Podcast
The POZCAST: Decoding Success with Adam Posner
Hosted by NHP Talent Group, Adam Posner · EN
Career & Life Journeys: Hosted by Adam Posner, he interviews top experts, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders from the world of Entrepreneurship, Talent Acquisition, Personal Growth, and other world-class amazing humans to decode their success via their insights into their own career journeys and personal growth.
The goal of #thePOZcast is to showcase amazing humans who share their stories to inspire you to harness your inner tenacity to drive your life and career forward.
Adam Posner is the Founder and Managing Director @ NHP Talent Group- a boutique NYC-based staffing agency with expertise in marketing, media and advertising.
59episodes
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BEST OF: Walking Barefoot Across the US for Mens Mental Health Awareness: Anton Nootenboom
3d ago00:57:41Tap to summarizeCHAPTERS: 00:00 Introduction to Anton Newtonboom 01:11 Anton's Military Background 04:26 Anton's Role in the Military 06:17 Mental Health in the Military 08:10 Coming Down from the Adrenaline 09:47 Realizing Something Wasn't Right 11:40 Negative Self-Talk and Identity 15:24 The Sign on the Hilltop 18:00 Seeking Help and Mental Health Tools 19:08 Walking Barefoot to Raise Awareness 20:44 Walking to Everest Base Camp 23:27 Walking Barefoot Across the United States 30:04 Aligning with the Movember Movement 32:11 The Importance of Mental Health Awareness 36:30 Encounters with Wildlife 41:34 Walking Across the United States 45:18 Projected Time to Finish the Journey 46:22 Self-Care Routine and Foot Care 47:48 Walking with Anton 49:53 Supporting Movember 50:52 Greatest Piece of Advice 52:19 Finding Purpose and Gratitude 54:38 Closing Remarks
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Unlocking Human Potential: Torrance Hampton’s Journey of Self Discovery
1w ago00:47:36Tap to summarizeThanks for listening, and please follow us on Insta @NHPTalent and www.youtube.com/thePOZcast For all episodes, please check out www.thePOZcast.com This special episode is brought to you by our dear friends at Blood Cancer United. An organization very near and dear to me. I’m here to remind you to give to causes that make a difference. You want to help but you don’t know where to start? Blood Cancer United is at the top of my list. They are the global leader in helping patients and families with blood cancer, and your dollars fund research, patient support, and advocacy. Please give today here: Thank you for supporting this important mission. Learn more and donate here: https://pages.lls.org/voy/nyc/nyclls26/aposner Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Torrance Hampton and his journey 01:00 Growing up in the DMV with a Secret Service father 02:15 Experiences working with the Bush family and White House 04:39 How career shaped Torrance’s perspective on power and influence 07:19 Early career in corporate America and realization of discontent 09:59 Discovering passion and storytelling as a career path 12:02 Recognizing your zone of genius and signals for passion 13:46 Understanding the 'alignment tax' and its organizational costs 16:18 The importance of leadership, culture, and remote work challenges 19:14 The role of AI in enhancing human potential and career development 26:47 Using AI as a thinking partner and tool for growth 34:28 Writing the book 'Genius Factor' and its personal significance 44:34 Living without regrets and defining success 45:53 The future of work, AI, and personal fulfillment 46:29 Closing remarks and call to action
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The Messy Middle of HR Tech Nobody's Solving — Until Now. Onboarded Co-Founder Mike Johnson (LIVE @ Transform 2026)
2w ago00:09:28Tap to summarizeThese episodes of #thePOZcast, live from Transform 2026 in Las Vegas, are proudly brought to you by our friends at PIN. AI recruiting tools that automate candidate sourcing, screening, and scheduling across 850M+ profiles. Built for recruiters, agencies, and hiring teams. Learn more and check out a demo: https://www.pin.com/book-a-demo?via=adam-posner Thanks for listening, and please follow us on Insta @NHPTalent and www.youtube.com/thePOZcast For all episodes, please check out www.thePOZcast.com CHAPTERS: 00:00 – The Witching Hour: An Impromptu Stop-and-Chat Day 10, final afternoon, luggage everywhere — Adam spots Mike Johnson at the Onboarded booth and pulls him into an unscripted conversation that delivers more insight than most prepared interviews. 02:00 – Meet Onboarded: The Messy Middle of HR Tech What Onboarded actually does: orchestrating the compliance-heavy gap between recruiter technology and back-office HRIS — federal, state, local obligations, background checks, integrations — built elegantly for high-volume hirers. 04:30 – From Checkr to Onboarded: The Origin Story Mike's background building trust and safety infrastructure for the gig economy at Checkr, why that exposed the far greater complexity of W-2 hiring, and what made him want to solve it. 07:00 – Building With People You Know, Love & Trust The team that followed Mike from his previous life — people whose kids and spouses he knows, who've gone on trips together — and why that trust foundation is the real secret ingredient behind Onboarded's early traction. 10:00 – Family First as a Company Value — Not Just a Talking Point Offsites where spouses and kids are invited, a hiring philosophy that prioritizes family relationships above work, and why Mike believes that's not a soft value — it's a performance strategy. 13:00 – The White Space Nobody Else Was Solving Every HR software product has its own onboarding experience. Nobody had built the orchestration layer that unifies the end-to-end worker experience across all of them. 15:30 – Enterprise Software Re-Architecture: 5 Months, Not 5 Years The speed at which AI is upending enterprise software is being radically underestimated. Not a five-year transformation — a five-month one. What Claude and coding agents are making possible right now. 18:00 – Compliance Is Not Vibable Federal, state, and local compliance obligations are discrete, black and white, and non-negotiable. That's Onboarded's moat — and why no amount of AI creativity replaces domain expertise in this space. 21:00 – Enabling Builders on Top of the Compliance Foundation How Onboarded balances compliance rigidity with entrepreneurial flexibility: partners and independent builders using the platform to build their own products on top of a compliance-ready foundation. 24:00 – The Founder Philosophy: Say Stupid Stuff to the Right People Finding people you trust enough to say your dumbest ideas to — who will push back hard and still be with you when the dust settles. That's the real engine of innovation. 27:00 – Where to Find Onboarded onboardr.com — a freshly launched website with a free trial and direct scheduling available. TAKEAWAYS: 1. The Messy Middle Is the Most Underserved Layer in HR Tech Every recruiting tool has onboarding. Every HRIS has onboarding. But nobody built the orchestration layer that connects them elegantly for the worker and for the operators managing it all. That's the gap Onboarded identified — and it's larger and more painful than most people outside high-volume hiring environments realize. 2. W-2 Hiring Is 10x More Complex Than Contractor Onboarding The gig economy built an enormous amount of infrastructure for contractor trust and safety. But the W-2 world — with its federal, state, and local compliance obligations, background check requirements, I-9 verification, and benefits enrollment — is a fundamentally different problem. Mike learned this at Checkr and built Onboarded to solve it. 3. Enterprise Software Is Being Re-Architected in Months, Not Years Mike's view on AI's pace is one of the most direct in the series: people are underestimating how fast the change is coming. Not a five-year transformation curve — a five-month one. The coding agents available today, powered by tools like Claude, are already capable of building enterprise- grade software. Every software company needs to be honest about what that means for their product. 4. Compliance Is the One Category AI Cannot Vibe Away The federal, state, and local obligations governing W-2 hiring are not ambiguous, interpretable, or creatively solvable. They are discrete, binary, and non-negotiable. That is Onboarded's defensibility. No vibe coding tool can build compliance infrastructure. That requires domain expertise, legal knowledge, and years of working inside the problem — and that's exactly what the Onboarded team brings. 5. The Right Moat Is Domain Expertise, Not Just Technology In a world where building software is getting cheaper and faster, the companies with genuine defensibility are those with deep domain expertise that can't be replicated with a good prompt. Mike's background at Checkr building trust and safety infrastructure for the gig economy is the foundation that makes Onboarded's compliance product credible — and the reason partners trust it enough to build on top of it. 6. Build With People You Know — Especially Your First Team Mike's intentional choice to build Onboarded with people from his past — people whose families he knows, who've traveled together, who have real relational history — wasn't nostalgia. It was strategy. Trust that's pre-built from shared experience is the fastest path to a high-functioning founding team. You spend zero time establishing credibility and all your time solving problems. 7. Family First Is a Performance Strategy, Not Just a Value Onboarded invites families to offsites. They prioritize the spousal and parental relationships of their employees as an explicit part of their culture. Mike's reasoning: companies that ask people to choose between family and work get less from both. Companies that make space for the whole person get more output, more loyalty, and more resilience when things get hard. 8. The Best Founding Teams Can Say Stupid Things to Each Other Mike's counterintuitive founder philosophy: the most important feature of a great founding team isn't complementary skills or market knowledge — it's the psychological safety to say your worst ideas out loud without losing credibility. When you can argue, disagree, say the dumb thing, and still trust each other completely, you can work through anything. That's the trust foundation that makes the rest possible. 9. Enabling Others to Build on Your Foundation Is a Growth Strategy Onboarded isn't just a product — it's a platform. Partners and independent entrepreneurs are building compliance-ready applications on top of the Onboarded foundation, extending its reach and value without the company having to build everything itself. In an era of rapid AI-enabled building, making your core defensible and your surface area open to builders is a powerful combination.
