What can HR professionals take away from HRFest 2026?
HRFest Australia returns on 18 November with a programme built around the pressures most weighing on the country's HR community, from boardroom buy-in to burnout, and from agentic AI to stagnant talent pipelines.
Held at The Timber Yard in Melbourne, the full-day festival brings together HR professionals, executives, and innovation leaders across six dedicated content themes.
Strategic HR & Executive Leadership
Sessions in this stream are designed to help people leaders translate their strategy into the commercial framing and financial language the C-suite actually responds to.
It covers topics such as how to build a compelling business case to secure budget approval and how to lead with conviction when there is no clear right answer.
Wellbeing, Safety & Psychosocial Risk
With underpayment scandals, new psychosocial regulations, and rising psychological injury claims reshaping employer obligations, this theme moves past checkbox compliance to address what genuinely defensible workplace safety looks like in practice.
Sessions cover Victoria's proposed right to work from home and new Psychological Health Regulations, as well as where the surge in workplace mental health claims is really coming from and how to address them.
Talent Acquisition & Workforce Planning
The talent market has reset, and organisations winning the war for talent are those rethinking recruitment from the ground up, from unlocking neurodiverse hiring and returnship programmes to using predictive analytics to get ahead of workforce risk before it becomes a crisis.
One of the sessions also confronts the harder question of what employers genuinely owe their people when technological transformation threatens livelihoods.
AI & HR Technology
These sessions move past generative AI to what is happening now: agentic AI that makes decisions, executes workflows, and operates autonomously across HR functions.
They cover practical guidance on predictive workforce planning within Australian data privacy guardrails, as well as a keynote on designing AI partnerships that reduce workload rather than compound it.
DEI & Inclusive Hiring
Real inclusion, the programme argues, is not a policy on a page, but about who gets hired, who gets heard, and what teams actually do under pressure.
Sessions examine the commercial case for skills-based hiring, the rise of returnships, why traditional engagement strategies are failing a hybrid workforce, and a rethink of performance management that prioritises strengths over KPI obsession.
Learning & Development
With Australia's tight labour market shifting the build-versus-buy equation firmly towards build, this theme addresses how to architect capability frameworks that go beyond passive, algorithm-driven e-learning and how to convert a stagnant talent pipeline into a cohort of future-ready leaders.
Other takeaways include the practical steps of turning a stagnant talent pipeline into high-impact leaders, and how to engage senior leaders and embed transformational learning that’s ready for future disruption.
HRFest Australia takes place on 18 November at The Timber Yard, Melbourne. Secure your slot at the HR industry's biggest festival by using this link. Choose from individual passes or group passes for teams of up to nine, with discounted rates available until 27 September.
