I Meant to Take the Week Off

I went in for shoulder surgery last week to repair a SLAP tear, so I didn’t write the newsletter. Nothing specific had even happened to trigger the injury – it was just the latest reminder that I’m getting old.

Thank you to everyone who wished me well on LinkedIn!

When I planned for the week of the surgery, I was expecting to lose most of the week’s productivity. Typing with one arm is slow and frustrating, and I didn’t expect to get much done besides maybe catching up on the latest season of The Four Seasons.

Instead I rebuilt ERE Pro, our on-demand video site for TA leaders, in three days, working almost entirely by giving voice instructions to Claude and reviewing the code as it went. 

The original site took a couple of months to build in 2020. I created it then because we needed somewhere to put the video from the virtual conferences that we were running during the COVID lockdown. Today it is more of a repository of the collective wisdom of the talent acquisition community.

The rebuild was quick, but it’s taken us years to curate the high-quality videos on the site. ERE Pro holds recordings from every session at our conferences, which now come to more than 425 hours of lectures and conversations with some of the most accomplished talent acquisition leaders in the profession. It covers topics like AI adoption, managing talent acquisition teams, working with hiring managers, candidate experience, and employer branding.

The new part is Talent Advisor, an AI with access to all this material, which you won’t find in ChatGPT or anywhere else online. Ask it a recruiting question and it answers from what the speakers on our stage have actually said, and points you to the sessions it drew from.

I tried it with a question every recruiting leader has asked: 

How do I get hiring managers to give useful interview feedback?

I expected the usual counsel about scorecards and deadlines. Instead, I got detailed advice, starting with an analysis of the most common root cause of the problem, which is a lack of hiring manager training and calibration. It suggested putting four real candidates in front of them within ten days of the kickoff and getting real feedback on each one, with a focus on not just who they like, but also what they like about each person. Then it pointed me to Kelly Bogey of OLIPOP, who got her executive team to fund interview training by pricing the hours she was asking for against the cost of a single bad hire.

Attendees of the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit have always had access to ERE Pro to rewatch or catch up on missed sessions, but nobody has the time to watch the hundreds of hours of video on the site. With the addition of Talent Advisor, we’ve unlocked all that knowledge and made it usable to help solve the real challenges that recruiters face day-to-day.

There are two ways in. The first is to subscribe to ERE Pro, which starts with a free seven day trial. The second is to register for the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit, which will be in San Diego on November 10 and 11. An in-person or virtual registration gets you three months of free access to all of ERE Pro, including Talent Advisor.

Give it a shot and tell me what you think.

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along — and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

Sponsored Content

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit - November 10-11

On November 10-11, join fellow talent acquisition leaders in San Diego for the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit, a practitioner-led event built around the real work of recruiting today.

You’ll hear from TA leaders sharing what is working, what is not, and what they are still figuring out across AI, hiring strategy, candidate experience, and recruiting operations. And the sessions are only the beginning. Small-group speaker AMAs give attendees direct access to speakers and peers for deeper, practical conversations after each session.

More Recruiting Insights

People have clicked the “Seems like AI slop” button on LinkedIn over a million times already. I’ve written about LinkedIn’s growing problem with AI slop. The company reports that users have flagged suspected low-quality AI content more than 1 million times since it introduced its “Seems like AI slop” option, while changes to its detection systems have cut views of content it classifies that way by 40%. (Techspot)

Salesforce leads $166 million investment in HiBob, valuing Israeli HR tech company at $3.2 billion. I met Ronni Zehavi and the HiBob team at the HR Tech Conference last year, and they made a strong impression on me. So this news caught my attention: Salesforce is leading a $166 million investment in HiBob, valuing the company at $3.2 billion. (CTech)

Talent Management May Be Dead. But HiBob Just Moved to the Front of Whatever It’s Called Next. Smart analysis on the SalesForce / HiBob investment from Steve Smith arguing that traditional talent management is giving way to a new model built around workforce data that can inform AI systems wherever work happens. (Work Tech Weekly)

A free tracker for employment AI regulation and litigation. Martyn Redstone emailed to let me know about a new resource: Warden Watch, which gives recruiting and HR teams one place to track employment-related AI rules and lawsuits, with 29 regulatory records and five litigation matters across 25 jurisdictions, including links to primary legal sources. (Warden Watch)

U.S. job openings rise slightly to 7.3 million as labor market remains sturdy. Job openings rose modestly to 7.27 million in July, but hiring fell to 5.1 million and fewer workers quit their jobs, as employers and employees both continue to show caution. (Associated Press)

Webinars

Sourcing Lab: Watch the Search Happen Live

September 15, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Expect real scenarios, real techniques, and real discussion around the moments that usually get edited out: dead-end searches, unexpected pivots, adjacent talent pools, niche communities, AI-assisted approaches, and the lateral thinking required to find people who don’t show up in a straightforward keyword search.

You’ll hear how these sourcers decide when to abandon one approach and try another, which tools and techniques they reach for when a search gets difficult, and why four experienced sourcers can attack the same challenge in completely different ways. (ERE)

What AI Is Actually Delivering in Recruiting: New Research from Kyle Lagunas

September 18, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Kyle Lagunas has spent the past three years studying how AI performs inside real talent acquisition teams. His research includes a survey of more than 350 senior HR and talent leaders, a head-to-head evaluation of 12 AI interviewing platforms, and an in-depth look at the rise of candidate fraud.

In this session, Kyle will share the findings that matter most to recruiting leaders. He will break down where AI is delivering measurable value, where tools are falling short, and what organizations should consider before making their next investment. (ERE)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

San Diego, CA
November 10-11, 2026

Talent acquisition is moving fast. The best leaders are not just chasing trends. They are comparing notes, testing new approaches, and learning from practitioners who are already deep in the work.

This November, the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit comes to San Diego for two days of practical insight, honest discussion, and peer-to-peer learning. You’ll hear real examples from recruiting teams tackling today’s biggest questions, from AI and automation to candidate trust, quality of hire, hiring manager alignment, employer brand, and recruiting at scale.

We hope to see you there! (ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)