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

This week we welcome Carina Clingman to the podcast. With a PhD in biochemistry, Carina’s early experiences looking for jobs in the biotech space led her to start Recruitomics, a TA consulting group that helps small and startup biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies find and retain top talent. 

 Topics include: the advantages (and disadvantages) of having recruiters with deep subject-matter expertise, why hiring the wrong person can be particularly costly for startups, the inherent tension between the speed and quality of hires, how the lens of “NOT hiring” can lead to better outcomes for early stage startups, the emerging concept of “fractional” hires, the difference between “fractional” hires and freelancers and consultants, the pros and cons of fractional positions from the candidate’s perspective, and the impact of AI on biotech and the jobs of the future

Carina Clingman

Founder & CEO, Recruitomics Biotalent Consulting
LinkedIn
Building Biotechs Podcast
Startup Resource Guide

This week we welcome Heather Dunn to the podcast. Passionate about HR from an early age (16!), Heather brings more than 15 years of experience has an HR leader in technology companies, having held senior roles at Microsoft and Dropbox before joining Gem, where she currently serves at Chief People Officer.

Topics include: how HR can be a “lonely” role in an organization, the similarities between HR and therapy, the importance of having “truth tellers,” the prevalence of open technical roles in non-technical companies, how non-technical companies can leverage their talent brands to compete with tech juggernauts like Amazon and Meta, the importance of career pathing to tech talent, how to foster efficiency within the recruiting process, the value of transparency to tech workers, how to leverage employee “personas” in talent attraction, the delta between employer messaging and employee perceptions, employee engagement scores, candidate nurturing, the interaction between remote work and “belonging”, and the role and value of employee resource groups (ERG’s).

Heather Dunn

Chief People Officer, Gem

LinkedIn

Chief Chat: Heather Dunn

My company pays ERG leaders $10K in equity per year. Here’s why

How startups and non-tech firms can better attract laid-off Big Tech talent

In this  episode of The Changing State of Talent Acquisition, hosts Graham Thornton and Martin Predd welcome Maria Christopoulos Katris, Founder and CEO of Built In. Maria shares her 15-year journey growing Built In from a Chicago-based tech community to a global recruitment platform, offering sharp insights into why traditional applicant tracking systems (ATS) are failing to capture the full candidate journey and how employer branding has become a cornerstone of modern talent acquisition. With Built In’s latest trends report as a backdrop, Maria reveals why companies are doubling down on employer brand investments and how referrals are surging as a top channel for tech talent—while also exposing the limitations of relying on them.

Topics include:

• The evolution of recruitment from job boards to a marketing-driven discipline
• Why ATS source-of-hire data is only 20% accurate and how to move beyond it
• The rise of employer branding as a core pillar of talent acquisition
• The surge in referrals for tech talent and their potential impact on diversity
• Strategies for improving candidate experience and treating applicants like consumers
• The growing importance of employer branding for internal retention
• How to educate executives on the value of employer brand investments when ROI is challenging to measure

Links:

Maria Christopoulos Katris, Founder and CEO of Built In

• LinkedIn 
• Built In 2025 Talent Trend Report
• Connect with the Built In team to learn more about how a recruitment marketing approach will help you attract top talent."

Tune in to discover how to transform your talent acquisition strategy by embracing recruitment as marketing and building a candidate-centric employer brand that stands out in today’s competitive landscape.

This week we welcome Gretchen Huestis to the podcast. Passionate about human potential and purpose-led change, Gretchen has more than 20 years of experience as a management consultant and holder of senior HR leadership roles. She honed her skills at Towers Perrin, Pitney Bowes, SABMiller, and HSBC before assuming her current position at Siegel+Gale, where she serves at Group Director of Brand-led Change.

Topics include: building bridges between HR and marketing, the persistence of silos within an organization, aligning an EVP with an organization’s wider purpose, the concept of brand champions, how to identify and nurture brand champions, the intersection of brand understanding and brand passion, “wild cards” vs “spectators,” and the importance of maintaining promises to employees in times of change.

Gretchen Heustis

Group Director of Brand-led Change, Siegel+Gale

LinkedIn

Times May Be Changing, But the Promises You Make to Employees Never Should

This week we welcome Jay Denton to the podcast. An expert in labor market analytics, Jay spent time at Bell Partners and Axiometrics before joining LaborIQ as Chief Analytics Officer.

