Johnny sits down with Mark Smith, SVP of Global Talent Acquisition at Cargill, for a conversation unlike any other on the show. A year ago, Johnny watched Mark tell a room at RecFest about a fall from a ladder that left him with a traumatic brain injury, and how recovering from it reshaped the way he works. Mark shares the six lessons on attention, focus and notifications that came out of it, and why protecting your attention is a skill any leader can build.

https://www.socialtalent.com/resources/guides/dave-poling-modern-leadership

Before 2020, a leader's job was mostly to drive performance and build culture. Dave Poling's view is that the lift has got a lot heavier since.

Dave has spent 32 years inside Allegis Group and now leads a team of around 750 recruiters across the US and Canada as VP of Talent Delivery at TEKsystems. In this episode he makes a case that will sound soft until you hear the reasoning behind it: you cannot lead through this pace of change unless you are doing deliberate work on yourself — mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally.

He talks about the burnout that started him meditating, the 120-day challenge that changed his routine, why modelling good behaviour turned out to be useless on its own, and how he made personal development a non-negotiable for his leaders without losing them.

Everyone wants to point AI at sourcing, screening and selection. Rob Devlin, senior global programme manager for TA technology at Synopsys, started somewhere quieter: the intake meeting.

He tells Johnny why it's the lowest-risk, highest-leverage place to begin — how he ranked the recruitment process by risk, why legal and privacy were his first call rather than his last, and what changed in the hiring manager conversation once recruiters stopped taking notes.

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.

Download Thom Staight's Top Tips here!

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.

Download Stacy Zapar's Top Tips

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.

Download Heather Bussing's Top Tips Here

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.

Download David's Top Tips