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 Mervyn Dinnen about six of the episodes published in January 2026
Episodes featured in this Round Up:
EP 758: Extracting Real Value From AI In TA
Ep 759: Career Sites and the Growing AI Gap
Ep 760 Co-Creating The Future Of TA
Ep 761: What Happens When Recruiters Embrace AI?
Ep 762: Moving From AI Hype To AI Value
Ep 764: Rewiring Organizations For AI
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00:18
Matt Alder
This episode of Recruiting Future Roundup is sponsored by Vonq. Vonq supports global enterprises worldwide to drive efficient hiring through AI powered job distribution and recruiting intelligence. Vonq recently unveiled Echo, a new AI agent ecosystem designed to make overwhelmed TA teams and outdated funnels a thing of the past. Echo rebuilds the hiring process for speed, clarity and fairness without losing human control. So that’s Vonq.com welcome to recruiting Future Roundup, which once more is coming to you live. If you’ve not watched Roundup before, it’s where me and my guest dig into the episodes that have been published on Recruiting Future in the last month so you don’t miss out on any insights that the guests are sharing.
01:02
Matt Alder
If you’ve not watched Roundup before, it’s where me and my guest dig into the episodes that have been published on Recruiting Future in the last month so you don’t miss out on any insights that the guests are sharing. And also if you’ve not listened to those episodes, you can choose which ones you want to go back and have a deeper dive into. So we’re looking at six episodes in this roundup and I am once more joined by my very good friend and special guest, Mervyn Dinnen, analyst, fellow podcaster and also co author. Hi Mervyn. How you doing?
01:34
Mervyn Dinnen
Hi Matt. Thank you for inviting me on again. And yeah, it’s. I’m doing good. I’m doing good. It’s exciting start to the year. It’s been. There seems to be lots happening and the world of TA never rests.
01:49
Matt Alder
Absolutely. Yeah. No, it’s been a, it’s been interesting January, even though the weather has been pretty terrible. But that’s to be expected, particularly as I live in Scotland. So. But did have, we did have some interesting joint news this January because we both received a copy of this in the post, which is the Turkish translation of our book Digital Talent. Digital Talent came out a few years ago, but the Turkish translation has just come out. So if you’re in Turkey or if you’re a Turkish speaker, the book is now available to you. So, you know, that was a kind of an exciting and almost unexpected development because I think we’ve both forgotten that it was being translated. Translate it.
02:34
Mervyn Dinnen
But yes, we gave the rights to translate. Seemed ages ago, but there it is out in the wild.
02:41
Matt Alder
Absolutely. So let’s get cracking with the episodes that we had in January. So first up to start the year was episode 758 and kicked off the year with Jonathan Kestenbaum from AMS. If you’re not sort of listened to or watched John’s work before, there’s probably no one else in the industry who looks as much TA technology as he does. So he pretty much his job is to basically evaluate everything that’s going on in the market. So it’s always great to have him on the podcast because he’ll. He can give a really sophisticated view of where we. Where we are and where we’re going. It was a bit of a prediction episode. He did a prediction episode for us last year, so judged him on his predictions from last year, which was a good thing to do.
03:31
Matt Alder
And he talked about some of his, you know, what he thinks is going to happen in the next sort of 12 months. Mervyn, what were the sort of big takeaways for you from this particular episode?
03:43
Mervyn Dinnen
There were certainly a few. As you say, Jonathan is very much on top of this stuff. And I think, I suppose the first point was that AI will not deliver kind of meaningful value in TA by itself. You know, it’s only really, I suppose, going to deliver returns when organizations redesign how work is done kind of around AI and also you. Through you know, continuous transformation, reskilling, and I suppose reshaping their operating model, you know, 2026 isn’t just about better tools, but it’s about building the. I think he referred to something like organizational muscle or something, you know, as AI, kind of reshapes so much about what we do.
04:27
Matt Alder
Yeah, I think that was. That was a sort of big takeaway of me. For me, it was about the importance of workforce planning and why a lot of sort of attempted AI transformation isn’t working because people don’t have a sophisticated talent plan in place around having the right skills, reskilling people. And also, I think one of the things that we’ve talked about on the show before is that AI isn’t taking jobs away, it’s taking tasks away. So it’s taking bits of jobs away, which is a really complicated thing to deal with if you don’t have an effective sort of talent plan. So, you know, I think that was a. It was a really sort of great observation, and I think it kind of explains a lot of what we’re seeing.
