2019 Speakers

Aaron is co-founder and CEO of LACE Partners, an HR consultancy specialising in HR transformation, tech selection and tech adoption. He is an HR transformation specialist and global programme director with 25 years’ experience in some of the world’s largest and most successful management consultancies. We like to think of our team as a family, so much so that the L A C and E in LACE stand for the names of Aaron’s four children!

He is accomplished in delivering complex business change and HR projects for global cross-industry clients for all aspects of HR, including HR systems (Fusion and Workday). Experience operating at a senior level in client organisations, to shape and deliver significant business change programs.

A Fellow of the CIPD, active member of the court of HR Professionals and former Partner at both Accenture and Deloitte with a very successful track record of delivery, implementation and selection.

Alan is a partner in global law firm DLA Piper and has considerable experience in all aspects of employment law, both contentious and non-contentious.

Alan acts for high-profile clients in both public and private sectors and across the full ranges sectors, advising  on senior executive severance, contract issues and large-scale reorganisation and redundancy programmes. He also manages industrial relations issues.

Alan is also a  member of the Equality and Diversity group and provides training and advice to clients on compliance and best practice relating to discrimination legislation. He also advises clients involved in employment tribunal claims on a wide range of issues including straightforward unfair dismissal, complex discrimination claims and TUPE issues arising from business transfers.

Alastair is Head of Sales at Arctic Shores and leads the Sales and Marketing Functions, focusing on the UK and Republic of Ireland.  Alastair manages a number of the business’ key accounts, including PwC, KPMG and Siemens, as well as a network of third-party partners.

With a background as a Business Psychologist, Alastair uses a consultative approach with clients and prospects to promote best practice in organisational selection and assessment. Alastair is passionate about next generation psychometric assessment and embracing innovation in the assessment space to improve client ROI and to boost candidate experience.

Prior to joining Arctic Shores Alastair led the Sales team at a leading traditional psychometric provider – so he has a wealth of assessment experience covering deploying aptitude assessments, personality questionnaires, situational judgment tests and assessment centre design projects. Prior to working in psychometrics Alastair spent a decade in advertising and marketing, specialising in consumer analytics.

I am currently the People Partner for multi award winning telco, giffgaff, where for the last 4 years I have led on all things internal Culture, Engagement and People experience. My passion is for people, creating connections and building better places of work. I scrape into the category of millennial apparently (but only just) with a degree in Visual Communication, a Masters in HR, and I’m also a certified Strengths Coach. This layered with years of experience in local government, at the coalface in HR, makes for a rather Interesting but concoction. I am a proud Brummy and even prouder dad to two pint-sized dictators, Matilda and Rowen.

Moneysupermarket Group comprises of four main brands – Moneysupermarket, MoneySavingExpert, Travel Supermarket and Decision Technologies. We are now focused on re-inventing price comparison for our customers and users, underpinned by an inclusive and innovative culture.

As the Head of People & Organisation, I work with the team to build internal capability and organise the business for delivery of the strategy with a strong focus on delivering a great employee experience through engaging People products. The team and I use methodologies that are used across our business and  take hard and soft data whether that’s onboarding, exiting and engagement feedback, or internal and market data to co-create and deliver products that enable our employees to thrive within the business by being themselves, being brilliant together and feeling like they belong.

Alison Esse is one of the founding partners of The Storytellers, a unique culture change, engagement and leadership consultancy which has pioneered storytelling in business to help leaders from over 170 major organisations all over the world to bring about high performing leadership, change and transformation.

She is a regular speaker on the subject of storytelling and the role it plays in changing attitudes and beliefs, and building an emotional connection to unlock energy and commitment within large, complex organisations.  Alison is responsible for building the profile and client base of The Storytellers worldwide and plays a pivotal role in building senior client relationships at board level.

Alison is a graduate in modern languages from Edinburgh University, her early career being spent in consumer PR, event production and sales and marketing.

