By Matt Alder, host of the Recruiting Future podcast · Updated August 2026
Recruiting was never deliberately designed. We inherited it, and it has barely changed in 200 years. That was the argument I made in Ep 800: Will AI Break Recruiting?, and it is where any honest conversation about the future of hiring has to start, because AI is the first technology that could redesign recruiting rather than just speed it up. We are at a fork in the road. AI could add value to recruiting at a scale we haven’t seen in two centuries, or it could be the point where the inherited process finally breaks under pressure it was never built for. I have spent more than a decade asking TA leaders, technologists and researchers where hiring is going, and the most reliable pattern in all those conversations is that predictions about hiring tend to be right about direction and wrong about speed. The pace of change is governed by the tension between organisational inertia, which slows everything down, and external events that can make things move at lightning speed. Generative AI sits firmly in the second category. This page separates what is changing now, what is coming next, and what is still vendor positioning.
Four shifts are already happening. None of them is a prediction.
The application process is stuck in a loop. When more people apply for jobs, fewer applications get read properly. When fewer applications get read, people apply for even more jobs. I opened Ep 813: The Strategic Case For Sourcing with that loop because it now defines inbound recruiting. The numbers behind it are stark. Nikos Moraitakis, CEO of Workable, told me in Ep 781: The Gap Between AI Adoption and TA Transformation that around 10% of applications across Workable’s global customer base are now AI-generated, and because they are AI-targeted they look relevant, which makes them harder to filter, not easier. Coinbase receives 1.5 million applications a year, far more than any human team could properly assess, which is the problem LJ Brock and I dug into in Ep 779: Can AI Democratize Hiring?. The result is that evidence of capability is moving to the front of the process, and that story continues in the companion guides to talent assessment and skills-based hiring.
The resume is losing its authority as a signal. I have been predicting the death of the resume since about 2005, before this podcast existed, and its survival tells you a lot about the speed of change in recruiting. We would struggle to find anyone to come on the show and stand up for the resume as a brilliant way to recruit, yet everyone still uses it, because nothing else has achieved universal adoption (Ep 485: What Will Replace Resumes?). The AI application flood is now forcing the issue. When a thousand near-identical documents arrive for one role, the document stops telling you anything useful. What replaces it is direct evidence of skills, whether that comes from assessment, from structured interaction, or from richer data about what people have done.
Discovery is moving inside AI tools. Candidates increasingly research employers and find jobs through LLMs rather than search engines and job boards. I looked at this in Ep 802: How LLMs Are Redefining Job Search. Employers who are illegible to machines are quietly losing reach with people.
Work itself is changing shape, not just recruiting. AI is displacing some skills, amplifying others, and concentrating value in judgement, relationships and complex problem solving, the themes Mark Stelzner and I explored in Ep 801: What Does AI-First Really Mean?. Hiring sits downstream of that redesign. You can’t understand the future of hiring separately from the future of work.
The show gives me an unusual advantage here. Everything my guests and I have predicted since 2015 is on the record, and we go back and mark our own homework. In Ep 600: Did We Predict The Future?, Mervyn Dinnen and I revisited the predictions we published in 2016, eight years on. The clearest lesson was that we were right about many directions and consistently too broad-brush about adoption. We wrote as if everyone would be doing these things on the same timeline, when change spreads through the working population far more unevenly than that.
The AI hype cycle has followed the same shape. At the peak of it I noted on the show that I was reading confident claims that I would be out of a job within months (Ep 571: The Road Ahead For Talent Acquisition). That short-term hype didn’t happen, and recruiters were not replaced on the promised schedule. It isn’t a reason to relax, though, because the underlying direction was sound even where the timing was wrong. The manual work of recruiting is being progressively automated, and the right response is to stay close to what the people doing the work are doing with the technology rather than betting on any single forecast.
That discipline is strategic foresight: not predicting a date, but seeing the direction early enough to act calmly instead of reactively. It’s the reason Foresight is the first of the four capabilities in the framework I distilled from ten years of interviews in Ep 700: Are You Fit For The Future?.
This is the most consequential live question in hiring. My own position, set out in Ep 800, is that we could quickly reach the point where the candidate has an AI agent that looks for jobs for them, the employer has an AI agent, and the agents talk to each other and handle most of the recruiting process. The point of that leap in technology has to be better human connections, not no human connections. If large parts of the funnel are automated, we need to be very clear about where the humans sit and the value they add, because the risk at the far end of this road is total automation with no humans at all, and that would be very counterproductive.
This is not a new conversation on the show. Richard Collins described almost exactly this future in early 2024: jobseekers with AI tools that apply on their behalf, employers with equivalent tools on their side, and the two shaking hands in between to create a frictionless first stage (Ep 591: Is AI Changing Jobseeker Behaviour?). Two years later the builders are saying it with conviction. Moraitakis has watched Workable’s customers adopt their agent, and his conclusion in Ep 781 was blunt: the top of the funnel is going to be handled by agents very soon, because once a team has worked that way it never goes back. When I put the agent-to-agent question directly to Bryan Ackermann in Ep 789: Leading TA Through AI Acceleration, his answer matched what I hear across the archive: automation is already running on both sides of the process, and the direction is set even though the pace will vary enormously between organisations.
