Hosted by Jamie Leonard (Founder & CEO @ The Recruitment Events Co.)

Speaker: Matt Alder, Host @ Recruiting Future Podcast

The odds are you are either going through a TA Transformation or will be going through one shortly. Planning for the future is always challenging, but it can feel impossible in such economically and technologically disruptive times. The best way to predict the future is to invent it, and in this session, Matt Alder will help you apply the key principles of strategic foresight to build your vision for the future of talent acquisition.

Speaker: Ewan Stark, CEO @ Hire Intelligence

Walk through using ODALoop on how to make quick, measurable, and continually improving decisions around performance and allocation of recruitment marketing budget. Takeaways: Reduce repetitive workload – Automate tasks to free up your team to make higher-level decisions. Real-time not one-time Data – Single view of recruitment marketing spend across all channels with granular detail around cost per application, cost per interview, and cost per hire by occupation and location. Optimization – You need the ability to implement quickly and easily changes so that you can reduce spend on easy-to-fill roles, focusing effort and spend on harder-to-fill roles.

Speaker: Bryan Adams, CEO & Founder @ HappyDance

In this keynote, Bryan Adams will show how employer branding—when done right—can power a high-performance talent acquisition strategy by focusing on the candidate experience and leveraging the careers website as a critical first impression.

Relevance to Senior Talent Acquisition Leaders:
This session is tailored for talent acquisition leaders who are responsible for attracting, engaging, and hiring top talent. Bryan will focus on how your careers website can become a powerful toolto improve the quality and volume of applicants. He’ll provide insights on building authentic, transparent candidate experiences that showcase both the opportunities and challenges of working for your organization—ultimately leading to better-fit hires.
Attendees will leave with actionable insights on how to leverage their careers website as the starting point for a winning employer brand strategy. By optimizing this critical touchpoint, they can reduce time-to-hire, increase the quality of applicants, and create a more efficient, effective recruitment process.

Speaker: Barrie Brown, Global Talent Acquisition Manager for Logistics and Customer Service Hiring @ Just Eat

As a company Just Eat Takeaway has moved from hypergrowth to sustainable growth leading to significant changes in our focus. In TA we have focussed on driving improvements to candidate and hiring manager experiences.

Here we will discuss how to make those experiences brilliant across diverse geographies and teams.

Speaker: Matthew de la Hey, CEO @ inploi

Matt de la Hey from inploi in conversation with a customer. They’ll discuss how optimising your candidate experience – working with existing ATSs – has a huge impact on key hiring metrics. The talk will include insights from a TA leader on their transformation journey, painting a vision of a future where talent attraction is an efficient and effective strategic advantage.

Takeaways:

• Focussing on candidate experience is a way to deliver substantial ROI from attraction spend
• A comprehensive attraction platform like inploi is a powerful way to address challenges with your ATS without having to rip it out and replace it
• Accurate TA data and ROI reporting increases your credibility as a TA leader and gives you the insight and ammunition you need to increase TA efficiency and engage credibly with the C suite

In this collaborative session, we will be looking at the potential of Talent Intelligence in a session facilitated by a leader in this field.  This session will empower you to achieve their TI and analytics goals for 2025!

Our signature Soapbox Sessions provide a unique space dedicated to open dialogue and collective problem-solving between our Resourcing Leaders community.

These sessions invite attendees to voice their concerns, challenges, and questions that a group of fellow leaders can potentially help solve or even sympathise with. Designed as therapeutic and welcoming forums, they offer a rare opportunity for participants to share experiences, seek advice, and gain insights in a supportive setting. With combined hundreds of years of TA experience in the room, you will always find great insights are shared!
If you have any topics in mind that you would like to get off your chest, this is your chance!

Speakers: Lorna Bullet, Head of Talent Acquisition Leader @ John Lewis Partnership

Following up 4 months after RecFest for an update, join us for a fireside chat as we delve into the groundbreaking move by John Lewis and Waitrose to publish interview questions in advance for all job levels.
This innovative approach aims to create a fairer and more inclusive interview process, reducing anxiety and providing candidates, especially those who are neurodivergent, with a better chance to succeed.
We’ll discuss the impact of this change, the mixed reactions from industry experts, and the future of interviewing in a competitive job market. Hear insights from talent head Lorna Bullett and other notable voices on how this could transform hiring practices for the better.