The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast

REVIEW OF THE YEAR 2025 - Sourcing, Employer Branding & RecOps   Third of our 4 part series reviewing the major events and trends of the year in Sourcing, Employer Branding & RecOps What has happened this year that we got on talk about?   - End of an Era? Irina Shamaeva - SOSU review - Is Sourcing dead or shifting toward automation of candidate discovery? - Demand for sourcing training being replaced by demand for AI training - Employer branding - how is AI being used to support this? - How is AI being ab-used to inadvertently damage this? - How do we understand 'AI first' through the lens of EB? - What happened to 'Mission focused' btw, was it anti-DEIB in disguise? - What is the percentage of AI ten content on career pages, going up or down? - Have any organisations consciously thought about their AI principles through an EB lens? - RecOps ...what have been the priorities for recruitment operations? - Have we seen AI operations leads in RecOps? - How has AI changed the RecOps role...replaced or expanded? - Forecasts for 2026 - sourcing, eb and recops   All this and more on brainfood live on air.   We're with Alla Pavlova, Recruiter (Riot Games), Chloe Morrison, RecOps (datadog), Steve Ward, Employer Brand Strategist (Blackbridge Communications) & Jeremy Lyons, Founder (RecOps Collective) on Friday 12th December, 2pm GMT   Register by click on the green button (save my spot) and follow the channel here (recommended) to be noticed when we go live.     Ep348 is sponsored by our friends Ashby   Drive faster, more confident hiring decisions with native AI-Notetaking   Ashby’s AI Notetaker brings structured meeting data together with emails, notes, feedback, and more. It shortens time to feedback and provides rich candidate context, helping your team align quickly and make faster, more confident hiring decisions.   Spend less time typing and more time hiring with interview notes that practically write themselves.

FRAUD PROOF AI? - ENDORSED LIVE DEMO   We will look back at 2025 as the year when candidate fraud escalated into amongst the top priorities of employers looking who were still looking to hire but also now needing to securitise their companies from risk.   Huge credit goes to technology vendors for responding to the demand - and we're seeing a lot of interesting techniques deployed to identify potential fraud risk. I'm delighted to welcome back one of those vendors at Live Demo to show us how his platform - Endorsed - is going to help recruiters find the right talent whilst mitigating risk of putting bad actors into the hiring process.   Its the man himself, David Head, CEO of Endorsed, at Live Demo! and we're on Weds 10th December, 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm GMT.   Follow the channel here (recommended) and register for the event now (save my spot) to get notified when we go live.     Episode 351 is sponsored by Endorsed   Endorsed.com is the AI recruiting agent platform for rapidly building talent-dense teams.   Rapidly growing companies like Quince, Eight Sleep, and Prokeep rely on Endorsed to surface hidden stars, combat candidate fraud, and streamline sourcing and applicant review workflows. Endorsed increases quality-of-hire, reduces time-to-fill by up to 75%, and boosts recruiter role capacity by up to 2x.   Get 10% off your subscription with the code BRAINFOOD   See Endorsed instantly triple your number of gold medal candidates on your real role by booking a demo.

REVIEW OF THE YEAR 2025 - CX, Assessment & DEIB   Second of our 4 part series reviewing the major events and trends of the year in CX, Assessment and DEIB. What has happened this year that we got on talk about??   - Mobley vs Workday, let's get an update on this, the quintessential CX challenge! - CX resentment rate...where are we tracking on this? - What do we know about AI and CX, can we see positive impact of AI on CX? - ID verification, this is both an CX and Assessment issue. In fact, it may also be a DEIB issu - How to deal with overcapacity of job applications into traditional hiring funnels? - How to do this whilst maintaining, improving CX? - Candidate agency - can enablement of great participation in shaping the experience improve both efficiency and CX? - What is the state of DEIB...rhetorical question... - How does the new inclusion work, can we still think about 'protected groups'? - Divergence between US and UK / EU - Yet migration of cultural influence from US to UK / EU - What do we think of AI Interviewing? - What do we think of other forms of AI powered Assessment? - Forecasts for 2026 on CX, Assessment and DEIB?   We're with Morgan Lobb, Founder (Vercida), Maddy Roberts, Head of TA Solutions (Aon), Euan Cameron, Founder, (Willo) & friends & friends on Friday 5th December, 2pm GMT   Register by click on the green button (save my spot) and follow the channel here (recommended) to be noticed when we go live.     Ep 347 is sponsored by our friends Willo   Hiring should be human, but too often it doesn’t feel that way.Recruiting isn’t slowing down; it’s more competitive and more global than ever. Yet too many teams are still buried in CVs, optimising for speed instead of connection.   That’s why teams are switching to Willo - the #1 candidate screening platform built for a world where connection matters more than credentials. With thousands of customers worldwide, Willo helps you meet talent faster, fairer, and smarter.Our 2026 Hiring Trends Survey is open until the end of October, and we’d love your take. What’s keeping you up at night (or getting you excited) about the future of hiring?   Share your voice or book a demo to see why hiring feels different with Willo.

