In-person Pass

Ryan is the Founder and CEO of ApplicantPro, a hiring software company founded in 2006. Ryan and his team have grown the small startup into a leading provider of hiring software for over 7,000 companies around the nation. Ryan's mission is to help companies, managers, and HR teams improve their hiring results. To do this, he and his team strive to create educational content, tools, integrations, and software to help businesses drive their hiring results. In addition, he is an HRCI and SHRM-CP Approved Provider and conducts weekly, free webinars and presents at SHRM events around the country. 

Dr. Melody Rawlings is Director of the Center for the Advancement of Virtual Organizations, Lead Faculty for Managing Virtual Organizations specialization, and doctoral chair at Northcentral University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Education, an MS in Technology specializing in business management, and a doctorate in leadership. Melody has led remote teams for 10+ years, developed partnerships between corporations and higher ed, and managed her own businesses. She has authored peer-reviewed publications and presented internationally on business topics such as leadership development, emotional intelligence, ethics, and conflict management. Melody has taught internationally in Europe and Asia.

Jennifer Currence is a Senior Partner of HR Soul consultancy firm in Tampa, Florida, where she delivers results through strategic HR solutions, customized training, and coaching programs for organizational and HR leaders. She is the creator of The SOTO Approach to Leadership and the content architect for the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) international People Manager Qualification (PMQ).

Jennifer is regularly published and featured in industry magazines, webinars, and podcasts, and is the author of three HR books on behavioral business competencies.

Jennifer was named one of the top 100 Influential HR professionals in Leadership and Development in 2023 and Tampa Bay’s HR Consultant of the Year in 2017.  She is a faculty member for SHRM and a former management professor at the University of Tampa.

Ryan Gottfredson, Ph.D. is a cutting-edge leadership development author, researcher, and consultant. He helps organizations vertically develop their leaders primarily through a focus on mindsets. Ryan is the Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author of Success Mindsets: The Key to Unlocking Greater Success in Your Life, Work, & Leadership. And, he is the author of the upcoming book, The Elevated Leader: Leveling Up Your Leadership Through Vertical Development. He is also a leadership professor at the College of Business and Economics at California State University-Fullerton.

Laura Maffucci is Sr. Director of Global Total Rewards & HRIS at Globalization Partners and has over 20 years of human resources leadership experience. She specializes in innovative, strategic total rewards solutions that attract and engage rockstar talent.

Laura’s experience encompasses many aspects of the human resources arena including HRIS, HR operations, culture and engagement, compensation, employee care and wellbeing, executive compensation, and people analytics.

Laura is passionate about the future of work, normalizing the value of work everywhere, and enabling employees across the globe to be their best selves and add value wherever they go and whatever they do.

Karl Ahlrichs specializes in helping professionals make order from chaos. He is a national speaker, author, and consultant, presenting on the people issues in all industries, and is often quoted in the local and national media. 

Karl’s experience is ideally suited to times of organizational change as he pulls on risk management and organizational development theories to replace “best practices” with “next practices”. He owes much of his communications mastery to working as a writer and editor in daily media, to on-the-job writing experience and to the process of becoming a published author.

He joined Gregory & Appel in 2010 after serving as a founding partner of ExactHire, bringing his HR, operations, diversity & belonging, and learning & development skills with him. Karl’s affinity for design, composition and learning started at a very young age, by taking and examining thousands of boring pictures with the goal of improving his craft. He loves deploying that practice-to-improve approach with all manner of hobbies including writing haiku, mastering cutting-edge technology and learning Spanish.

In 2003, he was named the SHRM Human Resource Professional of the Year for the State of Indiana. He is on the Boards of several organizations, including the Maryland CPA Society.  He has lived in Scotland and Spain and lives to explore new experiences with his wife and family.

Named a top 100 HR Professional of 2020, Dr. Allessandria Polizzi has 20 years of experience leading HR teams across multiple industries. Following recovery from burnout in 2021, Allessandria left her CPO position to focus on helping companies with resiliency, burnout prevention and psychological safety. Verdant offers programs designed around neuroscience, cognitive behavior theory, and the ISO 45003 standards by training practical, simple skills that help teams flourish. She also co-founded the Kite HR wellbeing app for HR teams and shares discoveries on all of these topics via the Be Verdant podcast.

JoDee is the Founder of Purple Ink, a human resources consulting firm in Indianapolis, IN. They serve a wide array of organizations with recruiting, HR consulting, leadership training, and HR outsourcing services.

JoDee serves on the Indiana SHRM State Council and is the chair of the Indiana SHRM conference.

Erika Sandoval (she/ella) is Partner with the Strategic Advisory Group at UKG and has spent 15 years in the areas of people and organizational practice, specifically in DEI, L&D, HR, organizational and professional development, and facilitation and consulting. Having lived and worked across North America, South America, Europe and Asia, Erika has experience in leading and guiding strategic and cross-cultural initiatives that impact organizations and drive business success.

Erika is multilingual and holds various DEI and training certificates; she received an MSc in Human Rights Law from the University of Birmingham in the UK and has an MA and BA.

As the Senior Director of Partnership Development at Disability Solutions, Kevin works directly with employers on developing programs to actively attract, hire and retain talent with disabilities, which includes Pepsi Beverages’ Pepsi ACT – Achieving Change Together and the expansion project Frito ACT for Frito Lay.  Kevin trains employers to educate them on the benefits of hiring talent with disabilities and provides tools to help them best engage and support potential and current employees.  He is also responsible for developing and managing relationships with talent partners to meet the hiring needs of Disability Solutions’ employer clients. Kevin also regularly contributes to blogs and hosts Disability Solutions’ podcast “Changing Minds and Changing Lives.”