20 years ago I chanced upon employer comms and have loved this industry ever since. The complex problems we solve for clients, and the life changing opportunities we enable candidates to take, make each day a fresh and worthwhile challenge. As a creative the RADs have always meant so much to me. From the moment I rushed to Moss Bros to try and find a tux on the day of my first RADs, the lure of the stage and the ability to have the work we do recognised, is a powerful motivator and a delightful affirmation. Maybe it’s the lack of sports day certificates I managed to secure for my parents’ fridge.

I’m excited to be taking part in the judging process this year. With so many super-smart people from across our industry judging, I know every piece of work entered will be eagerly assessed by real experts, committed to upholding the highest of standards – something for which the RADs have always been known.

Meg started her career in the design team at Wiser, crafting and executing design deliverables and campaigns for some of the biggest brands in the country such as Frasers Group, Lloyd's of London and Just Eat. After four years, she took the opportunity to focus on one of the most exciting (and scaling) brands in the industry: Wiser.

As Brand Manager, she dedicates herself to changing the way people think about work through social campaigns, content creation, email marketing and employee engagement, organising internal events that celebrate and champion the people of Wiser, empowering them to expect more.

Lizzie has worked in brand, communications, and employee engagement for nearly two decades, specialising in employer and corporate reputation for both superstar and specialist brands.

She's worked for Symphony Talent for six years, developing a global Brand Strategy team with a strong reputation for thorough data and insights that get transformed into smart, strategic creative work, and loves being the bridge between business and creative so she can champion both. Her passion is ensuring that these brands are reflected in employee behaviour and lived by all, as she believes people trust people, rather than brands.

Mark Bevans - MD and Founder of 'WeLove9am', an award-winning employer branding and marketing communication agency. He’s lived and breathed everything recruitment marketing for nearly 30 years. Mark’s driven by one defining purpose: to make the world of work a better place. He’s hugely passionate and enthusiastic about the employer branding industry. So much so he launched his own Podcast ‘The WeLove9am Breakfast Show’ where he packs a punch in a five-minute blast.

Mark heads up operations for the business, loves the insights and data behind today’s candidate market. He’s BIG on creativity and gets super excited about the emotions it can stir. And you can normally find him deep in conversation mapping out solutions and strategies for clients.

As an Account Director at Chatter, Alex's job is to make sure that his clients are happy which means working with the brilliant specialists in our agency to scope and deliver solutions to their challenges.

Starting his marketing career in the world of Youth Engagement, Alex has a passion for helping people to fulfil their potential. This grew into a passion for Employer Branding as he joined chatter in 2018. His background in Youth Engagement has led to specialising in Early Careers and creating campaigns that engage an ever-changing audience. Beyond this, his love for Social led him to leading the development of our agency's own bespoke content strategy.

When asked about joining the RADs judging panel, Alex said, "It's a real honour and a great opportunity - I've attended the awards evening a few times now and it's always fantastic seeing the winners collect their awards, so I’m excited to be a small part of that."

Clair’s a global marketer with over 18 years’ experience of working within the Recruitment and Talent Tech industry.

As a strategic marketer, she has a solid reputation for driving revenue and growth through demand generation, content, and brand management. She’s led go-to-market strategies for global SaaS, tech businesses, employer branding, staffing and recruitment agencies, job advertising and media organisations. Her passion is both marketing and storytelling and she’s in her element, knee-deep in ambitious organisations, with talent and creativity in abundance. A perfect fit for Adway!

Vanessa started her career as a Graphic Designer, and has since worn a number of different hats; as a creative, client partner, across operations, delivering end to end solutions to clients across all sectors and levels, from graduate to board & executive recruitment. More recently as a Chief Operating Officer for a recruitment and consultancy business specialising in D&I and later developing Talent Advisory solutions Globally for PeopleScout TMP. Her passion has always been helping, supporting and coaching people to become their best has always been her biggest driver.

Andy leads a global practice that partners with organizations to help them achieve the people results they need to deliver the business outcomes they are aiming for. He and the practice do this through talent and business strategy, change and transformation, technology, DEIB and employer branding.

Andy has over 20 years consulting experience spanning corporate, BPO and marketing agencies including 10 years at Cielo where he set up the global employer brand division. His passion is helping organizations make the most of their brand and their talent – the two strategic assets that he believes can best differentiate the leaders from the laggards.

