STRATEGIC WORKFORCE PLANNING IN AN AGENTIC WORLD Recruiters have long said that stronger SWP would solve all recruitment problems - if the business only told us with a bit more notice what they were looking for! But now with AI Agents becoming a population in the workforce, can we really know what the right size for a team is anymore? We're taking a deep dive into the world of talent intelligence and trying to figure out how exactly we can plan for a future workforce of AI-abled human workers, p...
Jul 25, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 369
Forget Filters: 1,000 AI Recruiters On-Demand - ENDORSED LIVE DEMO It should go without saying that finding suitable candidates is the primary purpose of recruiting. The promise of Artificial Intelligence is enabling more companies to do that more effectively than ever before. What does next generation sourcing tech actually look like? We're continuing our Live Demo series by challenging the founders of the business to come on screen to show what their tech can do. Next up, David Head, CEO of En...
Jul 23, 2025•58 min•Ep. 368
COMPANY CULTURE: AI FIRST VS HUMAN CENTRED? We know the right answer is 'both' but really - when push comes to shove - what is the driving principle in how you build your business? Two emerging philosophies are driving the decision making in companies - lets use Brainfood Live to figure out which one is going to be the right one when it comes your business - What is AI First? - What is Human Centred? - What are the main points of both / either? - In what points do they overlap, and which points ...
Jul 18, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 367
STATE OF TALENT ACQUISITION: THE RECFEST REVIEW 2025 Recfest is the largest in person event for Talent Acquisition professionals and the perfect barometer for the state of the market. Let's see what we learn from the 100+ talks and conversations with 1000's of delegates who will have attended the industry's premier event. We will review - RecFest main themes - UK Economy vs Global Macro - AI-enablement and the AI First Movement - Where are we with DEI? - Employer branding when the Internet is do...
Jul 11, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 366
HOW TO ASSESS JOB CANDIDATES FOR AI LITERACY? There is no company in the world that is not interested in becoming more AI-enabled. One of the ways to do this is directly relevant to us - recruit new people who can bring up the level of AI literacy in the workforce. In a direct analogy to the digitisation wave of the early 2000's, we now have the AI wave of the 2020's - becoming AI-enabled by hiring AI-enabled employees. Question is...how do we assess for this? This is the topic of Brainfood Live...
Jul 04, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 365
RECRUITER SKILLS PROFILE: HOW AI CHANGES THE GAME We all know that AI is going to change every job, but we don't know precisely how or when, much less the implications on the type of skills we need to be hiring when recruiting for 'AI first' employers. - What do we know about the impact of AI / Automation in knowledge work? - What skills are going to be insulated and valued from this impact? - Do we 'design out' job roles which have high component of these insulated skills? - How do humans uniqu...
Jun 30, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 364
CANDIDATE FRAUD: IT'S A RECRUITING EMERGENCY We probably never thought we'd ever encounter this challenge, but in 2025 there is no denying that candidate fraud poses an increasing danger to the fidelity of traditional hiring practices, Increase global economic uncertainty, a globalised talent pool who can find jobs and apply from anywhere in the world and the advent of powerful AI tools on the candidate side have increase the risk to employers, as well as damage the prospects of legitimate and g...
Jun 30, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 363
Brainfood on Tour - How to Hire in Brazil in 2025 & Beyond Brazil - the largest country in South America, an emerging power in the world with enormous natural resources, a growing population and huge space for development. What is it like hiring in Brazil in 2025? How will it look going forward? Brainfood is back on tour, so let’s talk to local recruiters and find out. We’re going to speak with Juliana Park, Founder (HRX Brasil), Monaly Malucelli, Exec Search (MMT), Patrick Gouy, CEO (Recrut...
Jun 25, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 362
BEYOND TALENT ACQUISITION: LEADERSHIP SKILLS NEEDED TO EXPAND SCOPE Talent Acquisition was the optimal specialism in the People Ops function during the ZIRP of hyper growth; but what organisations needed in 2019 is not what organisations need in 2025. We're already in a world where global growth is slowing, companies are getting smaller, more efficient, more automated. The need for everyone in Talent Acquisition is to expand scope but what skills are needed for us to get there? - Lay of the land...
Jun 20, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 361
TALENT ACQUISITION WITHOUT BOUNDARIES: LEADERSHIP LESSONS FOR GLOBAL TA TEAMS There are many reasons why companies become geographically dispersed - to better service local markets, to develop specific new products, tap into specialist labour markets, corporate tax efficiency and wage arbitrage, taking advantage of skilled labour wherever it can be found at the best cost coefficient for the business. How is it like to work in, manage and lead a Global Talent Acquisition team? This is the questio...
