As AI reshapes how work gets done, the most valuable thing a person can bring to their job isn’t recent task experience; it is the depth of judgment, sector knowledge, and decision-making that takes years to build. That is precisely what AI augments rather than replaces. However, in a cautious hiring market, recency is being given overinflated importance, and a large pool of deeply experienced professionals is being filtered out because they have a gap on their resume. These are people with the experience and maturity, and strong appetite for engaging with new technology that the AI era needs.
So why are employers overlooking this talent, and how should TA leaders rethink their hiring strategies to fix this?
My guest this week is Hazel Little, CEO of Career Returners. In our conversation, Hazel explains what the data reveals about the returner experience in 2026, why deep experience and judgment matter more than recency in an AI-augmented workplace, and shares some practical advice on making hiring more effective.
In the interview, we discuss:
• How the landscape for career returners has worsened in the last year
• The unique benefits returners can bring to organizations.
• Why there is still so much stigma around career breaks and resume gaps
• How the hiring process amplifies the confidence gap
• The importance of potential over experience in a fast-changing world of work
• Why the human judgment needed to work with AI comes from experience
• The skills shortage hiding in plain sight
• Building potential rather than buying experience
• Screening and the hiring manager mindset
• What TA needs to do differently to harness this valuable talent pool.
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00:00
Matt Alder
The AI revolution is making one thing more valuable than ever, and that’s the human judgment that comes with experience. So why are so many employers filtering out a deep pool of experienced talent by default? And what should they be doing instead? Keep listening to find out.
00:19
Matt Alder
Support for this podcast comes from Paradox. 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 from 12 days to 4 and 7/Eleven is saving their store leaders 40,000 hours per week. The craziest thing is all of these companies did it by leveraging the same technology. Paradox Acquired by Workday in 2025, Paradox pioneered conversational hiring. Whether acting as your ATS or automating the hiring process on top of your existing hcm, Paradox streamlines the entire experience. And if you’re a workday customer, Paradox now operates seamlessly within their talent acquisition suite as the Workday Paradox Candidate Experience Agent.
01:20
Matt Alder
Driven by a 24/7 ai assistant, Paradox 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 continues to help hundreds of the world’s top employers simplify hiring and save money while creating great candidate experiences. Spend more time with people, not software. You can find out more by going to Paradox.ai. That’s Paradox.ai.
02:21
Matt Alder
Hi there. Welcome to episode 804 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. As AI reshapes how work gets done, the most valuable thing that someone can bring to their job isn’t recent task experience. It’s the depth of judgment, sector knowledge, and decision making that can take years to build. That is precisely what AI augments rather than replaces. However, in a cautious hiring market, recency is being given overinflated importance, and a large pool of deeply experienced professionals is being filtered out simply because they have a gap on their resume. These are very often the people with the experience, the maturity, and the strong appetite for engaging with new technology that the AI era needs. So why are employers overlooking this talent? And how should talent acquisition leaders rethink their hiring strategies to fix it?
03:16
Matt Alder
My guest this week is Hazel Little, CEO of Career Returners. In our conversation, Hazel explains what the data reveals about the returner experience in 2026. Why deep experience and judgment matter more than recency in an AI augmented workplace. And share some practical advice on making hiring more effective.
03:38
Matt Alder
Hi, Hazel, and welcome back to the podcast.
03:40
Hazel Little
Hi, Matt, it’s a pleasure to be here again. Thanks for having me.
03:43
Matt Alder
Just for the people who may not have heard you on the show before can you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
03:50
Hazel Little
So I’m Hazel Little. I’m CEO of a company called Career Returners. We’re return to work specialists. So we combine coaching, community, consulting, support to both individuals coming back after long career breaks and organisations trying to hire and retain them effectively. I guess what we’re trying to achieve is to remove the career break penalty and we’re actually focused on both sides of that problem. So, on the employer side, we help organizations to rethink how they attract, how they assess onboard and support experienced talent with nonlinear career paths. We partner with them to design and deliver variety of returner programs and other supportive employment pathways. On the individual side, we support a global community of 10,000 experienced returners who are currently on a career break and they want to return.
04:55
Hazel Little
So through our career Returners community, they can access lots of free advice, events, coaching, upskilling, peer connection. And we’ve been doing this for 12 years. We’ve partnered with over 200 organizations and we’ve supported well over 4,000 returners back into work. So we’ve got a real depth of understanding of what is going on for returners, particularly the challenges and how career breaks are experienced. But at the same time, we’re also really practical about what organizations need to make this work. At the core, there is a huge pool of experienced professionals who are being overlooked, and that’s largely because hiring processes weren’t designed with them in mind. So we help organizations really unlock that in a way that delivers business value.
