Remote hiring, freely available deepfake tools and harvested identities have created an opportunity that organized criminals are now taking seriously. State-backed operations are training workers to apply for remote roles using stolen credentials and proxy interviewers. The aim is the salary and access to source code, customer data and intellectual property once they are inside. Recruiters are the ones meeting these people first, and in most organizations they are assessing them with a background check and their own judgment while IT, InfoSec and legal are rarely involved. So how seriously should employers be treating this, and what does a credible response look like?

My guest this week is Lauren Furey, Principal Product Manager at Proof, where she leads product work on candidate fraud and identity verification. In our conversation, Lauren explains how these attacks work, where hiring processes are most exposed, and what TA teams can do about it.

In the interview, we discuss:

• Bots, deepfakes, identity harvesting and proxy interviewers

• The criminal motivations behind state-backed infiltration

• Why the background check is no longer enough on its own

• How much recruiters overestimate their ability to spot a fake

• Why remote hiring created the gaps bad actors exploit

• Building identity continuity through the hiring process

• Making fraud prevention a shared responsibility with IT and InfoSec

• The candidate experience trade-off and where to place verification

• Verifiable credentials and protecting candidates' own identities

• Practical first steps and what does the future look like?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurennfurey/

https://www.proof.com

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If you've not listened to Round Up 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 my guest co-host Rhona Pierce from Workfluencer Media, about six of the episodes published during July and August 2026

Episodes featured in this Round Up:

Ep 803: AI Native Recruiting

Ep 807: Trust, Transparency And The AI Interview

Ep 809: The Data Foundation For AI In Hiring

Ep 812: Who Trains The Human In The Loop?

⁠⁠https://recruitingfuture.com/2026/07/ep-812-who-trains-the-human-in-the-loop/⁠⁠

Ep 816: Hiring For Judgment In The AI Era

https://recruitingfuture.com/2026/08/ep-816-hiring-for-judgment-in-the-ai-era/

Ep 821: Why Every Employer Brand Sounds The Same

https://recruitingfuture.com/2026/08/ep-821-why-every-employer-brand-sounds-the-same/

Inside most organizations, the pressure has shifted from proving that AI works to showing what it is worth in cost, productivity and headcount. Some workforce plans are now being decided on that basis before anyone has looked closely at how the work is done. The organizations getting the most from AI are treating it as a question of work design rather than technology.

So what does designing work around AI involve, and what does it cost the organizations that skip that step?

My guest this week is Matt Campbell, Managing Director at Alvarez & Marsal, where he leads the Talent, Organization & People practice and advises organizations on workforce strategy and organization design. In our conversation, he explains why most AI pilots produce an inconclusive result, a five-stage model of AI's impact on work, the ways organizations misread their own people, and why cutting too far, too fast creates a talent debt.

In the interview, we discuss:

- Why most AI pilots are designed to prove the wrong thing

- Who owns AI?

- Why big tech's approach to AI and headcount is the wrong template for everyone else

- The difference between a job and a role

- The five A's: avoid, assist, augment, automate and autonomous

- How to put numbers against cost, productivity and capacity

- The four things organizations most often get wrong

- Why unauthorized AI use gives employees the benefit and the organization the risk

- Talent debt and the cost of cutting too far, too fast

- Are you designing work around AI, and what does the future look like?

In software development, AI tools now write much of the code, and at a growing number of organizations junior developers are no longer doing that work themselves. Tech is where the impact on a first job is clearest, and likely a preview of what other industries will see next. When the tools handle the technical work, what is left requires judgment, collaboration and communication, capabilities that take much longer to develop. That changes how people are prepared for work and what employers should be hiring for. What should the pathway into a tech career look like now? My guest this week is Reuben Ogbonna, Co-Founder and Executive Director of The Marcy Lab School, a one-year alternative to college in Brooklyn that prepares young adults for careers in tech. In our conversation, he explains why the traditional college model is falling behind, what people are still needed for when AI writes the code, and how employers should rethink entry-level hiring.

In the interview, we discuss:

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Hi there, welcome to episode 822 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder.

Employer branding teams are still under sustained pressure. Budgets have shrunk and headcount has been reduced across many organizations, even when the hiring the business needs has become more specific and more critical. Despite all of the cuts, some employer brand leaders are still winning investment and influence.

