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Six practitioners. Six sessions. One consistent finding across all of them: AI is not replacing the need for human judgment in recruiting. It is raising the stakes for it.
On May 14th, 2026, speakEZ Live brought together frontline talent acquisition professionals to share what is actually working with AI in recruiting — not what vendors are promising. No pitch decks. No theory. Just practitioners running real AI-assisted recruiting workflows at scale, sharing what they have learned and what is still hard.
This is the full recap. Everything worth keeping, organized by session.
speakEZ Live is the evolution of hireEZ's For Recruiters, By Recruiters (F.R.B.R.) conference series. Same mission: give real talent acquisition practitioners a real stage. 100% virtual, 100% free — because recruiting knowledge should not be gated by your TA budget.
The May 14th event covered six topics across the full recruiting lifecycle: labor market data and AI's actual impact on hiring, skills-based hiring architecture, post-offer candidate experience design, practical AI adoption for everyday recruiting workflows, people management in an AI-driven environment, and AI across the full recruiting workflow at scale.
Dr. Mallory Vachon, Chief Economist, LaborIQ
The most important thing Dr. Vachon did in her opening session was separate signal from noise — specifically, the gap between AI-driven layoff headlines and what the actual headcount data shows.
The macro hiring picture in 2026 is stark. The U.S. is on pace to add fewer than one million jobs this year — the first time since the pandemic. That is a sharp contrast to the 14 million workers hired in a single 12-month window during the post-COVID recovery. Most industries are treading water. Healthcare is the clear exception, continuing to add jobs while facing a deep structural shortage of nurses, skilled care workers, and health tech talent. Data center construction is the other growth pocket, driven by AI infrastructure buildout.
On AI-driven layoffs: the data does not support the headlines. When Dr. Vachon examined actual headcount data at companies publicly citing AI as a reason for workforce reductions, the numbers did not match the press releases. Revenue slowdowns — not AI automation — appear to be the primary driver, with AI cited as a more convenient public narrative.
"Headlines are going to be very hyperbolic and often designed to get that click. At least right now, the data is not painting a picture that layoffs are being driven by AI."
— Dr. Mallory Vachon, Chief Economist, LaborIQ
What is real and durable: a structural talent shortage. Long-term demographic shifts, declining migration, inflation, and geopolitical uncertainty will keep upward pressure on wages even as business budgets tighten. For skilled roles in healthcare, technology, finance, and legal, unemployment remains below 3%. The competition for active talent has not softened regardless of macro headlines.
What recruiters and TA leaders should do with this:
Reset talent tracking dashboard metrics every quarter — the market is moving too fast for annual benchmarking. Use actual headcount and compensation data when building business cases for leadership, not press release narratives. For skilled roles, do not assume a softer macro environment means less competition for talent. The data says otherwise.
Arron Daniels, Head of Sourcing & Recruiting, Entelligence
Arron Daniels reframed how talent acquisition teams should approach hiring with a concept he calls talent ecology. Just as a healthy forest needs a strong root system underground to produce anything visible above the surface, a healthy organization needs skills aligned across the entire employee lifecycle — not just at the moment of hire.
The core problem is a misalignment between hire criteria and performance criteria. Most organizations hire against a job description, then evaluate performance against completely different criteria six months later. The employee is confused, the recruiter looks bad, and retention suffers. Arron's approach reverses the sequence: start with what the performance evaluation will actually measure, derive the skills that map to it, then recruit to that standard from day one.
"Why have a performance evaluation that says you meet our values but you're not doing well at this, this, and this? Build the performance checklist first. Derive the skills. Then go recruit off of it."
— Arron Daniels, Head of Sourcing & Recruiting, Entelligence
Proactive talent mapping is a genuine competitive advantage. During the session, Arron walked through a live search in hireEZ — 509 pre-qualified candidates already mapped to skills, location, and compensation range for an anticipated head of marketing opening, with automated outreach sequences queued and ready. The search was built 90 days before the role was formally approved. That lead time eliminates the reactive scramble that inflates time-to-fill.
Rethinking the success metric: candidate velocity over time-to-fill. Most TA teams are measured on time-to-fill, but that metric often obscures where the bottleneck actually lives. Candidate velocity — how fast a qualified, interested candidate moves through the process once identified — shifts accountability to hiring manager throughput when it belongs there, and away from recruiting.
