Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?

The episode has a handful of useful data points about LLM adoption and an interesting framing of ChatGPT's subscription model versus Google's ad model, but large portions are promotional throat-clearing, the Google comparison is drawn out well past its analytical value, and the mid-roll ad eats into substance. The actual tactical insight for a TA operator is thin: build an app, high-intent candidates arrive.

“ChatGPT is actually doing that five and a half times quicker”

“75% of revenue from ChatGPT comes from subscriptions. So that's coming from individuals who Pay to use ChatGPT more”

The Google-to-ChatGPT analogy is the dominant frame and it is already a widely circulated comparison in marketing and tech circles. The subscription-vs-ad-model distinction is a mildly fresh angle, and the 'headhunter for every job seeker' framing is pleasant, but the episode does not surface any contrarian or first-principles argument that challenges received wisdom in TA.

“It's called SEO 2.0 because we're comparing, you know, obviously to those Google days”

“I think this is like a really meaningful step for essentially a, you know, a kind of head hunter or a recruiter agent for, you know, every job seeker in the world”

Ben Russell is a genuine practitioner — co-founder of a startup with a real OpenAI partnership and enterprise client work — which gives him credible first-hand context. He is not a career thought-leader, but four years building a niche recruiting-tech startup is a limited operational track record, and the conversation stays at a strategic/marketing level rather than revealing hard-won operational depth.

“We've been partnering with OpenAI for the last couple of years now”

“we're building individual apps for, for enterprise clients, for enterprise employers”

The episode includes several concrete figures — 900M weekly users, 65% US market share, 5.5× faster growth than Google, 75% of ChatGPT revenue from subscriptions, 98% of early Google revenue from AdWords — which is above average for a podcast of this type. However, sourcing is consistently vague ('I think,' 'estimated'), and examples of employer outcomes or Sonic Jobs performance data are absent.

“I think it's now 900 million weekly users. The thick end of 20 billion weekly prompts”

“98% of revenue came from its AdWords product”

The host asks reasonable scene-setting questions but never pushes back on the guest's clearly promotional framing, does not probe on evidence quality or competing evidence, and at one point calls the guest 'Mike' instead of 'Ben.' Questions are largely open invitations for the guest to pitch rather than genuine intellectual challenges.

“And just to clarify, how does that work?”

“You mentioned indeed a few times and they're doing things in ChatGPT as well. How does this differ from what indeed are doing?”