05:52
Matt Alder
When we spoke about a year ago, you described just how challenging the landscape was for people returning to work after career breaks. I mean, how has that picture evolved over the last 12 months since we last spoke?
06:08
Hazel Little
Yeah, that’s right. So we carry out our annual research study, which is the Career Returners Indicator, and it looks at the experience of professionals returning to work after long career breaks. Matt so when we spoke Last year, the 2025 results were. Were pretty disheartening, I think it’s fair to say so. 94% Of returning professionals were finding it challenging to get back into a professional role, with 69% describing it as extremely challenging. What’s really worrying is that in 2026 it’s got worse. So we’re now seeing 99% of returners seeing that they’re finding it challenging to get back into work, with 74% saying it’s extremely challenging. So a real shift there in terms of the numbers. And I guess the obvious question from that is what’s driving that? I think a big part of it is obviously the broader hiring landscape.
07:13
Hazel Little
Over the last 12 months it’s been tough across the board. We’ve seen redundancies in many sectors. We know that hiring has slowed and as a result organizations are being much more cautious about hiring. At the same time, we know that teams have shrunk, which means that hiring managers are under more pressure, they are operating with fewer resources. So when you combine that caution with stretched teams, you see some really predictable behaviors. So first off, we know that hybrid hiring managers are becoming more risk averse. They are leaning much more heavily on recent experience as a proxy for capability. And actually 40% of returners of respondents confirmed that or reported that bias against their CV gap was the biggest barrier in their return to work.
08:14
Hazel Little
That is actually backed up by the REC research which was done last year, which confirms that recent experience is in the top two screening factors, above relevant skills and experience. So we know that recency is really becoming into the core. And given teams are stretched, there’s also much more pressure to hire someone who can hit the ground running immediately, which makes any candidate who might need even a short ramp up period feel like hard work and impossible. And in practice that often means that people with gaps are being filtered out very early in the process and in fact sometimes automatically in that recruitment process because they don’t have the recent experience and they’re perceived as taking longer to get up to speed. So we know that has been happening.
09:07
Hazel Little
But alongside that, we’ve also seen a real slowdown in structured returner programs in many markets. But we’ve certainly seen it in the UK with tighter budgets, fewer open rules, that some organizations have paused those initiatives, which returner programs have always been a bit of a lifeline for returners because they’re not competing against candidates with recent experience. It’s like a fairer playing ground. What we have is that returners are facing right now, pressure from both sides, fewer returner programs combined with a hiding environment that’s become even more conservative. And so I think that is why we’re seeing such a sharp increase in how difficult people are finding it to return.
09:54
Matt Alder
I think it’s really worth talking about what employers are missing out on here by focusing on recency and filtering out career returners automatically and all those sort of things that are going on. We discussed it the last time we spoke, but I think it’s really worked. Worth reiterating for people listening to this episode, what is it that employers are missing out on by really cutting off the entry to work for people returning from career breaks?
10:22
Hazel Little
So, first of all, they’re missing out on a really rich and experienced talent pool. That’s first and foremost. Again, looking at the data within our community, Matt, returners bring vast experience prior to their career breaks and it’s actually typically 10 years or more work experience that they bring to the forefront. So they’re missing out on that rich experience talent pool. What they’re also missing out on is the fact that these individuals have taken time out of their careers. They may have been doing volunteering, they may have been doing other work whilst they’ve been out. And so they have also developed different skills, different experiences. And so when they come back into the workforce, they’re bringing that different perspective, they’re bringing the cognitive diversity. So there’s that element as well in terms of the value of the career break.
11:20
Hazel Little
But over and above that, what we know from our work over the last 12 years is that returners, they bring motivation, they bring loyalty, they bring commitment, they bring an openness to learn. And so there’s all those kind of resilience, adaptability, there’s all of those fantastic softer skills and approaches that the organizations are missing out on alongside the professional experience and the diverse experience because of their career break.
11:46
Matt Alder
Just in terms of the job searches that people are doing to sort of dive into that in a little bit more detail, I mean, what are you seeing in terms of the effort that this group of people are putting into job searches? And what does it tell us about the way that the hiring process and of course the hiring process are really evolving at the moment, the way that those hiring processes are working for this.
