🎙️ Meet the recruitment industry’s original college recruiting disruptor and the mastermind behind College Recruiter, Stephen Rothberg

For 30+ years he has been on a mission to revolutionize early-career hiring, helping employers connect with the next generation of top talent. As the visionary founder of College Recruiter, he’s led the charge in data-driven recruitment marketing, programmatic job advertising, and scaling student hiring strategies that actually work.

This Friday on Shally’s Alley, we’re cutting through the noise and getting real about:

✅ How DOGE is impacting early career recruitment

✅ Programmatic job advertising: hype or game-changer?

✅ What Gen Z job seekers actually want (hint: it’s not what you think)

No fluff, just straight talk from one of the sharpest minds in recruiting. Bring your toughest questions – Stephen isn’t afraid to challenge the status quo.

Jeff Hunter Live on Shally's Alley

🎙️ Meet Ryan Affolter—a recruitment marketing and employer brand trailblazer with over 20 years of experience in digital marketing, talent attraction, and HR tech. Ryan has led award-winning initiatives at Jobs2Web, SAP SuccessFactors, Talroo, Life Time, and Proactive Talent. If you want to understand programmatic recruitment, employer branding, and cutting-edge hiring strategies, join us and ask Ryan!

🎙️ Meet Christine Hampton—a TA leader with 30+ years of experience, specializing in healthcare recruitment and sourcing. Christine has a doctorate in business administration and has mastered identifying, engaging, and hiring top clinical and non-clinical talent. Join us and ask Christine about her innovative sourcing strategies and expert insights on healthcare hiring.

💡 What to Expect?

✅ Digital marketing for recruitment

✅ Latest trends in employer branding

✅ New insights on healthcare recruitment

On the next episode of Shally’s Alley, I’m bringing in someone who’s been in the trenches, leading, advising, and transforming talent acquisition strategies across the globe, Paul Norman from Riviera Advisors! 🎙️

Paul is one of those rare TA leaders who’s seen it all—corporate recruiting, agency-side hustle, and now, top-tier consulting. If you’re serious about optimizing your high-volume recruiting function, elevating your employer brand, and driving strategic hiring outcomes, don't miss this.

We’re going to dig into:

✅ How organizations can move from reactive high-volume hiring to proactive talent pipelining

✅ The biggest mistakes TA leaders make (and how to avoid them)

✅ What the best recruiters do differently to win top talent

Paul’s perspective is real, insightful, and always practical—exactly what we love on Shally’s Alley. You don’t just get theories here; you get real-world, actionable insights from the best in the business.

Breaking Free from the Talent Abundance Trap

Do you feel like you are just overwhelmed with applicants these days? You're not alone.

A shift has to happen from a catch-all approach of chasing every viable candidate to a strategic approach that focuses on targeted interactions with the best talent.

Join Ravi as he and Shally discus the findings published in Shally's recent white paper: Breaking Free from the Talent Abundance Trap.

"Not a life coach" Tim Sackett probably has a trademark on the phrase ‘I told you so’ in HR circles. A legend in Talent Acquisition and proud dad, Tim who could probably negotiate a better deal for his kids’ allowance than most of us could for our salaries. He’s also a writer, speaker, and wearer of dad sneakers with unmatched confidence. In the "war for talent" Tim’s the guy you want advising your Generals, or at least bringing them donuts. Get ready for a conversation that’s equal parts insightful, entertaining, and just the right amount of HR snark. Welcome to the podcast, Tim!

Industry powerhouse Tracey Friend blends strategic insight with human connection. A tenacious talent leader with a proven track record of elevating recruitment and a career spanning from Talent Sourcing Innovation to TA leadership roles. Tracey makes complex challenges seem solvable and exciting.  Today we're going to peel back the layers on her journey, her insights on modern recruitment trends, and her vision for the future of talent acquisition.

In this episode we welcome Fletcher Wimbush, CEO of The Hire Talent and an expert in pre-employment assessments. Delve into the art and science of identifying top talent as Fletcher shares actionable tips for selecting top talent.

This week on Shally's Alley we dive into AWS Certification with Ray. Not just a tech talk; it's your ticket to understanding certifications.

Tune in for an unfiltered, witty, and wisdom-packed conversation. hashtag

#AWS #CloudComputing #RecruitmentTech #ShallysAlley

Adam Godson brings a rare combination to the recruiting world: a poetry background, entertainment industry experience, and deep expertise in design thinking and digital transformation. Working at Recruiting Advisors, he challenges assumptions about how we build and buy recruiting technology. This conversation rips apart the broken procurement process that gives us systems nobody wants to use, and offers a pragmatic path forward using design principles that actually work.

In this episode we talk about why most ATSs fail their users, how to apply design thinking to recruiting operations, the critical difference between user experience and candidate experience, and why sometimes making things harder to use actually improves outcomes. Adam shares real examples from his work at Viacom/Paramount and explains how asking better questions upfront prevents expensive tech disasters down the road.

Key Takeaways:

➡ Turning off LinkedIn Easy Apply reduced applications by 86% (from 14,000 to 2,000 per month) but dramatically increased pass-through rates and candidate quality.

➡ Most ATS implementations fail because companies select technology before defining actual user requirements and workflows.

➡ Design thinking isn't about making everything easy. Sometimes friction is intentional. The goal is making things intuitive for your intended user.

➡ Your target user might not be everyone. Good design can deliberately exclude the wrong people (like unqualified mass applicants).

➡ The best time to apply design principles is before you buy the system, not after when you're trying to fix what's broken.

➡ User experience (recruiter-facing) and candidate experience (applicant-facing) are different problems requiring different solutions.

➡ Poetry and recruiting have more in common than you'd think. Both require telling compelling stories with as few words as possible.

➡ Most technical requirement checklists are backwards. They focus on features the vendor offers rather than problems the business needs to solve.

Chapters:

00:00 – Intro and Meet Adam Godson

Sound Bites:

"I don't like saying that I'm a thought leader. It just irks me. I like to say that I'm a thought provoker."

"We went from 14,000 applications per month, half of which were duplicates, to less than 2,000 applications per month. The pass-through rates went up and the number of qualified candidates went up."

"Your user base or your target user may not be everyone. If you want certain people not to interact, you want to limit the scope of who's coming in as opposed to broadening it."

Guest Info:

Name: Adam Godson
Company: Recruiting Advisors
LinkedIn: [Connect with Adam]
Expertise: Digital transformation consultant specializing in design thinking, recruiting operations, and systems optimization. Former Viacom/CBS/Paramount talent leader with a unique background in poetry and screenwriting.