Talent intelligence started as a side effect of sourcing. Fifteen years on, it shapes location strategy, workforce planning and M&A — and increasingly sits outside TA altogether.

In this episode, Johnny is joined by Toby Culshaw of ServiceNow, founder of the Talent Intelligence Collective, to trace how the discipline grew up, how the tooling changed, and where AI genuinely helps versus where it just sounds convincing.

Worth a listen if you're deciding what your data should answer, and what still needs a human.

On this episode of Hiring Excellence, Johnny sits down with Judith Rudge, VP of Talent Acquisition at Optimum, to talk about disruption in telecom and talent acquisition, and a surprising source of insight into it: the 26 chickens she raises at home. Judith shares how watching her flock reshaped her thinking on onboarding new hires, rotating leaders before they stagnate, and why people who don't fit the mold can be a team's best investment.

Leadership lessons from the Coop - Download here!

Johnny sits down with Ray Chaaya, VP of Talent and Culture at Zurich Canada, to unpack how HR's role has shifted since 2020; from crisis response to a genuine seat at the strategy table. Ray shares a three-bucket model for the modern HR function (AI-driven transactional work, HR business partners as concierges, centres of expertise), why skills-first workforce planning is replacing role-first thinking, and why early-career apprenticeships need a rethink.

Internal mobility is having a moment. Johnny sits down with Thom Staight, who spent 11 years at Microsoft, most recently as General Manager of Global Talent Acquisition for EMEA and Asia, to unpack how the company built a scaled internal mobility system from the ground up. Thom explains why the biggest barriers weren't technology but culture, how a shared skills taxonomy became the common language that made everything else work, and why a hard business case, not an HR case, is what finally got leaders on board.

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Candidate fraud isn't a fringe problem anymore. It's organized and hitting companies of every size. Johnny talks with Stacy Zapar, longtime recruiter and founder of the Fraud Squad community, about how fake applicants, proxy interviewers, and North Korean IT operatives are slipping through hiring funnels. Stacy shares her framework for catching fraud at every stage, not just one interview, plus ways to add friction that stops bad actors without hurting real candidates.

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AI in hiring isn't a yes-or-no question, it's a risk-management one. Johnny talks with Heather Bussing, an employment attorney who's spent almost 40 years at the intersection of employment law and technology, about what's actually required under the EU AI Act and US state laws. They dig into why risk rises the closer AI gets to a hiring decision, why pre-interview sorting is the hardest area to get right, and how bias audits can protect you.

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Most TA leaders lose budget battles not because their ideas are bad, but because they're making the wrong argument. Johnny sits down with David Weinstock, VP at News Story, who learned the hard way that soft costs don't move CFOs. Hard dollars do. David shares how he rebuilt his approach to business cases: finance language, benefit loads, EBITDA thinking, and using AI to stress-test pitches before the real meeting. Worth a listen if you're trying to get TA investment approved and keep hitting a wall.

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Johnny sits down with Melissa Thompson, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Ford, to talk about something the AI conversation often skips: how TA leaders — not just recruiters — should actually be using it. Melissa shares how she built Project Bengal to tackle runaway req volumes, how she uses AI to analyse quality-of-slate data, and what it took to get her team genuinely on board. Honest, practical, and grounded in what's actually working at Ford right now. Worth a listen if you lead a TA team and want a real example to follow.

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Most TA teams measure where they've been. Mike Peterson, Senior Director of Talent Source Intelligence at Edwards Lifesciences, is building something different — a sourcing model driven by the workforce plan, not the req queue. Johnny talks with Mike about moving from reactive to proactive: working backwards from need dates, pressure-testing the plan, and measuring success by whether you delivered on time — not just how fast. Listen for a practical look at how one team is making proactive recruiting actually work.

How is AI actually reshaping talent acquisition? Johnny sits down with Elias Albino, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Syngenta, to talk through what changes when you free up recruiter capacity — and where human judgment still has to stay. They get into the friction between TA, HR business partners and talent management, why the 360 recruiter is fading, and how to measure whether all this automation is producing better hiring, not just more activity.