Hiring On All Cylinders

Some Salesforce teams were running 12 interviews for every hire. Hiring was finishing in January, the same month sales leaders were trying to close the year. And in EMEA, where notice periods can be three months, leaders who waited to replace leavers were starting the new year short.

In this episode of Hiring on All Cylinders, Kathryne Friend sits down with Nicole Pruner, VP of Recruitment EMEA at Salesforce, to talk about how her team went from taking orders to planning hires in advance. She doesn't push leaders into it. She shows them the numbers, including the target they'll miss if they don't hire ahead.

Nicole has recruited at a 100%-commission agency, at Walmart and for 11 years at Google, so she has seen hiring work in very different organisations.

We get into meeting 100 people in her first 90 days before changing anything, getting the basics right before buying the next tool, cutting interview loops, explaining EMEA hiring to HQ, why intake, selling and closing still need a person when every CV is written with AI, and what she learned leaving Google after 11 years.

In this special compilation episode of Hiring on All Cylinders, we bring together the best moments from interviews with winners of the HIGHER Talent100 — the annual list recognizing the most impactful TA leaders across 200+ organisations.

From building recruiting functions from zero, to aligning TA with $13.8 million in revenue, to navigating the AI hype without losing the human element — these are the stories, frameworks, and hard-won lessons that define the best in the business.

Featuring: Jennifer Anker Kaufman (Illumio), Jonathan Beaney (Revolut), Becky McCullough (HubSpot), Jim Turbek (Box), Samantha Perlman (OneSignal), Alexa Lane (Placements.io), Kobi Ampoma (Heineken), Jerome Leclercq (Wise), Tommy Hansen (Juniper Square), Manjuri Sinha (Miro), Karen Arnold (Automattic), and Anastasia Pshegodskaya (Remote).

Danielle Clark leads a team of 130 people across five countries as VP of Global Talent at eBay — covering everything from talent acquisition to learning, performance, ops, and analytics under one roof.

In this episode, she sits down with Matt Staney to unpack how eBay built an innovation hub in India from scratch, scaling from zero to 1,000 hires in under a year while maintaining just 6% attrition. Danielle shares the playbook behind their high-velocity hiring drives, why leadership hires should come first, and how tools like BrightHire are helping her team move from reactive order-taking to genuine talent intelligence.

She also gets into eBay's responsible AI framework, why "human in the loop" is non-negotiable, and what it really takes to get hiring managers on board with interview transparency. If you're navigating AI adoption, global scaling, or trying to consolidate your talent function — this one's packed with practical takeaways.

The AI talent market has fundamentally shifted. It's no longer a sourcing problem — it's a differentiation problem. The talent is findable. The challenge is cutting through the noise and capturing hearts and minds.

In this episode of Hiring on All Cylinders, Matt Staney sits down with Evie Rose-Deighan, VP of AI & Deep Tech at Talentful, to unpack what's changed in the six years she's spent scaling teams at some of the most ambitious AI and deep tech companies in the world. 

From frontier labs racing toward AGI to Series A startups building founding engineering teams, Evie breaks down why the old playbook doesn't work, what top AI talent actually cares about, and why the recruiter's role is shifting from executor to strategic advisor.

We get into the pivot from research to application, why your EVP matters more than your compensation package, how to rethink your assessment process to actually impress the best candidates, and why your founding team is your talent strategy.

Amanda Johnson, Senior Director of Global TA at DeepL, joins Kathryne Friend to unpack how she built a data-driven hiring engine across Salesforce, Uber and DeepL. From turning recruiter buy-in into genuine data fluency, to rethinking candidate profiles as AI reshapes how we work — Amanda shares the frameworks behind a 25% YoY productivity increase, improved NPS, and a hiring function that measures what actually matters: right people, right roles, staying power.

Hope Weatherford, VP of Talent Acquisition at Camunda, is doing what most TA leaders are still evaluating: building. In this episode, she sits down with Matt Staney to unpack how she vibe-coded her own interview question generator and JD tool with zero engineering background, why "change leadership is the job now," and how Camunda's process orchestration mindset is reshaping how her team hires.

We get into over-engineering vs. first principles, the deepfake and fake-candidate problem, and the near-future where AI agents are extensions of us; applying for jobs, splitting revenue, and forcing a rethink of what "capability" even means. If you're a TA leader wondering where to start, Hope's answer is simple: just do it.

How do you build a high-performance hiring bar when you're expanding into a brand-new country with zero historical data, zero benchmarks, and limited local brand awareness?

Ben Baillie-Lane knows the playbook inside out. Having scaled teams from 2,000 to 13,000 at Revolut before taking the reins at Mollie, Ben joins us to discuss the art of market expansion.

He reveals why the biggest mistake TA leaders make when hiring for pioneering roles is over-indexing on technical skill sets, and how reversing the engineering of performance data holds the key to quality.

The days of Talent Acquisition operating as a reactive, order-taking engine are officially over. In today’s hyper-competitive tech landscape, headcount is no longer a vanity metric for success—quality of hire is everything.

In this episode of Hiring on All Cylinders, we sit down with Frankie Greenwell, Early Stage Talent Lead at EQT Group (one of the world's largest private equity and venture firms), to break down the profound evolution of the talent leader role. Drawing from his experience advising 50+ early-stage portfolio companies, Frankie pulls back the curtain on what venture-backed founders are actually looking for in a TA partner today.

If you are a talent acquisition executive looking to transcend traditional recruiting boundaries, bridge the credibility gap with the C-suite, and build a world-class hiring infrastructure from seed to pre-IPO, this masterclass is for you.

Candidates aren't clicking on your carefully curated career site anymore. Instead, they’re asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude what it’s really like to work at your company—and the answers might surprise you.

In this episode of Hiring On All Cylinders, host Matt Staney sits down with Duarte Mendonça, Director of Global Talent Systems and Operational Enablement at PayPal, to unpack a massive behavioral shift: the transition from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to AI Optimization (AIO).

Duarte shares startling data on how LLMs source employer data, why third-party sites like Reddit control 40% of the narrative, and how TA leaders can structurally adjust their infrastructure to fight back.

Efficiency in recruiting isn’t just about working faster; it’s about working smarter by knowing where to let the machines take over and where to double down on human connection. In this episode, Mary Price, an enterprise talent leader with experience at LinkedIn and Apple, reveals how her teams are leveraging AI to reduce administrative burnout while driving a 32% decrease in attrition through better candidate-to-role matching.