Recruiting more and hiring faster is not a strategy, yet organisations continue to put pressure on TA to deliver.

At Coles, the focus is:

• What is the problem we are trying to solve?
• How do we get to the root cause of the issue?

Tammy will share examples of recruitment, retention and people challenges that were solved through partnering with TA and the business, including:

1. Use of Internal and External Data
2. Understanding the business model and context of the organisation
3. Focusing on both short-term and long-term talent planning
4. TA having the business acumen and communication skills to guide the right conversations and decision.

In today’s evolving work landscape, the importance of skills cannot be overstated. With skilled workers in high demand and skills gaps widening, talent leaders are bracing for tougher challenges ahead.

You might be asking… Is skills-based hiring the answer? How do we bridge the gap between the skills we have and the skills we need? How can we cater to the diverse expectations of six generations in the workforce? And how can we future-proof our upskilling strategies?

Let’s explore shall we? Join Indeed as they delve into the essential skills for the workforce of the future and tackle that question… Skills based-hiring, fad or future?

How often have you started a role and found a 5-year-old Talent Strategy sitting in a file somewhere gathering metaphorical dust?

“Not bad” you nod, I could use 70% of this!  Yet only its creator remembers its existence.

Developing a robust Talent Strategy that deeply aligns to the Organisation’s Strategy, that is successfully embraced and embedded into the business, yet agile enough to rise to bend to the demand of the future – it’s no mean feat.

Craig will share how Worley’s Talent Strategy approach and the elements that have made it so successful.

Feedback is a critical but difficult part of the Hiring Process, it honours the time commitment of the candidate, deepens Candidate Experience, builds trust and organisational reputation. It can also go wrong if you’re not prepared.  In this session Simon will cover:

• Feedback Types: Corrective/Unconstructive and Positive;
• Feedback Discovery: How to set expectation and work flows to easily obtain feedback from Hiring Manager;
• Feedback Hygiene: Setting yourself up for success;
• Feedback Techniques: Feedforward, What/Why, Situation, Behaviour and Impact;
• Feedback Examples:  From poor communication skills, not a cultural fit, lacking technical depth to negative internal reference, we’ll dive into real examples and how to manage them.

RMIT’s Inclusive By Design approach to recruitment is changing systems and removing barriers, that empower candidates and employees to apply equitably for opportunities, without disclosing or requesting additional support.

Through RMIT’s commitment to inclusion and diversity, they’re not only creating best practice recruitment processes, they’re also attracting top talent in places others aren’t looking. Tania and Mat will share how it started, lessons learnt and where the program is heading next.

AI across the recruitment lifecycle is evolving. This is impacting the way TA teams approach and adopt AI to drive better outcomes across productivity, efficiency, quality, and user experience.

Jesse will offer his perspective on AI’s influence in Talent Acquisition and how it’s causing us to re-examine our ways of working. He will also share how SEEK is embedding AI practices today to personalise the experience and enhance the talent acquisition strategy.

Choose a topic and share your questions and knowledge on the topic in these small roundtable sessions. Hear a range of perspectives and how talent teams are approaching it.

Topic 1 – Demand Planning: Ways in which you are working with the broader business to better demand plan.

Topic 2 – Showcasing your EVP on a Budget: Some of the best performing elements in your Talent Attraction strategy don’t cost a lot.

Topic 3 – Referral Programs: Share the process of how referrals are made, what the parameters and rules are, how much you offer, how you engage the business to get involved and outcomes.

Topic 4 – TA’s role in Internal Mobility: With internal hires on the rise, let’s share what TA’s role in Internal Mobility is in each Organisation and how you’re collaborating with Business Leaders and HR to achieve it.

Topic 5 – TA’s role in the Gender Pay Gap: How are TA, HR and Rem & Benefits working together on salary offers and the Gender Pay Gap?

Topic 6 – Disability Confident Hiring: Ways to build Disability confidence across your Hiring Team.

Topic 7 – Internal Brand & Reputation: How do you actively manage the brand and reputation of the Internal TA team with internal stakeholders?

Following the success in the US, UK and Canada, McDonald’s has recently rolled out recruitment automation across ANZ. Join Robert Hunter, Manager of Local Employee Experience at McDonald’s as he shares how the company strategically balances automation with the human touch to enhance efficiency while maintaining a personal, values-driven hiring experience. Through practical examples, you’ll gain insights into solution design, implementation strategies, and the critical skills and mindset shifts needed for talent acquisition professionals to excel in an AI-enhanced recruitment landscape.

