pivot

Annual Report 2017

What do we do?

We have world-class expertise building world-class businesses. We are leading global experts in qualified, professional and skilled recruitment and employ 10,000 people in 33 countries across 20 specialisms.

Over1,000 Jobs filled every
working day

70K Perm roles filled
in FY 17

240K Temp assignments
placed in FY 17

This has been a milestone year for the Group.

Alistair Cox
Chief Executive

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How did we perform this year?

  • Net Fee Income

    £954.6m

  • Basic Earnings per Share

    9.66p

  • Operating Profit

    £211.5m

  • Cash Conversion

    103%

  • Core Dividend per Share

    3.22p

  • Special Dividend per share

    4.25p

Download Full Year Results (1.4MB)

We identify four mega trends which are likely to influence the future shape and direction of the world of work and therefore how we manage our business and develop our strategy.

MORE, AND VARIED WAYS OF BUILDING A CAREER

For many skilled candidates, the ‘job for life’ has largely come to an end. There is an increasing appetite to embrace a more flexible, contract style of working or project roles, with candidates seeking interesting, often highly paid non-Permanent roles enabling them to build their career flexibly, as opposed to working their way up a single corporate ladder. The non-Perm businesses are becoming an increasingly important part in many more of our markets.

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SKILLS SHORTAGES AND BUSINESSES’ DEMANDS FOR FLEXIBILITY

A key challenge that many of our clients across the world are increasingly facing, is adding flexibility to their skilled workforce to enable them to respond to fastchanging market conditions and access the skilled labour they need, when they need it. Employing skilled people on a contract or project basis injects more flexibility in their cost base and enables them to benefit from a workforce with a wide portfolio of relevant experience as and when they need it. For an increasing number of businesses therefore, Contract and Temporary workers make up an increasingly important part of their skilled workforce.

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STRUCTURAL MARKET GROWTH AND EVOLVING CLIENT DEMANDS

Most professional recruitment around the world is still done by in-house HR teams, with many immature markets, as well as some more mature economies, increasingly opening up to the concept of outsourcing specialist recruitment. Amongst certain client groups we continue to observe a shift towards increased levels of centralised procurement, mostly seen in large corporates. Our services must be tailored to these different client needs, whether it is first-time outsourcing or providing different specialist recruitment delivery models.

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EMERGENCE OF NEW, AND EVOLVING, TECHNOLOGIES

Technology is in many ways transforming how people work, enabling remote working and impacting on how clients and candidates engage and interact with the jobs market and with Hays. Also, almost every area of the jobs market is becoming increasingly digitally enabled and the digitalisation of both supply and demand creates vast quantities of data to be analysed and put to use.

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MEGA TRENDS

What are our strategic priorities?

  • Materially increase and diversify Group profits
  • Build critical mass and diversity across our global platform
  • Invest in people and technology, responding to change and build relationships
  • Generate, reinvest and distribute meaningful cash returns

HOW DO WE CREATE VALUE

As the ultimate people business, everything we do is focused on placing the right people into the right roles.

 

310,000

LIVES TRANSFORMEDEvery working day last year we placed over 1,000 people into the next job, that’s over 300,000 over the course of the year. We also promoted 2,162 of our own people across the Group and run 2,322 formal training days. Transforming lives through our expertise: it’s what we do.

 

7 million

CVs RECEIVED LAST YEARLike many businesses, the amount of data we need to deal with has increased dramatically in recent years. The key for us is having the systems and tools in place to enable us to understand, interrogate and search that data quickly and effectively.

 

1 million

INDIVIDUALS LOOKING TO FLOURISH
We seek to personally meet all candidates we plan to put forward to our clients to make sure we fully understand their needs and can match them to the most suitable roles. Last year our consultants conducted over 1 million candidate interviews.

 

10,000

PASSION FUELLED EXPERTS
Key to our success is our ability to hire, train and develop the best people in our industry. We expect them to be experts in their local market, understanding the evolving challenges and needs of clients and candidates.

Our four point investment case

One: The breadth of our business model across sector and contract type

One: The breadth of our business model across sector and contract type

Two: Our balanced exposure to both mature and structural growth markets

Two: Our balanced exposure to both mature and structural growth markets

Three: Our ability to deliver superior financial performance through the cycle

Three: Our ability to deliver superior financial performance through the cycle

Four: Our potential to generate significant cash flow and dividends

Four: Our potential to generate significant cash flow and dividends

Downloads

The Strategic Report, Corporate Governance, Financial Statements and the full Annual Report 2017 can all be downloaded as PDFs.

Downloads

The Strategic Report, Corporate Governance, Financial Statements and the full Annual Report 2017 can all be downloaded as PDFs.