The Jim Stroud Podcast

The Jim Stroud Podcast

The Jim Stroud Podcast is part therapy, part exposé—and grounded in reality. Some weeks, I talk with insiders. Most weeks, I say the quiet parts out loud—no filter, no fluff, and no patience for corporate nonsense. This isn’t career advice theater. It’s the raw, unvarnished side of work: AI misfires, hiring hypocrisy, culture scams, and why the future of work increasingly feels like a Black Mirror episode in business casual. This podcast is for leaders, recruiters, advisors, and job seekers who want unfiltered clarity about what’s actually happening at work—and what it means for the decisions ahead. It’s not for anyone looking for motivational fluff, corporate talking points, or sanitized “best practices.” Because what’s coming for your job, your company, and your peace of mind won’t show up in an all-hands meeting. But you’ll hear it here. This podcast is brought to you in part by The Recruiting Life newsletter—clarity on what’s happening now and next in the world of work. Subscribe at 👉 https://jimstroud.beehiiv.com

Episodes

The Most Private Data Your Employer Will Ever Touch

October 5, 2026 • 12 mins
The Most Private Data Your Employer Will Ever Touch In clinical trials right now, people who can't move their hands are typing with their thoughts. Investors put about a billion dollars into brain-computer interfaces last year. Precision Neuroscience, Neuralink, and Synchron led the charge. Most Human Resources (HR) leaders assume none of this will ever reach their desk. It will, and it won't come through procurement. Drawing on ...
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Why Recruiters Never Find the Best Candidates

September 28, 2026 • 10 mins
You're qualified. You're experienced. And when a recruiter searches for your job title, your name never loads. Here's how recruiter search works and four moves to get found this week. 🎧 ... Cited in this podcast: Job Search 3.0 (jobsearch.jimstroud.com) Career Intelligence Weekly (newsletter.jimstroud.com) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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4 AI Job Storms Are On The Horizon

September 21, 2026 • 14 mins
A storm sits offshore, and the map shows four tracks. That's the AI labor market, according to a new Conference Board report offering four futures and no odds. So how do you write a workforce plan under a map like that? Jim borrows the answer from coastal families, who read their own gauges and write their rules before the storm season starts. In this episode, you'll get five gauges hiding in your recruiting data, the trigger e...
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How to Spot People Who Actually Know AI

September 14, 2026 • 28 mins
AI can help almost anyone produce average work. So how do recruiters identify the people who can actually think, judge, and create beyond the machine? In this episode of The Jim Stroud Podcast, Jim talks with Bryan McAnulty about what AI fluency really looks like, how hiring assessments need to change, and why judgment, communication, workflow design, and specialized knowledge are becoming more valuable as AI handles more of the...
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Your employer is about to cut your pay and call it a benefit

September 7, 2026 • 12 mins
Mercer says employer health costs jump 8.2 percent in 2027, the steepest climb since 2003. That number made the headlines. A second number in the same survey decides what happens to your paycheck, and it got almost no ink. This episode follows the money from a doctor's office to a benefits meeting you will never attend, then lands on the one decision still in your hands. Brought to you by: Career Intelligence Weekly https://ne...
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Test Them With AI. Test Them Without It.

August 31, 2026 • 14 mins
Your candidate nailed questions one and two. Question three broke him. That's hiring now: the chatbot did the prep, and you have to find the person underneath. This episode is the fix. How to hire thinkers, keep the ones you have, and spot the moment your team stops thinking. ... This episode brought to you by Career Intelligence Weekly - Tracking the hidden job market for smarter career decisions. https://newsletter.jimstroud.co...
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The Rot You Can't See on a Resume

August 24, 2026 • 12 mins
What happens when AI makes you more productive—but less capable? Jim Stroud explores the hidden “cognitive debt” of outsourcing your thinking, the growing divide between AI-fluent workers and passive dependents, and why recruiters can no longer trust polished resumes as proof of real ability. The new hiring challenge: finding candidates whose brains still work when the machine steps away. Sponsored by: Career In...
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Nobody owns the decision that costs you rent

August 17, 2026 • 11 mins
A model spends 300 milliseconds on your resume and the decision follows you for years. Courtrooms are fighting over whether hiring algorithms tilt toward some candidates or against others, and both sides are arguing about the wrong thing. This episode makes the case that the real scandal is not the bias setting. It is that nobody has to sign their name next to a rejection. ... Brought to you by: Career Intelligence Weekly https...
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Time Travelers in Your Pipeline

August 10, 2026 • 14 mins
In this episode: One in five LinkedIn users has rewritten a job they already left. A new Stanford study caught "time travelers" adding AI skills to old roles, deleting DEI, and letting chatbots ghostwrite their pasts. What the edits reveal, and why a freshly polished old job is the loudest hire-me signal nobody is watching. ... Brought to you by my newsletters: The Recruiting Life Career Intelligence Weekly https://newsletter.jim...
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We Have AI. Do We Still Need HR?

