We got into founder hiring mistakes, personal brand, recruiting as advisory work, AI tooling, layoffs, compensation resets, candidate experience, and the emotional reality of spending your career somewhere between business strategy and human decision making. And of course, we chopped it up on if recruiting is sales.

There are few folks in this industry I respect more than Nate. His reputation speaks for itself. Seriously. Ask anyone. Founders, hiring managers, candidates, internet fans. His personal brand and ability to build community is absolutely legendary. No one works harder on both sides of the hiring relationships than Nate. And I also straight up respect his hustle as a business owner.

Going out on your own as a recruiter isn’t for the faint of heart. But Nate has been able to successfully build a playbook that scales the way he likes to work with companies. On his terms.

Nate’s also been there for me over the last few years, supporting my professional and personal journey. So thank you for your friendship, Nate. You’re one of a kind.

Enjoy the conversation with Nate, it’s a longer one, but we had a ton to catch up on.

Connect with Nate: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nwylie/

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Timestamps

3:00 Building a personal brand in recruiting, staying independent, and why creativity matters more than people think

8:00 Founder hiring mistakes, candidate trust, and why transparency wins with top talent

16:00 AI hiring expectations, unrealistic job requirements, and the widening gap between what companies want and what exists

20:00 Layoffs, compensation resets, and the emotional reality of career pivots in today’s market

26:00 Recruiter burnout, layoffs in talent acquisition, and carrying the weight of hiring decisions

29:00 Why recruiting stays emotional after 15 years and how rejection impacts recruiters too

32:00 Using AI to improve stakeholder management, soften communication, and become a stronger advisor

38:00 Interview processes, candidate experience, and how founders unintentionally lose great people

43:00 Talent engineering, recruiting operations, and whether recruiters need to become systems builders

48:00 AI tools, hiring workflows, and the tension between sophisticated systems and simple recruiting fundamentals

52:00 The future of sourcing, AI-powered talent mapping, and what recruiters would actually pay for

1:20:00 Is recruiting sales? Nate unpacks the similarities, where the comparison breaks down, and why recruiting may be harder because the product can always walk away

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Shout out to our sponsor, Rooster.

Rooster is a native interview scheduling platform built inside Workday Recruiting that eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience. If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience, visit rooster.us to book a demo.

We also talk about startup hiring patterns, bias in talent mapping (a recent trope I’ve been on lately) fractional work (did stuff there, too), creator life (sup sup), online authenticity (one does not simply act authentic online), and why companies often wait too long to invest in people strategy (oops?).

Madison shares lessons from building an audience of more than 150K followers, writing publicly for over a decade, and navigating the realities of being a visible woman online. The conversation is ultimately about one thing: leadership starts with being human first. Something I’m all in on right now with AI dominating conversations and the constant hype cycle.

Connect with Madison: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bluehairedunicorn/

A few thoughts from the conversation:

Performance management should never be a surprise. Feedback works best as an ongoing conversation, not a twice-yearly event. You should know your top performers and they should know how you feel about their performance. Like all the time. No, the paycheck is not the thank you. Split off your merit increases while you’re at it. Okay here’s where I’m challenging my own thinking. I’ve long been a big believer in the Pareto Principle. (80% of value comes from 20% of your people). With Revenue Per Employee being the new cool top line metric, and arguably the only one that matters for HR teams before they’re eliminated, and diminishing headcount in tech companies, I’m actually curious if Pareto holds up in the future of work where everyone will be responsible for delivering value and there will be nowhere for under performers to hide. Most of HR projects around L&D and training are about getting under performers to acceptable anyways. Only time will tell on Pareto, but for now it’s a good reminder for HR teams to double down on engaging the 20% and letting go of the pipe dream of the remaining 80% getting anywhere close to their level of output.

Here’s an interesting part of the convo, startups often build people systems reactively. Waiting until things break creates trust gaps that are difficult to repair. But that’s the old model of startups. Where we’re headed is uncharted territory. There’s two camps here. Build early, or scale quickly and do HR right later. Let’s be real for a beat. HR has allowed PEOs to outsource the most business critical functions of traditional HR in favor of learning and development, engagement, and culture projects. These are often initiatives that cost the company time and money, that bring satisfaction and fulfillment to the HR but aren’t often very tangible, scalable, long lasting, with ROI that is very, very hard to prove, let alone repeat. We’re dealing with human beings, remember? Humans are unique, their output and performance is unique. HR can’t take credit for that. But they do. And love to tell you about it at conferences (Le sigh.) L&D and culture projects are often long term visions. But the average CHRO’s tenure is about 4 years. So that disconnect speaks for itself. In startups you probably don’t need HR early. In fact the future household tech companies will likely be 100 people. This is where Pareto Principle crumbles, because everyone will be incredible value creators operating in pi-shaped skillsets. There simply won’t be a need for L&D, because hiring will solve that problem (as it always has).

This is the part of the post where I tell you I’m not a monster. And I’m totally fine being wrong. In the conversation with Madison, we spoke about how the best leaders model vulnerability, create psychological safety, and recognize that people do not leave their lives at the door when they come to work. I can be totally wrong about my anti-L&D trope. I’m a sourcer. I’m fundamentally biased to want to go out and solve the problem of performance with the skillset I have developed for a decade. If there’s an HR rep who has receipts for their projects that led to higher RPE and got an under performer to cracked I’m all ears. No disrespect to my HR startup folks. You allow in house recruiting to be possible since they’re the one’s willing to pick up the phone and deliver the next great hire. What better accountability than loving to do that in these uncertain times?