 Topics include: the current status of the labor market, layoffs vs. new job creation, inflation, skills-based hiring and industry switching, pay equity, approaches to setting compensation for remote roles, employees as “free agents,” and how generational demographic shifts are impacting the labor market

Jay Denton

Chief Analytics Officer, LaborIQ

LinkedIn

This week we welcome Adam Godson to the podcast. An HR technology veteran, Adam spent more than eight years at Cielo Talent before assuming his current role as President & Chief Product Officer at Paradox, a conversational AI platform for talent.

Topics include: the growth of quick apply frameworks, the challenges of communicating an EVP in a quick apply context, how quick apply frameworks help and hinder recruiters, job seeker traffic and job board incentives, SMS and high volume recruiting, interview scheduling and the importance of speed-to-candidate, “human” touchpoints as an indicator of value, ChatGPT, how large language models will affect the future of recruiting

Adam Godson

President & Chief Product Officer, Paradox

LinkedIn

Twitter

This week we welcome Becky Chung to the podcast. Passionate about HR, organizational design, and workforce development, Becky honed her skills in a range of industries, including health care, financial services, and software, before assuming her current role as Vice President of Talent Development at Cielo Talent.

Topics include: skills-based recruiting, workforce development, the role of compensation in job hopping, how upskilling can support employee retention efforts, the impact of technology and innovation on the durability of skills, how the current talent shortage is shifting productivity and growth expectations, immigration policy and the labor market, the effect of remote work on organizational culture, work-life balance and employee productivity, control vs. trust in performance management, the importance of diversity of thought in building high-performing teams, how authenticity during the hiring process leads to better outcomes, and the ROI of employee upskilling investments.

Becky Chung

Vice President, Talent Development 

Cielo Talent

LinkedIn

Co-hosts Graham and Marty return for The Changing State of Talent Acquisition Season 3 debut. They share how the agency business has evolved in the past year and discuss key trends that will shape the talent acquisition landscape in 2023 and beyond.

Topics include:

 Skills-based hiring, how automation can improve the hiring process, approaches to measuring the ROI of an employer brand, how strong employer brands create efficiencies in recruiting, the rising importance of retention in a tight labor market, and how organizations are utilizing AI to make layoff decisions

 Articles Referenced

AI Is Starting To Pick Who Gets Laid Off
Aptitude Research: 2023 HR Technology Trends and Predictions

This week we welcome Chandan Golla to the podcast. Chandan is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer for Included.ai, a DEI-first people analytics platform. Prior to co-founding Included.ai, Chandan spent more than 20 years delivering compelling experiences powered by data, having led product teams at eBay, OneTrust, and Integris Software.

Topics include: the “touchy feely” nature of DEI efforts historically, DEI as a catalyst for the HR data revolution, closing the gap between DEI awareness and small actions that improve outcomes, the backwards-looking nature of most dashboards, the value of “live” DEI data, the challenge of setting realistic DEI goals, corporate accountability and the public sharing of DEI metrics, the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning in supporting DEI initiatives, how AI uncovers hidden DEI insights, the use of segmentation to deliver tailored benefits and services to underrepresented sub-groups, and the connection between segmentation and intersectionality.

This week we welcome Adam Jackson to the podcast. Adam is a serial entrepreneur (Dr. On Demand, DriverSide.com, MarketSquare.com), startup advisor, and technology investor (Cambrian Asset Management). Adam’s most recent venture, Braintrust, is the first and largest decentralized talent network completely controlled by its users.

Topics include: the distinction between user-owned networks and corporate-owned networks, the concept of a “rake” as it relates to talent networks, why middlemen tend to extract an increasing amount of value over time, the case of DoorDash and stolen driver tips, how blockchain tokens help keep rakes low (or negative), the role of governments in regulating the gig economy, the historical purpose of corporations and the coming “unbundling” of labor, how elastic workforces benefit employers and workers alike, the likelihood of finding job security in the gig economy, the question of who “owns” a freelancer’s work history, and how the Braintrust token serves as both an incentive mechanism and a governance system for the Braintrust network.

This week we welcome Delfina Stabile and Xavi Martinez Salcedo to the podcast. Delfina began her career in Buenos Aires, where she worked as a Recruiting Analyst for Michael Page, before joining Uber—first out of Mexico City, and currently out of San Francisco, where she serves as Talent Attraction Manager. Prior to joining Uber, where he currently serves as Head of Global Strategic Initiatives, Talent Attraction, Xavi served as Program Manager, Executive Search and Talent Management for Philips and Manager of People Technology for TomTom.

