Agenda

Recruiters aren't short on activity. They're short on a reliable way to know, at any given moment, which of their reqs most deserve the attention next, and which ones only look urgent. This session tackles that live. Shally Steckerl built a three-signal prioritization system: how hard a role has actually filled before, how its pipeline is moving right now, and whether the recruiter carrying it is already at capacity. The system caught its own mistake early: a fifth of the reqs flagged as "at risk" turned out to be finishing, not starving, and fixing that changed how the entire board reads. On stage, Shally pulls a real attendee's current req list and runs it through the same lens, live, the way he'd do it for a client. Attendees leave with a self-audit they can run on their own desk Monday morning: a simple way to tell what's actually moving from what only looks like it is.

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Here's an uncomfortable truth: the best recruiters in 2027 are the ones who stopped filing tickets and started shipping solutions that 10x'd their sourcing and recruiting abilities. Vibe coding changed the game. You describe what you want in plain English, the AI writes the code, and suddenly the sourcing tool you begged IT for six months ago exists by lunch. No CS degree. No roadmap. No permission.

In this session, we're not talking about it. We're building it. Live. Your ultimate sourcing engine, assembled in real time! The recruiters who learn this become force multipliers. The ones who don't become line items. Come find out which one you want to be.

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AI assistants are becoming the first stop for job seekers. Learn how to optimize your career site, content, and employer brand so ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and other AI tools recommend your organization — not your competitors.

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Break Free from Indeed. Discover an Alternative that Delivers Hires, Not Volume.

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At a time when every business function is expected to demonstrate measurable value, the this moderated conversation will challenge the traditional view of Talent Acquisition as a transactional hiring function and explore what it takes to become a true strategic partner to the business. The discussion will uncover the challenges and organizational gaps that inspired MXA’s Recruitment Maturity Index, while examining how Talent Acquisition leaders can more effectively measure, communicate and elevate the impact of their function. Through a structured, data driven approach, the conversation will explore how organizations can strengthen talent strategy, selection, early career hiring, talent engagement and Talent Acquisition operations, creating greater alignment between recruiting priorities and broader business objectives. Real business cases from Hertz and Graphic Packaging will bring the framework to life, demonstrating how organizations can improve collaboration, strengthen hiring outcomes and position Talent Acquisition as a powerful driver of growth and organizational performance.

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Session details coming soon! 

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Job board costs keep climbing while reach keeps shrinking. Every TA team is bidding for the same pool of candidates, which means your pipeline is only as strong as your budget. Your best untapped channel doesn't cost more the harder it works: the recruiters and employees already writing your story every day through the work they do. Scaling a social recruiting strategy doesn't mean sacrificing authenticity. It means using automation to extend the reach of the real people and stories behind your employer brand, while keeping your recruiting strategy unmistakably human, without adding headcount.

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Discuss why separate hiring strategies create duplication, inconsistent candidate experiences, and missed opportunities, and how an integrated approach can improve outcomes.

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Think about the last thing you discovered while scrolling that you absolutely did not need, but suddenly had to have. The pet-hair-removing glove? The fuzzy socks with eyeballs? That red light therapy mask?

You weren’t in the market for any of it. You discovered it, and then… take my money!

Now imagine scrolling past horses, otters, makeup tips, and comedians when someone tells you about an amazing talent brand job. Your ears perk up. You stop. You listen. You might even click and apply.

That’s the algorithm at work.

This session will unpack Job Discovery (what happens before someone searches for a job), demystify how social algorithms distribute content, including why geography isn't the neat little box we sometimes imagine it to be, and dig deep into trust.

Discovery gets someone’s attention. Trust gives them a reason to lean in.

Together, we’ll connect the dots between how we behave as consumers, how algorithms shape what we discover, and how employer brands can create more human, trusted pathways to opportunity.

