Maris Krieger is the  Senior Director, Talent Programs at the Hearst Corporation.

Shaunda Zilich is the Senior Director, Employer Brand and Talent Attraction at Marriott.

Ken Oliver is the Vice President of Checkr.org, the Social Impact division of Checkr, Inc., and also serves as the Executive Director  of the Checkr Foundation. Checkr.org is dedicated to the mission of Building a Fairer Future of Work: one job at a time, by reshaping the narrative and providing pathways to sustainable employment for the 80M Americans who suffer from an arrest and conviction record. Ken's professional expertise spans the landscape of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ), record clearance, talent development, talent sourcing strategy, change management, and public policy. His proximate leadership is informed by lived experience after having been sentenced to life in prison for joyriding. During his close to 24 years of incarceration, he served nine years in solitary confinement for reading a book by former Black Panther Party member, George Jackson. With the support of Stanford University and corporate law firm Mayer Brown, Mr. Oliver successfully filed a civil rights lawsuit against the state, which led to his release in 2019. Upon reentering society, Mr. Oliver quickly established himself in the legal field, first as a paralegal at a public interest law firm and later as a state policy director. In 2020, he co-founded and became the Executive Director of a nonprofit organization focused on providing justice-impacted individuals with career pathways in tech and the knowledge-based economy. Under his leadership, the organization secured a $28.5 million investment from the State of California to establish a unique residential tech training campus for justice-impacted individuals.

Ken's insights and contributions to the field have been recognized and featured in publications such as Newsweek, Fast Company, Forbes, Inc., the New York Times, and others. He also played a role in shaping California Governor Newsom’s 2021 Future of Work Report.

In addition to his primary roles, Mr. Oliver holds board positions with several organizations, including The Last Mile, the San Mateo County of Community Colleges Foundation (SMCCCF), Turning Basin Labs (TBL), ClimbHire, Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (CURYJ), the Justice Reform Foundation (JRF), and the National Reentry Workforce Collaborative (NRWC).

Jane Curran is the Global Head of Talent Acquisition at JLL. In her more than 20 years at JLL, she has served in a variety of HR roles and demonstrated a solid track record of delivering proactive and creative human capital solutions for ever-changing business needs. As head of Talent Acquisition, she has led a significant shift toward a more tech-enabled and marketing-focused function to better source and attract diverse talent pools to fill approximately 30,000 roles a year. She is a passionate champion of diversity and inclusion, wellbeing, and a people first approach.

Jane and her husband Mike reside in Chicago, IL with their two children. Quality time for the Curran family includes trips to the ski slopes of Utah, spending time on Torch Lake in Northern Michigan, football games at the University of Wisconsin, and countless weekends cheering on her kids at basketball, baseball, volleyball and softball games.

Cheryl Petersen is the Associate Principal, Region Talent Resourcing Leader, Americas Region at Arup.

Lydia Dishman is Fast Company’s senior editor for growth and engagement. She has also written for CBS Moneywatch, Fortune, The Guardian, Popular Science, and the New York Times, among others.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz at Work, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.

Naomi is the Senior Director of Design at Employ, where she leads product design for Employ’s talent acquisition and recruitment marketing solutions — JazzHR, Lever, and Jobvite — to create great people-first experiences for the candidates and hiring teams who rely on Employ every day.

Naomi began her adventures in tech over 20 years ago — a journey that's spanned work for startups, scale-ups, and enterprise companies. She's passionate about creating seamless, empowering experiences in the digital products that people use on the job, and has seen first-hand how these are key to helping whole organizations collaborate effortlessly on hiring. Naomi grew up in Toronto, Canada, and loves giving back to the design and tech community through mentorship and teaching. When Naomi isn't in front of a computer, you can usually find her gardening, riding her bicycle, or exploring new cities.

Paul Phillips is Global Head of Talent Acquisition and Onboarding at Avanade and leads a team across 26 countries. He brings the Avanade brand to life for its candidates and new hires, and provides an engaging, high-touch and consistent pre-board and onboarding experience. This reaffirms the new hire decision to stay and integrates our people into Avanade’s culture, core values, processes, and policies.

Over the past 10 years, Paul has held several roles at Avanade including Global Head of Total Rewards and Global Head of HR Strategy and Operations. Prior to joining Avanade, he worked in senior HR strategy and consulting positions at CGI, PwC, and KPMG. Paul is based in New York, U.S.A.

Avenica CEO Scott Dettman is a dynamic leader with a strong track record of driving growth through transformation and innovation in the human capital arena.

Scott joined Avenica in 2019 following a six-year stint with ManpowerGroup that included progressive leadership roles spanning analytics and transformation to general management and business development.

Scott has a master’s degree and Ph.D. (ABD) from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and most recently completed an Executive Leadership program at Harvard Business School.