05:10
Matt Alder
I think the other thing that really stood out for me and really made me think actually, was he sort of mentioned at one point we’re talking about resumes and, you know, how they haven’t changed in hundreds of years and all the. All the usual kind of narrative about them, you know, not being. Not being very useful. But, but not going away. And he pointed out that a resume is like it is because it’s basically defined by limits. It’s defined by the amount of time that a recruiter and a hiring manager has to actually review it, which is why it’s a short summary. And, and the thinking was in a world of AI where you know, I can ingest so much information, you know, so quickly, why limit it to two pages?
05:58
Matt Alder
Why not make it unlimited in terms of the amount of information that’s kind of being put across? I thought was an interesting point. I mean, what’s your sort of take on that one, Merv?
06:07
Mervyn Dinnen
Yeah, no, I agree, I think with the, you know, we have access to everything somebody has done as opposed to what they decide to share with us, they have done. And I think one of the things that I think relates to this that he was talking about was that hiring manager experience becoming a key indicator of effectiveness, how well recruiters can translate business needs into, I suppose, successful hires. But some of that comes with, I think, really understanding, you know, the candidate and what they have done, what they’re not, not just kind of, you know, what their list of jobs are, but, but the real, their understanding, their ability to translate that into effective hiring.
06:55
Matt Alder
Yeah, absolutely. And you’d still be dealing with a, a summary ultimately. But that summary would be based on, you know, a huge amount of information which presumably the candidate would consent to share, which is then tailored to illustrating why they’d be a great fit for that job. So it’s an interesting one and I think it’s something we’ll come back to actually a bit later because another, there’s another sort of episode where the interview sort of goes over similar grounds to, to that one. So that’s a, that was a really great episode to start the year and I’d really recommend listening to that if you want a real sense of what’s going on with AI. The next episode was 75 9. The return of friend of the show Baz von de Hatred.
07:39
Matt Alder
Who is competition with you, Mervyn, to have the most appearances on Recruiting Future. I think he’s edged ahead now, but here you are again coming back at him. And basically every year for the last. I can’t even remember how many years it is. 15 years, 20 years. It says in the episode. It’s a long time. Bass has done some really in depth research into the state of corporate career sites where he effectively has a group of People who go and apply for jobs look at every single facet of corporate career site really sort of then sort of really kind of summarize, you know, what’s changed, what the issues are. And over the course of his research, you can see how things have developed. So we do it every year. We sort of catch up about the research.
08:25
Matt Alder
What was really interesting this time was he flagged up that a lot of the problems we’ve had with career sites for a really long time, so terrible mobile interfaces, bad ATS integrations with broken links, bad seem to have now been fixed. And there was a real sense that actually we got to grips with some of the, you know, the biggest problems that career sites have had. The problem is these are 2015 problems. And we now live in a very different world. We live in a different world where candidates have different expectations. And really the career sites were not scoring well in terms of things like personalization, conversational AI, the kind of things that are now being expected in a job search.
09:09
Matt Alder
And really, I think that sums up perhaps the issue that we have in ta, that it takes a really long time to address the issues that are out there. And now the world is moving even quicker than we could even imagine a few years ago. What were your takeaways from this one?
09:28
Mervyn Dinnen
I think what really struck me is there’s a bit of a paradox there in that career sites finally fixing the problems we’ve been complaining about for ages and ages. ACS implementations are getting better, ghosting is down, in progress. But at the same time, and candidates are like, you know, increasingly discovering and evaluating employers before they even get to a career site. You know, AI now anybody can say, what’s it like to work at Recruiting Future? Or, you know, is Recruiting Future a good podcast? Or we don’t have to watch loads of episodes to see it’s a good podcast, you know, we can find out.
10:04
Mervyn Dinnen
So I think that, you know, it’s almost this kind of thing, that the risk is that organizations are now going to spend the next year or two perfecting almost a yesterday’s experience when, you know, the real shift is to AI driven discovery and personalization and stuff.