Three things you'll be able to do the next day:

1. Start measuring discovery, not just search and applications.
   Identify where your future candidates are spending attention, and start building a strategy for reaching them there.
2. Stop treating algorithms like geography textbooks.
   Learn the signals that actually help social platforms distribute content, and rethink how you target talent. Your next great candidate in Dallas might discover you because of a creator in Detroit.
3. Build trust before you ask for an application.
   Use authentic employee and creator voices to show people what working for your company actually looks and feels like. Give them a reason to believe you before you ask them to believe a job description.

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Most leaders judge their hiring function by how fast they close a role. That is the wrong test. A hiring function is built when the number you commit to in March is the number you deliver in September. This session gives executives a practical way to assess whether their talent acquisition infrastructure is real or improvised, using system data rather than opinion, and lays out what to fix first at every stage of growth, from start-up to mid-market.

Top five things attendees will walk away with:

• A diagnostic for whether your hiring function is predictable, not just fast.
• Why more recruiters rarely fix a backlog, and how 1,200 requisitions became 550 without added headcount.
• How to build a capacity model from ATS data instead of self-reported ratios.
• Where hiring delay actually lives: the handoffs, not the tools.
• How to report hiring in vacancy cost and first-year retention, the numbers executives act on.

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AI has added powerful new capabilities to sourcing—but the fundamentals still matter. This session could focus on the tools, channels, communities, research techniques, and creative sourcing approaches recruiters can use to find talent beyond AI-powered platforms.

Session takeaways:

• Finding talent through communities, associations, niche sites, events, and professional networks
• Using Boolean, X-ray searching, and creative search techniques more effectively
• Identifying new talent pools when traditional sources run dry
• Building talent maps for hard-to-fill roles and markets
• Turning referrals, alumni, and existing networks into proactive sourcing channels
• Creating a sourcing toolkit that doesn't depend on a single platform or technology

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Explore how to bring a global employer brand to life through employee storytelling at scale, authentic video and social content, and giving employees a meaningful voice in the brand. Discuss how to balance a consistent global brand with locally relevant stories.

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Every company wants to deliver a great candidate experience, but many organizations collect large volumes of feedback without a clear strategy for turning insights into action.

In this session, Schneider Electric will share its candid journey to improving candidate experience through a simple philosophy: control the controllables. We'll discuss how we moved beyond satisfaction scores to identify the moments that matter most, uncover meaningful trends in candidate feedback, and prioritize improvements that create measurable impact. Attendees will hear practical examples of small, targeted changes that delivered outsized results, demonstrating that better candidate experiences don't always require major investments or large-scale transformation efforts.

We'll also explore one of the biggest challenges facing talent acquisition teams today: recruiters don't own every touchpoint. Hiring managers play a critical role in shaping candidate perceptions, yet influencing thousands of managers across a global organization requires more than training alone. We'll share how Schneider Electric uses data, process design, and in-the-moment reminders to reinforce candidate-centric behaviors throughout the hiring journey. Most importantly, we'll be honest about the lessons learned, including the risks of overreacting to individual comments, trying to solve every piece of feedback, and losing sight of broader trends.

Whether you're launching a candidate experience program or evolving a mature one, you'll leave with practical strategies to collect meaningful feedback, focus on what matters most, influence key stakeholders, and drive measurable improvements without boiling the ocean.

Attendees Will Learn

• How to turn candidate feedback into actionable insights
• A practical framework for prioritizing what you can control
• Small changes that can create significant candidate experience improvements
• Ways to influence hiring managers at scale
• Common pitfalls to avoid when acting on candidate feedback

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In this hands-on session, Dean Da Costa will show you how to think like a social detective and use Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) techniques to find, connect, and verify information that can help you solve real-world sourcing challenges. You’ll learn how to search smarter, uncover useful clues, and move from one piece of information to the next without getting lost down the rabbit hole.

Dean will break down practical techniques including Boolean search, Google operators and advanced search, people-search workflows, and a range of OSINT tools—including how AI can help speed up research and investigation. He’ll share real-world examples and demonstrate how experienced sourcers approach the process of finding, pivoting, and verifying information.

Just as important, we’ll cover the boundaries: how to investigate responsibly, protect privacy, recognize unreliable information, and use OSINT ethically in recruiting.

