Manufacturing jobs are back on American soil. The factories are running. The roles are open. 

But the workers? They’re missing.

In this solo episode, Tim Sackett unpacks the growing gap between opportunity and desire in today’s labor market. Why did generations of proud factory families embrace these jobs – and why do today’s young workers turn away? 

From cultural shifts and education gaps to lifestyle choices and societal stigma, Tim explores the uncomfortable reasons behind this silent rejection.

Is it a temporary hesitation… or a permanent shift? 

And if manufacturing jobs no longer inspire the next workforce, what does that mean for America’s future?

Chapters:

00:00:00 – Intro  

00:03:02 – Should America bring back manufacturing?

00:07:44 – The pride and reality of factory jobs

00:12:40 – Why younger generations don’t want these jobs

00:20:54 – Ghost towns and the cost of offshoring

00:22:58 – The recruiting tech problem: why all-in-one dominates

00:26:48 – Can point solutions survive in HR tech?

I did a brief stint in the casual dining industry. My friends laugh at me when I bring up old HR war stories from my days at Applebee’s, but the reality is I loved that work. Over the years, I’ve tried to figure out why. 

First, it was a constant challenge. The moment you figured out one location, another one needed help. Second, I loved the people. Guest service-focused. They wanted to deliver an experience people enjoyed. I love eating out, and so do so many people. It was an experience you could immediately relate to. So given my background and personal affinity towards the restaurant industry, I was immediately intrigued when I saw the National Restaurant Association recently released its Workforce Technology Report, discussing the challenges the industry faces today. The report served talent leaders from 17 different major restaurant organizations, including Chipotle, Potbelly, and Flynn Group (Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Wendy’s). 

Turns out, not much has changed since I left Applebee’s:

• High turnover
• Hard to recruit
• Hard to retain your best

Over 75% of restaurant leaders say recruiting and retaining employees are a “significant” challenge to their business. If you’ve been to a restaurant since the pandemic, you’ve probably seen this in action. You see full sections of a restaurant open, but you can’t be seated. Signs saying “please be patient,” so you try to find a manager to speak to but you can’t find one because the manager is probably on the line helping cook everyone’s meals.

I had a field operations leader I used to work with who loved telling his general managers, “Staff for the business you want, not the business you have!” The point being, if a customer comes in and has a bad experience because we’re understaffed, they probably don’t come back. You saved a little bit of money by running lean, but you cost yourself a returning customer. Sure, it costs a little more to be properly staffed, but you can then deliver an amazing experience, and those people will keep coming back multiple times.

Given all the challenges, it feels like most restaurants today aren’t appropriately staffed. I have some ideas on how to fix that… 

Click here for the fix! (Ugh, don’t you just hate clickbait!?!)

I had to do this one for the kids.

Too often, I make pop culture references from the late 80s and 90s and it’s lost on too many people. Too many times I’ll say the phrase, “Because I’m good enough, and I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!” The GenXers know this as daily affirmations with Stuart Smalley from Saturday Night Live.

So, why not Daily Affirmations from Tim Sackett? I’m also not a licensed therapist or even a Life Coach!

So, here goes –

You deserve hiring manager feedback.

There I said it! It’s out in the open.

For too long, we’ve beaten ourselves up, thinking it must be something we’ve done. Maybe we are unlovable. Perhaps we just aren’t pretty enough.

Well, I’m here to say you are lovable and gorgeous! It’s not us. It’s them!

We aren’t some second-class peer. We’re a full, first-class peer like everyone else. You know who doesn’t deserve our best candidates?! Yeah, those managers who don’t give us feedback. We need to just stick those good candidates back in that super secret good candidates folder we hide away for those special times when we get real pressure!

So, next time you don’t get the manager feedback you need on a candidate, you tell them they’re no longer getting your best talent!

Because you’re good enough, and you’re smart enough, and doggone it, candidates like you!

AI agents aren’t coming for recruiting.

They’re already here – and they don’t care how many reqs you filled last quarter. In this episode, Tim Sackett sits down with Jason Roberts, SVP of Tech & Analytics at Cielo, to break down what AI is actually doing inside RPOs and staffing firms – and why the old recruiting playbook is about to get torched.

From sourcing automation that 5x’s recruiter output to building a fully operational AI agent of yourself, Jason pulls back the curtain on the tools reshaping talent acquisition in real-time.