10:23
Matt Alder
Yeah, no, I think that’s the issue and that’s one of the big challenges that I think we’ve got to face. Let’s move on to episode 760. Now this is an epic episode. We could do a whole roundup show about this one. So it was an interview with Simon Bishop, who is head of TA at SoftwareOne, and Ritu Mohanka, who’s CEO at Vonq. And it’s really a kind of a. It’s a conversation in two parts. So the first part Simon’s talking about really a very kind of modern approach to employer brand activation in the world of tick tock and YouTube and some of the really interesting recruitment marketing things that they’ve been doing. Which to honestly is probably an episode in its own. In its own right. The second half we get into the.
11:12
Matt Alder
This whole idea of co creation and co creating the future and they talk about Ritu and Simon talk about the story of how they basically vonk collaborated with Software1 and some other partners to develop their new Agentic AI offering. And I just thought in a world that’s full of vendors putting AI products out there to solve recruiting problems that very often you completely missed the mark. This was just such a great case study in a vendor working really closely with a TA team to kind of really refine look at the problems they’re solving, look at how the hiring managers were reacting, testing assumptions, you know, looking at what the candidates were saying about it. And I just thought it was, you know, it’s just brilliant from that perspective. What did you think?
12:08
Mervyn Dinnen
I think that, yeah, it was a very strong conversation. And the key points, AI is strong enough now to do parts, to screen at scale, consistency, way above what a human can and it reduces noise, it prevents good candidates being missed, gives recruiters time to do human work, you know, trust building, that kind of thing, judgment. So I think that it’s, you know, the partnership is important. The also, you know, there’s a consistency about it. So it’s kind of, you know, we don’t have this drop off.
12:57
Matt Alder
Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s, yeah, I think it’s just a really interesting way of working and the problems they solve and the product they come up with are worth a look. So again, would really recommend listening to that one, which is really two podcasts shoved into one. So two for the price of one. So next one we are jumping to episode six, sorry seven, six, two which is called Moving from AI. No we’re not. I’ve missed one out. So we’re not jumping, we’re going to episode 761, what happens when recruiters embrace AI. Again, really interesting. And there’s a real running theme running through all of the episodes in January they were quite sort of carefully curated to really complement each other. So it’s interview with Dr. Ali Raza who I met while I was on a trip to Dubai a couple of months ago.
13:49
Matt Alder
He’s got a really interesting story. So he used to be an academic, he used to be a professor at university, but he’s become a recruiter and basically listen to the podcast to hear the story about how that very strange shift happened. But the short version is that he has designed his own AI matching and screening tool, and he’s just taken out to the market himself and he’s using it to run a recruitment business, which is him. And what’s really interesting about this is the way that it’s using technology to be really strong at what the technology is strong at. So in this case, matching candidates with opportunities. So that’s what his AI does. But what he then does is, does what humans are really strong at. So he builds a relation.
14:46
Matt Alder
He’s recruiting for senior people in very hard to fill roles, and he builds a relationship with those people, just like recruiters should or do or certainly did in the past. But also he then talks them through what their score was, what the AI said about their suitability for the job, and fills in the blanks because ultimately the AI is going off a resume which has limited information. There may be information about their background that’s not in there. And he fills that in, in conversations and then gets a very clear picture of, you know, great candidates he matched. And he’s had some brilliant, you know, some brilliant results from it.
15:27
Matt Alder
And it’s just really interesting because it’s just that combination of human and machine in a way that might make some recruiters uncomfortable because they might think they’re better at matching than anyone in the world ever. But, but here we’re kind of seeing really how AI and humans can work together to better for everyone. And I just think it’s a fantastic story. Mervyn, as a former recruiter, what did you think of this one?
15:54
Mervyn Dinnen
I thought it was very interesting. There are now screening tasks where AI can easily outperform humans in scale consistency and being able to assess against multiple criteria across thousands of applications. And his story, you’re right, is really interesting. And it’s kind of, I suppose one of the points is about what volume does to behavior. You know, that with volume, recruiters start take shortcuts. They might sample a small portion, they might have 700 applications, and they might, you know, somehow only maybe assess a small proportion of that because, you know, they can’t process the rest. Where AI can evaluate everybody consistently against agreed, you know, criteria and spot relevant experience, even when I suppose it was interesting because it’s kind of. Even if it’s not described in the way you would expect it.
16:59
Mervyn Dinnen
So it’s kind of somebody hasn’t described their experience really well, but AI will know they’ve got that experience.
17:04
Matt Alder
Yeah, exactly.
