The Hiring Room

AI Agents are Already Recruiting- Are you Ready for It? with Steve Zipparro

AI agents are already taking candidate calls, running pre-screens, and digging through old databases to find people recruiters forgot about. Steve Zipparro spent 20+ years on the staffing side before moving into staffing tech, and he's watching this shift happen from the inside. In this episode, Renee and Steve talk through what AI can actually do in recruiting today versus what's still just noise, why staffing hasn't changed much in decades until now, the token and credit costs behind these AI agents, and why the human side of recruiting still wins, especially in executive search where trust and relationships carry the deal. They also get into training recruiters, hiring internally, tripling sales during the 2008-2009 recession, and how LinkedIn changed cold outreach for good. About the Host Renee Beckman is the Founder of MSeed, where she partners with growth-stage and mid-market companies to build disciplined, repeatable hiring systems. With over two decades in executive search and talent strategy, Renee has interviewed thousands of professionals and built leadership teams across industries. Through her SearchOS methodology, she helps organizations reduce costly hiring mistakes and create structured hiring ecosystems that drive long-term performance. Learn more at: www.mseedinc.com [http://www.mseedinc.com] https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-beckman/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-beckman/]

AI Isn't Taking Your Job. It's Exposing Whether You Can Think with Devin Johnson

Devin Johnson spent 7 years at Amazon at the intersection of employee experience and AI workforce development. Now at Nordstrom, he's watching the same questions play out in retail — and he's got clear opinions about what companies are getting wrong.   This episode covers the roles AI is reshaping first, the growing gap between what schools are teaching and what companies actually need, what a real job search strategy looks like right now, and why the fear-based narrative around AI unemployment is making things worse. Devin is optimistic about the future of work — but clear-eyed about the mistakes being made on the way there.   Topics include: AI and future hiring, critical thinking as a workforce skill, early career talent gaps, retail high-volume hiring, candidate experience, job seeker strategy, small business AI adoption, data center environmental impact, and the need for federal guardrails on AI. ABOUT THE HOST   Renee Beckman is the Founder of MSeed, where she partners with growth-stage and mid-market companies to build disciplined, repeatable hiring systems.   With over two decades in executive search and talent strategy, Renee has interviewed thousands of professionals and built leadership teams across industries. Through her SearchOS methodology, she helps organizations reduce costly hiring mistakes and create structured hiring ecosystems that drive long-term performance.   Learn more at: www.mseedinc.com [http://www.mseedinc.com] https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-beckman/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-beckman/]

Why People Follow This CFO From Company to Company with Becky Norris

Becky Norris is the CFO of North Star Aerospace, now a GE Aerospace company. She has spent over two decades in finance, working her way up from senior accountant to divisional CFO across three companies, each one eventually acquired or sold. In this episode, Renee and Becky talk about why people follow Becky from job to job, what actually makes a leader worth trusting, and why she interviews for culture fit over skill set every time. They also dig into the differences between private equity ownership models, what changes when a company gets absorbed by a corporation the size of GE, and whether AI is really replacing jobs or just getting blamed for layoffs that are really about cost cutting. If you hire people, lead a team, or are trying to figure out what kind of leader you want to be, this conversation is full of real, unscripted advice from someone who has lived it. ABOUT THE HOST Renee Beckman is the Founder of MSeed, where she partners with growth-stage and mid-market companies to build disciplined, repeatable hiring systems. With over two decades in executive search and talent strategy, Renee has interviewed thousands of professionals and built leadership teams across industries. Through her SearchOS methodology, she helps organizations reduce costly hiring mistakes and create structured hiring ecosystems that drive long-term performance. Learn more at: www.mseedinc.com [http://www.mseedinc.com] https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-beckman/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-beckman/]

Why Business Owners Are Underestimating AI's Impact & What It Means for Hiring with Ganesh Krishnan

Ganesh Krishnan has been working in machine learning for over 20 years — at eBay, IBM, and alongside the team that built the transformer model at Google DeepMind. So when he talks about what business owners are getting wrong about AI right now, it's worth slowing down and listening. In this conversation, Ganesh and Renee cover a lot of ground. They start with the big picture: why the velocity of AI is closer in scale to the invention of computers than any previous tech wave — and why most leaders aren't taking that seriously enough. From there they get practical. Ganesh walks through what he does when he interviews candidates for his 28-person team: he opens up ChatGPT with them in the room and watches how they think, not what the tool spits back. He explains what separates the people who are going to thrive from the people who are going to get left behind — and it's not what most people expect. They also dig into hallucination: why it's still the central unsolved problem with LLMs, why it matters so much for companies trying to use AI in finance or operations, and what Ganesh's team is building with Hal0 to try to address it. The conversation moves into bigger territory from there: who controls the major AI models, what Google's actual incentives are versus Alibaba's, and whether the career ladder as we know it survives the next five years. Honest, direct, and full of things you haven't heard on the standard AI podcast circuit. ABOUT THE HOST Renee Beckman is the Founder of MSeed, where she partners with growth-stage and mid-market companies to build disciplined, repeatable hiring systems. With over two decades in executive search and talent strategy, Renee has interviewed thousands of professionals and built leadership teams across industries. Through her SearchOS methodology, she helps organizations reduce costly hiring mistakes and create structured hiring ecosystems that drive long-term performance. Learn more at: Website: https://www.mseedinc.com [https://www.mseedinc.com] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-beckman/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-beckman/] YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MSeed-Inc [https://www.youtube.com/@MSeed-Inc]

He Was Inside Coinbase During the IPO. Here Is What He Learned About Culture with Dr. Adam Link

Dr. Adam Link was at Coinbase when it was still under a thousand people. He watched it grow to over five thousand, lived through the IPO, and then walked away on purpose. What followed was three startup exits, backend teams, earn-outs that did not fully pay out, and eventually a fiduciary wealth management firm he built from scratch called Fireweed Capital. In this episode Renee and Adam talk about what hypergrowth does to a company's culture, what he looks for when he builds a small team, and why abundance mindset is the hardest thing to hire for. They also get into retirement planning, what a fiduciary advisor actually does differently, and why outliving your money is the risk nobody takes seriously enough until it is too late. Plus Adam breaks down the AI marketing agent he built himself to replace an outside agency and why he thinks small businesses will absorb the impact of AI very differently than anyone is predicting. A candid conversation with someone who has been on the inside of hypergrowth and chose to build something small and intentional instead. ABOUT THE HOST Renee Beckman is the Founder of MSeed, where she partners with growth-stage and mid-market companies to build disciplined, repeatable hiring systems. With over two decades in executive search and talent strategy, Renee has interviewed thousands of professionals and built leadership teams across industries. Through her SearchOS methodology, she helps organizations reduce costly hiring mistakes and create structured hiring ecosystems that drive long-term performance. Learn more at: www.mseedinc.com [http://www.mseedinc.com] https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-beckman/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-beckman/]