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One Size Fits Many: How Wellhub Turned Personalized Wellbeing Into a Retention Strategy: CPO Lívia de Bastos Martini (LIVE @ Transform 2026)
3w ago00:13:02Tap to summarizeThese episodes of #thePOZcast, live from Transform 2026 in Las Vegas, are proudly brought to you by our friends at PIN. AI recruiting tools that automate candidate sourcing, screening, and scheduling across 850M+ profiles. Built for recruiters, agencies, and hiring teams. Learn more and check out a demo: https://www.pin.com/book-a-demo?via=adam-posner Thanks for listening, and please follow us on Insta @NHPTalent and www.youtube.com/thePOZcast For all episodes, please check out www.thePOZcast.com CHAPTERS: 00:00 – Serendipity: How This Episode Happened A mutual friend, a caffeine need, and a chance introduction — Adam welcomes Lívia Martini, CPO of Wellhub, in what turned into one of the most data-packed conversations in the series. 02:00 – Meet Wellhub: 16 Years, 100,000+ Partners A global wellbeing platform serving companies of all sizes across gym studios, personal trainers, nutrition, sleep, mental health, and physical health — one platform, fully personalized. 04:30 – The Adoption Problem: Why Great Benefits Get Ignored The biggest challenge in corporate wellness isn't the product — it's education and adoption. People leaders have to be genuinely bought in, and the first step has to be frictionless. 07:00 – How a Wellness Movement Starts Inside a Company What happens when adoption takes off: colleagues watching each other change, bad knees getting better, muscle being built. The movement becomes self-sustaining — but it has to start somewhere. 09:30 – 5% vs. 50%: The Adoption Gap That Defines the Market The industry average for gym-only wellness benefits is 5% adoption. Wellhub's platform sits at 40-50%. Breadth, personalization, easy onboarding, and people team support drive the gap. 12:00 – The 86% Number That Changes Everything 86% of employees say they would consider switching jobs if their company didn't offer wellbeing benefits — and that number is growing year over year. 15:00 – Wellness as a Healthcare Cost Strategy Healthier employees mean lower medical costs. Wellbeing benefits aren't a morale spend — they're a healthcare offset. The direct business case, made clearly. 17:30 – GLP-1s: Medication Is Only Half the Solution Why weight-loss medication without lifestyle change is unsustainable: muscle mass loss, bone density loss, the rebound effect. GLP-1s need to be paired with nutrition, exercise, and sleep to hold. 21:30 – Sleep Is a Weight Management Tool Most People Ignore Lívia's personal data: two to three nights of poor sleep raises her weight regardless of diet or exercise. The interconnected nature of sleep, weight, and wellness — and why all of it needs to be addressed together. 24:00 – AI at Wellhub: Coach, Recommendations & Selling at Scale An AI wellness coach, personalized content recommendations, and AI tools on the sales side to explain the product at scale across companies of all sizes and geographies. 26:30 – Letting Teams Experiment: The Chaos and the Clarity Wellhub gave its people teams license to experiment freely with AI — lived through months of productive chaos — and is now in the best practices sharing phase where one solution is solving 15 problems. 29:00 – Transform 2026: Connection Over Content Lívia's first Transform — and her verdict: the value is in the unscheduled moments, the hallway conversations, the person who sits down mid-introduction and becomes the best exchange of the conference. 31:30 – Where to Find Wellhub wellhub.com for product, partnerships, and getting in touch — and a reflection on what makes conferences like Transform genuinely worth attending. TAKEAWAYS: 1. 86% of Employees Would Consider Switching Jobs Over Wellbeing Benefits This is the most striking retention data point in the series. Wellhub's annual survey shows 86% of employees would consider or actively switch jobs if their company didn't offer wellbeing benefits — and the number is growing. For HR leaders and total rewards strategists, this moves wellness from ancillary to foundational in any competitive benefits package. 2. Industry Adoption Averages 5%. Wellhub's Is 40-50%. The gap between a generic gym benefit and a well-designed wellness platform isn't marginal — it's a 10x difference in adoption. The combination of breadth, personalization, easy enrollment, and people team support is what drives utilization from a footnote to a movement. Companies measuring benefits ROI by the number of options offered rather than the percentage of employees actually using them are measuring the wrong thing. 3. Wellness Benefits Drive Healthcare Cost Reduction The business case for wellness investment isn't just retention and morale — it's medical spend. Healthier employees drive lower insurance claims, fewer sick days, and more sustainable long- term healthcare costs. Lívia makes this connection directly: wellbeing benefits are a healthcare offset strategy, not a culture spend. 4. People Leaders Have to Be Genuinely Bought In — Not Just Compliant Adoption starts at the top. When HR and people leaders are personally using and visibly championing a wellness benefit — not just administering it — that signal travels through the organization. Lip service produces 5% adoption. Genuine conviction produces 50%. 5. A Wellness Movement Is Self-Sustaining Once It Starts The most powerful driver of wellbeing benefit adoption isn't communication or incentives — it's the moment employees start watching each other change. A colleague's bad knee gets better. Someone builds muscle. Someone sleeps through the night for the first time in months. Those visible transformations create organic pull that no marketing campaign can replicate. 6. GLP-1 Medication Without Lifestyle Change Is a Dead End Lívia's GLP-1 take is the clearest and most medically grounded in the series: the medication works by burning energy indiscriminately — it doesn't distinguish between fat, muscle mass, and bone density. Stop taking it without having built sustainable habits, and the weight returns. The medication is a tool, not a solution. Nutrition, exercise, and sleep have to accompany it for the program to hold. 7. Sleep Is a Weight and Wellness Variable Most Companies Aren't Tracking Lívia's personal data: two to three nights of poor sleep raises her weight regardless of diet or exercise. This connection — between sleep quality and metabolic health — is well-documented but largely absent from most corporate wellness conversations. Any wellbeing platform that doesn't address sleep is leaving a critical variable unaddressed. 8. Wellbeing Personalization Is the Future of Benefits Design The choose-your-own-journey model — where employees select their own wellness path from a broad menu of options, and can change it as their life changes — is the direction all benefits design is heading. One-size-fits-all packages are already failing on adoption metrics. The companies that move to personalized, flexible, employee-directed wellbeing will see the utilization numbers that justify the investment. 9. Give Your Teams License to Experiment With AI — Then Share What Works Wellhub's internal AI journey: give people teams permission to experiment freely, accept that it will be chaotic for a few months, and then create a structured best practices sharing process that surfaces the solutions that are actually working. The companies that are winning with AI internally right now aren't the ones with the most sophisticated strategy — they're the ones who started experimenting earliest and created feedback loops fastest. 10. The Best Conference Connections Are Unscheduled Lívia's first Transform validated something this series has heard repeatedly: the most valuable moments at conferences like this aren't the sessions — they're the conversations that happen between them. The person who sits down mid-introduction, the hallway exchange that turns into a 30-minute deep dive on AI adoption and change management. Conferences that create more space for that serendipity deliver more value than those packed with content.
