pivot

Annual Report 2024

Despite the challenging backdrop for our industry, we are not satisfied with our financial performance in FY24. We are market leaders in some of the most attractive, long-term growth recruitment markets globally. Our focused strategy is to target these opportunities and is designed to increase our resilience, quality of earnings and cash generation through the cycle. While we have made some difficult decisions to restructure and manage tough near-term markets, we have also been actively positioning the business for long-term success. Hays is a strong business with a great team of talented colleagues, and the Board is confident in our strong profit recovery potential as our end markets stabilise, and then recover.

Andrew Martin
Chair

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What we do

We have world-class expertise building world-class businesses. We are leading global experts in qualified, professional and skilled recruitment. We employ c.11,100 people in 33 countries across 21 specialisms.

1,100+ Jobs filled every
working day

58K Perm roles filled
in FY24

225K Temp assignments
placed in FY24

Our performance this year

  • Net Fee Income

    £1,113.6m

  • Net cash

    £56.8m

  • Operating Profit

    £105.1m

  • Core Dividend per Share

    3.00p

  • Basic Earnings per Share

    4.03p

  • Free cash flow

    £59.0m

Accelerating megatrends in the new world of work

The world of work is being shaped by powerful long-term megatrends. Our strategy is designed to capitalise on these, targeting structural growth opportunities within our cyclical end markets.

Our strategy is designed to capitalise on powerful megatrends, targeting long-term growth structural opportunities in recruitment and workforce solutions.

Why Hays delivers success

Our purpose is to benefit society by investing in lifelong partnerships that empower people and organisations to succeed. We achieve this via our business model, which is centred around solving our clients’ talent problems. Our services range from Contracting, Temp and Permanent recruitment to complex, integrated HR solutions.

Hays sits at the heart of this rapidly changing work ecosystem, and we strongly benefit by solving our clients’ talent problems

  • Skill shortages
  • New job creation
  • Greater job churn
  • Workforce challenges
  • Wage inflation

Powerful Megatrends driving the world at work

Our strategic priorities

  • enhanceENHANCE - Drive productivity and efficiency to deliver cash-backed profit growth, fund reinvestment and enable substantial returns to shareholders
  • PROFITABLE GROWTHPROFITABLE GROWTH - Materially increase Group operating profit and drive conversion rate towards our medium-term target of 22-25%
  • partnerDEVELOP NETWORKS - Nurture stronger relationships with candidates and clients, and partner with best-in-class third party technology providers
  • partnerFOCUS - Increase our focus on resilient, growing industries and markets

Our priorities will help to increase our business resilience, our quality of earnings and our cash generation. We will do this by building a more balanced portfolio of business lines in key and focus countries by sector. This will allow us to return to, and then exceed, previous peak Group profits.

How we create value

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

Over

c.280,000

people in new jobs

7,045

sector experts

3,842

internal promotions

20%

of new joiners' time spent in training

c.28,000

volunteer hours

OUR THREE POINT INVESTMENT CASE

One: Market position

One: Market position

Two: Strategic focus

Two: Strategic focus

Three: Shareholder returns

Three: Shareholder returns