Topics include: how the labor shortage is intensifying the war for tech talent, what matters to tech talent beyond salary, the importance of closing the feedback loop when conducting employee surveys, the tradeoffs associated with different organizational structures and the employer brand function, strategies for bridge building between employer branding and consumer branding teams, the importance of creating action plans prior to launching employee engagement surveys, how connecting an employer’s EVP to the company’s broader mission creates a stronger brand, how to measure ROI of employer brand initiatives, the value of discovering what doesn’t work, talent acquisition as a cost center vs. revenue creator, and how organizations are navigating the post-COVID return to office.

This week we welcome Amit Parmar to the podcast. With more than 16 years of experience in technology and human capital management, Amit spent time at IBM, Deloitte, and Unisys before founding Cliquify, an AI-powered content marketing platform that drives equity in recruitment.

Topics include: the fourth industrial revolution, how AI makes the current revolution more “sophisticated” than previous industrial revolutions, the plummeting cost of data analysis and processing, how automation stands to eliminate (and create) jobs, the likelihood of universal basic income becoming a reality in our lifetime, the concept of employees as “customers” of HR, time versus money as “currencies” in talent attraction, the question of where employer brand sits (and should sit) within an organization, how the labor shortage has elevated the stature of talent acquisition and employer brand, NPS as a measure of employee “stickiness”, how employee referral bonuses can cloud the meaning of NPS scores, and how employee referral programs can impede diversity and inclusion efforts.

Episode Description

This week we welcome Jeffrey Spector to the podcast. Jeffrey spent more than six years at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he served as Chief of Staff to Melinda Gates, before co-founding Karat, a service that helps CTO’s and CHRO’s make technical interviewing a customer-centric experience. 

Topics include: the surging demand for software engineers, the parallels between training effective teachers and training effective interviewers, why interviewing can be a lonely craft, the notion of a professional interviewer, soft vs. hard skills often found in professional interviewers, the importance of offering “redo” interviews, the concept of a “false negative” as applied to candidate interviews, how candidate interviews can be leveraged post-hire, the meaning of the “access gap,” why many well-intentioned DE&I efforts are ineffective, how democratizing information about interview processes supports diversity efforts, and alternate education paths for technical roles.

In this thought-provoking episode, we welcome Alex Swartsel, leader of JFF Labs Insights Practice at Jobs for the Future, to explore the growing AI skills gap and its implications for the future of work. Alex shares eye-opening research showing how AI usage in the workplace skyrocketed from 8% to 35% in just one year, while revealing a concerning disparity: 60% of employees are using AI for self-directed learning, yet only 16% have access to employer-provided AI tools.

Our conversation dives into what makes a "quality job" in today's economy and JFF's ambitious mission to see 75 million Americans working in quality jobs within the next decade. Alex unpacks how AI is transforming both educational settings and workplaces, challenging traditional notions of digital literacy and reshaping the skills landscape.

You'll discover why the most valuable future skills may not be AI-specific technical abilities, but rather the "human skills" that AI can't replicate—creativity, critical thinking, communication, and adaptability. Alex also explores how different educational institutions are navigating AI adoption and the policies that could help create more equitable access.

Whether you're an HR professional, educator, or worker navigating this rapidly evolving landscape, this episode offers critical insights on how we can ensure AI becomes a technology that makes everyone better off, rather than deepening existing divides.

Links: 

JFF Labs: The AI Ready Workforce Research Findings

Jobs for the Future

This week we welcome Lindsay Witcher to the podcast. As a member of Randstad RiseSmart's global leadership team, Lindsay guides the development of solutions that empower talent leaders to successfully manage mobility within their organizations. We sat down to discuss her recent article, “DeBunking 4 Myths About Reskilling Your Workforce.”

Topics include: the connection between the current labor shortage and skills mismatches, how the pandemic has changed employee expectations, the shortening half-life of skills, the declining value of college degrees in the labor market, alternative approaches to post-secondary education, skills-based hiring and the limitations of current application tracking systems, the issue of newly upskilled workers leaving an organization for other opportunities, how to weigh the cost of a significant pay increase vs. replacing a lost employee, why entry-level employees are less likely to be offered upskilling opportunities, how company ‘eco-systems’ can lead to mutually beneficial talent pools, and the distinction between attrition and regrettable loss.

