Over the last year, I have been using AI to develop a searchable archive of the content in every episode of Recruiting Future, 3 million words from over a decade of unscripted conversations with practitioners and thought leaders across talent acquisition. James Whitelock, host of The Marketing Rules Podcast, has been doing the same thing with his own archive of more than 200 episodes over seven years.
Between us, we now have over a thousand real conversations we can interrogate for trends, and the picture that emerges is an industry caught in familiar tensions: fighting to prove its strategic value, grappling with AI that moves faster than it can be adopted, and trying to figure out which parts of hiring should stay fundamentally human.
So what do years of real conversations reveal about where talent acquisition actually stands?
In my conversation with James, we compare what our respective archives reveal about TA’s shifting identity, the real pace of AI’s change, and the tensions the industry keeps returning to.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Using AI to turn podcast archives into industry intelligence
• TA’s journey from growth engine to cost center and back again
• How the AI conversation has shifted over time
• Adaptability as the critical skill for TA
• Is TA becoming a marketing function?
• Standing out when AI content all sounds the same
• Ring-fencing the parts of hiring that should stay human
• Bias in humans and bias in AI
• What does the future look like?
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Matt Alder [00:00:00] Over the last year, I’ve been using AI to build a searchable archive of nearly a decade of Recruiting Future conversations. James Whitlock has done the same with over 200 episodes of his Marketing Rules podcast. Across both archives, the same debates keep surfacing year after year. So is the industry actually making progress, or just having the same conversations in different ways? Keep listening to find out.
Sponsor message — Maki
Matt Alder [00:00:30] Support for this podcast comes from Maki. Maki began by replacing the resume screen with a fair, structured voice interview that assesses real skills before anyone formally applies. Now that same intelligence is extending across the whole funnel, from the first conversation to the final decision. They recently launched Tomo, an AI interview assistant for hiring managers, the next step towards one connected system that screens, interviews and gives every candidate a consistent, fair experience at scale. See how the end-to-end picture comes together by going to makipeople.com. That’s makipeople.com, and Maki is spelled M-A-K-I.
Introduction
Matt Alder [00:01:34] Hi there. Welcome to episode 806 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Over the last year, I’ve been using AI to develop a searchable archive of the content in every single episode of Recruiting Future: three million words from over a decade of unscripted conversations with practitioners and thought leaders across talent acquisition. James Whitlock, host of the Marketing Rules podcast, has been doing the same thing with his own archive of more than 200 episodes over seven years. Between us, we now have over a thousand real conversations that we can interrogate for trends, and the picture that emerges is an industry caught in familiar tensions: fighting to prove its strategic value, grappling with AI that’s moving faster than anyone could adopt it, and trying to figure out which parts of hiring should stay fundamentally human. So what do years of real conversations reveal about where talent acquisition actually now stands? In my conversation with James, we compare what our respective archives reveal about TA’s shifting identity, the real pace of AI’s change, and the tensions the industry keeps returning to.
Hi James, and welcome back to the podcast.
The conversation
James Whitlock [00:02:55] Thank you very much, Matt. It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s always great to get invited back.
Matt Alder [00:03:00] For people listening who may not know you or your podcast, give us a quick introduction and tell people what you do.
James Whitlock [00:03:06] In the day job, I run a marketing agency for the recruitment and HR space. But part of that is that we also run the Marketing Rules podcast, which has been going well for six or seven years now — we’re on to 200-plus episodes. We talk to all kinds of people in the space, from recruitment agency owners to people of influence within the space, people who have just got something interesting to say about recruitment and talent acquisition and talent tech generally. So that’s what we do.
Matt Alder [00:03:35] One of the things that’s really interesting when you have a podcast that’s been going as long as yours has, as long as mine has, is that you can spot the trends over time in terms of how people are talking. Now, I’ll let you talk about this first and I’ll talk about what I’ve done, but you’ve used AI to analyse that with your podcast, haven’t you?
James Whitlock [00:03:54] Yeah. Again, I can’t take all the credit for this — I think you were looking at something else, and I thought we would do maybe something similar. So we pumped all of the episodes into an AI engine. We put all of the transcripts in there, we fed in as much information as we could, and we taught it a taxonomy on how to categorise everything, with the aim of initially just building out an archive of the Marketing Rules podcast, but then with a longer-term view of: well, over time people’s opinions are going to change, things in the space are changing. We know there are points within the last few years, i.e. COVID and so on, that have changed things, and on the other side of it, it’s a little bit different. So can we use all this data we’ve captured from all these conversations — 200-plus over the last seven years — to make some meaningful use of it? It’s great to have all these conversations, it’s great to have this content — as a marketer, we love all that — but actually, you gave me the impetus to think there’s more to this.
