Okay, look, each year vendors wet their pants waiting for Gartner’s Magic Quadrant to come out. The reality is that a lot of less-than-robust (err. lazy) researched professionals use the quadrant as their go-to to pick technology. Also, a reality, if I’m a CHRO or CPO, do I really have the time to go look at a bunch of tech or am I going to assume a trusted-partner like Gartner will do all of that work for me?

Honestly, in some past years, I’ve seen the magic quadrant and thought to myself, “Yeah, all the major players are there. Maybe some aren’t where I think they should be, but they didn’t miss anyone.” In the 2025 Magic Quadrant, I want to believe that either the analyst(s) that worked on this died or got fired halfway through the project, and someone at Gartner let this get out by mistake!

Okay – What did Gartner get right?

First, let me say, by Gartner’s own definition, this is a review of ATS technology for enterprise (large employers).

• Workday, Oracle, & SAP all have to be on the grid. They’re the big three by a mile. Love them or hate them, if you’re an enterprise TA shop, you probably use one of these techs.

• Cornerstone, Avature, and Phenom aren’t really ATSs. Cornerstone is primarily learning. Avature and Phenom are CRM, website, etc. Can you use them as an ATS? Yes. But most enterprise orgs layer them onto the Big 3.

• SmartRecruiters and Greenhouse are amazing best-of-breed ATSs with some larger clients. But most in the industry wouldn’t necessarily consider them large enterprise ATSs. Still, great tech, most TA teams would love to have.

• Darwinbox and PageUp I’m guessing are on here because they are mostly global players outside the US. They are not considered an enterprise, nor would I put them in best-of-breed. “Just because you name him Darren doesn’t mean he belongs to Darren” – Katt Williams

• iCIMS is another best-of-breed ATS that does a bit more enterprise clients. So again, makes sense they are on the list.

11 total “ATSs” on the Magic Quadrant. Seems super light. Was it too much work to get 20 or 25? I could probably give you 50 off the top of my head!

Who did Gartner miss?

• Eightfold. If you’re putting Phenom on this list, how do you not have Eightfold?

• Paradox. One of the fastest growing high-volume hiring technologies that many of the largest enterprise employers are already using today.

• Beamery. One of the best CRMs on the market that competes with Eightfold, Avature, and Phenom. That can also run as an ATS. So, why aren’t they on the list?

• Gem. Another one of these ATSs, CRM, we-do-it-all technologies used by large companies.

• Jobvite & Lever. If you have Smart, Greenhouse, and iCIMS, why stop adding other best-of-breed ATSs that also work with mid-enterprise?

• HireEZ and Seekout. If you’re going to put someone like Cornerstone on your list, both of these techs can be used as ATSs and would be exponentially more effective and useful.

• Ashby, Loxo, Clear Co, Workable, BreezyHR, Pinpoint, TeamTailor, JazzHR, Fountain, Humanly, and Bullhorn (I could go on for days). There are hundreds of ATSs on the market. The Gartner team didn’t even scratch the surface of this market.

• Infor, UKG, Dayforce, iSolved, all the Payroll techs. If you’re going to add HCM recruiting modules, then why stop at three? There are others out there who also work with large organizations that help them do their recruiting.

Gartner will tell you this is an “independent” survey of the market. No one pays to be placed on the magic quadrant. With all that said, I think everyone in our space gets the game. I’m going to assume Phenom actually works with Gartner and pays them for research reports, etc. But Phenom did not pay to be on the quadrant. I’m also going to assume that Eightfold does not. Why? Becuase these two are giant competitors! It makes no sense that one would be on and one isn’t.

Also, you’ll notice only one company is in the bottom quadrant, Cornerstone – which doesn’t even compete in the ATS space. This is done by design. “Hey, Cornerstone, we are putting you in the top quadrant for learning, but since you did a bit of TA, we’ll put you in the bottom for that.” But don’t worry, you sell learning. There are plenty of crappy ATSs on the market to put in the bottom quadrant! But, saying someone sucks, isn’t good for business.

Look, I love recruiting technology. Those who made it onto the quadrant all have good technology. There are also a ton of others that have good technology and should be on there. I’d love to know the analyst(s) who actually did this research. When I asked around to the 200+ people I know who cover this space, no one knew who it was.

Over the past weeks, I’ve gotten a chance to see the latest and greatest inside of Workday Recruiting. There have been some amazing transformations happening over the past 18 months or so with the product. The obvious acquisition of HiredScore and the launch of their own CRM product, Candidate Engagement. These two alone make the product look and feel drastically different, in an excellent way.