You’ll leave with a repeatable people-search workflow, new ways to approach hard-to-find talent, and a practical toolkit you can put to work immediately.

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In this practical case-study session, Eaton will share how its talent team brings employer brand strategy to life across multiple talent audiences and stages of the recruiting journey. From building an employee advocacy program to using CRM campaigns to engage talent, Eaton will highlight the strategies, tools, and lessons learned behind its approach.

The session will explore real-world examples of employee advocacy, CRM-driven talent engagement, hourly talent attraction, and early talent strategies, offering attendees practical ideas they can adapt to their own employer brand and recruiting efforts.

Attendees will learn how to:

• Activate employees as authentic voices for your employer brand.
• Use CRM campaigns to build and nurture relationships with talent.
• Adapt employer brand strategies to attract and engage hourly talent.
• Build early talent strategies that connect with students and emerging professionals.
• Align people, tools, and content to create a more consistent talent attraction strategy.

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In today's fast-moving organizations, the greatest barriers to progress are rarely a lack of effort or expertise. More often, teams struggle because they are operating from different assumptions, incomplete information, or misaligned perspectives.

The CLUE Framework — Curiosity, Learning, Understanding, and Empathy — provides leaders with a practical, human-centered approach for improving the conversations that drive business outcomes. By focusing on how leaders engage rather than simply what decisions they make, CLUE helps create clarity, alignment, and trust in moments that matter most.

In this session, you'll explore how each element of the framework contributes to stronger leadership effectiveness, better decision-making, and more productive collaboration across teams. Whether you're navigating strategic decisions, hiring conversations, performance discussions, or organizational change, CLUE offers a repeatable approach for creating shared understanding and reducing friction.

Key Takeaways

• Learn how Curiosity helps uncover context and reduce assumptions
• Discover ways to stay open to new information and increase adaptability
• Create stronger alignment by focusing on Understanding what truly matters
• Build trust and engagement through Empathy and intentional leadership
• Apply the CLUE Framework to hiring, coaching, collaboration, and change management
  Improve decision quality and accelerate alignment across stakeholders

Organizations don't struggle because people aren't working hard. They struggle when people are working from different assumptions. CLUE equips leaders with the tools to ask better questions, create shared understanding, and make more informed decisions that drive better outcomes.

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Building a successful sourcing function requires more than finding profiles — it requires strategy, structure, repeatable processes, and the right balance of technology and human expertise.

In this practical session, Brittany Duncan will share how organizations can build and optimize sourcing capabilities that deliver results. From defining sourcing models and creating scalable workflows to identifying the right tools, tactics, and metrics, attendees will learn how to move from reactive recruiting to a proactive talent strategy.

Whether you are building a sourcing function from the ground up or looking to improve an existing approach, this session will provide practical ideas you can apply immediately.

Key Takeaways

• Define the key elements of a high-performing sourcing function
• Build repeatable sourcing processes and workflows
• Create proactive talent pipelines before roles open
• Balance sourcing technology with recruiter expertise
• Identify what sourcing tactics work—and what doesn’t
• Measure sourcing impact and communicate value to stakeholders

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At Rosendin, Rachel Duran is tackling a complex talent attraction challenge in the union space, working to create a more connected approach to overall talent attraction, talent pool management, and source tracking and analytics.

In this practical session, Rachel will share how she is working to solve for these challenges while connecting employer brand, recruitment marketing, and candidate experience along the way.

Get a behind-the-scenes look at the work of building a more cohesive talent attraction strategy—from reaching and engaging the right audiences, to managing talent pools and gaining better visibility into which sources and efforts are actually delivering results.

Walk away with practical ideas for strengthening attraction, managing talent pools more effectively, and using source data and analytics to make smarter recruitment marketing decisions.

