The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast

Sourcing: Dead or Alive? Reviewing SOSU 2026 — Past, Present and Future of Sourcing It's the question that refuses to go away: with AI now able to find, engage and even screen candidates at scale, is sourcing still a profession — or just a feature of your ATS? Every year, the Sourcing Summit (SOSU) brings together the sharpest minds in the field to interrogate exactly that. In this special episode of Brainfood Live on Air, Hung Lee and our panel take stock of SOSU 2026, reflecting on how far sourcing has come, where it stands today, and whether the role as we know it survives the next wave of AI. Is this a renaissance moment for sourcers — or a farewell tour? Key Themes We'll Cover: The SOSU 2026 Takeaways – The big themes, debates and moments from this year's Sourcing Summit From Phonebooks to Prompts – Tracing the evolution of sourcing from Boolean strings and X-ray searches to conversational AI Is Sourcing Really Dying? – Separating hype from reality: what automation has actually replaced, and what it hasn't The New Sourcer Skillset – Data literacy, AI orchestration, market mapping and the human craft that machines can't replicate AI as Co-Pilot, Not Replacement – How the best sourcers are using AI to amplify their reach, speed and insight The Talent Intelligence Pivot – Why more sourcing teams are evolving into strategic market intelligence functions Engagement Is the Differentiator – When everyone has access to the same tools and databases, outreach quality becomes the moat What Happens to Junior Sourcers? – Rethinking career entry points and training pipelines when the traditional apprenticeship tasks are automated The Next Decade of Sourcing – Predictions from the SOSU floor on where the profession goes from here Whether you're a battle-hardened sourcing veteran, a TA leader rethinking your team structure, or a newcomer wondering if there's a future in this craft, this episode will give you an unfiltered view of the state of play. Expect strong opinions, healthy disagreement, and zero fluff. We're on Friday 16th October, 2pm BST. Follow the channel here (recommended) and register for the show to get your questions answered live by the panel. See you on air! Ep413 is supported by our friends at Metaview Metaview is the Agentic Recruiting Platform built for radically efficient hiring, end to end. Source, engage, and hire better with agents that truly get your brief. Metaviews AI Agents finds candidates, reviews inbound applications, automatically captures notes, constantly learns and spots talent opportunities, whilst your recruiters spend time doing work which humans can only do - build relationships with candidates and hiring managers. Need to uplevel your hiring function? Book a demo or start for free here.

Employer Branding in the Era of AI Generated Career Sites - Who Owns the Story? The career site is the front door to your employer brand — and until recently, building or even tweaking it meant months of agency briefs, dev tickets, and design sign-offs. Not anymore. A new wave of AI-powered platforms now lets recruiters and TA teams build entire career sites simply by typing what they want in plain language. "Create a landing page for our engineering roles in Berlin, add employee testimonials, and hook it up to our ATS" — and it just happens. In this episode of Brainfood Live on Air, Hung Lee and our panel of experts explore what natural language prompting means for the way employers attract, engage and convert talent — and whether the era of the bloated, three-year website redesign project is finally over. Key Themes We'll Cover: The End of the Static Career Site – Why the traditional "rebuild every few years" model is breaking down in a world where hiring needs shift week to week Prompt to Publish – How natural language prompting actually works under the hood, and what it can realistically deliver today Who Owns the Build Now? – Whether career sites become a recruiter's tool rather than a marketing or IT project Speed vs. Substance – Avoiding the trap of generating slick, AI-built pages that say nothing about what it's actually like to work at your company Personalisation at Scale – Building dynamic career site experiences that adapt by role, location or candidate segment — without a developer The SEO & Conversion Question – Do AI-built career sites actually perform better, or just launch faster? Employer Brand in a Prompt-Driven World – Protecting authentic storytelling when anyone can spin up a polished site in an afternoon Governance and Guardrails – Who approves what when content creation is democratised across the TA function Where This Is Heading – What the next generation of career sites will look like as prompting gets more conversational and multimodal Whether you're stuck with a careers page that's been "due a refresh" since 2022, or you're simply curious about what AI can do beyond writing job ads, this is a session you won't want to miss. Recruiters, sourcers, TA leaders and employer brand folks — join us for a practical, no-hype conversation about the future of your most important hiring asset. We're on Friday 2nd October, 2pm BST. Follow the channel here (recommended) and register for the show here. Ep411 is supported by our friends at Joveo High-Performance Recruitment Marketing Powered by Agentic AI. Integrated Talent Attraction - everything before the ATS. Find out more here

