The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast

Employer Branding in the Era of AI Generated Career Sites - Who Owns the Story? The career site is the front door to your employer brand — and until recently, building or even tweaking it meant months of agency briefs, dev tickets, and design sign-offs. Not anymore. A new wave of AI-powered platforms now lets recruiters and TA teams build entire career sites simply by typing what they want in plain language. "Create a landing page for our engineering roles in Berlin, add employee testimonials, and hook it up to our ATS" — and it just happens. In this episode of Brainfood Live on Air, Hung Lee and our panel of experts explore what natural language prompting means for the way employers attract, engage and convert talent — and whether the era of the bloated, three-year website redesign project is finally over. Key Themes We'll Cover: The End of the Static Career Site – Why the traditional "rebuild every few years" model is breaking down in a world where hiring needs shift week to week Prompt to Publish – How natural language prompting actually works under the hood, and what it can realistically deliver today Who Owns the Build Now? – Whether career sites become a recruiter's tool rather than a marketing or IT project Speed vs. Substance – Avoiding the trap of generating slick, AI-built pages that say nothing about what it's actually like to work at your company Personalisation at Scale – Building dynamic career site experiences that adapt by role, location or candidate segment — without a developer The SEO & Conversion Question – Do AI-built career sites actually perform better, or just launch faster? Employer Brand in a Prompt-Driven World – Protecting authentic storytelling when anyone can spin up a polished site in an afternoon Governance and Guardrails – Who approves what when content creation is democratised across the TA function Where This Is Heading – What the next generation of career sites will look like as prompting gets more conversational and multimodal Whether you're stuck with a careers page that's been "due a refresh" since 2022, or you're simply curious about what AI can do beyond writing job ads, this is a session you won't want to miss. Recruiters, sourcers, TA leaders and employer brand folks — join us for a practical, no-hype conversation about the future of your most important hiring asset. We're on Friday 2nd October, 2pm BST. Follow the channel here (recommended) and register for the show here. Ep411 is supported by our friends at Joveo High-Performance Recruitment Marketing Powered by Agentic AI. Integrated Talent Attraction - everything before the ATS. Find out more here

Vibe Coding TA Tools - How Viable Is This Really? The promise is intoxicating: describe the recruiting tool you want in plain English, and AI writes the code for you. No engineering team. No six-month procurement cycle. No budget request that dies in finance. Just you, a prompt, and a working prototype by lunchtime. "Vibe coding" - building software through conversational AI rather than traditional programming - has already spawned a generation of side projects, internal dashboards, and "I can't believe this actually works" automations. But before every recruiter starts spinning up their own ATS plug-in or candidate scoring app, we need to ask the hard questions. Does it scale? Is it secure? What happens when the person who "vibe-coded" it leaves the company and nobody knows how it works? In this session, we'll separate the genuine productivity breakthroughs from the hype, and figure out where vibe coding belongs in a professional TA tech stack - and where it absolutely doesn't. Key Themes We'll Cover: What "Vibe Coding" Actually Means – A plain-English explainer of how AI code generation works in practice, and why the barrier to building custom tools has dropped through the floor The "It Works on My Laptop" Problem – Why a prototype that runs in a browser tab is a world away from a tool that handles real candidate data, integrates with your ATS, and doesn't crash on a Monday morning Security, Compliance, and the GDPR Nightmare – What happens to candidate data when it's flowing through AI-generated scripts that nobody technically owns or understands When Vibe Coding Makes Perfect Sense – The low-stakes, high-value use cases where a recruiter-built automation genuinely outperforms waiting for IT: custom reporting, outreach sequencing, internal workflow triggers When You Absolutely Should Not Vibe Code – The red lines around production systems, data infrastructure, and anything that touches payroll, compliance, or candidate-facing experiences The Maintenance Trap – How "no-code" tools built by one enthusiastic team member become "who-knows-code" liabilities when that person moves on Integration Reality Checks – Why your vibe-coded dashboard probably won't talk to Workday, Greenhouse, or LinkedIn Recruiter without a lot more than a clever prompt The Recruiter as Builder – Whether this trend signals a permanent shift in the recruiter skill set, or just a temporary novelty that will be absorbed back into proper tooling Enterprise vs. Startup Viability – Why a five-person agency can vibe-code its entire stack, and why a Fortune 500 TA function probably shouldn't Whether you're a recruiter who's already built three ChatGPT-powered automations this quarter, a TA leader worried about shadow IT creeping into your function, or just someone trying to figure out if "vibe coding" is a genuine capability shift or another buzzword destined for the graveyard, this session will give you a clear-eyed assessment. The tools have never been more accessible—but accessibility and viability are not the same thing. Join Hung Lee and our panel as we stress-test the vibe coding promise against the messy reality of enterprise recruiting. We're on Friday 18th September, 2pm BST. Follow the Recruiting Brainfood channel here (recommended) and register now - because before you ship that AI-generated candidate matching algorithm to production, you might want to hear this first. Ep409 is sponsored by our friends SCALIS This week’s brainfood is supported by our friends SCALIS Your contract renews. The price goes up. You add another tool to patch what it still can’t do. Repeat. SCALIS replaces the whole stack: AI sourcing, AI screening, CRM, ATS, AI scheduling, AI notetaker, offer management, conversational analytics, and 82 HRIS and payroll integrations, all in one system. It also runs inside Claude and ChatGPT, so your team can work requisitions and candidates without ope

