Best HR Executives in Australia
and New Zealand | Hot List

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The leadership formula

The best HR executives in Australia and New Zealand are redefining what “HR” means, moving far beyond policy and process to become architects of: 

• culture
   

• capability
   

• resilience

Across sectors and geographies, they show a consistent pattern of attributes of being deeply people centred, commercially astute, culturally aware and personally disciplined in how they lead through complexity and change.

In creating the Hot List 2025, the HRD Australia and New Zealand team conducted a survey to identify the most influential leaders who had made significant industry contributions. To qualify for nomination, candidates needed to hold an HR director or similar position and have at least 10 years of HR experience.

Will Prest, associate director at recruitment specialists Hays, describes a top performer as “a strategic business partner who combines strong people expertise with commercial acumen, data literacy and change leadership”. 

The best HR executives in Australia and New Zealand are confident with workforce analytics and AI-enabled tools, using skills intelligence to anticipate shortages, model future workforce needs and make evidence-based decisions. At the same time, they set clear ethical guardrails around how these technologies are deployed, conscious that credibility can be lost quickly if trust is compromised.

Fellow industry expert, WTW’s director of work and rewards, Evangeline Daquilanea, takes this a step further, arguing that AI adoption itself is no longer a differentiator – it is “the entry ticket”. The real edge lies in strategic talent allocation: the ability to translate technology, data and market insights into “measurable organisational value”. 

In a world of constrained salary budgets and premium pricing for in-demand skills, top HR leaders think like “talent economists” – measuring impact, investing with intent and deliberately choosing which capabilities to build, buy or borrow to drive growth.
 

Both experts are clear that the best HR leaders are judged on outcomes. Prest notes that they “are measured by impact, not activity,” able to draw a straight line from people strategy to productivity, retention, capability growth and long-term organisational resilience. For Daquilanea, this is visible in how they interrogate trade-offs: when salary increases are holding at around 3.5% in both Australia and New Zealand, despite inflationary and cost pressures, top leaders ask: where will each marginal dollar of investment deliver the greatest uplift in performance, engagement or future readiness?

Prest highlights sustained pressure from skills shortages, cost constraints and “ongoing organisational change” across both markets. HR leaders have been forced to balance tight cost controls with the need to attract, engage and retain critical talent in a context where employees still expect flexibility, meaningful work and development opportunities.

There are also local nuances. In Australia, he points to heightened complexity around labour laws, industrial relations and compliance, while in New Zealand, the focus has leaned more towards managing workforce capacity amid economic volatility. 

Daquilanea describes the overall picture as “sustained workforce pressure” in both countries, with tight labour markets, structural skills gaps and rising expectations around well-being and inclusion keeping HR firmly at the centre of business strategy. The real challenge, she argues, is not any single issue but “managing all of the issues simultaneously,” using data and insight to make deliberate trade-offs rather than reactive decisions.
 

For Prest, top-performing HR leaders require a “strong balance” of hard and soft skills. Hard skills such as commercial acumen, workforce analytics, technology literacy and regulatory knowledge are what earn HR a respected voice at the executive table. Soft skills – empathy, communication and change leadership – are what allow them to bring people with them through transformation.

Daquilanea reframes this from balance to integration. Hard skills underpin credibility: data fluency, workforce planning and the ability to quantify trade-offs. Soft skills underpin influence: judgement, trust, ethical clarity and the capacity to lead through ambiguity. In her words, hard skills might get you a seat at the table, but soft skills determine “whether you truly deserve that seat”.

Belinda Perisic, director and chief operating officer at Coulter Legal, exemplifies people-led transformation through space and design.

Over the past year, she has led the delivery of two new office spaces, purpose built to support flexible, hybrid work while protecting and amplifying the firm’s culture. Her approach was anchored in genuine cocreation: engaging people across the business to collate their ideas, wants and needs, and then negotiated with external stakeholders to bring those ideas to life. Staff were clear that they needed a blend of open-plan areas and private offices, along with flexible meeting spaces that could support both collaboration and deep, individual work.

The project became a practical demonstration of psychological safety and trust. By involving people early, listening closely, and then “doing what we said we would” in the final design, Perisic turned a property initiative into a culture initiative. The new spaces now visibly “show off and reflect” the firm’s culture, proving that workplace design, when led by HR savvy leaders, can be a strategic lever for engagement rather than just a facilities decision.
 