Big HCM recruiting modules get a bad rap for being slow to adapt to new technology. What’s usually not said with that is there are very good reasons for this. You’re talking about a client base that is the most prominent brands and employers across the planet. They tend to only work with proven commodities in everything they do. These products tend to hold a lot of weight from the sheer market size they’ve captured. They have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of users globally. For so many, this is the only window in talent acquisition technology they’ll ever have.

What’s new and what did I like?

• When you combine Workday Recruiting, Candidate Engagement (their internal CRM product), and HiredScore (a recent acquisition with deep integrations), the technology you see feels and acts very Best-of-Breed-like.

• Candidate Engagement is much more candidate marketing automation than a full-blown CRM. This is a very good thing. It’s a product that recruiters can easily use in their daily work. There is no need for a full recruitment marketing team to run a CRM.

• The HiredScore piece will make Workday Recruiting stand alone amongst their large enterprise recruiting tech competitors. They now have full match capabilities within the internal database with “Fetch”, and clients using it are seeing almost unbelievable hiring increases from it. Like 75% of hires come from their own active past candidates. Time to fill dropping by half. Improved source accuracy near 100%. All these metrics immediately speak to a speedy ROI on the tech being used.

• The Workday Screen of Death (Create a profile screen) will soon be going away! Workday is launching social sign-on later this year across all of their clients. Again, haters will ask why this took so long. The reality is, with almost 5,000 clients globally, any seemingly small change has major ripples.

• Like any big recruiting product, each client has to build it out as will work best for them. What I saw with the combination of products is a recruiting platform that a recruiter would live and work in on a daily basis, without the need to have to log into other technology to be effective and efficient.

• As you can imagine, the Workday Recruiting roadmap is loaded with AI and Agentic AI. They are adding a Conversational AI Assistant, which leads me to believe they want to capture some of that high-volume hiring that many of their clients have layered in Paradox for. They have an Agentic Recruiting Coach in the works that will do much of the Agent recruiting automation we are seeing from many best-of-breed players. And many more types of recruiting specific use agents in development. Workday is extremely conscious about AI ethics and governance. You can assume they’ll take a little more time to ensure their clients are 100% confident using the AI that is being launched and developed in-house.

The big HCM recruiting modules continue to grab more market share. The use of these technologies is almost inevitable if you work in large enterprise organizations, and we are increasingly seeing mid-enterprise organizations also make the moves towards this big tech.

I rarely see Workday make fast decisions or make wrong decisions. They know who they are, and they know their clients’ needs. It was nice to see the movement that has been made on the recruiting product side and the very detailed roadmap they have in front of them. I think the talent acquisition users of Workday have a bright future ahead.

(For the folks who believe I’m saying all this because Workday is paying me, sorry, that isn’t the case. I’m just a recruiting tech nerd who likes seeing progress, and I think the Workday Recruiting product team genuinely cares about delivering good stuff.)

The future of recruiting isn’t coming. It’s already here. And if you’re still relying on your legacy tech stack and spreadsheets, you’re already behind.

Enter Steven Jiang, CEO and Co-founder of HireEZ, who just dropped one of the most important AI launches in the recruiting space – EZ Agent, their agentic AI companion built to fundamentally reshape the recruiter’s role.

Forget everything you know about “copilots” and “gen AI assistants.”

EZ Agent is not just another AI tool bolted onto your ATS. It’s a fully integrated, always-on agent that plans, reasons, executes, and evolves – empowering recruiters to get out of the weeds and back into real talent relationships.

Steven joins to break down:

• Why agentic AI isn’t just better – it’s a whole new operating system for recruiting

• How recruiters move from task managers to true talent strategists

• What it means to create a white-glove candidate experience at scale

• And how EZ Agent is solving the “black hole” problem by giving 100% of candidates a shot at the plate

Steven’s built more than a product – he’s building a movement to re-humanize recruiting with AI doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes.

If you care about talent, inclusion, and the future of work – this is the conversation you need to hear.

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Do you know what happens after a decade of historically low unemployment?

We’ve become accustomed to selecting below-average talent and acting like it’s the best talent.

Ouch!

No! I didn’t mean you. I meant all of the other organizations. You were the one who kept super high standards and had a crystal clear vision of what great talent looked like. Everybody else just hired mouth breathers. You were fine…

That’s what we tell ourselves.

In the zeal to hire fast. Lower that time to fill. We hired warm bodies. Sometimes, we hired lukewarm bodies. Sometimes, we hired the walking dead. I mean, if we are being honest.

The ironic part of this is that your CEO is still out there telling the stakeholders, “We only hire the top talent”! Little by little, every time you hear that, a part of you dies inside. Because we know the truth, we know they hired the best of the applicants for the job when it was open, and there’s a greater than zero chance some of those hires were actually the worst talent in our market.

I bet your CEO would have a hard time telling the local news outlet about that!