August 3, 2026 • 30 mins
Jim Stroud speaks with Susan Anderson, Chief Services Officer for Mitratech’s HR Solutions Division, about why human judgment, accountability, and transparency still matter in an AI-powered workplace. They discuss AI-driven hiring decisions, workplace policies, employee productivity, algorithmic management, compensation, and whether AI agents should be treated like workers. Susan explains how HR can help organizations redesi...
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Fairness Is Not the Same as Equal

July 27, 2026 • 30 mins
What does fairness at work really look like, and who is responsible for creating it? Jim Stroud speaks with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, author of Seeking Fairness at Work, about workplace expectations, manager accountability, employee engagement, unwritten rules, and when it may be time to address a problem or move on. ... Connect with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner via LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannahaslkelchner/ ... Book Website:...
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Recruiters Will Decide Which Companies Survive the Silver Talent Wave

July 20, 2026 • 12 mins
Companies claim they cannot find enough talent while routinely rejecting professionals with decades of experience. This episode examines the “overqualified” trap, age bias in recruiting, and how outdated hiring systems may be creating the very talent shortages companies are struggling to solve. Brought to you by my newsletters: The Recruiting Life Career Intelligence Weekly https://newsletter.jimstroud.com Learn mor...
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The Great AI Layoff Lie

July 13, 2026 • 31 mins
Is AI really replacing workers, or are companies using it to justify decisions they already planned to make? Jim Stroud sits down with technology equity activist and AI for Job Security Foundation President Leigh Felton to discuss AI washing, failed automation experiments, responsible AI, workplace bias, and the risks of allowing algorithms to make decisions about human potential. They also explore why some companies are rehiring ...
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The Retirement Map is a Lie

July 6, 2026 • 13 mins
The retirement map you were handed at 25 is wrong. It told you to work hard, hit 65, and disappear. Clean ending. Simple math. It was always a lie. The labor force is aging, and companies are not ready. Artificial intelligence (AI) is eating the entry-level jobs that used to grow the next generation of leaders. And the people with the deepest knowledge, the ones who know where the bodies are buried, are being passed over by hirin...
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College is Not the Only Path to Success

June 29, 2026 • 31 mins
What if college is no longer the only path to a meaningful, high-paying career? In this episode of The Jim Stroud Podcast, Jim sits down with Reuben Ogbonna, co-founder and executive director of the Marcy Lab School, a tuition-free, one-year alternative to college helping young adults launch careers in tech. Reuben shares why the traditional higher education model is failing too many talented students, especially those facing cru...
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Are we becoming less human?

June 22, 2026 • 34 mins
AI is reshaping work, hiring, dating, leadership, and how we connect. But as technology gets smarter, are we becoming less human? Jim Stroud talks with Victor Cho, CEO and founder of Emovid and former CEO of Evite, about empathy, leadership, automation, and building AI that amplifies people instead of replacing them. Learn more at www.Emovid.com. ... Victor ChoCEO and Co-Founder Emovid Corpvictor@emovid.com Starting your job sear...
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A Tale of Two Resumes

June 15, 2026 • 9 mins
After months of rejections, a 58-year-old man decides to test the system. He submits two nearly identical job applications to the same company—one with his real work history and graduation year, the other carefully scrubbed of any age clues. One gets an immediate rejection. The other gets a callback. What starts as a quiet experiment to beat the algorithm quickly turns into something much darker once he lands a job inside th...
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Are There Really Jobs, or Just Openings Nobody Plans to Fill?

June 8, 2026 • 16 mins
Are there really jobs out there, or just openings nobody plans to fill? In this episode, Jim Stroud breaks down the strange, tangled reality of today’s labor market, where job postings are up, hiring feels frozen, recruiters are stuck in limbo, and job seekers are losing trust in the system. The market is not booming. It is not collapsing. It is entangled. This episode brought to you by: The Recruiting Life & Career In...
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The Robot Isn’t Coming for Your Job. The Spreadsheet Is.

June 1, 2026 • 20 mins
Brought to you by: The Recruiting Life Newsletter - Clarity on what's happening now and next in the world of work. https://newsletter.jimstroud.com ... AI may not take your job overnight, but the spreadsheet might decide your team needs fewer people. In this episode, we move past the sci-fi panic and look at the real workplace question: how employers will use AI to change headcount, hiring, productivity expectations, and caree...
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All those AI Layoffs Were for Nothing

May 18, 2026 • 15 mins
Gartner studied 350 executives at billion-dollar companies. Eighty percent had cut staff for AI. None of it correlated with higher returns. Goldman Sachs found the stock bounce is gone. Forrester predicted half of all AI-attributed layoffs would be reversed by 2027. The data is in, and it says the same thing from every angle: the cuts were theater. This episode breaks down who knew, who stayed quiet, and what the companies actuall...
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