SPEAKERS
Nominate Canada’s Top Staffing Leaders & Agencies
Recognize the leaders, agencies, and innovators delivering real results — growth, impact, and progress for the industry.
Nominations take 3–5 minutes.
Suky Sodhi
Suky Sodhi has been disrupting the staffing and recruiting industry for over twenty-five years.
She’s an award-winning industry coach and trainer who has helped recruitment leaders around the world build stronger businesses through her events, masterminds, programs, and courses.
Suky is highly respected in the recruitment space and is globally recognized expert for businesses and consultants who want to take their earning potential to the next level. A serial entrepreneur, she has founded numerous businesses and her clients include global staffing brands, start-ups, mid-sized agencies, and European recruitment businesses growing into the North American market.
OUR KEYNOTE SPEAKER
SPONSORED BY:
Bill Boorman
Bill Boorman brings 42 years of experience in and around recruiting, blending hands-on industry practice with deep market analysis. A long-time recruiter and developer of people, he now serves as an analyst with the AIM Group, where his work focuses on emerging hiring technology, market shifts and the changing economics of talent. Bill sits on boards shaping practical applications of AI in recruiting and advises companies on how tech, process and human capability come together. His perspective is grounded in real-world experience and informed by continuous research, giving staffing leaders clear, actionable insight into what’s coming next.
Mark Coetzee
Mark, the winner of the 2024 Canadian Staffing Summit Leadership Award, brings over 30 years of executive/board level experience across five continents, achieving excellent returns for shareholders with a track record of formulating, advising, and assisting in execution of chosen strategy, resulting in high impact performance improvement, business transformation and company turnarounds in multicultural environments. Working within organisations across 5 continents – including start up’s, mid-sized, and large/multinational organisations – typically within Private Equity, Private Equity/ Venture Capital type environments. Mark has played a pivotal role including but not limited to 3 successful exits: 2 x PE events, 1 x listing on a stock exchange, several 100% business transformation gigs, from major loss-making situations to full profitability.
Kevin Gill
Kevin Gill is the Founder, President & CEO of the Staffmax group of companies. Kevin was born and raised in Winnipeg. He is a graduate and current Governor of RRC Polytechnic and is an inductee in the Canadian Staffing Hall of Fame. Under his leadership and vision, he has grown Staffmax into one of the largest Staffing & Recruiting firms in Canada and led expansion into the USA, Australia, and Europe. He has added service offerings to include Travel Nurse & Healthcare Staffing and EOR services.
Craig Brown
A strategic leader with more than 25 years of experience within the staffing and retail industries. Craig has focused on building outstanding teams with a focus on service excellence. Recognized for his consultative approach to sales and marketing, Craig believes in asking questions and the importance of being an avid listener.
Travis O'Rourke
Travis is a strategic executive leader overseeing market-facing strategy and client-centric operations for Hays across North America. He was the driving force behind the firm’s most successful service innovations, architecting and establishing the Hays Contract, Temporary, and Outsourced Solutions divisions from the ground up to provide scalable workforce solutions to the region’s largest organizations. Widely regarded as a preeminent voice on employment trends, Travis is a 2023 Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) "40 Under 40" honoree and a LinkedIn Top Voice—a distinction reserved for the top 0.001% of professionals on the platform. His insights are frequently sought by global media, with over 100 live television appearances on networks including Bloomberg, CBC, and CTV. A Fanshawe College Distinguished Alumni, Travis is a dedicated mentor and serves as an Executive Sponsor for diversity and sustainability initiatives. Beyond the industry, he is a liver transplant donor and a long-standing supporter of Big Brothers Big Sisters and SickKids Hospital.
Londa Burke
Londa Burke is a seasoned staffing industry leader with over 30 years of experience driving recruitment excellence and operational success. She has managed major client accounts, built high-performing teams, and led the expansion of recruitment operations across Canada. Currently serving as Director of Professional Services at Bevertec CST Inc.,and BITS Recruitment, Londa oversees the operations, focusing on service delivery, profitability, issue resolution, and continuous improvement. She holds a Certified Personnel Consultant (CPC) designation through ACSESS and a Bachelor of Science from Mansfield University in Pennsylvania. Londa’s strategic insight and deep industry knowledge continue to make a strong impact across every client engagement.
