Hiring Excellence with Johnny Campbell

How do you build a talent acquisition function that can go from five hires at a site to 60 in two months, then back again?Johnny is joined by Patrick Grant, Head of Talent Acquisition at Watlow, a 100-year-old St. Louis engineering and manufacturing company riding the semiconductor cycle. Patrick shares how he built global TA from scratch in two years, cut 15–20 agencies down to two preferred vendors, and is using text-first screening, referrals and early-career pipelines to flex with demand.Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/pgrant24/

How do you buy and implement AI in talent acquisition without making your problems worse?Johnny is joined by Eileen Kovalsky, a TA practitioner of almost 30 years who has worked in TA ops at companies including Mondelez and General Motors, worked on the vendor side at Paradox, and now consults independently.They cover why process must come before tech, defining your North Star, phasing rollouts, and why change management is the hardest part. Useful whether you’re buying TA tech or selling it.

HSBC hires 40,000 to 50,000 people a year. So how do you bring AI into that without losing what matters most? In this conversation from our recent SocialTalent Live webinar, Johnny sits down with Noel Brown, Global Head of Enterprise Talent at HSBC, to unpack their guiding principle: don’t automate trust. Noel shares how HSBC uses an AI interviewer to understand the career goals of its own workforce, why the “no” experience matters as much as the “yes”, and why every dollar spent on tech needs $3–4 more in change to land.

Johnny sits down with Nick Vitale, Head of Global Talent Acquisition and Mobile Strategy at Kenvue, the consumer health company spun out of Johnson & Johnson. Nick walks through standing up a global TA function from a near-blank sheet: staying lean on tech at day one, using RPO for flexibility, and fixing people and process before technology. He also covers building recruiter capacity for real talent advisory work, and why agentic AI needs intent, not just enthusiasm.

Most TA teams are using AI to cope with more volume. Fewer are asking where it belongs. This episode replays AI Native, Still Human, a conversation from our SocialTalent Live webinar in September. Johnny talks to Kyle, Director of Talent Acquisition at Grindr, and Mick, co-founder of Smart Jobs. Kyle explains how an AI chief of staff built by his own recruiters takes a role from kickoff to launch in five minutes. Mick brings a sales lens: not every candidate is equal, because of how they found you.