All love,

Brando

Timestamps

3:00 Human capital, startup burnout, and why treating people transactionally fails over time
8:00 Leadership, vulnerability, and why managers need to humanize themselves first 12:00 Playfulness, performance metrics, and understanding the realities behind human performance
16:00 Rethinking performance management and why feedback should never be a surprise
20:00 Advocating for people while balancing business priorities
22:00 Startup scaling problems, reactive HR, and accidental bad management
26:00 Human motivation, identity outside of work, and what actually makes people successful
30:00 Founder mistakes, talent density, bias in hiring, and building better teams 34:00 AI, intuition, creator life, and building an audience through authenticity
39:00 Representation, empathy, online visibility, and Madison’s advice for creators

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Shout out to our sponsor, Rooster.

Rooster is a native interview scheduling platform built inside Workday Recruiting that eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience. If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience, visit rooster.us to book a demo.

LA has always had a sunny spot in my heart, so to roll up in the Hills to film
The Greenhouse Recruiting Roadshow was truly special.

Last year I quit my job to focus on Building the Talent Machine full time. And what’s been revealed through this process is how strong the human element in recruiting truly is.

For this series, I set out to talk to recruiters about the problems keeping them up at night. Things like AI, candidate fraud, identity verification, employer brand, sourcing, and more.

And the problems that recruiters are facing are moving faster than even where they were just a few months ago. A year ago candidate fraud was being discussed behind closed doors and hallway conversations at conferences. Now it’s front and center because identity verification has become so critical.

That’s why dedicating my energy to having these conversations with recruiting leaders on camera is more important now than ever. So that the industry better understands the strains that are facing recruiting processes and systems. And the cool part? How vendors are building for us, recruiters.

Digital transformation has always been part of the conversation in HR. Over the past decade as a practitioner, I’ve worked on several waves of innovation, from mobile-optimized ATS implementations and candidate texting, to one-way video interviewing and equal pay initiatives. I’ve also worked on the vendor side, for ethical AI behavioral science software, an employee compliance training and eLearning platform, and helped launch a tech-enabled exec search agency. I strongly believe that we’re entering into the Golden Age of recruiting. And while recruiters have been put through the wringer in the last few years, it’s the perseverance from those who are dedicated to the craft that inspires me.

Which is why I’m more energized than ever to get out into the real world to share these stories with you, because these recruiters are some of the most passionate people I’ve ever met and folks I’m privileged to call my friends.

So check out the latest episodes of The Greenhouse Recruiting Roadshow with some of LA’s best recruiting leaders as we talk about the problems that are keeping us up at night.

»Watch here

Featured Guests

Jeremy A. Lyons, Co-Founder @ RecOps Collective

Jessica Sims-Gousse, Talent Operations Manager

Nicole Cibella, SVP Talent & Engagement @ Lincoln Property Company

Tracy St.Dic, Global Head of Talent @ Zapier

Thank you Greenhouse for making this dream a reality.
See you at Open for Ops in NYC and SF!

We covered how metrics, such as reschedule rates and time to schedule, can reveal deeper organizational issues beyond tooling. And also touched on the limits of automation in candidate interactions, the role of recruiting operations as a discipline, and how incremental process improvements can influence hiring outcomes over time.

Rooster is positioned as an infrastructure layer that integrates with existing systems to automate scheduling logistics and surface data on process breakdowns. It eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience.

Follow Luke: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luke-switkowski/

Timestamps

00:00 Why scheduling is the linchpin of recruiting and where processes typically break

05:00 The real cost of scheduling complexity including reschedules and coordination overhead

10:00 Enterprise scheduling challenges and why complex hiring workflows need dedicated systems

15:00 Increasing process complexity from video interviews and added recruiting technology

20:00 Using scheduling data to uncover breakdowns and drive accountability in hiring teams

25:00 How automation shifts coordinator and recruiter roles and improves team efficiency

30:00 Hidden costs of manual scheduling and the downstream impact on hiring outcomes

35:00 Solving global scheduling challenges including time zones and candidate experience

40:00 Limits of AI in recruiting workflows and where automation falls short

45:00 Why fully automated scheduling breaks without context and introduces friction

50:00 The role of human judgment in complex hiring and candidate coordination

55:00 Balancing automation with flexibility across different interview types and teams

60:00 How scheduling impacts hiring velocity for high-priority and executive roles

65:00 Aligning recruiting processes with business outcomes through better systems

70:00 Future of recruiting operations and the role of infrastructure like scheduling systems

If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience visit rooster.us to book a demo.

Thanks for tuning in!

This series has been top of mind for me for a few years now, and there’s no better time to pack up and hit the road to talk about it all with my friends, new and old.

After spending 10 years recruiting and storytelling for public, private equity, and startup companies, with the last few years working exclusively in the HR tech industry, the mission is clear…to upskill and uplift the recruiting industry, one conversation at a time.

Season 1 where I travel from San Francisco to San Diego to Los Angeles is releasing now.

See you on the road✌️

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Huge thank you to my friends at Greenhouse for partnering on this series and always believing in my passion for recruiting.

Anyways, on with the notes.

Brian runs Rework Group, and is absolutely crushing it right now after taking the leap from W-2 land. When people ask who the best tech recruiter in the world is, people often say “Brian Fink”. He’s built incredible engineering organizations and has taught hundreds of recruiters how to source. He jumped on the mic to unpack what sourcing looks like right now and where recruiting is actually heading. We get into inbound versus outbound recruiting, how tooling is changing the function, and why most teams are over-indexing on systems instead of developing real recruiting skill. Brian brings a practitioner perspective shaped by years of hands-on sourcing, operator experience, and teaching the craft. He’s a legend. Don’t do yourself the disservice by ignoring Brian.