Kelsey Burt
Kelsey Burt is an Account Executive at Loxo with over eight years of experience spanning recruitment and recruitment technology. She began her career in in-house recruitment before moving into agency environments, where she implemented multiple ATS solutions and saw firsthand how the right, or wrong, tech stack can directly impact productivity and revenue. Driven by those experiences, Kelsey transitioned into the technology space and now partners closely with recruitment teams to help them streamline workflows, automate processes, and scale more effectively through modern recruiting technology.
Janelle Bieler
Janelle Bieler is President of Akkodis US a division of The Adecco Group, a global staffing company. Ms. Bieler has comprehensive experience in Leadership, Strategy, Sales, Operations, Marketing, and Financial Management. Her areas of expertise include turnaround endeavors, building new markets and revenue streams, P&L management as well as leading, driving, and developing high-performing teams. Ms. Bieler has over a decade of leadership experience in the staffing industry. Prior to Akkodis, she most recently served as President of the Western Division at Employbridge where she led a total business transformation and market leading results.
Carolyn Levy
Carolyn Levy is a people-first, growth-minded leader whose purpose is to spark joy while helping leaders and teams unlock their best work. She builds clarity, connection, and momentum to strengthen culture, accelerate execution, and scale results. Carolyn is known for driving transformation that creates sustainable impact for organizations and the communities they serve. Recognized in the SIA Top 100 in North America, recipient of the SIA DE&I Influencer Award and the WXN ED&I Award and the SIA. Carolyn also dedicates her time as the National Board Chair for Women in Communications & Technology.
Hunter Reid
A serial entrepreneur, Hunter is the founder of Faithshire Corporation, Payroll Funding Canada, WorkForce Capital and a founding member of TheMCLS.com (Multiple Career Listing Service). Hunter’s businesses operate in full support of the Staffing Industry, providing staffing firms with human resources and recruitment support, payroll funding and growth capital as well as full service back-office support. As an honours graduate of Sheridan College with additional studies in business and psychology at the University of Toronto, Hunter is community focused and was one of the founders and directors of the Milton Christian School and the non-profit Milton Christian Education Association, he has held Trustee roles in both Churchill Meadows Christian Church, where he was active as Vice Chairman, and past trustee of Westcoast Christian Church in Surrey, British Columbia. He has served on several boards and advisory boards for not-for profits and has participated at the board level for both public and private companies believing in the philosophy that we all have opportunity to give back to our communities through our time, talent and treasure..
Sami Boubertakh
As an entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Leap Recruitment Partners, Sami is obsessed with the future of work and the innovation required to navigate it. Over the past decade, he has solved complex recruitment challenges by bridging successful models from across various industries. Sami has moved past the "seat-filling" mentality by building strategic talent infrastructure for his clients that empowers them to out-innovate their competition. At Leap, he has replaced reactive, transactional hiring with agile frameworks designed to drive measurable business growth.
Michael Wolford
With over 18 years in talent acquisition and stops at NPR, Capital One, Twitter, and Claro Analytics, I’ve seen every side of the hiring game. From the war for talent to the leadership lessons learned in storms, one thing’s always been clear: recruiting isn’t broken—it’s just behind. That’s why I write. That’s why I build. That’s why I teach. As CEO of Lex Duo, I lead the development of tools like The AI Recruiter and the Talent Intelligence Agent, products built not for HR, but for the humans in HR. I’m also the co-author of The AI Recruiter: Revolutionizing Hiring with Advanced GPT-Powered Prompts, written with GPT-4, in just three weeks. The book isn’t theory. It’s templates, prompts, and battle-tested strategies for real recruiters. My work has been featured in RecruitingDaily, ERE, and on stages like Talent42. Whether I’m writing about lessons from old farmers, unpacking Google's success, or calling out LinkedIn’s blind spots, my goal is always the same: tell the truth and raise the bar.
