The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast
The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast: Your weekly 60 minute dose of brilliant conversation about Recruiting & HR
Episodes
January 21, 2026 • 61 mins
TOO COMPLEX FOR AI? HOW POLICE SCOTLAND SOLVED THE UNSOLVABLE HIRING PUZZLE
Most recruiters think their organisation is too "unique" or "complex" to trust AI. Then there is Police Scotland. Operating across 13 regions, managing 22,000+ staff, and balancing the hyper-sensitive vetting requirements, their hiring process is as high-stakes as it gets. Yet, they didn't just implement AI—they used it to automate 90% of candidate e...
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January 16, 2026 • 63 mins
TALENT STRATEGY: WHAT, WHY, HOW AND WHEN
Does your company have a talent strategy?
It's probably the right thing to say that you do, but how much do we know about what a Talent Strategy is really? I asked this question within the Brainfood community and received some outstanding observations, so much so that we have to elevate this to a full discussion on Brainfood Live.
“Talent strategy is how the business ensu...
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January 14, 2026 • 66 mins
VIBE SOURCING 101: LEARN TO SOURCE FROM THE WEB & YOUR ATS WITH METAVIEW AI AGENT
We are going to look back at 2025 as the year it all changed for sourcing. AI Agents entered the market and immediately began to demonstrate talent acquisition teams could become massively more efficient by leverage the increasable ability of AI Agents to ingest huge amounts of candidate data and instantly return viable results from natural...
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January 9, 2026 • 62 mins
HIRING BENCHMARKS FOR THE 16 MOST COMMON OCCUPATIONS IN THE USA
We all want to be 'data driven' but most of the time the only data we have access to are those which we have recorded of ourselves and our own activity. This is vitally important for tracking your progress over time, but not the complete picture when it comes to how you are doing against the market and against the competition.
In partnership with our frie...
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January 7, 2026 • 59 mins
Informing Happy Hiring: Signals from Willo's Hiring Intelligence Report 2026
This year, Willo didn’t just watch hiring change, they measured it.
In this episode of Brainfood Live on Air, we’ll explore what the data from Willo’s Hiring Intelligence Report 2026 reveals about how hiring teams are actually operating in the AI-era, how this compares to previous years, and what that means as we look ahead.
What will we be talk...
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December 19, 2025 • 65 mins
REVIEW OF THE YEAR 2025 - Economy & AI
Final part of our 4 part series on the Review of the Year. The two dominant mega themes of this year has undoubtedly been the global economy and the rise of AI. The two are becoming intertwined, especially with the AI investment boom drawing down investments from other parts of the US economy, whilst Trump Trade War 2.0 hobbles global economic growth, likely inadvertently accelerati...
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REVIEW OF THE YEAR 2025 - Sourcing, Employer Branding & RecOps
Third of our 4 part series reviewing the major events and trends of the year in Sourcing, Employer Branding & RecOps What has happened this year that we got on talk about?
- End of an Era? Irina Shamaeva
- SOSU review
- Is Sourcing dead or shifting toward automation of candidate discovery?
- Demand for sourcing training being replaced by deman...
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December 10, 2025 • 57 mins
FRAUD PROOF AI? - ENDORSED LIVE DEMO
We will look back at 2025 as the year when candidate fraud escalated into amongst the top priorities of employers looking who were still looking to hire but also now needing to securitise their companies from risk.
Huge credit goes to technology vendors for responding to the demand - and we're seeing a lot of interesting techniques deployed to identify potential fraud risk. I'm del...
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December 5, 2025 • 65 mins
REVIEW OF THE YEAR 2025 - CX, Assessment & DEIB
Second of our 4 part series reviewing the major events and trends of the year in CX, Assessment and DEIB. What has happened this year that we got on talk about??
- Mobley vs Workday, let's get an update on this, the quintessential CX challenge!
- CX resentment rate...where are we tracking on this?
- What do we know about AI and CX, can we see positive impact of AI...
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November 28, 2025 • 73 mins
REVIEW OF THE YEAR 2025 - TALENT TECHNOLOGY
Can you believe that we're at the end of another year in Brainfood?
As is tradition, we're going to do a 4 part series to conclude the year - and I will be a 4 part series where we review the major events and trends which have occurred on all the topics which matter to us. To kick off the series, let's talk about the the talent tech landscape - what is going on the tools we r...
