The Leeds Recruitment Leader Summit 2025

Gain exclusive access to industry data, insights, trends, and best practices to help you and your business save time, improve efficiency, increase profitability and keep you ahead of the game.

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN WIDELY ACCLAIMED IN LONDON, MANCHESTER, CARDIFF AND BRIGHTON.

We expect to see out quickly, so book early to avoid disappointment.

An event by recruitment leaders, for recruitment leaders. Attend if you are a recruitment agency owner, MD, team leader, future leader, FD, head of ops or marketing or a key decision-maker within a recruitment agency.

In addition to speaker content, you'll have the chance to meet peers, build relationships, and share experiences.

7 dynamic speaker presentations and fireside chats to ignite personal and commercial advantage for you and your business.

• Legal and employment law update - all you need to know to remain relevant
• The UK recruitment economy: trends and data to help you make the right decisions

• Tech & AI - maximise what you have, be more efficient, the future of rectech

• Marketing - optimising your company brand to create a brillaint value proposition

• Future proofing your recruitment agency and successfully scale to hit your goals

• Ops - whatever size your business, practical advice on what great modern ops looks like

• Why all recruiters need to take cyber security seriously and how to do it

Tickets include lunch, refreshments, networking drinks.

"I've attended three of these Summits and have to say they are the best recruitment events I've been to. Great speakers, loads of useful content, and professionally run." Kelly Fenna, Business Director, Anderson James

"Hands down the most informative recruitment leader event in Manchester for years!" Janine Owen, Founder, Talent Crowd

"Everytine I attend, something positive happend immediately after." Rohan Shah, Managing Director, Reuben Sinclair

Maria Vavoulas, Fractional COO & Founder, Event MC

Maria is a specialist in helping recruitment businesses scale efficiently through structured facilitation, operational best practices, and strategic execution. With a track record of optimising processes, implementing high-performance systems, and enabling businesses to 'make it happen', Maria will guide us you through a practical, no-nonsense session to help you improve your tech and operations.

Talk Title - Map Your Stack - What’s Really Powering Your Recruitment Business?

Whatever the size of your recruitment business, before you invest in new tools or explore the latest trends, it’s worth taking a step back and understanding what’s already powering your business.

This opening session is designed to help you take a fresh look at your current tech setup - across every function of your recruitment business. From BD and candidate engagement to operations and finance, we’ll explore what tools are in use, where there may be overlap, and what might be missing. Get ideas on where to consolidate, upgrade, or replace tools based on actual use cases from other businesses.

Gain a better understanding of how integrated - or fragmented - your current tech stack is, and what impact that may be having on efficiency, cost, and user adoption

This isn’t just about tech - it’s about clarity, value, and making more informed decisions about how you scale.

6 Key Takeaways

1. A Clearer View of Your Tech Stack
2. Spot Gaps and Duplications
3. Peer-to-Peer Insights
4. Operational Reflection
5. Inspiration for Smarter Investment
6. Context for the Rest of the Day

Kick off the event with a practical lens that will help you connect the dots between your current setup and the ideas shared by the rest of the day’s speakers, and walk away with a complete picture of what tools and systems you’re using across the business - many of which you may have forgotten or underestimated.

John Salt, Recruitment Advisor, NED, Tech Specialist, Economist, Speaker & Presenter

I build, advise, deliver and execute commercial strategies.

A market tested strategy and operating executive with a successful track record of driving aggressive growth in digital businesses. A hands-on people leader, individual contributor, and entrepreneur with successful P&L management experience.

An expert in internet marketplace, e-commerce and SaaS business models with deep experience in marketing execution, and multi-channel sales. A background rooted in data-driven problem solving as a strategy consultant and working in a top-tier firm across multiple sales channels and industries.

A driver of change within large matrix-organisations (£350M+) as well as a creator and builder of pre-revenue start-ups or SMB’s, leading them as they scale (<£1M).

Talk Title: The UK Recruitment Economy: Why Data and AI are your Recruitment Allies, Not your Replacements

Key takeaways:

• A look at the current economy.
• What does that data tell us and what does that mean to you now?
• How Data and AI can drive your growth. Be fuelled, not fooled.

John is invited to speak at all the RecConnect Summit events because, well, quite simply, he's awesome!

Alicia Torres, Senior Marketing Manager, Force24

Full of energy, passionate, and highly knowledgable, Alicia is a force of nature - hardworking, diligent, and great fun to work with and listen to. Alicia is skilled in email marketing and social engagement, and her talks always land in a way that makes sense, as well as being loaded with practical tips and tricks to ensure our messages get read.