Here’s where Brian and I align…

1. Recruiting operates like sales, but with a more complex buyer and longer decision cycle.

2. Sourcing is evolving, not disappearing, and the edge comes from creativity and signal detection.

3. Most companies still underinvest in recruiting because attribution is weak, even though talent outcomes drive the business.

4. The teams that win are the ones who prioritize direct outreach, understand candidate motivation, and build real conviction instead of relying on inbound pipelines. And the only way to build conviction is through the confidence that comes from doing the work.

Brian’s also a phenomenal writer and motivational leader. You can follow him on Substack and FinkedIn. Thanks for being you Brian. You’re the best.

Timestamps

3:00 Mentorship, paying it forward, and respect across the hiring ecosystem
6:00 The state of sourcing and how tooling is reshaping the function
9:00 Inbound vs outbound and what actually qualifies as recruiting
12:00 Candidate fraud, identity verification, and risk in the funnel
15:00 Creative sourcing and why motivation matters more than background
18:00 Market shifts, layoffs, and changing candidate expectations
22:00 Funnel math, conversion rates, and recruiting as a sales motion
25:00 Attribution gaps and why recruiting is treated like a cost center
28:00 Talent density, analog recruiting, and competitive advantage
31:00 What great recruiters actually do across the full lifecycle
33:00 AI removing transactional work and raising the bar on human skill
35:00 Sourcing strategies, sleuthing, and finding signal in non-obvious places
38:00 GitHub, Medium, and alternative surfaces for identifying talent
40:00 Evaluating engineers through signals, not credentials
41:00 Outreach channels, sequencing, and founder-led messaging
43:00 Multi-channel engagement, tooling maturity, and what’s coming next

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Shout out to our sponsor, Rooster.

Rooster is a native interview scheduling platform built inside Workday Recruiting that eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience.If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience, visit rooster.us to book a demo.

He represents a group of recruiting operators who helped shape modern recruiting through experimentation, curiosity, and knowledge sharing. Steve is also a friend and mentor to many. He truly embodies, the “Uncle Steve” persona which many of us lovingly call him. The first time I ever spoke with Steve, he left the conversation with a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that brought me to tears. Steve has always advocated for equity and inclusion in hiring, while being one of the frontier voices for how technology advancements impacts marginalized groups. And because Steve is truly one of the most memorable people I’ve ever met, he followed that up by putting me in a headlock the first time we met in person. (He contains multitudes. And we love him for it.)

I see Steve probably five or so times a year at events, and speak with him weekly, so it’s always a treat to hit record and have a few pointed questions for the maestro. I grew up in recruiting learning from people like Steve, and his famous blog which tech recruiters of a certain generation worshipped. Believe it or not, Steve influenced the industry long before this concept of “influencers". Because at the end of the day, what matters is credibility from doing the work. And we spoke about what it takes to be credible with hiring managers and candidates, how recruiters actually learn a domain, and why most of the core challenges in recruiting have not changed. And of course, we talked about AI sourcing tech and talent engineering.

If you need a few takeaways, know this:

Recruiting requires real expertise.
You have to understand the role, the business, and performance expectations at a deep level to be effective. Oh yeah, and understand human behavior.

Most tools are just improving access to data and workflow. You’ll have to listen to the show to find out what Steve and I think of all these AI sourcing tools and “talent engineering”. But here’s the Tl;dr on AI sourcing…If a recruiting tech founder hasn’t done the work themself, how could they possibly build a tool for recruiters?

Counterpoint: Can these young founders who’ve never had a job learn through doing, much like recruiters themselves? I’ll let you decide.

Performance in recruiting comes down to behavior.
Curiosity, humility, and direct interaction with people separates strong recruiters from average ones. The work still centers on understanding humans and making informed decisions, not relying on automation.

Hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

Follow Steve here.

Timestamps
05:00 - Knowledge sharing and mentorship in recruiting
07:00 - Evaluating new tools and defining real problems
08:30 - Why recruiting is harder than it looks
10:00 - Ego, failure, and learning through experience
11:00 - Becoming credible with hiring managers
12:00 - Founders building recruiting tools without experience
15:00 - AI as a shift but not a replacement for humans
19:00 - Messaging and getting candidate responses
22:00 - Compassion and understanding human behavior
24:00 - Pushing back on hiring managers and defining real requirements
26:00 - Talent density, flawed sourcing assumptions, and lack of performance data
27:00 - Getting out from behind the screen and meeting candidates in person
29:00 - Going above and beyond to close candidates
30:00 - Conference tactics and how to approach real conversations
33:00 - Patience, humility, and long-term development
34:00 - Giving back, mentorship, and closing the loop with candidates and clients

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Shout out to our sponsor, Rooster.

Rooster is a native interview scheduling platform built inside Workday Recruiting that eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience.If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience, visit rooster.us to book a demo.

Follow and subscribe to her newsletter here.

Timestamps

3:00 - Why Elena is focused on building better talent functions
5:00 - Why hiring manager partnership is the foundation of recruiting
7:00 - The problem with the term hiring manager
10:00 - Using team design before kickoff meetings
13:00 - Founder led hiring vs structured hiring at scale
15:00 - What founders want from talent leaders early on
18:00 - The debate around quality of hire
22:00 - Who should own accountability for hiring outcomes
26:00 - Time in stage, speed, and useful recruiting metrics
31:00 - AI hype, 10x talent expectations, and staying grounded

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Shout out to our sponsor, Rooster.

Rooster is a native interview scheduling platform built inside Workday Recruiting that eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience.If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience, visit rooster.us to book a demo.

I was stoked to talk with Johannes about AI recruiting and HR to ask him about how he optimizes implementations, and how leaders should be thinking about change management, data privacy, and how we preserve humanity in the world of work.
We also got into what the future looks like for management, and if organizations are ready for what’s coming.

