Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?

Recruiting Future is a podcast that helps Talent Acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing their strategic capability in Foresight, Influence, Talent, and Technology. 

This episode is about talent.

Economic uncertainty and disruption has reached a whole new level in 2025, with companies freezing hiring plans and candidates hesitating to make career moves. But if talent attraction strategies fail during market volatility, how can organizations that need scarce and specialized talent survive and thrive? 

So, when candidate markets are tight, how can TA teams turn uncertainty into opportunity?

My guest this week is Dave Napeloni, Senior Vice President of Global Life Sciences at Korn Ferry. Dave's team is helping life sciences companies navigate talent scarcity by transforming how they engage with candidates during economic disruption. Dave has valuable insights to share, on effective talent engagement and pipeline building, that are changing how organizations compete for talent in these uncertain times.

In the interview, we discuss

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Recruiting Future is a podcast designed to help Talent Acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing strategic capability in Foresight, Influence, Talent, and Technology. 

This episode is about technology and foresight.

AI terminology is getting confusing, which is compounded by vast amounts of marketing focusing on future promises rather than the current reality. Beyond the jargon and hype, how can AI agents be used to tackle today's recruiting problems?

My guest this week is Shiran Yaroslavsky, SVP Product at SmartRecruiters. Shiran shares the importance of using customer research to build AI solutions for genuine recruiting challenges and to create the right vision for the future

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In the interview, we discuss:

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A full transcript will appear here shortly.

Recruiting Future is a podcast designed to help Talent Acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing strategic capability in Foresight, Influence, Talent, and Technology.

This episode is about technology.

Most HR tech projects end in disappointment because organizations focus all their energy on implementation rather than adoption. If successful transformation is dependent on what happens after the go-live date, how can employers build sustainable tech adoption that delivers lasting business value?

My guest this week is Melissa Hojwall, Global HR Tech Leader at H&M. H&M has over 100,000 employees, the majority of whom are frontline workers, making internal tech adoption both challenging and high impact. In conversation, Melissa talks about the strategies around implementation, adoption, and continuous change management that help make TA and HR Tech projects successful.

In the interview, we discuss:

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For the last five months, the excellent people at Purple Acorn have been broadcasting the Alder Hour live on LinkedIn on Monday afternoons. It's an hour-long show where I team up with my co-hosts Rhona Pierce from Perceptible Studios and Jocelyn King from Virgil HR to talk about TA and HR headlines we've spotted during the week, analyze real-life workplace dilemmas, debate what's trending and what's ending in recruiting and interview a different guest every week.

I am dropping the audio podcast version of this week's show in the Recruiting Future feed so you can take a listen to what we've been doing. I'd love to know what you think and whether I should drop the show into this feed more regularly.

This week, we covered the merging of technology and HR departments, AI bias, mental health at work, why the use of Resumes is way past its sell-by date, and RecFest founder Jamie Leonard dropped in to talk about the most significant issues for TA Leaders at the moment.

You can catch the Alder Hour weekly on my LinkedIn profile, via The Purple Acorn LinkedIn page, or on their YouTube channel.

Let me know whether I should drop more Alder Hour episodes into this feed in the future.

Enjoy the show

Recruiting Future is a podcast designed to help Talent Acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing strategic capability in Foresight, Influence, Talent, and Technology. 

This episode is about talent and technology.

Many employers are facing an increasing problem with candidates' use of AI. Along with dramatically increasing application numbers, AI tools are, in some cases, allowing potentially unsuitable candidates to jump to the front of the queue, endangering the integrity of the recruiting process. One potential answer to this challenge is to deploy science-based psychometric testing much earlier in the process than has traditionally been the case.

So, how should assessment tools and technologies evolve to combine scientific robustness, candidate engagement, and resilience against AI manipulation

My guest this week is Alan Bourne, Partner at Omatti and an expert in assessment innovation. Alan highlights the issues with legacy assessment tools and sets out a blueprint for transformation that embraces AI to enhance both the candidate experience and the predictive accuracy of the tools. We also discuss the role of assessment in the move to skills organisations.

In the interview, we discuss:

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Recruiting Future helps Talent Acquisition teams drive measurable value by developing strategic capability in Foresight, Influence, Talent, and Technology. In this episode, we'll be focusing specifically on technology.

The fundamental shift from complex software user interfaces to conversational recruiting technology is happening right now, with profound implications for how we think about the ATS. 

What are the implications for both recruiters and candidates when the recruiting system becomes an invisible part of the flow of communication?

