New Episode
Paid License, No Clue
with Vanessa Raath, Founder, The Talent Hunter; Global Keynote Speaker, Talent Sourcing Strategist, and AI Strategist
About This Episode
Here's the most common way recruiters use AI, according to the woman who has trained more than 8,000 of them: paste three to five CVs and a job description into the free version of ChatGPT, then ask it to pick the best candidate. Vanessa Raath's reaction is the whole episode in one line: “Why are you handing over why you were actually hired to do the role?”
Vanessa started out as a teacher, became a scuba diving instructor across the Far East and East Africa, and then landed in recruiting, where she noticed nobody was teaching recruiters how to actually find people. She founded The Talent Hunter in 2019 and has trained professionals in more than 100 countries. In 2023 she turned her focus to AI because, in her words, it was coming for her breakfast. She refuses to call herself a subject matter expert. She's a Subject Matter Enthusiast, because anyone who claims to be the expert will be out of date in half an hour.
Her fixes are refreshingly basic. Pick your weapon (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot) and pay for it. Stop using it like a glorified Google. Treat it like a junior member of your team, give it real context, and build skills so it learns how you work. She has one called “Van's Voice,” trained on hours of her own training sessions, that writes outreach you can't tell came from AI.
The bigger point: AI amplifies whatever habits you already have, good or bad. Ashley adds that it also kills the excuses. If you can't spend the AI inch of effort on a candidate, that tells everyone what your culture really is. Vanessa expects recruiter numbers to drop, and says the industry could use a tidy-up anyway. The recruiters who stay will be the ones who specialize, build a network, and have a brand people can actually look up.
Then they get into the doom loop. Vanessa signed up for an auto-apply tool just for fun and watched it apply her to Java developer jobs (she can't write a line of code). Ashley describes the bots interviewing bots, and Vanessa tells the story of a client meeting with two humans and five AI note takers. They draw a clear line on AI screening: great for 3,000 call center applicants, not for your next CTO.
On outreach, Vanessa disagrees with Desiree to keep it spicy. LinkedIn's built-in AI messages are terrible, she says, but a well-trained AI that researches the candidate can write outreach better than most humans. They also cover deepfake candidates and a quick check she uses on video calls, “magpie syndrome” (buying every shiny AI tool your competitors have), and why the real divide in AI isn't by country, it's by leadership.
Her closing rule: AI handles the tasks, humans handle the trust. She wasn't booked to keynote in Australia for her PowerPoint skills, so Claude builds the slides and she brings the knowledge.
In Talent Outside the Box, Ashley looks at how identity verification tools check a candidate's digital footprint, and at what the names we give AI tools say about who we think does the thinking and who does the serving.
In this episode:
- Why Vanessa is a Subject Matter Enthusiast, not an expert
- The most common way recruiters misuse AI (and why it replaces the recruiter)
- Pick your weapon, pay for it, and stop using it like Google
- Treat AI like a junior team member, not a search bar
- AI amplifies your good habits and your bad ones
- Why the industry needs a tidy-up, and which recruiters stay
- Personal branding when the person messaging you might be a bot
- AI screening: yes for volume, no for your next CTO
- The doom loop: auto-apply bots, AI screeners, and five note takers
- How to write AI outreach that doesn't smell like AI
- Building skills in Claude, including “Van's Voice”
- Deepfake candidates and identity checks
- Magpie syndrome and smarter AI enablement
- Why leadership, not geography, decides who's ahead on AI
- AI handles the tasks, humans handle the trust
- Talent Outside the Box: digital footprints and the gender in AI tool names
Resources & Links:
- Vanessa Raath on LinkedIn
- Vanessa's website
- Free AI training for recruiters
- Vanessa's Tried & Tested AI Tools list (the one she mentions in the episode)
- Desiree's book, Leadership is a Practice, Not a Personality, is out now
- Watch Talentless on The HR Channel on Roku and Fire TV
- Join the T-Hive newsletter
This episode's partner: Phone Loops, phone straps and slings for a secure one-handed grip. Use code TALENTLESS for 15% off your entire order at phoneloops.com/TALENTLESS. We earn a commission when you use our code or link.