Sourcing has changed a lot from when it first burst onto the TA scene over 20 years ago. Boolean Search changed to AI Search and when that became easier, the focus moved to creative outreach comms. Cal will lay out his view on the career paths and unique value propositions that current Talent Sourcers have in front of them in an ever-changing talent landscape.

Get ready to re-examine the established recruiting norms. Some sessions will delve deep into one topic with a specific case study or analysis, and in others you’ll experience our 5+5 format, where several people will take turns challenging a hiring norm in 5 minutes using 5 slides. It’s going to be thought-provoking and fun.

We can’t tell you the topics in advance, that would be cheating.

In FY24, AFCA made 490 hiring decisions for their organisation of 1100. At just under 50% of the workforce, the volume and quality of these hiring decisions would make a huge impact to the Culture and DNA of the organisation, enough to change it fundamentally. Hiring Managers all had strong expertise in interviewing and hiring but all from different past employers with different hiring ideologies. This is when the penny dropped, our Hiring Managers were not as aligned as we needed them to be.

We delivered a program of work on:

• The key dimensions of Culture, Diversity, Leadership, Fairness and a Future-Ready workforce.
• Clarity around the Durable Skills our workforce needs.
• A selection process roadmap that supports the organisation’s strategic priorities and enhances our culture.
• Training Leaders to hire the AFCA way, making decisions that align to organisational goals, not just divisional needs.

Gen Z (circa 19–28yo) have been dubbed ‘the visual generation’. They are not only digital natives but where other generations may lean towards Google or Google Maps to find a service or recommendation, Gen Z prefers social media. The content here is short, highly visual and very engaging. Spending a whopping 7.3 hours on their phone and online per day, Gen Z are highly influenced by social media personalities and trends. To attract this cohort, you must embrace and adapt to the forms of communications that cater to their preferences of this group that now make up one firth of Australia’s population and workforce.

Mils will share:

• How to create compelling campaigns tailored to resonate with Gen Z candidates;
• The role of influencers in amplifying your brand message and reaching a wider audience;
• Examples of successful content and why it hits the right mark;
• Mastering advanced search and filtering techniques to reach Gen Z talent on social media;
• The use data insights to optimize your strategies and enhance outcomes;
• Staying informed about the latest trends and tech that Gen Z engages with.

Join us as we unlock the doors to a world of endless possibilities in talent attraction and sourcing specifically targeted at Gen Z.

We have a great candidate experience! Really, compared to who?

When we measure the candidate experience we provide, it is a foot race with no competitors (or at least, no competitor data). Otherwise, it is a collective number that does not consider the experience of women versus the experience of men.

This year, we will be announcing the BenchmarCX 2024 Excellence in Candidate Experience Award finalists and winner – live on stage – and share how it has been measured and who it has been measured against.

ATC’s annual Talent Tech Pitch Off is one of the most exciting elements of the event. The audience all become judges and investors.  We’ll arm you with $100,000 (fake) dollars to invest and give you a chance to question the finalists pitching on stage so you can help decide who wins and is crowned the ATC2024 Innovation Lab Winner!

The Hays team will also select the Hays Choice Award Winner.  They’re looking for a standout entrant whose innovative solutions has the potential to significantly elevate the RPO and MSP customers.

Collect your lanyard, catch up with industry friends and check out the exciting Tech Expo located in Fed Square’s Zinc building.

Welcome to ATC2025! ATC2025’s mainstage is in the beautiful architectural building known as The Edge, built on the banks of the Birrarung.

Ever wondered where one billion dollars a day in AI R&D is going and how these developments might soon reshape your workplaces and lives? Or what it actually takes to power those systems?  This session kicks off with a look behind the curtain at AI R&D, unearthing not just what’s being built, but what it demands from the world around it.

We’ll explore two different timelines:

• Now-2030: The next five years where AI agents improve and embed themselves in white-collar and industrial workflows.
• 2030-2040: The timeframe in which many predict AI may outthink us altogether and work for some may be optional unless we design and regulate it differently.

For HR and Talent Leaders, the real tension lies in the questions we’ll unpack: How do you redesign jobs when AI takes the “productivity” out of performance? What happens when hiring decisions are made by machines and who is keeping the bias in check? Is your organisation ready for “AI-native” roles, and do your people have the literacy to thrive in them? How do we ensure the right kind of impact on our people, workplaces and society?

