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
January 25, 2026 • 24 mins
Bias in hiring has been a topic of discussion for decades, yet our understanding of what actually happens within recruiting processes remains surprisingly limited. Most research focuses on single types of bias in isolation, making it impossible to build a complete picture. Meanwhile, the arrival of AI tools is intensifying the scrutiny of hiring decisions, demanding a level of accountability that many organizations simply aren't pr...
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January 22, 2026 • 26 mins
The constant noise around AI has created a strange situation in talent acquisition. On one side, relentless hype has made many TA leaders deeply skeptical, reluctant to invest in technology that feels oversold. On the other side, some employers have pushed through the fog and are getting genuine, measurable results from AI agents in their hiring processes. The gap between these two groups is widening fast.
So how do you separate w...
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January 21, 2026 • 24 mins
There are now tasks in recruiting where AI genuinely outperforms humans. Holding multiple evaluation criteria in mind while scanning hundreds of applications, spotting relevant experience described in unexpected ways, and ensuring no qualified candidate gets overlooked through fatigue, overwhelm, or shortcuts. These aren't things recruiters actually do badly, but there are things humans can’t physically do at scale that the current...
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January 15, 2026 • 42 mins
Strategic partnerships in talent acquisition can mean the difference between incremental improvement and transformational change. But what does a true strategic partnership actually look like? How do you move beyond the traditional vendor-client relationship to genuine co-creation?
My guests this week are Simon Bishop, Head of Talent Acquisition at SoftwareOne, and Ritu Mohanka, CEO at VONQ. Their partnership spans employer bran...
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January 14, 2026 • 24 mins
If you’ve not listened to Roundup 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 Rhona Pierce about six of the episodes published in December 2025
Episodes featured in this Round Up:
Ep 751: The Trust Problem...
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January 13, 2026 • 23 mins
There's something paradoxical happening with corporate careers websites right now. After years of broken links, mobile application nightmares, and clunky technology implementations, organizations are finally getting the basics right. Mobile experiences are improving. ATS systems are working properly. The longstanding problems we've talked about for years are finally being addressed.
However, while we've been busy fixing problems f...
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January 9, 2026 • 23 mins
Last year brought plenty of AI hype, but actual adoption in talent acquisition remained tentative. Some organizations ran pilots, most watched from the sidelines, and expectations stayed cautiously low. The technology advanced rapidly, yet widespread implementation lagged far behind the headlines.
Now, heading into 2026, there's a genuine opportunity to move beyond experimentation. But extracting real value won't come from simply ...
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December 30, 2025 • 81 mins
AI is the most disruptive technology we've seen in our careers, but most industry conversations stay at the surface level of use cases and future predictions. This special bonus episode goes deeper.
These four interviews, taken from a behind-the-scenes film I recently made, explore how AI recruiting products actually get built. We're talking to the people who created SmartRecruiters' AI-first platform Winston to uncover the lesson...
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December 23, 2025 • 25 mins
The pandemic forced organizations to rethink how they engage their people, with many old rules torn up almost overnight. Five years on, AI has arrived and changed the game again.
Leaders are now facing a new set of questions. How do you design experiences that attract and retain talent while driving the performance your business needs? And how do you prepare for a future that’s increasingly impossible to predict?
So, how do yo...
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December 19, 2025 • 21 mins
Hi there, welcome to Episode 756 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Recruiting Future helps Talent Acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing strategic capability in Foresight, Influence, Talent, and Technology.
This episode is about Foresight.
Making sense of talent acquisition right now feels impossible. Every week brings new technology announcements, shifting economic signals, and conflicting advice abo...
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December 12, 2025 • 28 mins
We’ve been talking about automation in recruiting for a long time. The AI developments of the last two years have significantly shifted the landscape of what is possible with automation, making it a strategic imperative rather than a nice-to-have. However, the current situation is pretty problematic. Some recruiters and TA teams are doing it poorly, particularly in outreach, inundating candidates with generic, obviously AI-generate...
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December 12, 2025 • 13 mins
If you’ve not listened to Roundup 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.
I hope you have been enjoying the live Round Up episodes we’ve been doing over the last few months. This month sees a brief return to the old school format, but don’t worry, Round Up Live will return in January
Episodes featured in ...
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December 9, 2025 • 28 mins
It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the pace of change in talent acquisition. AI developments, vendor mergers and acquisitions, a confusing technology landscape, and shifting candidate behaviours are just some of the current trends making everything feel chaotic. But if we take a step back and look carefully, patterns start to emerge. There are clues everywhere to what the future will look like.
So how do we make sense of it all?
My...
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December 8, 2025 • 20 mins
Despite the challenging economic landscape and wave of layoffs across many sectors, finding exceptional senior talent remains a challenge, and many employers are making it worse for themselves.
Trust has eroded with lengthy interview processes, poor candidate experience, and misaligned employer branding are pushing top talent away. With as many as one in four workers set to be over 55 by 2031, age-related biases are also causing...
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December 1, 2025 • 31 mins
Skills, tasks, jobs, activities. These terms get used interchangeably across HR and talent acquisition, but they mean fundamentally different things. Skills are attributes of people. Tasks are components of work. Jobs are bundles of activities.
Having clarity here matters more now than ever. As AI begins reshaping how work gets done, organisations need a precise understanding of their workforce at the task level. Without clear ta...
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November 30, 2025 • 23 mins
Uncertain economic times, high volumes of layoffs, and easy access to AI tools mean many employers are dealing with an unprecedented number of applications.
Recruiters are overwhelmed, candidates are getting ghosted, and trust in the recruiting process is suffering. But are TA teams doing all they can to relieve the pressure at the top of the funnel and give job seekers the clarity they need? Employers want candidates to be more i...
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November 27, 2025 • 23 mins
SAP's recent acquisition of SmartRecruiters has generated considerable interest across the talent acquisition community. The deal brings AI-native recruiting capabilities into a broader HR suite, creating complete visibility into data across the entire employee lifecycle. For recruiters, this means seeing what happens after a hire is made with the potential to connect talent acquisition decisions to performance, retention, and enga...
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November 26, 2025 • 44 mins
This is a special episode, recorded live on stage at TA Tech Europe in London earlier in November. It's a wide-ranging discussion about the state of our industry and where it's heading with one of recruiting's true pioneers, Jeff Taylor, the founder of Monster.com and the soon to be launched Boomband, . We debate AI's true impact on hiring, discuss why traditional tools and approaches are failing, and explore what recruiting could ...
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November 20, 2025 • 34 mins
The AI agent marketplace has become a confusing landscape full of chatbots and co-pilots that aren't agents, claiming revolutionary capabilities. But genuine AI agents represent something fundamentally different. They're digital workers that can handle complex, multi-step processes independently, making decisions and adjustments along the way.
The technology is already here and working, and the employers succeeding with it are f...
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November 19, 2025 • 30 mins
Many organizations treat accessibility as just a compliance checkbox, checking the box to meet legal requirements and then moving on. But this mindset misses massive opportunities. When companies design truly inclusive hiring processes, they don't just help candidates with disabilities, but also improve the experience for everyone.
Forward-thinking employers are discovering that accessibility drives innovation, expands talent pool...
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