Labor Landscape: Existing Trends, New Urgency
We believe the pandemic has given us a window into the future of work.
Our data, insight and discussions with clients, reinforce that the structural changes and impact of the trends we have been tracking for some time have been accelerated; notably talent shortages due to shifting demographics and changing demands for skills due to digital transformation across industries and geographies.
Against a backdrop of volatility — most recently the tragic conflict in Ukraine — employers are adapting to this new environment by transforming their business models to be nimbler, with more resilient supply chains, consolidated partners and greener solutions in response to heated competition, greater transparency and unpredictability. They are also transforming their workforce attraction and retention strategies for new skillsets, and with louder demands from workers for employers to offer more — from more competitive pay and more flexibility to a stronger stance on socio-economic issues where governments fall behind — organizations need help to get even more creative attracting, upskilling, reskilling and retaining valued workers.
As 2021 closed, we saw increasing confidence and a stronger, dynamic labor market, even if the Omicron variant muted sentiment somewhat in the final weeks. More people were returning to work and changing jobs than we have seen for quite some time, resulting in our view of more of a mass reshuffle than a mass resignation. The strategic and operational flexibility that our clients need to transform and thrive aligns well to our own transformation, our shifting business mix and our investments in technology and innovation.
Our Diversification, Digitization And Innovation Plans
Considering these trends, we are optimistic and well-prepared to leverage the market opportunities ahead: especially the increasing demands for scarce talent and fast-changing skills. We believe our strategic choices and investments will strengthen our capabilities, differentiate our offerings and provide the foundation for profitable growth and long-term sustainable value creation for all our stakeholders.
DIVERSIFICATION — Accelerating Growth of Higher Margin Business Across Our Brands
In 2021, we accelerated our plans to diversify our ManpowerGroup business mix and expand the contribution of our higher growth and higher value services. Clients are seeking more specialized skills and more integrated, tech-enabled solutions to complex workforce challenges and we see strong demand across our brands in both temporary and permanent hiring across sectors.
Our Manpower brand is our history and an important part of our future. Across our 75 countries we continue to diversify, differentiate and specialize, generating more value for our clients and candidates. Our diversification into higher value solutions — already in Permanent recruitment and Convenience client segments — has further accelerated in 2021. And our specialized resourcing business lines are targeting a skills focus on Engineering, Business Professionals, Finance, Life Sciences and Supply Chain, to position us for strong profitable growth.
For Experis, our successful acquisition of the ettain group, completed at the start of the fourth quarter, increases our presence in the IT convenience segment and positions us as an overall top-four IT resourcing and services provider in the U.S. market. This investment improves our geographic diversity within the U.S., and strengthens our Experis offerings in digital workspace, business transformation, enterprise applications and cloud & infrastructure. Experis now provides an all-time high contribution of 26% of ManpowerGroup gross profit and positions the brand as a $4.5 billion global business specializing in IT resourcing and services.
Our Talent Solutions business continues to be a leader in its space, driving strong profitable growth as organizations increasingly seek more strategic and operational flexibility. In 2021 we were recognized for RPO by leading industry analysts Everest Group for the eleventh year in their PEAK Matrix Assessment, scoring highly for our strong tech ecosystem, consulting capabilities, data-driven solutions and business intelligence. TAPFIN MSP was named leader for the eighth consecutive year by Everest too, highlighting our data-driven approach and scope of solutions, including our outplacement and integrated consulting capabilities. Our ability to design and deliver workforce management services that enable agility and resilience in continued uncertainty earned us the coveted Pacesetter designation by Industry Analyst ALM, and our Right Management team is rightly proud to be the only company in the industry to receive this accolade.
DIGITIZATION — Driving Return on Investment, from Deployment to Adoption
Investment in digitization accelerated as a result of the pandemic.2 As these shifts continue, we are combining the power of AI, analytics and human expertise to create a more future-ready workforce and revolutionize the employee experience.