How to Assess Skillful Use of AI The way we assess engineering talent is undergoing a fundamental shift. With AI now capable of generating functional code in seconds, the old evaluation playbook - whiteboard algorithms, take-home tests, "does it compile?"- is looking increasingly obsolete. The real question for hiring teams isn't whether a candidate can write syntax; it's whether they can exercise judgment, orchestrate multiple AI agents, and ship production-quality systems in a world where code generation is commoditised. G2i has been on the front lines of this shift, spending the last two years embedded inside frontier AI labs building reinforcement learning environments, human evaluation workflows, and training data infrastructure. That hands-on experience has completely redefined how they vet engineers - not for what they can type, but for how they think, direct, and evaluate AI-generated output. In this session, we'll unpack how reinforcement learning principles are reshaping technical assessment and what it means for anyone hiring engineering talent right now. Key Themes We'll Cover: Why Syntax Is No Longer the Differentiator – How AI code generation has flattened the playing field and why "can they code?" is the wrong question to ask in 2026 From Code Tests to Judgment Tests – What G2i's live technical evaluations actually measure now: agentic development, RL pipeline design, RAG architecture, LLM engineering, and the ability to evaluate AI output quality Inside the Frontier Lab – What G2i learned from two years building RL environments and human evaluation systems for cutting-edge AI models, and how that experience rewired their vetting philosophy Reinforcement Learning as Evaluation Framework – How RLHF-style feedback loops and reward modelling concepts are being applied to assess candidate decision-making under uncertainty The Orchestration Skill Gap – Why the engineers worth hiring today are the ones who can direct, critique, and refine the output of multiple AI agents—not just prompt them What "Taste" Looks Like in Practice – How G2i distinguishes between engineers who ship AI-assisted code and engineers who ship good AI-assisted code Building Multi-Agent Workflows – How G2i developed internal orchestration tools to coordinate complex agentic pipelines, and what that reveals about the skills they now screen for The Recruiter's Translation Challenge – How TA teams can bridge the gap between technical hiring managers and engineering candidates when the evaluation criteria have shifted this dramatically What Comes Next for Technical Vetting – How assessment is likely to evolve as AI capabilities accelerate, and why the platforms still testing for LeetCode-style problems are falling behind Whether you're a recruiter struggling to keep up with how engineering assessment is changing, a TA leader rethinking your technical interview process, or a hiring manager wondering why your last three "great on paper" hires couldn't ship reliable code, this session will give you a clear-eyed view of where evaluation is heading. G2i isn't talking theory—they've been building the systems that train the models. Join Hung Lee and David House as we explore what reinforcement learning reveals about real engineering judgment, and why the best hires in the agentic era will be defined by taste, not syntax. We're on Thursday 17th September, 10am PT / 1pm ET Follow the Recruiting Brainfood channel here (recomended) and register now - this is one skill shift you need to understand before your next technical search

Disconnected AI vs. Multi-Agent Ecosystems: Building a TA Tech Stack in the Agentic AI Era For the past few years, talent acquisition teams have been bolting AI tools onto their existing tech stacks - an AI scheduler here, a chatbot there, a CV parser with some machine learning sprinkled on top. It's worked, sort of! But we're now entering the agentic AI era, where autonomous AI agents don't just assist with tasks; they execute entire workflows, hand off work to other agents, and make decisions that ripple across your entire hiring process. The question is no longer "Which AI tool should we buy?" but "How do we architect a system where multiple AI agents actually talk to each other?" A disconnected stack of point solutions risks creating more friction than it solves, while a well-designed multi-agent ecosystem could fundamentally reshape how recruiting gets done. In this session, we'll explore what it takes to build a TA tech stack that isn't just AI-enabled - it's agentic by design. Key Themes We'll Cover: The Point Solution Problem – Why your current stack of disconnected AI tools is creating data silos, workflow gaps, and a fragmented candidate experience What "Agentic AI" Actually Means for TA – Moving beyond chatbots and auto-schedulers to autonomous agents that can source, screen, engage, and coordinate across the hiring funnel Multi-Agent Architecture 101 – The key design principles for getting AI agents to communicate, delegate, and collaborate without creating chaos The Integration Imperative – Why your ATS, CRM, assessment platform, and HRIS need to become agent-friendly, and what that looks like in practice Orchestration vs. Automation – How multi-agent ecosystems differ from traditional workflow automation, and why the distinction matters for scale Governance in a Multi-Agent World – Who's accountable when one agent's output becomes another agent's input? Building oversight without killing speed Vendor Landscape Shifts – Which platforms are pivoting toward agentic ecosystems and which are clinging to the old single-tool model The Recruiter's Role in an Agentic Stack – How the job changes when agents handle execution and recruiters focus on strategy, relationship, and judgment Building Your Roadmap – Practical steps to audit your current stack, identify integration gaps, and prioritise investments for an agentic future Whether you're a TA leader planning next year's tech budget, a recruiter wondering how your workflow is about to change, or an operations specialist trying to make sense of the vendor noise, this session will give you a clear framework for thinking about your stack in the agentic era. The shift from disconnected tools to intelligent ecosystems is happening fast - don't get left stitching together point solutions while your competitors build agent armies. We're on Friday 11th September, 2pm BST. Follow the Recruiting Brainfood channel here (recommended) and register for the show here now. Ep407 is supported by our friends Joveo. High-Performance Recruitment Marketing Powered by Agentic AI. Integrated Talent Attraction - everything before the ATS. Find out more here