“My key strength is an ability to interpret people’s strengths and find the right role and environment for them to succeed”
Belinda PerisicCoulter Legal

Her biggest leadership challenge has been more internal than external: managing her own responses in high stakes or emotionally complex situations.

To be “an effective and grounded leader,” she talks about: 

• maintaining strong self-awareness
   

• recognising early signs of emotional pressure
   

• continuously developing strategies

 
This disciplined self-management under pressure is a recurring theme across the cohort. HR leaders are not just managing organisational complexity; they are intentionally managing themselves.

Jess Lantieri, Judo Bank’s chief people and culture officer, proves that culture can be a bank’s primary competitive advantage.

Judo Bank was founded to serve Australia’s underserved SMEs with a relationship-driven model, and Lantieri is clear that people and culture are not “support functions” but “core strategic enablers” of that model. Her leadership over the past year shows an ability to translate that philosophy into concrete, scalable mechanisms.

Two flagship initiatives illustrate this. 

First, the Bank on Her™ program, a high-potential women’s development experience endorsed by the executive leadership team and board, is designed to strengthen the leadership pipeline and challenge long-held norms in banking. Through workshops, senior leader exposure, peer coaching and customer partnerships, the program “backs talent with opportunity,” accelerating women’s readiness for leadership roles.

Second, the Banker 2.0 operating model is a central enabler of Judo’s FY30 strategy. Rather than a cost-cutting exercise, it is framed as an investment in the bank’s future – re-examining how Judo delivers its Customer Value Proposition in a more volatile, competitive environment. Critically, Banker 2.0 also strengthens development pathways, career progression and alignment between reward and performance expectations, ensuring Judo remains a compelling destination for top SME banking talent.
 

“Over the last year, my leadership focus deliberately shifted in response to the organisation’s increasing performance ambition, delivery risk and leadership maturity requirements”
Jess LantieriJudo Bank

Lantieri’s defining challenge is scaling without losing Judo’s challenger DNA. She is explicit that her worst-case scenario is “sleepwalking into becoming a mini big bank”. To guard against this, she and the executive team have deliberately designed reward structures and ways of working that reinforce the desired culture. 

A striking example is that Judo has no individual sales targets. Instead, the bank operates with a single company-level balanced scorecard and team-based incentives – an “all ships to shore” model. This enables bankers to work in agile pods, focused on the best customer outcomes rather than personal quotas, and encourages load balancing across the team. In an era marked by the fallout from traditional sales-driven models, this is a powerful statement of values backed by system design.

For Athena Chintis, director of people and culture at Cliftons, outstanding HR leadership starts with listening and visibility.

One of her most impactful contributions has been turning employee engagement feedback into tangible, organisation-wide action at the events solutions firm. Following Cliftons’ latest engagement survey, two themes emerged strongly: employees wanted a clearer line of sight to the organisational vision and a stronger sense of purpose beyond commercial results.

Chintis responded by sharing the survey results openly and facilitating virtual feedback and ideation sessions across all sites, modelling transparency and inclusion. From that process emerged the Vision in Action monthly webinar series, where leaders across the business share client stories, innovations and lessons learned. The aim, as she puts it, is not just communication but connection, enabling people to see themselves in the strategy rather than simply hearing about it.

She also helped launch the Cliftons ESG Support Fund, which offers in-kind event expertise, technology and venue support to not-for-profit and community organisations. This allows employees to see their work contributing to social impact, embedding purpose into day-to-day operations rather than treating it as an add-on.
 

“Leaders need someone who can challenge thinking, simplify complexity and help navigate difficult decisions. Being able to balance empathy with pragmatism has been central to how I work”
Athena ChintisCliftons

Chintis identifies the biggest challenge of the past year as balancing organisational sustainability with rising employee expectations. As financial discipline tightens, she has seen that culture is often most visible “during moments of constraint rather than growth”. 

Her insight is that leadership credibility is built not just through positive outcomes, but through how leaders “show up when decisions are difficult”. For HR professionals, this means holding space for tough trade-offs, communicating with honesty and empathy, and maintaining trust even when decisions are unpopular.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, Ember Korowai Takitini’s chief people and culture officer, Gil Sewell, showcases a blend of strategic foresight, cultural competence and personal vitality.