So we took a couple of months, pumped all this into AI, and now we’re able to search the archive, interrogate the archive for all kinds of trends that run up to where we are now, but also start to do a little bit of planning for the future, which is the next stage of where we go. As of now, we can interrogate the archive and ask: look, what’s happening with tech over this time? How do those conversations change? So that was the process we’ve been through, and one we’re continuing to go through with every new episode. It just gets continually updated.
Matt Alder [00:05:42] Yeah, it’s really interesting. For years, I was saying that I wished someone would invent something that would allow me to go and look back through all the episodes of the archive. When I first said it, I was semi-joking, and then, as time’s passed, that’s become approaching reality — and now it is reality. So I’ve done exactly the same thing, and it is fascinating to see people’s opinions change over time, and really get a steer on how the industry’s moving forward, what people have been saying about the future, all of that. There’s so much data there to interrogate, and I’m only really scratching the surface with what I’ve got at the moment, which is why I thought it’d be great to have this conversation, so we could do a little bit of comparison in terms of the things we’ve been finding.
James Whitlock [00:06:28] Yeah, indeed. Whether it’s just for us podcast nerds to dive into this stuff, for your audience and my audience it really does give you either a snapshot or a longer-term view of what’s going on. And it becomes slightly obsessive, if I’ll be honest, to sit there and interrogate the archive, because now it’s quite powerful. Anything I’m potentially going to be talking about with any of our customers, I can go back into the archive and just say: actually, where were we with this, or what has been going on, or where is this going? So it’s become a really good tool, because it’s real-life conversations with real experts. It’s not AI hallucinating this stuff — it’s actual conversations, which I think is probably the most powerful thing about all of this.
Matt Alder [00:07:26] Yeah. And I think when you do a survey to get market intelligence or get the temperature of what’s going on, that’s really a snapshot in time. With something like this, you can actually see what people believe now, how long they’ve believed it, how that’s changed, how reality has caught up with certain things. It’s really fascinating. So let’s just dive in and look at some of the topics. You had sort of ten main things that you found — I think we’re going to look at a few of them. Just give us an overview of what you found in the archive.
James Whitlock [00:07:58] It’s interesting, because nothing has really stood still. There’s nothing we’ve been able to interrogate — especially when we’re looking really at talent acquisition trends; there are other things that come along, but it’s really TA trends we’re looking at in this instance — nothing we found has really stayed static. Things have definitely moved and changed, for the better or for the worse. So one of the things we’ve picked up on is that talent acquisition has moved from this growth engine to a cost centre, and then is trying to skew itself back to becoming more strategic again. Whether people listen to that and say, oh, that’s not correct — this isn’t necessarily my opinion, this is from the conversations, but definitely the conversations we’ve had, with probably 10, 20 or so, maybe a few more people who have really dug into this, that’s the trajectory we see: it started as this growth engine, with businesses perceiving it that way, and now it’s perceived as a cost centre, and it’s trying to wrench itself back to be seen as more useful within the business. So it wanted to be more strategic, wanted to be measured as being less transactional, and it shouldn’t be seen as being in this fragile position within a business that could be let go. Yeah, those are the kinds of things we’re seeing in point one.
Matt Alder [00:09:43] Yeah, I think that’s really interesting, because it mirrors what I’ve seen as well. In the early days of my podcast, talent acquisition was growing; it was all about saving costs for the business. COVID threw everything up in the air, then a lot of companies were back in that growth mode again. But we very much are in that phase at the moment where almost every conversation I have is about talent acquisition wanting to be more strategic. There are conversations coming through where that is very much the case, but there are also conversations where it’s still aspirational, and a lot of the things around measurement and proving value are really at the forefront. I think there’s a really interesting thing when you look at these archives, in terms of the aspiration of what people want and where they are now, and how that gap moves over time. We are seeing that gap close, but in a lot of cases there’s still a long way to go.
James Whitlock [00:10:47] I think that’s an almost general consensus across everything we found when it comes to talent acquisition in our archive: it mirrors exactly what you’ve just said. It’s trying to move itself back to understanding what its value is within the business and express that. That seemed to have all got quite muddled, and obviously a few years ago there were these huge layoffs — we spoke to guests who were going through that at the time — and the perception of the people within TA, and of businesses, was: what is the value of this? What’s it adding to the business beyond recruiting people? So I think the conversation has now moved on to: how do we prove the value we add, that isn’t just putting bums on seats? It’s everything else — how are we building the long-term future of the business we’re working within, and how do we help them understand that? How do we speak that language better? Those are the conversations, some of the topics that come up within this cost centre versus strategic question within TA at the moment. Let’s…
Matt Alder [00:12:07] …move on to the next one. What was the next biggest thing that came out of your archive?