You won’t leave with hype or headlines but a frank assessment of the work and opportunities ahead from Australia’s leading AI expert Dr Toby Walsh, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales.

What if redesigning work didn’t mean choosing between productivity and people? Medibank’s Work Reinvented program is a bold case study in how to reimagine work with purpose at its centre.

This session will spotlight three strategic moves:

• Transitioning to a 4-day work week to support flexibility and performance.
• An ambitious goal to become Australia’s Healthiest Workplace by 2030.
• Systemic friction-fixing – removing red tape to enable performance and impact.

These aren’t isolated experiments. They’re interconnected shifts in how work is designed, led, and experienced at Medibank. For Talent and HR leaders, this session will spotlight what it really looks like to enable performance through intentional design.

Enjoy a gourmet morning tea and barista coffee while you explore the Expo Hall.

 Pre-Work Required: https://advisory.tcsinsights.com/

Automation is forcing TA teams to evolve from Recruiters to Strategic Talent Advisors. This interactive workshop uses live attendee assessment data across five critical advisory competencies – Curiosity, Analytics, Strategic Thinking, Influencing Skills, and Agility. Those that combine Curiosity with data analysis draw better conclusions about talent needs, whilst those who are Influential can drive strategic workforce decisions. In the workshop we will share:

• Live Results Reveal: Interactive analysis of your responses and scores across competencies.
• Competency Deep Dive: Collaborative discussion on how the two lowest-scoring traits impact daily TA effectiveness.
• Solution Workshop: Interactive development of improvement strategies and takeaway exercises.

By the end of the session, you’ll have two tangible outputs:

1. Collective Competency Benchmark: how the data for the five traits compare to Talent Advisor Standards.
2. Two Ready-to-Use Exercises: Practical scenarios that you can immediately implement with your teams to begin the bridge the gap and develop your lowest-scoring competency.

For Canva, allowing candidates to use AI during the hiring process isn’t a question of enabling shortcuts or allowing “cheating”- it’s about practically assessing the real, usable skills our people need on the job. Almost half of our engineers leverage AI to prototype ideas, understand our large codebase and generate code allowing them to focus on what matters most: Empowering the World to Design. This meant that our hiring practices needed to evolve alongside the tools and practices our people use every day. Learn how we shaped new policy, updated communications and embedded the assessment AI tools like Copilot, Cursor, and Claude into our technical interviews.

Following this morning’s Keynote session, Toby Walsh will host an intimate extended Q&A for Talent Directors and Heads of Strategy. This is an off-the-record opportunity to gain a deeper understanding and discuss ethical considerations and workforce implications amongst peers.

As a global leader in healthcare technology, Medtronic faces a unique challenge: competing with both medical innovators and technology giants for highly specialised talent, whilst hiring thousands of employees each year, across 150+ countries. In this session, Medtronic will share its approach to talent acquisition automation – leveraging AI to streamline hiring, simplify candidate experiences, and empower recruiters to act as true talent advisors.

You will gain practical insights into:

• Moving beyond AI hype to achieve measurable business outcomes.
• Redesigning candidate-focused hiring journeys with AI and automation to enhance both recruiter efficiency and the candidate experience.
• Laying the groundwork for data-driven, future-ready talent acquisition strategies.

This session introduces a ground-breaking case study of a TA Function that mapped their team at a task level – unpacking in detail, how recruiter time is really spent. The analysis revealed stark gaps between business leaders’ perceptions of what counts as “critical and productive work” and the everyday reality inside TA teams. It also highlighted where people found their energy, spark, and professional drive, and what drains them. You’ll leave with an understanding of practical next steps and how to redesign work in a way that aligns productivity gains with both business outcomes and employee engagement. This session sits at the intersection of work design, productivity, automation, skills and task analysis and preserving the joy in human-centric work. This is the future.

In talent, the conversation often centres on “getting a seat at the table.” Athanasia Corso, Head of Talent at Network Insurance House, believes the real opportunity lies in owning the seat you already have. With a $10k budget and the support of VideoMyJob, she flipped the traditional recruitment marketing playbook, replacing long timelines and costly film crews with an agile, AI-driven process that surfaced what employees truly value and turned those insights into authentic stories.

The result was a reverse-engineered value proposition shaped by employee voices, a library of hundreds of on-brand videos, and thousands of auto-generated shareable assets such as social clips, branded quote cards and ready-to-publish blogs, all created in just 15 hours of her time. These assets now fuel recruitment marketing, onboarding, internal comms and culture, and will also play a crucial role in amplifying their recent rebrand, proving that even lean resources can deliver enterprise-level impact at scale.