Nico Roberts is the Chief Business Officer at Fountain, the high volume hiring platform that empowers companies with an hourly workforce to streamline and scale their recruiting operations across the globe. As employee #3, he has worked with many global Fortune 1000 companies, helping them standardize and scale their high volume operations and hiring practices. Roberts specializes in streamlining and automating companies’ hourly recruiting process from sourcing and screening to onboarding.

Seán Delea is a Team Manager, Talent Acquisition, EMEA at Greenhouse. Seán has helped innovative companies hire for a wide variety of roles within the Tech industry for over 7 years, previously at Gitlab and Zendesk. He’s based in Dublin and is a graduate of University College, Cork.

From a 10-hour-a-week content writer to CEO, Heidi Barnett has lived an impressive story of overcoming obstacles, inspired pivots and deep personal growth. Heidi is the passionate leader at the helm of ApplicantPro, a bootstrapped, HR tech company founded in 2006 that today,  services over 10,000 customers nationwide.

Heidi’s degree in Business Marketing helped mold her belief that ‘Hiring is just Marketing’.  She has learned that proper marketing principles applied to the recruiting space creates outstanding results - some customers are seeing a 200% increase in applicant flow when they move to ApplicantPro! This insatiable drive to improve client applicant flow has led to many strategic partnerships in the HR space including becoming 1 of only 5 Platinum Partners of Indeed this inaugural year.

Heidi is a champion of women in the workforce and has coached and mentored many women inside and outside of ApplicantPro into positions of leadership. Their results and direct impact is one of Heidi’s biggest joys and accomplishments. This culture of coaching, connection, and inclusivity has earned ApplicantPro a place in Utah’s Top Workplaces 3 consecutive years.

When Heidi isn’t running one of Inc 5000’s fastest growing companies (for an astonishing 11 years in a row!), she is a loving wife, devoted mom of 4 incredible kids, and an avid traveler. While Heidi daydreams of warm tropical beaches, hiking, skiing and adventuring in the Utah mountains is her favorite.

Prior to joining MiTek, Dr. Rotolo serviced as Vice President of Global Talent Management and Organization Development for PepsiCo, where his team was responsible for the global core HR people processes including the employee surveys, performance management, leadership development and feedback, career development tools, team effectiveness and early pipeline succession management. Christopher led the design and launch of
PepsiCo’s LeAD program for high potential assessment and identification. This program went on to win
SHRM/SIOP’s HR Impact Award in 2018 as well as several Brandon Hall Awards (2017, 2018, 2020). Prior
to joining PepsiCo, Christopher led the Leadership Strategy and Research team within IBM’s Global
Executive and Organization Capability group, where he was responsible for developing IBM’s strategy for
leadership assessment and development. Christopher’s other experiences include the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and the Hay Group, as well as running his own consulting firm.
Dr. Rotolo has presented over 50 sessions at professional conferences spanning over 30 years, and has
authored over 30 articles and book chapters focusing on the topics of leadership, high potential, culture,
and talent assessment. In 2015, he and his co-authors were awarded the Elliot Jaques Memorial Best
Paper of the Year Award from the Consulting Psychology Journal for their submission “How are top
companies designing and managing their high-potential programs?”
Since 2003, Dr. Rotolo has been an adjunct professor at New York University’s Graduate School of Arts
and Sciences in the school’s Master’s program in Industrial-Organizational Psychology. He teaches
Hiring & Selection, Organizational Climate and Culture, Training & Development, and Consumer
Psychology. He has also taught at Columbia Teacher’s College and Sacred Heart University.
Dr. Rotolo earned his Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at Old Dominion University in
Norfolk, Virginia and his M.S. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at University of Central Florida. His
Bachelors of Science was in Psychology from the University of Florida. He is a Fellow of the Society for
Industrial and Organizational Psychology and past-president of Metropolitan New York Association of
Applied Psychology.

Since 2018, Tim Wesson has served as IQVIA’s Senior Vice President of Global Talent Acquisition. In this role, Tim is responsible for creating and executing a Talent Acquisition strategy that supports IQVIA’s mission of accelerating innovation for a healthier world.

Collectively, Tim has over 22 years of results-driven success in Talent Acquisition across all global regions. Prior to joining IQVIA, Tim held several positions of increasing Talent Acquisition leadership responsibility at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce. Earlier in his career, Tim founded a boutique agency specializing in go-to-market recruiting for the technology industry.

Tim has been happily married to his wife, Laura, for the past 28 years. Together, they have two children, Madison and Jack, who have left the nest but visit often. Tim enjoys spending his free time with his family, playing golf and exercising.

Jeanhee Kim is a freelance journalist and editor at Unchained. She has worked as an editor, producer and writer at CoinDesk, Crain's New York Business, Meredith Interactive, Oxygen Media and Money Magazine.

Justin is the Executive Director, Talent Acquisition at MGM Resorts International.