This week we welcome Ali Hackett to the podcast. After starting her career in the agency world, Ali spent more than 15 years as a talent acquisition and employer brand consultant before co-founding Meet & Engage, an award winning candidate experience technology. We sat down to discuss virtual hiring events in a post-pandemic recruiting landscape.

Topics include: how the pandemic has accelerated adoption of live virtual events, the challenge of standing out in a world characterized by “screen fatigue,” social mobility and the democratization of information, the use of talent personas to create personalized experiences, how positive candidate experiences lead to employer brand advocacy, key considerations when evaluating virtual event platforms, how to measure ROI of virtual event platform investments, the future of chatbots in recruiting, chatbot use cases and limitations, the importance of “humanizing” chatbot interactions, and how to create “social style” candidate experiences.

This week we welcome Bryan Adams to the podcast. As Founder and CEO of Ph.Creative, a leading employer branding and talent attraction agency, Bryan has spent more than 17 years helping organizations build world-class employer brands. His creative, unconventional and even controversial methodologies have changed the way people think about employer branding and EVP’s. We sat down to discuss the state of the industry as a whole, as well as an article he recently wrote challenging the importance of retention as a metric against which to measure talent acquisition efforts. 

Topics include: the maturation of employer branding as a business function, the stubborn misconception that employer brands are “created,” good and bad aspirational branding, internal collaboration (and conflict) between employer branding and consumer branding teams, how strong employer brands generate revenue and value for consumer brands, the difference between retention and regrettable loss, how supporting employees who leave for better opportunities leads to higher performing cultures, the intersection of politics and the employer branding, the impact of virtual work on employer branding, and how remote work serves as a “litmus test” for strong employer brands.

This week we welcome Raghav Singh to the podcast. Raghav’s career in talent acquisition spans more than 30 years, including chapters at Taleo (where he served as Product Manager from 2000-2004), UnitedHealthGroup, KornFerry, and Salesforce, where he currently serves as Director of Product leading a team building HR and talent acquisition products. Raghav also regularly appears as an author in noted industry publications, including ERE, where he’s written extensively about the pre- and post-pandemic labor market.

Topics include: the advent and evolution of the ATS as a SaaS product, the commoditization of HR technologies, the record high numbers of job openings in the US, the impact of government incentives on hiring, how lack of quality childcare and eldercare has forced women out of the workforce, the persistent bias against the resume “gap”, Baby Boomers and “forced” early retirements, the challenges of skills mismatches between recent college graduates and available jobs, the difference between American and European approaches to addressing unemployment, the long-term implications of birthrate falling below replacement levels, the outlook for immigrant workers entering the job market, and the effects of remote work on talent pools and wages.

This week we welcome Scott MacGregor to the podcast. Prior to entering the world of talent acquisition, Scott spent 17 years as Chief Revenue Officer for Flo-Tech, where he saw the company grow from five employees to more than 300. Along the way, his experiences with recruiting systems and processes led him to believe that talent acquisition is fundamentally broken, which inspired him to start his own talent strategy firm, SomethingNew. Scott is also the proud Founder & CEO of the Talent Champions Council, a private membership community designed to mobilize expertise in talent strategy from the best in corporations, the military and professional sports.

Topics include: the value of applying first principles thinking to talent acquisition, why traditional recruiting fee structures are illogical, the “epidemic” of treating recruiting as a cost center, the disconnect between the importance of HR and its lack of attention from the C-suite, why many recruiters lack the skills required to effectively vet job candidates, what professional sports and the military can teach us about recruiting, how to use scorecards to make data-driven hiring decisions, the importance of investing in employees with robust onboarding and training programs, and the post-COVID outlook for talent acquisition.

This week we welcome Lindsay Pedersen to the podcast. Lindsay spent her early career as a brand manager at Clorox before starting her own brand strategy consulting firm, Ironclad Brand Strategy. Her recent book, “Forging an Ironclad Brand: A Leader’s Guide” provides an accessible overview of what branding is (and isn’t) and offers a multitude of real world examples to demonstrate how strong brands help businesses make better decisions—from product design, to customer experience, to talent acquisition.