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AI Offense and AI Defense: How Greenhouse Is Redesigning Its Entire Interview Process: VP of People Transformation, Ariana Moon (LIVE @ Transform 2026)
3w ago00:16:13Tap to summarizeThese episodes of #thePOZcast, live from Transform 2026 in Las Vegas, are proudly brought to you by our friends at PIN. AI recruiting tools that automate candidate sourcing, screening, and scheduling across 850M+ profiles. Built for recruiters, agencies, and hiring teams. Learn more and check out a demo: https://www.pin.com/book-a-demo?via=adam-posner Thanks for listening, and please follow us on Insta @NHPTalent and www.youtube.com/thePOZcast For all episodes, please check out www.thePOZcast.com TAKEAWAYS: 1. Full Disconnection on Leave Is a Culture Signal, Not a Personal Choice Ariana's ability to fully disconnect during five months of maternity leave wasn't just personal discipline — it was enabled by a company culture that explicitly supports and expects it. Greenhouse has a caregiver community, respects the whole person, and understands that genuine recovery and presence during leave leads to a better return. Companies that say they support leave but create implicit pressure to stay connected are signaling something important about how they see their employees. 2. Institutional Knowledge Is the Best Return-to-Work Advantage What made Ariana's return from leave smooth wasn't a structured onboarding plan — it was nearly 11 years of context. She knew the Q4 rhythms, the relationships, the unwritten rules. For companies managing returning employees, this is a reminder that the investment in long tenure pays dividends at the most vulnerable moments. 3. The Candidate Experience Has to Be Half the Product Greenhouse's mission — make hiring work for everyone — isn't just a brand statement. It's a product design imperative that extends to the job seeker experience, not just the recruiter experience. In a market that is genuinely brutal for candidates right now, companies and platforms that design for both sides of the hiring equation will win trust from both. 4. Dream Job Signals Cut Through AI-Generated Noise Greenhouse's My Greenhouse platform — which lets candidates designate companies as dream job targets and signal genuine intent once a month — is a direct response to the noise problem created by AI mass-application tools. In a world where volume no longer equals signal, deliberate intent becomes the most valuable data point in the funnel. 5. The Market Is Shifting Toward Behavioral Hiring Over Background Matching Greenhouse is redesigning its own interview architecture around specific defined behaviors — 'make good decisions fast,' 'invent the future,' 'be entrepreneurial' — rather than experience checkboxes. The implication for candidates: the ability to demonstrate how you think and decide is becoming more important than where you've worked. Portfolio career holders take note. 6. The STAR Method Is Fully Gameable — and Everyone Knows It Traditional structured behavioral interviewing was built for a world where candidates had to recall and articulate their own experiences. AI second-screen tools have made that world obsolete. Real-time answer coaching during live interviews is happening right now, at scale, and the recruiting teams that haven't redesigned their interview approach for this reality are operating on outdated assumptions. 7. AI Offense and AI Defense Is the Most Useful Interview Framework in This Series Ariana's team ran a workshop that split into two tracks: AI defense (how do we design questions that are more AI-resistant and require genuine human judgment to answer?) and AI offense (how do we explicitly screen for AI mindset, curiosity, and capability as a positive qualification?). Both are necessary. Neither alone is sufficient. This framework is immediately replicable. 8. 'How Do You Use AI Personally?' Is One of the Most Revealing Interview Questions Right Now Asking candidates how they use AI in their personal or professional lives — not to catch them using it wrong, but to surface genuine curiosity and self-direction — is becoming one of the sharpest signals available in an interview. The candidates who have been experimenting, iterating, and developing their own AI workflows are showing you something important about how they'll operate in roles that don't yet have defined playbooks. 9. Portfolio Careers Need Behavioral Framing to Land Adam's candid share about feeling 'unhirable' after 10 years running his own business is a common experience for independent professionals re-entering corporate environments. Ariana's coaching: the shift toward behavioral hiring is actually an advantage for portfolio career holders — because the behaviors that make someone successful in an entrepreneurial context (making decisions fast, inventing solutions, operating without consensus) are exactly the behaviors companies are now explicitly hiring for. 10. The Best Conference Value Is the Hallway Conversation, Not the Session Ariana didn't attend a single formal session at Transform and still left with more actionable intelligence than most attendees. The real value — for her and for the industry — is in the one- to-one conversations between practitioners comparing notes on what they're actually building and experimenting with. Conference organizers should design more space for that. Attendees should prioritize it. CHAPTERS: 00:00 – Welcome Back: Motherhood & the Return Adam reunites with Ariana Moon — last seen 8 months pregnant — and gets the update on baby Leo, sleep training, and how a strong support village made the first year survivable. 02:30 – Taking 5 Months of Leave — Fully Disconnected What it looks like to actually step away: Greenhouse's culture of respecting leave, why full disconnection is both supported and expected, and why Ariana has zero guilt about it. 05:30 – The Timing Was Right: Checking Out During the AI Gold Rush Her leave coincided with peak AI hype saturation. Stepping away while the market worked itself out turned out to be exactly the right call. 07:30 – Coming Back After Leave: The Real Reimmersion Story How 11 years of institutional knowledge, strong internal relationships, and knowing exactly what Q4 looks like made the return smoother than it would have been for anyone else. 10:00 – What It Means to Recruit at a Recruiting Platform The unusual dual role: running a great recruiting team while also serving as a live feedback loop for the product and staying connected to how the market is evolving. 13:00 – The Candidate Experience Nobody Talks About Enough Greenhouse's mission — make hiring work for everyone — and why it has to extend beyond the recruiter to the candidate side. The market is brutal for job seekers right now. 15:30 – My Greenhouse: The Dream Job Feature How Greenhouse's B2C platform lets candidates designate dream job companies, signal genuine intent once a month, and give recruiters a quality signal in a market flooded with AI-generated noise. 18:30 – Portfolio Careers & How to Position Them Adam gets personal about feeling 'unhirable' after 10 years of entrepreneurship — and Ariana's coaching on positioning portfolio skills in a behavioral hiring market. 21:30 – Behavioral Hiring: The Shift Toward Interpersonal Skills How Greenhouse designs interviews around defined behaviors — 'make good decisions fast,' 'invent the future' — and why the shift toward behaviors over background may be the biggest structural change in recruiting right now. 24:30 – AI Killed the STAR Method. Now What? Traditional structured interviewing is fully gameable by AI second-screen tools. Ariana's team ran a workshop to directly confront this — and built something new. 27:00 – AI Offense and AI Defense: The Framework The two-part workshop: AI defense (questions that require genuine human judgment) and AI offense (explicitly testing for AI mindset and capability as a positive qualification). 30:00 – Testing for Curiosity as a Hiring Signal Why "how do you use AI personally?" is becoming one of the most revealing interview questions — surfacing genuine curiosity and self-direction rather than catching people out. 32:30 – What's Lighting Ariana Up at Transform 2026 Ariana didn't attend a single session — and that's the point. The value of Transform is the one-to-one conversations about what people are actually doing, building, and experimenting with right now. 35:00 – Connect With Ariana & the Vegas Advocate Where to find Ariana on LinkedIn — and her unexpectedly enthusiastic case for why Las Vegas is actually a great place to live.