James Whitlock [00:12:11] Well, it’s everyone’s favourite: this is AI, right? To caveat that, we actually resisted doing a huge amount of AI discussion right at the start, but then you just couldn’t get away from it. A lot of it just filtered into everything — every conversation you ended up having, there was some touch point. I guess that’s possibly a reflection on my views on it, but also a reflection of the guests’ views, that it was starting to become ubiquitous within everything. So this AI discussion shifted from real excitement about it through to more around the governance of it, which is a very obvious trend that it was going to go through. Definitely the guests we’ve been speaking to — people will know the likes of Martyn Redstone — that’s where this conversation gets to now. It’s definitely around: it’s here, how do we now manage it, control it? It’s not going away. It’s adding something. We’re not necessarily sure which side of the fence we sit on. We’re not going to fight it, so we need to make sure it works for our business and we govern it. We have to have that oversight, through to, I’m still a bit concerned about the bias and all those kinds of things. So I guess it’s a situation where, even though they’re talking about governance, I think there’s still a little misunderstanding, and people haven’t really got their heads around it yet within talent acquisition.
Matt Alder [00:13:50] Yeah, I think it’s an interesting point. I really want to do a report or a graph that looks at how AI has been spoken about over time in my podcast, because it’s fascinating. I think the first mention was back in 2016, where someone made a ridiculously accurate prediction about scheduling tools and things like that. But then no one mentions it after that for a couple of years. Then there’s this big debate about “is AI real?” — because a lot of things that, in retrospect, were just algorithmic search were being called AI. So there’s this big debate about “is AI actually… this isn’t AI, it’s just a search engine.” And then generative AI explodes everything. It’s interesting to watch that go from hype to experimentation to, as you say, looking at the serious consequences of this. What are the risks? And what I’m also seeing develop — and I think it’s related to that governance point — is an increased conversation about trust, and trust with candidates. I think the candidates are the people driving that, and it’s interesting to see how it plays out. But still, if I’m honest, there aren’t that many sophisticated use cases. I have a few, and I have more and more, and I’m seeing people doing some amazing things, but it’s not as widespread as people feel it is, or certainly as it should be. So it’s a much slower evolution than was predicted a few years ago, but it’s still going quicker than anything else we’ve seen.
James Whitlock [00:15:29] Agreed. And it feeds into the previous point around TA proving their value. If they can get to grips with this and be the owners of the AI for their part of the business, and feed that upwards and talk that language, I think it can again prove their value to a certain point. It slightly touches upon something which isn’t one of the main points, but there are other things around curiosity and adaptability of talent acquisition — being able to manoeuvre fast enough and keep pace with these changes. Those are definitely valuable skills for recruiters and people within talent acquisition, as opposed to massive amounts of expertise in the end. It’s around this adaptability. The whole process with AI is being shaken up — maybe not as fast as we thought, but it’s not going anywhere — so the ability to adapt to that is something we picked up on as well: being more adaptable, as opposed to being great recruiters. Some of that adaptability is probably one of the skill sets that a modern TA person needs, and that will feed into use of AI and technology as well.
Matt Alder [00:16:50] I think that’s a stunning point, actually, because that adaptability versus expertise is critical. I think back to literally just two years ago, where people were coming on the show demanding that everyone had to be an absolute expert in prompt engineering. Remember prompt engineering? That was the thing — people were going to learn prompt engineering, you have to learn prompt engineering. And now you just tell Claude what you want it to do and it does it. Now, obviously there’s more to it than that, and understanding what’s going on is really important, but as you say, it’s more important to keep up to date with what’s possible, and think about the implications, than to dive into the very specifics, because they change literally on a weekly basis at the moment, which is extraordinary. So yeah, it’s a particular type of mindset that you have to have to be able to deal with this, I think.
James Whitlock [00:17:46] And it feeds back into the first point around being able to add value. A lot of these — again, not a direct point — but the threat of technology to talent acquisition’s usability within a business, and their skill sets, has definitely changed, either from being very wary of this new technology to trying to evaluate it better and use it more intelligently, and not necessarily see it as the threat it was originally positioned as. We definitely see these conversations. They’re not one of the main ten we’ve picked up, but they’re conversations I’ve definitely had, around: technology is great, we’re excited about it; actually, it’s going to be doing our job for us; actually, no, we’re going to need to adapt and change and work with it.