So what does that do to recruiters? The consistent answer from the people actually doing this is redistribution rather than replacement. LJ Brock’s view in Ep 779 is that recruiters become more valuable, not less, but the work changes: less sourcing and workflow management at scale, more crafting and leading a process that reliably picks the best candidate at every level. Moraitakis makes the same argument from the vendor side. The value of top-of-funnel execution diminishes, and the recruiters who thrive are the consultative ones who bring judgement the AI cannot. The fork in the road I described in Ep 800 runs straight through this question, and the deeper argument about redesigning processes and mental models is in the companion guide to AI in talent acquisition.
The intuitive answer is less, and it may be wrong. One of the more provocative theses on the show comes from Toni de Graaf in Ep 808: The Starting Point For TA Innovation: when AI and automation run the operational core of a function, organisations no longer need a permanent employee to cover all of its recurring tasks. His example is the accountant. The role bundles together discrete jobs, the quarterly reporting, the annual tax filing, and if AI handles the routine work in between, each of those jobs just needs a specialist for a few days or weeks. One long-term hire becomes many shorter ones, and if that pattern spreads, TA functions could end up doing far more hiring, of shorter engagements, which would demand fast and reliable skills assessment at a scale most teams are nowhere near today. Jacob Morgan was predicting a dynamic workforce of gig workers and freelancers on this show as far back as 2017 (Ep 100: Trends In Talent Acquisition). What has changed is that AI now supplies a mechanism.
Segmentation is the other half of this picture. John Vlastelica argued in Ep 660: Recruiting Rewired by AI that TA leaders need to divide their hiring portfolio deliberately: well-defined, high-volume roles that can be heavily automated, and judgement-heavy roles where senior recruiters concentrate. He pointed to FedEx hiring 300,000 people in a year for well-defined hourly roles without a recruiter involved in the process. Volume hiring at that scale without human recruiters is no longer a prediction, and that makes the deliberate placement of human judgement everywhere else the real design question.
Long-horizon workforce planning assumed you could see far enough ahead to plan. Toby Culshaw’s argument in Ep 712: Is Workforce Planning Obsolete? is that we have moved from a world that was volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous to one that is brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible, where changes compound too fast to forecast years out. His answer is real-time talent intelligence. Planning becomes a continuous discipline built on live labour-market data rather than a long-range forecast, and TA teams sit on exactly the intelligence the wider business needs, which is a genuine opening for TA to provide measurable strategic value.
Stacey Harris connects this to the money in Ep 790: Rethinking Work In The Age Of AI. Boards have stopped writing open cheques for AI and expect the people budget to fund it, which is producing short-sighted layoffs. Her argument is that workforce planning of the future is tied to understanding what work is shifting to and, more importantly, what value can be created with AI. The organisations that answer that question deliberately will hire differently from the ones that simply cut and hope.
There is a trust dimension to all of this. As content, outreach and applications become cheap to synthesise, candidates and employers alike discount the abundant and pay attention to the verified, the human and the consistent. That is why employer brand and honest communication compound in value as automation spreads, an argument I make at length in the companion guide to employer branding and recruitment marketing.
Distilling the practical advice from across the archive, five priorities stand out.
Recruiting Future publishes two episodes a week plus a monthly Round Up synthesising the themes across recent episodes, a running commentary on where hiring is heading. The weekly newsletter gives the inside track on what’s coming up.
No single source should be anyone’s only source, so here is what I’d recommend alongside the show. For labour-market fundamentals, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs research is the standard grounding, and the work of academic labour economists, David Autor at MIT in particular, is essential reading on AI and labour markets. Kevin Wheeler of the Future of Talent Institute has been doing serious foresight work on recruiting for decades, and has been bringing it to this show since at least Ep 178 in 2019. The Burning Glass Institute is consistently honest about the gap between corporate announcements and actual practice. For the HR technology landscape and what organisations are doing with it, Sapient Insights Group’s independent annual research is the reference point, and their Chief Research Officer Stacey Harris appears on this page via Ep 790. The future of hiring is contested territory. Triangulate.
Browse all 300 episodes tagged Future of Work and 71 tagged Foresight.
Recruiting Future is an independent podcast for senior talent acquisition and HR professionals, hosted by Matt Alder since 2015. It publishes two episodes a week plus a monthly Round Up, and has published 882 episodes exploring AI, recruiting technology, recruitment marketing, employer branding, skills-based hiring, assessment and the future of work. Full details are on the about page.
Matt Alder is a talent acquisition futurist with over 25 years of experience across talent acquisition and talent strategy. He works with enterprise TA and HR leaders on AI readiness, has delivered keynotes in 18 countries, and is the co-author of Exceptional Talent and Digital Talent, both published by Kogan Page with Mervyn Dinnen.
Recruiting Future is an independent production. Sponsors do not set the show’s agenda or its editorial positions, and the show does not rank or recommend vendors.