Topics include: the various meanings and incarnations of “brand,” the concept of brand as a relationship between a company and an audience (i.e., customers, candidates), the distinction between “functional” (rational) and higher order (emotional) benefits of a product or service, the connection between strong brands and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, how strong brands serve as “north stars” to guide business decisions, the recent emergence of “employer brand” as a concept and its connection to an organization’s consumer brand, the value of having a singular unified brand for both employees and customers, the challenge of rehabilitating a brand with a poor reputation, the four P’s of positioning, and the importance of building strong connections between talent acquisition and marketing.

This week we welcome Hung Lee to the podcast. With more than 20 years of recruiting experience, Hung is the creator and curator of the wildly popular “Recruiting Brainfood” newsletter and community, and Founder of Workshape.io, a next generation matching service for tech talent.

Topics include: the origin and growth of Recruiting Brainfood, the historical nature of resumes, alternative approaches to visualizing the interests and goals of tech talent, the inherent subjectivity of words and the implications for recruiting, the switching cost associated with moving away from the resume, employee experience and career pathing, the shift to remote work and the digitization of workforce behavior, opportunities to automate the ~170 unique tasks of a recruiter, and the use of AI for sourcing, scheduling and sentiment analysis. 

This week we welcome Aaron Kraljev to the podcast. Aaron began his career at Wells Fargo, where he served as VP - Marketing Program Manager for the Student Banking Program, before transitioning in 2009 to lead the organization’s employer brand and candidate advocacy program. At the time, the concept of employer branding was still in its infancy, uniquely positioning Aaron to watch the industry evolve alongside his own career. Today Aaron brings his employer brand expertise to Fisher Investments, where he serves as Group Vice President for Talent Acquisition and  Employer Brand. 

Topics include: the recent history of employer branding, the connections between consumer marketing and talent acquisition, the challenge of translating talent acquisition concepts and nomenclature to marketing “speak” (and vice versa), the growing importance of data in employer branding functions, approaches to measuring ROI of employer brand investments, the tradeoffs of outsourcing talent acquisition efforts, the hidden costs of making bad hires and leaving positions unfilled, the future of job boards, and the value of a strong consumer brand for talent attraction.

This week we welcome Vivek Ravisankar, CEO of HackerRank, to the podcast. Vivek co-founded HackerRank in 2012 with the mission of using skills assessments to match developers with the right jobs. Since then, the company has helped more than 2,000 organizations go beyond résumés and ‘pedigree’ to find talent with proven programming skills. 

Topics include: the advantages and limitations of using résumés in hiring for technical roles, the issues with relying on educational or career ‘pedigrees’ as proxies for technical skill, the biases introduced when screening based on measures like GPA, why software development has been one of the last fields to “digitize” its screening processes, the role of emotions in making hiring decisions, the hidden costs of communication when hiring a remote workforce, the meaning of culture and the implications for remote workforces, the necessary ingredients for creating a thriving tech eco-system, how a city’s “vibe” dictates which industries will thrive there, the attrition problem facing engineering departments, and the ways in which technology can enable career development within an organization. 

This week we welcome Francis Suarez, Mayor of Miami, to the podcast. Mayor Suarez made news in recent months with his Twitter activity promoting Miami as the next Silicon Valley. We sat down to discuss the tweet that went viral, how Miami is capitalizing on this “lightning in a bottle” moment, and the city’s efforts to build a workforce development pipeline for tech talent of the future.     

Topics include: the efforts of local governments to attract employers and employees, the concept of employer branding as applied to cities, Miami’s divergent approaches to tax and public safety policy, the role of a mayor as a city’s chief brand ambassador, Miami’s pitch for Amazon’s HQ2, the issue of gentrification, Miami’s ongoing campaign to re-brand itself as a new tech hub, and how the city is cultivating tech talent of the future with its “Miami for Everyone” initiative.  

In this episode, Kyle Lagunas of Aptitude Research discusses the crucial distinction between "human-in-the-loop" and truly "human-centric" AI approaches in HR. Drawing from his extensive 15-year career studying innovation cycles in HR tech, Kyle explains why adoption rates for AI in HR are stalling despite executive support, and offers practical strategies for building AI literacy within organizations.

Topics Covered:

• The difference between human-in-the-loop vs. human-centric AI design
• Why HR departments struggle with AI adoption and tech literacy
• Practical ways to increase AI literacy within HR teams
• Evaluating AI use cases across impact, risk, and complexity
• Success stories and low-risk starting points for HR AI implementation
• Moving beyond the "bias boogeyman" in AI evaluation

Discover how to evaluate AI implementations and learn why many HR departments are starting their AI journey with conversational AI. This episode provides a nuanced framework for HR professionals looking to move beyond fear-based decision making and implement AI solutions that genuinely augment human capabilities.