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We Went from Doing More to Doing Better: HR Tech Analyst Kyle Lagunas's State of the Union on AI (LIVE @ Transform 2026)
3w ago00:16:50Tap to summarizeThese episodes of #thePOZcast, live from Transform 2026 in Las Vegas, are proudly brought to you by our friends at PIN. AI recruiting tools that automate candidate sourcing, screening, and scheduling across 850M+ profiles. Built for recruiters, agencies, and hiring teams. Learn more and check out a demo: https://www.pin.com/book-a-demo?via=adam-posner Thanks for listening, and please follow us on Insta @NHPTalent and www.youtube.com/thePOZcast For all episodes, please check out www.thePOZcast.com TAKEAWAYS: 1. The Industry Shifted From Doing More to Doing Better Kyle's State of the Union in a single sentence: a year ago, AI was being applied to do more things faster. In 2026, the question has become whether those things are being done better. Volume was the first wave. Quality is the second. The vendors who survive the next cycle will be the ones who can demonstrate genuine outcome improvement, not just efficiency gains. 2. The Consolidation Bloodbath Is Over — and the Race Is Back On The expected wave of vendor exits didn't fully materialize, but AI gave surviving vendors the ability to ship value to customers faster than ever before. The competitive dynamics haven't eased — they've intensified. The companies still standing are moving faster, not slower. 3. Build vs. Buy Is Now a Real Strategic Question for TA Teams Enterprise talent acquisition teams are building their own AI workflows in-house, and that's changing the calculus for every vendor on the floor. Kyle's framework for go-to-market leaders: track how much building culture exists in your target accounts before burning sales calories. If a prospect is already building, that's not necessarily a lost sale — but it's a fundamentally different conversation. 4. Recruiting Fraud Has Become a National Security Issue The convergence of application agents, high job-seeker volume, and organized bad actors has turned recruiting fraud from an edge case into a genuine organizational risk. Kyle knows first- degree connections who have had the FBI in their office after hiring agents of foreign states. This is not hypothetical. Every company with any sensitive data or infrastructure is a target. 5. Fraud Detection Isn't One Problem — It's a Stack Problem Interview fraud doesn't have a single point of intervention. It needs to be addressed at the ATS, at the top of the funnel, and through identity verification across multiple interview stages. Kyle's benchmark of 12 AI interviewers found screen analysis capabilities — matching visual identity from interview to interview — becoming a standard feature. Manual workflows are a bridge, not a solution. 6. AI Is Finally Making Benefits Personal at Scale Benefits has always been complicated, jargon-heavy, and delivered as a one-size-fits-all package that employees don't understand. AI chat interfaces that know an employee's profile — single, two dogs, no kids — and can explain in plain language which plan makes sense for their specific life are making personalized benefits navigation possible without requiring an HRBP to sit with every employee. That's a meaningful change in how benefits gets delivered. 7. Candidates Are Getting Smarter About Total Comp — And Recruiters Need to Keep Up Kyle's observation from the market matches what Adam hears in the trenches: candidates are increasingly asking about the full picture of compensation, including employer contributions to healthcare, equity, and benefits value. Recruiters who can't articulate total comp in real numbers are at a disadvantage — and companies that can are converting more offers. 8. The Trust Gap Between Candidates and AI Is a Communication Failure, Not a Technology Failure The friction candidates are experiencing with AI in the hiring process isn't primarily a product problem — it's a communication problem. Employers are deploying AI interviewing, screening, and assessment tools without telling candidates how to use AI, what to expect, or why these tools actually benefit them. That vacuum is being filled by Reddit misinformation and candidate frustration. Simple, proactive communication could close most of that gap. 9. AI Interviewers Eliminate Ghosting — and That Matters More Than People Admit Kyle's case for AI interviewers directed at frustrated candidates: no ghosting (every candidate gets an interview option), 24/7 scheduling flexibility, the ability to self-select out of a bad fit, and a genuine touchpoint with a company that otherwise might never respond. The value proposition is real. The problem is nobody is communicating it clearly to the people who most need to hear it. 10. Practitioners Build Better Best Practices Than Vendors Do Kyle's Human-Centric AI Council — an independent group of HR and talent leaders producing free, practitioner-led resources for navigating AI — is a direct response to the gap between what vendors say about AI and what people actually in the trenches need to know. The best guidance on using AI in HR isn't coming from conference keynotes. It's coming from the people doing the work. 11. Data Labeling Is the Final Mile of AI — and Almost Nobody Is Talking About It Kyle's standout product observation from the conference: Findem's data labeling capability gives AI the contextual grounding it needs to move from generic outputs to genuinely useful ones. The last mile of AI isn't the model — it's how well the data feeding the model is understood and labeled. That's an unsexy insight with enormous downstream impact. CHAPTERS: 00:00 – Introduction: The Analyst With the Best Swag Game Adam welcomes Kyle Lagunas — industry analyst, founder, and proud owner of a Peppa Pig cardigan — and sets up a State of the Union on AI in HR tech. 02:30 – State of the Union: From More to Better Kyle's one-line summary: a year ago the industry was doing more stuff. Now it's trying to do better work. What that shift actually means. 05:00 – The Consolidation Question: Is the Bloodbath Over? The expected vendor consolidation didn't fully materialize — but AI unlocked a new level of innovation speed for those who survived, putting the race back on. 07:30 – The Build-vs-Buy Threat: When Clients Become Competitors Enterprise TA teams are building their own AI tools — and what that means for vendors without genuine defensibility beyond workflow automation. 10:00 – Fraud: From Edge Case to FBI in the Office First-degree connections who've had the FBI show up after hiring agents of foreign states. How application agents, volume, and bad actors have converged into a national security problem. 13:00 – Where Fraud Detection Lives in the Stack Fraud isn't one problem with one solution — it needs to be addressed at multiple points from ATS intake through interview identity verification. 16:00 – AI as the Great Equalizer in Benefits How AI chat interfaces are finally making personalized benefits navigation possible at scale — without requiring an HRBP to sit with every employee one-on-one. 19:30 – The Smart Candidate Who Asks About Total Comp Candidates are getting more sophisticated about total compensation — and recruiters need to be ready to explain the full picture in real numbers. 22:00 – The Trust Gap: Candidates, AI, and No One Telling the Rules Employers are deploying AI throughout hiring but issuing no guidance to candidates. The result: friction, mistrust, and a PR problem that doesn't have to exist. 25:00 – The Case for AI Interviewers — Told to the Frustrated Candidate Kyle's win-win reframe: no ghosting, 24/7 scheduling, self-selection out of bad fits, and a real company touchpoint. The value is real; the communication isn't. 28:00 – The Human-Centric AI Council: Practitioners Building the Playbook An independent council of HR and talent leaders producing practitioner-led best practices for navigating AI — free, no vendor influence. 31:00 – Love It: Findem's Data Labeling Capabilities The quiet feature Kyle called the final mile of AI: contextual data labeling that gives models the grounding they need to actually deliver value. 33:30 – Love It: CodeSignal's Persona-Based AI Interviewer The demo that impressed him most — an AI interviewer that adopts the persona of the actual hiring manager, not a generic interviewer. 35:30 – Leave It: Generic Vendors Running the Same Playbook Booths full of AEs, cheap water bottles, same motions. Kyle's prescription: bring your solutions people, bring your product people, bring something worth the conversation. 37:30 – Where to Find Kyle & Transformation Realness kyleandco.com for research, Transformation Realness for the podcast, and LinkedIn where he checks in every morning and afternoon.
