The Changing State of Talent Acquisition – Details, episodes & analysis

Yvette Hansen has spent nearly two decades leading talent acquisition at major health systems: UnitedHealth Group, Optum, Amedisys, and most recently as Director of TA & Belonging at Baylor Scott & White Health. In that time, she's learned that healthcare doesn't let you chase shiny tools. High stakes, compliance requirements, and tight labor markets force a process-first mindset.

But Yvette's also honest about what disappoints: vendors who oversell integration capabilities, tools that look great in demos but disrupt recruiter workflows, and the gap between "we can do that" and actually doing it. One vendor demo promised seamless integration. When implementation started? "Not so much."

One surprising insight: healthcare is no longer lagging in tech adoption. Health systems have moved to the front of the pack on responsible AI implementation, proving that constraints can drive better outcomes.

For TA leaders drowning in vendor pitches and paralyzed by options, this episode delivers a practical roadmap.

Fresh off conference season, Mark Tomasino and I break down what we actually saw on the show floor. The net out: If your differentiator is "AI-powered," you've already lost.

We dig into the feedback loop nobody's talking about: job seekers using AI to mass apply to jobs, employers using AI to filter the noise, and the whole apparatus just... creating more work for all. 

Mark walks through his six-question framework for cutting through vendor pitches, why context matters more than the algorithm, and why the most interesting solutions may come from founders who've never worked in traditional TA.

Also: why everyone's fishing from the same data ocean, what skills taxonomy actually means (and why you're probably not doing it), and Mark's contrarian take on why AI won't take our jobs – but it will expose which work shouldn't have been ours in the first place.

If you're a TA leader trying to figure out where to put your AI budget, this one's for you.

Talivity helps employers see what others miss – brand reputation risks, workforce shifts, and the real value of AI – so you can make smarter decisions and achieve measurable hiring outcomes. Learn more at Talivity.com.

#60: On the Frontline – How AI is Shaping the Future of High Volume Recruiting

 This week we welcome Sean Behr to the podcast. Sean is a successful entrepreneur spanning multiple industries, including e-commerce, advertising and automotive. Before joining Fountain as an investor and CEO, Sean held a number of founding and senior leadership roles at STRATIM, Adap.tv, and Shopping.com. He is also an active investor and advisor for numerous early stage companies, including Nana, AntHill, and Kinectic Eye, among others.

Topics include: the unique challenges and opportunities of frontline recruiting, the limitations of applying recruiting tactics and technologies designed for corporate roles to frontline roles, how the labor market is forcing organizations to consider new approaches to frontline recruiting, technological innovation in recruiting as an agent for (and impediment to) change, the increasing demands for efficiency in HR/TA, strategy vs. technology, task-based automation vs. goal-based automation, and the iterative nature of advances in artificial intelligence

Sean Behr
CEO, Fountain

LinkedIn

Change State is thrilled to introduce a new recurring “mini” feature on the Changing State of Talent Acquisition podcast. In “Change State Method and Practices”, we’ll periodically share practical tips, frameworks, tools, and strategies we rely on to help our clients build world-class talent brands and recruitment marketing strategies.

What is Methods & Practices?

 We launched the podcast five years ago with a focus on education: how do we engage with, promote, and elevate the most interesting voices in our industry? This has led to fascinating conversations with nearly 60 leaders in and around the talent acquisition space. As our listener base has grown, some questions keep popping up from our fans: What is Change State, anyway? How do we help clients? How can I take a similar approach in my organization?

Methods & Practices is one part of our answer. Staying true to our educational mission, these mini episodes provide a quick “behind the scenes” look at our approaches to solving common problems in the TA space. And while we love the opportunity to partner with new clients, we created these, like all of our episodes, to be helpful whether you ever become a Change State Client.

 Have a topic or guest suggestion? We love to hear from our fans! Shoot us an email at podcast@changestate.io 

Topics include:

The definition of employer brand, how an employer brand differs from an employee value proposition, perception vs. reality in branding, the connection between a consumer or master brand and an employer brand, key dimensions of strong employer brands, stakeholder groups involved with an EVP project, and the top considerations when designing an employee survey.

This week we welcome William Sims to the podcast. Before joining Lightcast as SVP of Professional Services, Williams held a number of leadership positions in talent acquisition and sales at Qualtrics, Jani-King Gulf Coast, and Career Builder, where he served as Director of Global Solutions Architects. 

Topics include: the current state of the labor market, the connection between the labor market and interest rates, the role of the Fed, the near and far term prognosis of the labor market, the concept of workforce readiness, Gen Z attitudes towards employment, the trend towards “quick quits”, novel approaches to talent retention, the growth and evolution of people analytics roles in senior leadership, reactive vs. proactive mindsets, how public-private partnerships are attempting to address the skills gap, and the future of universities in a world where college degrees are becoming less valuable in the labor market 

William Sims

SVP Professional Services, Lightcast

LinkedIn

This week we welcome Susan LeMotte to the podcast. Before starting exaqueo, Susan held a number of leadership positions in talent acquisition and employer branding, including as an HR consultant for Home Depot, Director of Talent Acquisition at Ritz Carlton, and Senior Director of Global Employer Branding and Marketing at Marriott.

Topics include: the evolution of and current state of employer brand as an industry, reactive employer branding vs. strategic employer branding, why employer brand should “live” under HR instead of marketing, the concept of recruitment marketing as a subset of employer branding activities, transactional vs. communal relationships in marketing, post-hire employer brand touchpoints, the limits of consumer marketing when applied to employer branding, the differences between competition for talent and competition for products and services, how early career and hourly jobs can be more than transactional, the current state of the candidate experience, and why large organizations are sometimes the worst offenders in terms of offering poor candidate experiences

Susan LaMotte

CEO, exaqueo

LinkedIn

This week we welcome Heather Tenuto to the podcast. Before taking on her current role as CEO of The Muse Group (owners of The Muse and Fairygodboss), Heather spent her early career as a public school teacher before pivoting to a range of sales enablement and revenue growth roles, including VP of Channels at ShoreTel, VP of Sales (SMB Services) at Office Depot, and Chief Revenue Officer of Zift Solutions.

Topics include: employer brand as a strategy vs. tactic, employer brand ambassadors, how to identify and activate employer brand ambassadors, the importance of incorporating regular employee feedback into employer brand management, DEI beyond gender and ethnic identity, and the value and power of introverts to an organization.

Heather Tenuto

CEO, The Muse Group

LinkedIn

This week we welcome Ben Zweig to the podcast. With a Ph.D. in Economics, Ben currently teaches a course on “the Future of Work” at NYU’s Stern School of Business, and serves as CEO of Revelio Labs, a workforce intelligence consultancy he founded in 2018.

Topics include: economics, the basic definition of “work,” the value of viewing jobs as a bundle of work activities and people as bundles of skills, the trouble with understanding jobs as collections of skills, the difficulty of quantifying the output or profitability of individual employees, the forces shaping the future of work, the difference between workforce intelligence and talent intelligence, the variety of available external data sources, why social profiles are foundational to workforce analytics, choosing the right benchmarks vs. choosing the right metrics, and approaches to evaluating the quality of external data sources, and generative AI and the future of recruiting 

Ben Zweig

CEO, Revelio Labs

Adjunct Professor, NYU Stern School of Business

LinkedIN

This week we welcome Rachel Gulley to the podcast. Rachel started as a recruiter at staffing agencies before taking on a variety of recruiting operations management roles at WilsonHCG, Asurion, and FanDuel, where she currently serves as Director of Talent Acquisition Operations.

Topics include: organizational culture, core values, how core values can serve as a “framework” for effective decision-making, using product-development frameworks to optimize recruiting operations, the value of iterative approaches in driving organizational alignment and buy-in, how to get “people” people to embrace data and analytics, the concept of recruiter enablement, and generative AI and the future of recruiting

Rachel Gulley

Director, Talent Acquisition Operations at FanDuel

LinkedIn