Rich Sternin witnessed recruiting evolve from Rolodexes to robots. Now, as founder of Madeline Labs, he's on a mission to cut through the AI hype paralyzing today's job market. What do Applicant Tracking Systems actually do? Where does human judgment end and automation begin? And why are both job seekers and employers more frustrated than ever despite so much tech? This episode explores the messy intersection of technology and talent, and why the solution isn't less AI or more AI, but smarter humans using better tools.

Confused and simultaneously afraid of AI agents after all the recent hype? Dilip Dand, a pragmatic AI strategist and entrepreneur discusses the evolving landscape of AI agents: how they’re defined, their strategic implementation in businesses, the importance of measuring success, and the risks associated with AI deployment. Dilip emphasizes the need for proper governance and change management as AI becomes more integrated into business processes. The conversation also touches on the transformation of jobs, and the narrative surrounding artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Takeaways

- AI agents can perceive their environment and take action.

- Companies often fall for shiny object syndrome with AI.

- A clear business goal is essential for AI agents.

- Measuring business outcomes is crucial for AI success.

- AI agents require ongoing monitoring and adaptation.

- Strategic thinking is needed for AI implementation.

- Agent lifecycle management is vital for performance.

- Data protection and bias are significant risks in AI.

- Change management must focus on educating employees about AI.

- The future will see more physical AI agents and new job roles.

Is it too late to change your career after 40?

Engineer and business strategist Sairan Aqrawi says, "absolutely not!" She corrects the limiting stories about midlife career prospects for her clients so they have a clear roadmap for a successful career transition driven by intent. Inspired by her journey from Kurdistan to the United States, Sairan also shares her insights on the challenges of adapting to a new culture, the realities of the American dream, and the importance of mentorship for personal growth. She emphasizes that midlife is not a “crisis” as we’ve been led to believe, rather a time for reinvention and growth with our acquired experience and wisdom.

Takeaways

• Cultural transitions can be challenging, and it's important to manage expectations when moving to a new country.
• The American dream is often idealized, but the reality can be quite different, especially for immigrants.
• Midlife professionals can leverage their experiences and skills to reinvent themselves and pursue new opportunities.
• Ageism is a damaging narrative that can hinder personal growth; midlife should be seen as a time of opportunity.
• Confidence often grows with age, and especially women should embrace their wisdom and experiences.
• Mentorship is crucial for navigating career transitions and gaining clarity on one's path.
• Taking small, consistent actions is key to overcoming feelings of being stuck. Even if your challenge feels to bog to solve or too confusing.
• Practical concerns should be prioritized alongside fear-based limitations when considering career changes.
• Everyone has a unique story, and outward appearances can be deceiving; it's important to dig deeper into personal narratives.

WTF is up with the job market?! Floods of workers are taking to LinkedIn to vent about their frustrations searching for a new role. What is happening and why are so many talented, qualified people out of work despite a steady flow of job openings?  The narratives around today’s job seeking experience range from grim to hopeful and can cause emotional confusion. Albert Qian, founder of Albert’s List, a 50k+ member group of recruiters, job seekers, and hiring managers in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond discuss reasons for current job market fluctuations, the impact of AI on job applications, Applicant Tracking Systems and recruitment, and the psychological effects of prolonged job searching.

Albert illustrates key background factors driving the challenges faced by job seekers while sharing winning insights from his community on how they can persevere.

Albert explains how:

-The job market is currently experiencing significant challenges due to an amalgamy of factors, from economics, technology, and the onset of AI.

-Albert's List was created to address the difficulties of job searching from a community level, as referrals and personal contacts are more effective.

-AI has disrupted traditional recruitment processes via Applicant Tracking Systems and the technology tools recruiters use to choose and hire candidates.

-Prolonged job searches have negative impacts on job seeker self esteem, especially the stories job seekers tell themselves about their own worthiness and success. 

-Applicant Tracking Systems can hinder qualified candidates from being seen if their resume is not an exact match to the system’s parameters.

-Refining your personal narrative and ensuring your LinkedIn profile and application documents clearly communicate them is crucial to stand out in an applicant pool. 

The founder–investor world often transactional, misaligned, and void of deeper values.