How to Assess Skillful Use of AI The way we assess engineering talent is undergoing a fundamental shift. With AI now capable of generating functional code in seconds, the old evaluation playbook - whiteboard algorithms, take-home tests, "does it compile?"- is looking increasingly obsolete. The real question for hiring teams isn't whether a candidate can write syntax; it's whether they can exercise judgment, orchestrate multiple AI agents, and ship production-quality systems in a world where code generation is commoditised. G2i has been on the front lines of this shift, spending the last two years embedded inside frontier AI labs building reinforcement learning environments, human evaluation workflows, and training data infrastructure. That hands-on experience has completely redefined how they vet engineers - not for what they can type, but for how they think, direct, and evaluate AI-generated output. In this session, we'll unpack how reinforcement learning principles are reshaping technical assessment and what it means for anyone hiring engineering talent right now. Key Themes We'll Cover: Why Syntax Is No Longer the Differentiator – How AI code generation has flattened the playing field and why "can they code?" is the wrong question to ask in 2026 From Code Tests to Judgment Tests – What G2i's live technical evaluations actually measure now: agentic development, RL pipeline design, RAG architecture, LLM engineering, and the ability to evaluate AI output quality Inside the Frontier Lab – What G2i learned from two years building RL environments and human evaluation systems for cutting-edge AI models, and how that experience rewired their vetting philosophy Reinforcement Learning as Evaluation Framework – How RLHF-style feedback loops and reward modelling concepts are being applied to assess candidate decision-making under uncertainty The Orchestration Skill Gap – Why the engineers worth hiring today are the ones who can direct, critique, and refine the output of multiple AI agents—not just prompt them What "Taste" Looks Like in Practice – How G2i distinguishes between engineers who ship AI-assisted code and engineers who ship good AI-assisted code Building Multi-Agent Workflows – How G2i developed internal orchestration tools to coordinate complex agentic pipelines, and what that reveals about the skills they now screen for The Recruiter's Translation Challenge – How TA teams can bridge the gap between technical hiring managers and engineering candidates when the evaluation criteria have shifted this dramatically What Comes Next for Technical Vetting – How assessment is likely to evolve as AI capabilities accelerate, and why the platforms still testing for LeetCode-style problems are falling behind Whether you're a recruiter struggling to keep up with how engineering assessment is changing, a TA leader rethinking your technical interview process, or a hiring manager wondering why your last three "great on paper" hires couldn't ship reliable code, this session will give you a clear-eyed view of where evaluation is heading. G2i isn't talking theory—they've been building the systems that train the models. Join Hung Lee and David House as we explore what reinforcement learning reveals about real engineering judgment, and why the best hires in the agentic era will be defined by taste, not syntax. We're on Thursday 17th September, 10am PT / 1pm ET Follow the Recruiting Brainfood channel here (recomended) and register now - this is one skill shift you need to understand before your next technical search