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Recruiting tech has spent the last several years optimizing the bottom of the funnel — automating scheduling, interviews screening, note-taking — all in the name of speed and efficiency. But speed applied to the wrong candidates just gets you to the wrong outcome faster. This session asks the question the industry hasn't fully reckoned with: if automation isn't improving who enters the funnel, is it actually improving hiring at all? We'll explore the gap between efficiency metrics and real outcomes — no-shows, offer declines, early attrition — and make the case that candidate intent, employer brand connection, and genuine expression of interest at the top of the funnel are leading indicators of quality of hire and retention.

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Talent acquisition has always depended on infrastructure: the systems, processes, and platforms that turn strategy into hires. Today, a new layer has been added to this stack. Candidates are increasingly using AI tools to research employers, compare opportunities, and answer questions that once sent them to job boards, career sites, review platforms, and search engines. As a result, companies now have a new recruiting challenge: not just where they appear online, but what AI says about them when candidates ask. 

This session explores how the candidate journey is changing, why AI visibility is becoming a critical component of recruitment strategy, and what leading talent acquisition teams are doing to adapt. 

Attendees will leave with a framework for understanding, measuring, and improving their organization's presence across the emerging AI ecosystem before their competitors do.

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Action Through Collaboration. 

Pull up a seat and join your peers. Skip the slide decks and scripted presentations. The Recruiting Exchange is a facilitated peer-to-peer collaborative session designed for talent acquisition leaders who want to tackle real challenges, share practical solutions, and learn directly from one another.

The discussion focuses on whatever you want to focus on — timely recruiting topics and emerging trends, creating space for open discussion, problem-solving, and knowledge sharing among practitioners facing similar opportunities and obstacles. Participants are encouraged to contribute experiences, ask questions, exchange ideas, and explore new approaches in a highly interactive setting.

Whether you're looking for fresh perspectives, actionable takeaways, or meaningful connections with fellow TA professionals, the Recruiting Exchange delivers candid conversations and collaborative learning you won't find in a traditional conference session.

No presentations. No sales pitches allowed. Just real conversations, real challenges, and real solutions from your peers.

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Pull up a seat and join your peers. Skip the slide decks and scripted presentations. The Sourcing Exchange is a facilitated peer-to-peer collaborative session designed for sourcing and talent acquisition professionals who want to solve real challenges, share proven strategies, and learn directly from one another.

The discussion centers on today's sourcing realities — from AI and talent intelligence to candidate engagement and hard-to-fill roles — creating space for open discussion, collaborative problem-solving, and practical knowledge sharing. Participants are encouraged to exchange ideas, ask questions, challenge assumptions, and explore new approaches in a highly interactive environment.

Whether you're looking for fresh sourcing techniques, actionable insights, or meaningful connections with fellow practitioners, the Sourcing Exchange delivers candid conversations and collaborative learning you won't find in a traditional conference session.

No presentations. No sales pitches. Just real conversations, real sourcing challenges, and practical solutions from your peers.

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Collaborative Learning for Employer Branding and Recruitment Marketing Teams

Pull up a seat and join your peers. Skip the slide decks and scripted presentations. The Branding Exchange is a facilitated peer-to-peer collaborative session designed for employer branding, recruitment marketing, and talent brand professionals who want to tackle real challenges, share proven strategies, and learn directly from one another. Participants are encouraged to exchange ideas, ask questions, challenge conventional thinking, and discover new approaches in a highly interactive environment.

Whether you're looking for fresh inspiration, actionable insights, or meaningful connections with fellow employer brand practitioners, the Branding Exchange delivers candid conversations and collaborative learning you won't find in a traditional conference session.

No presentations. Just real conversations, real branding challenges, and practical solutions from your peers.

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Most Talent Acquisition dashboards are excellent rear-view mirrors: they explain what already happened. But business leaders increasingly need something closer to a GPS. Where are we now? Where is the business going? What talent-supply constraints are ahead? And when should we change course before demand becomes an urgent requisition?

This session introduces a practical framework for moving from retrospective TA metrics toward a more predictive talent system. Michael will connect Talent Intelligence, recruiting capacity, workforce demand, external market signals, and AI-enabled decision support to show how TA can become a more reliable source of business foresight — not simply a faster recruiting operation.