David Sweetman
David Sweetman is a seasoned executive in human capital solutions with over 18 years of experience helping organizations around the world identify, attract, and retain top talent. Specializing in the engineering, construction, manufacturing, and IT sectors, David leads with a deep understanding of the industries he serves — and a clear commitment to people-first recruiting. Having led high-performing teams for some of the largest brands in the industry, David provided strategic guidance, supported critical delivery needs, and coached leaders through strategic designs to uncover blind spots, build confidence, and enhance performance. His coaching-based leadership approach fosters a culture of collaboration, accountability, and agility — key pillars that drive success for both clients and candidates. David partners closely with both emerging Canadian SMEs and global enterprises with Canadian operations, ensuring talent strategies are tailored to the unique needs of each client across the country’s dynamic engineering and technical landscape.
Francis Larson
Francis Larson is the founder and CEO of Ascen, a back-office platform and employer of record for staffing firms expanding into the US, providing payroll, onboarding, and funding for US placements. Ascen was funded by Y Combinator and was acquired by Lifted, an Upwork company, in 2025. Before Ascen, Francis founded and exited a fintech lending platform.
Nik Gandhorkia
With over a decade of international recruitment and executive search experience, Nik Gandhorkia co-founded Foresight Recruitment Group in 2024 to bring high-impact hiring solutions to Canada’s real estate industry. Now based in British Columbia, he partners with clients nationwide, blending global perspective with local market insight. An active contributor to industry development, Nik serves on committees with BOMA BC and ICSC Vancouver. Under his leadership, Foresight has become a national partner with BOMA Canada, recognized for its people-first, tech-enabled approach to recruitment.
Michael Leacy
With almost 30 years of experience in the Professional staffing industry, Michael currently serves as Chief Sales Officer and EVP with Raise (formerly Ian Martin Group), one of largest, progressive and technologically advanced staffing companies in North America. He has in-depth knowledge of the industry’s best practices, especially in terms of strategic growth strategies, market trends, the regulatory landscape, and corresponding compliance issues. He has a trusted reputation in the broader staffing industry, acting as a strategic partner to Raise's enterprise clients. His strong executive leadership, strategic thinking, and visionary account planning continue to result in significant value for Raise’s clients
Huruy Tewelde
Huruy Tewelde is the VP of Sales with StaffingOS. He has been helping companies with their tech stacks for 7 years. In his current role he guides staffing agencies leaders to better plan for the future of staffing.
Sabashan Ragavan
Sabashan R is the founder of HeyMilo AI, a platform rethinking how high-volume recruiting is done using applied AI. He previously worked at Meta and Microsoft, where he built large-scale recommendation systems and helped scale data labeling and human-in-the-loop teams. As a hiring manager, he experienced firsthand the inefficiencies and breakdowns in high-volume recruiting—manual screening, inconsistent evaluation, and tools that didn’t reflect how teams actually hire. These experiences led him to build HeyMilo, focused on bringing reliable, practical AI systems into real-world hiring workflows. His interests center on deploying AI that operates at scale, integrates with human decision-making, and delivers measurable operational impact.
Jaime Alvarez
I get excited easily when I see an opportunity to help and influence companies improve their talent acquisition process and subsequently see fast improvement in their business. I am passionate about people, about their careers and what we do, as a company, to support them. In this fast moving world I adapt fast, build teams and solutions that represent a need today or anticipate the one for tomorrow.
Brian Kennedy
Brian Kennedy is a Partner at R.A. Cohen Consulting, where he advises staffing company owners on sell-side M&A, valuation, and exit planning. In March 2026, Brian celebrates 44 years in the staffing industry, having started in 1981 as a full-cycle IT recruiter and later expanding into contract/temp, employee leasing, and retained search across IT, engineering, and healthcare. His career includes leadership and ownership roles since 1996, building and managing staffing firms with revenues up to $40 million and completing two successful business exits. Brian is also a founding member of NACCB Canada and a former Provincial and National board member of ACSESS.