In this conversation, economist Danetha Doe shares a different vision. She’s redefining how entrepreneurs and investors connect—prioritizing shared values over pitch decks and financial projections. Through her work launching luxury brands, Danetha challenges the tired idea that innovation must be born from solving pain points, instead making a case for pleasure and cultural capital as real drivers of a brand’s iconic success.

She introduces the Glamour Economist and the Legacy Circle frameworks to show how authenticity, values alignment, and global perspectives on inclusion can reshape how capital flows. This episode unpacks not just business and investment transactions, but how we choose to build legacies rooted in meaning.

Danetha explains how:

• storytelling is essential for aligning investors and entrepreneurs.
• cultural capital is key to a brand's iconic status.
• the funding narrative needs to be rewritten to support diverse founders.
• securing financing is akin to dating; alignment is crucial.
• the 'Glamour Economist' philosophy centers on beauty, desire, and passion.
• luxury brands focus on craftsmanship and legacy, differing from traditional startups.
• values alignment between founders and investors is critical for success.
• the 'Legacy Circle' empowers founders to choose their investors wisely.
• authenticity in pitching can protect a founder's vision.
• pleasure can drive profit, challenging traditional narratives.

Visit Danetha's website here.

Negotiation and conflict resolution expert Dr. Beth Fisher-Yoshida offers insights into navigating everyday interactions to life-course altering conversations from her extensive experience in negotiation and communication. Using her How can I use that? approach, Beth emphasizes the importance of personal narratives and emotional intelligence in effective negotiation while highlighting the impact of cultural and gender narratives on negotiation styles. Beth also addresses the challenges of impostor syndrome, often driven by the stories that we take with us into our conversations. 

Beth is the author of New Story, New Power: A Woman’s Guide to Negotiation and a Professor of Practice, M.S. in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia University School of Professional Studies

Takeaways

-Effective communication shapes our social worlds.

-Personal experiences significantly influence negotiation strategies.

-Identifying and rewriting personal narratives can enhance negotiation skills.

-Emotions play a crucial role in negotiation outcomes.

-Past failures can undermine confidence in negotiations.

-Childhood experiences shape negotiation behaviors and beliefs.

-Gender narratives affect how women negotiate and advocate for themselves.

-Cultural differences impact negotiation styles and effectiveness.

In an era where anyone with a laptop can become a media outlet, what does "media" even mean anymore? Simon Owens - a seasoned journalist and publisher of ⁠a newsletter⁠ dedicated to exploring the media industry - joins me to dive into the seismic shifts reshaping how we consume, create, and monetize information.

From the democratization of expert voices to the rise of newsletter-preneurs, we explore how creators are bypassing traditional gatekeepers and building direct relationships with audiences, including navigating the signal-to-noise ratio in our increasingly content-saturated world.

Simon shares real strategies and innovative monetization models that media entrepreneurs are using to build sustainable, profitable brands and muses on the future collision course between traditional media and AI-generated content.

Amanda Knox spent nearly four years in an Italian prison and eight years on trial for a murder she didn’t commit. At the heart of her wrongful conviction was the power of sensational “sticky” media narratives—stories shaped more by spectacle than truth, and weaponized in particular ways against women.

Amanda reflects on the journey of reclaiming her voice from the grip of global tabloids. She unpacks how the media often distorts female identity through the lens of sexuality to vilify women and sway public perception, especially during criminal trials. She also shares the surprising emotional work of coming to see her prosecutor—the man who helped orchestrate her wrongful conviction—as a human being.

But this conversation isn’t only about the past. Amanda also emphasizes today’s attention economy, where facts often lose to the most compelling narrative, and where the line between reality and fiction grows ever thinner.

-Visit Amanda's website ⁠here⁠.

-Order Amanda's new book, Free: My Search for Meaning ⁠here⁠ (released in March 2025):

*This episode is an extension of FAWCO’s recent expert panel at the United Nations 69th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and NGO-CSW, which examined the growing threat of Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery (NCII), including real and deepfake content, as a tool of gendered abuse, especially targeting women in the public eye.

Watch the full panel discussion here featuring Andrea Powell, Susanna Gibson, Breeze Liu, Noelle Martin, and Silvia Semenzin.

