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Recruiting Future Feast

Greetings from Edinburgh

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

The Unintended Consequences of AI Hype

I recently had an interesting conversation with the General Counsel of a mid-sized company with offices in the US and Europe. Their HR team had just invested in a new ATS, but shortly after signing, the vendor began touting the system’s “powerful AI.” This wasn’t mentioned in the original due diligence, and it threw the legal team into a panic.

As the General Counsel explained, legal departments are caught trying to tread an impossible line between the risks of breaching new legislation and existing laws on discrimination and copyright on one hand, and the need for their organizations to embrace AI to stay competitive on the other.

In the end, the so-called “powerful AI” was just basic machine learning, already reviewed during due diligence. But the vendor’s exaggeration stressed the legal team, hurt the HR team’s credibility, and almost cost the vendor the contract.

AI is amazing, problematic, transformational, and full of risk all at the same time. Vendors overstating their capabilities isn’t helping anyone.

Latest Episodes

Three new episodes on the podcast in the last week, all with a specific lens on TA Transformation

​Episode 548 was recorded at the SmartRecruiters Hiring Success event in Amsterdam and features Dr. Swathi Palasamudram, Enterprise Business Architect at Bosch, and Nazim Ünlü, Global People and Organization Lead at Novartis. We talked about why the transformation of talent acquisition is truly unstoppable—and how TA leaders can harness this momentum to not only keep pace but lead the way.

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On Episode 649, I spoke to Don Tomlinson, CTO at Daxtra. Don gives us a refreshingly pragmatic view of the AI use cases that can combine to build a personalized candidate experience and highlights pitfalls and dangers to be aware of.

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In Episode 650, I discussed how employers need to think differently about talent with the authors of a new book called “The Talent-Fueled Enterprise.” It was great to speak to all three of its authors, Mike Ohata, Larry Durham, and Eric Dingler, who, between them, have 85 years combined experience in leading talent at Fortune 15 companies.

As Heard On Recruiting Future

I was delighted to see Dart Lindsley’s ideas on work as a product were recently published in the Havard Business Review. Dart is a consultant and strategic advisor on People Experience at Google.

Dart believes that rather than being seen as resources or units of production, employees are actually customers of a product we call work. There are some vast implications for talent acquisition here, and my interview with him from last year is a must-listen for anyone developing a strategic talent plan for the future.

Sponsors

A big thank you to SmartRecruiters and Plum for sponsoring Recruiting Future during October. If you are interested in sponsoring the show in 2025, now would be a great time to get in touch; drop me an email at matt@metashift.co.uk or send me a message on LinkedIn.

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Thanks very much for reading. I'll be back with another issue of Recruiting Future Feast next week.

Matt Alder

P.S. Would you like me to deliver a workshop session on strategic foresight and the future of talent acquisition for you and your team? Reply to this email, and we can discuss all the details.