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HRFest Canada returns to Rebel Toronto on Nov. 10 and 11, with more than 750 HR professionals, executives and innovation leaders coming together for a two-day festival.
There will be more than 120 speakers across more than 60 hours of programming that’s built across four open festival stages plus more than 40 networking activities, — alongside a separate, senior-only Leaders Forum that runs as a fifth track for chief human resources officers (CHROs) and other senior people leaders.
Four of the stages are open to all festival attendees and are designed to let people build their own day by moving between panels, workshops, candid conversations and career-focused sessions. The fifth — the Leaders Forum — requires a separate ticket and is restricted to CHROs and senior people leaders.
HRFest Canada 2026 stages
The Hangar serves as the festival's main stage, described by organisers as the event's "heartbeat" and IS intended to host the big-picture conversations and headline speakers. It will draw the widest cross-section of attendees, with programming spanning next-generation talent, AI adoption, legal risk and wellbeing return on investment through keynote panels, fireside chats, live debates, live podcast recordings and expert sessions, in a larger format built for scale.
The Vault is the festival's "gritty conversations" stage, designed for subject matter other conferences tend to avoid, with the line between speaker and audience deliberately blurred. Topics include what AI is actually doing to the HR function, live legal question-and-answer sessions, employee value proposition (EVP) honesty, skills-based hiring realities and trauma-sensitive leadership. While open to all attendees, this will particularly appeal to senior practitioners looking for substance over polish, through short talks, audience open-mic segments, audience-driven problem-solving and standalone expert sessions, staged in a smaller, more intimate setting.
The Lab is the festival's hands-on workshop stage, positioned as the place where ideas get built rather than simply discussed. Sessions cover compensation structure diagnostics, mergers and acquisitions integration checklists, AI use-case mapping, people analytics storytelling, conscious leadership and feedback frameworks. It targets attendees who want to leave with something tangible — a template, a checklist, a plan or a draft — through workshop-style sessions run at smaller capacity, each one designed to produce a named artifact participants can bring back to their workplace.
The Loft is calibrated for emerging leaders, described by organisers as an "upstairs stage" both literally and figuratively, built for HR professionals at mid-career and beyond who are weighing their next move. Programming includes traditional career paths, budget conversations with chief financial officers, the reshaping of HR roles by AI, internal communications and promotion strategy. It is aimed at managers, senior managers and directors working toward head-of and director-level roles, and will run panels, expert sessions, live coaching and peer-led conversations in a smaller, more personal setting.
The Leaders Forum operates separately from the main festival as the senior-most room at HRFest Canada — a private, peer-only space for CHROs, chief people officers (CPOs) and other senior people leaders. The room is capped at 300 attendees to maintain peer quality, and tickets include full access to the main HRFest programming alongside the Forum itself. Sessions are positioned as off-the-record and will include moderated panels, fireside chats, executive case studies and peer-led decision sessions.
The festival's broader theme covers six areas: AI implementation, ethics and the future of HR; leadership at the top of organisations; legal risk and compliance, including Ontario's shifting regulatory landscape; talent, skills and workforce planning; wellbeing, caregiving and psychological safety; and rewards, EVP and total compensation.
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