AI's rapid ubiquity is exciting and threatening, especially to those outside of its development. Emmanuel Acheampong, the visionary co-founder of yShade.ai, has meticulously curated a dataset of 12 million diverse skin tones. This feat isn't just transforming the beauty industry's approach to inclusion—it's poised to enhance safety standards for autonomous industrial machines, prevent fatal accidents in self-driving vehicles, and revolutionize dermatological diagnostics.

With host Jessica Buchleitner, Emmanuel challenges the prevalent Value Neutrality Thesis of technology—the widely accepted narrative that technology emerges as neutral and becomes imbued with traits based on its user behavior. Through compelling examples, he reveals AI as a ubiquitous microcosm, where small enclaves of engineers and technologists create solutions for global populations while primarily addressing scenarios relevant to their limited perspectives.

What sets his approach apart is his human-centered methodology of building a diverse AI dataset through qualitative research interviews with beauty industry experts and medical professionals. This provides a stark contrast to the narrative that AI datasets are built solely by scraping the internet. As DEI measures disappear in government and private companies, he explains how economic forces remain the beauty industry's driver for inclusivity. 

One conclusion is apparent from this conversation: Our understanding is fundamentally limited by our datasets, and we don't know what our data fails to show us.

Connect:

- Emmanuel's LinkedIn

- yShade.ai

Imagine waking up to find your most intimate images plastered across social media platforms and search engines—whether authentic or AI-generated. How would you cope? What could you do?Host Jessica Buchleitner delves into the dark side of media technology, exploring how the transition from 90s VHS tapes to today’s generative AI has fueled the rise of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), also known as "deepfake pornography" and "revenge porn." Joined by Susanna Gibson, founder of My Own PAC, and Andrea Powell, co-founder of Alecto AI, the discussion uncovers the devastating toll NCII takes on victims' mental health, reputations, and professional lives.Their discussion addresses narratives inducing cultural stigmas, victim blaming, and the significant legal hurdles victims face. They highlight the latest advancements in U.S. state, federal, and international laws and offer actionable advice for those affected. This episode is a call to action, urging collective efforts to combat and criminalize NCII while empowering listeners to be a culture of change.Resources-DMCA takedown request: https://copyrightalliance.org/educati...-Cyber Civil Rights Initiative: https://cybercivilrights.org/-My Own PAC: https://www.myownpac.org/-Alecto AI: https://alectoai.com/Susanna Gibson, My Own PACSusanna Gibson is a Nurse Practitioner and advocate. She currently serves on the board of Her Bold Move, and has worked in healthcare for over 15 years, including several years as the Lead Advanced Practice Provider for the VCU Health Division of Geriatrics. During her tenure with the division, she served as the clinical lead for a joint medical home model venture between Medicaid, Virginia Premier Health Insurance and VCU Health, as well as participated in the CMS Demonstration Project Independence at Home. She is a passionate advocate for health equity and justice, and has a unique insight into the intersectionality of health with economic stability, education, environmental justice, gender, discrimination, social support systems, gun violence, and much more, from spending years providing home-based primary care in her community.Susanna served as the 2023 democratic nominee for the Virginia House District 57 and understands firsthand the distinct challenges female candidates face in the political arena. In 2024 she established "MyOwn" PAC as a direct response to her experience during her political campaign, when she realized she had been the target of nonconsensual pornography while simultaneously being subjected to Nonconsensual Distribution of Intimate Images as well as to severe and prolonged Image-Based Sexual Abuse, both online and in person. Andrea Powell, Alecto, AIAndrea Powell is the co-founder of Alecto-AI and former Executive Director of Karana Rising where she supports advocacy and care for survivors of sex trafficking whose own trafficking led to their arrest and incarceration.. For the past 18 years, she has led national and international efforts to develop services, housing, and policies to advance the rights and healing of survivors of human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and sexual abuse. Andrea is also the Director of The Reclaim Coalition at Panorama, a global movement to end online image based sexual violence.In 2004, Andrea co-founded FAIR Girls, where she led her team for 14 years in providing case management services and establishing a safe home for survivors in Washington, D.C, and played a leadership role with the DC Human Trafficking Task Force. At Karana Rising, co-founded by Andrea in 2019, survivors lead to advance justice and healing with and for survivors who have experienced arrest and incarceration as a result of their own trafficking. Through these efforts, Andrea has served and interfaced with over 2,000 survivors of trafficking and gender-based violence in the United States, the Balkans, Russia, Bangladesh, India, and Uganda.