In the last three years, we have continued to increase our investments in technology to ensure we are best-placed to deliver the value our clients and candidates expect and to ensure our talented teams can enjoy focusing their skills where they most add value. With these investments, we are accelerating our progress on the Digitization part of our strategy, at speed and scale.
By the end of 2021 we implemented PowerSuite™ applications, our leading cloud-enabled front and middle office technology, in 22 of our businesses. We are also improving efficiency and productivity via progressive moves to global SAAS platforms, shifting more of our data assets to the cloud. And we continue to refine our workforce data, using [email protected] to enable better insight, source and place more talent and build our predictive match capabilities to perform even more accurately, and to drive new value creation. We are investing in and scaling our B2C technology and continuously improving our candidate user experience. We have built off the success of Mon Manpower, the most downloaded and highly rated app in the French staffing market and designed and launched our candidate app in other large markets including Spain, Netherlands and UK.
We remain committed to our plug and play approach to technology to be able to implement the best tools that increase efficiencies through smart automation, and we are building our data warehouse while making significant progress on our NextGen Network, and info security posture and maturity. We are turning our aggregate data into key assets that enable insight and deliver new, differentiated value for stakeholders, while deepening relationships with clients and candidates.
Through our Digitization strategy we are implementing modern, cloud solutions across the value chain to source, assess, develop and manage the workforce at scale. And we have amplified our focus on digital adoption as a key enabler to maximizing our return on our technology investments and ensuring value realization is embedded in our technology program.
INNOVATION — Our Engine for Growth, Progress and Change
Innovation continues to be our engine for growth across our brands. Since our Skills Revolution3 series launched in 2016, we have highlighted how technology would shift in-demand skills, exacerbate talent shortages and require investments to reskill and upskill workers. Identifying career pathways and guiding people to take the steps required to improve their employability is how we will reduce inequity, solve talent shortages and build prosperity for the long-term.
In 2021 we continued to invest in our Center of Excellence in People Analytics, Assessment and Innovation building our data-centric solutions and capabilities. Our proprietary SkillsInSight assessment — which has now been used by 140,000+ people — identifies people’s strengths and work preferences and with our aggregate data helps us predict an individual’s likely fit for the role and future skills potential.
We are committed to becoming creators of IT talent at speed and scale, as more and more organizations need talent to design, deploy and drive adoption of their tech and transformation plans. We have accelerated investment in our Experis Academy services providing intensive ‘business-ready’ tech training and coaching to new graduates, as well as customized upskilling to develop existing employees for in-demand roles. Experis Career Accelerator, our AI-driven platform, is now active in six markets and uses machine learning and dynamic data to match our high potential Experis consultants to IT learning pathways.
We continued to scale our skilled talent pool of the future through our Manpower MyPath — upskilling and transforming 154,000+ associates’ lives across 12 countries by end of 2021. We now have more than 11,000 clients actively engaged in this career pathways program in growth sectors including our Manpower Specializations of Finance, Supply Chain and Engineering as well as Cloud, Manufacturing and Sales. We believe MyPath participants are more motivated and loyal with higher NPS scores, more skilled with higher participation in training, and as a result enjoy higher pay and reassignment rates, than non-MyPath associates.
In our Talent Solutions brand our award-winning tech tools are further evidence of industry leadership and innovation. RapidRecruit, part of our PowerSuite HR tech stack, provides our clients with accelerated recruitment and onboarding technology to enable them to optimize time-to-value, more critical than ever when talent is scarce and the supply chain environment is volatile. Our TAPFIN MSP Statement of Work (SoW) solution leverages AI and insights to enable large organizations to mitigate workforce risk, drive efficiencies and compliance and is now active in seven markets. Our global IntelliReach® platform, now scaled to 24 countries, is helping clients differentiate with tailored real-time data and insight that benchmarks their talent strategy with peer organizations and drives competitive advantage.
With all our proprietary assessments and tech tools we are using analytics, creating talent pools at scale and providing clients and candidates with valuable insights and solutions, while delivering on our ESG strategy and strengthening our own sustainable competitive talent advantage.