12:09
Hazel Little
Group, I think what we’re seeing really clearly is that returners, they are putting in a huge amount of effort and they are applying for high volume of roles. So around a quarter have applied for more than 100 jobs and about 40% have applied for more than 50. So there is that kind of higher volume in terms of applications. But I think what’s really important here is that they’re not just applying for jobs, so they’re actively upskilling. Around 80% have done formal learning, ready to prepare for their return to work. They’re taking on volunteering work, they’re taking on project work to demonstrate that recent experience and try and plug the gap on their cv. They’re building or rebuilding, should I say networks, because they’re often from scratch after being out of the corporate workplace.
13:05
Hazel Little
They’re getting mentoring, they’re reaching out to employers directly, they’re attending events. You know, they are doing everything that you would expect of a highly proactive candidate. They’re taking a very broad, they’re taking a very active, they’re taking a really kind of a multi route approach to try their best to get back in again. But because they’re being screened out of traditional recruitment, because of their gap, they can’t only rely on that standard application route. Despite their experience that we’ve just talked about, despite their upskilling, there is a feeling that they need to go around the system just to be visible. I think that in itself is a really strong signal that processes are not working for this talent pool. The recruitment process should be able to recognize people who have gaps on their cv.
14:00
Hazel Little
They should be able to get through and they’re simply not.
14:03
Matt Alder
And that must have a real impact in terms of confidence and things like that.
14:08
Hazel Little
Absolutely, it does. So what we see is fairly consistent over the last three years, Matt, is that 89% of people have reported that their career break has had a negative impact on their confidence. And actually, I think, you know, what’s important to point out here is that the hiring process plays a critical role in that because what we often see is that it amplifies that existing confidence gap. So if, for example, someone, you know, they’re coming back to work, they already feel a little bit uncertain, they’ve lost their professional identity, and then they struggle to get any traction on their application. And particularly if that is over a longer period of time, often months, sometimes years, then it reinforces that loss of confidence very quickly.
15:04
Hazel Little
And so you get into this cycle, if you like, where confidence drops further, not because of their ability, but because of how the system is responding to them. So it’s kind of perpetuating that loss of confidence and having a real significant impact on this talent pool.
15:25
Matt Alder
The big discussion at the moment is AI and digital skills reshaping the workforce, both in terms of the skills that people need. And there’s a really interesting ongoing debate about whether it’s taking jobs away or not, which seems to be swinging in kind of both directions depending on what week. We’re sort of listening to the news from a career returner’s persp. How ready are they to engage with that shift to AI. And do you feel that employers are recognizing the readiness that they might have?
15:55
Hazel Little
They are super ready. And I love this. This is something that I’m so excited about, because in our data, we ask the question around an interest in upskilling and reskilling, and actually 93% of returners are open to retraining in AI or digital roles, and 71% are very open to that. Alongside that data point, what we know is 42% they are actively interested in pivoting into a new role or into a new sector. What this tells us, if we look into the data, is that we’ve got this talent pool that has a very strong learning mindset and a high degree of adaptability. Yet when you look at the broader narrative around skills shortages, again, particularly in tech and AI, there’s quite an interesting disconnect there because we often hear there isn’t enough talent. We often hear that there aren’t enough women in these areas.
17:02
Hazel Little
And yet 90% of returners are women, and the vast majority, 93%, they are open to retraining into exactly those types of roles. So it’s not just a pipeline problem, but it is. We also need to think about then, how we are assessing, but also how we are developing talent, because this is a large, motivated, experienced group of people who are actively willing to reskill. They’re actively wanting to move into these areas. But the real question, as you say, is whether employers are recognizing that readiness, whether they’re willing to hire, and whether they’re willing to develop the talent rather than just expecting it to arrive fully formed with recent experience. And I have to say we’re not quite yet seeing enough traction.
17:56
Hazel Little
But I think what’s also really important is to point out that there is that underlying assumption, particularly for people who have been out of the workforce for a while, and often for older returners, that they either can’t or that they don’t want to engage in new technology. I’m really excited that our research challenges that, because unlocking this talent pool isn’t just thinking differently about how we hire for our measuring skills, but it also requires that willingness to invest in training and development. And so if organizations could put more emphasis on learning agility, on potential, and if they are prepared to build skills rather than just buy them, then what I’m really excited about is that there’s a strong match here between what returners are offering and actually what the market is needing in terms of skills and AI and data.
18:59
Hazel Little
And that’s what I’m really excited about.
19:00
Matt Alder
The Thing to add about that as well is we talk about AI sort of augmenting humans in the. In the workplace potentially, rather than replacing them whole scale and it just kind of really occurs to me that actually in order to do that, then having a huge amount of experience in a particular. In a particular sector or industry or transferable experience is really important because that’s what can be augmented with. That’s what can be augmented with the AI. So there’s a. There is a really good match here for lots and lots of reasons, isn’t there?
