The Jim Stroud Podcast

MIT's 11.7% isn't a prediction — it's a glowing red indicator that AI can already replace millions, and executives are simply waiting for the price tag to give them permission. | Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life Newsletter" at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The collapse in H-1B approvals for Indian firms isn't a retreat — it's a quiet transfer of power as Big Tech turns the visa pipeline into its personal talent engine. | Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life Newsletter" at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Where you work in America matters more than what you do, because state lines—not job titles—are determining who gets a life and who gets a grind. | Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life Newsletter" at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

SHRM, the organization that teaches the world how to treat people at work, is now the cautionary tale proving that even the self-proclaimed experts can forget their own fundamentals. | Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life Newsletter" at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of The Jim Stroud Podcast, Jim sits down with Josh Hill—Head of People and co-founder of SuperHired—to explore what's really happening at the intersection of HR and artificial intelligence. Drawing from his unconventional path from the Australian military to executive HR leadership, Josh breaks down why today's recruitment engine is fundamentally broken, how AI is both helping and harming the process, and why “human in the loop” isn't just a best practice—it's a necessity. Together, they dive into the future of hiring, including: Why AI should augment, not replace, human decision-making How small companies can use AI without losing their culture Which parts of recruiting must remain human-led Why resumes offer almost no predictive value—and what should replace them How clearer company context creates better candidate matches The legal and ethical traps HR leaders must navigate as AI tools proliferate Whether you're an HR executive, recruiter, or talent strategist, this conversation offers a candid, forward-thinking look at how to build more human, transparent, and effective hiring practices in an AI-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wall Street wants AI powering everything inside the bank—except your job application, where using the very tools they demand on day one can get you flagged, grilled, or tossed before you ever make it to the interview room. | Proven Base is an AI-powered talent acquisition and Deep Search sourcing platform that helps organizations find, match, and engage hard-to-find candidates from thousands of real-time online sources. https://provenbase.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A new report says men now make up most working caregivers. Proven Base is an AI-powered talent acquisition and Deep Search sourcing platform that helps organizations find, match, and engage hard-to-find candidates from thousands of real-time online sources. https://provenbase.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Washington's circling a new idea—taxing AI—and if the machines really are about to take our jobs (and our tax base), the real question is why we didn't send them the bill sooner. | Proven Base is an AI-powered talent acquisition and Deep Search sourcing platform that helps organizations find, match, and engage hard-to-find candidates from thousands of real-time online sources. https://provenbase.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The labor market is whispering six warnings right now—and if you know how to listen, you can feel the recession circling long before everyone else hears the crash. | Proven Base is an AI-powered talent acquisition and Deep Search sourcing platform that helps organizations find, match, and engage hard-to-find candidates from thousands of real-time online sources. https://provenbase.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A remote-work hustle just proved that all it takes is a stolen identity and a shipped laptop to turn corporate trust into a backdoor for trouble you never saw coming. | Proven Base is an AI-powered talent acquisition and Deep Search sourcing platform that helps organizations find, match, and engage hard-to-find candidates from thousands of real-time online sources. https://provenbase.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Even as incomes rise, Americans watch their paychecks evaporate in hours, revealing an economy so tight that survival has replaced stability—even for those earning what used to feel like “enough.” | Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life" newsletter at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ghost listings inflate the illusion of opportunity while leaving workers chasing smoke, hiring stalled, and trust drained from a labor market built on promises no one intends to keep. | Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life" newsletter at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A tech fellowship lures teenagers past the college gate, offering fast-tracked prestige and peril in equal measure as they gamble their futures on a new definition of merit written by a single company. | Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life" newsletter at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A higher wage promised dignity, but instead exposed a fault line where rising pay collided with shrinking hours, lost jobs, and the uneasy math of a system built on trade-offs no one wants to say aloud. | Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life" newsletter at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A shrinking headcount becomes a corporate trophy, masking the quiet erosion of humanity, trust, and culture beneath the glow of “lean and AI-ready” bragging rights. | Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life" newsletter at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

