Letting Go
Greetings from Edinburgh
Welcome to 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.
Letting Go
There are things AI already does better than your recruiters. That’s uncomfortable to accept, yet understanding it is how you make your teams more valuable, not less.
Consider what happens when you put AI against human experience in resume matching. For argument’s sake, let’s say a recruiter reviews 250,000 resumes over a twenty-year career. An AI can rank that same 250,000 resumes in under a minute, reading every single word without skimming, without fatigue, without unconscious shortcuts. The volume of deeper pattern matching it can do on that data in under an hour is beyond anything a human team can replicate, no matter how experienced they are.
We place enormous value on experience in this industry, and rightly so, yet that same value makes us blind to where our real strengths actually lie. When your recruiters are spending their time on work that AI demonstrably does faster and more thoroughly, you’re wasting the capabilities that actually set them apart.
Because the things that make recruiters genuinely valuable aren’t going away. Understanding nuance and context, knowing how a hire will actually play out in practice, building the relationships that surface insights no resume ever could, and navigating the regulatory and ethical complexities that come with every hiring decision. These are profoundly human skills, and AI is making them more important, not less.
The challenge for TA leaders right now is a difficult one. You have to help your teams let go of tasks they’ve built their professional identity around so they can hold on to the things that only they can do.
Foresight
Job boards have connected candidates and employers for over thirty years, but the model that sustained them is under strain. Frustrated candidates and overwhelmed employers are eroding trust in the system, while business models built on volume are amplifying the problem rather than fixing it. When neither side believes the process works, the future becomes uncertain.
My guest on Episode 765 was Lou Goodman, a job board strategy expert who partnered with Jobiqo on new research into the sector’s future. She explained why the industry keeps repeating the same patterns, how AI is exposing structural weaknesses, and what job boards can learn from other two-sided platforms if they are to evolve rather than fade.
Influence
Many organisations say AI is transformative, yet few have redesigned themselves to reflect that belief. Announcements are made, and pilots are launched, but ownership, structure, and accountability often remain unclear. Without clear ownership and structural change, AI remains a series of experiments rather than a real transformation.
My guest on Episode 764 was Stephen Wunker, co-author of AI and the Octopus Organization. We discussed why companies are not wired for cross-functional change, what distributed innovation really looks like, and why clearer models of ownership are essential. Stephen also explored the implications for talent, culture, and leadership as adoption accelerates.
Talent
Bias in hiring has been debated for decades, yet our understanding of how it actually operates inside real processes remains limited. Most research isolates single variables, making it difficult to build a complete picture of what is really happening.
My guest on Episode 763 was Bas van de Haterd, Co-founder of the TA Audit Institute. He shared findings from new research that challenged conventional thinking about where bias occurs and how it manifests. We discussed methodology, what was measured and what was not, and how better data can support more targeted and effective change.
Technology
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of AI noise right now and can’t tell who to listen to, I’d point you towards Tom Goodwin’s newsletter Nowism.
Tom is an author, consultant, and speaker on new technology and was also a guest on Recruiting Future a few years back. He has this rare ability to make sense of the chaos without falling into either the hype camp or the doom camp. He only publishes when he has something worth saying, and his latest issue is a perfect example, pulling apart the AI polarisation debate with the kind of sharp, grounded thinking that makes it much easier to see the wood for the trees.
Transform
Are you going to Transform in March? Please let me know if you are, because Recruiting Future is once more a media partner for the event.
If you are thinking of going, you can find all the details here.
It’s an excellent event, and I highly recommend it
Follow & Listen
Recruiting Future Feast will be back next week.
In the meantime, you can keep up with all the latest podcast episodes by following Recruiting Future on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Many Thanks
Matt