What recruiters and TA leaders should do with this:
Build the performance evaluation first. Derive required skills. Then write the job description to that standard — not the one written two years ago. Begin talent mapping at least 90 days before a requisition is formally opened. Track candidate velocity alongside time-to-fill to identify where your actual pipeline friction lives. Share compensation market data with hiring managers before the requisition is written, not after the offer falls through.
Michelle Hart, Senior Talent Strategist, Cottage Health
Michelle Hart has 30 years in talent acquisition across healthcare, technology, and employer branding. Her focus for Cottage Health in 2026: redesign every touchpoint between offer acceptance and day one.
Pre-boarding is where candidates quietly disengage. The problem is universal but especially acute in healthcare, where talent scarcity makes every accepted offer precious. Organizations invest heavily to earn a "yes" from a candidate, then lose them in the gap between that "yes" and their first day. The culprit is almost always the same — a dense, text-heavy onboarding email that overwhelms instead of welcomes. Candidates mark it to deal with later. Questions pile up unanswered. Trust erodes before the person ever starts.
"Every moment sends a signal. We had all the right information in that long, text-heavy email — but we were sending all the wrong signals."
— Michelle Hart, Senior Talent Strategist, Cottage Health
The solution: a living, scannable onboarding hub. Michelle replaced the email-based experience with a centralized onboarding page built using hireEZ's EZ Agent — no web development skills required. She described what she needed — onboarding timeline, orientation schedule, health screening details, FAQs, contact information, leadership introductions — and EZ Agent built a structured, branded page. Crucially, the page is live-editable: any update is immediately visible to anyone who holds the link, including candidates hired months prior.
The measurable result: fewer repetitive inbound questions from pre-hires, and new employees arriving on day one informed and confident rather than anxious. Over 60% of Cottage Health's workforce has 15 or more years of tenure. The investment in pre-boarding is about extending that retention track record to every new cohort they bring in.
What recruiters and TA leaders should do with this:
Design the pre-boarding window as deliberately as the interview process — it is equally fragile. Replace one-time text-heavy emails with a living, scannable, FAQ-forward page candidates can return to. Ensure hiring managers are making personal contact before day one, not just at orientation. Every pre-boarding touchpoint either reinforces or erodes the decision a new hire just made.
Larry Anderson, Customer Education Manager, hireEZ
Larry Anderson spent more than ten years in recruiting before joining hireEZ. His session cut through the theory-heavy AI conversation saturating the industry to focus on what is immediately usable, regardless of your current tech stack.
The core warning: do not let AI pass you by the way the internet passed Sears. The CEO who called e-commerce a fad did not lose gradually — he lost decisively. AI adoption will not take 30 years to reach universal adoption the way the internet did. The window to build comfort and practical capability is now.
For teams with native AI enabled — Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, Claude, or similar tools — Larry recommended the executive assistant frame: your AI can review your calendar and emails before your day starts, flag what you missed, draft follow-up responses, and format candidate notes for any client or hiring manager. The key behavioral shift is simple.
"Prompt the AI, then go do something else. That's where the efficiency comes in."
— Larry Anderson, Customer Education Manager, hireEZ
For teams without native AI access, two high-ROI wins require nothing new. First: Boolean string generation. Feed any large language model your job description and intake notes and receive a stronger Boolean string than most sourcers would build manually — skill synonyms, title variants, and parenthetical groupings handled automatically. Second: AI note-taking. Every smartphone and every major video platform already transcribes. Stop writing by hand.
Building reusable AI skills — saved prompt templates — is where the compounding efficiency lives. One attendee shared two live examples during the session: a Recruiting Scorecard skill that rates screening call transcriptions against a candidate rubric, and a Weekly Meeting Extractor that strips production meeting transcripts for only what is relevant to talent acquisition. These are not future capabilities. Recruiters are running them on live requisitions today.
What recruiters and TA leaders should do with this:
Identify two or three repeatable tasks that consume time without requiring judgment — build AI skills for those first. Apply the executive assistant frame to native AI tools: daily briefing, email triage, candidate note formatting. Implement AI note-taking in every interview — the technology is already available on every major video platform. And remember: AI gets you to a decision faster and more informed. It does not make the decision for you. That distinction matters legally and practically.
Kearstin McGinnis, VP of Employment, Teksynap
Kearstin McGinnis works daily at the intersection of AI adoption and people management. Her session addressed what most AI conversations skip: the fear employees feel, the disengagement that follows when that fear goes unaddressed, and the specific leadership behaviors that prevent quiet attrition before it shows in any metric.