Alexis joined Penna in 2014 and here she combines her passion and experience, bringing equality, diversity and inclusion expertise to clients as the Head of EDI. She’s also leading Penna on their own EDI journey. Alexis oversees the entire recruitment and employment lifecycle for Penna’s clients’ attraction, selection, assessment and retention; ensuring it promotes the highest standards of equality, diversity and inclusion. She offers client support in all things EDI to set clear responsibilities for strategy and programme development, challenging organisations to change and grow.

Her approach is to stop focussing on culture ‘fit’ and start focusing on culture ‘add’ eradicating unhealthy monocultures in workplaces. She’s passionate about all strands of diversity and has most recently worked across the UK and USA to ensure actions are being taken to remove racial inequality in the workplace, in light of the recent height of the Black Lives Matter movement. She has also recently been part of the judging panel for the UK Top 50 Inclusive Employers 2021, and the Inclusive Awards 2022.

With 15 years of experience working for brands such as Indeed, Sage and Carphone Warehouse/Dixons Carphone, Helen has experienced most of the challenges within the Employer Brand space. Now taking on a new role at Microsoft building out their recruitment marketing strategy in EMEA, she has a particular passion for creating an EVP and how it is integral for companies to create that competitive advantage when hiring.

Scandinavia’s leading Employer Branding expert. Founded Coreworkers in 1994. Author of ‘Employer Branding as a Discipline’.

I've been part of the recruitment communications industry for over 25 years and have seen a whopping amount of change in that time. I've been at SMRS for almost 22 of those, in various client-facing roles, and am now Lead Client Partner, working closely with clients from a broad range of sectors to explore their challenges as well as their aspirations

Whether it's getting under the skin of an organisation and helping them to uncover their employer brand story, to working out the best strategy to tackle some of the attraction challenges in this current crazy market, I love to work with teams from across our agency to make a real difference for our clients. And much as I love it when a beautiful piece of creative work gives me 'the feels' I'm also passionate about making sure it does the job it needs to do, too. So, I'm really excited to see how that's been done for a whole load of different projects as a judge this year.

Across the past decade, Jenna has produced multiple award-winning campaigns, websites, film and content for some of the biggest brands in the world. Starting her career originally in publishing, she worked with many agencies and contract publishing houses producing work for Diageo, The Sunday Times and famous British photographer, Rankin.

In 2013, she made the jump to the world of employer brand and hasn’t looked back since. Delivering outstanding creative work and campaigns in her time at Pink Squid and now in her role as Head of 33RED Films, ThirtyThree’s film and content production company. Joining ThirtyThree in 2016 in a hybrid creative services and production role she supported the creative team in some of the agencies best known hero work today. This led to the creation of 33RED in 2018 with the vision to become the leader of film and content in the industry. In her role as ‘Head of RED’ she is responsible for all film and content created from the three offices, leading a talented team of brilliant filmmakers in the process to create brave, bold and meaningful work.

Charu is PA Consulting’s Global Head Of Talent Marketing, she is a self-confessed geek in all things employer branding and an ‘outspoken’ advocate for creating inclusive equitable company cultures. Charu has held leadership positions in employer marketing, Talent transformation, and Diversity + Inclusion in organisations including Unilever, BP plc, Mckinsey & Company & Primark.

Charu has been a judge for a number of industry awards across marketing and HR and is a recognised speaker at HR + Marketing industry events globally.

If you need ingenious experimentation, punchy opinions on why diversity doesn’t need a business case and unwavering commitment to always putting the candidate into the centre of every creative idea, follow Charu on Twitter and LinkedIn.

One English Literature and Language degree and a lot of reading later, Emma surprised the humanity degree haters, and didn’t become a teacher (who knew there were more options?). With 6 years in the employer brand industry behind her, Emma is no stranger to a challenging brief. Whether it’s directing a global shoot in the midst of a global pandemic, or coming up with an immersive installation experience to capture graduates’ attention on-campus, Emma is always striving to create a memorable experience that stays with the audience. She’s got a particular soft spot for film, social and experiential, and she’ll relate anything, and everything, back to her love of food.

As Global Head of Talent Marketing for Technology Sales, Ben guides a part of IBM on attracting talent with digital, content, and social media marketing best practices.

Ben has worked in large corporates, medium digital /creative agencies, and growing tech companies. Whether marketing has been B2C, B2B or C2C (company to candidate), one thing has remained constant – the need to communicate a clear message, effectively and efficiently through multiple touchpoints.

