Staffline’s purchase of welfare-to-work provider Fourstar Employment & Skills will give the industrial recruiter and training firm the ‘third leg’ it has been looking for, according to chairman and chief executive Andy Hogarth.

Staffline announced today that it has acquired Fourstar from Dutch company Fourstar Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lern Holding, a company registered in the Netherlands, for £3m.

Fourstar has been a Flexible New Deal provider in the Birmingham and Solihull area since October 2009 and, following the replacement of that programme with the Work Programme, has won preferred bidder status for a new five-year contract from July in that area with additional expansion into the Black Country.

Hogarth told Recruiter: “This deal marks a broadening of our services. We will carry on as an industrial recruitment business as we always have been. This is the natural ‘third leg’ of the business. We now have three strands of the business: the standard industrial recruitment, training and now back to work — all three mingle together.

“Depending on the people involved, some people just want a job, others want a job and need training — we use all three parts of the business.

“There is a lot of work to integrate the businesses together. They [Fourstar] have a phenomenal management team … and they will run alongside the existing business — we are certainly not making any changes there. There is a lot of recruitment because they have won a new area in the Black Country and we have to more or less double the size of the business [Fourstar] overnight.”