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November 21, 2025 • 58 mins
RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING ....WITH AI AGENTS?
We may look back at 2025 has a pivotal year in online job advertising. Economic chaos, investment uncertainty, rise of AI, has made employers change how they think about headcount and are increasingly scrutinising the ROI of traditional job distribution. The flood of irrelevant applications has more or less killed the ppc model - what other iterations do we expect to see over the n...
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November 14, 2025 • 59 mins
Diversity & Inclusion in an Era of Emerging AI and Cyberthreats
The rise of candidate fraud has been a huge topic in recruitment in 2025, so much so that employers have had to take extreme steps to protect their businesses, from asking candidates to physically move on command in front of screen to come in person to attend interview on premise, to go through ID verification procedures which would have previously been rese...
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November 14, 2025 • 60 mins
GRADING MY RECRUITMENT FORECASTS FOR 2025
Every year I write a long post making 20 predictions for the year ahead. This year, for the first time ever, I'm going to grade my predictions and see how I have got on
20 x Predictions for Recruiting in 2025
1. AI Assessment mainstreams; 50% of high volume hirers (more than 5000 hires per year) will have a solution in place by EOY.
2. ‘Skill based hiring’ revives as em...
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November 7, 2025 • 65 mins
CAREER TRANSITION - LESSONS FROM EX-PRO ATHLETES
Changing career is never easy, especially if you've committed everything into a vocation which you might have thought to be your whole of life focus. I know well myself, having previously attempted to go down the tech entrepreneur path but now very happily but very fortuitously landing into what seems to be a media business!
Perhaps no other vocation is as tunnel focused...
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October 31, 2025 • 57 mins
BUDGETING FOR AN AI-ENABLED TALENT ACQUISITION FUNCTION
We're racing toward the end of the year and inevitably attention turns to plans for the future. But today we face a future which is increasingly difficult to predict and where agility, resilience and ability to quickly pivot without loss of performance are the qualities every function needs to develop to maintain value to the business. What does this mentality mean for ...
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October 29, 2025 • 59 mins
FASTER, SMARTER, MORE HUMAN: THE FUTURE OF RECRUITER ENABLEMENT.
Hiring has never been harder.
Recruiters are under pressure to move fast, personalise outreach, and tell a story candidates believe in.
But here’s the problem: recruiters don’t have the same tools that sales or marketing teams take for granted.
I’m teaming up with Vouch to show how recruiters can finally catch up — with a new way to cut throu...
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October 24, 2025 • 66 mins
A PSYCHOLOGISTS TAKE ON CANDIDATE FEEDBACK.
Bad feedback - or no feedback - is perhaps the most common criticism by job candidates looking for work. Why is feedback important, and why do recruiters do this so badly? We're going to take the psychologists perspective one of the most persistent problems in our industry and see whether we can learn from a field of study outside of our own!
- What are the current theories a...
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October 23, 2025 • 55 mins
INTERVIEWS AREN'T EVALUATING THE RIGHT SKILLS: INSIGHTS FROM ANALYSING 1,311 INTERVIEW LOOPS
What is actually happening at interviews?
It's the most critical part of any assessment process yet it is also the one which we know least about, not least because we've never had the means to really study them at scale. That is why this latest research from Harvard Business Review is so significant - across 1300+ organisations...
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October 19, 2025 • 54 mins
ANNUAL BENCHMARK REPORT 2025: CORPORATE EXECUTIVE SEARCH
There probably isn't a recruitment function more shrouded in mystery than Corporate Exec Search! This is hiring for the function leaders who will make disproportionate impact on your organisations bottom line and often involves a high degree of discretion, especially as incumbent-in-place is a common scenario.
For organisations are able to tell us what this worl...
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October 10, 2025 • 62 mins
RECRUITMENT AGENCY: 2028!
It's been an incredibly challenging 3 year period for the staffing agency market. Hostile de-globalisation, End of ZIRP, and the Rise of AI has prompted employers to radically rethinking their workforce requirements - and in the case of many of the highest paying sectors - finance, technology, consultancy - reduce absolute number of heads in order to do more with less.
Forward thinking recrui...
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