BESA DEDA

Chief Economist

Westpac Business Bank

ROSS CLENNETT

High-performance recruitment coach and recruitment industry blogger and commentator. 

RossClennett.com

MARTIN RICHARDSON

Founder

Ready Set Recruit Legal

GEORGE HAROS

Partner - Employment Law

Gadens

Besa Deda is the Chief Economist of the Westpac Business Bank. She is also the Chief Economist of St.George Bank, Bank of Melbourne, and BankSA – which are regional banks within the Westpac Group.
Besa has been with the Group as a Chief Economist since 2009.
As the Bank’s economic spokesperson, Besa is responsible for research on the economy and financial markets.
She formulates views and forecasts on the outlook for the economy, interest rates, and currencies and manages a team of economists. Besa gives regular presentations and often appears in the media reporting on economic conditions.
Over his fifteen years as an agency recruiter and leader Ross worked in London, Sydney, Adelaide, and Melbourne. 

Since 2003 Ross has run his own business, RossClennett.com, providing a range of services to the recruitment industry in Australia and New Zealand, predominantly high-performance coaching in addition to online recruitment and leadership programs
 
For more than 20 years Ross has been writing forthright opinion pieces on recruitment, the recruitment industry, the labour market, and high performance with these articles being published on his blog, via his weekly newsletter, InSight, since 2007.
Martin Richardson draws on his hands-on industry experience running the Adecco legal team to help agencies all over Australia.

He has plenty of war stories, and he's seen all the things that (should) keep you up at night. But he's also delivered real success and results to agencies everywhere because he goes beyond 'magic pills' and generic legal documents and advice, to get to what matters to agencies, and why.
George Haros is a leading employment and industrial relations lawyer. He has significant experience advising clients concerning a range of employment and industrial relations matters, including Fair Work Commission (FWC) matters, Federal Court matters, equal opportunity, restraint of trade, bullying and harassment, discrimination, workplace investigations, and workers' compensation. George offers industry-specific knowledge in areas including labour-hire, recruitment, and professional services.

NICK KAMPER

CEO

Purpose Bureau

EMILY McLEOD

Co-Founder and Director

WOW Recruitment

SIMON HAIR

Managing Director

Precision Sourcing

MARK SMITH

Managing Director

people2people

Nick Kamper is the Chief Executive of Purpose Bureau, Australia’s largest ESG business bureau.

Frequently covered in international and national media, Purpose Bureau’s novel intelligence on every business in Australia is used by policymakers, corporates, and fintechs to better understand the stakeholder economy.
Emily is the co-founder and director of WOW Recruitment, a Sydney-based consultancy operating across
sales, marketing, digital, and business support. In five short and eventful years, (punctuated by a pandemic) Emily and her team have won the trust of some of Australia’s most recognisable brands, recruiting at some serious scale whilst retaining a commitment to WOW’s founding principle – to make clients, candidates, and recruiters happy.
 
How is she doing? Well, exponential headcount and profit growth underpinned by industry-leading NPS scores and client retention rates saw WOW rewarded with the Rising Star Award at last year’s Tiara’s.
 
Emily and WOW really are a shining example of the power of personality and relationship building in achieving success.  
Simon is the Managing Director of the award-winning recruitment business Precision Sourcing. 

Starting his recruitment career 22 years ago in London working for some of Europe’s largest corporate staffing businesses Simon moved to Sydney in 2009 with the goal of establishing Precision Sourcing as Australia’s stand-out recruitment experts in SAP, Data and Project Services.

Today Precision Sourcing is recognised as a champion of the 4 day work week as a catalyst for improving the health and well-being of their employees. Operating out of Sydney, Precision Sourcing leverages innovative events, podcasts, technology, and the old school recruitment craft to access dormant talent that others are unable to reach.
 Recruitment is a lifelong passion. After practicing for a few years as a qualified accountant, Mark decided to make the switch to the recruitment industry in 1994, where he recruited and managed teams for two listed recruitment entities in Sydney, Brisbane, and London.

In February 2005, Mark, alongside, Manda Milling, Simon Gressier, and Greg Savage founded people2people. They believed there was a gap in the market for an agency that values long-term relationships.

Now people2people has grown to eight offices across Australia and New Zealand. Mark works with people to find the job they love.

LISA ANNESE

CEO

The Diversity Council of Australia

RANI NANDAN

Diversity & Inclusion Director APAC

PageGroup

MARK NIELSEN

Global CEO

Talent International 

MAROUN ELIAS

Senior Manager, Global Immigration

Ernst & Young

Lisa Annese has been the Chief Executive Officer of Diversity Council Australia since 2014. In this role, she leads debate on diversity and inclusion in the public arena.

Under her leadership, DCA delivers innovative diversity practice resources for Australian businesses and supports in them improving their inclusion capability. She has led a broad array of ground-breaking, evidence-based research, including Australia’s first national index on workplace diversity and inclusion, seminal research on the economics of the gender pay gap, and original work on Counting Culture and building Asian Leadership Capability, as well as research supporting individuals being “Out at Work” main-streaming flexible work and myth-busting workplace responses to sexual harassment and, domestic and family violence.

In 2018, Lisa was named one of the AFR’s 100 Women of Influence. In 2019 she was elected to the Board of Amnesty International Australia and in 2021 to the Board on the non-partisan organisation, Women for Election. Lisa is a member Chief Executive Women is Executive Producer of DCA’s podcast, The Art of Inclusion.
Lisa has had a long career in the diversity and inclusion space across the corporate, government, and not-for-profit sector.

 

With more than 15 years experience working across retail, contact centre, and sales environments as an HR leader, Rani Nandan has a passion for diversity, inclusion, and HR business partnering. 
Since joining PageGroup in 2015, Rani has been the driving force behind progress in diversity and inclusion for the Australian business. 

