How to become a commercial TA leader with Jessica Zwaan

In this special compilation episode of Hiring on All Cylinders, we bring together the best moments from interviews with winners of the HIGHER Talent100 — the annual list recognizing the most impactful TA leaders across 200+ organisations. From building recruiting functions from zero, to aligning TA with $13.8 million in revenue, to navigating the AI hype without losing the human element — these are the stories, frameworks, and hard-won lessons that define the best in the business. Featuring: Jennifer Anker Kaufman (Illumio), Jonathan Beaney (Revolut), Becky McCullough (HubSpot), Jim Turbek (Box), Samantha Perlman (OneSignal), Alexa Lane (Placements.io), Kobi Ampoma (Heineken), Jerome Leclercq (Wise), Tommy Hansen (Juniper Square), Manjuri Sinha (Miro), Karen Arnold (Automattic), and Anastasia Pshegodskaya (Remote).

Danielle Clark leads a team of 130 people across five countries as VP of Global Talent at eBay — covering everything from talent acquisition to learning, performance, ops, and analytics under one roof. In this episode, she sits down with Matt Staney to unpack how eBay built an innovation hub in India from scratch, scaling from zero to 1,000 hires in under a year while maintaining just 6% attrition. Danielle shares the playbook behind their high-velocity hiring drives, why leadership hires should come first, and how tools like BrightHire are helping her team move from reactive order-taking to genuine talent intelligence. She also gets into eBay's responsible AI framework, why "human in the loop" is non-negotiable, and what it really takes to get hiring managers on board with interview transparency. If you're navigating AI adoption, global scaling, or trying to consolidate your talent function — this one's packed with practical takeaways.

The AI talent market has fundamentally shifted. It's no longer a sourcing problem — it's a differentiation problem. The talent is findable. The challenge is cutting through the noise and capturing hearts and minds. In this episode of Hiring on All Cylinders, Matt Staney sits down with Evie Rose-Deighan, VP of AI & Deep Tech at Talentful, to unpack what's changed in the six years she's spent scaling teams at some of the most ambitious AI and deep tech companies in the world. From frontier labs racing toward AGI to Series A startups building founding engineering teams, Evie breaks down why the old playbook doesn't work, what top AI talent actually cares about, and why the recruiter's role is shifting from executor to strategic advisor. We get into the pivot from research to application, why your EVP matters more than your compensation package, how to rethink your assessment process to actually impress the best candidates, and why your founding team is your talent strategy.

Amanda Johnson, Senior Director of Global TA at DeepL, joins Kathryne Friend to unpack how she built a data-driven hiring engine across Salesforce, Uber and DeepL. From turning recruiter buy-in into genuine data fluency, to rethinking candidate profiles as AI reshapes how we work — Amanda shares the frameworks behind a 25% YoY productivity increase, improved NPS, and a hiring function that measures what actually matters: right people, right roles, staying power.

Hope Weatherford, VP of Talent Acquisition at Camunda, is doing what most TA leaders are still evaluating: building. In this episode, she sits down with Matt Staney to unpack how she vibe-coded her own interview question generator and JD tool with zero engineering background, why "change leadership is the job now," and how Camunda's process orchestration mindset is reshaping how her team hires. We get into over-engineering vs. first principles, the deepfake and fake-candidate problem, and the near-future where AI agents are extensions of us; applying for jobs, splitting revenue, and forcing a rethink of what "capability" even means. If you're a TA leader wondering where to start, Hope's answer is simple: just do it.