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You Can't Improve What You Can't See: The Origin Story of BrightHire: Teddy ChestnutL (LIVE @ Transform 2026)
3w ago00:15:21Tap to summarizeThese episodes of #thePOZcast, live from Transform 2026 in Las Vegas, are proudly brought to you by our friends at PIN. AI recruiting tools that automate candidate sourcing, screening, and scheduling across 850M+ profiles. Built for recruiters, agencies, and hiring teams. Learn more and check out a demo: https://www.pin.com/book-a-demo?via=adam-posner Thanks for listening, and please follow us on Insta @NHPTalent and www.youtube.com/thePOZcast For all episodes, please check out www.thePOZcast.com Takeaways: 1. You Can't Improve What You Can't See The founding insight of BrightHire — and one of the most durable frameworks in this series — is that hiring is the most consequential activity in any business, yet it produces almost no data. Interview conversations happen, and then they're gone. Capturing them isn't surveillance; it's the minimum requirement for actually improving the process. 2. Comp Comes Up in Fewer Than 2% of Candidate Conversations The most surprising data point from BrightHire's 930,000-interview analysis: salary and compensation are almost never what candidates are actually talking about in interviews. What they are asking about: remote and flexible work, company growth trajectory, and product innovation. If your recruitment messaging is leading with comp, you're answering a question most candidates aren't asking. 3. Interview Data Is a Goldmine for Employer Brand Strategy Sliced by seniority, function, and location, BrightHire's interview data tells employers exactly what different candidate segments care about — giving TA teams real intelligence for outbound messaging, recruitment marketing, and preparing recruiters and interviewers to answer the questions candidates are actually going to ask. That's a fundamentally different input for employer brand strategy than surveys or focus groups. 4. Interview Fraud Is Real and Growing — and the Defense Is Already Built The use case nobody anticipated when BrightHire launched: using candidate video profiles to verify that the person who showed up for onboarding is the same person who interviewed. Dozens of customers have built SOPs around this capability. As AI-generated fraud becomes more sophisticated, the ability to cross-reference identity signals across the entire interview process is becoming a core compliance function, not a nice-to-have. 5. AI Interviewers Don't Replace Recruiters — They Give Them Better Candidates Recruiter reaction to BrightHire's AI interviewer product wasn't fear — it was relief. By expanding access at the top of the funnel, AI interviewers surface qualified candidates who would have been passed over due to capacity constraints, giving recruiters a better pool to work from and more time to do the high-value human work of cultivating and closing those candidates. 6. The Recruiter Who Adapts Has a Massive Advantage Teddy's view is direct: recruiting professionals who embrace agentic workflows will be elevated by them. Those who resist are going to find themselves on the wrong side of an irreversible shift. The profession has always evolved — and the ones who leaned into each evolution came out ahead. 7. AI Agents Are Taking on Longer, More Complex Tasks Than Most People Realize Teddy's personal experience in the last six weeks: watching an engineering colleague execute a complex multi-step task by telling his AI agent, 'Find Teddy's Slack and execute on what Teddy asked for' — and then quality-controlling the result. The length and complexity of what agents can handle autonomously is increasing faster than most people outside of engineering teams appreciate. 8. The Right Acquisition Is One That Protects Founder Velocity Teddy's framework for evaluating the Zoom acquisition: founder-led culture at the acquiring company, strong strategic alignment on product thesis, and a track record of enabling acquired companies to retain their brand, culture, and growth trajectory. Workvivo is the proof point. Being acquired by a company where the founder is still running the show at four billion in revenue is a different experience than getting absorbed into a conglomerate. 9. Customers Are Already Building What Vendors Are Selling The most clarifying thing Teddy saw on the conference floor: customers sharing the in-house AI workflows they've already built — and the framework they're using to decide what to outsource. If a tool doesn't touch PII, compliance, or regulatory requirements, they're building it themselves. The bar for defensibility has permanently moved upward, and every vendor on the floor needs to be honest about what's truly irreplaceable about what they offer. 10. Trust Is the Most Valuable Commodity in an AI-Flooded Market In a market where AI has lowered the cost of building software dramatically, vendors are proliferating and noise is at an all-time high. Teddy's observation is that the differentiator in this environment is old-fashioned: trust, integrity, post-sales investment, and actually showing up and delivering on promises. Easy to lose, hard to build — and more valuable than ever precisely because it's become rare. CHAPTERS: 00:00 – Introduction & Congrats on the Acquisition Adam welcomes Teddy Chestnut, co-founder of BrightHire, fresh off the company's acquisition by Zoom. 02:00 – Born Into Recruiting: The Origin Story Both parents in HR for 30 years. Dad met mom as a recruiter. A childhood of dinner table conversations about comp plans — and how that led to BrightHire. 05:00 – The Problem Statement That Started It All Hiring is the most important decision in business, yet treated with less rigor than a $15,000 software purchase. You can't improve what you can't see. 07:30 – 2019: A Crazy Idea That Turned Out to Be Right Pitching interview recording before LLMs, before COVID, before the world normalized AI in meetings — and how the pandemic validated the thesis overnight. 10:00 – The First Customer Who Asked If They Were Charging Enough BrightHire's first beta customer asked if they were making money on the deal. The signal that they were onto something real. 12:30 – From Resistance to Commonplace: The Adoption Journey How resistance to recording interviews dissolved as recording became normalized across all business meetings — and how the conversation shifted to unlocking insights. 15:00 – 930,000 Interviews: What the Data Says The striking finding: comp comes up in fewer than 2% of candidate conversations. What candidates are actually asking about: remote work, company growth, and product innovation. 18:30 – Turning Interview Data Into Employer Brand Intelligence How BrightHire slices that data by seniority, function, and location to give customers real intelligence for outbound messaging, recruitment marketing, and interviewer prep. 21:00 – Interview Fraud: The Use Case Nobody Saw Coming The email that changed BrightHire's roadmap: using candidate thumbnail profiles to verify that the person at onboarding was the same person who interviewed. 24:00 – AI Interviewers: The Next Frontier BrightHire's conviction that AI interviewers expand access — and the recruiter reaction: "This is a godsend because I'm getting better candidates I would have passed over otherwise." 27:00 – The Recruiter Who Adapts vs. The One Who Goes Extinct Recruiters who embrace agentic workflows gain time for high-value human work. Those who resist are on the wrong side of an inevitable shift. 29:30 – Agents Are Taking on Longer-Range Tasks What Teddy witnessed in the last six weeks: a colleague executing a complex task by telling his agent "Find Teddy's Slack and execute on what Teddy asked for." 32:00 – The Zoom Acquisition: Why It Was the Right Move Founder-led culture, strong product thesis alignment, and the Workvivo track record as proof that Zoom enables acquired companies to thrive independently. 35:00 – What Impressed Teddy Most on the Conference Floor Not a vendor product — the in-house AI workflows customers have already built, and the framework they're using to decide what to outsource vs. build themselves. 38:00 – Trust Is the Most Valuable Commodity in AI-Flooded Markets In a market where building AI products is cheap and vendors are proliferating, the only truly defensible asset is trust — brand, integrity, and delivering on promises.
