Unrivalled speaker content
Be inspired by success stories from talent professionals from various industries
Join us at #MCRCX26 to learn what world-class candidate experience actually takes, from the people who've built it.
Rising expectations. AI everywhere. Candidate experience has never been harder to get right, or mattered more.
IHR Candidate Experience Conference brings the UK's in-house TA teams to Manchester for a day of insightful sessions and roundtables that go beyond theory. You'll hear what's working from the people making it work, pressure-test your own approach against your peers', and walk out with a plan you can start immediately.
Premium Members can unlock FREE tickets (worth £295) using their Membership ID (found in My Account) as the promo code at registration.
Speaker Topics
Candidate confidence
Rebuilding trust and reducing friction in hiring
Pre-application experience
Improving the journey before candidates click ‘Apply’
Consumer-led hiring
Designing simple, engaging application experiences
Application overload
Balancing candidate volume, quality and fairness
Skills-based assessment
Identifying potential beyond the traditional CV
Employer values
Using content and human connection to secure better hires
Agenda
22 October 2026
British hiring is under increasing pressure, but the biggest risk may be one employers can't see. Drawing on new research from 2,000 UK job seekers and 500 TA and HR leaders, this session reveals how rejection fatigue, algorithm anxiety and hiring friction are reshaping candidate behaviour. Discover where employer assumptions differ from reality, what it means for attracting and retaining talent, and the practical changes that can rebuild confidence and improve hiring outcomes.
What to expect:
- Why candidate confidence is falling and the impact it's having on application behaviour.
- The biggest disconnects between how employers think they hire and how candidates actually experience the process.
- How algorithm anxiety and AI-driven recruitment are influencing candidate trust.
- Practical ways to reduce hiring friction without compromising speed or quality.
- The actions leading organisations are taking to create more human, effective hiring experiences.
Most organisations focus on improving the application process, but our analysis of more than 400 employer journeys tells a different story. The biggest influences on candidate experience often happen long before someone clicks "Apply". In this session, discover the hidden patterns shaping candidate decisions and learn where TA teams can make the greatest impact before recruitment even begins.
What to expect:
- What 400 employer journeys reveal about the pre-application experience
- Where candidate experience really begins, and why it matters
- The hidden barriers and missed opportunities influencing candidate decisions
- The two opposing forces that shape every candidate journey
- Practical changes you can make immediately to attract, engage and convert more of the right talent
You can buy a pair of trainers in under a minute, from a phone, on a train. Applying for a job at most large employers still takes twenty minutes and a password reset. That gap is not really a technology problem, it is a design problem, and it costs employers talent, time and trust. This session applies behavioural science and consumer design principles to the candidate journey: how people actually perceive time, choice and effort, why hiring processes so often optimise for the wrong things, and which practical changes make the biggest difference at scale.
What to expect:
- Why candidates behave like consumers, and what changes when you design for them that way.
- How to build the business case for candidate experience, including what to measure when the thing you care about is hard to quantify.
- The three quiet villains behind poor candidate experience: accountability sinks, the wrong benchmarks, and quantification bias.
- Practical examples that hold up at scale: real-time application feedback, natural language job search, and using friction deliberately rather than accidentally.
- Where AI helps the experience and where it quietly makes it worse. Design sets the rules, AI delivers them.
What to expect:
- Are organisations making it harder to apply?
- Screening assessments vs CV screening
- AI detection, worth it or not?
- How recruiters are spending their time differently
- What quality metrics actually matter
The CV is becoming a weaker predictor of hiring success. As AI makes it easier than ever to submit polished applications, talent acquisition leaders need new ways to identify genuine potential. Learn how Aegon replaced their Entry Careers hiring process with behavioural, immersive assessments that improved candidate experience and delivered measurable business outcomes.
What to expect:
- Replace CV screening with behavioural assessments that cut no-shows rates from 25% to 10%.
- Learn how immersive assessments helped Aegon broaden talent pools, minimise bias, and identify high-potential candidates beyond traditional employment pathways
- Create assessment experiences that improve candidate engagement, support fairer hiring decisions, and help every candidate showcase their true potential.
- Connect assessment, onboarding and internal mobility through behaviours that support long-term career progression.
- Deliver measurable business impact with lower attrition, reduced sickness, and increased customer NPS score
What if candidate experience wasn’t simply about keeping applicants happy, but helping the right people choose you? With 1,500 hires, a 97% direct hiring rate and candidate experience scores consistently reaching at least 4.5/5, RS Group is using curated content, values and human connection to create a more intentional selection journey.
What to expect:
- Curate the story before interview: bring your culture, values and proposition to life upfront.
- Make values part of selection: uncover what resonates, what doesn’t and where genuine fit lies.
- Make an unfamiliar brand compelling: give candidates clear opportunities to understand, engage with and choose you.
- Design interviews that bring out the best: structured for interviewers, empowering for candidates.
- Innovate with what you already have: use tools more creatively, without waiting for major tech investments.
Speakers
Have a look at our upcoming speakers.
Why attend
Unrivalled speaker content
Strategic roundtable discussions
Hear from your peers on their successes, challenges and changes within candidate experience space
Best practice sharing
Best practice sharing
Hear from your peers on their best practices in the candidate experience world
Career development
Discover how IHR Membership gives you the community, content, events and connections to grow
Networking opportunities
Networking opportunities
Grow your network at our dedicated lounge areas and post-event drinks
Offers, goodies and competitions
Pick up some treats for your team and be in with the chance to win big prizes!
Register for the event
Premium Members can unlock free tickets using their Membership ID as the promo code.
Who attends?
