Building a TA Function That Flexes With Demand

Job ads are down, yet employers are paying more per job than ever.Why?Johnny sits down with Bill Boorman, who has spent 44 years in and around recruiting and now writes about job boards as an analyst, to unpack his research into 17 publicly listed job boards and 47 staffing companies. They cover how job boards became recommendation engines, why staffing firms are turning into talent marketplaces, and what that means for how TA leaders spend their budgets in 2027.

How do you build a talent acquisition function that can go from five hires at a site to 60 in two months, then back again?Johnny is joined by Patrick Grant, Head of Talent Acquisition at Watlow, a 100-year-old St. Louis engineering and manufacturing company riding the semiconductor cycle. Patrick shares how he built global TA from scratch in two years, cut 15–20 agencies down to two preferred vendors, and is using text-first screening, referrals and early-career pipelines to flex with demand.Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/pgrant24/

How do you buy and implement AI in talent acquisition without making your problems worse?Johnny is joined by Eileen Kovalsky, a TA practitioner of almost 30 years who has worked in TA ops at companies including Mondelez and General Motors, worked on the vendor side at Paradox, and now consults independently.They cover why process must come before tech, defining your North Star, phasing rollouts, and why change management is the hardest part. Useful whether you’re buying TA tech or selling it.

HSBC hires 40,000 to 50,000 people a year. So how do you bring AI into that without losing what matters most? In this conversation from our recent SocialTalent Live webinar, Johnny sits down with Noel Brown, Global Head of Enterprise Talent at HSBC, to unpack their guiding principle: don’t automate trust. Noel shares how HSBC uses an AI interviewer to understand the career goals of its own workforce, why the “no” experience matters as much as the “yes”, and why every dollar spent on tech needs $3–4 more in change to land.

Johnny sits down with Nick Vitale, Head of Global Talent Acquisition and Mobile Strategy at Kenvue, the consumer health company spun out of Johnson & Johnson. Nick walks through standing up a global TA function from a near-blank sheet: staying lean on tech at day one, using RPO for flexibility, and fixing people and process before technology. He also covers building recruiter capacity for real talent advisory work, and why agentic AI needs intent, not just enthusiasm.

Most TA teams are using AI to cope with more volume. Fewer are asking where it belongs. This episode replays AI Native, Still Human, a conversation from our SocialTalent Live webinar in September. Johnny talks to Kyle, Director of Talent Acquisition at Grindr, and Mick, co-founder of Smart Jobs. Kyle explains how an AI chief of staff built by his own recruiters takes a role from kickoff to launch in five minutes. Mick brings a sales lens: not every candidate is equal, because of how they found you.

Most employer brand teams are small and stretched. Hannah King, Head of Employer Brand and Recruitment Operations at Straumann Group, joins Johnny to share what drives results without a big budget. They cover measuring impact beyond vanity metrics, why recycling content beats chasing new ideas, and how one recruiter with a phone turned employee stories into higher reach and engagement. A practical listen for anyone who needs to prove employer brand isn't fluff.Download Hannah King's Top Tips:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HKm845-2NJ652nO2UIExrLAhqT1t2bBh/view?usp=sharing

Most companies keep their high-potential lists and succession plans well away from recruiters. Merck opened both.Colleen Rush is Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt — around 11,000 hires a year across 60 countries. She joins Johnny to explain what changed when her team got access to that data, what recruiters now do with it, and the capacity, capability and internal agreement it took to get there.

Johnny sits down with Mark Smith, SVP of Global Talent Acquisition at Cargill, for a conversation unlike any other on the show. A year ago, Johnny watched Mark tell a room at RecFest about a fall from a ladder that left him with a traumatic brain injury, and how recovering from it reshaped the way he works. Mark shares the six lessons on attention, focus and notifications that came out of it, and why protecting your attention is a skill any leader can build.

https://www.socialtalent.com/resources/guides/dave-poling-modern-leadershipBefore 2020, a leader's job was mostly to drive performance and build culture. Dave Poling's view is that the lift has got a lot heavier since.Dave has spent 32 years inside Allegis Group and now leads a team of around 750 recruiters across the US and Canada as VP of Talent Delivery at TEKsystems. In this episode he makes a case that will sound soft until you hear the reasoning behind it: you cannot lead through this pace of change unless you are doing deliberate work on yourself — mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally.He talks about the burnout that started him meditating, the 120-day challenge that changed his routine, why modelling good behaviour turned out to be useless on its own, and how he made personal development a non-negotiable for his leaders without losing them.