Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?

Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?

Talent acquisition is undergoing unprecedented disruption as AI, economic uncertainty, and the ever-shortening lifespan of skills radically reshape recruiting. On Recruiting Future, Matt Alder explores this evolving landscape, using insightful interviews with transformational TA practitioners and forward-thinking experts to spark your imagination and provide the insights you need to shape the future of talent acquisition in your organization. Each episode explores topics such as AI, recruiting automation, recruitment marketing, employer branding, skills-based hiring, assessment, candidate experience, DEI, internal mobility, and the transformation of TA teams. Recruiting Future is an essential resource for everyone involved in hiring. Matt Alder is a globally respected talent acquisition futurist, author, and speaker with over 25 years of experience exploring what’s next in recruiting. Renowned for his expertise in strategic foresight and technology trends, Matt provides a unique perspective that empowers leaders to navigate disruption. His deep industry knowledge and ability to spark meaningful conversations make Recruiting Future a must-listen for talent acquisition and HR professionals everywhere.

Episodes

Ep 817: The Human Bias Fueling Talent Shortages

August 13, 2026 • 18 mins
Cybersecurity is one of the hardest markets to hire in, and a lot of the difficulty comes from how companies approach the process. Candidates are still being filtered on degrees, previous employers, and years of experience- signals that are particularly weak in a field where the best work is confidential, and skills need updating constantly. Good people are getting screened out, and what looks like a talent shortage can often be a ...
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Ep 816: Hiring For Judgment In The AI Era

August 11, 2026 • 23 mins
There is growing consensus that AI is eroding the experience pathways organizations depend on to develop human judgment. Entry-level roles are shrinking, hands-on work is being automated, and fewer people are building the experience their businesses need. This is a well-documented challenge. What remains far less clear is what the talent strategy response should look like. Most skills systems today are built to track whether someon...
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Ep 815: Do You Know How Work Gets Done?

August 7, 2026 • 20 mins
AI adoption is accelerating, but for most organisations it is still ad hoc. Tools are bought reactively, budgets keep growing, and few leaders can say with confidence what is being used, what is working, or what return they are getting. Some companies are already going further, cutting roles on the assumption that machines can simply take over tasks from people. What rarely gets examined is what those decisions do to the people who...
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Ep 814: The Science Of Storytelling In Employer Branding

August 6, 2026 • 27 mins
Storytelling might be the most overused word in employer branding. Every company claims to tell stories, yet most of the content being produced sounds the same from one company to the next, and AI is about to make the problem significantly worse by flooding every channel with even more identikit messaging. At the same time, the science behind how stories work on the human brain is well established, comprehensive, and much harder t...
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Ep 813: The Strategic Case For Sourcing

August 5, 2026 • 22 mins
AI has disrupted the dynamics of hiring. Candidates can now apply to hundreds of roles in a single click, while legal and regulatory constraints limit how far recruiters can use AI to review what comes in. The result is a flood of applications that keeps growing because so little of it gets properly reviewed. With the inbound recruiting channel under this much pressure, sourcing offers a different equation; it's a channel where emp...
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Ep 812: Who Trains The Human In The Loop?

July 29, 2026 • 34 mins
For the last few years, most corporate conversations about AI have been about efficiency, automating tasks, and reducing headcount. That conversation is now starting to change, with more attention on what constant AI use is doing to the human capabilities organizations depend on. Judgment sits at the center of this. It develops through years of hands-on experience, often in exactly the kind of junior work AI is now taking over. Wi...
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Ep 811: The Hiring Problems Technology Can't Fix

July 28, 2026 • 28 mins
TA leaders are under real pressure to keep up with AI, new tools, and what they think other employers are doing. In that rush, a lot of functions are spending heavily on new technology without first understanding whether their existing processes are working, only to find the real problem was something no platform could have fixed. Getting this right means doing the internal work first, auditing what's already in place, and being ho...
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Ep 810: End-to-End Hiring Intelligence

July 24, 2026 • 23 mins
AI has been applied to almost every step of the hiring process. Sourcing, screening, assessments, interviews; each has its own tools, and many of them are effective. For many organizations, though, the gains from optimizing individual stages are flattening out. Hiring quality is shaped by the entire journey, not by any single step, and most hiring technology was never built to connect those steps. The focus is shifting toward conne...
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Ep 809: The Data Foundation For AI In Hiring

