Welcome to Keep Moving Forward, a biweekly podcast from X-Team for tech professionals who are passionate about growth, leadership, and innovation. In this podcast, we'll talk to seasoned tech leaders, forward-thinking engineers, and visionary experts about the lessons they’ve learned on scaling high-performing teams, navigating complex challenges, and driving innovation. Subscribe now, share with your colleagues, and let’s keep moving forward together.
Why Your Hiring Process Loses Candidates After the Interview
Trent Cotton jokes that he used to hire anyone with a pulse and a prayer, back when the hard part was finding enough candidates. Now nearly a third of candidate drop-off happens after the interview, and slow hiring teams lose people to whoever makes the first offer.
Trent, Head of Talent Insights and Analyst Relations at ICIMS and author of Sprint Recruiting, joins Gemma Versace on Keep Moving Forward to talk about where candidates drop off and how leaders can tell real AI ability from tool familiarity.
They cover:
- Why 32% of hiring drop-off happens after the interview stage
- How two-week recruiting sprints keep a stretched talent team focused on the roles that matter most
- The screen-share exercise Trent uses to see how candidates think with AI
- Why AI training and apprenticeships can win over candidates that a bigger paycheck can’t
24 Sept 2026
Why Faster Code Doesn't Always Raise AI Developer Productivity
Sunita Verma has been building AI since before anyone called it AI, and her warning to engineering leaders today is about what happens after the code gets written. Speeding up one step of development, she says, just hands the bottleneck to the next one.
Sunita, CTO of Ironclad, spent years at Google and Character AI before leading AI strategy in legal tech, a heavily regulated field. On Keep Moving Forward, she connects AI burnout to deployment choices and makes the case for spelling out what a model shouldn't do before it does anything. She also shares how Ironclad keeps its engineers moving in the same direction while the tools change underneath them.
They cover:
- When to hand a task to AI outright, and when staying in the back-and-forth creates more work
- What agentic coding does to code review when nobody redesigns the review process
- How Ironclad decides when a human stays in the loop, using a risk-based framework that lets standard work like NDAs run autonomously
- Why Sunita ran a 20-day AI program across every location to give a distributed team a shared vocabulary
- What Ironclad saw after pairing its most AI-forward engineers with teammates further behind the curve
17 Sept 2026
Real AI Adoption Requires Authentic Intelligence
When an automated system answers instead of a person, Ryan Estis has one reflex: ask for a human, immediately. It's the same instinct he says most AI adoption plans forget to plan for.
Ryan Estis, keynote speaker and co-author of Prepare for Impact, calls that instinct authentic intelligence. In this episode of Keep Moving Forward, he talks about what it actually takes to lead a team well as AI changes the shape of the work, and why coaching still depends on a person who can build trust rather than just track performance. He also gets into why the return on AI investment comes down to leadership judgment more than the technology itself.
They cover:
- Why the same AI tools available to everyone stopped being anyone's advantage
- What Ryan means by authentic intelligence, and what automate the tangible, humanize the intangible actually rules out
- Why retention still comes down to the relationship between a manager and their team, not the technology layered on top
- Ryan's idea of building a "leadership family tree," and why he believes good leaders prepare people to eventually move on
- How Ryan manages a mix of human employees and AI agents inside his own business
Who has been a guest on Keep Moving Forward
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Paul Gentile
Will Jung
Joel Hron
Andy Sen
Mike Gibson
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