Most panels hedge. This one won’t.

Between them, Gerry Crispin, Melissa Thompson, Dani Monaghan, and Joanna Clark have spent more than a century in talent acquisition — leading global recruiting organizations, building teams through recessions and expansions, navigating the arrival of the internet, the ATS, social recruiting, programmatic, and now AI. They’ve been right about things. They’ve been wrong about things. And they’ve earned the right to say which is which.

This is a live, open-floor session — no scripted questions, no polished talking points. The audience drives it. Bring the question you’re afraid to ask, the assumption you’ve never been able to get a straight answer on, or the thing your leadership keeps getting wrong. These four have enough scar tissue and enough perspective to give you a real answer. What does 100+ years of recruiting experience actually tell you about where this is all heading? Show up and find out.

Attendee Takeaways

Which TA trends have real staying power — and which are being oversold. Unfiltered perspective from four leaders who have seen enough technology waves, market cycles, and industry pivots to distinguish signal from noise — including an honest read on AI’s actual impact on recruiting today versus the hype.
Hard-won frameworks for making decisions under pressure. Direct insight from people who have made consequential calls at Ford, Expedia, Wells Fargo, and across the industry — on hiring strategy, team structure, technology adoption, and how to push back on leadership when the direction is wrong.
Honest answers to the questions practitioners rarely get a straight response on. The format is audience-driven. Bring your real challenge — the one you can’t workshop with your team, can’t Google, and haven’t gotten a useful answer to at other conferences. This panel has seen enough to give you one.
A clearer read on what the next five years in recruiting actually looks like. Not prediction — pattern recognition. People who have watched recruiting evolve across multiple decades can see things in the current moment that others can’t. Leave with a more grounded sense of where TA is heading and what to build toward.