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The Part After Cancer Nobody Prepares You For — A Conversation Between Two Survivors: Geoffrey Rogow & Adam Posner
3w ago01:27:25Tap to summarizeThanks for listening, and please follow us on Insta @NHPTalent and www.youtube.com/thePOZcast For all episodes, please check out www.thePOZcast.com This special episode is brought to you by our dear friends at Blood Cancer United. An organization very near and dear to me. I’m here to remind you to give to causes that make a difference. You want to help but you don’t know where to start? Blood Cancer United is at the top of my list. They are the global leader in helping patients and families with blood cancer, and your dollars fund research, patient support, and advocacy. Please give today here: Thank you for supporting this important mission. Learn more and donate here: https://pages.lls.org/voy/nyc/nyclls26/aposner CHAPTERS: 00:00 – 500 Episodes: Introducing Geoffrey Rogow Adam opens the milestone episode, introduces Geoffrey Rogow — journalist, survivor, founder, author — and sets the tone for the most personal conversation in the show's seven-year history. 03:00 – Who Were You Before? The Person Before Treatment Geoffrey's life before diagnosis: 30 years old, living in New York and Sydney, feeling infallible, driven by professional ambition. And Adam's contrast — a father of two at 45, diagnosed only because he went to a cardiologist after his brother-in-law died. 07:00 – The Diagnosis: Two Very Different Moments Geoffrey's blood clot in the night that saved his life. Adam's cardiologist scan that caught a mass nobody expected. The two very different ways a diagnosis lands — one like a movie, one like a text message. 13:00 – Four Days vs. Six Weeks: The Window Before Treatment Geoffrey had four days between diagnosis and chemotherapy. Adam had six weeks. What that difference does to your mind, your fear, your processing — and why no two cancer stories are the same. 17:00 – The Thing Nobody Tells Young Adults: Fertility The Vanderbilt study that found 50% of young adults diagnosed with cancer are never told about their fertility options before treatment. Geoffrey's sperm banking story. Adam's moment of levity. The organizations that exist to help — and why you should use them. 23:00 – Chemotherapy: The Reality Nobody Films Steroids that make you feel like Batman. Fatigue that puts you to bed at 1 PM. The taste of treatment — Geoffrey's: a burning Nike Air Max. Adam's: Sour Patch Kids and Shrek's condom. The rhythm of treatment cycles and the crash that follows. 30:00 – Hair Loss: The Moment It Hits You Not just the hair on your head — all of it. Geoffrey's Jewish mohawk and the cat photos. Adam's man bun, the shower, the wall of clumps, the hairdresser call. Why the eyebrows and eyelashes are the part nobody prepares you for. 37:00 – Going Out in Public Without Eyebrows Geoffrey at his best friend's wedding, feeling like a freak. Adam at a bar mitzvah two weeks post-treatment, cancer beanie and all. Why "you look great" hits differently when you don't recognize yourself in the photos. 42:00 – Tribes, Villages & Crisis Language Geoffrey's lesson: his tribe was too small — just his wife and the cat. The mistake he'd change. Adam's: an oversharer married to a shield, learning to lean on his guy friends so his wife didn't have to carry everything. What "crisis language as a couple" actually means. 49:00 – Tolerance for Bullshit: The Larry David Effect What cancer does to your patience for other people's bravado. Geoffrey's bar story, running out into Times Square and crashing full speed into Elmo. The anger that's real, and the work it takes not to carry it forever. 55:00 – The Biannual Check-In: A Framework for Purposeful Change A scheduled, structured personal evaluation every six months — professional path, relationships, health, direction. The check-in that led Geoffrey to leave the Wall Street Journal after 21 years. Why you can't make the changes when the warning lights are flashing; you have to make them later, in clarity. 61:00 – Scanxiety: The Incurable Side Effect of Survivorship Geoffrey's scan is next Wednesday. He started thinking about it two weeks ago. The reality that scanxiety doesn't diminish with time — it sometimes gets worse. What helps, what stops helping, and why there's no permanent answer. 66:00 – After Treatment: The Part Nobody Celebrates The financial reality: bill negotiations, illegal anesthesiologist charges, state-specific protections, hospital programs for lower-income patients. Life insurance rejection at 35. Career decisions constrained by healthcare costs. The bills that arrive 18 months later asking "didn't I already pay this?" 73:00 – Ambition After Cancer: Don't Change the Level, Change the Lane The advice from career coach Michelle Woodward: keep the same level of ambition even if you have to find a different lane. Geoffrey's Hong Kong trip — the first time after treatment he felt like himself professionally again. Adam's silver lining of leaning into tech during treatment. 79:00 – Writing It Down: The Value of Documentation Adam's Super Whisper app diary — before and after every treatment session. Geoffrey's 14 years of running away from his cancer story, and what writing the book finally unlocked. Why every survivor should find their version of processing. 85:00 – I'm Alive: Now What? — The Book Geoffrey's nine-chapter guide for survivors — money, career, physical health, mental health, family planning, caregiving, purpose, the business of advice — built around real people's stories paired with expert guidance. Pre-order at after-treatment.com/the-book. 91:00 – Are You Getting the Support You Need? Geoffrey's question for Adam — and for every survivor. The cancer imposter syndrome that comes with a high-survival-rate diagnosis. Why you can't let anyone take away what you went through, and why the work doesn't end at remission. 97:00 – North Stars: What Keeps You Focused Geoffrey's: a willingness to change his North Star — short-term, practical, written down, evaluated regularly. Adam's: being the best example for his kids and leaving the world better than he found it. How cancer changes your definition of success. 104:00 – 500 Episodes: Thank You Adam closes the milestone episode with gratitude — for the guests, the listeners, seven years of consistency, and what comes next. TAKEAWAYS: 1. The Diagnosis Is Never Like the Movies — Except When It Is Geoffrey's came in an ER at 30. Adam's in a text from his cardiologist. No two stories are the same — but both changed everything. 2. 50% of Young Adult Cancer Patients Are Never Told About Fertility Options A Vanderbilt study found half of young adults aren't counseled on fertility preservation before treatment starts. The window is measured in days. Make sure this conversation happens first. 3. The Biannual Check-In Is the Most Powerful Tool for Purposeful Change Twice a year, scheduled, with a workbook: evaluate your path, relationships, and direction — in calm, not crisis. The check-in that led Geoffrey to leave 21 years at the Wall Street Journal. 4. Don't Change the Level of Your Ambition — Change the Lane If cancer takes away what you were world-class at, find another lane at the same level. Don't shrink. Redirect. That's not a lesser life — it's a different one. 5. Your Relationship With Time and Bullshit Changes — But Differently for Everyone Every survivor agrees on two things: time feels different, and their tolerance for bullshit has shifted. Geoffrey went full Larry David. Adam found unexpected clarity. The work is figuring out which version of you emerged. 6. Cancer Exposes Your Crisis Language as a Couple The couples who survive this well learn how to communicate what they need, what not to say, and what to let breathe. It's practiced, not instinctive. 7. Scanxiety Is Real, Incurable, and Changes Over Time What helped before may stop helping. Survivors need to plan for this, not be surprised by it. 8. The Financial Reckoning Comes Long After Treatment Ends Medical bills stay higher forever. Many are negotiable. Some are illegal. Own the advocacy, ask the questions, build the spreadsheet. 9. Write It Down — In Whatever Form Works for You Adam used Super Whisper before and after every treatment. Geoffrey wrote a book 14 years later. The form doesn't matter. Externalizing the experience gives you a time capsule you can go back to. 10. Are You Getting the Support You Need? Just the honest, periodic question. What you went through is not nothing — and the work doesn't end at remission. 11. You Are Different Now — Not Better or Worse. Different. Not better, not worse. Fundamentally changed in ways that can't be fully accounted for. That difference isn't a loss. The work is learning to live in the new timeline.