Even cooler is that I just got back from UNLEASH in Las Vegas where I turned the corner in the expo hall and nearly bumped into Johannes, quite literally. Neither of us knew each other were going, and it brought to life a phrase I’ve repeated many times on stage and on the show…recruiting has taught me that the world is a lot smaller than we think. Johannes, you’re the man!

Subscribe to FullStack HR and follow Johannes on LinkedIn.

Timestamps

3:00 Building AI agents in HR and keeping up with the pace of change
5:00 Why most AI implementations fail inside organizations
7:00 The reality of employees using personal LLMs vs company-approved tools
9:00 GDPR, data security, and why communication matters more than policy
11:00 The risks of humanizing AI and naming agents
13:00 Accountability problems when AI acts like an employee
15:00 The future of HR roles and why tech fluency is becoming mandatory
17:00 Could AI replace managers or make them better?
19:00 What people really think about AI managers vs human managers
23:00 Hiring philosophy and the idea that better hiring reduces HR overhead
25:00 Using AI to augment leadership instead of replacing it
29:00 What great managers actually do well in an AI world
31:00 AI adoption differences between the US and Europe
34:00 Job market shifts, work culture, and changing expectations
37:00 Lessons from building teams and the importance of curiosity
39:00 Why human connection matters more as technology advances
41:00 The origin and growth of the Full Stack HR newsletter

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Shout out to our sponsor, Rooster.

Rooster is a native interview scheduling platform built inside Workday Recruiting that eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience.If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience, visit rooster.us to book a demo.

Tyler is now transitioning into a Talent Engineer role and building recruiting tools full time. His perspective sits at the intersection of recruiting operations, automation, and the evolving relationship between recruiters and technology.

He and I caught up to talk about:

• What recruiting actually looks like across startups and large tech companies

• Why agency recruiting creates strong operational instincts

• And the emerging role of the Talent Engineer

I appreciate Tyler’s perspective on how recruiters can evolve into more technical problem solvers, while maintaining the human connection that ultimately drives hiring decisions. Thanks for talking the time to sit down and talk Recruiting, Tyler, rooting for you!

Connect with Tyler: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-knell/

Timestamps

3:00 Tyler’s journey entering recruiting, and why speaking publicly about the industry matters
5:00 Startup vs. big tech recruiting and breaking the myth that recruiters cannot operate in both environments
10:00 Boomeranging back to Okta and the importance of strong recruiting leadership and talent density
12:00 Nonprofit experience, empathy in recruiting, and why humility shapes better hiring outcomes
14:00 The origin of HireScribe and why Tyler started building tools for recruiters
18:00 Offline AI tools, privacy concerns, and why recruiters should own their data
20:00 Lessons from agency recruiting including urgency, discipline, and time management
22:00 Operational differences between startup recruiting and large scale hiring organizations
23:00 Defining the talent engineer mindset and solving hiring problems through systems thinking
24:00 Why human connection will remain central to hiring even as automation increases
27:00 AI capturing organizational decision making and the next layer of recruiting data
29:00 How AI may challenge traditional ideas of what makes a good hire
32:00 Proof of work hiring models and the potential shift away from resumes and job descriptions
35:00 Entrepreneurship, portfolio careers, and the decentralization of work
37:00 The limits of labor market data and why practitioners must interpret hiring trends carefully
40:00 Recruiters as arbiters of truth aligning hiring teams around data and judgment

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Shout out to our sponsor, Rooster.

Rooster is a native interview scheduling platform built inside Workday Recruiting that eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience.If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience, visit rooster.us to book a demo.

We talked about what it actually takes to build a talent machine inside a venture studio model, how to design structured and competency based hiring processes without over-engineering them, and why growth without intention creates fragile organizations. Maggie also shared her perspective on recruiter layoffs, the shift toward measured hiring, the role of personal brand in building long term leverage, and her philosophy of the reverse sell where recruiters focus on surfacing risks rather than overselling opportunities.

Connect with Maggie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggie-bedro/

Timestamps

2:17 From venture studio to Bedrock Talent building zero ramp recruiting for early stage founders

5:03 Scaling Redesign Health from 3 startups to 60 plus and building the talent function from scratch

6:18 Hiring the right recruiters first talent density culture and structured competency based process

11:01 The shift in health tech hiring from tech enabled services to AI native engineering teams

13:04 What building a talent machine actually looks like experimentation hustle and constant iteration

14:33 Interview fatigue take homes and how to design a process that balances rigor with candidate experience

19:46 Personal brand as career insurance why inbounds and zero expectation networking compound over time

23:09 Recruiter layoffs and the lesson growth without intention is fragile

34:51 Recruiting is not sales the reverse sell and why great recruiters highlight the risks first

42:01 AI sourcing tools versus real world relationships why touching grass still wins in 2026

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Shout out to our sponsor, Rooster.

Rooster is a native interview scheduling platform built inside Workday Recruiting that eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience.If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience, visit rooster.us to book a demo.

If you’re in recruiting and care about:
• Speed that actually improves
• Data you can defend in exec meetings
• Recruiter capacity that isn’t duct-taped together
• Trust from leadership

I’d love to have you join a webinar I’m moderating on March 5th at 12 p.m. ET

I’m sitting down with Luke Switkowski, Katie Wagner, and Jeremy A. Lyons for a live conversation on RecOps.
Register here.

We talked about demystifying cleared recruiting, building candidate trust through personal brand, and the advice for why recruiters shouldn’t let applicants take themselves out of the game. Stephanie shared what it looks like to manage hundreds of applicants in hours, how ATS knockout questions really work, and why rejection is rarely personal. We also covered scheduling engineers who work inside SCIF environments, the growing risks of candidate fraud and bad actors, and how AI can help recruiters focus on fewer, higher quality conversations rooted in. respect. At the center of it all was her belief that recruiting is human work, and that even in classified spaces, empathy, clarity, and integrity still win.