OpenAI's plan to automate hiring threatens to replace not just recruiters, but the human instinct to choose and be chosen—the last frontier of work going digital. / Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life" newsletter at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nearly a million young people in England are disappearing from work and education pipelines, exposing a broken system that keeps failing those it claims to help. / Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life" newsletter at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tech giants are proving they can add a trillion dollars in revenue while barely hiring, revealing an economy that grows richer by making people optional. / Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life" newsletter at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A federal lawsuit exposes how America's H-1B visa program can turn opportunity into captivity when employers weaponize immigration status to control workers. / Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life" newsletter at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When a government shutdown erases the nation's job data, recruiters and job seekers are left flying blind in an economy where trust is the only metric left. / Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life" newsletter at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Uber's paying drivers to train the very AI that could replace them—proof the gig economy's latest side hustle is teaching workers how to disappear. In the race for efficiency, we've gone from driving for Uber to driving ourselves out of a job. | Subscribe to The Recruiting Life newsletter at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Microsoft Teams is about to blur the line between “connected” and “surveilled” — using Wi-Fi to tell your boss whether you're truly in the office or just logged in from Starbucks. | Subscribe to The Recruiting Life newsletter at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The H-1B debate isn't just about visas—it's about value. Raise the bar too high, and we lose the next Google; leave it too low, and we price out our own grads. America has to decide whether it's protecting jobs or building the future. | Subscribe to The Recruiting Life newsletter at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The AI boom is minting billionaires while making workers obsolete—a digital gold rush where coders cash in and everyone else gets coded out. If we keep celebrating innovation without protecting people, we won't just have smarter machines—we'll have a dumber society. | Subscribe to The Recruiting Life newsletter at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

AI isn't coming — it's already here, and it's flipping the script on how we hire, manage, and work across the globe. In this episode, I sit down with Laura Maffucci, VP of HR at Globalization Partners (G-P), to break down how AI is reshaping everything from recruiting to compliance—and what it really means for people on both sides of the hiring table. We talk about the good, the bad, and the “uh-oh” moments of bringing AI into the workplace. Is it making hiring fairer or just faster? Can we trust it to make big decisions? And what happens when employees start wondering if the robots are coming for their jobs?

Google's not bringing interviews back in person for nostalgia — it's doing it to prove the humans are still human. | Subscribe to The Recruiting Life newsletter at JimStroud.com to keep up with what's happening now and next in the world of work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

China's 996 culture didn't vanish — it just learned to smile for compliance photos while burning people out in silence. | Subscribe to The Recruiting Life newsletter at JimStroud.com to keep up with what's happening now and next in the world of work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hiring isn't broken — trust is, and now companies are paying premium rates just to be believed again. | Subscribe to The Recruiting Life newsletter at JimStroud.com to keep up with what's happening now and next in the world of work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amazon didn't kill jobs — it rebranded erasure as “innovation” and taught us that efficiency is just empathy with the batteries drained. | Subscribe to The Recruiting Life newsletter at JimStroud.com to keep up with what's happening now and next in the world of work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Small talk didn't die — we just got too busy performing meaning to remember how to mean nothing together. | Subscribe to The Recruiting Life newsletter at JimStroud.com to keep up with what's happening now and next in the world of work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

South Africa's jobs crisis proves the harsh truth: in the age of AI, skills beat degrees every time. | Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life" newsletter at JimStroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The next diversity metric isn't gender or race—it's proving there's still a human on the payroll. | Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life" newsletter at JimStroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

America's biggest unions just told Silicon Valley: the code doesn't get the final say—workers do. | Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life" newsletter at JimStroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

