time with people, not software. With paradox, you can find out more by going to paradox.ai.
Matt Alder 01:53
Hi there. Welcome to Episode 754, of recruiting future with me. Matt Alder, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the current pace of change in tire acquisition AI developments, vendor mergers and acquisitions, a confusing technology landscape and shifting candidate behavior are just some of the current trends making everything feel chaotic. But if we take a step back and look carefully, patterns start to emerge. There are lots of clues out there that are telling us what the future might just look like. So how do we make sense of it all? My guest this week is Adam godson, General Manager of paradox at workday. In our conversation, Adam cuts through the noise, explains how the agentic future is taking shape. Discusses what the workday acquisition of paradox means for the market. Reviews the predictions he made on the show this time last year about 2025 and shares where he thinks things are heading in 2026 Hi Adam, and welcome back to the podcast. Hey, Matt, great to be with you. Always a pleasure to talk to you. For people who may not know who you are, please introduce yourself and tell us what you do.
Adam Godson 03:30
Thanks, Matt. I’m Adam Godson. I am now general manager of paradox at workday. I’m a lifelong talent acquisition practitioner. I started my career as a recruiter 20 years ago, have been building talent acquisition technology and process ever since. And I’m an absolute nerd for this space, and spent the last six years as CEO at paradox, the last two of those as CEO, and then joined workday just last month.
Matt Alder 03:56
Fantastic. So we’ll talk about the workday acquisition sort of later in the conversation, because obviously been a very big year for paradox in lots of ways, before we do though, I want to go back to last December. So last December we had a podcast conversation, and you very generously said that you made some predictions for 2025 and very generously said I could come back a year later and we could see how accurate you were, so I brought those predictions along. So these are the three things that you kind of sort of highlighted for this year. So the first one was companies will choose to get started with AI and start in a spot that is a significant pain to them. The second one you predicted a year of chaos with job seekers using AI to write resumes, employers struggling to find signal. Maybe we’ll have more assessments, more in person interviews to get around that, and then finally, again, fairly chaotic, but companies will start to develop a vision about what TMO looked like in the AI driven future. How did you do how do you think the year sort of measured up to where you thought it would be?
Adam Godson 04:59
Well. So not to give myself congratulations, but I feel pretty good about all of those. And in terms of what the year, the year wrought, I think the second one, I think, resonated particularly well. We hear from talent acquisition practitioners regularly that it’s been chaotic and that there’s candidate fraud, and there’s identity challenges, there’s mass applications, and they’re having hard time with the processing of increased volumes, and, of course, with constrained resources, and that they’re having a difficult time with that. So I feel good about that the first one as well. Companies getting started with with AI, I think we see almost everyone dipping their toe in the water to some some degree, whether that’s with interview scheduling, whether that is with screening, whether it’s some other part of the process, but I think, I think almost everyone is leaning into some to some degree, as we See our client budgets decrease and the work volumes increase. There’s only one real way out of out of that. So, like, I think I feel pretty good about those predictions.
Matt Alder 06:09
Yeah, no, I think, you know, I think it kind of sums up the year very well. One thing we didn’t talk about was, perhaps, happened to paradox this year, and as you say, you’ve been acquired by work day. Let’s talk about that a little bit. Why paradox? Why did work day acquire paradox? And really, where does paradox go from here? Yeah, that’s a great question.
Adam Godson 06:27
Well, I wouldn’t have been able to predict it last year, because such things are pretty unpredictable. And so people, of course, have asked over the years, you know, what’s the what’s going to happen there? And my response has always been consistent, which is, my job is to build a great company, and the rest will take care of itself, and we’ll figure out what the best strategy is from from there, and frankly, really proud of the fact that I think we did that. We built a paradox into a great company as one of the leaders in AI and talent acquisition and being able to do things the right way. And we’re able to join workday this year in terms of strategy for workday and paradox coming together. I think there’s really a couple of strategies that are important to talk about. One of those is paradox, finding great fit with the technology in the frontline worker, and really finding strength there with the right technology at the right time and taking the friction out of the process being able to walk into a restaurant. I had a meeting a few weeks ago at a restaurant with it with a client, and I saw a guy wiping tables. I couldn’t resist asking him, how did you come How did you come to work here? His name was also Adam, and he said, Well, last week, I was going into the drive through because I was hungry, and I saw on the receipt now hiring text to 12345, this number, and it asked me a couple questions. Are you 16? Can you work these hours? You know, are you eligible to work those kinds of things? Can you lift this box so kind of things like the qualifications and scheduled interview for the next day, and he started the day after that, and then he was wiping tables. It was it’s the right technology for the right time, not having the clunky applications. What’s your login, create an account, those types of things. So I think the increasing focus for workday on the frontline worker, and seeing paradox as a company that had expertise in that space and had the right technology to solve that, that challenge, I think the other thing that’s really important is the ability to work beyond the workday ecosystem. At workday has had a changing philosophy, and so I think it’s some of the past acquisitions at workday, it has been, how do we make workday better for workday clients? And this is different in that we’re going to continue to serve the entire market, so whether it’s clients that are native on any other system, as their HCM, other applicant tracking systems, continuing to supplement those with functionality, continuing with our own conversational ATS, to serve frontline workers, especially in the franchise, restaurant, retail space, and so being able to serve the whole market, I think for me and the core group at paradox, many are ex practitioners, and we want to solve the whole challenge. We want to make a dent in the universe and to really change how people get jobs, and when we see the results of some of our clients, time to hire, going from 21 days to three days, and time to schedule an interview from five days to three minutes. Those kinds of things that we see that have made a difference. It just makes us want to do more of that. And I think that’s one of the great opportunities here, is to scale that, to make a make a dent in the universe.
