Skip to content
Sign in
Artwork for The Missing Manual Show
The Missing Manual Show · October 1 · 18 min

AI Needs the How

Talent acquisition teams do not need more convincing to use AI. At RecFest 2026 in Nashville, most of the leaders in the room already had leadership buy-in and access to tools like Claude and ChatGPT. What they wanted was the actionable how: which use case to start with and how to build it. In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas recap two days of hosting, speaking and listening at one of the biggest TA and HR conferences in the US. Jenny Cotie Kangas spoke on the applied AI stage. When she asked the standing-room-only audience who had leadership buy-in and who had AI tools at work, almost every hand went up both times. The notes came out when leaders described agents they had actually built, such as a job posting checker and a signal brief. Julia Levy spoke on the "Your ATS Sucks" panel, where teams of every size described the same problems and different ways to work around them. The hosts also explain why RecFest feels like an unconference, and why the relationships built there matter. On the Unplugged Stage, they gave every audience two minutes to meet a stranger, and attendees kept telling them about those connections for the rest of the event. Julia connects this to her relationship bank account idea and to the peers she has called for advice over the years, including people at competing companies, because the problems in TA rarely change from one company to the next. Julia is also honest about her plans that never happened: the QR code business cards, the badge photos and the notebook that stayed blank. The takeaway for your next conference is to go in with a plan, meet people outside your own team and follow up afterward. Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.

0:00-18:50
Play in

transcript

No transcript — this publisher did not publish one.

show notes

Talent acquisition teams do not need more convincing to use AI. At RecFest 2026 in Nashville, most of the leaders in the room already had leadership buy-in and access to tools like Claude and ChatGPT. What they wanted was the actionable how: which use case to start with and how to build it. In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas recap two days of hosting, speaking and listening at one of the biggest TA and HR conferences in the US.

Jenny Cotie Kangas spoke on the applied AI stage. When she asked the standing-room-only audience who had leadership buy-in and who had AI tools at work, almost every hand went up both times. The notes came out when leaders described agents they had actually built, such as a job posting checker and a signal brief. Julia Levy spoke on the "Your ATS Sucks" panel, where teams of every size described the same problems and different ways to work around them.

The hosts also explain why RecFest feels like an unconference, and why the relationships built there matter. On the Unplugged Stage, they gave every audience two minutes to meet a stranger, and attendees kept telling them about those connections for the rest of the event. Julia connects this to her relationship bank account idea and to the peers she has called for advice over the years, including people at competing companies, because the problems in TA rarely change from one company to the next.

Julia is also honest about her plans that never happened: the QR code business cards, the badge photos and the notebook that stayed blank. The takeaway for your next conference is to go in with a plan, meet people outside your own team and follow up afterward. Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.

more episodes

All episodes