Talk Title: Making the Inbox Hit Like Instagram

Marketers put so much effort into creating scroll-stopping content for social media, so why do emails often feel like an afterthought?

In this session Alicia show us how to apply the same creativity, storytelling, and engagement techniques from social media to email marketing. From visual thinking to hook-driven copy, learn how to make your emails stand out in a crowded inbox just like the best posts on Instagram.

It’s time to stop treating email as a static channel and start making it thumb-stopping!

Paul Chamberlain, Partner & Head of Employment, JMW Solicitors

An expert at providing solid, pragmatic and effective legal advice to employers and employees in relation to the world of work, Paul is a respected employment lawyer and business networker.

Labour's pending employment law reforms are widely considered the BIGGEST and most DECISIVE to hit our industry in DECADES.

As recruitment business owners and leaders, we have a duty to ourselves, our candidates, and our clients, to ensure we understand how these reforms will impact what we do. If you recruit contract and temp workers, this talk will be especially valuable.

Talk Title: The Employment Rights Bill – How Will Labour's Generational Employment Law Reforms Affect the Recruitment Industry?

• Zero hours and guaranteed hours contracts
• Day one rights
• Tribunal time limits

• Limiting fire and re-hire
• Umbrella company regulation

• Extending SSP and maternity rights
• Flexible working
• Trade union reform

Darren Westall, CEO, Paiger

Following a decade of success as CTO of Broadbean Technology, Darren established Paiger, the dynamic recruitment marketing product enabling recruiters to market their candidates, market their jobs and build their brands without taking them away from selling to candidates and clients.

A techy at heart, Darren is perfectly placed to help recruiters make the most of their technology, save time and money, and make more placements.

Talk Title: Your Employees LinkedIn Networks Are Your Business’s Net Worth

The often repeated Tim Sanders quote ‘your network is your net worth’ applies to businesses even more so than to individuals. Your business needs to access the network of networks your employees are building. AI and automation can help you do this.

This session will cover the following areas:

• The Value of Employee Networks
• Understanding how employees’ LinkedIn connections can drive business growth.
• AI and Automation in Networking
• How automation streamlines outreach and relationship management.
• Accessing the Network of Networks
• Encouraging employees to participate in network-sharing initiatives.
• Automated Engagement Strategies

Balancing automated messages with authentic interactions.

Paul Sharpe, Business Mentor & Advisir, NorthStar People, Talent Acquisition Consultant, Magician

On a mission to share the thousands of mistakes he's made(his words, not ours!) and the successes to help recruitment agency owners grow their businesses or achieve operational excellence or both.

An experienced Board member with over 20 years experience in successfully building and leading teams, Paul has pretty much worked within all aspects of the recruitment industry including large national agencies, an SME technical agency, and three years working in-house recruiting for BAE Systems.

Talk Title: Moving From Contingent Recruitment – the Value of Committed Clients

Since the first recruitment agency in 1650 has the services that agencies offer really changed. In this session we will focus on why now is the ideal time is to develop new recruitment products and services and how this change will impact your business, your customers and your people.

• Why NOW is the critical moment for change
• The value of commitment
• Where to start and why
• Adding value beyond contingent recruitment
• The ‘how’
• Recent case studies

Key takeaways

• How to segment your customer base
• How to remove waste from your business and drive profits
• Why innovation with your customers drives conversations
• The best possible process for change

Are you ready for change?

Brian Whigam, CEO and Founder

Brian Whigam is the CEO of Venn. Following 8+ years working within the recruitment industry, Brian founded Venn based on his passion for transforming the way recruiters connect with candidates and clients through technology and strategic marketing.

Venn’s mission is to help recruiters to attract, engage and convert talent and clients.

Talk Title: Vanity vs Value. What is the Purpose of Your Recruitment Agency’s Website?

Does your website talk about the number of candidates placed? Does your pitch deck reference your global offices? So does everyone else’s.

To truly stand out from the crowd, it is time to stop talking vanity and start showing clients the value of partnering with your agency in a way that goes far beyond the price.

This isn’t an easy process, but articulating how your agency’s insights, knowledge, and capabilities add value to your clients is what is going to make you stand out in a competitive market. Telling the world about your global footprint is one thing; proving how it helps clients hire the right people faster is what really matters.

In this interactive session, we’ll take a deep dive into how to create a value proposition that is truly unique to your agency and explore ways that you can tell that story through the lens of those who know you best - your most valuable clients.