Thanks for coming on the show, Stephanie! Connect with Stephanie here.

Timestamps

00:00 A recruiter changed my life

02:30 What cleared recruiting actually means

04:50 Changing lives through recruiting

05:35 Why cleared hiring is so opaque

07:50 Building a creator brand in a restricted space

11:00 Candidate trust and personal reputation

14:00 Recruiting as hospitality and marketing

16:00 AI, signal, and fewer better conversations

19:15 Applicants vs candidates and high volume roles

20:15 200 applicants in 90 minutes and ATS myths

22:15 Bringing humanity to automated rejections

24:10 Do not take yourself out of the game

27:00 15 rejections before Amazon

29:00 Your social footprint matters

30:35 Scheduling cleared engineers in SCIF environments

32:35 Candidate fraud and security threats

34:40 Keep going one step at a time

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Shout out to our sponsor, Rooster.

Rooster is a native interview scheduling platform built inside Workday Recruiting that eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience.If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience, visit rooster.us to book a demo.

If you’re in recruiting and care about:
• Speed that actually improves
• Data you can defend in exec meetings
• Recruiter capacity that isn’t duct-taped together
• Trust from leadership

I’d love to have you join a webinar I’m moderating on March 5th at 12 p.m. ET

I’m sitting down with Luke Switkowski, Katie Wagner, and Jeremy A. Lyons for a live conversation on RecOps.
Register here.

Daniella came on the show to talk about what it really means to raise the bar while hiring 50, 100, or 200 people at a time, why speed without rigor compounds mediocrity, and how to audit and rebuild recruiting foundations inside scaling companies. Daniella shared her approach to documentation, ATS hygiene, scorecards, and retrospective analysis, along with her philosophy on “strong yes” versus “soft yes” feedback, hiring tradeoffs across time, quality, and cost, and whether personality assessments have a place in modern hiring. The conversation centered on building a recruiting machine that balances data and judgment while keeping the human element intact.

Thanks for coming on the show, Daniella! You can connect with her here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniellabodansky/

Timestamps

00:00 Setting the tone and why recruiting is still a craft

03:00 From clinical research to in house startup recruiting

07:00 What to assess first when joining a scaling company

09:00 Speed versus rigor and why the bar has to go up

13:00 Hiring operators who can handle ambiguity and build from first principles

15:00 Quality of hire and the 30 and 90 day rehire test

19:00 Building an operations recruiting hub with documentation and dashboards

22:00 What makes a strong hiring manager partnership

26:00 Time, quality, and cost as hiring tradeoffs

29:00 Strong yes versus soft yes and eliminating vague feedback

31:00 Personality assessments, bias, and human judgment in hiring

37:00 Scaling recruiting infrastructure from early stage to global growth

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Shout out to our sponsor, Rooster.

Rooster is a native interview scheduling platform built inside Workday Recruiting that eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience.If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience, visit rooster.us to book a demo.

If you’re in recruiting and care about:
• Speed that actually improves
• Data you can defend in exec meetings
• Recruiter capacity that isn’t duct-taped together
• Trust from leadership

I’d love to have you join a webinar I’m moderating on March 5th at 12 p.m. ET

I’m sitting down with Luke Switkowski, Katie Wagner, and Jeremy A. Lyons for a live conversation on RecOps.

Register here.

Brooke and I cover diagnosing broken hiring systems, eliminating unnecessary agency spend, injecting smart friction into the funnel, and why clarity beats complexity in modern recruiting. Brooke shares lessons from scaling high-volume teams, rebuilding employer brand after leadership turnover, and the difference between internal TA and fractional impact.
It feels like Brooke is one of those friends from the internet who has been a positive supporter in the comments, and quick to engage. Whether on LinkedIn, in the community at events, or industry webinar chats. So if you don’t already follow Brooke, be sure to: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brookewheeler/

Timestamps:

00:00 Meet Brooke Wheeler: From agency roots to VP of TA to fractional advisor

02:00 The Atlanta recruiter community, RecFest, and why showing up still matters

05:00 Conferences as career leverage: Investing in yourself in a low-budget function

08:15 Internal TA vs. Fractional TA: Rapid diagnosis, trust-building, and seeing the full system

11:00 The rise of fractional recruiting and why agency experience is a superpower

12:30 The exploding ATS and HR tech landscape: More tools, more noise, more opportunity

15:30 Eliminating agency spend without burning bridges: Containing chaos and building partnerships

18:30 Why recruiting should have a bigger seat at the executive table

20:15 Diagnosing a “hot mess” hiring process: Start with structure, remove bottlenecks

23:00 One-size-fits-all hiring is broken: Speed, touch, and process must flex by role

25:00 Do candidates really hate interview rounds? Communication vs. round count

26:30 AI interviews, one-way video, and candidate sentiment in 2026

27:45 Behavioral vs. skills-based hiring: What actually predicts performance?

30:00 High-volume hiring done right: Deadlines, clarity, and disciplined execution

32:00 – Injecting friction back into the funnel in the age of AI applications

34:00 Radical clarity in job descriptions: Stop hiding the real job

35:45 Rebuilding employer brand after layoffs and leadership turnover

38:15 RecOps, AI adoption, and the overwhelm of modern recruiting tech

39:45 Who Brooke helps best and how to work with Restoration Talent Solutions

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Shout out to our sponsor, Rooster.

Rooster is a native interview scheduling platform built inside Workday Recruiting that eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience.If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience, visit rooster.us to book a demo.