REVIEW OF THE YEAR 2025 - TALENT TECHNOLOGY   Can you believe that we're at the end of another year in Brainfood?   As is tradition, we're going to do a 4 part series to conclude the year - and I will be a 4 part series where we review the major events and trends which have occurred on all the topics which matter to us. To kick off the series, let's talk about the the talent tech landscape - what is going on the tools we rely on every day?   - Investment landscape in Worktech - Sector breakdown...where is the VC going? - Rise of AI sourcing tools - Big deals, the M&A's - what does this mean? - Linkedin Hiring Assistant - Open AI jobs - Monster / Career Builder Obit - Mercor... - Indeed, what is going on? - Verticalised AI Agents, what are the implications for core platforms? - ATS / HRIS combo - didn't happen? - ATS / CRM - did happen? - Job Candidate use of AI vs AI Assessment - Rise of Verification / Background Checking - What else is under-the-radar that we need to talk about?   We're with Alexander Chukovski, HR Tech Consultant, George LaRocque, Founder (WorkTech), Louise Triance, Founder (UK Recruiter) & friends on Friday 28th November, 2pm GMT   Register by click on the green button (save my spot) and follow the channel here (recommended) to be noticed when we go live.     Ep 346 is sponsored by our friends Greenhouse   Feeling buried under a backlog of disconnected tools, spammy applicants, and stalled workflows? This latest guide from Greenhouse shares how their innovative platform brings simplicity and control back to recruiting.   Discover how to: Centralize sourcing, scheduling, and reporting seamlessly Gain end-to-end visibility into pipeline health Cut through noise with fraud detection and smart automation Download to see how your team can hire with confidence 👉 [Read the full article]

RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING ....WITH AI AGENTS?   We may look back at 2025 has a pivotal year in online job advertising. Economic chaos, investment uncertainty, rise of AI, has made employers change how they think about headcount and are increasingly scrutinising the ROI of traditional job distribution. The flood of irrelevant applications has more or less killed the ppc model - what other iterations do we expect to see over the next 12 months?   We're going to be speaking with the C-level team at VONQ to better understand state of market.   - Recruitment Advertising 2025 - What are the available job advertising models? - Which ones seem to be on the rise / on the decline? - Niche vs Generalised Job Board advertising and relationship with business models - AI-enabled Job Applications, how big an impact on job advertising? - How does this force job advertising vendors to adapt? - What are the mitigation strategies? - AI Agents, verticalised vs generalised - What can they do - How does this impact candidate acquisition? - What does Recruitment Advertising look like over the next 12 months?     We're with Ritu Mohanka, CEO & Bill Fischer, CTO, (VONQ) & friends on Friday 21st November, 2pm GMT. Register by clicking on the green button (save my spot) and follow the channel here (recommended) to be noticed when we go live.     Ep345 is sponsored by VONQ   Transform recruitment advertising by leveraging AI-driven technology, deep ATS integrations, and expertise to deliver high-quality candidates to the shortlist while elevating employer brands. Our solution is now available via over 100 Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and Human Capital Management (HCM) platforms, accessible to over 80% of the US and EU talent acquisition teams.   We have a +5000 global media channels network and back our solutions with reliable automation, data-driven recommendations, recruitment marketing expertise, programmatic advertising, and meaningful reporting.   Need to get more qualified, relevant and motivated job candidates at the top of the funnel? Get in touch with VONQ here