The Questions We Never Ask
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.
In the early 2000s, the rise of the World Wide Web was supposed to fundamentally disrupt how companies recruit. It changed things a lot, but the basic tenets that have underpinned recruiting forever simply migrated online largely intact. Newspaper job adverts became job postings. Resumes stayed essentially the same format, just without the printing and posting.
The AI revolution is fundamentally different. This isn’t about adapting existing practices to a new medium. It demands we question everything.
In my recent interview with Jon Kestenbaum, he made a point that really made me think. Resumes exist because they’re designed for a process constrained by human capacity. A hiring manager can only review so much information, so we make candidates compress themselves into two-page summaries. But why would we limit a job application to a resume when AI can analyse vastly more data? Why not capture a much richer picture of who someone actually is and what they can do?
This is where things get genuinely difficult. Questioning assumptions that have always been there is something our brains actively resist. We’ve been looking at resumes for so long, we’ve forgotten to ask why they exist in the first place.
The companies willing to do that hard cognitive work, to think what has previously been unthinkable, will be the ones who win in this emerging AI era.
Foresight
Employee experience has become one of the hardest areas for leaders to plan with confidence. The pandemic rewrote expectations almost overnight, and just as organisations began to stabilise, AI arrived and shifted the ground again.
Designing experiences that engage people, support performance, and remain resilient in an unpredictable future now requires more than incremental change.
My guest on Episode 757 was Jacob Morgan, author of The Eight Laws of Employee Experience. Jacob joined the show to share insights from more than 100 CHRO interviews, exploring what has genuinely changed over the past five years.
We discussed proactive planning, empathetic excellence, the role of AI in amplifying humanity, and what leaders need to prioritise to build employee experiences that stand up to the next phase of disruption.
Influence
Influence in talent acquisition is not only about having a seat at the table. It is also about shaping the tools and systems that define how recruiting operates day to day. Too often, TA teams find themselves reacting to technology decisions rather than helping to design them, limiting both impact and adoption.
My guests on Episode 760 were Simon Bishop, Head of Talent Acquisition at SoftwareOne, and Ritu Mohanka, CEO at VONQ. We discussed how their partnership moved beyond a traditional vendor relationship into genuine co-creation.
The conversation explored how transparency, shared ownership, and real-world testing influenced product development, supported recruiter adoption, and helped guide TA through acquisition-driven change.
Talent
There is a widening gap between what organisations think candidates need and what candidates now expect. While many long-standing issues with career sites have finally been addressed, expectations have shifted again.
Candidates increasingly look for relevance, context, and interaction rather than static information and linear application journeys.
My guest on Episode 759 was Bas van de Haterd, who runs the industry’s most extensive continuous research programme on corporate career sites. Bas joined the show to share findings from his nineteenth year of research, highlighting the slow adoption of conversational AI and the growing importance of making career sites visible to AI tools.
We discussed what employers need to rethink if career sites are to remain credible in an AI-driven labour market.
Technology
AI has been discussed in talent acquisition for years, yet progress has remained uneven. Many organisations still apply AI tactically, focusing on efficiency while avoiding more profound questions about how technology reshapes work, decision-making, and value.
As I said at the start of this newsletter, the real opportunity lies not in adapting existing practices, but in questioning why those practices exist at all.
My guest on Episode 698 was Matt Burney, Senior Strategic Advisor at Indeed. While this episode was recorded early last year, it remains extremely relevant to where TA finds itself today.
We discussed why moving from automation anxiety to augmentation advantage is critical, why asking better questions matters more than faster answers, and how skills-based thinking, training, and awareness are essential if recruiters are to move beyond inherited constraints and into more genuinely strategic roles.
Follow & Listen
Recruiting Future Feast will be back next week.
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Many Thanks
Matt
Really like how you flip the usual “what can this tool do?” question into “what problem are we actually trying to solve, and for whom?”.
In talent and HR, it’s so tempting to chase features and benchmarks, but the harder, more useful questions are the ones you’re pointing to around value, trade‑offs, and what we’re prepared to change in the way we work.