Matt Alder 09:41
And I suppose as we, as we kind of move towards the agentic AI age, in terms of whatever that might look like from kind of a workday customer perspective, having really kind of end to end data across the employee lifecycle has got to be a big advantage from that kind of data feeding AI angle.
Adam Godson 09:59
It’s. Massive. It’s massive, right? Like, I think even in the past, when we talked about systems, customers had sort of a choice. They had to choose this connected system to the rest of their HCM that was probably not up to par feature wise, but was connected to the rest of the data set, which had its advantage. Or they had to choose a best of breed system that had more features, but was not connected into the to the HCM system. Had to have integrations maintained forever to do that. And I think the this is the first chapter, and being able to break loose of that, that tension, and to have a third way, which is this deeply connected data system and the workflow running in in software, but the work happening in agents, and those agents being able to connect deeply to, yes, of course, the core system at workday, but also into systems that that others might might have in that and so being able to have the agents do much of that work, but having that, to your point, the data be connected all the way through to see, not Only Did someone get hired, but did they do well and and what can be the hired for their next job? What skills do they have? What What experience do they have that can help them with internal mobility? And can we measure not just the most immediate outcome, but the next and the next outcome to really get a signal on whether we’re effective as a talent acquisition team?
Matt Alder 11:19
Yeah. And I think that’s just going to be that’s going to be, that’s going to be sort of fascinating for the industry as a whole. I’m really, really kind of revolutionary as well. Let’s just dig a little bit deeper into frontline hiring. Because I think almost every event the industry, event I’ve been to this year, frontline everyone is talking about, everyone’s talking about frontline hiring. And obviously it’s something that paradox has been in that space for since the beginning, really. How is it developed this year? What are the sort of challenges that your your clients have been seeing? How are they, you know, what is there anything different about how they’re how they’re working and solving them?
Adam Godson 11:50
Yeah, I think a few things that are really different that we’re seeing is more distributed responsibilities, and so the hiring manager being empowered to run much of the process alongside of AI agents, and so we’re seeing much more activity in the field where it’s not a recruiter. And we’ve known this for a long time. I think the early days for us in a quick service restaurant, there’s no recruiter in a quick service restaurant, the manager is the recruiter, and so so for us, it was, how do we make Olivia, or the persona the client chooses as that recruiter to help with those tasks. So can you screen this candidate for me? Can you help me schedule this this interview? Can you guide them through their onboarding tasks and be able to do those things all the way through with with AI assistance? And the key is, and has always been, messaging, getting them to in the device that we all have with us all the time, and being able to ensure that that’s the Access Portal. And we see that in all of our data is when we’re able to message someone, we get really fast responses, and when we aren’t able to message them, we get really slow responses. And I think the other thing is just, I even forget sometimes, again and again, that speed is the IS, IS candidate experience in the front line, and when, when you hire people in real time, and when you, when your team has confidence that you can hire in real time. So many other things take care of themselves. I was having a good conversation with a a client that this last week, and yes, they reduced their time to hire. It was their goal was to go from 60 days to 30 days, and it’s at six. And so they just dramatically reduced that. And they’re proud of that. What they’re really, really proud of was that they had fewer applicants in that it used to take 100 applicants to get a higher now it took 17 because they’re moving faster. Fewer people are falling out along the way, and for a retail brand to have fewer applicants is fewer people that they disappointed and people that they got through the process faster and just higher satisfaction for every person in that process, both the person that got hired and the 87 that didn’t
Matt Alder 14:06
just in terms of AI itself, it’s been another, another interesting year. We’ve seen chat GPT five. We’ve just seen Google steam in and overtake overtake that with some of its newer models. What do you think have been the most sort of significant developments in AI itself this year that will have some implications for time acquisition?