Episode Transcript
Full conversation — searchable and screen-reader friendly
Desiree: Well, hello folks. We are back for another round of Talentless. and Desiree is showing up elated but exhausted. Today, from a long election night, but this is going to be a wonderful episode. I'm excited, and quick one before we start. This episode is brought to you today by Phone Loops. You can check them out at phone loops.com. It's an affiliate of ours, and you get 15% off if you buy anything from them. And it's a cool thing to put on the back of your phone. I know we all spend way too much time on our phones, so it's a good way to hold it without holding it. So we're super excited for that one. But today I am excited. excited because my guest has Known her for a while, and I'm back to global TA days. and she is like the head of like the genius behind so much talent sourcing and tech talent sourcing, and she's a teacher, a scuba diver, I mean all of these things, but I really want to read her bio because I think I'm doing it dis disjustice, so I will read it. so Vanessa is Has become one of the most recognized voices in global talent sourcing. She started out as a teacher, then she became a scuba diving instructor across the Far East and East Africa. So yes, she has read panic in someone's eyes underwater. Your candidate fidgeting on Zoom does not scare her. Then she somehow ended up in recruiting and noticed almost immediately that nobody had taught recruiters how to actually find people. That gap has driven everything since. She's worked agency and internal talent act was But a deep specialty in tech sourcing, and in 2019 she founded The Talent Hunter. Since then, she's trained more than 8,000 professionals in over 100 countries, delivered keynotes on five continents, and built an online academy with seven courses from Boolean to personal branding. In 2023, she turned her voice focus to AI, not because it was trendy, but because she could see what was coming and wanted people teams to ready instead of blindsided. So today she trains organizations on large language models, prompting, AI workflows, and advises leadership teens on which tools are actually worth adopting. And I love that. And I love the part where you say you're not a AI expert, but you're like a subject matter enthusiast, I read somewhere.
Vanessa: Yes, yes. I'm not an SME. I'm a subject matter enthusiast and not a subject matter expert because too many of these people, and I hate to say it, but mainly men that I present with at these conferences, sat up on stage and like, we're the subject matter expert. And I'm like, well, you better be because it's going to change in the next half an hour. So you can have that title for the next half an hour and then yeah, go go and watch some some content because it's all changing so quickly.
Desiree: a subject matter expert ever again, okay? Not that I have a pick. Right. I love it so much. Like everybody, you know, like this is where we kinda stand. LinkedIn says, you know, the vo volume of applications is up, you know, but the amount of jobs is down and all of these crazy things happening in AI, people don't love it, people hate it, that you know, like we're in a weird space with AI. Why don't you first tell me a little bit about your general philosophy around where we're going in talent and AI? and how you see it shaping out over the next, you know, I don't know, six months 'cause everything moves so fast. Yeah.
Vanessa: Yeah. Well, let's let's talk six weeks. But no So when you mentioned in 2023 I pivoted into AI, the big reason, if I'm honest, is I could see AI was coming for my breakfast because here I was a talent sourcing trainer, yet AR was getting smarter. AI could learn how to talent source and I needed to, you know, up my game. So I think where we at, I mean, we literally four years in this month. We're recording in November. Four years ago, OpenAI gave us Chat GPT, us mere mortals could start interacting with AR. it was like a flash in the pan, it would come and go in six months and get out of my hair and I could continue with everyday life. But I think what we figured out is hell no, it's actually here and it's gonna stay. So when you talk about the impact, my god, it's gonna be huge. I mean, it's it every industry, the way that we work, it's gonna affect everything. And my take on it is that let me get involved, let me add this to my training repertoire. So it's not just training about talent sourcing and personal branding and writing. Boolean, let me train TA teams and HR to learn how to use AI better because if we're not careful, it's gonna turn around and literally take our jobs out from underneath us. But we need to learn how do we work alongside it and how do we use it effectively to position ourselves for success.
Desiree: I think you said something. Hi Ashley. Ashley has joined everybody. Just so everybody knows. Ashley
Vanessa: Hey Ashley, good to see you.