17:06
Mervyn Dinnen
That they’ve got that experience.
17:06
Matt Alder
Yeah. And then he was filling in the gaps with conversations and I think that’s a really interesting point. It was like, you know, 700 people applied. A recruiter might stop looking at candidates after number 50 if they feel they’ve got a great shortlist. What if the best fit for that job ever is number 650 to apply? They never even get looked at. So, yeah, I think it’s a really great story. I mean, you know, there’s obviously a question about, you know, how do you do this at scale? Because he’s very much doing this with, you know, with senior roles where there is the opportunity to spend that one one time with candidates. But then I guess that’s what some of the other, you know, case stud got in this month have been looking at how you do that at scale.
17:49
Matt Alder
So really, really interesting and yeah, absolutely. You know, check this one out if you want to see what the future of being a recruiter just might be like. Now we’re going to move on to episode 762, which again, moving from AI hype to value. So another approach to AI, different market. Interview with Max, who is the CEO of a company called Mackie People. They work with some very big employers with really kind of high volumes of applications. And again, just a really interesting story about what is actually happening on the ground with this technology, what it’s doing to recruiting, what the case studies look like, all that sort of stuff. Now I think the interesting thing for me was one of the big focuses that Mackie has is on the giving the best possible candidate experience.
18:48
Matt Alder
And one of the examples that’s quoted is one of their clients is a massive retailer who gets 1.6 million applications every year. They reject 98% of those people. However their kind of promoter scores, the candidate’s kind of happiness with the brand is still very high because the candidate experience is so good. And I think this is really important because we need to talk about this because at the moment I think a lot of the commentary in the space is focused, you know, not incorrectly, but is focused on, you know, various potential legal cases and regulations and things that are going on. The, the kind of, the more mainstream Media is sometimes when it looks at.
19:31
Matt Alder
Looks at AI interviews and those kind of things focuses on, you know, some anecdotes and some vocaboks from people who had a terrible experience and think it’s a horrible thing. Compute. No, we don’t want to be in this kind of world but actually here what we’re seeing is candidates are getting a fantastic experience and the hiring managers are getting a great experience and it’s just really kind of helping to improve recruiting. And I think it’s something that, you know, we need to talk about more so we can a get that understanding of the advantages out there but also hold all the event, all the vendors out there to this kind of, this kind of high level of this is what the candidate experience needs to be. It needs to better than it was. Otherwise, what’s the point of bringing in this technology?
20:19
Matt Alder
So there’s me going off one. What do you, what do you think, Murphy?
20:24
Mervyn Dinnen
You pretty much said it, so I’ll try and think of something else to say. No, the. Yeah, it is fascinating and I think, you know, if we go back, if you and I go back years and years when we first started talking about this stuff online on social media, things like Twitter and stuff. Yeah, we always was about how, you know, the candid, that link between how a candidate is treated when they apply for a job and how they’re treated when they’re a potential customer and that all the people we give a really bad experience to when they apply for a job are potential customers. The potential advocates, the potential. It’s kind of like I didn’t get the job, but what a great company they are. I’d recommend them to anybody because of the way they treated me.
21:08
Mervyn Dinnen
And we kind of with volume, we lose a lot of that. Particularly recruiters. Ta people under pressure to fill roles. It’s only the people who maybe that fit the criteria that you focus on. But I think that, you know, we’re still making hiring. I think, you know, one of the things that Max was saying is we’re still making hiring decisions with signals from the past. CVS keywords, gut feel and kind of it’s improving the candidate experience, you know, even for rejects, even for people who aren’t going to be right, we know at the beginning aren’t going to be right to give them something to take away. Say actually, you know, it’s a great company. I didn’t get, you know, I didn’t get as far as an interview, but I could Just tell the way they treated me was really good.
21:57
Mervyn Dinnen
And I think it’s the kind of. There’s, there’s too much almost still unstructured process, particularly in volume recruitment, which we shouldn’t really have. So I think that the kind of metrics that really matter, you know, candid experience, recruiter efficiency, time to hire are important, but I. That, you know, at its heart, the CV is almost the core failure.
22:28
Matt Alder
Yeah, absolutely. Coming back to this again and again and again and again. It’s. I think it’s just going to dominate what we talk about this year. To, to me, I think this is the year where we finally get some understanding and traction in that particular area. And I think, yeah, you know, just case studies like this with some sort of really big companies doing great stuff is the thing that moves it forward.