Andrea was appointed as HR Director for the UK in December 2017. Her passion is helping individuals, teams & businesses be the best they can be. Her role is to drive forward the people strategy for the UK, to attract, develop and retain great talent. Working closely with the UK leadership team, she oversees the development of HR initiatives which create a culture that empowers employees to innovate, do their best work, and grow the business. She leads a team of HR professionals focused on staffing, business partnering, talent development and compensation and benefits.

Andrea joined Microsoft as a Graduate almost 20 years ago and was most recently the HR Director for UK Sales & Marketing. Prior to this Andrea has worked both within the UK business and across Microsoft International, and has held leadership roles within Talent Acquisition & Talent Management. She holds a BA Hons degree in Business and Financial Services, and post-graduate certificates in Human Capital Management & Advanced Organisation Design from the University of Southern California.

Andy White is an energetic, confident and silly Brummie who combines silly voices and a mad afro to devastating comic effect. Andy has numerous media appearances, including winning the Weakest Link comedian’s special! His appearance on the BBC quiz show featured in his five-star (***** Three Weeks) Edinburgh show, ‘It Started With A Quiz’ in 2007. Most recently he featured in the Vote Now Show on BBC Radio 4 during the 2017 General Election campaign.

He regularly headlines up and down the UK and has worked with all the major chains and comedy promoters along the way, as well as numerous corporate clients. Overseas, he’s performed in Monte Carlo (Laughing Horse), Berlin (Bleu Montag), Abu Dhabi and Dubai (Laughter House) amongst others

Angela is responsible to for the go-to-market strategy, product management and P&L performance of the Microsoft 365 business in the UK. In our mission to reinvent productivity and empower every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more we are delivering a continuous flow of new functionality and applications that deliver on the mission. 

The Microsoft 365 product portfolio includes : Office 365, Windows, EMS, Microsoft Teams, Sharepoint, One Drive, Exchange, Skype for Business, Skype, Yammer, Project, and Visio.

Angela joined Microsoft in 2016 leading the Microsoft Office Category management team in the consumer business, transitioning into the business group lead for Office in September 2017.

Angela Roseboro is the Global Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Dropbox.  She is responsible for the development and implementation of strategic initiatives and actions to drive inclusion and belonging as well as ensuring that Dropbox is an employer of choice for all talent.

During her more than twenty years of human resource experience, Ms. Roseboro has held positions leading diversity and inclusion, talent management and leadership development for companies in the financial services, asset management, government, entertainment, and manufacturing industries.  She has provided human resource guidance to Fortune 500 companies such as T. Rowe Price, Jones Lang LaSalle, Genworth Financial, Whirlpool Corporation, and Manpower International.

As a member of senior leadership teams, Ms. Roseboro has developed and led best-in-class global diversity initiatives focused on recruitment and retention of diverse talent, cultural transformation, increasing employee engagement and implementing supplier diversity programs.  She has received several recognitions for her contributions including 2012 Midwest Real Estate News Hall of Fame recipient, Commercial Property Executive Distinguished Leaders Award, Black Enterprise’s 150 Diversity Executive, The Network Journal’s 25 Influential Black Women in Business and 50 Out Front for Women’s Leadership, Diversity and Inclusion.  She has also been featured in the Chicago Tribune, The Diversity Journal, and The Commercial Real Estate Women’s Network.  Ms. Roseboro’s passion and knowledge gives her the ability to change the corporate perception of diversity and inclusion from being the right thing to do to being a strategic enabler of business success.

Ms. Roseboro holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Human Resource Management from Roosevelt University.  She also served as an Adjunct Professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Ms. Roseboro is active in her community. She’s developed professional development workshops to help Chicago’s low-income residents in partnership with the Banking Industry’s Community Reinvestment Act, and she also is on the Board of Directors of Teach for America Baltimore. Ms. Roseboro and her husband Dimitric have two daughters Jordan and Chandler.