19:34
Hazel Little
Definitely, absolutely. You know, that prior experience, the decision making, the maturity, the ability to kind of bring that broader thinking, all of those elements that you’ve mentioned, it really aligns with this talent pool. So there’s a huge amount of potential here.
19:53
Matt Alder
So for the talent acquisition leaders who are listening, who want to make their hiring process genuinely more accessible to people returning after career breaks, where should they be focusing their energy?
20:05
Hazel Little
First, I would highlight three key areas. So the first is how candidates are screened and shortlisted. So it’s the single biggest barrier, you know, I’ve talked about it is your process filtering out people who have gaps on their cv, either through automated screening or through recent experience requirements, or even just how CVS are interpreted, because then returners will never get into the process. So the first step, I would say, is really interrogating. Are we overweighting recency? Are we defaulting to linear career paths? Because if you don’t open that door, then honestly, nothing else matters. We need to get that door open. The second is how you assess capability once they’re in the process. So you’ve opened the door, kind of what’s next? And traditional interviews, they often favor confidence, they favor recent context, which can disadvantage returners.
21:08
Hazel Little
So it’s about designing out that bias and enabling people with gaps on their CV to perform at their best. So look at your questions that you’re asking, look at the language that you’re using. Is it inclusive for people without recent experience? Are you allowing returners to draw an experience from outside of the corporate world? And if you are, is it really genuinely valued? So those are just some really relatively simple tweaks, adjustments that you can make to your assessment and your recruitment process. And I think the third one is the hiring manager mindset and support. You know, I’d like to think we’re at 20, 26. I’d like to think that by now we’ve moved on beyond needing to make the business case for diverse and inclusive teams. But in reality, even with the Right process in place.
22:04
Hazel Little
If hiring managers still see returner candidates as a risk, it will not translate into hiring decisions. So helping managers to understand what more about a career break, helping them to understand around the rich talent pool, helping them to have the confidence to hire for potential as well as for experience is absolutely critical. And you know, where possible provide additional support like coaching for returners. It can make a real difference not only to the individuals, because obviously it can help build their confidence and accelerate their reintegration back into the workforce. But it can also take some of that, I guess, that perceived pressure off the hiring managers as well.
22:52
Hazel Little
I think of your audience, Matt, and I think talent leaders are in such a strong position here to shape how hiring works in practice and to make a meaningful difference to who gets access to these opportunities. There’s lots of advice out there, but that would be my top three things for people to think about. Practically.
23:13
Matt Alder
As a final question, what kind of policy changes or structural changes? Just the way that the work happens and governments and employers think about it what would make the biggest difference to career returners over the next two to three years?
23:28
Hazel Little
Firstly, is at the policy level. I think there needs to be a greater recognition of career returners as a distinction labour market group that would benefit from more targeted support. So that could include things like reducing the cost, barriers to retraining. It could better aligning reskilling opportunities with real employment pathways and again, particularly in growth areas such as AI and digital, because as I’ve said, the willingness to retrain is there, but access and affordability for this talent pool can be a barrier. So I think government needs to step up in terms of that at a policy level. I think the second thing is around employers creating structured pathways back into mid to senior level roles. We’ve talked about the importance of returner programs, about the importance of supported hiring and bridging that gap.
24:27
Hazel Little
But we also know in the current market that we’ve seen a number of those programs have been paused or scaled backs. I do think that would be one of the biggest shifts that we would see more organizations reinvesting in those structured pathways. Then the third, I would say is more about normalizing career breaks more broadly. At the moment, career breaks, they are still being treated as an exception and that perception feeds directly into hiring decisions. So I think it’s about changing how organizations think about careers more fundamentally through policy, through culture, through how performance potential are assessed over time. Recognizing that as careers become longer and more flexible, stepping in and out of the workplace is going to become increasingly common.
25:20
Hazel Little
And I do think that for organizations that design for that reality, they will have access to a much broader and more resilient talent pool. Whereas at the moment returners, they’re having to adapt themselves to fit the system. And I think there’s a real opportunity to start redesigning system around how careers actually work in this day and age. And I guess if we look to the future, careers are only going to become more non linear. So organizations that will adapt to that now will have a real talent advantage in the future. And that’s exciting.
25:57
Matt Alder
Hazel, thank you very much for talking to me.
25:59
Hazel Little
Great. Thanks for having me. Matt.
26:02
Matt Alder
My thanks to Hazel. 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 recruitingfuture.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.
26:26
Matt Alder
Hope you’ll join me.