This week we welcome Ashutosh Garg to the podcast. Ashutosh is CEO & Co-founder of Eightfold.ai, the first Talent Intelligence Platform to address the talent gap by harnessing the power of AI and search, and Founder of Bloomreach, a leading vendor for Digital Experience Platforms. Prior to founding these enterprises, Ashutosh managed Search and Personalization efforts at both Google and IBM Research. With 6000+ research citations, 50+ patents, and 35+ peer-reviewed research publications, Ashutosh is one of the world’s experts in machine learning.

Topics include: hiring for potential vs. hiring for past skills and experiences, the connection between hiring for potential and diversity, the limitations of resumes and their modern-day equivalents, the growing problem of attrition, the mismatched incentives between advertisers (employers) and job boards, the importance of viewing talent acquisition and talent management holistically, the concept of a “half-life” as applied to skills, the hyper-specialization of jobs, “good” attrition vs. “bad” attrition, augmented intelligence vs. artificial intelligence, the importance of transparency when deploying AI-powered solutions, the rise of remote work and its effects on pay parity and talent pools, and and employer branding for cities. 

This week we welcome Alysha M. Campbell to the podcast. With more than a decade of experience as both a recruiter and HR business partner, Alysha is currently Founder and Principal of CultureShift HR, where she helps companies utilize and engage their best talent while creating diverse and purposeful work environments that help businesses grow and thrive.

Topics include: the meaning of culture in an HR context, understanding culture as the “why” behind a business, the difference between company culture and employer brand, the “checkbox” mentality behind many HR initiatives, the effects of remote work on company culture, approaches to setting realistic goals for diversity and inclusion, the importance of building new pipelines for under-represented STEM talent, and how to measure progress on DE&I initiatives.

This week we welcome Laurie Ruettimann to the podcast. As the face of the popular “Punk Rock HR” podcast, Laurie will need no introduction for many of our listeners. Laurie began her career working in HR operations and recruiting for such organizations as Monsanto, Alberto-Culver (now Unilever), and Pfizer, before leaving corporate America altogether to speak truth to power through her websites (The Cynical Girl and Punk Rock HR), podcast, public speaking engagements, and books. Launching on January 12th and available now for pre-order, Laurie’s latest book, Betting on You: How to Put Yourself First And (Finally) Take Control of Your Career, is an essential guide for employees hoping to work more effectively and approach their jobs in a smarter (and healthier) manner in the new year. 

Topics include: the importance of personal accountability in fostering positive workplaces, the practical meaning of empathy, why HR initiatives often fail to live up to their promises, the pitfalls of asking for employee feedback without a process in place to implement change, how to retain control of your time as a job candidate and employee, the need for “un-sanitized” feedback on employers, how the independent workforce is shifting the employer-employee power dynamic, universal basic income as a tool for employee (and entrepreneur) empowerment, HR as the intersection of work, power, politics and money, surveillance capitalism, and the future of remote work.

In our final episode of 2020, we are guest-free and share our reflections on Change State’s second year in business, the lessons we learned along the way, and the topics and trends we’ll be watching as we look ahead to the new year.

Topics include: Change State’s growth during a pandemic year, the value of founder-created content for organic business growth, the challenges of starting a content engine from scratch, our approach to hiring our first employee(s), soft vs. hard skills in making hiring decisions, the difficulty of writing high quality job descriptions, the meaning of company culture in start-ups with minimal headcount, the pros and cons of the gig economy, the bane of Powerpoint presentations, the economic ripple of effects of remote workforces, and employer branding for cities.

This week we welcome Kelly Robinson to the podcast. Kelly has founded numerous ventures in the talent acquisition space, including a staffing firm (MECS Communications), a job distribution platform (Broadbean), a marketing content sharing tool (Paiger), and most recently, RedDotMedia, a recruitment marketing agency.

Topics include: the future of business travel, Graham’s beard, why many organizations lack insight into their top sources of applications and hires, the problem of overworked and underpaid recruiters, the use of video conferencing background images as a basis for evaluating job candidates, reactive vs. proactive recruiting, the mistake of equating talent acquisition with human resources, approaches to incentivizing quality hires, the lack of quality data in talent acquisition, and employee engagement survey fatigue. 