Adam Godson 14:25
Yeah, absolutely. I think certainly the ability for ai ai coding has gone, gone really, really mainstream, and being being sure that individual sort of citizen developers can start to make apps and solve problems on their own, and not just things that are going to be commercialized, but little tools that they can use for problems they have in their own, in their own job, even like making great spreadsheets that they need to do, advanced models that help them solve a business problem, I think that’s been just a leaps and bounds type of thing this this year. We, we did some good work this year as well, on AI generated images, with the context being for giving folks a realistic job preview and being able to have an AI generated video to give folks a better chance at the job. There’s just always been a scalability problem. You had to have this video crew come out and do this to sort of show someone what the job is like. And you know, for a lot of job, especially in the front line, you want to communicate that this is this is hot, it’s hard work. Things are heavy, like, this is hard work. And you want to communicate that on before they take the job so they don’t find out on day one and say, Oh, I’m out. You want to tell them that on day negative something, so that they know when they come in with good expectations and that they can understand what the job is about. And so that’s certainly been interesting to have something that’s previously unscalable to become more scalable. And as you think about what we talked about last year, which is the matching problem cut 15 years ago, and I tried to solve some of the early matching things my originally I thought, man, candidates are really bad at writing resumes, but there’s not enough information here. But what I quickly discovered that’s actually companies that are really bad at writing descriptions of jobs, and there’s not much information there, and that the depth of information through video and voice and other mediums are going to go a long way to improving that match and hopefully achieving the goal of having the right person in the right job.
Matt Alder 16:21
Let’s just talk about the candidate side for a second, because I kind of find this quite fascinating. As we say, we’ve got, you know, candidates using AI flooding, you know, they’re using tools that are kind of flooding applications and all that sort of stuff. I kind of just get the impression that, you know, ta, ta Tech, we kind of sort of look at those tools as, you know, kind of cheating or a bit sketchy or, you know, just like kind of flash in the pan, but to me, that I can really see that some of these tools could develop into kind of full blown career agents for candidates, which would be quite interesting. What’s your sort of take on the technology that’s available to candidates moving forward?
Adam Godson 16:58
Yeah, well, now, Matt, you’re gonna get me to go down a really deep rabbit hole of nerdness. If you so, I’ll do you all want to fast forward this for a hot minute. I won’t judge you, but I think you’re right. I think that that’s ultimately where it moves is just like people will move from sort of web page hunting based answers to any question. There’s an agentic side to the job application that will happen and candidates will use it because it will simply be a better experience. What has to happen is infrastructure for companies to do a good job of accepting those applications in their systems and being sure that that’s seen as a valid and thoughtful way to apply. I think the number the top thing that will matter here is finding a way to generate an artificial constraint on the number of jobs that the person could apply to, for example. So the constraint today is human energy, right? Is I could have probably muscle my way through I don’t know, 10 to 30 job applications a day until I’m tired of creating an account on every website or whatever I have to do, but there’s some constraint there. With AI, there would be no constraint. And so you could conceivably apply to every job in the universe that’s open at every day. And so whether that’s a token system, and some people have suggested people should pay a nominal amount of money to apply for a job. I don’t think that’s the right idea, but I understand, like the concept of introducing some constraints, so you can’t apply to every job at every moment. So I think it’s really just developing some architecture as an industry in those systems of how we make a genetic apply work for both the candidate and for the company. And I actually think it produces a better result. You can use, for example, a technique called a zero knowledge proof to do something, to get information, but not share it with either side. So one of the trickiest things is salary information. The candidate says amount they’re willing to work for, but doesn’t want to say what it is exactly. The job has an amount they want to pay, but they don’t want to say what it is exactly. We have this sort of move. This sort of moving target. Well, by using a distributed network with a zero knowledge proof, you’re able to share information and simply have signal that is indirect, that can go back to each side that says, yes, there’s a match here. I won’t tell you exactly what it is, but there’s a match, and we can actually make this work go forward. Or no, there’s no overlap here. This doesn’t work. Or potentially some conditionality, like, oh yes, they do this, but only if the job was that, or it was a relocation or something. And so there’s, there’s agents have more ability to do those types of things than humans do. And so there’s, there’s a real chance, I think, that an agentic structure improves the quality of applicants. It certainly can do the improve the quantity, but the quality is what’s going to matter to making that happen. So that’s my long answer to your short question.
Matt Alder 19:49
Matt, yeah, no, it’s a great answer, and I’m not going to dive into the rabbit hole where and tell you about my theory that should we get quantum computing? Then every single every single candidate can apply for every. Single job of the world, in the world instantly.