Away from work, Ben is a husband, dad, Tottenham FC fan, and a complete MAMIL (middle-aged man in lycra)! Now isn’t that a lovely mental image to leave you with.

After an incredibly unsuccessful year as an Auditor, I fell into the world of employer branding. And in the ten years since that first half page ad buy in the New Civil Engineer, I've become immersed in this world. Even when I moved to New Zealand for a year, the hostel I stayed in was over the road from the only employer brand agency in the country!

Now, after mixing it up in-house and agency side, I'm Head of Employer Brand Strategy at Pink Squid. That means shaping research projects, drawing out insight and turning it into a clear strategy for our clients around the world. Only then do the crayons come out and the fun can begin.

Clare’s background is in early careers talent acquisition and she has a real passion for employer branding and recruitment marketing. Clare joined Police Now almost five years ago, a social enterprise with a mission to recruit and train brilliant and diverse graduates to be game changers for policing and society. In her role as Recruitment and Marketing Director, Clare has led activity which has seen the Police Now brand enter and climb The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers, won well over 30 industry awards including one RAD and many focused on D&I, and was an Honouree for her Contribution to Inclusivity and Diversity at the Female Frontier Awards. She’s excited to be in the judging seat this year.

As Head of Strategy at Havas People I work with incredible global clients to help them with their most complicated comms challenges. For me there’s no better way of getting up close and personal with inspiring people and the business challenges they face.

I’ve been lucky enough to often attend, and win, at the RADS over the last 20 years. This year, I couldn’t be more excited to see how our industry is stepping up to push boundaries ever further. I can’t wait to see creative work that raises the hairs on the back of your neck and, importantly, solves the big hairy problems that our clients face.

Siobhän is an integral part of the Early Careers team at Experience Event. She is responsible for maintaining Client relations and producing unique campaigns, to attract a diverse talent pool to some of the UK’s leading companies.

Spearheading Experience’s partnership with Lloyds Banking Group, Siobhan’s initiatives have received industry accolades, with several category awards received from ISE and the RADS.

Siobhan is thrilled to share her expertise and “give-back” to an industry that is emerging from a challenging few years, with bold and exciting concepts. “I’m looking forward to seeing how brands are thinking out of the box and rising to today’s challenges!”

Siobhan always welcomes meeting new people and looks forward to hearing from you!

Stef has been a Creative Director at Ph.Creative for over 5 Years. In that time producing award winning work for clients like GVC, BT, NatWest, DAZN and Tipico. Prior to this Stef spent over 20 Years across consumer marketing, entertainment marketing and broadcast; launching Jeans, Cars, Movies and PlayStation games (along with a WHOLE BUNCH of other stuff!). Innovation has been at the heart of Stef’s work and the drive to create impact and engagement has been paramount. That continues in the exciting world of Employer Branding and Talent Marketing.

Debbie Smith has over 30 years experience in recruitment communications, media and digital consulting. Before joining ManpowerGroup in 2019 Debbie headed up the talent practice at the digital consultancy, Carve and prior to that built the media function at employer communications agency ThirtyThree. Debbie spent her early career in recruitment media working as Sales Director for Redactive Media and worked on the launch of Totaljobs back in 1999. She has a unique insight into the ever changing media landscape from a talent acquisition and employer branding perspective and now heads up the media team responsible for media and delivery at ManpowerGroup UK.

Equally comfortable as a peacetime or wartime professional, Ray'n is a seasoned Global leader who believes a successful business is driven by successful individuals. As the Human Resources Director at Stepstone, her goals include building an environment of psychological safety and belonging, developing successors at all levels, and having a robust forward-looking mindset. Ray’n leads with affection and love and is known for driving high results through engaged and inspired teams. As an American expat living in London, she is curious about other cultures and their varied communication, motivation, and decision making. She takes time to connect with everyone around her, learn about what makes them uniquely them, and adapts her style to her audience.

Known for welcoming her team each morning with a hug, Ray’n knows the strengths and opportunities of the team and leverages that knowledge when assigning roles or delivering feedback. She asks herself the 5 why’s frequently, loves a good whiteboard brainstorming session, and works with the flow of her own energy levels vs. traditional set hours. Ray’n is mindful and respectful of her role as an expat so when not at work, she takes every advantage to explore Europe including smaller British towns and villages.