Matt Alder [00:18:40] I’m reminded — this is me sounding very old — but back in the day, probably about the year 2000, I was working for a recruitment marketing agency. We had an early version of what would turn into an ATS. And I remember sitting down talking to a TA team about this, and they didn’t want to know, because basically this ATS would take away all the administrators’ jobs. So they didn’t want to buy it because of that. It’s interesting, and obviously things evolved and were different, but it’s a really difficult time, a really interesting time, and tracking what people are saying about this, and the sentiment, is also interesting. Because if we look back, I think we could see shifts in sentiment as well — from everyone being really excited, to people being wary, to talking about governance, to being cautiously excited, do you know what I mean? There’s probably an interesting trend line we could put around that when it came to AI as well: scepticism, excitement, scepticism, fear, all those sorts of things. Let’s move on to the next one, because it’s definitely related to this.
James Whitlock [00:19:51] So this next one is, I suppose, close to my heart, being a marketeer, and it’s TA quietly becoming a marketing function. Just to caveat it, this is where the data within the podcast is — I’m not sure I necessarily believe or agree with this myself, but from the conversations we’ve had, that’s the trend we’re seeing. And I suppose it’s right, in a certain sense, that TA is no longer necessarily seen to just be recruiters and vacancy fillers. There’s a whole other area around: are they the arbiters of employer branding? Are they the arbiters of EVP? There are social strategies around the TA infrastructure, and the way they have to understand how content works online and the types of content they put out there. We haven’t really dug into this enough to know whether it’s really the role of the people within talent acquisition, or whether it’s recruitment marketing, or someone else, or a combination across all of these different things — whether it actually is their job. But the conversations we’ve had definitely show there’s more of a marketing slant and skill set needed if you’re going to be in this space now, definitely.
Matt Alder [00:21:08] I think that’s really interesting. I’m just struck by all of the different roles that TA teams are supposed to be fulfilling — as you say, employer branding, recruitment marketing, actually filling jobs, but also being technical experts and all this sort of stuff. So it’s a very difficult position to be in. The marketing thing’s interesting. My background’s in recruitment marketing a million years ago — that’s how I started off — and it’s interesting to track over time what’s happened. In some ways, I think things have been a little quiet about recruitment marketing very recently. However, I can really see that it’s going to have to bounce back, because what’s happening at the moment is that people are using AI to shortcut lots of things — lots of copywriting, lots of stuff like that — and we’re living in a world where everything is just starting to look and sound identical. I think the marketing skills around understanding your audience, standing out and getting the right messages out there are going to be critical in a world drowning under AI slop.
James Whitlock [00:22:16] That touches on some of the other points we’ve made. It’s interesting — 20 years ago, would a person in TA be expected to understand even some of the basics around recruitment marketing, like cost per click and cost per application and retargeting, and omnichannel engagement? I don’t think so. Maybe it was slightly a boring role, I don’t know, but they definitely didn’t have that pressure on them to be the arbiters and managers of all this stuff, as well as trying to put bums on seats, understand if that person’s right for the role, find the right person, interview the right person, all of this. Which, again, I know technology has a part to play in now, but it probably comes down to the people in TA having to prove their value and their worth a bit more, so they have to understand some of this stuff — that their cost per application could technically be attached to the work they’re doing elsewhere, and so on.
It’s interesting, and I’m not sure I agree that they should be marketeers. I think it’s a very different skill set and role. There are people within talent acquisition that do it very well — you can see the ones that do it very well — but it’s not the fault of the ones that don’t. They shouldn’t be almost left behind, because actually I don’t think it should be their role. As I said, the conversation we have suggests it’s moving in that direction. We’ve got nothing to actually say whether it should or shouldn’t be the direction it’s heading, but it does seem to be the direction, certainly.
Matt Alder [00:23:59] What I’ve noticed is that if you go back 10, 15 years ago, this stuff would have automatically gone to a recruitment marketing agency, and over that time, gradually more and more of it has come in-house. It’s gone in waves. And there is an interesting discussion around that, and also around expertise, because, as I said earlier, if you have a team that’s supposed to be doing all these different things, what kind of expertise do you need to do that? So yeah, it’s a really interesting one. Time for one more — give us another one.