In this session, Jamie Holder, Head of Talent at MUFG Retirement Solutions, sits down with Athanasia to unpack her storytelling playbook, the lessons, advice and strategies she used to move fast, prove outcomes, and demonstrate talent’s strategic power without waiting for permission.

Enjoy lunch in the Expo Hall while catching up with the Talent Community overlooking the banks of Birrarung.

Australian workplaces are undergoing unprecedented disruption, with a wave of new laws and regulatory interventions reshaping employer obligations. Without a clear understanding of these changes, Workforce Leaders risk being caught in a perfect storm of compliance and operational challenges.

Workforce Lawyer, Nick Duggal will unpack:

• The legal implications of AI’s reorganisation of the labour market, and what it means for employers’ obligations.
• The recent High Court decision that expands the way employers need to redeploy workers when undertaking redundancies.
• The Victorian Government initiative to mandate 2 days WFH.
• Impacts of the Economic Reform Roundtable on workplace productivity.
• The growing momentum behind the four-day week, and the legal considerations for contracts, awards, and enterprise agreements.

Walk away with easy-to-understand insights on new legal obligations, areas of risk to watch, and the chance to test your own scenarios and ask your questions direct to Nick.

How work gets done it about to change. This session will introduce you to the world of AI Agents in the most practical way.

By the end of this session, you will understand:

• Automation Agents: Agents that are trained to perform tasks.
• Virtual Partner Agents: Agents that partner with you to discuss and explore, creating a virtual workmate.
• How Agents differ from other tools: Agents are different to GPTs, Chatbots or Prompts.
• Practical Uses: How Agents can be used in recruitment, marketing and even for your kid’s homework, etc.
• How they are bought, built and trained: How to get started fast.
• How the workforce will change: Worried about job losses? There are far more opportunities than you think.

Many organisations are grappling with what role TA plays in Internal Mobility. MYOB decided not to look at Internal Mobility in isolation, but how it intersects and overlaps with Talent Pooling, Talent Advisory and Talent Management and Demand Planning to align with their Strategic Workforce Plan. Together, Adam and Ash will share:

• Why they are expanding their pre-existing Talent Advisory function to broaden impact on the business and being true Talent Advisors.
• How the Exec and SLT team were engaged on the concept of mobilising internal talent.
• How they got Hiring Managers onboard with TA providing career planning to their employees.
• How they engaged Employees to help them “manage their careers”.
• The scope and elements of the Career discussions.
• Lessons they learned from this program of work and where it goes next.

They will also share the results including more empowered and engaged employees, deeply qualified talent pools with increased internal mobility and improved Strategic Workforce and Demand Planning.

Globally, one man dies by suicide every minute and in Australia, it is the #1 cause of death for men under 45. But even as wellbeing strategies become business priorities, men’s health is largely left out of the conversation. Men’s health requires visibility, conversation, and collective action and the workplace is a powerful place to start. Movember have built the world’s largest movement for men’s health, and every November is an opportunity for People & Culture Teams to drive real impact inside their Organisation. Let’s co-create a low-lift, high-impact activation that supports your DEI and ESG goals and drives meaningful change.

Imagine a Talent Acquisition function unburdened by low-value, manual, and siloed processes, and instead, free to focus on relationship building and optimising recruiting strategies.

Join Workday for a look at the new AI Operating Model for TA, a definitive move that transforms your team from transactional recruiters into a genuine strategic powerhouse. This isn’t just an upgrade—it’s an evolution. Discover how implementing a trusted, responsible AI for HR solution can:

• Boost recruiter capacity by an average of 54%.
• Cover on average 70% of requisitions from existing talent pools.
• Enhance hiring collaboration and the candidate experience.
• Reduces time-to-fill and enable a more agile, future-ready workforce.

In this live and interactive session, you’ll be presented with real-world hiring dilemmas. Working in small groups, you’ll weigh your options, debate your approach, and decide how you’d handle each scenario. Will you prioritise speed or rigour? Candidate experience or business pressure? Lock in your decision and then our expert panel will weigh in with a verdict – breaking down the risks, ethics, and evidence behind what best practice really looks like. No one gets voted off the island, but you might just rethink how you hire.

Jo and Eva will wrap up the day and let you know what’s next and what you can expect from Day 2 of ATC2025.

Enjoy social drinks, eats and catching up with the Talent Community overlooking the banks of Birrarung.