22:52
Mervyn Dinnen
Yeah. And I think that there is a belief that AI just speeds up hiring, but it doesn’t because it really changes what we assess to see if the candidate is right, how we go about it, as opposed to just. We can process people quicker now.
23:08
Matt Alder
Yeah, exactly. And I think that, you know, so we don’t sound like just two cheerleaders for everything to do with AI ever. I think we need to caveat that, you know, there are lots of instances of AI being used out there that aren’t, you know, that aren’t good, that aren’t transparent, that, you know, are not doing what they. What they should. And I think that again, the great thing about the interviews that we did on the podcast in January is they kind of really sort of told this story about, you know, everything from transformation to regulation to, you know, to making things better and showing just how. How. Yeah, you know, how great. How great it can be.
23:49
Matt Alder
Which brings us nicely onto the final interview that we’re going to talk about, which is episode 764 with an author and a consultant called Steve Wonka. He’s written a book called AI and the Octopus Organization, which is co authored with a guy called Jonathan Brill who runs or ran AI labs at Amazon. So, you know, two kind of very experienced people writing this. And it kind of goes back to the interview with John Kesterman that we talked about right at the beginning of this conversation in terms of how do you make AI change work in an organization? And the premise of the book is that octa. Octopuses. Octopi. Is it octopus? How do you say that? What’s the plural? Octopus. My 10 year old, he’ll correct me on this. Anyway, octopus could be, couldn’t it? Yeah, there we are. Don’t know.
24:52
Matt Alder
But I need to ask AI but I can’t because I’m on camera. Right. So anyway, an octopus has a number of different brains and effectively it has brains in its tentacles so they can off. They can operate independently to the rest of the octopus. It’s really quite, it’s really quite interesting, fascinating creatures. And what they’re saying in this book is actually for AI to work properly it needs to be, you know, kind of organic, come from the grassroots. Every division needs to be owning and driving innovation with a kind of a central, you know, a central view on it as well. It can’t just come from the top of an organization and distributed innovation is what they call it. And we cover a lot on this in the episode. So I won’t go into it too much.
25:42
Matt Alder
Take a listen and you can hear what we were talking about. But the big conclusion I came out with was from a talent acquisition perspective. Talent acquisition has a real chance to lead change in this area because you know, recruiting is very much at the cutting edge of what’s happening with AI in organizations, certainly AI within the talent part of organizations. And I think it’s TA’s chance to kind of really lead here rather than, you know, trying to follow. So a really kind of interesting message to finish with. Mervyn, what was your take on the octopus?
26:20
Mervyn Dinnen
It was fascinating, you’re right. I mean it’s something that is well, you know, it’s well thought out and it’s a very good, you know, calling the octopus thing organization rather is, is very well sought out because it’s the, the of all the different potential strands. So I mean, I think that it is very interesting. I think that a lot of organizations will probably struggle to really adopt something like this, but I think that they need to, you know, I think the operation. Yeah, organizations now need to be very open minded about how they adopt this and how they implement it and how they use it. You know, who owns AI transformation within the organization, for example, things like that I think is now becoming very important. It’s kind of, and in fact it’s the.
27:23
Mervyn Dinnen
One of the thoughts I had about this was that it, this isn’t really just about AI in the flow of work. It’s almost about, you know, changing. It’s, it’s almost changing, you know, how decisions are made, who makes them, what information is used to make decisions, what speed we make decisions at. It’s kind of the. I think there’s a lot more of that in it.
27:45
Matt Alder
Yeah, 100%. I think it’s a great way to. A great way to close January. So that’s it. That’s Roundup. Mervyn, thank you very much for your input and insight on this one. We are already into February and there will be another set of interviews on Recruiting Future. But you know, with some new themes and also digging deeper into some of themes that we’ve already talked about, it tells me that 2026 is going to be a very interesting year. So make sure you follow and listen to Recruiting Future. You can find it on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also find the website at recruitingfuture.com where you can search all the past episodes and find the episodes that we’ve talked about in this show. So round up. We’re back live this time next month.
28:37
Matt Alder
So all it remains me to say is a big thank you to Mervyn for coming along and sharing his thoughts and thank you to everyone who’s been watching. See you next time.
