Job security has become important, but people do not want to give up flexible work: Randstad CEO

There are three things that are impacting our clients and, therefore, our business. First of all, talent is scarce, especially in mature markets such as North America, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia. The population is aging, so there’s going to be more work to be done by fewer people. It is not just the number of people, but also the mismatch in terms of the skills that people have versus the skills that companies need in the market. And because talent is scarce, it’s now written at the top of the agenda of our clients at the C-level. It has become the top priority. The third thing is that the world is getting digitised. We need to make sure we engage with both clients and talents and our own people, in a more digital way. That’s why we have set our ambition to become the world’s most equitable and specialised talent company. People talk about Randstad as a general staffing company but those days are over. We are now putting talent at the heart of everything we do.

You have to look at the long-term trend, and the long-term trend is aging populations, more work, and fewer people. The current situation is not great. But it’s not terrible, and it’s definitely not disastrous. The companies are making sure that their supply and demand are balanced. If you look at specifically the tech industry, they had grown their headcount by 20 to 40 per cent over the last two years. So now those companies are saying their revenues are a little flat, so they are reviewing their resources. I call it rebalancing or pruning. But long-term, there’s still a bright future ahead of them because we’re just in the first innings of the digital transformation.

Yes, it has changed. But I always called it the “great rotation,” because people were not resigning from their jobs to sit on the beach or play golf. People were looking for other opportunities because they could. Now, the topic of job security has come up again. People are more likely to sit tight now than they were before. But attrition levels are not going to come down from 25 to 2, maybe it will come down to the 15–18 per cent range. There’s still a lot of movement in the labour market, and people still have options. Yes, job security has become important, but people do not want to give up flexible work.

Organisations that have been quite forceful about getting everybody back in the office are not realising that people have found that flexible work has a lot of benefits in terms of the commute, in terms of spending time with family, and in terms of balancing work and personal life. That flexibility is highly appreciated. We call it flexibility with intentionality at Randstad. If a job requires you to come into the office, then you come to work, but we leave it up to the teams to decide when and how often. But work is always the number-one priority. This is a big global experiment at a scale we have never seen before, so there will be companies making mistakes and learning.

The phenomenon of people having two jobs is not new and not bad per se. But there is a fine line between ‘can I have two part-time jobs and can I have full-time jobs?” Where does having two jobs become legitimate, and when does it become cheating? This is something we will have to figure out over time. I would say that if people have a full-time job with us, I want their full attention and energy, and I would not expect them to have another job in the same industry for another type of company. But if they want to do something on a Saturday at a local place, then that should be fine. We will have to put in place the right policies and guardrails.

India is a big and exciting market that is growing fast, and Randstad can do phenomenal business. There’s a lot of talent here in India that we can leverage globally for our clients. We have sizeable recruiting teams and technology teams here in India that work for our clients globally. We have an opportunity to double or triple our headcount in India over the next, let’s say, three to five years.

It’s very hard to assess at the moment, but this whole Silicon Valley Bank saga doesn’t help. What we need is confidence in the economy and confidence in business, because that’s what makes our clients make more investments. The other aspect that plays into the whole thing is what are our central banks doing in terms of interest rates. It’s a blunt instrument, and I call it the ‘ketchup effect’. You have a bottle of ketchup, you hit the back of the bottle, and nothing happens, you hit it again, and nothing happens. And then, all of a sudden, it’s all over your plate. That risk is there, and we’re going to have a bit of a prolonged period of going sideways. But from my conversation with my clients, it feels like things are bottoming out.