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Skills Over Experience: How Udemy Rebuilt Its Hiring Framework: Ale Pegnim (LIVE @ Transform 2026)
4w ago00:13:38Tap to summarizeThese episodes of #thePOZcast, live from Transform 2026 in Las Vegas, are proudly brought to you by our friends at PIN. AI recruiting tools that automate candidate sourcing, screening, and scheduling across 850M+ profiles. Built for recruiters, agencies, and hiring teams. Learn more and check out a demo: https://www.pin.com/book-a-demo?via=adam-posner Thanks for listening, and please follow us on Insta @NHPTalent and www.youtube.com/thePOZcast For all episodes, please check out www.thePOZcast.com TAKEAWAYS: 1. Agency Recruiting Builds Skills That In-House Roles Don't Teach Sixteen years on the agency side gave Oli a closer's mentality, a sense of urgency, and an intolerance for avoidable fallout that she carried directly into Udemy. The best in-house recruiters often came from agency backgrounds — and companies that understand that have a sourcing advantage. 2. A 50% Inbound Hire Rate Is a Brand Achievement, Not an Accident Udemy's ability to fill half its roles from inbound applicants is a direct result of employer brand investment. Candidates who apply are already bought in — which means recruiters can spend more energy on screening quality than generating awareness. Inbound is not passive; it's the payoff of deliberate brand-building over time. 3. Skills-Based Hiring Requires Persona-Building, Not Just JD-Writing Udemy's approach goes deeper than listing skills in a job description. They build candidate personas modeled on current top performers — identifying what skills, behaviors, and experiences have actually driven success at the company — and use those personas to train recruiters on what to look for when scanning resumes and running screens. 4. Realignment Is a Sign of a Healthy Recruiting Process, Not a Failure Roles evolve mid-search. What a hiring manager thought they wanted in week one is often different from what they realize they need by week four. Oli's team treats realignment as a normal part of the process — using recruiting managers, people partners, and fresh perspectives to have the calibration conversation before more time is wasted. 5. Referral Bonuses Don't Improve Referral Quality — Culture Does Udemy's research-backed decision to eliminate referral bonuses is one of the most counterintuitive moves in this episode. The finding: happy employees who believe in where they work will refer good people because they want to work with them — not because there's a check waiting. Bonuses attract volume. Culture attracts quality. 6. Referrals Get Prioritized — But Not Protected Even without a bonus, referred candidates at Udemy receive a guaranteed recruiter conversation. But they still go through the same interview process as everyone else. No preferential treatment, no shortcuts. When a senior leader's referral doesn't make it, Oli holds the line — respectfully but firmly. 7. The Career Evolution Exercise Is the Best Antidote to AI Anxiety Oli's team exercise is immediately replicable: ask your recruiters to list what they did at the beginning of their career that they no longer do, then what they do today that didn't exist before. It makes the evolution of the profession visible — and reframes AI as the next chapter of a story that's been changing all along. 8. Turn Job Descriptions Into Job Ads With AI Oli's personal AI workflow is one of the most practical in the series: take a job description, prompt AI to rewrite it as a compelling job advertisement, refine for candidate appeal, then reverse-engineer: where do these people work, and how do I find them? It's a complete sourcing strategy built from a single starting point. 9. FIFO Is the Only Real AI Learning Strategy F around and find out. Oli's philosophy for AI adoption — at the individual and team level — is that the only way to understand what these tools can actually do for your process is to use them, break them, and learn from what happens. Udemy's monthly U Days give the team structured time to experiment in a low-stakes sandbox. 10. For Job Seekers: Network Hard, Stay Persistent, and Use AI to Find the Adjacent Role Oli's advice to candidates in a tough market: your network is your most underused asset — lean on it. Don't let one rejection stop you from applying elsewhere; timing and fit are company- specific, not a verdict on your value. And use AI to map your skills to adjacent industries and roles you might not have considered — your next opportunity might not look exactly like your last one. CHAPTERS: 00:00 – Introduction & Meet Oli Adam welcomes Alessandra "Oli" Pegnim, Head of TA and Employer Brand at Udemy, and hears how she got into recruiting through 16 years on the agency side. 02:30 – The Agency Advantage: What In-House Teams Miss What 16 years of agency recruiting gives you: always be closing, speed, urgency, and the discipline of never letting a placement fall through. 05:00 – Inbound vs. Outbound: Udemy's 50% Hit Rate How Udemy manages a 50% inbound hire rate — filtering fraud while treating genuine candidate intent as the signal it is. 07:30 – Tools for Filtering Fraud at the Top of the Funnel How Greenhouse's AI functionality, combined with human oversight and skills-trained recruiters, separates real candidates from noise at volume. 10:00 – Skills-Based Hiring: From Theory to Practice How Udemy builds skills into job descriptions, creates candidate personas modeled on top performers, and trains recruiters to assess underlying competencies. 13:00 – Aligning Recruiters and Hiring Managers Where most searches break down — and how Udemy uses recruiting managers, people partners, and fresh-perspective interventions to keep searches on track. 16:00 – Outbound Sourcing: Tools and Approach LinkedIn Recruiter as the primary outbound tool, the role of referrals and internal mobility, and how Udemy navigates global regulations when sourcing externally. 18:30 – Why Udemy Killed the Referral Bonus Udemy removed referral bonuses after research showed they didn't improve quality — and that happy employees refer good people whether or not they're paid to. 22:00 – Holding the Line When Referrals Don't Make It The tough conversation: when a senior leader's referred candidate doesn't pass the interview, and how Oli handles it with honesty and fairness. 24:30 – Are Recruiters Scared of AI? Real Talk. Oli's candid take on AI anxiety inside her team — and the reframe she used to shift the conversation from fear to curiosity. 26:30 – The Career Evolution Exercise That Calms AI Anxiety Ask recruiters to name things they did at the start of their career they no longer do — and things they do now that didn't exist before. The answer reframes everything. 29:00 – How Oli Uses AI to Write Better Job Ads A practical AI workflow: take a JD, turn it into a compelling ad, refine for appeal, then reverse-engineer sourcing strategy from the output. 32:00 – FIFO: F Around and Find Out Oli's philosophy for AI adoption. Udemy's monthly U Days give the team a sandbox to experiment safely — because the only way to learn AI is to use it. 35:00 – Golden Advice for Job Seekers Lean on your network, don't let one rejection stop you, and use AI to identify adjacent roles and industries your skills can transfer into.