My guest this week is Michal Nowak, SVP of Engineering at SmartRecruiters. In our conversation, Michal shares his insights on how conversational interfaces can transform recruiting from an admin-heavy profession to one focused on meaningful human connections and strategic thinking.

In the interview, we discuss:

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Employee turnover continues to undermine talent acquisition efforts, with many organizations investing heavily in hiring only to watch new talent walk out the door feeling unappreciated. Even organizations with the most robust hiring processes continue to struggle with retention, costing millions in lost productivity and repeated recruitment efforts.

So how can companies ensure their hard-won talent becomes long-term, engaged contributors in competitive talent landscapes?

My guest this week is Brie Harvey, Head of Market Research and Community for Achievers. Achievers is helping organizations implement recognition strategies that transform employee experience and dramatically improve retention rates.

Brie offers valuable perspectives on data-driven insights connecting recognition to business outcomes and how taking the right approach to appreciation can protect recruitment investments and drive performance across the entire employee lifecycle.

In the interview, we discuss:

• TA's lack of control over ultimate hiring outcomes

• Praise versus recognition

• When hygiene factors are missing, recognition will always fail to have an impact.

• Low-cost, high-impact strategies

• Impact of recognition on key business metrics

• Building the business case for HR Tech

• Identifying the performance outcomes that move technology investment from nice to have to must-have

• AI-driven personalization

• What does the future look like?

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Recruiting Future is the podcast that helps Talent Acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing strategic capability in Foresight, Influence, Talent, and Technology. 

Skills shortages in emerging technologies have reached critical levels, with companies all fishing in the same tiny talent pool for experienced professionals. But if these technologies are relatively new, why assume only experienced talent can work with them? 

In such fast-moving industries, how can companies develop their early career hiring strategies to ensure they get net new talent who can be productive immediately?

My guest this week is Tan Moorthy, CEO of Revature. Revature is helping employers build pipelines of entry-level talent by giving high-potential hires the training and development they need to be effective from their first day. In our conversation, Tan gives us an insight into a structured approach to identifying, developing, and deploying new talent, which is transforming how organizations solve their tech talent shortages.

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The early careers landscape is experiencing unprecedented disruption. While AI technology offers opportunities to transform how organizations operate, it eliminates many administrative tasks that once formed the foundation of entry-level positions. At the same time, employers are rigidly demanding years of experience and specific technical skills for roles labeled as "entry-level," leaving Gen Z unable to even begin their careers and risking their disconnection from the workforce altogether.

So, how can talent acquisition professionals transform this crisis into an opportunity?

My guest this week is Caitlin McGregor, CEO and co-founder of Plum. Caitlin shows how employers can leverage Gen Z as the first AI-native workforce who don't have to unlearn old ways of working - they can start with AI-powered approaches from day one without the burden of "how things used to be done." But accessing this advantage requires shifting focus toward durable skills like innovation, adaptation, and communication, not the hard, perishable skills most employers are currently looking for

In the interview, we discuss:

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Celebrating 10 years of Recruiting Future!

Over the last 10 years, I’ve interviewed hundreds of TA Leaders as well as CEOs, thought leaders, and the people building the technology that drives the industry forward.

Back in 2015, we thought the pace of change was super fast and that the level of disruption was off the scale with social and mobile technologies reshaping how we communicated. In some ways, we might think it was impossible back then to imagine the world we live in now, but many of the changes we see in TA today have been in the works for a long time.

The speed of change in talent acquisition is governed by the tension between organizational inertia, which slows things down, and external events like the pandemic, which can cause things to move at lightning-fast speeds.

The Generative AI revolution is most definitely in the latter category. We are on the cusp of the most significant changes to TA and recruiting we have ever seen.

So, as a TA Leader, how do you manage that change and make sure you and your organization are fit for the future?

Over the last few months, I’ve been using the power of AI to unlock the Recruiting Future archive and model the mindset and behaviours of the most successful TA leaders that I’ve interviewed. People who have changed how their organizations think about talent, who thrive on disruption as a catalyst for positive change, and who know how to use technology to enable their vision.

These leaders all have four things in common. They use foresight to understand and shape the future, they build influence with the most senior stakeholders in their organisation, they think different to create innovative talent strategies and they use the impact of new technologies to accelerate change.

Foresight, Influence, Talent and Technology = Fitt

This episode features clips from interviews with two TA leaders, two CHROs, a Behavioural Scientist, and a Futurist talking about these four key areas and what you and your teams can do to be fit for the future.

Featuring:

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