They talk agentic workflows, how execs are chasing 50% AI-driven recruiting models, and why most CRMs still suck. The future of recruiting isn’t theoretical – it’s operational. And if you think your job’s safe because you “build relationships”?

Think again.

Chapters:

00:00:00 – Intro

00:01:33 – Intro: Tim Sackett Welcomes Jason Roberts from Cielo

00:03:14 – The Agent Idea: AI That Calls You Like an Assistant

00:04:37 – What Agents Actually Do (vs. ChatGPT)

00:06:57 – The Difference Between LLMs and Agentic AI

00:10:32 – Building Digital Clones of Yourself and Loved Ones

00:14:41 – The Future of RPO: 50% AI-Driven Recruiting?

00:18:61 → (Adjusted to 19:01) – Why Some Tools Are Winning: Paradox, HireEZ & CRM Simplicity

00:22:35 – Why Campus Recruiting Still Sucks

00:26:26 – The Only Recruiting Metric That Matters: Hires

00:29:37 – Automation vs. Human Touch in Recruiting

00:32:43 – The Real Value of RPOs and Performance Gaps

00:37:36 – Why TA Leaders Need to Know Their Capacity

00:42:10 – Tech Makes Average Recruiters Great – If Managers Know How to Use It

00:45:00 – Favorite AI Recruiting Tools: SourceEngage, HireEZ & CodeSignal

00:49:04 – Where to Find Jason (and Tim)

Next Connect with Jason Roberts –

Follow Jason on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasrober

Learn more about Cielo: https://www.cielotalent.com

We love to believe that misconduct is something “other people” do—some other company, some other bad hire, some other culture. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: misconduct isn’t just a character flaw. It’s contagious. And if you’re in HR, you’re either the shield or the open gate. There’s no middle ground.

So, what is misconduct? It’s everything you hope your team isn’t doing: harassment, threats, intolerance, violence, drugs, fraud—you name it. The ugly stuff that keeps you up at night and ends up in headlines. But what most leaders miss is how easy it is for normal people to drift into misconduct. It starts small: exposure → acceptance → advocacy → participation. That’s the journey. And it’s scarily fast.

Here’s a stat from Fama’s State of Misconduct 2024 Research that should punch you in the gut: financial advisors are 37% more likely to commit misconduct if they work alongside someone else who has. Why? Because misconduct has a social multiplier of 1.59. It spreads. People mirror what they see. Culture is contagious—for better or worse.

Let’s talk about Financial Services for a minute. It’s a pressure cooker. High stakes, job insecurity, layoffs, and return-to-office stress. In that environment, misconduct doesn’t just thrive—it evolves. And guess who sees it first? Not the CEO. Not your corporate policy manual. It’s your middle managers. They’re 2.5x more effective at spotting misconduct than your policies. Yet we train them the least on how to deal with it.

And your TA team? They’re your first and best shot at prevention. But right now, most TA teams are screening like it’s still 2012. We run a background check, maybe scan a resume, and call it a day. Meanwhile, 1 in 10 Financial Services candidates already show online warning signs of misconduct—before we even onboard them. And the average FiServ candidate flagged by Fama has 28 instances of problematic online behavior. Trolling. Harassment. Threats.

Think about that. They’re making it all the way to the offer stage without anyone knowing they’re already waving red flags online. Why? Because those screens aren’t happening early enough.

It’s time to evolve:

1. Build Cultures of Accountability.
Misconduct should never feel normal. Set the tone at the top. But more importantly—empower your middle managers to call it out, address it, and report it without fear.

2. Expand Your Screening Process.
Old-school background checks aren’t enough. Tools like Fama bring behavior intelligence into the process, identifying patterns of misconduct from publicly available online content—before they become an HR nightmare.

3. Listen and Check Often.
Misconduct doesn’t stop at the offer letter. Current employees commit 26% of workplace violence. Ongoing checks matter. Fama has literally stopped a workplace shooting by flagging a manifesto. That’s real. That’s the human side of what we do.

TA and HR are the gatekeepers. You can wait for misconduct to become a crisis—or you can stop it before it starts.

Your call.

Download the State of Misconduct 2024 Research from Fama.

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.

Like & Subscribe!

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!