Sewell has recently reworked the People & Culture Strategy 2025–28 after delivering the previous 2023–25 plan, a sign of her long-range orientation. A major pillar has been Support the People, focused on developing robust career pathways. Over nine months, she has led the creation of a comprehensive competency framework, now at final pilot stage.

“My key strength probably lies in being intentionally relational. There is no substitute for having strong relationships with peers, your seniors and across the whole organisation,” she says. 

What sets Sewell's work apart is deep cultural integration. She has overseen the incorporation of an external Aotearoa New Zealand indigenous competency framework, working closely with Te Ahi Kaa, Ember’s bicultural team. 

Alongside that, she has run a wide change management effort, bringing in representatives from all parts of the operational services and all levels of the organisation, meeting weekly to make the framework “workable and user-friendly”. 
 

“The integration of organisational development into HR at senior levels is critical, so we are seen as working with the business to deliver the business strategy and provide the best possible experience for everyone”
Gil SewellEmber Korowai Takitini 

The project has also involved significant HR technology work, integrating the framework into the HRIS so it can be used in monthly one-to-ones between managers and team members. Using an agile methodology for the first time in a People & Culture project, she describes the work as demanding “clear vision, effective leadership, cultural understanding, strong facilitation skills” and a large dose of energy and passion.

Sewell’s most personal challenge has been navigating perceptions of age and longevity in leadership. Having turned 65, she notes with humour that she is technically a pensioner yet remains deeply active: working full-time and going to the gym four times a week. She is one of the organisers of the network Chief People Officers in NZ and also mentors young HR professionals.Sewell underlines an important lesson for the profession: outstanding HR leadership, when combined with ongoing curiosity and energy, can be a significant asset in times of rapid change.

At Myriota, director of people and talent Sharon Elding demonstrates what it means to build culture deliberately in a high-pressure deep-tech scaleup.

For her, the standout achievement of the past year has been Myriota’s recognition as an Employer of Choice 2025, because it reflects the company’s underlying reality. Myriota, which provides secure satellite IoT connectivity solutions, operates in a deep-tech environment that brings sharp constraints: limited funding, scarce specialist talent and the complexity of scaling a business that is “genuinely changing how the world connects”. In that context, achieving strong, measurable engagement is not incidental. As Elding puts it, “we built that deliberately”. It is the result of intentional choices around how people are hired, supported and connected to the company’s mission, rather than a by-product of growth. 

Elding’s biggest challenge mirrors that of many high-growth organisations, but with added intensity. Myriota hires globally because its strategy demands it, which has forced Elding to “tear up the traditional HR playbook and rebuild it for an environment that doesn’t sit still”. Practices that might work in a mature organisation simply don’t map onto a fast-moving, innovation-driven scaleup.
 

 

“The initiative I’m most energised about in my
role is building a
formalised talent
development framework”
Sharon EldingMyriota 

The harder work starts after hiring. Myriota’s team is growing and globally distributed, spanning multiple generations, cultures and working styles. On top of that sits the cultural complexity of scaling: balancing in-office collaboration with flexibility, embedding vision and values into a constantly evolving team, and ensuring culture doesn’t “quietly drift while everyone is focused on execution”. Elding is clear that there are no neat solutions. 

“You pull multiple levers at once and stay close to the data and the people simultaneously. That vigilance is what separates teams that scale well from those that quietly drift,” says Elding.

Watching engagement signals, listening deeply and course correcting early is, in her view, what separates teams that scale well from those that lose their way as they grow.
 

The best HR executives in Australia and New Zealand are not chasing technology for its own sake but using AI and digital tools to solve real organisational problems, elevate culture and create more human-centred workplaces.

 Across the leaders spotlighted, there is a consistent pattern: 

• curiosity about new tech
   

• disciplined decision-making about what to adopt
   

• relentless focus on impact rather than novelty

Chintis describes her approach as “grounded in solving real organisational challenges rather than adopting technology for its own sake”. That philosophy has shaped a series of integrated, people-centric platforms rather than a patchwork of point solutions.