Name the fear directly. Employees are worried about their jobs. When leaders avoid the topic, silence fills with rumors. Disengagement follows quietly — invisible until it appears in attrition data. The leaders who get ahead of this are not the ones with the best technology. They are the ones creating real clarity and meeting people where they actually are.
"The organizations that attract and retain talent won't simply have the best technology. They're going to have the strongest human connections."
— Kearstin McGinnis, VP of Employment, Teksynap
A practical retention framework: the five work love languages. Kearstin introduced a framework built around five modes of authentic engagement: personal touch (genuine one-on-one connection), acts of service (supporting people through change), quality time (real presence in 1:1 conversations), tangible investment (development and recognition), and words of affirmation (honest, consistent feedback whose absence, she noted from personal experience, is more disorienting than most managers realize).
The business case for engagement is measurable. Consistent, authentic engagement correlates with 21% higher profitability, up to 3x improvements in morale and productivity, 10% higher customer loyalty, and up to 2x lower turnover. These numbers belong in any leadership business case — not just an HR conversation.
Culture is now publicly visible. Every LinkedIn post, every Glassdoor review, every informal conversation an employee has about where they work shapes the candidate pipeline TA teams are trying to fill. The recruiting team owns that signal from the first touchpoint.
What recruiters and TA leaders should do with this:
Name AI-related fears directly in team conversations — do not let silence become its own message. Apply engagement practices individually, not just collectively. Bring the 21% profitability and 2x turnover reduction data into your next leadership conversation about team investment. Culture is a recruiting asset. Treat it like one.
Jeff DeModna, VP of Recruiting Services, ExtensisHR
Jeff DeModna closed the event with exactly the perspective the room needed: a practitioner who has run AI-assisted recruiting for nine years, at scale, for a PEO managing outsourced HR for hundreds of small and mid-sized businesses across the U.S. ExtensisHR has 27 years of history. The last three have been their biggest.
Workforce planning and intake. AI engagement starts before a search is opened. His team uses platforms that pull from Federal Census Bureau data to benchmark compensation across markets, particularly valuable as ExtensisHR has expanded into new regions. AI-generated intake templates and suggested interview questions give recruiters leverage in client conversations — setting realistic expectations on market availability and time-to-fill before expectations are locked in.
Job description creation. AI handles the initial draft — removing biased language, keeping descriptions current, producing consistent output at scale. The recruiter's responsibility is to add what AI cannot know: the growth story, the culture signals, the role context that is not in any database. As Jeff put it: ChatGPT was not in the leadership meeting. You were.
Sourcing and auto-engage at scale. ExtensisHR has used hireEZ for more than four years. The auto-engage capability — building a targeted sourcing search in seconds and reaching a candidate pool with automated, tracked follow-up — is Jeff's single biggest operational change in 15 years of recruiting. Combined with a gamified hiring manager dashboard that makes profile response rates visible data, it created shared accountability across the hiring process. Clients who took too long to respond were no longer an invisible bottleneck making recruiters look slow.
"It puts skin in the game for our clients and for the hiring managers."
— Jeff DeModna, VP of Recruiting Services, ExtensisHR
AI-assisted screening and interviewing. AI note-takers changed the quality of Jeff's interviews — not by automating the conversation, but by freeing the interviewer to be fully present in it. When you are not scrambling to document every answer, you go deeper. His standing rule: AI flags and risk identifiers are prompts to ask better follow-up questions, not grounds for a hiring decision. The final call is always human.
Offer, onboarding, and the post-hire relationship. AI generates offer letter drafts matched to job descriptions, speeding compliance review. But every candidate negotiates — interns, internal transfers, executives. That conversation is always human. And when a final-round candidate does not get the role, Jeff's team picks up the phone. A call creates closure and leaves a brand impression that an automated decline message cannot replicate.
The long-term results are concrete. ExtensisHR went from approximately 150 hires in 2023 to over 300 in 2024. Q1 2026 was their biggest quarter on record. Their AI-assisted recruiting capability is now a competitive differentiator in new business development — clients choose ExtensisHR in part because of how their recruiting function operates.
"The technology enhances recruiters. It doesn't replace them. When you can blend these together, it allows for just a great experience — and it's really made for a much more efficient process."