Speaker 1 20:01
No, I actually like that. This is a good episode. I want to be next year’s episode now, next December, we’ll make it a
Matt Alder 20:08
Yeah, that’s definitely a conversation for another time. Coming back to the present, as it were. I mean, it’s a very one of the things that struck me about this year is the tech vendor market is just now so confusing for TA leaders. You know, there aren’t distinct categories that there were. There’s just so much going on. There are people selling solutions that don’t actually kind of exist. There are great companies selling great solutions that ta leaders are not kind of assessing properly. What would your advice be to the TA leaders listening about their strategy moving forward, and how they choose the technology to support it.
Adam Godson 20:45
Yeah, it’s a tricky one. I’ll say, having been around a while, like it’s always been pretty chaotic in the industry, it’s one that gets in an outsized level of investment, because it’s sort of an obvious business problem where many companies have trouble hiring, and so many people are familiar with the challenge. And so companies start because it’s a problem that exists, and there’s, it’s always noisy in that way, I think, is, I think for practitioners, it is getting the proof from others in their in their industry that have, that have done it. I think those ROI stories, the, you know, someone has to be first. And there’s, there’s a good, brave number of people in our industry that are willing to be fully, fully first, and and they get the advantage of doing some, some co creation, and that’s, that’s fun. Many others are going to be with companies that have really long data security and other things that are not going to get to be first. And so I think it is talking to their peers, talking to other practitioners that have been there, and what the experience was on, on their ROI, and how it worked from an implementation perspective, was that vendor responsive? Did the solution achieve what they wanted it to achieve? And so I think now more than ever, the kind of, I think, unique network that exists among talent acquisition professionals. We’ve got lots of conferences in this industry, lots of industry groups that we go to, but using those to really to drive forward, discover the right solutions, get word of mouth in the street is more helpful than ever.
Matt Alder 22:16
Yeah, no, I agree. I agree 100% I think that is really the thing that people we need to look at very, very carefully. So finally, then let’s talk about 2026 so we talked about a few things that are kind of the direction of travel and things like that. But just give us some, give us some kind of, you know, predictions that we can sort of look back on. What do you think is going
Adam Godson 22:36
to going to happen in 2026 Yeah, yeah. I think a few things. So I think one is AI adoption becomes absolutely mainstream in talent acquisition I think it becomes one where almost every talent acquisition department is using AI in one form or another. And one of the questions I get asked really regularly is, where do I start? And my answer is two parts to it. One is, start where it hurts. If you have some particular pain points that’s in your process, like yes, start there. If you don’t know what hurts, start with interview scheduling. It’s like a really clear one that the AI tools are really good at clear ROI on almost guaranteed win, and you get the right to do the next project. And so that’s but I think just the ubiquity of of talent acquisition AI is number one. I think number two, I think there will be viable AI apply solutions in the market that create a change in the market for systems, where early adopters to an MCB based apply system is going to, is going to matter and give a, at least a temporary competitive advantage to some companies that adopt different technology from an apply perspective. But I think so. I think there will be a potentially a temporary competitive advantage as the consumer market always moves faster than the business software market, and so as the AI apply tools hit critical mass, that will create some symptom differentiation in the market. And then maybe third is, I think we’ll see a substantive counter wave of AI where I think there will be full full companies that hit the news wire saying that they are doing only in person interviews. I think we’ll probably see some service, if it’s a WeWork like service or something offer like aI rooms that are AI free rooms for interviews, so that you can’t use that to cheat on a coding test or to have an AI avatar, those kinds of things. But there’ll be a service that is sort of this gap room, air gap room, something like that, for for an interview, but, but just this counter current. I think what will matter, as in maybe the last is the obvious, overall overarching, which is it will continue to be chaotic, so we’ll see both the advances of AI and the pullback in some high profile News. Stories of folks that are trying to reconcile the use of AI and aren’t sure how to do it, and so go to the no AI interviews in certain certain ways. But the technology advances is inevitable, and so it will. It will be pushing forward in lots of different ways as AI becomes really ubiquitous in talent acquisition, and what a time to be alive in this agentic era, right? Like it is, it’s a lot of fun for the nerds that really love it. We’re having a good time. It’s just
Matt Alder 25:28
kind of amazing everything that is happening. Adam, thank you very much for talking to me.
Adam Godson 25:33
Matt, great to see you as always. Talk to you next year.
Matt Alder 25:37
My thanks to Adam. You can follow this podcast on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, you can search all the past episodes at recruiting future.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, recruiting future feast and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time, and I hope you’ll join me.
