In this episode, Neil Armstrong talks with Matt Howe, Head of Volume Recruitment for BT, EE, Plusnet, and Openreach, about the high-stakes challenge of hiring thousands of people – and doing it well.
They dig into what it takes to balance scale and substance – the systems, process, and people decisions that can make volume recruitment work without becoming a mess. Expect insight on automation, candidate experience in high-volume settings, maintaining fairness under pressure, and building recruitment infrastructure that can scale and endure.
If you’re leading hiring where volume matters – public sector, retail, utilities, big brands – this is for you. You’ll come away with frameworks and guardrails to make recruitment at scale not just possible, but powerful.
These approximate timestamps map to key themes in the episode:
00:00 – The tension between volume and quality, and why this conversation matters
03:30 – How scale works across BT, EE, Plusnet, Openreach — challenges he faces
08:20 – Systems & automation in high-volume hiring. Where tech helps and where it fails in volume settings
13:45 – Candidate experience under volume pressure; How to keep candidates respected, engaged, and not lost in the queue
18:30 – Fairness, bias & filtering at scale
23:20 – How you build teams and processes to sustain volume hiring
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