Tue, 26 Nov 2013Recruitment and staffing giant Adecco tells recruiter.co.uk that employee retention is its number one priority, and the key challenge for newly-appointed chief HR officer Mark De Smedt.

Adecco chief executive officer Patrick De Maeseneire says De Smedt will work to “further improve the group’s employee retention rate”, which currently stands at 75%. However, a company spokesperson says there is no specific target for improving that figure.

The firm’s new HR head succeeds Christian Vasino on 1 January, moving from the role of country manager for Belgium and Luxembourg that he has held since 2009. De Smedt has been with Adecco since 2002 and previously held executive roles outside of recruitment for high-profile firms including Apple and Citibank.

Retention is the most important of the company’s six strategic priorities, the spokesperson tells recruiter.co.uk.

The other five strategic priorities, as outlined in the recruiter's Annual Report 2012, are:

1. IT integration and standardisation. Since 2011, the company has been merging and aligning systems across different firms and businesses.
2. Developing its professional staffing & services. These account for 33% of the global staffing market, but just 25% of Adecco’s work, and are “more profitable”, the spokesperson says.
3. “Also more profitable” is working with SME clients, although Adecco tends to focus on larger clients, the spokesperson adds. Adecco calls this offering of different models and services to different types of clients segmentation.
4. Offering business process outsourcing solutions, including managed services programmes, recruitment process outsourcing and vendor management systems.
5. Emerging markets, where there is currently a low level of staffing industry penetration, and so great potential. Around 40% of worker hours Adecco supplies are in these markets, but they only account for 10% of global revenues, recruiter.co.uk hears.