Keeping the day on track.

How inclusive is your employer brand when you look beyond the averages? In this interactive session, we’ll use a realistic, anonymized case study to uncover how seemingly “healthy” data can hide exclusion and bias for specific groups. Working in small groups with pre-prepared data packs (segmented by different demographic groups), participants will:

Identify where employer brand promises hold true, and where they break.
Spot signals of systemic bias hidden behind aggregated results.
Explore the brand and trust risks of misaligned narratives.
Co-create more inclusive, evidence-aware employer brand messages.

Participants will leave with a simple framework and practical questions to stress-test their company's EVP and campaigns using the DEI-relevant data they already have.

*Please note, attendees at this session require a laptop / device with access to excel.

The right candidates aren't always scrolling job boards, or even thinking about changing jobs. This showcase session demystifies how programmatic advertising can help employer brands reach the people traditional recruitment marketing misses, and turn attention into action.

We'll introduce programmatic in simple terms and explore the metrics that matter, from awareness and reach to conversions and measurable impact. We'll show how MiQ's global footprint helps brands activate campaigns across multiple markets.

We'll also give a snapshot of how we've brought these channels to life and the impact they've delivered.

Organisations talk about transformation through the language of innovation, productivity and future readiness. Employees hear something different: security, workload, fairness, relevance and trust.

In this hands-on workshop, you’ll put a transformation message through a live translation test, exploring what leaders say, what employees hear and what gets repeated afterwards.

Using SMRS’ Promise-Practice-Proof framework, you’ll uncover the gaps between intention and interpretation, then rebuild the message around what people actually need to hear. Leave with a more human way of communicating change and a reusable tool for the future.

Employee-generated content works because it taps into something deeper than authenticity alone. Who tells a story, how they tell it and whether audiences can see themselves in it can shape trust, connection and perceptions of belonging.

This session explores the behavioural science behind why some employee stories resonate and why others fall flat. We’ll look at the psychology of both the employees creating content and the audiences consuming it: what makes people want to get involved, what makes their stories connect, and the common mistakes that can get in the way.

Working with others, you’ll explore how to overcome these barriers and apply the principles to your own organisation helping more employees contribute and creating content that people genuinely trust, connect with and remember.

Most ambassador programs don't fail because the idea is wrong. They fail because the foundation isn't there. Maja and Katarina from Nordeus know this firsthand. In this workshop, they're sharing the unfiltered story of building the Nordeus Brand Academy (NBA): the mistakes, the lessons, and everything they'd do differently from day one.

You'll work in groups on a shared company brief, so it doesn't matter what size your company is, what your budget looks like, or where you're starting from. Everyone's on equal footing. Together, you'll work through the full Prep, Find, Equip, Activate, and Measure framework, including one exercise dedicated entirely to what you can build for $0.

No polished theory. No perfect case studies. Just two Employer Brand team members who learned the hard way, and an hour of real, practical work.

You'll leave with the first draft of an ambassador program you can actually use. Not someday. Monday.

Employer Branding is entering a new era. The future is no longer about creating better personas or writing better prompts. It is about building an AI powered team of specialists that challenges assumptions, uncovers insights and supports better Employer Branding decisions.

In this session, participants will discover a completely new operating model for Employer Branding. Instead of using AI as a single assistant, they will learn how to create their own AI Employer Brand Team after the session, bringing together specialists such as an Employer Branding Strategist, Behavioral Scientist, Recruiter, Candidate Persona, Employee Persona, Data Analyst and Storytelling Expert. Through practical examples and live demonstrations, they will experience how these AI experts collaborate to solve complex Employer Branding challenges.

Participants leave with a ready to use framework, including prompts, roles and implementation guidance, enabling them to build their own AI Employer Brand Team immediately and transform AI into a strategic thinking partner for future Employer Branding initiatives.

Every organisation invests in employer branding, yet many continue to struggle with inconsistent employee experiences, low advocacy, declining engagement and retention challenges. The usual response is to refine the EVP, create more content or launch another campaign. But what if these actions are only addressing the symptoms?

This interactive lab introduces Culture Debt: the accumulated gap between the culture an organisation intends to create and the one employees experience every day.

Using the Culture Debt Canvas, participants will examine their own organisation across six areas: promise, experience, gap, underlying debt, business impact and first action. The session will help them identify the hidden organisational barriers weakening their employer brand and understand where employer branding connects with leadership, communication, culture and employee experience.

Participants will leave with a new perspective on employer branding and a practical way to start broader conversations with their teams, challenge fragmented approaches and begin building a more connected employer brand system.

Employee advocacy and referrals are often managed separately, with different teams, tools and objectives. But what if bringing them together could unlock significantly greater impact?

Both rely on the same fundamental principle: engaging employees to become advocates for your business. And when combined, they can do more than boosting your employer brand — they can deliver measurable hiring outcomes.

Join our talk to discover how Rentokil worked with Real Links to combine a referrals and advocacy strategy which:

• Drove greater employee participation with a joined up approach
• Moved beyond ambassadors and turned all employees into advocates / referrers
• Demonstrated impact on employer brand through impressions, reach & earned media value, but also impact on applications, interviews and hires
• Delivered key ROI metrics which blew the business away: Earned Media Value of £253k and 35%+ of its hires via referrals & advocacy

We’ll leave you with practical lessons to take back to your business so hope you’ll join us!

In the world's best luxury hotels and Michelin-starred restaurants, unforgettable service relies on "unreasonable hospitality": the art of creating unexpected, deeply human moments. But how do we bring that magic into our workplaces?
In this interactive workshop, we’ll explore how to use experience science and "surprise and delight" to turn candidates and employees into brand champions. I’ll share how we operationalized this at Qualtrics, from executives pushing Treat Trolleys and fulfilling employee requests through the Dream Team, to shipping surprise swag to high-priority talent communities.
You’ll roll up your sleeves and leave this session having identified three specific, high-impact moments in your own employee experience and talent communities where you can incorporate surprise and delight to supercharge your employer branding.

Impressions, followers, applications, awards. Most employer brand teams can prove they were busy. Far fewer can prove they spent the year on the right things.
This session will put familiar metrics under pressure and ask which ones genuinely help you make better decisions. Which numbers tell you when to stop a campaign, move budget, change direction or rethink a partnership? And which ones simply make the dashboard look busy?
Bring your own dashboard and work with others to audit what’s there, challenge what’s missing and decide what deserves to stay. You’ll leave with a shorter, sharper set of measures you’d actually bet your budget on.
No dashboard, or prefer not to share yours? We’ll have sample versions ready to tear apart instead.

A practical workshop for mapping the career pathways you're already promising

One of the biggest problems with conferences is whether it was actually worth participants’ time. Not just networking, but have they taken away tangible insights that will make a difference in their tomorrow. We hardly find time to properly digest the wealth of information or action on them in the future. This is where art of facilitation is designed to help!

With activities to ignite sharing, brainstorming, prioritizing, and in the end taking a step back to put it into your own context is how we can both help participants build their own value of the conference and ensure you, as organizers, get valuable feedback in real time.

The same concept can be adapted to the beginning of the day. To assess what they want to get out of the conference, then plan their day accordingly. With 5 tracks and many workshops, this exercise will help them prioritize and build their own agenda tailored to their goals.