Pavi Iyer, Simon Hedt and Steve Nield are the Talent Acquisition Leaders hosting our ATC2026 Breakout Stages.

Pavi Iyer started her career in medicinal chemistry, which taught her early that the most interesting problems sit where science, people and experimental thinking all meet. She found her way into People and Talent, took a detour to co-found a specialty coffee roastery and café in Melbourne where she learnt what running a business actually demands, and came back to People and Culture. Fifteen years later she is still obsessed with the same fundamentals, just with better tools and fewer coffee burns.

She has built people functions from scratch inside high-growth startups and scaleups, delivered thousands of hires across her career, and holds an organisational coaching accreditation that shapes how she coaches founders and leaders. Today she leads the People and Talent function at Fortiro, alongside coaching and facilitating workshops for early-stage founders outside of work.

Pavi is currently experimenting with AI and vibe coding tools, working out what AI can genuinely do for People teams and how to speed up the administrative side of the work without losing the human judgement that makes it worth doing. She is still forming a view on parts of it, and enjoying the journey of exploring and learning.

Simon didn’t take a straight path into talent. He started out in design and engineering; fields that taught me how to think laterally, ask better questions, and get curious about how things (and people) work. Somewhere along the way, He realised it wasn’t just the systems and loved improving, it was helping people find where they really fit.

Since then, Simon has worked across agency and in-house teams, built and led high-performing recruitment functions, and hired for everything from tech specialists to non-tech leaders. He’s rolled up his sleeves on process redesigns, workforce planning, forecasting, talent advisory projects, you name it. What ties it all together is simple: He gets a kick out of seeing people do well. Whether it’s helping a business hit its growth targets or guiding someone through a career move that changes their life, that’s the real reward.

Outside of work, he’s usually on a bike, listening to something loud, or spending time with his brilliant wife and their three kids. Simon also barracks for Collingwood, it runs in the family, so don’t hold it against him.

Steve’s all grown up! After spending the past 15 years managing Early Careers portfolios in the Engineering Consulting Sector, this year he commenced as the new TA Manager with Yarra Trams, with an extra lens around Social Inclusion. In practical terms, this means leading a team of TA professionals, working across experienced, volume and Early Careers hiring as well as partnering with external organisations to improve diverse hiring outcomes across the business.

With a life-long passionate for graduates, interns, vacation students and all things in between, he is currently working to reinvigorate these pathways across the Yarra Trams business. Steve’s also a passionate STEMinist and has advocated for gender equity across the broader Engineering industry for many years.

In addition to his work with GHD, he is also involved with the Australian Association of Graduate Employers (AAGE). He has been a Director with the AAGE since 2014 and held the position of Board Chair from 2017 – 2020.

Steve is also a father to two neurodivergent daughters, is learning a lot through the experience and is bringing the best of his lived experience into the workplace to advocate for constructive change for other neurodivergent individuals going through recruitment processes.