JP Morgan's new $3 billion HQ trades keycards for fingerprints and eye scans—a shiny monument to how workplace security just became workplace surveillance. | Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life" newsletter at JimStroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A $75M VC firm just fired every human analyst and let AI run the show—proof that the future of work isn't coming, it's already replacing you. | Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life" newsletter at JimStroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Australia might make hybrid work a legal right—and CEOs are panicking. --- Subscribe to The Recruiting Life newsletter at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bernie says if AI takes your job, the robots should pay for it. --- Subscribe to The Recruiting Life newsletter at https://jimstroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Technology is moving faster than ever — and your comfort zone might be your biggest liability. In this inspiring episode, Jim Stroud speaks with Allister Frost, former Microsoft marketing leader and author of Ready Already, about what it truly means to develop a future-ready mindset. Frost argues that “if it works today, it's already obsolete,” and challenges professionals to rethink the myths of stability, future-proofing, and the comfort zone. Together, they explore how to stay adaptable in the AI age, why curiosity is a superpower, and how “augmented intelligence” — not artificial intelligence — can elevate your work instead of replacing it. Why Leaders Should Listen: • Learn how to break free from the “if it ain't broke, don't fix it” mindset. • Discover the Ready Already Growth Cycle — a model for constant personal and organizational reinvention. • Understand why future-proofing is a myth — and how to become future-ready instead. • Hear how curiosity and naïve questioning fuel innovation across generations. Whether you lead teams, manage change, or simply want to stay relevant in a world of accelerating disruption, this conversation will help you rethink how you learn, adapt, and lead. Learn more:

Scammers are flooding LinkedIn—and they're getting smarter. In this episode, Jim Stroud talks with Jay Jones (aka “The Profiler”), a copywriter-turned-scam hunter who has personally helped take down 31,000+ fake jobs and 7,000+ bogus profiles. Jay breaks down the most common grifts hitting job seekers and employers—from ATS “resume score” shakedowns to hijacked recruiter identities, one-way video “interviews” used to clone you, and brand-impostor company pages—then shares a clear playbook HR and TA leaders can use to protect their pipelines, reputations, and people. You'll learn: • The top red flags: Gmail “recruiters,” zero-activity profiles, low connection counts, camera-off interviews, missing requisitions, too-fast timelines. • How fake “ATS scores” and resume rewrites become gateways to identity theft. • Why hijacked profiles + brand impersonation are skyrocketing—and how to spot them fast. • Practical verification steps your recruiters should follow every time. • What companies can do beyond a website disclaimer to actively deter fraud. Resources & CTA • Jay's Scam Detection Guide (Vol. 1 – Free): Find it in the Featured section of Jay's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonesdoyoucopy/ • Volume 2: Advanced tactics, psychology of scams, and hijacked-profile forensics. https://theprofiler.gumroad.com/l/volume2 • Book Jay to brief your team or campus: mrjones@jonesdoyucopy.com • More info about Jay Jones https://theprofiler.gumroad.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this thought-provoking conversation, Jim Stroud sits down with Dayna Guido, a licensed clinical social worker and ethics consultant, to explore one of the most urgent questions facing HR leaders today: Where does humanity end and artificial intelligence begin in the world of work? Together, they unpack the ethical gray zones of AI in hiring, employee monitoring, and layoffs — and what transparency, accountability, and compassion look like in an age of algorithms. Dayna brings 46 years of experience in clinical supervision and ethics to this nuanced conversation, reminding leaders that the future of work is still human at its core. From AI-driven interviews to predictive analytics that “guess” who might quit, this episode challenges HR pros to reflect: Are we using technology to empower people, or to replace trust? Why HR Leaders Should Listen: * Discover how ethical frameworks can guide AI adoption in recruitment and employee management. * Understand the hidden risks of bias, surveillance, and AI fatigue on workforce mental health. * Learn how to build ethical resilience inside your organization — before regulators force your hand. If you believe in the power of people, this episode is a must-listen. --- Contact Dayna Guido via her website https://daynaguido.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Federal workers found their out-of-office messages hijacked and rewritten with partisan blame—without asking, without warning, and possibly breaking the law. | Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life" newsletter at JimStroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

California just told employers: if your AI discriminates, you own it—vendor, algorithm, and all the receipts for four years. | Subscribe to "The Recruiting Life" newsletter at JimStroud.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices