33,000 Applications and Counting: Navigating the AI Hiring Surge with Katie Rakusin of Merit America
Jul 29, 2026
Katie Rakusin, Director of Talent Acquisition at Merit America. has seen the AI hiring surge hit in real time: 33,000 applications in five months, 10,000 in May alone, and yes, the bots have officially arrived. The conversation covers how her team is restructuring its entire hiring process around the assumption...
Jul 24, 2026
Jim has held senior people roles at Hulu and Quibi, but he'll tell you this job is different: the stakes are higher. The episode digs into why employer-sponsored healthcare is broken, how health deserts across rural America make virtual care a necessity, and why recruiters are leaving one of the most powerful...
Jun 30, 2026
Steve Cadigan, the first CHRO of LinkedIn and one of the most candid voices in the talent space, discusses where AI is genuinely helping organizations and where it is quietly doing damage. Steve challenges the assumption that replacing humans with AI is a strategy, makes the case that entry-level talent is the...
Jun 26, 2026
Quentin shares what it actually means to future-proof a workforce, introducing his the three box framework for simultaneously maintaining the present, abandoning the past, and building the future, and walks through a real case study from the SDN era when network engineers resisted upskilling into software roles, with...
May 29, 2026
Show Notes
Rob reunites with Erin Wilson, Talent Lead at Rox and a returning champion from the very first episode of Talk Talent to Me. Erin breaks down the two things Rocks screens for in every conversation, conviction and crank, explains why he still writes his own outreach by hand despite being one of the most...