Recruiting Future Feast

Greetings from Edinburgh

Welcome to the weekly edition of Recruiting Future Feast, the newsletter from The Recruiting Future Podcast.

Recruiting Future helps Talent Acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing their strategic capability in Foresight, Influence, Talent, and Technology.

The Agentic Wars Have Begun

The big news this week has been SAP's acquisition of SmartRecruiters. First of all, huge congratulations to the team there, and what sounds like a very positive move for the company. SmartRecruiters has been a long-term partner of Recruiting Future, and I'm really grateful for their continuing support. Here is a video of me interviewing Jerome, the founder, when they were just four people in an office in San Francisco back in 2012.

There are lots of theories as to why SAP would want to do the acquisition, not least the inadequacies of their current talent acquisition software. However, for me, this is a play about AI and data. There is an agentic war going on with the big enterprise software companies (ERPs and the likes of Salesforce, etc) to win the battle to deploy their agents end-to-end across the enterprise. Talent Acquisition is a missing piece for most of them. SmartRecruiters has done a fantastic job in recent months of repositioning itself as an AI-first company, and this is the result. I don't think this will be the last major acquisition this year. The big question is, who will be next?

Foresight

The headlines this year have been full of CEOs announcing their business is becoming AI-first and effectively demanding their employees become instant AI experts to make this happen.

However, the companies at the cutting edge have not only been on this journey for a while, but they have also deeply focused on having the right culture and support to bring their employees with them.

I was delighted to speak to Brandon Sammut, Chief People Officer at Zapier, on Ep 721 of Recruiting Future.

Ever since Zapier's CEO issued a 'Code Red' on AI back in March 2023, Zapier has been undergoing an AI transformation across every part of its business. In our conversation, Brandon shares how their AI strategy is boosting both productivity and employee engagement, why and how every new hire must demonstrate AI fluency, and why it is critical to maintain the human touch in talent acquisition and throughout the employee journey.

Influence

Fascinating conversation with Amy Schultz on Ep 720. Amy has been on the podcast twice before, once while working at LinkedIn and once while working at Canva. She is now VP Market Development & Operations for RPO at Korn Ferry ANZ, and her combination of experience across agency, in-house, and RPO gives her a unique perspective.

In our conversation, she shares her belief that TA's natural product mindset and tech experience well position recruiting teams to influence HR's evolution from fixed programs towards an agile, iterative product development mindset.

⚡️ How FITT is your Talent Acquisition function?

Over the last decade, I’ve interviewed hundreds of successful TA leaders on the Recruiting Future podcast. One thing stands out: the best leaders consistently excel in four crucial areas:

Foresight: Anticipating future trends to prepare proactively.

Influence: Building credibility and securing stakeholder support.

Talent: Adopting innovative strategies to attract and retain critical skills

Technology: Leveraging tech (including AI) strategically to stay ahead.

To help you quickly assess your own capability in these essential areas, I’ve created the free FITT for the Future Assessment.

Ready to see if you are FITT for the future?

👉 Take the Free FITT Assessment now

Talent

There seems to be many debates about skills-based hiring going on at the moment, so this is the perfect time to listen to Ep 718. It's an interview with David Wilkins, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Talent Neuron. David has produced some exclusive data insights for Recruiting Future that paint a clear picture of where skills-based hiring stands today.

In our conversation, he shares where the market is, what specific companies are doing, the real benefits they're seeing, and his thoughts on how AI might change everything in the future.

Technology

How do we move from reactive recruiting to predictive talent acquisition? What if AI could help us predict performance before a candidate even starts? And what happens when we connect hiring decisions to actual performance outcomes, creating a feedback loop that makes recruiters smarter over time?

My guests on Ep 722 were Veronique Lacasse, Senior Manager at Bell Canada, and Stephane Rivard, Co-founder and CEO of HiringBranch. In our conversation, Veronique and Stephane walk us through Bell's integrated approach to talent acquisition, which utilizes AI assessment data on soft skills to create a predictive, performance-driven hiring system that is still very much driven by human recruiters.