Less Spend, More Impact

To remain cost-effective while still delivering meaningful social value and strengthening your brand, focus on initiatives that align closely with your business goals, values, and areas of expertise. By supporting local communities, building strategic partnerships, and creating opportunities that contribute to a sustainable talent pipeline, businesses can generate long-term social impact while addressing future workforce needs. This targeted approach maximises value, enhances brand reputation, and demonstrates a genuine commitment to both social responsibility and talent development.

Talent is everywhere. Opportunity isn’t. Rethinking recruitment through social mobility

This session explores the role recruitment professionals can play in advancing social mobility while addressing a very practical business challenge: where will the talent of the future come from? Using Aon’s Work Insights Programme and Displaced Workforce Impact Programme as examples, it will look at how organisations can rethink traditional routes into employment, reach overlooked talent and remove unnecessary barriers to opportunity. It will consider why widening access is both a societal imperative and an opportunity to create broader, more resilient talent pipelines.

The Human Advantage: Candidate Experience in an Age of Efficiency

As organisations become more efficient and scalable in how they attract and engage talent, the challenge is no longer just about finding candidates faster, but creating experiences that feel personal, authentic and human. This session will explore how Microsoft EMEA is thinking about the future of Talent Acquisition, balancing efficiency with meaningful candidate engagement, and why candidate experience may become one of the few remaining differentiators in an increasingly competitive talent market.

Candidates now ask AI what it's like to work for you, and they believe the answer. Do you know what it's saying?

Employer Brand consultancy TMPW will chair a lively panel discussion where you can hear from leading employers how to audit your AI reputation, keep your brand authentic when every employer sounds the same, and use AI to make hiring more human.

Miss this, and you're leaving your story to an algorithm.

Raising the Standard: Why Great Recruitment Is Still About People

Recruitment has never had more technology, data or automation available to it… and yet, candidates often experience the same poor processes and communication. In this thought-provoking keynote, David McGrane explores how in-house recruiters can raise professional standards by combining critical thinking, human judgement and AI to create better hiring experiences. Rather than asking what technology can do, this session challenges us to ask what great recruitment should be.

High performance and high potential are often treated as though they mean the same thing, but they don’t.

This session explores the difference between what someone has already demonstrated and what they may be capable of next, and why that distinction matters when we hire, develop and identify talent. I’ll look at how relying too heavily on past performance, traditional experience or familiar indicators of “talent” can cause organisations to overlook capability and potential, and what we should be looking for instead. I’ll also explore how Talent Acquisition and Talent Management can work more closely together to build stronger and more diverse talent pipelines for the future.

Your future, not your past” – developing talent safely for people with offending histories and complex experiences

For nearly 50 years, local charity Back on Track Manchester has been offering learning, support and community to adults who experience multiple disadvantages, including people who’ve been in the criminal justice system. With 25% of working age adults now having some kind of conviction, that is a significant pool of talent for employers. Drawing on real lived experience, Back on Track’s expert team will share what they do and what you can do to develop talent safely and impactfully when working with people with those backgrounds

Why Internal Mobility Is Becoming the Talent Strategy of Choice

As organisations face ongoing skills shortages and changing workforce demands, many are shifting their focus from external hiring to developing talent from within. This session explores how businesses are using upskilling, reskilling and internal mobility to build capability, improve retention and create more agile workforces, while highlighting the key role Talent Acquisition plays in driving this strategic shift

The Human Advantage – AI, Ethics and Hiring That Works

AI is accelerating hiring at an unprecedented pace, but speed without structure is a business risk. Navigating AI isn’t just about adopting the newest tech; it’s about maintaining assessment integrity, protecting quality of hire, and governing candidate AI use without hurting candidate experience.

This session will discuss where we reframe AI ethics from a rigid compliance afterthought into a powerful strategic enabler. Learn how values-led frameworks can help you make justifiable, confident decisions that balance efficiency with governance.

The dangers and pitfalls of AI in hiring: what the court cases tell in-house teams

For five hundred years a CV was something a person wrote. Now most are written with AI, in-house teams are getting hundreds of applications per role, and many are turning to AI to cope. It is a wild west. Regulators have found screening tools guessing candidates' ethnicity from their names, and employers and vendors are already in court over automated rejections. Rob Hodds walks through the cases, what went wrong in each, and what compliance-first, AI-assisted recruiting looks like in practice: explainable scores, bias checks, human decisions and an audit trail you can show. 

Don't Wait for AI - Make Changes Now to Save You Admin Tax

Jed Shaw is Talent Acquisition & People Ops Manager at CDL, a FinTech/InsurTech software house, where he's spent the last few years repositioning TA from a cost centre into a data-driven, commercially accountable function - as a department of one. By building automation infrastructure before chasing AI hype, Jed has managed over 2,500 interviews solo, cut time-to-hire well below the market average, and recovered upwards of £400k in business value over the past two years without adding headcount.

In this session, Jed will unpack the "Admin Tax" - the hidden cost every TA function pays in manual, repetitive work - and make the case that you don't need to wait for AI to "arrive" to start clawing it back. He'll share the real workflows and numbers behind how automation, not AI hype, has driven measurable savings and efficiency gains within his own TA function, and how other TA leaders can start applying the same thinking today.

THE FUTURE OF RECRUITMENT ISN’T RECRUITMENT

Organisations winning the competition for talent are spending less time recruiting and more time workforce planning, skills forecasting, and predicting the hiring impact of economic turbulence. That capability to pivot to a challenging market can provide valuable weeks and months over organisations that treat recruitment as a solution, not the outcome.

During this session I’ll explain how predictive insights can dramatically support where and when you source talent, how engagement, onboarding and retention metrics lose emphasis when treated as targets and compare examples of projects that have both succeeded and missed when it came to hiring on high profile contracts.

AI In Recruitment Panel Debate

Join this lively  Talent Leader debate for the latest on AI in Recruitment