What sets them apart is how closely their work connects to what the business is trying to achieve and how effectively they communicate its impact.

So what does it take to make employer branding matter to the business?

My guest this week is Stephen Quinn, CEO of Atomic, an insight-led agency working with employer brand leaders at some of the world's largest organizations. In our conversation, Stephen shares what the most effective employer brand leaders do differently, which metrics carry weight with the business, and how to plan employer branding for the long term.

In the interview, we discuss:

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Employer messaging has a sameness problem. Candidates researching potential employers find the same values, the same mission statements, and the same well-meaning phrases wherever they look, which makes choosing between companies harder than it should be. The upside is a genuine opportunity. Standing out is no longer about outspending the competition; it comes from understanding what your organization offers that others don't, and the work of finding and proving that difference is now within reach of employers of any size. So how do you uncover what genuinely makes you different?

My guest this week is James Ellis, founder of Employer Brand Labs and author of several books on employer branding. James has spent his career arguing that every company, whatever its size, can compete for talent by leaning into what makes it different. In our conversation, he shares why difference matters more than ever, why real proof beats nice-sounding claims, and where employers should start.

In the interview, we discuss:

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The gap between claiming to be strategic and actually operating strategically has real consequences, and nowhere are they clearer than at the top of HR. CHRO turnover is unusually high at the moment, and it also spikes sharply in the first year under a new CEO. A change at the top usually brings a new thesis about what the business needs, and what the CEO needs from HR shifts with it. Many CHROs find themselves running a system built for the previous mandate, and by the time the gap becomes visible, trust has already eroded. The problem is structural rather than personal, which means it can be fixed.

So what separates the HR leaders who thrive in the role from those who don't?

My guest this week is Jackson O. Lynch, founder of Talent Sherpa and a former CHRO who works with CEOs, CHROs, and boards on connecting talent systems to business strategy. In our conversation, Jackson shares why mandate misalignment drives so much churn at the top of HR, what operating at the top level means in practice, and why AI is making the redesign of work urgent.

In the interview, we discuss:

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The job of Chief People Officer has never been more demanding, and the way organizations decide who gets it is changing fast. Appointment volumes have fallen sharply, boards are rethinking what they value in an HR leader, and the profile of the people winning the top seats looks different from even two years ago. Experience of having done the job before is no longer the deciding factor it once was, which changes the calculation for everyone with ambitions on the role. So what are boards really looking for when they appoint a Chief People Officer?

My guest this week is Olivia Sharp, a Partner at executive search firm Eton Bridge Partners, where she leads searches for Chief People Officers and board-level appointments and heads the firm's research into CPO hiring globally. In our conversation, she shares what the data reveals about experience versus potential, the skills that now define the role, and how TA leaders can position themselves for the top job.

In the interview, we discuss:

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Skills have been on the HR agenda for decades, but they rarely became the basis for real decisions; frameworks took so long to build that the business had moved on before they were finished. What's different now is that AI agents are starting to handle work that used to require a person, and that changes the question employers need to ask. It's no longer just about who to hire; it's about whether the work needs a human at all. When you can map work to the skills it requires, you have a basis for deciding what stays with people and what moves to an agent. Making that shift isn't straightforward, though; it raises questions about what HR itself needs to look like and what capabilities the function needs to develop. So what does it take to make skills the basis for deciding how work gets done?

My guest this week is Ciara Harrington, Chief People Officer at Skillsoft. In our conversation, Ciara shares how Skillsoft is rethinking which work needs a person, why HR has to become more technical to lead that conversation, and what happens when you add "bot" to your talent strategy.

In the interview, we discuss:

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This is the final episode of Decoding the C-Suite, a five part miniseries from Recruiting Future about how leadership really thinks about AI, recorded with the leadership team at SmartRecruiters seven months into their acquisition by SAP.

Three years into the AI boom, the marketing noise has never been louder. Everything is AI-powered and every vendor makes the same claims. In the final episode, Steve Hardy, who leads marketing at SmartRecruiters, is unusually candid about all of it: why he tells his own sales team to stop demoing, what he calls AI washing, why buyers should start with business priorities rather than features, and what actually builds trust with buyers and candidates alike. The series closes with the question that ran through every conversation: what does good leadership look like in an AI-driven world?