In mid-2021, Rani was promoted to D&I Director, APAC. This role focuses on developing and deploying PageGroup’s DEI strategy across the Asia Pacific region, building on the framework she successfully delivered across Australia in the past six years. In this role, she works collaboratively with PageGroup’s global DEI team, the APAC Executive Leaders, and Country Heads across the region. 
This role aims to strengthen PageGroup’s DEI goals regionally and demonstrates the investment and commitment the business places on this important topic. 

Supporting her role, Rani is a member of the global sustainability working group, where she collaborates with business leaders to implement the sustainability goals the business has in place, as part of PageGroup’s membership and signatory to the United Nations Global Compact.

 

Mark Nielsen is the Global Chief Executive Officer of Talent International.

Over a career spanning more than 25 years, Mark has held C-level roles across start-ups, turnarounds and multinational corporations. This experience included organisations in Australia, South Africa, China, the United Kingdom, and the USA, and across the recruitment, technology, resources, retail and medical device sectors.

Throughout his career he has held executive and non-executive director positions on listed and unlisted company boards.
Mark’s current role is managing Talent’s $800m+ APAC business, driving both Talent’s global expansion and its cultural and digital transformations. He is also the co-founder and board member of Talent's foundation Talent RISE, which addresses youth unemployment through the mentoring and placement of young people into technology-related roles.

In 2018, Mark was named Australian CEO of the Year (CEO Magazine), Professional Services Executive of the Year (CEO Magazine) and Recruitment Leader of the Year – Australia (SEEK SARA Awards) and in 2021 Deloitte Top 50 LGBTIQ Leaders.

 

Maroun specialises in cross-border talent management. Collaborating with organisations across a myriad of industries and sectors, Maroun incorporates workforce planning and talent acquisition strategies to develop mobility solutions, with an entrenched focus on immigration requirements.

Maroun is a practising Australian immigration lawyer. Maroun has over 10 years of experience at leading international professional services organisations and top-tier law firms. He has extensive experience in global mobility, with a comprehensive understanding on national and international immigration strategy.

Maroun has a proficient expertise in all aspects of the Australian immigration framework and has extensive experience navigating overseas immigration requirements, mainly in the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore and Hong Kong. Maroun also has a strong background in corporate structuring, immigration regulatory compliance and managing immigration risk reviews and audits for his clients. Maroun is responsible for the day to day management and delivery of immigration services to his clients.

 

NICOLA MARTIN

Partner, Labour & Employment Practice Group

Squire Patton Boggs

SIMON HAMMOND

Chairman 

50 Crates

GREG SAVAGE

Advisor, consultant, mentor, investor and trainer to the recruitment, staffing, professional services, and social media sectors.

STEPHANIE ZUNIGA-MAHER

Diversity and Inclusion Talent Partner

Canva

Nicola Martin is a partner in the Labour & Employment Practice Group. She is a highly regarded lawyer with two decades’ experience advising clients on the full spectrum of employment relations, industrial relations and human resources matters.

Nicola’s focus is on how she can best support her clients in their strategic objectives, while navigating a heavily regulated environment. She is not only reactive to their issues, but also particularly enjoys rolling out proactive training to boards, management, HR teams and employees on employment issues. 
 
For over 30 years Adj. Professor Simon Hammond has consistently defined the real drivers of social change and consumer behaviour.  
 
At his heart, Hammond is a cultural anthropologist, stemming from his earliest training as an investigative journalist, to the last 30 years of making sense of modern consumerism, branding and customer connection.
 
His outspoken views on human connection, the power of belonging, and his research & development of the concept of belief within business has made Hammond a sought-after speaker and business advisor in North America, Europe, and Sth East Asia, adding considerable value to boards and management teams in hundreds of major businesses.
 
Hammond is currently chairman for branding agency, 50 Crates. It uses cultural anthropology to create brands that are relevant to the culture they seek to serve.
Greg started his career in Executive Search in Australia before managing the London office of the United Kingdom's largest accounting recruiter for two years. Then, in the early '80s, he returned to Australia to run the Sydney office of Accountancy Placements (now the Hays Group), where he joined the Board of Directors at age 27.
 
Greg founded Recruitment Solutions in 1987 and rapidly built the start-up across Australia and New Zealand, culminating in its successful listing on the Australian Stock Exchange, with Greg as both Executive Director and COO.  In April 2001, Greg joined Aquent and, as International CEO, assumed responsibility for all Aquent businesses outside of North America, comprised of over 25 offices in 17 countries across Europe, Asia and ANZ.
 
In 2010 Greg acquired Aquent's Permanent and Search business in a management buy-out and founded Firebrand Talent Search. He quickly created a global brand for this specialist Digital and Marketing recruiter and successfully sold the company, in 7 countries, in January 2013.
 
In recognition of his contribution to the Australian recruitment industry, Greg was offered Honorary Life Membership of the Recruitment and Consulting Services Association (RCSA) in 2004. 
With over 15 years of experience in Technology Recruitment,  Talent Acquisition, and Talent Attraction, Stephanie is passionate about building diverse teams, celebrating differences and helping to build cultures where people can bring their whole selves to work.
 
Prior to moving into her current role as a Talent Inclusion Partner, Stephanie worked across many roles in the Australian recruitment industry. 

Stephanie understands the pivotal role that agencies can play in working with clients on diversity and inclusion. 

After working as a Talent Acquisition Partner at Splunk, she is currently focused on strategies and programs to increase diversity and equity within the talent pipeline at Canva.  
 
Originally from Washington, DC, Stephanie brings a global perspective and intersectional lens to discussions around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion