Jerry Grady is a partner with UHY, former Board Member of UHY Advisors Inc., and is a partner in the firm’s Ann Arbor, MI office. Jerry is the Chairperson of the firm’s National Staffing Practice, where he leads a team of more than 50 professionals who provide accounting, attest, tax, digital transformation, cybersecurity, and M&A services to more than 250 staffing companies across the U.S. Jerry specializes in providing financial and business consulting services to optimize opportunities for growth and profitability. He assists staffing companies with corporate growth and management strategies to identify tax savings, improve operating efficiencies, and increase profits. Jerry is an annual speaker at various staffing conferences across the country such as the American Staffing Association, Staffing Industry Analysts, TechServe Alliance, the Affiliated Staffing Group, TempNet, and many state staffing associations.

Alex Kane is Director of Strategic Accounts at Teambridge, a composable, AI-native workforce platform. For 15+ years, he’s helped hyper-growth tech companies sell, scale, and win. Based in San Francisco, Alex has worked across the industry’s biggest shifts—from the iPad to cloud migration to now agentic AI.

At Teambridge, Alex partners with forward-looking staffing leaders to re-engineer key workflows like shift coverage, candidate engagement, and client SLAs. He’s known for turning buzzwords into measurable outcomes: faster time-to-fill, stronger redeploy rates, and protected margins.

In “Beyond ChatGPT: Turning AI Into Staffing’s Growth Engine,” he'll share a practical playbook to scale without sacrificing quality, move faster, and stay ahead.

Will Matthews has helped companies develop high performing, effective leaders who care about the mission and the people they lead, and deliver consistent results. Your attendees will come away inspired with new tools and specific performance improvement skills that will help them be resilient, strong, innovative, collaborative, energized and more deliberate in the way that they show up, lead and work. Price Waterhouse Coopers Twitter Charles Schwab Vail Resorts Hilton State Farm Insurance Johnson & Johnson CenterPoint Energy Northwestern Mutual Mass Mutual Financial Jefferies Financial Group United Way Energy Systems Group University of Denver University of Texas at Arlington OSHA Bard Center for Entrepreneurship Colorado Secretary of State’s Office American Staffing Association Women's Energy Network Institute for Supply Management Will takes your audience on a journey filled with laughter, personal reflection and powerful insights that will improve both their work and lives. By connecting in a personal way with each audience member at the mental/intellectual level, logical level and emotional level, they will feel positively challenged and recommitted to improve performance, tap into hidden potential, optimize their results.

John Ruffini is the vice president of professional development for HealthTrust Workforce Solutions. He and his team focus on training and development for the entire organization in an effort to help employees be the best they can be at whatever role they are playing within the company.  His passion is recruiting and every recruiter hired at HealthTrust goes through a two-week boot camp training he developed that has improved new hire ramp-up time by 30%. Ruffini started on a perm desk and developed a knack (or sickness!) for starting branches from scratch in new markets or rebuilding struggling ones. While he has been in the recruiting and staffing industry for almost 30 years, he has spent the last 10-15 years in roles that have focused on training, mentoring, and developing individual contributors and managers. He is the current chair of American Staffing Association’s Healthcare Section Council and Education and Certification Committee and a past chair for the Search and Placement Section Council. He has had the honor of being a presenter at ASA’s Staffing World nine times. He is the author of “Money Makers – Proven Ways to Increase Sales and Productivity in the World of Professional Recruiting” which has been an Amazon Best Seller and is used by staffing firms across the country to train their recruiters and instill recruiting fundamentals.  In 2023 he published his first non-fiction work, “A Quest for Alex” which rose to #1 on the Amazon best seller list in two categories. He is also the Co-host of the “Recruiters With No Limits” live stream podcast.

David Searns is Co-CEO of Haley Marketing, a content, digital marketing, and web design firm that focuses exclusively on the staffing and recruiting industries. For the past 28 years, David and his team have helped staffing companies to stand out from the competition, improve recruiting response, increase sales productivity, and stay top-of-mind with employers and talent. Prior to forming Haley Marketing, David was Director of Marketing for a Western New York temporary staffing and direct placement service.  He holds an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor's in Management Information Systems from Clarkson University.

Susan Steward is a partner in the Cerritos office of Atkinson, Andelson, Loya, Ruud & Romo. She counsels and represents public and private sector employers in all employment-related matters, including defending against claims of discrimination, harassment, retaliation and wrongful termination. Ms. Steward also defends employers in class action lawsuits, particularly class actions involving claims for unpaid overtime and meal and rest periods. She represents for-profit and nonprofit companies, governmental agencies. In addition, Ms. Steward has extensive experience advising and representing regional and national staffing agencies in all aspects of employment law.