Matthew Calvin
Matthew has been a licensed commercial insurance broker for over 15 years, with extensive experience in several industry sectors, including market research, financial institutions, and management consulting. For the last 10 years, he has focused exclusively on the Staffing, Recruitment, & Executive Search industry and has seen risk from every perspective. As the leader of PROLINK’s Staffing & Recruitment Solutions Practice, Matthew works with clients to develop tailored, practical, and innovative risk management solutions that align with their unique needs, business operations, and strategic objectives. In addition being licensed in almost all provinces and territories in Canada, Matthew has earned the following industry-specific designations: Certified Insurance Professional (CIP) and Canadian Risk Management (CRM).
Eileen Gittens
Eileen Gittens is an accomplished strategic and transformative leader with over 18 years in the Staffing Industry where she has extensive experience leading and inspiring purpose driven teams that deliver top talent and best in class workforce solutions to our clients. As an agile executive, she is known for her ability to build high performing teams, finding and implementing innovative strategies to attract talent to deliver on-time to our clients, and develop the markets that we are invested in.
Tracey Both
A seasoned recruitment professional, Tracey chose to leave the large, global recruitment firms behind to build a forward-thinking, people-first firm that believes that relations comes first. Thoughtful, yet direct, Tracey brings transparency, responsiveness and a little bit of humour to her client and candidate relationships.
Roxanne Seguin
OPAL Corporate Connections was founded by our Director of Recruitment, Roxanne Seguin. Over 20 years ago, Roxanne made a name for herself in talent acquisition and head hunting, originally specializing in bilingual recruitment within the Insurance, Retail, and Finance sectors. Through referrals, as well as steadfast and loyal relationships with her clients, the demand for Roxanne’s assistance naturally evolved into her leading teams of recruitment professionals and foraying into other dynamic industries including Information Technology, Healthcare, Corporate Services/Administrative Support, and more. However, while working within the guided, and often rigidly banal, structure of other recruitment firms, Roxanne realized that there were more creative, effective, and innovative ways to connect with her clients and candidates. And so, this was the foundation upon which OPAL Corporate Connections was built.
Nadia Ciani
Nadia is the Founder of EnergyXChange Group, an HR Consulting and Fractional Leadership firm. Close to 30 years of experience in HR - nearly 20 in an Executive capacity. Has lead HR teams across North America in a Hybrid model with expertise in leading virtual teams. Nadia Has lead all aspects of HR from Business Partner teams, Talent & Development, Talent & Succession Planning through to Data and Analytics.
Michael Coffill
With over 30 years of experience in staffing and recruitment, I founded Wages Corp in 2019 to provide various services to help you manage your Canadian workforce. Wages Corp is a business passionate about enabling independent recruiters, as well as small businesses, to reduce costs and risks, using our experience-based, back-office support system.
Peter Zukow
Peter is Managing Partner at IQ PARTNERS, leading daily operations, strategic growth & geographic expansion. Peter is a business builder with an extraordinary track record of delivering results and positive outcomes for key stakeholders. As an executive search leader he is a trusted advisor to clients, colleagues, and business partners. As a business leader he thrives on challenge, inspires those around him to achieve their full potential, and has led many high performing teams to success. For over 20 years, Peter was the driving force behind recruitment firm Lock Search Group. Executing ambitious growth strategies, he helped grow the business from a small boutique firm with three employees to one of Canada’s largest search firms with 10 offices across the country. He then went on to become a Partner with Conroy Ross which merged with Optimum Talent a year later, where Peter helped orchestrate, the strategic growth leading to its acquisition in November of 2020 by AJ Gallagher.
Steve McNeil
Steve McNeil is a serial entrepreneur born and raised in Sudbury, with a proven track record of leadership, innovation, and a deep passion for improving business operations and community initiatives. He is the Co-Owner and General Manager of Workforce Inc (inclusive of Calstone Search Group and HR Project Partners), a labor supply company with seven offices across Canada. When all else failed him in human resources, he became the co-founder and Vice president of Unmanned Areial Services Inc., a service company in the Americas that deploys drones and robotics globally to access the inaccessible in mining operations, forestry and defence.
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