James Whitlock [00:24:30] So this one is slightly contrary to everything we’ve just discussed — that human connection has become more valuable as technology has increased. I guess people might say, well, that’s obvious, but it feels like there’s a shift: there are certain points within the recruitment and talent acquisition process that are almost ring-fenced now. This is a bit that technology shouldn’t be involved in, and actually this need for human connection is the bit that’s going to make you stand out from the crowd, because it’s not all completely automated. You mentioned that there’s this reliance on a lot of automated processes, but there’s a trust element involved in whether that’s actually doing the right thing, and again, that leans into this human connection. I think people are starting to feel that they want humans to make some of those judgments over the technologies. That’s definitely come up in conversation, especially around the interview process — it definitely came up on numerous occasions that that’s a person-to-person process, not a technology process. So yeah, things around that are definitely in the archive.
Matt Alder [00:25:59] And this plays into everything we’ve spoken about so far. There’s that huge candidate trust issue at the moment, there’s the AI and there’s the automation, and it’s definitely something that’s been coming across in my podcast as well. Some of the cutting-edge teams who are really doing some amazing things with AI and automation — this is their debate. It’s like: what should be automated, what shouldn’t be automated? The debate’s gone beyond “what can we automate” to “what should we automate,” and I think there’s an interesting debate coming, or that I’m starting to see, around this. Because, absolutely, as you say, it’s about ring-fencing the bits that are still fundamentally human. But I also think it’s trying to decide what those bits actually are, because there might be things that people take for granted, or like doing, that actually an AI can do better. A lot of the companies I’ve spoken to have automated some of the interview process, and have done it so the humans can have better conversations when they get involved. The candidates really like that, because they’ve been able to get an element of transparency and have a great conversation with the human.
So there’s a whole thing about judgment as well — human judgment being really important, but humans are also biased. I think this, to me, is the really interesting debate for the next two years or so — although, the speed things are going, maybe the next two months or so. It’s like: what is it that should remain human, and what shouldn’t? And I don’t think it’s always going to fall the way that people think it will.
James Whitlock [00:27:42] No, I agree. I absolutely agree. One of the interesting points I gleaned from a couple of the conversations was that those moments of human interaction are becoming more and more valuable, wherever that is in the process. And with regard to that judgment point, we had a couple of guests speak about how candidates just weren’t ready to trust AI enough — they’d still trust a potentially biased human over a biased AI. So whether it was making an actually correct and fair decision or not wasn’t necessarily the thing they were concerned about; it was just still this overcoming of the trust issue, which I think is from outside influences on talent acquisition.
Matt Alder [00:28:31] It’s really interesting, because I think that’s so accurate at the moment. And I think also, from a candidate perspective, there’s a perception that AI is far more pervasive than it actually is at the moment. A lot of the time, the problems you’re having are because of outdated processes, or overwhelmed recruiters, or whatever it is. So it’s going to be interesting to see how it shakes out. But yeah, fascinating. Any thoughts on the future — where do you think we might be going? What would we be expected to be talking about if we were to do this again in a year’s time, with the guests we’ve got coming up?
James Whitlock [00:29:11] I don’t know… I think you’ll be talking about this kind of similar stuff for a few years yet, right? My feeling is, if you take the past as a trend, we had these similar discussions, especially around something like AI and new technologies — around the internet, around job boards. I think you’re right, there’s a learning process we’re still going through with AI specifically that hasn’t come to a conclusion yet, and I don’t think we will within the next year or so, because it’s moving too fast. I think the pressures on TA to prove their value — to prove that they can do the marketing, or that they shouldn’t be doing the marketing — that piece is what I would like to see shift. I’d like to see the fact that TA is given its due within a business at those points, and hopefully that has started to shift. We’re starting to see a little bit of it — the recruitment within talent acquisition seems to have plateaued and is going back up again — so it feels like there’s a bit of a shift happening there, and hopefully that continues. And, again, just for the betterment of TA, I hope they’re able to become way more embedded and really prove within those organisations what they actually do. Hopefully that’s a trend I’d like to see, and we’re seeing the edge of it. The technology stuff is going to happen — we can’t avoid it — but, like you said, it probably isn’t going to be as pervasive as it’s perceived to be. So yeah, I think it’s the attitude around what TA does and should be doing.
Matt Alder [00:30:57] That’s absolutely spot on. Interested to see how it pans out with the conversations we’ll have over the next few months. So James, thank you very much for talking to me, and I look forward to comparing notes again sometime soon.
James Whitlock [00:31:13] Perfect. Thank you very much, Matt.
Close
Matt Alder [00:31:14] My thanks to James. 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 hope you’ll join me.