“It was a brilliant and energising experience. Events like this remind me just how powerful our community is when we come together to share, challenge and learn.”
“The event was fantastically insightful, with the array of interesting topics and the brilliantly organised roundtable discussions.”
“It was a great event, filled with insightful discussions and inspiring speakers. Beyond the sessions, the chance to network with so many brilliant minds within Talent Acquisition was invaluable.”
Gold Partners
Silver Partners
Venue
Emirates Old Trafford Cricket Ground, Manchester
0161 282 4000
o find the main cricket ground in Manchester (Emirates Old Trafford), travel to Talbot Road, Stretford (Postcode: M16 0PX), located two miles southwest of the city centre. The venue is easily accessible by public transport; simply take the Metrolink tram to the Old Trafford stop, which is just a 5-minute walk from the stadium
Craig is a Talent Acquisition and Employer Brand leader with over 10 years of experience driving recruitment and talent strategies across the financial and professional services sectors. Based in Edinburgh, he leads Aegon UK’s end-to-end Talent Acquisition function and oversees the development and delivery of the organisation’s Employer Brand strategy.
Nick Denned is a Global Talent Acquisition Leader with deep experience across Industry, Financial Services and Big 4 consulting. Throughout her career, she’s helped organisations unlock the full potential of their talent strategy by designing and delivering scalable, high-impact programmes that drive growth, enhance diversity, and strengthen employer brand. She brings a strategic mindset to every challenge, combining data-driven decision-making with a strong understanding of business priorities. Her expertise spans executive search, stakeholder engagement, onboarding, and global team leadership, and she’s known for her ability to build trusted relationships with teams, stakeholders and C-suite leaders. She thrives in complex, fast-paced environments where talent is a key driver of success, and she’s passionate about creating inclusive hiring practices that attract and retain top-tier talent. Nick is also a committed triathlete. Having raced 8 global full distance ironman triathlons, and proud mother of twins.
Marc Redmond is Senior Talent Acquisition Manager and UK&I Lead at RS, with extensive experience spanning talent acquisition, recruitment transformation and sourcing across multiple industries. He specialises in building and implementing scalable TA processes, developing high-performing recruitment teams and strengthening business partnering capability. Prior to RS, Marc held talent acquisition and recruitment leadership roles across numerous industries and his experience ranges from executive search and specialist technology recruitment to establishing new TA functions, improving recruitment processes and supporting hiring teams with interviewing, onboarding and talent acquisition best practice.
With over 12 years of experience in Talent Acquisition, she is currently working as a Talent Acquisition Business Partner at TalkTalk—operating as the Head of Talent Acquisition and reporting directly to the Chief People Officer.
She leads on defining and executing the organisation’s EVP, building an inclusive and agile recruitment framework, and driving strategies that enhance candidate experience, employer branding, and diversity in hiring.
From shaping scalable hiring processes to embedding a culture-focused talent strategy, she brings a hands-on, forward-thinking approach to attracting top talent and supporting organisational growth.
Transformational leader with excellent communication skills, known for successfully developing and managing both centralised and remote teams. With a strong focus on enhancing capability, driving technology-led experiences, and achieving outstanding delivery and performance, this individual fosters a culture of excellence. Passionate about creating and embedding a “hiring culture,” they coach, influence, and educate across all organisational levels; strategic, tactical, and operational, building trust and aligning teams around common goals. Fully embracing the integration of human-touch hiring with AI and automation technology, they bring a forward-thinking approach to hiring, ensuring innovative and efficient talent acquisition strategies.
Tessa Fuller is Head of Talent Acquisition at N Brown Group, where she leads, inspires and develops the in-house recruitment team across Digital Tech, Data, Financial Services, Supply Chain, Finance and Retail. Having joined N Brown Group as Talent Acquisition Lead in 2019, Tessa stepped into her current leadership role in 2020. She is an enthusiastic and committed brand ambassador for the business, with a strong focus on working at pace while supporting her team’s development. Above all, Tessa is passionate about delivering an exceptional candidate experience and brings more than a decade of recruitment and talent acquisition experience to her role.
After 10 years working within recruitment and software sales, Matt managed to combine both worlds when joining Tribepad. He's passionate about helping recruiters hire fairer, faster and better, and is our resident expert on all things public sector, leading the charge on helping Tribepad's growing customer base in local government to transform their hiring processes. Tribepad is used by more than 25 million people across the globe in 16 languages. Clients include The BBC, Tesco, Subway, NHS Professionals, Grant Thornton and The Church of England.
Graham Hewitt is Solutions Insights Director at ManpowerGroup, with over 25 years' experience helping organisations solve complex talent attraction and workforce challenges. He helps employers rethink how they attract, engage and convert talent in an increasingly complex hiring market by combining commercial strategy with data-driven insight.
Graham has led the development of the Talent Insight Scans, a framework that benchmarks employer brands, career sites and candidate journeys across hundreds of organisations. His work centres on balancing candidate friction and candidate signal, helping employers remove unnecessary barriers from the hiring process while capturing the right information to make better hiring decisions.
Drawing on insights from hundreds of employer assessments, Graham works with business leaders to explore the impact of AI, changing candidate expectations and skills-based hiring on the future of talent acquisition.
Alex Hanson-Smith is co-founder and CTPO of inploi, where he leads product and engineering. He began his career in eCommerce and customer engagement strategy at Ogilvy, working with global consumer brands, and has spent the decade since applying that thinking to hiring. inploi now sits behind the careers sites and application journeys of employers including PureGym, Compass Group and Wagamama, reaching millions of candidates a year. He is most interested in the point where behavioural science, design and hiring technology meet, and in what recruitment can borrow from consumer products that people actually enjoy using.