When one plus one makes three

Best in breed integrations can achieve meaningful change and growth

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At the start of this year, our leadership at Gi Group Holding confirmed the finalisation of our acquisition of Kelly Europe’s staffing division and that team’s planned integration into our larger Gi Group family. This is an important milestone for our business because it will allow us to blend the strengths of our current staffing team at Gi Group with the talents and insights of the Kelly Europe team to build a truly world-class partner for all our clients seeking staffing solutions.

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What does the acquisition mean in real terms

The main impact of the acquisition will involve boosting Gi Group’s presence in the staffing space on 14 European markets: 11 of which are geographies where Gi Group Holding already has a presence (Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Switzerland, and the UK) and 3 where the integration will mark the parent company’s market entry (Belgium, Luxembourg and Norway). Likewise, Gi Group Holding will benefit from the specialised know-how and skills that the Kelly Europe team has in specific niche areas, like Life Sciences specialised staffing and recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) strategy and planning. On top of that, our ability to blend Kelly Europe’s strengths in sourcing talent for white collar roles with Gi Group Holding’s solid experience in the blue collar segment enables us to deliver clients and candidates even a bigger full-scale set of services across markets, industries and job specialisations. The Gi Group Holding philosophy of thinking and strategising as a global player, now complemented by Kelly Europe’s ability to maximise use of its networks for global delivery, is truly a perfect fit for ensuring our delivery of services that address all aspects of both business HR departments’ and job seekers’ needs.

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Kelly Europe’s integration helps our teams work smarter to deal with a fragile macroeconomic outlook

In research shared by outlets like ING Bank, there are comments that hiring through recruitment and staffing agencies will possibly remain steady or stagnate later this year. There are a number of factors contributing to this scenario, including uncertainties about continued economic growth or slower than anticipated growth. Plus, businesses are having trouble achieving desired earnings and expansion due to bottlenecks in sourcing the skilled talent they need. It’s important to point out that this forecast involves primarily the hiring of temporary workers. Countries across the continent are citing varied reasons for hiring slowdowns: from the slower growth mentioned above to fears of recession and in some cases workers shifting toward self-employment and gig work. With the Kelly Europe team, we have onboarded a great group of skilled, talented minds who can help us produce the deep dives required for offering clients staffing and recruitment strategies and project solutions that make the best sense. These proposals will also integrate sought-after and needed agility to ensure recruitment efforts can be scaled up (or down) depending on our clients’ and partners’ needs in the moment.

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Making better choices with a limited talent pool

Parallel to the economic concerns mentioned above and along with some geopolitical considerations, staffing and recruitment experts now have to make smarter and better choices when sourcing from contracting candidate pools. Unfortunately, at the moment, there is a perfect storm of multiple factors that impact access to needed workers. One of these is that populations are ageing and a large portion of skilled labour is, or soon will be, exiting the workforce. On top of that, work regimes throughout most of Europe still have not returned to pre-pandemic levels and businesses are just not getting the anticipated number of working hours from their teams. The ING outlook shows that temp agencies have been heavily impacted by restricted talent pools, with markets like Belgium and the Netherlands reporting that up to 5% of their vacancies went unfilled in late Q3/early Q4 2023.

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Essentially (per my own personal experience and comments I’ve seen from the market), this means businesses (employers) will have to invest more time into rationalising and developing practical, strong hiring plans for the remainder of this year. This includes factoring into those efforts higher degrees of agility and considering where support for international worker mobility and boosting hybrid worker options will make sense and ease talent shortages for their businesses. Alongside all this, I believe that the Kelly Europe team will be a critical partner and play an important role in helping Gi Group Holding and its staffing division to bring value-added services to our clients: current and future. During 2024, we expect to see greater demand for insights features in staffing services (i.e., aligning staffing and temp processes with overall business goals) and use of tools like generative AI (for talent assessment and vetting), upskilling activities and other programmes (onboarding and performance tracking apps) that help with candidate preparation, job readiness and impact measurement. All these will be hot ticket items.

2024 looks to be a challenging year for our industry. So, needless to say, we are glad that we have our new colleagues from Kelly Europe to help brave potential storms in a measured, practical and client-beneficial way.