I sat down with Martel Howard to talk about sourcing the way it actually shows up in the work and some of the latest tooling. Martel is a technical sourcing specialist who thinks about profiles in the sense of character arcs which is pretty cool interpretation of keyword search.

We got into:

• Why curiosity is still the most valuable skill in sourcing

• Why it is not enough to read text on a resume

• How some of the best hires come from reading the gray.

He shared how:

• Building candidate personas creates institutional memory so teams are not starting from zero on every req

• How sourcing done well can dramatically improve pass through rates at the top of funnel.

We also spent time on Boolean, AI tools, and what changes as sourcing becomes more about talent intelligence.

Martel and I agree that AI is helpful, but only if you understand the foundations first. We talked about A/B testing search strategies, pulling silver medalists from the ATS, writing outreach that actually gets replies, and why sourcing is shifting toward a more strategic advisory role. The through line was simple. Data is easy to share, insight is harder to apply, and the real value of a sourcer is knowing how to use that insight to evolve the search.

And since “sourcer” remains undefined by spellcheck, here’s a reminder to sign the petition to get it added to the dictionary.

Timestamps

2:00 Martel’s background and why he gravitated toward technical sourcing
4:00 Rejection, resilience, and why recruiting is supposed to be hard
5:00 Building candidate personas and institutional sourcing memory
7:00 How Martel defines the sourcer ↔ recruiter handoff
9:00 What roles are getting the most traction right now
9:45 Why Boolean is still the foundation of great sourcing
12:00 Why Martel prefers outbound sourcing vs full-cycle recruiting
13:50 Curiosity as the most valuable sourcing skill
14:30 Reading resumes as character arcs and finding signal in the gray
17:00 A-B testing tools, Booleans, and search strategies
18:00 Martel’s hardest search and how an old JD changed everything
23:00 The future of sourcing as talent intelligence and strategic advisory

Shout out to our sponsor, Rooster.
Rooster is a native interview scheduling platform built inside Workday Recruiting that eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience.

If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience, visit rooster.us to book a demo.

In this conversation, Chris and I dig into what it actually means to be a sourcer in 2026. Not the “junior recruiter” version. The career sourcer who lives in the data, builds pipelines from zero to one, and earns a seat at the table by consistently delivering qualified submissions. And I live for this.

We spoke about man versus machine, why Boolean and X-ray search still matter, how to A/B test sourcing tools and outreach, and why response rate and pass-through rate are more meaningful than raw activity metrics. Chris also shares how community, free learning, and investing in yourself have shaped his career, plus what pulled him into advising Lex Duo and helping build tools for recruiters from folks who are doing the work.

If you care about precision sourcing, thoughtful outreach, and building pipelines that actually convert, it’d mean the world if you gave it a watch and shared with a recruiter friend.

Thanks so much for coming on the show, Chris. You’re a bright spot in the industry!

Connect with Chris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-carver94/

Show Notes

00:00 – Meet Chris “Aquaman” Carver and what he’s working on today
02:30 – What Chris sources at BECU (software, data, AI, and tech roles)
03:45 – What it means to be a sourcer in 2026
04:55 – Why sourcers are not “junior recruiters”
06:15 – Where the handoff happens between sourcer and recruiter
08:10 – Building pipelines in two weeks and earning a seat at the table
09:10 – The metrics that actually matter: submissions and pass-through rate
10:00 – Finding candidates who don’t have strong digital profiles
11:05 – Tools Chris trusts and why SeekOut, HireEZ, PIN, and Lex Duo stand out
12:10 – AI for research vs. humans for conversion
12:58 – Why A/B testing sourcing tools is non-negotiable
14:20 – Chris’s outreach sequencing and radical transparency in first messages
15:50 – How X-ray search has changed and why it’s still critical
18:05 – Giving back to the sourcing community through free webinars
21:05 – How reselling sneakers prepared Chris for sourcing
22:00 – Why some recruiters are intimidated by sourcing and how to get past it
25:00 – The future of AI sourcing is really about email deliverability
27:30 – What Chris reports up to leadership today
33:15 – Advice for recruiters who want to specialize in sourcing
35:10 – How Chris got involved with Lex Duo and Prospect Pro
38:30 – The “sourcer should be in the dictionary” petition
Sign here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScw8A0zAhUqKtSy_Z8m4R9zFSanINxvPolbNo-CbrIRXIRNlA/viewform?usp=header
38:40 – How to connect with Chris and get involved in his webinars

Shout out to our sponsor, Rooster.
Rooster is a native interview scheduling platform built inside Workday Recruiting that eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience.

If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience, visit rooster.us to book a demo.

Michael leads Global TA Ops and Sourcing at US Renal Care, where hiring outcomes are inseparable from retention, onboarding, and day-one readiness. This work is high-volume, high-stakes hiring in healthcare, where burnout is real, turnover is expensive, and process decisions show up fast in patient care and business continuity.

I’ve followed Michael’s writing through his Talent Transformer blog for a while, and he’s been someone I’ve wanted on the show because he doesn’t talk about RecOps like a tooling problem. He talks about it like an operating system. He’s led through mergers, unified fractured processes, worked with executives who need answers and spent years translating recruiting data into something leaders actually understand. This conversation went deep, fast.

Throughout the episode, we spend a lot of time on retention, and why most teams treat it as an HR problem when it’s actually a recruiting design problem that starts before day one. Michael breaks down why the first 45 days matter more than most TA metrics, how onboarding is one of the most underutilized levers in RecOps, and why explaining the why to hiring managers is the real test of operational maturity.

We also get into the parts of recruiting operations that don’t get enough airtime, like:

• Why RecOps needs to own the experience, not just the process

• Why stakeholder impact should come before system changes

• Why recruiters should stay connected through the first paycheck and beyond

• Why retention data tells a better story than time to fill

• Why earning a seat at the table starts with learning the business, not buying more tools

Michael also shares how he’s using AI practically, not to replace people, but to build dashboards, scorecards, and internal tools that help RecOps leaders move faster and speak the language of finance, operations, and leadership.

If you care about post-hire outcomes, real retention, and what RecOps should actually own in 2026, this episode is worth your time.

Thanks for coming on the show, Michael. This one hit exactly where the industry needs to be looking. See you in San Diego at TA Week!

Connect with him here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dallasmichaelgoldberg/

Timestamps
00:00 Why retention is the real recruiting metric
02:00 Michael’s background and operating in high-turnover environments
04:30 Unifying processes after acquisitions without breaking trust
06:45 Explaining the why to hiring managers
08:30 Onboarding as a retention lever
10:15 The first 45 days and why they matter
12:30 What recruiters should own post-hire
14:45 Checking in through the first paycheck
17:00 RecOps, data, and telling the right story to leadership
19:00 Building dashboards without waiting on engineering
21:00 AI as a force multiplier for RecOps
23:30 Learning the business to earn a seat at the table
26:00 Why empathy and operations have to coexist
28:30 What great RecOps leaders do differently in 2026

Shout out to our sponsor, Rooster.
Rooster is a native interview scheduling platform built inside Workday Recruiting that eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience.

If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience, visit rooster.us to book a demo.

Planning your 2026 recruiting events?
TalentSphere Summit is worth checking out, especially if the usual conference circuit isn’t doing it for you anymore.

Hosted by Talent Collective, it’s a two-day, in-person working summit designed around how recruiting actually operates today.
About AI in recruiting, talent intelligence, candidate fraud, and the systems teams are trying to make work in practice.

What I like:

Less stage content, more practitioner-led workshops, playbooks, and training sessions
Solution sessions and customer stories without glossy demos
Space to connect, reflect, and recharge with your TA homies

It’s structured more like a retreat than a traditional industry event, which honestly feels overdue.

Savannah, GA | Feb 9–11, 2026

Vibe Out → Use my code BJEFFS for $200 off.

https://talentcollective.zohobackstage.com/TalentSphereSummit#/

Erin is currently leading talent at Rox, an agentic CRM backed by Sequoia, GV, and General Catalyst, where he’s building hiring alongside product and engineering teams that are moving fast and making real tradeoffs. Before that, he worked directly with startup executives as a principal, stepping into moments where hiring wasn’t theoretical. It was mission-critical.

I’ve been wanting to have Erin on the show since we met on the internet over the summer. He’s been on every side of the table. He’s scaled recruiting firms and built proprietary platforms. He’s owned people tech and internal mobility at Yahoo, where systems, compliance, and scale actually matter. He’s recruited through hypergrowth, acquisitions, layoffs, and resets. And he’s done the work himself, not just designed it. Plus his name comes up in circles I’ve been running with, so it was about time. And for me honestly this conversation blew my expectations out of the water. You’ll see why at the end.

Throughout the episode we talk about why most recruiting teams still aren’t using AI in any meaningful way years into the hype cycle, and why that’s not a failure of recruiters but a signal that the problems haven’t been framed correctly. Erin breaks down the difference between sourcing and recruiting, and why understanding the business is still the most under-leveraged skill in the function. We get into why AI doesn’t replace recruiters so much as it compresses headcount, and why confusing those two ideas has created a lot of unnecessary fear in the market.

We also get into the parts of recruiting that don’t show up in dashboards, like:

• Why being in standups with hiring teams matters.

• Why trust sits with recruiters more than almost any other role.

• Why symmetry of information is the real unlock in hiring.

• Why video outreach works not because it’s novel, but because it restores context and humanity.

• And why so many teams are still solving the same problems they were solving a decade ago, just with shinier tools.

If you care about craft, signal, and outcomes in recruiting right now, give it a listen and send this to a recruiter friend.

If you’ve ever felt skeptical of the AI hype, frustrated by broken ops, or convinced that recruiting is more art than automation, there’s a lot to learn from how Erin thinks about the work. And I agree on a ton of it.

Thanks for coming on the show, Erin. This is truly one of those fast friendships. You’re the man.

Connect with him here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/techmatchmaker/

(Hah! I just saw the custom LinkedIn url “Tech Match Maker” well played, dude.)

Timestamps
00:00 Why the AI replacement question keeps missing the point in recruiting
02:00 Erin’s background and why she’s skeptical of recruiting hype cycles
04:45 Where innovation in recruiting actually starts and why pain, not tools, drives change
06:15 Why most recruiting teams still aren’t using AI two years in
07:25 Does AI replace recruiters or just reduce headcount
08:40 The danger of personifying AI and why “AI agents” miss the mark
10:30 Recruiter identity, value, and the difference between amplifying work and replacing people
11:35 Sourcing vs recruiting and why understanding the business is the real unlock
13:00 Why recruiters need to be in standups, not stuck downstream of decisions
14:45 Where recruiters actually develop craft: reps, pressure, and execution
16:30 Learning the business and becoming a true partner to hiring managers
18:00 Why great recruiters focus on symmetry of information, not volume
18:45 Using simple tools like video outreach to create real signal and better responses
20:10 What candidates actually want from recruiters right now
21:45 Why making candidates feel special still matters more than automation
23:00 How fast, decisive hiring beats dragged-out processes
24:30 Recruiting trust vs HR trust and why recruiters sit closer to the truth
26:00 Why recruiting is undervalued inside most org charts
27:30 How layoffs created more experienced, battle-tested recruiters
29:00 Recruiters as internal consultants, not resume servers
31:00 Broken recruiting business models and the flattening of service quality
33:00 A vision for recruiter-to-recruiter collaboration over competition
35:00 Why the future of recruiting is simpler, more human, and less hype

Shout out to our sponsor, Rooster.