This week we welcome Elliott Garms to the podcast. Elliott’s career in talent acquisition dates back to childhood, when he helped run his father’s executive search business out of the family basement. Much has changed since these early days of manually inputting paper resumes into a then-new-fangled system called an ATS; Elliott went on to found or co-found numerous tech recruiting ventures, including Tech in the Middle, HubFunnel, Dev Bootcamp, HumanConnections.io, and most recently, humanpredictions, a comprehensive database of tech talent that leverages public data to help clients find tech talent outside of LinkedIn.

Topics include: the importance of bringing timing to sourcing, public vs. private “signaling” as it relates to recruiting, why high demand talent is often less likely to maintain up-to-date public profiles, how activity on platforms like GitHub can reveal an impending career switch, the natural connection between predictive sourcing and candidate nurturing, the importance of relationship building, the issue of job-hopping, and the rise of remote work and its implications for tech recruiting.

This week we welcome Mahe Bayireddi to the podcast. As a member of Forbes Technology Council, Mahe has co-founded multiple startups, including BHSP Nexus Software Consulting, BijaHealth, SnipSnap, and most recently, Phenom, where he currently leads as Chief Executive Officer.

Topics include: why effective leaders must be effective recruiters, Phenom’s audacious goal of helping one billion people find the right job, the importance of viewing talent acquisition and talent experience management from a global perspective, the value of seeing the big picture when thinking about workforce diversity, why focusing on D&I with hiring managers (the “interview” stage) can be more effective than focusing on frontline recruiters, approaches to setting realistic D&I goals and measuring progress by industry or role grouping, how to use AI to identify opportunities for improving D&I across all stages of the funnel, the concern about amplifying an organization’s existing biases with “black box” AI systems, and the future of remote work in a post-pandemic economy.  

This week we’re guest-free and discuss the nominees for Recruiting Brief’s MVP award in the category of employer branding as well as Glassdoor’s new “Review Intelligence” offering.

Topics include: the impact of COVID on employer brands, the ways in which our predictions in March proved (in)accurate, whether an organization’s pandemic response is a basis for a differentiated employer brand, the rise of remote work and its effects on company culture, the evolving meaning of “work-life balance,” the importance of creating processes and frameworks to reinforce an organization’s commitment to its employer brand pillars, how employee referral programs can be misleading indicators of employer brand health, the importance of combining NPS with other employee satisfaction metrics, the ways in which virtual meetings have deepened employee-employee connections, the evolution of employee wellness initiatives during COVID times, and our early impressions of Glassdoor’s new “Review Intelligence” offering.

This week we welcome Richard Carsley to the podcast. Rick has led talent acquisition teams at a number of well-known brands, including Farmers Insurance, Bankers Life and Casualty Company, TSYS, IKEA, and most recently, Freedom Mortgage, where he currently serves as Director of Talent Acquisition. 

Topics include: the superiority of Wawa pizza subs, the FinTech recruitment landscape during the 2020 pandemic, the synergies between mass market consumer brands and their talent brands, the differences between “awareness” marketing and job-specific marketing, how (and why) recruitment marketing lags consumer marketing in its approaches to truly understanding its target “customers”, how job boards have failed to adapt to the explosion of remote work opportunities, why posting remote jobs nationwide may be counterproductive from a cost/efficiency point-of-view, the different challenges posed by too-many and too-few applications for a given requisition, how to effectively deploy gamification to automate assessments at scale, the double-edged sword of employee referral programs, how employee referral incentives can undermine the value of NPS as a employer brand health metric, and the future of industry conferences and trade shows.

This week we welcome Morgan Llewellyn to the podcast. As a trained data scientist, Morgan shares his wealth of experience from a career spanning multiple industries, with stints at Salesforce, Predictive Partner, and eventually Jobvite, where he currently serves as Chief Data Scientist.

Topics include: the history and purview of “data science,” how the explosion of available data in recent years has increased the demand for data scientists, the challenges and opportunities presented by this new wellspring of “big data,” the importance of keeping analysis rooted in specific business problems and use cases, the different forms of bias that exist within the recruiting function, how seemingly minor differences in job descriptions and skill requirements can have significant effects on the types of talent an organization attracts, how AI can help organizations identify biases within recruitment processes (and what to do about them), approaches to addressing D&I by expanding talent pools, and logical starting points for organizations newly focused on identifying and correcting biases in their systems and tools.