Jun 13, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 360
VC Investment in WorkTech - Where is the Money Going in 2025? We're halfway through the year (can you believe this??) and so a great time to stop and take stock on where we are going with recruitment and HR technology. It's pretty clear that investors know that the organisational transformation is underway - driven by AI innovation which is changing the nature of almost every job. What can we learn from where the investment is going? - Volume of VC investment in H1 2025 - How does this compare t...
Jun 06, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 359
HIRING EFFICIENCY: HOW AGENCIES, RPO'S AND IN-HOUSE USE AI / AUTOMATION Agencies, RPO's and In-house - we're all recruiters at heart but we too often end up self siloing in order to create safe spaces, which whilst necessary, can also lead to a slow down in knowledge transfer across party lines. Lets use this week's Brainfood Live to find out if we can break down some of these barriers - How are recruitment agencies using AI / Automation? - Is AI transforming how business development is performe...
May 30, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 358
CHIEF OF STAFF - WTF IS THIS ROLE (and can TA / HR do it?) Chief of STAFF? Sounds like it should be a role which falls into the People Org so its weird that such a senior position so often appears elsewhere ;-) What is the Chief of Staff role, how does it differ from CHRO / Head of HR / EA ....and is it a good idea to have one in your organisation? - Wtf is Chief of Staff? Can we outline what it definitely is or isn't - History of the role, why is it in politics and governance, but not always in...
May 23, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 357
HIRING MANAGER SELF SERVE - THE PAST AND FUTURE OF RECRUITMENT? It was also the Past of Recruitment - where hiring managers were doing most of the work in hiring for their teams, everything from putting up adverts in shop windows, handling the first enquiries, reviewing CV's, screening candidates, scheduling interviews, interviewing candidates and then offering / hiring said candidates. Perhaps Personnel got involved in the contracts of employment, but 'recruitment' was once handled entirely by ...
May 16, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 356
HOW TO BUILD CAREER PAGES WHICH ACTUALLY WORK One of the biggest mistakes in Talent Attraction is failure to maximise conversion from attention you've already captured! The people who visit your career page are ALREADY declaring interesting in working for your business and you need to have a digital property there that underlines your EVP, helps both self select in/out and makes it easy for the right candidates to enter into the recruiting process. What do know today about building a career page...
May 15, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 355
RECRUITING REIMAGINED IN THE AI ERA Friends, we have a special Brainfood Live to kick off the week! Continuing our series of profiling innovative AI solutions in the recruitment space, we have none other than Hari Srinivasan, VP of Product at LinkedIn, joining the show on May 12th to talk about LinkedIn’s AI hiring tools for recruiters! Including LinkedIn’s first generative AI hiring experience, Recruiter , and the launch of its first AI agent, Hiring Assistant . Hear directly from Hari about ho...
May 12, 2025•33 min•Ep. 354
TRANSITIONING TO CV FREE HIRING The CV has been around for maybe even longer than recruiting itself become a distinct profession, so are we destined to forever have a document like this in our hiring process? What does it look like if we can remove the CV - does it thicken our pipeline, improve it or make it even harder to handle or process? Lets have a chat with TA leaders who have made the shift to CV Free Hiring and see if we can learn how they did it, what they learned and what they would re...
May 09, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 353
AI REGULATIONS IN TA & HR: 2025 Q2 UPDATE! 2025 has been the year of AI innovation in recruitment technology. There hasn't been a serious recruitment tech vendor hasn't infused their product with AI, and more than a few are moving toward to next step with Agentic or Agent-like AI now taking on significant chunks of the recruiter / hr workload. Time is perfect for us to update on our understanding of AI regulations in the US, UK and EU! - What is the latest with AI regulations across differen...
May 02, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 352
MITIGATION STRATEGIES VS FAKE JOB CANDIDATES Reports of fraudulent job applications are on the rise. A globalised internet, universal job insecurity and the reduction of friction provided by technology innovation from EasyApply to AI-powered mass personalisation, is a producing a perfect storm which is overwhelming recruitment teams. As these trends accelerate, we can expect the volume and sophistication of fake job applications to likewise increase. Let's talk about the techniques job candidate...
Apr 27, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 351
Agentic AI in the Wild: Live Demo Some of you might have noticed that whenever a recruitment software business promotes their Agentic AI, Brainfood is here to challenge them to do a live demo. So far no one has yet shirked the challenge, nor have their agents disappointed - we're beginning to understand that the generalist agent is likely be to an aspiration goal for business, but those that domain specific are going to be in with a chance to truly transform our approach to recruitment. Next up ...