— Jeff DeModna, VP of Recruiting Services, ExtensisHR
What recruiters and TA leaders should do with this:
Bring AI into workforce planning and intake — not just sourcing. That is where strategic credibility is built with clients and hiring managers. Use AI to draft job descriptions; use yourself to add what AI cannot know. Make hiring manager response rates visible data, not an invisible variable. Keep the phone call in your post-offer and post-rejection process. And when you run AI-assisted recruiting well, it becomes a competitive differentiator — not just an internal efficiency tool.
Is AI replacing recruiters in 2026?
Based on data presented at speakEZ Live by Dr. Mallory Vachon, Chief Economist at LaborIQ, AI-driven layoffs are not showing up in actual headcount data despite widespread headlines suggesting otherwise. Every practitioner who spoke at speakEZ Live — across nine-plus years of AI recruiting experience — reached the same conclusion: AI is enhancing recruiter output, not replacing recruiter judgment. When AI handles sourcing, outreach, note-taking, and scheduling, what remains is the work that requires a human: trust-building, candidate assessment, and relationship management.
What does skills-based hiring actually mean in practice?
Skills-based hiring means building your recruitment criteria from the performance evaluation backward — not from the job description forward. Start with what success looks like in the role at 90 days and 12 months. Derive the skills that map to that outcome. Then source and screen against that standard. This approach, detailed by Arron Daniels of Entelligence, reduces misalignment between hire expectations and performance reality, which is one of the primary drivers of early attrition.
What is candidate velocity and why does it matter more than time-to-fill?
Candidate velocity measures how quickly a qualified, interested candidate moves through the hiring process once identified. Unlike time-to-fill — which starts the clock at requisition open — candidate velocity isolates the speed of the actual hiring decision. It separates recruiting performance from hiring manager throughput, making it possible to identify where pipeline friction actually lives. When hiring managers are the bottleneck, candidate velocity makes that visible in the data.
How do you use AI in recruiting without losing the human element?
Every session at speakEZ Live addressed this directly. The consistent answer: use AI to handle the tasks that consume time without requiring judgment — Boolean strings, note-taking, outreach sequencing, scheduling, offer letter drafts — and redirect that recovered time toward the work only a human can do: interviewing deeply, building candidate trust, making hiring decisions, and managing the post-offer relationship. AI as a co-pilot, not a replacement.
What AI tools are recruiters actually using in 2026?
Practitioners at speakEZ Live cited: large language models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot) for Boolean string generation, email drafting, and interview summarization; AI note-takers in Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet for screening and interview documentation; hireEZ for end-to-end agentic recruiting automation including sourcing across 45+ platforms, auto-engage outreach, AI candidate review and ranking, and EZ Agent for workflow automation; and saved prompt templates (AI skills) for repeatable tasks like candidate scorecards and client write-ups.
How do you build a business case for proactive talent mapping?
The business case rests on a simple calculation: reactive requisition-based hiring inflates time-to-fill, increases agency spend, and creates pressure-driven hiring decisions. Proactive talent mapping — building pre-qualified candidate pipelines 90-plus days before a role is approved — reduces all three. Arron Daniels of Entelligence demonstrated a live example during speakEZ Live: 509 pre-qualified candidates ready for outreach for a role that did not yet formally exist.
Six sessions. One consistent finding.
AI is not replacing the need for human judgment in recruiting. It is raising the stakes for it.
When AI handles sourcing, outreach, note-taking, scheduling, and Boolean string construction, what remains is the work that determines whether great candidates say yes and stay: the trust-building, the clarity, the follow-through, the moment a recruiter picks up the phone and says I see you. That work cannot be automated. Every practitioner on stage at speakEZ Live is doing it at a high level — and they built this stage to show the rest of the profession how.
speakEZ Live is hosted by hireEZ — the Agentic AI Recruiting Platform and System of Actions for Talent Acquisition. hireEZ sits on top of any ATS as an intelligent execution layer, unifying talent data and automating the full recruiting workflow: sourcing, screening, outreach, scheduling, and analytics. One platform. No rip-and-replace. Connects to 40+ ATS platforms. Deployed in weeks.
Capabilities referenced across sessions include EZ Agent for agentic sourcing and content building, AI Review for candidate ranking and job-fit analysis, auto-engage for personalized outreach automation at scale, and hireEZ's unified talent data foundation spanning 45+ platforms and 1 billion-plus candidate profiles.
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speakEZ Live | May 14, 2026 | Virtual | Free Hosted by hireEZ | hireez.com
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