Why This Matters Now

Many TA organizations have improved dashboards, automation, and recruiter productivity while the underlying business question has changed: Can we anticipate where talent availability, competition, cost, timing, or internal capacity will constrain the business before the hiring need becomes urgent? The session reframes TA measurement around reliable talent supply and better forward-looking decisions.

Attendees will walk away with: 

• A simple GPS framework for distinguishing retrospective TA reporting from predictive decision support.
• Practical questions TA can answer before a requisition exists, about supply, competition, capacity, timing, location, and alternative routes.
• A clearer view of how Talent Intelligence and AI can support business decisions without turning the session into another generic 'AI in recruiting' presentation.
• Three practical actions TA leaders can begin applying immediately.

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The case-study session focuses on doing more with less, thinking creatively, and finding unexpected ways to build employer brand and connect with talent. Attendees will learn: 

• Creative ways to build employer brand without a big budget
• How to turn unexpected opportunities into meaningful talent engagement
• Practical ideas for getting more impact from the resources you already have

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In this practical case study, Aaron Adragna, Head of Talent Acquisition at Road Runner Sports, shares how he approaches leading a retail recruiting function—from establishing clear expectations and team objectives to working directly with recruiters and hiring leaders to identify challenges and opportunities for improvement.

Aaron will share a candid look at the realities of retail recruiting, including building buy-in for change, strengthening recruiter–hiring manager relationships, training and coaching recruiters and leaders, and creating greater accountability across the recruiting process.

The conversation will also dig into the metrics and practices that shape Road Runner’s recruiting operation, including employee referrals representing approximately 30% of hires, managing recruiting costs, and identifying opportunities to make the recruiting process more efficient.

Attendees will walk away with practical ideas for evaluating their own recruiting processes, setting expectations, developing their teams, improving partnerships with hiring managers, and finding opportunities to make recruiting more efficient—without simply throwing more resources at the problem.

A real-world retail recruiting story with practical lessons you can put into motion—and a few ideas to help your own team pick up the pace.

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Building a Human-Centered Sourcing Function in the Age of Automation

AI has made it easier than ever to find candidates — but finding someone and winning them over are not the same thing. As sourcing tools get faster and more automated, many talent teams are optimizing for volume and speed while quietly eroding the thing that actually converts: genuine human connection. This session pulls back the curtain on building a modern sourcing function from the ground up — from candidate personas and always-on campaigns to hard-to-fill pipelines — and makes the case that sourcing ROI isn't just apply-to-offer conversion. It's the relationships, trust, and brand equity you build with talent who may not be ready today but will remember you tomorrow. Drawing on a real-world Avature build-out, this talk offers a practical framework for using AI to handle the grind so your team can spend its time on what AI can't do: building relationships that actually convert.

Session Takeaways

• Learn how to reframe sourcing success beyond the apply/interview/offer funnel to include brand equity, awareness, and long-term candidate relationships
• Discover a practical framework for building sourcing infrastructure from scratch — personas, always-on campaigns, and hard-to-fill pipelines
• Understand where AI genuinely improves sourcing efficiency versus where it erodes candidate trust and brand voice
• Explore how to give your team's outreach a distinct, human voice in a market flooded with generic AI-generated messaging
• Walk away with a checklist for auditing your own sourcing function against the "human-in-the-loop" standard

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How do you close the gap between what employers promise and what candidates — and AI — discover?

Your employer brand isn’t defined by what you say about your organization. Candidates are increasingly checking the evidence for themselves, while AI can surface and synthesize information from sources far beyond your careers site and social channels.

In this practical session, Carrie Corbin of HLMG will explore how employer brand and recruitment marketing teams can build a story that is credible, consistent, and backed by evidence.

From employee experiences and candidate touchpoints to online reviews, social content, job descriptions, and the information AI can find, we’ll look at where your employer brand story can break down—and how to make sure what you promise is supported by what candidates actually experience and discover.

Walk away with practical ideas for identifying gaps in your employer brand story, strengthening the proof behind your messaging, and building a more credible talent brand that holds up wherever candidates — and AI — go looking.

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