Hilary Jarman

Some estimates say that millennials will represent 75% of the workforce by 2030. So, it behooves companies to be familiar with this generation. And 40 Under 40 member Hilary Jarman, head of marketing for Adecco in the US, has focused on this demographic, modernizing how the company views millennials and updating how it uses digital communications channels.

What drives Jarman are people and their passions, and she likes to engage with people who are 100% involved in what they are doing and in improving their day-to-day lives. And the workforce ecosystem as a whole is undergoing significant change, she says. With automation, digitization and globalization, “more and more, we’re going to be in a place where the workforce is ambiguous, it’s fluid,” she says.

However, Jarman believes people will still matter despite the ongoing automation and advances in artificial intelligence. “People will become a lot more important in the creative side, the strategy side, the out-of-the-box side,” she says. “Human creativity is the new currency.”

Jarman jokes that the sport of Quidditch from the Harry Potter novels helped her to land her first job in staffing. Students in the Northeast developed a live version of Quidditch about 15 years ago. Jarman got involved and ultimately became marketing manager for the US Quidditch league. When she applied for a marketing job at Adecco, her interviewers found out she was involved with Quidditch and said they had to call her in to ask about it.