July 17, 2026 • 30 mins
Agentic AI is only as useful as the data it can access, and getting that foundation right is proving to be the harder half of the work. Years of mergers, acquisitions, and local decision-making have left many talent operations running on data and processes that were never meant to work together, and no amount of AI on top will fix what lies beneath. Some organizations are now rethinking their technology strategy in light of that pr...
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Ep 808: The Starting Point For TA Innovation

July 15, 2026 • 28 mins
Innovation in recruiting is hard. TA leaders are experts at running their operations, but improving them in a structured way is a different discipline, and the AI revolution has made it one that no one can avoid. Before any function can innovate, though, it has to know where it is starting from, and that is where benchmarking becomes critical. Recent research from the Recruiting Excellence Foundation, which has assessed the maturi...
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Round Up June 2026

July 11, 2026 • 30 mins
If you've not listened to Round Up before, it's a short review of the episodes that I've published in the last month to make sure you don't miss out on the valuable insights that my guests are sharing. This month Round Up returns to its live format, and this is a recording of my live conversation with Ben Chino, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Maki People, about five of the episodes published in May and June 2026 Episod...
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Ep 807: Trust, Transparency And The AI Interview

July 10, 2026 • 31 mins
Application volumes are climbing fast, and AI has made it far easier for candidates to produce a strong-looking resume. For talent teams trying to give every candidate a fair hearing, the traditional model of recruiting is starting to break down. Some employers are now handing the first conversation to an AI voice agent, and that raises some obvious concerns. Does automating the first step strip out the human connection that recru...
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Ep 806: The Real Trends In Talent Acquisition

July 9, 2026 • 34 mins
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...
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Ep 805: Hiring's Signal Problem

July 5, 2026 • 28 mins
The talent market is sending mixed signals. Employers insist they can't find the people they need, while experienced, capable candidates say they are applying into a void and hearing nothing back. Both are describing the same market, so something in the middle is failing. A lot of recruiting technology was built to handle volume, to move large numbers of applicants through a process quickly. What it struggles to do is read signal, ...
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Ep 804: The Talent Pool Employers Need

July 2, 2026 • 29 mins
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 ...
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Ep 803: AI Native Recruiting

June 28, 2026 • 35 mins
AI offers a genuine opportunity to reinvent talent acquisition, but not many employers have gone beyond targeting incremental improvements in speed and efficiency. The ones who are truly using AI to be transformational are doing something fundamentally different. It takes a real commitment to experimentation, a clear definition of what AI fluency means, and a willingness to redesign hiring from scratch.  So what does that shi...
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Ep 802: How LLMs Are Redefining Job Search

June 25, 2026 • 32 mins
The way people look for work is changing fast. A growing number of job seekers now begin by using tools like ChatGPT, asking questions in plain language about roles, salaries, and what it's actually like to work for a company. It is a very different starting point from typing a job title into a search box and scrolling through pages of aggregator links. At a time when employers are drowning in low-intent applications, something in...
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Ep 801: What Does AI-First Really Mean?

June 18, 2026 • 24 mins
A growing number of organizations are rushing to put AI to work, often announcing themselves as AI-first before working out what that actually means. What many are finding is that AI tends to surface whatever was already underneath. Where the data is patchy, the content conflicting, and no one quite owns the end-to-end process, the technology exposes all of it rather than fixing any of it. At the same time, AI is starting to res...
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Ep 800: Will AI Break Recruiting?

June 12, 2026 • 46 mins
Recruiting has always had an innovation problem, and the AI revolution has brought it to a fork in the road. Will AI facilitate a revolution in hiring that drives more value than we have seen in 200 years or will it finally break recruiting as we’ve always known it.  In this special 800th episode of Recruiting Future, Matt Alder tells a story that brings together Cornish Tin miners migrating to Mexico in the 1820, a let...
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Ep 799: Growing the Talent You Can't Hire

June 3, 2026 • 28 mins
In some industries, aging workforces and deepening skill shortages mean companies can no longer rely on hiring the experienced workers they need. The only realistic option is to grow their own, and that puts apprenticeship schemes right at the centre of workforce planning. Running a programme at that scale raises questions that go well beyond recruiting. Culture shapes whether people stay, mentoring determines whether skills act...
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