Edan Haddock was a florist until he was 30. A good one, too. Self-employed and creative, with soil under his fingernails. But somewhere in those years of arranging flowers and running a small business, he started to feel like there was something else waiting.
Watch the full interview with Rudy Crous above.
"I never thought I could do this kind of work," he says. "I was raised in an era where creative people do creative work and mathematical people do white-collar work."
The shift, when it came, was total. He took a role at a call centre, directing members of an association to HR support when the Fair Work Act came in. He'd never worked in an office before. He got very into the after-work drinks. There are stories there, he says, that he's not going to share. 😉
From that call centre, Haddock moved into agency recruitment and found his niche in talent acquisition. Internal roles followed at Monash University, AIA Australia, Flybuys, and eventually REA Group on a parental leave cover, where his scope expanded well beyond talent alone. That REA stint confirmed what he already knew: he wanted to lead.
Today he's Head of Talent and People Experience at Movember, leading a distributed team across six countries. He's a 2026 HR Influence Awards Top 12 winner, founder of the Total Talent community and podcast, and the person who embedded an AI agent named Joel into Movember's talent function.
What drew Haddock to Movember wasn't the role itself. It was the cause.
"I'm at that point where the work that I do needs to contribute to something bigger than me," he says. "I lost an uncle to suicide. I've lost several friends to suicide. Men's health is just really, really important."
He'd been doing Movember every year as a supporter. When the opportunity came to do what he loved inside a mission he was already behind, the decision was immediate. "I was like, this is my calling. I feel like that journey, I finally reached where I should be."
The moustache stays on year-round, by the way. The only time he shaves it off is the first of November, when everyone goes smooth and starts growing. It started as something silly, he says, recalling Ned Flanders and the daggy 1970s aesthetic. Now moustaches are trendy. "You can't tell whether someone's got it on to be raising awareness for men's health or whether someone is just trying to look cool."
Of all the things Haddock carried forward from his years as a florist, the one he keeps coming back to is creativity. And he thinks it's about to become the most important skill in HR.
"I've been reflecting on this quite a bit," he says. "When we're talking Workforce 5.0 and the rise in AI technology and the changes to the way each and every one of us will be working, I keep reflecting on those human skills. The really big one for me is creativity."
He gives a concrete example. He and his team member Kiyo recently completed a large piece of people analytics work using Claude AI. What would have taken weeks was done in a fraction of the time. But that wasn't the point.
"We've got this wonderful technology that can analyse our people data. Then Kiyo and I could really focus on, well, how do we bring this to life and how do we creatively tell these stories to the people that matter."
The implication is clear. The analytical work is being automated. The creative interpretation of what the data means, and how to communicate it, is where humans earn their keep.
"I think the people that haven't been able to do that, or perhaps don't have that skill, are going to find it harder to adjust in this kind of automated world that we're moving into."
Most people don't think of data and creativity as natural partners. Haddock does. He describes himself and his Chief People Officer, Fiona, as "quite unconventional" and says the HR industry has a habit of following frameworks that have been in place for decades without questioning whether they actually serve the people in the organisation.
"We are just bombarded with these principles and ways of doing things, these frameworks that have been in place for a really long period of time," he says. "We actually don't listen to the needs of our organisation and we don't listen to our people."
At Movember, the team has rebuilt how they think about talent data. They've simplified the traditional nine-box performance-potential grid into two six-box models, then overlaid them to create a risk score that shows who needs attention and why.
"You start with talent at the centre and then you overlay engagement, tenure, risk signals like absenteeism data, all of those kinds of things," he says. "Then it leans into, okay, how do we design positions that are meaningful to both Movember and to our people."
The creative part comes in what you do with the numbers once you have them.
"It's about experimentation," he says. "Using design thinking to develop, test, learn, iterate. Our people need to get comfortable with experimentation because that's the environment we're moving into. A lot of our safe work is being automated."
He's also clear about where data and HR are heading. Within five years, he believes, talent data will be self-serve for leaders. The technology will pull the information together automatically. What it won't do is tell the story.
"That's where we make a start. We're human people, we're in the industry of human beings. We like to tell a story. We like human connection. The technology can't tell that authentic humanistic story. So it's amplifying that. Bring it to life."
The Joel story is Haddock's favourite, partly because of what Joel does and partly because of how the introduction went wrong before it went right.
Joel is an AI agent embedded in Movember's talent function. He supports sourcing candidates across time zones (reaching out while the Australian team sleeps and Canada is awake), but his real purpose is more personal than that.
When Haddock arrived at Movember, he noticed something that bothered him. Around 300 people would apply for a given role. Maybe 10 would get a phone conversation with the team. Perhaps four would go through the full interview process. One would get hired.