Want to be better at selecting talent?

There are three things I think we can do to increase the level of talent we hire massively.

1. Job samples are the number one predictor of whether or not a person can actually perform the job. Yet, almost none of us do it. It’s hard to do, expensive, and complicated. I have hope. I’ve seen some new Agentic AI tools that can create life-like job samples for things like sales, accounting, etc.
2. Hire intelligent people. If all else fails, hire smart people. If you simply had every single applicant take an intelligence test, and you only hired the smartest, you would actually select better talent than almost everyone else in your market. If you add an assessment around agility to learn, you’ll be even better.
3. Interview like you’re a military interrogator. We’ve made interviewing too easy. “Hi! How are you? What’s your favorite color? Oh, you feel stressed? How about we just skip this part, and you can have the job!” We need to get back to truly digging in, asking tough questions, and making sure we want this person and that this person wants us. What I’ve found is that the harder you interview, the more interested the high talent gets. Talented people want to be challenged. Low talent people don’t.

I think we took our eyes off the ball.

We started just hiring skills and forgot about the rest. Yes, I need your skills, but I also need you to buy into what we are doing. Does your crazy match our crazy? Do you want to join this funny farm, or is this not right for you? We stopped trying to get people to opt out of our process, believing that everyone with the right skills is the right hire for us. That just isn’t true.

Some of our organizations have been held back because we simply moved too fast on marginal candidates. We weren’t patient. We bought into the narrative that we might not get anyone if we don’t hire this average talented person.

Even in tough talent-times, we have to move with purpose, not pace. We have to have a clear directive around what is great talent, good talent, average talent, and below-average talent. That bar can’t move, but unfortunately, we have let it move for so long that I’m not even sure if most organizations know the difference between good talent and average talent.

When we look at all the AI tech that will help us hire, and I get to dream about all this extra capacity we’ll have to work with, this is what I think about. Now, we can hire great again!

If you hear any HR/Recruiting Influencer talk bad about returning to work/office, know they haven’t actually worked in an office in probably a decade. They have no idea what they’re talking about, and they’ve most likely already established their professional networks. So, yeah, they have no idea what they’re talking about. RTW for them is HR content porn. They know they’ll get a lot of likes from other old HR people.

Here’s what I know from actually running a company and working in an office today:

• If my employees were most productive on the Moon, I would have them strapped to a rocket by Monday. Every CEO thinks exactly the same way. They don’t give a sh*t about some office building lease. They only care about making their numbers better.

• There’s zero causation between someone saying they’re most productive working at home and actually being measurably most productive at home.

• So many people want to work at home right now, even though it hurts their career, that if you’re a younger worker who comes in and gives average effort in the office, you’re going to win. It’s so easy to win in corporate America today!

• Most data around productivity and working from home is flawed. Most of it was done during the pandemic when everyone was freaked out, so we sat in front of our computers all day and had non-stop Zoom meetings. We also have 3 trillion dollars of free money jammed into the economy, so every company was doing well. Once that all dried up and we got comfortable, measurable productivity fell off a cliff.

• The vast majority of workers lack the self-motivation to work from home and need the structure of an office to be most productive. Roughly 10% of humans perform better working remotely. (Yeah, I know you reading this think you’re one of the 10% – you’re probably not. That’s the entire problem.)

RTW for GenZ has so many advantages. Here are some stats from some new research by deel –

Organizations want GenZ workers more than ever for their digital-native skill set.

Here’s the reality. This isn’t about RTW vs. Remote.

This is about treating workers like adults and giving them some flexibility.

Sure, I’ll come into the office, but when I have a dentist appointment at 2 pm on Tuesday and I have no other meetings after that, I’m not coming back to work so you can see my ass sitting in a cube. That makes no sense.

I think most CEOs and executive teams get that now.

They also understand that the vast majority of workers are more productive and collaborative when they work close together in a space designed for work.

Young workers shouldn’t care about where they work. You should care about what work experience will give you the best network and development. Then work your butt off for a few years and see what happens!

AI isn’t coming – it’s here. And it’s changing recruiting faster than most realize.

In this crossover episode between RecTech Media and HR Famous, Chris Russell and Tim Sackett dive into the latest from Phenom’s conference in Philadelphia.

2600 attendees.

25+ new AI agents rolled out.

And a vision for HR tech that feels more like science fiction than reality!

But what happens when AI isn’t just automating tasks – it’s making decisions? And if recruiters aren’t the ones screening candidates, curating talent pools, or delivering feedback, what’s left for them to do?

Phenom is betting big on agents that can reason – detecting mistakes, providing real-time feedback, even building personalized hiring experiences. And they’re not alone. Paradox and Eightfold are in the race, each taking different approaches to AI.

