Eightfold’s Lawsuit: A Wake-Up Call for Talent Acquisition
Posted on January 23, 2026 4 Comments
Nothing ever really happens in HR Tech. Not objectively, anyway. Sure, the messaging and product marketing might change, and there might be some M&A or funding activity impacting the ecosystem.
Most of this is esoteric inside baseball that has little to no relevance to the overwhelming majority of recruiting end users, or the candidates they’re hoping to hire.
It’s a lucrative but arcane little niche that’s oversaturated with emerging technologies positioning themselves as “challenger” brands, which is kind of cute, considering that legacy ERPs have such a disproportionate share of the HR Technology market.
The space thrives on stasis and monetizes the status quo, save for a steady drip of product announcements, “AI powered” pitch decks that all look and sound pretty much identical, and LinkedIn posts insisting that this time, it’s different.
It’s always the same shit, of course – but optics are everything in recruiting, really. This is why startups in the space generally spend more on SG&A than R&D, after all.
But then again, once in a very long while, something momentous happens, with significant repercussions for companies and candidates alike; these blue moon events do, decidedly, drive widespread changes in how companies find workers, and how candidates find companies.
Most of the time, these seminal, seismic shifts follow a pretty predictable pattern, even if no one sees them coming.
It all starts when the legal system and the talent acquisition ecosystem collide. Lawyers, as you may know, don’t really care about category positioning, product roadmaps or integration partners.
They do care about compliance – and often, when attorneys dig into the intersection of hiring and technology, they don’t see “innovation” – they see a lot of potential violations. And, inevitably, they’re forced to ask one of talent technology’s most enduring questions:
Is this even allowed?
Read MoreTalent Acquisition Trends to Watch in 2026
Posted on December 30, 2025 4 Comments
Talent Acquisition loves nothing more than a good listicle. Particularly when it’s about trends – the more ambiguous and hypothetical, the better. That’s why you’ve already been deluged by everyone’s speculative, specious “top recruiting trends in 2026,” the latest iteration of an entrenched annual ritual that’s as cloying as it is cliched.
It’s a pretty well worn canon of crappy content, mostly – and chances are, you’ve already read a ton of these annual preview posts. I feel you; the last thing anyone needs is another one, but here we go.
As a rule, recruiters tend to embrace this sort of content, presumably because it lets us pretend we know what’s coming – but the only prediction that’s unilaterally true is that predicting this market, at this moment, is as Quixotic an exercise as trying to add “AI” to a legacy ERP.
Read MoreTransforming Recruitment Marketing: From Data to Insights
Posted on November 26, 2025 1 Comment
Let’s be honest: if you’re still reporting recruitment marketing performance in spreadsheets, you’re not “data-driven,” nor does this constitute anything resembling “talent intelligence.”
You’re just stuck sometime in the era where Clippy was the most advanced answer engine on the market, Monster was still part of the S&P 500 and on-premise vs. cloud was still a real debate in the esoteric world of HR Technology.
If you’re still relying on spreadsheets and third party reporting to inform your recruitment marketing strategy, then no matter how great you might be at creating v-lookups, macros or pivot tables, you’re getting an inaccurate, incomplete and most importantly, ineffective snapshot of historical numbers without context or benchmarks.
Read MoreStill Crazy After All These Metrics: The Myth of Quality of Hire
Posted on November 20, 2025 Leave a Comment
Quality of hire is the kind of metric you trot out when you want everyone to believe you’ve unlocked the secrets of strategic recruiting without actually unlocking anything.
It’s performative, ambiguous and sounds like something you’d learn in business school, not something made up by product marketers. It looks great in a QBR. It sounds great during budget season. It gives executives that warm, fuzzy feeling that talent acquisition knows what it’s doing.
But behind the curtain, it’s no secret that no one really knows what they’re doing if their existential crisis led them to this random career path. We mostly do a pretty effective job of hiding that fact behind brand, bluster and buzzwords.
There’s a saying you can’t manage what you can’t measure, but the paradox of TA leadership is that when you have no actual clue what you’re supposed to be doing, you also have no idea what you’re supposed to be measuring, or what good looks like.
This makes choosing optics over outcomes an increasingly perilous decision for talent acquisition and recruiting leaders; the increasing focus on finally capturing the unicorn that is quantifying quality of hire proves that if recruiters disappear, it won’t be because of AI – it’ll be because of real stupidity.
Read MoreVideo Interviews Evolve: Zoom’s Strategic Move with BrightHire
Posted on November 18, 2025 Leave a Comment
When Sunset Boulevard Meets Sass
I want to tell you a story. Back when I was running social and employer content over at Monster (aka so long ago that it was actually an S&P 500 component, and dinosaurs ruled the Earth, and Taleo shipped its last update), I wrote a harmless little post on their employer resource center suggesting that companies film their hiring managers and embed those videos into job descriptions.
Nothing fancy. I pointed out that in fact, companies shouldn’t invest in video – for the recruitment marketing genre, Cinema Verite is the optimal style – a reference that was probably lost on those employers who paid agency retainers to make their career site look like a McG sizzle reel.
Then, as now, I suggested that all you need to make it not cringe was a simple introduction from the person a candidate would actually work for, talking about what the job is really like. Kind of like one of those director’s commentary tracks they used to stick on DVDs.
PS: Sorry, Gen Zers – not that you don’t get the reference, but you didn’t experience the joy waiting for Netflix to mail you DVD gems like Showgirls narrated by a drunk Paul Verhoven or Scorsese droning on about the cinematic influences of establishing shots or cutaways.
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Snark Attack 