In this episode of The Changing State of Talent Acquisition, we sit down with Craig Fisher—CEO of TalentNet Media, author of Hiring Humans, and one of the most respected voices in the HR tech space. From his early days in staffing to launching TalentNet Live, Craig has worn nearly every hat in the talent world.

We explore why friction in the hiring process is actually a good thing, how AI tools can enhance rather than replace human connection, and why most companies are missing the mark on retention and employee advocacy. Craig also shares behind-the-scenes details on rewriting 13,000 job descriptions for one of the world's largest banks—and why SEO and contextual AI optimization are now table stakes for recruiting.

Plus, he gives us a sneak peek at his upcoming book Paint Your Store, designed to help job seekers and solopreneurs level up their personal brands.

Whether you're a recruiter, TA leader, or job seeker navigating today's AI-infused hiring landscape, this is one conversation you won't want to miss.

🛠️ Topics covered:

• How social media shaped early recruitment marketing
• The case for human friction in hiring
• Why AI won't replace recruiters (but bad job descriptions might)
• Tactical tips for job SEO and optimizing for AI search
• The overlooked power of onboarding and employee advocacy

🔗 Learn more about Craig's work: hiring-humans.com New episodes every week at changestate.io

This week we welcome Prem Kumar to the podcast. Before co-founding Humanly, an Y Combinator-accelerated startup focused on improving the efficiency of candidate screening, scheduling, and engagement at scale, Prem spent ten tears at Microsoft, where he was responsible for delivery and operations of all software initiatives for the organization’s HR portal. He also served as Director of Product at TINYpulse, an employee survey and engagement platform.

Topics include: the meaning of “accessible for all” with regard to HR tools and tech, the prevalence of male-gendered words in job descriptions, why years of experience often isn’t predictive of an employee’s success, how technology can reduce our reliance on resumes as screening shortcuts, how an organization’s chosen mode of interviewing candidates (e.g., video, phone, chat) can introduce biases against candidates with certain personality types or communication styles, the importance of using candidate feedback to improve hiring team outreach and communication, and differing approaches to measuring employee impact or “employee lifetime value.”    

This week we welcome Lucy Williams to the podcast. Lucy's distinguished career in talent acquisition spans more than twenty years, with stints at such organizations as RP International, IBM, and most recently, Visa, where she led a team as Regional TA Director for Central Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Topics include: the similarities and differences between talent acquisition functions in US, the Middle East, and Africa, how and why hiring timelines can vary widely by market, the importance of creating a robust workforce plan for multi-national organizations, proactive vs. reacting recruiting, the necessary inputs to create a viable workforce plan, getting beyond the “cost center” mindset in talent acquisition, internal mobility as an crucial component of an effective TA strategy, the meaning of “company culture,” the difference between highlighting individual employees’ personal brands and an organization’s employer brand, and the relationship between company culture and employer brand.

This week we welcome Bas van de Haterd back to the podcast (our first repeat guest!). Bas proudly identifies as a “professional snoop” — a title that captures his more than 15 years of experience as an HR consultant, candidate assessment and experience expert, and frequent conference speaker. 

Topics include: the problems with using questionnaire-based assessments in recruiting, why game-based assessments are more accurate for testing cognitive skills and assessing personality traits, the difference between conscious and unconscious “bias” in candidate self-perceptions, how our frame of reference influences our perceptions of ourselves, how pre-screening technology can reduce bias in assessing job candidates, the parallels between assessing “chemistry” in romantic relationships vs. business relationships, the meaning and implications of application order bias, how pre-selection technologies can help reduce application order bias, the difference between true AI and “explainable” AI, the concerns about relying on AI to make “black box” recruiting decisions, and how using employee performance data to predict future-

This week we’re guest-free and begin with a recent ERE article about AI and screening bias, before unpacking an article from Bas van de Haterd about the future of digital assessments.

Topics include: biases in screening and assessments, the ways in which AI can amplify (or minimize) the biases of the human recruiters who use them, the problem of training assessment tools on employee datasets that have inherent biases, how rising employment has increased the importance of effective screening at scale, the value of “pre-screening,” how the sorting problem is different for volume vs. professional roles, the connection between the shifting educational landscape and the declining value of resumes, the difference between using assessments for hard skills vs. culture and personality “fit”, how reducing reliance on resumes and traditional educational milestones can support diversity and inclusion initiatives, and how the preference for candidates with a good stage presence introduces a bias against otherwise qualified introverts.