Daily News

View All News

Executive Forum Europe – 2016 and Beyond: Opportunities in Global Staffing Markets

07 October 2015

Barry Asin, President of Staffing Industry Analysts, took to the stage on the second day of Executive Forum Europe to deliver a keynote on the significant trends that staffing firms need to be prepared for and what they mean in terms of market opportunity.

Using Staffing Industry Analysts’ ground-breaking research, Asin provided a global overview and identified which markets and sectors offer the most attractive and lucrative opportunities for growth.

“I think there’s a tremendous amount of change out there in the market. The technology, globalisation; all of that is driving change. And along with that, of course, comes some real threats to the business and how business has been done historically. And along with those threats, opportunities.”

“If you’re thinking about opportunities, one of the questions on the mind of many companies is what sort of opportunities are out there globally?”

“One of the things we do as an organisation is market research among other things; we’re actively working on estimating the size of the global market, the growth, what’s changing, what’s moving…”

“The single largest market is the US, interestingly though, [followed by] the Japanese market, which is a world unto its own in many ways, and is disproportionately large in the size of the Japanese economy. The other big markets are all right here in Europe; UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands. Sort of the next tier of markets. If you take the top five markets globally – that’s two-third of the global staffing industry.”

"So if you’re thinking about where’s my business, what’s my footprint […] one way to think about it is where is your business compatible with these markets and the size of the markets?”

“Another change that’s going on is, and probably one of the big stories that we’ve seen over the last decade, there has been a change, a moving up in terms of skills for the staffing industry. I think this is an opportunity  for those in the industry.”

An analysis of the European staffing market found that, in many countries, business is still weighted towards lower skilled commercial rather than the higher skilled professional staffing. This compares with areas of the UK where is it 50/50, and in the US where professional staffing is the majority of the market.

Asin continued: “The European market continues to be dominated by commercial staffing What we have seen is faster growth on the professional staffing side. So if you’re thinking about your business mix, where you are positioned, we have seen this long term trend towards more growth on the professional staffing side. I think there is opportunity there and that’s kind of a natural evolution over time for the industry. It’s not to say that there isn’t growth available, or there isn’t money to be made in the commercial staffing side. That absolutely still exists. But faster growth on the professional staffing side.”

Citing professional staffing firm Robert Half as an example, Asin said: “In terms of revenue, Robert Half, which is one of the largest professional staffing firms in the United States it’s number 11 globally in terms of revenue. It’s number four in terms of shareholder value, market capitalisation globally. I think that really highlights the opportunity there, the profits that are available, for a company that’s really focused hard on the professional side of the business and have been very true to their vision over the years.”   

“Once a year or so we do an industry forecast. We looked at the global market; what’s we’re seeing, what we’re estimating in 2015 is a better year globally than 2014. About 7% growth in the global market. In Europe, better than that, 9% growth.”

“One of the nice things that we are seeing in the industry these days is that, pretty much across the board in 2015, the market is behind us right now. There’s growth which was certainly not the case a couple of year ago. Looking in the path, if you look into 2016 that is the big question… How is that going to go? I think on a global basis, by and large, we think that the growth will continue roughly in line where we are today.”  

“We just updated our US forecast and we think the US is going to slow down a little bit. But broadly speaking we’re predicting mid-single digit growth in the core staffing industry over the next year,” he concluded.