The Future of Hiring, with Matt Wilson, CEO of Jack & Jill Matt Wilson, CEO of Jack & Jill, joins Hung Lee live to discuss what happens when AI makes applying almost effortless, application volumes explode, and the traditional signals recruiters rely on start to disappear. Key Themes We'll Cover: The End of the Application? - What happens when applying becomes effectively free, and why more applications plus better filters may not be the answer An Agent for Every Candidate - What changes when people have an agent that understands their experience, ambitions, salary expectations and what they actually want next What Recruiters Do Next - Where agents can assist with searching, matching and introductions, and where human judgement, persuasion and relationships matter more than ever. The Job Market in 2030 - What hiring could look like if agents continuously search the market on behalf of people and companies, without candidates needing to apply at all Whether you're sceptical about AI agents or already exploring them for your team, this session will give you a clear-eyed view of where the technology stands and where it's going. Follow Recruiting Brainfood here (recommended) and register (save my spot) now to join the live discussion on 15 September at 2pm - bring your questions, because this one is going to get interesting!

Disconnected AI vs. Multi-Agent Ecosystems: Building a TA Tech Stack in the Agentic AI Era For the past few years, talent acquisition teams have been bolting AI tools onto their existing tech stacks - an AI scheduler here, a chatbot there, a CV parser with some machine learning sprinkled on top. It's worked, sort of! But we're now entering the agentic AI era, where autonomous AI agents don't just assist with tasks; they execute entire workflows, hand off work to other agents, and make decisions that ripple across your entire hiring process. The question is no longer "Which AI tool should we buy?" but "How do we architect a system where multiple AI agents actually talk to each other?" A disconnected stack of point solutions risks creating more friction than it solves, while a well-designed multi-agent ecosystem could fundamentally reshape how recruiting gets done. In this session, we'll explore what it takes to build a TA tech stack that isn't just AI-enabled - it's agentic by design. Key Themes We'll Cover: The Point Solution Problem – Why your current stack of disconnected AI tools is creating data silos, workflow gaps, and a fragmented candidate experience What "Agentic AI" Actually Means for TA – Moving beyond chatbots and auto-schedulers to autonomous agents that can source, screen, engage, and coordinate across the hiring funnel Multi-Agent Architecture 101 – The key design principles for getting AI agents to communicate, delegate, and collaborate without creating chaos The Integration Imperative – Why your ATS, CRM, assessment platform, and HRIS need to become agent-friendly, and what that looks like in practice Orchestration vs. Automation – How multi-agent ecosystems differ from traditional workflow automation, and why the distinction matters for scale Governance in a Multi-Agent World – Who's accountable when one agent's output becomes another agent's input? Building oversight without killing speed Vendor Landscape Shifts – Which platforms are pivoting toward agentic ecosystems and which are clinging to the old single-tool model The Recruiter's Role in an Agentic Stack – How the job changes when agents handle execution and recruiters focus on strategy, relationship, and judgment Building Your Roadmap – Practical steps to audit your current stack, identify integration gaps, and prioritise investments for an agentic future Whether you're a TA leader planning next year's tech budget, a recruiter wondering how your workflow is about to change, or an operations specialist trying to make sense of the vendor noise, this session will give you a clear framework for thinking about your stack in the agentic era. The shift from disconnected tools to intelligent ecosystems is happening fast - don't get left stitching together point solutions while your competitors build agent armies. We're on Friday 11th September, 2pm BST. Follow the Recruiting Brainfood channel here (recommended) and register for the show here now. Ep407 is supported by our friends Joveo. High-Performance Recruitment Marketing Powered by Agentic AI. Integrated Talent Attraction - everything before the ATS. Find out more here