Rooster is a native interview scheduling platform built inside Workday Recruiting that eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience.

If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience, visit rooster.us to book a demo.

Planning your 2026 recruiting events?

TalentSphere Summit is worth checking out, especially if the usual conference circuit isn’t doing it for you anymore.

Hosted by Talent Collective, it’s a two-day, in-person working summit designed around how recruiting actually operates today.

about AI in recruiting, talent intelligence, candidate fraud, and the systems teams are trying to make work in practice.

What I like:

• Less stage content, more practitioner-led workshops, playbooks, and training sessions

• Solution sessions, customer success stories, without glossy demos

• Space to connect, reflect, and recharge with your TA homies

It’s structured more like a retreat than a traditional industry event, which honestly feels overdue.

Savannah, GA | Feb 9–11, 2026

Vibe Out → Use my code BJEFFS for $200 off.

https://talentcollective.zohobackstage.com/TalentSphereSummit#/

Erin is currently leading talent at Rox, an agentic CRM backed by Sequoia, GV, and General Catalyst, where he’s building hiring alongside product and engineering teams that are moving fast and making real tradeoffs. Before that, he worked directly with startup executives as a principal, stepping into moments where hiring wasn’t theoretical. It was mission-critical.

I’ve been wanting to have Erin on the show since we met on the internet over the summer. He’s been on every side of the table. He’s scaled recruiting firms and built proprietary platforms. He’s owned people tech and internal mobility at Yahoo, where systems, compliance, and scale actually matter. He’s recruited through hypergrowth, acquisitions, layoffs, and resets. And he’s done the work himself, not just designed it. Plus his name comes up in circles I’ve been running with, so it was about time. And for me honestly this conversation blew my expectations out of the water. You’ll see why at the end.

Throughout the episode we talk about why most recruiting teams still aren’t using AI in any meaningful way years into the hype cycle, and why that’s not a failure of recruiters but a signal that the problems haven’t been framed correctly. Erin breaks down the difference between sourcing and recruiting, and why understanding the business is still the most under-leveraged skill in the function. We get into why AI doesn’t replace recruiters so much as it compresses headcount, and why confusing those two ideas has created a lot of unnecessary fear in the market.

We also get into the parts of recruiting that don’t show up in dashboards, like:

• Why being in standups with hiring teams matters.

• Why trust sits with recruiters more than almost any other role.

• Why symmetry of information is the real unlock in hiring.

• Why video outreach works not because it’s novel, but because it restores context and humanity.

• And why so many teams are still solving the same problems they were solving a decade ago, just with shinier tools.

If you care about craft, signal, and outcomes in recruiting right now, give it a listen and send this to a recruiter friend.

If you’ve ever felt skeptical of the AI hype, frustrated by broken ops, or convinced that recruiting is more art than automation, there’s a lot to learn from how Erin thinks about the work. And I agree on a ton of it.

Thanks for coming on the show, Erin. This is truly one of those fast friendships. You’re the man.

Connect with him here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/techmatchmaker/

(Hah! I just saw the custom LinkedIn url “Tech Match Maker” well played, dude.)

Timestamps
00:00 Why the AI replacement question keeps missing the point in recruiting
02:00 Erin’s background and why she’s skeptical of recruiting hype cycles
04:45 Where innovation in recruiting actually starts and why pain, not tools, drives change
06:15 Why most recruiting teams still aren’t using AI two years in
07:25 Does AI replace recruiters or just reduce headcount
08:40 The danger of personifying AI and why “AI agents” miss the mark
10:30 Recruiter identity, value, and the difference between amplifying work and replacing people
11:35 Sourcing vs recruiting and why understanding the business is the real unlock
13:00 Why recruiters need to be in standups, not stuck downstream of decisions
14:45 Where recruiters actually develop craft: reps, pressure, and execution
16:30 Learning the business and becoming a true partner to hiring managers
18:00 Why great recruiters focus on symmetry of information, not volume
18:45 Using simple tools like video outreach to create real signal and better responses
20:10 What candidates actually want from recruiters right now
21:45 Why making candidates feel special still matters more than automation
23:00 How fast, decisive hiring beats dragged-out processes
24:30 Recruiting trust vs HR trust and why recruiters sit closer to the truth
26:00 Why recruiting is undervalued inside most org charts
27:30 How layoffs created more experienced, battle-tested recruiters
29:00 Recruiters as internal consultants, not resume servers
31:00 Broken recruiting business models and the flattening of service quality
33:00 A vision for recruiter-to-recruiter collaboration over competition
35:00 Why the future of recruiting is simpler, more human, and less hype

Shout out to our sponsor, Rooster.

Rooster is a native interview scheduling platform built inside Workday Recruiting that eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience.

If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience, visit rooster.us to book a demo.

Planning your 2026 recruiting events?

TalentSphere Summit is worth checking out, especially if the usual conference circuit isn’t doing it for you anymore.

Hosted by Talent Collective, it’s a two-day, in-person working summit designed around how recruiting actually operates today.

about AI in recruiting, talent intelligence, candidate fraud, and the systems teams are trying to make work in practice.

What I like:

• Less stage content, more practitioner-led workshops, playbooks, and training sessions

• Solution sessions, customer success stories, without glossy demos

• Space to connect, reflect, and recharge with your TA homies

It’s structured more like a retreat than a traditional industry event, which honestly feels overdue.

Savannah, GA | Feb 9–11, 2026

Vibe Out → Use my code BJEFFS for $200 off.

https://talentcollective.zohobackstage.com/TalentSphereSummit#/