But is all this innovation really making hiring better? Or just faster?

If AI agents are handling the heavy lifting, where does that leave recruiters? And if everyone’s automating, what actually sets your hiring process apart? From the analyst I spoke with at I AM Phenom, most agreed that Phenom’s Agentic AI was two years ahead of most of the industry. But if that’s true, what happens to everyone else still playing catch-up?

Listen to discover why this shift in HR tech could leave even the most seasoned recruiters rethinking their entire approach.

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AI is showing up in every headline. But in the workplace?

Most people still aren’t sure what to do with it.

Enter Cam Sackett – a social media manager from Away, and Tim Sackett’s middle son. He joins HR Famous for a candid conversation on how Gen Z views AI at work, why creative teams are skeptical, and what’s missing from most company rollouts.

Cam shares how AI tools are marketed with bold promises but little instruction and why “figure it out” isn’t a strategy.

He explains the tension between speed and trust in creative roles – and why, sometimes, knowing how to explain a phone to your grandma might make you the best person to lead AI adoption.

The real question? If AI is here to stay, who’s actually responsible for making it usable?

One thing’s clear: Gen Z isn’t rejecting AI. They’re just waiting for someone to make it make sense.

Connect with Cam:

Cam Sackett

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameronsackett/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cameronsackett/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sackettc

Check Out Away: https://www.awaytravel.com/

This week on HR Famous, I interviewed Danielle Farage, a GenZ expert who is actually a GenZer. We talked about why all these people are lazy and don’t want to work!

Danielle is a bright mind in the GenZ community and one who isn’t waiting around to find out what work is, but digging in and working to determine what this entire future of work thing is all about. Oh, and the best thing is, she isn’t scared of work!! Lets’ Go!

Make sure you connect with Danielle, and for heaven’s sake, stop hiring non-GenZs to talk about GenZs!! She’s your girl!

Enjoy.

As the kids say, “Like and Subscribe”!!

alent acquisition has always been slow. Adoption is slow. Change is slow. Processes are slow. Even as the world rapidly evolved around us, TA remained stuck in sort of the same place for years. 

It feels like that’s changed. AI made sure of that. 

Now, it really feels like change is the only constant, and you really can’t be moving fast enough. The best organizations are not only using AI in recruiting currently, but they’re also following trends and thinking a year, two years, three years ahead. The reality is that the best talent teams will evolve very quickly, using AI as a foundation to attract better talent, faster. 

And if you’re only thinking about today, tomorrow, or even this year, it honestly might not be enough. You might already be falling behind. 

One of the things I’m finding when talking to most talent leaders is that they see the benefits of AI, and they are working toward implementation at some level within talent acquisition. But the total focus is almost always on how we will use AI for maximum impact — never is there a thought on how we will use our people with AI for maximum impact. This is a huge miss. You can’t just be thinking about people anywhere, but you also can’t just be thinking about AI. You need to be looking ahead and envisioning a world where you have both humans and AI to do TA work. The question is: Who does what for maximum efficiency?

I’ll give you an example of an organization who did this well: 7-Eleven.

Recently, 7-Eleven went through a massive AI transformation in talent acquisition. After acquiring Speedway, they found themselves with two very different talent tech stacks and two very different recruiting processes. It’s an easy call to go down to one stack. It’s a much harder call to determine which stack and which process. Or better yet, maybe a new tech and new process that fits even better — true transformation. I won’t get into the full details (you can read the case study from my friends over at The Josh Bersin Company here), but essentially, they completely reimagined the structure of their recruiting team to maximize both their talent and their technology. Their result was 40,000 man-hours per week savings. Read that again! Between recruiting and store leaders, they used AI to do roughly 95% of all previous recruiting tasks done by humans. Look, massive organizational change is never easy. But 7-Eleven is proof that there’s so much untapped potential here. 

There are five Steps to making this happen—click over to Paradox, where I’ll give you the exact five-step plan!

Hiring is broken – but not for the reasons you think.

Recruiters flood hiring managers with candidates, yet decision-makers hesitate to pull the trigger. The process drags, top talent walks, and organizations pay the price.

I’m not here to sugarcoat this for you. In this unfiltered solo session, I explain why the hiring machine is failing and what needs to change. From hiring managers’ paradoxical indecision to the myth of “more candidates = better hires,” I explain how talent acquisition teams have conditioned bad behavior – and why fixing it requires a shift in trust, process, and execution.

Then there’s Elon Musk. His blunt demand for accountability in government sent HR circles into a tailspin, but is he wrong? I cut through the noise to dissect why performance management is broken and why most leaders are afraid to ask their employees the one question that actually matters. The workforce is shifting. The hiring game is changing.

If you’re still playing by the old rules, you’re already behind.

Enjoy!