Apr 17, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 350
Sourcing Automation: What can be done in 2025? Finding and engaging candidates more efficiently remains the No1 concern of recruiters the world over - nothing gets more clicks on the Recruiting Brainfood newsletter than cool new ways! And in 2025, there are so many things we can do - perhaps no time since the beginning of the web era have we seen such an opportunity to massively scale up our sourcing efforts. Let's see what leading experts in the European sourcing scene have to say about the Sou...
Apr 11, 2025•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 349
Brainfood on Tour - How to Hire in China in 2025 & Beyond? China has an enormous workforce and therefore a huge amount of recruitment. Most of the rest of the world knows very little about it! So it is time to speak to local Chinese citizens and residents to better understand how labour circulates through what by some measure has been the largest economy in the world since the mid 2010’s We’re going to speak with Lin Xin, Marketing Director (Avature), Maria Ma, Talent Acquisition Regional He...
Apr 10, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 348
Key Recruitment Trends to Watch in 2025: What Top Agencies Are Doing Differently Recruitment agencies continue to face major obstacles, including the paradox of a talent shortage despite a decrease in job openings. With more candidates rejecting job offers, it’s become essential to expand sourcing efforts for each vacancy. According to this year’s GRID Industry Trends Survey by Bullhorn, the most successful agencies have developed strategies that have enabled them to grow revenue despite economi...
Apr 03, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 347
Brainfood on Tour - How to Hire in Australia in 2025 & Beyond? Australia is the 7th largest recruitment market by dollar value - a very decent barometer to how the global staffing market is performing. Let’s dive into the conversation with local recruiters and find out what’s going on in 2025 We’re going to learn: - What is the state of the economy in Australia in 2025? - What are the main strengths, main challenge here? - What sectors are the largest employers? - What is the competition for...
Mar 30, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 346
DOGE, US Fed Gov and the Future of HR & TA in the USA We have to talk about DOGE. The US Federal Government is the largest single employer in the United States at 2.5 million employees. The intent of the Trump 2.0 administration is to radically reduce this number - by at least 10% in the first tranche - and maybe to end up with a workforce of about 10% when it is all said and done. This is unprecedented downsizing of government function, the likes of which we have rarely seen outside of acti...
Mar 21, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 345
IDEAL STRUCTURE OF AI-ENABLED TA You might have noticed a run of AI Agent demo's on Brainfood Live recently - product makers are increasingly confident that they are going to produce intelligent software which will increasingly behave more like a colleague than a tool. What does this mean for the humans in the recruitment function? Transformation is closer than we think and we need to get busy thinking about a future where AI indeed transforms our function, how that function needs to be structur...
Mar 14, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 344
Autonomous Agentic AI Recruiters: Here, Now? If 2025 is going to be year of the Agentic AI, then companies like SeekOut are going to be one of the tech companies at the frontier of building them. We have already reviewed what Agentic AI is (see Ep293!) - and discussed how close and how far we are away from seeing them in production. Can product builders shed more light on where we currently stand - can we even see some of these agents in action? I challenged SeekOut CEO Anoop Gupta to show us wh...
Mar 08, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 343
Brainfood on Tour - How to Hire in Indonesia in 2025 and beyond? Indonesia has nearly 300 million people and therefore MUST have a huge amount of recruiting going on! And yet, it will come to no surprise to anyone that this is yet another country of which I am shamefully ignorant! Let’s talk to local recruiters and found out how exactly recruiters, employers and candidates interact in this incredible country. We’re going to learn: - What is the state of the economy in Indonesia in 2025? - What a...
Mar 04, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 342
Hiring Insights Report 2025 One of the best value changes for Brainfood Live in 2025 is showcasing proprietary data from recruitment technology companies who are able to aggregate data on how TA teams actually behave. Join us for an exclusive webinar as we dive into the key findings from GoodTime’s 2025 Hiring Insights Report, including trends, challenges, and strategies shaping talent acquisition in 2025. Here’s what we’ll cover: The state of hiring in 2025 Why TA teams only hit 47.9% of their ...
Feb 28, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 341
INTRODUCING AI AGENT BY JUICEBOX AI Agents promise to revolutionise the work of recruiting but early experiments with generic products like OpenAI Operator have shown there is still some way to go - humans still needed to oversee, correct and train, especially for the unique use case of finding other human beings as candidates for the jobs we're recruiting for. It's time for the recruitment technology vendors to step up and fill this need! David Paffenholz, CEO of Juicebox, the company behind th...
Feb 26, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 340