"90 percent don't get to share their story that is so important to them with us," he says.
At Movember, that story often involves deep personal connections to the cause. People apply because they've lost someone to suicide, because they've been through testicular cancer, because they have a man in their life whose health they care about. The reasons are personal and varied. The standard recruitment process meant most of those people never got to tell anyone at Movember why they were there.
"Sean and Kiyo can't interview 100 people in a day. And we're global, we're in six different time zones."
Joel changed that. Candidates can now have a 30-minute, two-way conversation with the AI agent. It's conversational, not a rigid list of questions. People share their stories. On the back of that, instead of a generic rejection, the team can actually acknowledge what someone has shared.
"If not something that's very important and very emotive to them, it's someone that they love," Haddock says. "We all have a man in our lives that we love, or we love ourselves."
But the introduction didn't go smoothly. Haddock assumed everyone would understand why he was doing it. They didn't.
"Even one of our founders said, 'Edan, what on earth are you doing? We're humanistic. Why are you bringing in a robot to talk to our candidates? That's not us at all.'"
He pauses.
"And then when I said to him, this is why I'm doing it, he goes, 'Oh, absolutely. If we can talk to everyone, talk to everyone.'"
The lesson, Haddock says, was about storytelling. He had the right idea but fumbled the communication. "None of us are perfect," he says. "But I think using AI technology to be humanistic, which is a very controversial thing for me to say, there is meaning and there is power in that."
Ask Haddock about culture and he'll redirect you to community. It's a deliberate word choice, and it runs through everything Movember does.
"When you're looking at Movember, we're a global movement and we fund over 70 different programs throughout the world," he says. Programs that tackle young men in a digital world, gender-responsive healthcare, Indigenous men's health, and masculinity in its many forms. "The one thing that glues that together is community."
Inside the organisation, that same principle applies. Leadership development and mentoring, social connection and performance conversations: community is the connective tissue running through all of it.
"Culture is really community," he says. "And communities are vast. They're diverse, they're rich. All of those wonderful things need to be acknowledged."
He pushes back on the idea of culture as something fixed that people are expected to fit into. "It needs to be something that completely evolves and changes as different perspectives come in, as different people with different backgrounds come in."
For building teams, Haddock takes a values-first approach rather than hiring for personality or perceived culture fit. Movember's values are fun, courageously kind, change agent, better together, accountable, and remarkable. Drawing those out in conversation, he says, tells you far more than a personality assessment.
"If you take a values-first approach to getting to know your team, whether it's an existing team or building your team, getting to the core of that is really important."
He's also honest about bias. "We are drawn to people that are like us and we pick up on cues of people like us. We form a natural connection with people that are like us." Move past that, he says, and focus on values. "Then you build this wonderful rich diverse team around you that the contribution is so much greater than if you've got a team of five Edans."
When asked what he'd tell his younger self, Haddock doesn't reach for corporate wisdom. His advice is personal.
First: your creativity is going to be your greatest asset. For someone who spent decades being told creative people do creative work and office people do office work, that realisation came late but landed hard.
Second: be authentic at all times and never doubt yourself. "People will either be drawn to me or not drawn to me, but that's okay. If I'm my authentic self, I'm going to love the work that I'm doing."
Third: never follow others. This one he credits to Fiona, the leader he's reported to twice across different organisations. "She has a firm belief that you can rewrite the playbook. And it's taken me a long time to realise that. When I had that moment with her in a previous organisation, that's when success really started for me."
He catches himself, adds one more. "Test and learn. There's no right or wrong. And not to be afraid when it fails. I fail on a daily basis and I'm comfortable with that."
The HR Influence Awards judges noted the consistency of what Haddock has built. "Edan has built something genuinely distinctive at Movember," they said. "When your mental health mission becomes your people design principle, and you back it with a global community, a podcast, and real AI innovation, that is influence in action."
For Haddock, the energy is unmistakable. He talks about the current moment in HR with the kind of conviction that's hard to fake. "We are in a position we've never been in before where we can really define, design and deliver on what our value is as a profession," he says. "I just think this is a moment in time we've never had and we probably will never have again."
A florist who became a call centre agent who became a recruiter who now leads global talent for a men's health charity. Each step made no obvious sense at the time. All of it, he says, brought him exactly where he needed to be.
Edan Haddock is Head of Talent and People Experience at Movember, Melbourne. He is a 2026 HR Influence Awards Top 12 ANZ winner, founder of the Total Talent community and Total Talent podcast, and has been quoted in HRD, AFR, SMH, ABC, and international outlets. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
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The HR Influence Awards 2026 Top 12 ANZ are presented by Compono.
Full details at hrinfluenceawards.com.au.
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