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The Best Candidate is in Slot Number One. Pin's CEO Steven Lu on Rebuilding Recruiting Search (LIVE @ Transform 2026)
4w ago00:08:19Tap to summarizeThese episodes of #thePOZcast, live from Transform 2026 in Las Vegas, are proudly brought to you by our friends at PIN. AI recruiting tools that automate candidate sourcing, screening, and scheduling across 850M+ profiles. Built for recruiters, agencies, and hiring teams. Learn more and check out a demo: https://www.pin.com/book-a-demo?via=adam-posner Thanks for listening, and please follow us on Insta @NHPTalent and www.youtube.com/thePOZcast For all episodes, please check out www.thePOZcast.com TAKEAWAYS: 1. Same Tools, Same Results — You Have to Rebuild the Engine The insight at the heart of Pin: giving AI the same Boolean search infrastructure that human recruiters use produces the same mediocre results, just faster. The only way to get genuinely better outcomes is to rebuild the search engine itself so that AI can operate on a fundamentally different foundation. That's what Pin did — and why the results look different. 2. The Best Candidate Should Be First, Not on Page Seven The clearest signal that a recruiting search tool is working: the most qualified candidate for a role appears at the top of results, not buried deep in a list that requires manual excavation. For recruiters who've spent years digging through pages of search results, seeing the right person in slot one is a genuinely disorienting experience — in the best way. 3. Natural Language Filtering Closes the Gap Between Search and Judgment Standard filtering tools handle objective criteria — location, tenure, title. Pin's natural language feature handles the subjective judgment calls that used to require hours of resume scanning: the specific details that determine whether a candidate is actually worth a call. Resolving those questions in two questions or fewer is a meaningful time return for high-volume recruiters. 4. Pattern Recognition Learns Even Without Feedback — But Feedback Makes It Faster Pin's algorithm doesn't require explicit feedback to improve — it reads behavioral patterns in what recruiters accept and reject and adjusts accordingly. But providing reasons for rejections accelerates the learning dramatically. The system is watching, learning, and tuning, whether or not you tell it why. 5. The Curveball Candidate Is a Feature, Not a Bug Periodically surfacing a candidate who sits just outside the current search parameters isn't an error — it's deliberate calibration. When a recruiter declines that candidate, Pin learns where the line actually lies, resulting in increasingly precise results over time. The tool is always running a low-stakes experiment to get better. 6. A Visual Pipeline Changes How You Manage a Search Pin's upcoming Kanban board — drag-and-drop stages from interested through offer made — addresses one of the most persistent frustrations in recruiting: knowing at a glance where every candidate stands without digging through notes or spreadsheets. Pipeline visibility is a workflow problem as much as a sourcing one. 7. MCP + Claude Desktop = Autonomous Sourcing The MCP Server integration is the most forward-looking announcement in this episode: the ability for Claude Desktop to run Pin autonomously, without manual recruiter input, using Claude's broad knowledge base to execute searches and surface candidates. For business development and high-volume sourcing, this is autopilot for the top of the funnel. 8. The Second Company Is Easier Because the Team Already Knows How to Build Together Steven's team story is a blueprint for founder-led companies: seven people from his first venture joined him at Pin, bringing a shared language, shared trust, and a shared understanding of what works and what doesn't. The result is what Steven calls "life on easy mode" — not because the work is easier, but because the team already knows how to do it together. 9. Always Give Feedback to Your AI Tools Every rejection is a data point. Every accept is a signal. The recruiters getting the best results from AI-powered search tools are the ones who treat the interface as a two-way conversation — providing context, reasons, and reactions that train the system toward increasingly precise output. Passive use gets passive results. CHAPTERS: 00:00 – Day 9: The Return of Steven Lu Adam, on day 9 of 10 at Transform, welcomes back Steven Lu — a returning guest and the founder of Pin, the recruiting AI tool Adam uses every day. 02:00 – Why Giving AI Boolean Tools Gets You Boolean Results The core problem Pin was built to solve: if you give AI the same search tools as a human recruiter, you get the same results. Pin rebuilt the search engine itself so AI could actually deliver better outcomes. 04:30 – The Aha Moment: Best Candidate, Slot Number One What clients experience when they switch to Pin: the best candidate for the role appears first — not buried on page seven. 06:30 – Natural Language Questions That Answer the Hard Stuff How Pin's natural language feature goes beyond standard filters — answering the nuanced, make-or-break questions about a candidate in two questions or less. 09:00 – Pattern Recognition: Learning From Every Rejection Pin's behind-the-scenes intelligence: even without explicit feedback, the platform picks up on recruiter behavior patterns and adjusts results automatically. 12:00 – The Curveball Candidates Why Pin intentionally surfaces occasional outlier candidates — to test parameters, refine the algorithm, and deliver increasingly precise results over time. 14:30 – Alpha Drop: The Kanban Pipeline Board Feature 1 in development: a visual Kanban board for tracking candidates through the hiring pipeline with full drag-and-drop functionality. 17:00 – Alpha Drop: MCP Server + Claude Desktop Integration The bigger announcement: Pin is building an MCP Server integration that allows Claude Desktop to run Pin autonomously — putting AI-powered sourcing on autopilot. 20:00 – The Team Behind Pin: Seven People Who Followed Him Seven employees from Steven's first company joined him for Pin — and that shared experience is what makes the second company feel like "life on easy mode." 22:30 – Real Results: Fees Collected, Offers Made The feedback that hits hardest: fee emails arriving up to 20 a day, and Adam's live proof point — three Pin-sourced candidates getting offers by end of the week. 24:30 – Where to Find Pin A direct listener recommendation: try pin.com, mention Adam and Steven, and see what a rebuilt search engine actually delivers.
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