Over the past year, Chintis has focused on creating a more connected people ecosystem. LinkedIn Learning has been rolled out across the organisation, with strong uptake in sales, leveraging its AI-enabled coaching features to provide targeted, real-time support aligned to live challenges. Culture Amp is being expanded beyond engagement measurement to help align organisational goals with team and individual priorities, giving employees a clearer line of sight between their work and business outcomes.

She has also introduced AbilityMap to enable structured capability assessment, giving hiring managers and leaders deeper insight into candidate strengths and future workforce planning. At the same time, she has “democratised creative capability” by adopting platforms such as Canva, Beautiful.ai and Loom, allowing HR to design and communicate with a level of professionalism that once required specialist support.

Chintis views AI as an augmentation tool, not a substitute for judgement. AI is increasingly used to support drafting, analysis and insight generation, freeing her team to focus on decision making, creativity and human connection. 

She adds, “For me, innovation succeeds when people experience it as making work easier and more meaningful.”

At Ember Korowai Takitini, Sewell treats innovation as a core leadership competency rather than an optional extra. She notes that most of what she has done “sits in the innovation space” and that it is “the key to taking an organisation forward”. That belief is embedded formally into the organisation’s new competency framework, where “openness to innovation and change” is one of the defined behaviours expected across the workforce.

While she has not implemented new P&C systems this year, Sewell’s focus has been on getting the foundations right, including preparing an RFP for a learning management system that will support future capability building. Her stance reflects a broader truth about top HR executives and technology: they know when not to deploy another platform, and they invest time in designing the right infrastructure before layering on tools.
 

In the high-growth, deep-tech context of Myriota, Elding balances curiosity with ruthless discipline.

“My philosophy is stay curious but be disciplined. I’m innately curious and can suffer from tech FOMO,” she says. “I follow the latest platforms and try to play around in them. But in a scaleup environment, bloated systems are a real risk and every tool has to earn its place.”

Her current focus is on reviewing HRIS options alongside an Employer of Record model to support international growth – both decisions driven by operational need rather than trend chasing. 

For Elding, innovation in HR is about building the right foundation at the right time. In practice, that means choosing technologies that simplify complexity, enable global consistency and protect agility.

As a committed innovator, Perisic describes herself as thriving on bringing people together to deploy tech and understand its benefits.

“Whilst I love the consistency of routine and structure, listening to others and bringing people together to create some amazing projects is how I can contribute to creating the environment for success at Coulter Legal,” she adds. “Leadership is more often about connecting and coordinating, than the actual doing.”

Perisic’s contribution lies in creating an environment where innovation can succeed: engaging stakeholders, aligning design choices with cultural aspirations, and making sure technology supports collaboration and high-quality work rather than simply adding new steps.

At Judo Bank, Lantieri uses technology to operationalise the service profit chain in real time. Deeply influenced by the principle that highly engaged employees drive better customer and business outcomes, she has rejected the traditional annual engagement survey as too slow and too blunt. Instead, Judo measures engagement weekly via the Judo Employee Delight Index (known internally as JEDI), a two-minute mobile survey with simple sliders and open comments.

“We ask about things like how employees felt about their last week at Judo, their emotional connection to our purpose and their physical and mental energy – it’s a general pulse check,” explains Lantieri. “JEDI helps us effectively listen to our people and respond quickly. It helps us listen, learn, react and manage the needs of our people, both big and small, in real time.”

As an example, a seemingly simple insight of bankers asking for coffee support during a peak lending period led to free coffee carts across offices, which have since become hubs for connection and customer storytelling. 

More powerfully, analysis of JEDI data shows a direct correlation between banker engagement, performance and customer NPS, empirically proving the service profit chain within Judo’s own context.

“Higher banker engagement levels directly correlate to higher customer NPS. Our JEDI data proves the service value chain exists,” adds Lantieri.
 

The best HR executives in Australia and New Zealand vary in industry and focus, but all share a common profile of skills that have propelled them to the top of their industry.

➡️ 🧠📊: They are strategic, impact-driven business leaders. 
➡️ ⚙️🤝: They integrate hard and human skills to lead through constant change.
➡️ 🌐👥: They are culture architects who design systems, spaces and technology around people.