Best-selling author, entrepreneur and inspirational public speaker, Angus Ridgway is the Co-founder and CEO of Potentialife. Over the course of a 20-year prior career advising clients at McKinsey, he came to see what a performance differentiator it is when leaders, managers and the front-line are at the ‘top of their game’ every day. The productivity differential between energetic, purposeful, positive and engaged leaders and those that are just going through the motions isn’t just a few percentage points – it’s more like a factor of 10. His recent book, ‘The Joy of Leadership’, co-authored with world-renowned positive psychology expert Tal Ben-Shahar, sheds light on the personal operating models and the practical daily behaviours that separate the most productive individuals from the rest.

Annabel Jones is the UK HR Director at ADP, a global provider of Human Capital Management solutions. She is a seasoned HR professional with experience across all key areas of HR. Annabel started her HR career with a dotcom start-up and then worked in the media industry for 13 years before joining ADP in 2014. Annabel leads the HR function for approximately 1000 UK based employees, working as part of the International HR Leadership Team. She is responsible for the development of strategies related to areas such as total reward, talent management and corporate social responsibility, with a particular passion for aligning strategy and culture in order to drive greater employee engagement and deliver business success. Annabel is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD and holds a degree in psychology from the University of Portsmouth. She lives in Surrey with her husband and daughter and enjoys running (or jogging!) in her spare time.

Anne joined JLL in March 2018, after spending the previous 15 years supporting global organisations to develop and deploy their Talent agendas. Passionate about the future of work in a digital age, with a strong focused on leading teams through change, building talent acquisition strategies and ensuring Talent has a seat at the executive table.

Anne is also a tutor for the Institute of Recruiters (IoR) where her focus is to develop in-house Recruiter capability and in turn professionalise the industry.

When she has any spare time, she enjoys motorcycle touring, fast cars and is a bit of an adrenaline junkie!

As an Oracle ACE for Business Intelligence, Antony is one of Europe’s leading BI architects. His primary focus is on Oracle BI and related database and middleware products. These include BI Foundation, Exalytics, BI Applications, Spatial, Real-Time Decisions (RTD), Big Data Discovery, Data Mining, Endeca, SOA Suite and Oracle VM.

Antony is passionate about HR analytics and is an avid blogger in the field, demonstrating thought leadership across the world of analytics.

This year, Antony has been instrumental in the development of a new automation tool – Tallinn Machine Learning. Enabling users to quickly enter into predictive analytics on a large scale, it allows you to become proficient in machine learning.

With over 15 years’ experience working with Oracle BI and Data Warehousing, Tony is the Technical Director with BI specialists Peak Indicators.

As VP of Global Talent Acquisition at Nielsen, Barbara focuses on developing and executing scalable strategic initiatives, leveraging innovating and emerging concepts and technologies, to deliver TA solutions that support and advance the company’s mission.

Having joined Nielsen in 1999, over the past 19 years Barbara has held a variety of increasingly responsible HR leadership roles across all areas of the business, leading teams and driving large scale and sustainable organisational change.

She is passionate about leading transformational change in TA at Nielsen, to elevate the function by developing the teams’ collective talent expertise, building an engaging candidate experience and leveraging technology solutions to enable world class delivery.

Ben is the co-founder of Arch Apprentices. Ben joined the Blenheim Chalcot Group to set up Arch Apprentices at the start of 2012.

Ben has over fifteen years’ experience building organisations and initiatives that address social and economic challenges. He began his career helping Government organisations to understand the effectiveness of regeneration and labour market programmes. Ben then co-founded and ran RSe Consulting, a specialist firm helping councils to improve how they work for the benefit of their residents.

RSe worked with over 1/3rd of all English local authorities on improvement and transformation as well as key central Government departments before it was acquired by Tribal Group in 2008. In 2001 Ben set up SAFE, the country’s leading financial inclusion initiative based at Toynbee Hall, where is now the Non-Executive Chairman. He first got involved with Toynbee Hall through 7 years’ volunteering as an adult leader on camps for teenagers from London’s East End.

Ben studied Classics at the University of Oxford.”