At its recent Talent Summit, PeopleScout announced the expansion of its service centers in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia Pacific, plus the acquisition of TMP Holdings, a provider of employer branding and RPO services operating in the U.K. via Yocto, the RPO division of TMP Worldwide. Already the largest RPO provider in terms of number of hires (~300k annually) and the largest[...]

NelsonHall recently attended the Atos global analyst event in Boston, where we were keen to get an update on topics including: Atos’ strategy for growth in North America, which has new leadership following a rather disappointing 2017 Recent developments and short-term priorities for offerings in the Digital Transformation Factory. It appears to us that, nearly three years af[...]

  Loan originations are a key part of the digital revolution taking place in the banking industry, and banks have two key goals when they replace their legacy loan origination systems (LOS): Enabling omnichannel delivery of LOS services Reducing time to fulfillment (turnaround time). Long-established banks are adopting digital solutions to achieve these goals with the expe[...]

NelsonHall recently published its Next Generation RPO market analysis and NEAT vendor assessment, as part of which we interviewed the clients of 20 RPO vendors across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific to ascertain their expectations and satisfaction levels across a range of >40 recruitment service criteria. Here I look at how working with candidates has emerged as the top area for impr[...]

  The RPO market has traditionally been dominated by vendors who were established in the U.S., the U.K., or Australia, the first countries to embrace the concept of RPO. The majority of their clients were large organizations headquartered in those regions, who typically had high-volume permanent hiring requirements, and as those organizations expanded internationally, the RPO vend[...]

  Here I look back at how M&A activity has impacted the IT services industry over the past year and make a few broad predictions for the type of activity to be expected in the next twelve months. 2016 had been marked by some large M&A announcements, with: Hardware companies moving out of services:  HPE announcing the sale of Enterprise Services to CSC (completed i[...]

  Recent NelsonHall interviews with the clients of the top ~20 global RPO vendors revealed that candidate communication was rated the most important vendor characteristic, with an importance score of 96%. However, the satisfaction score for candidate communication across all vendor clients was 82%, falling some way short of client expectations. Recognizing the importance of can[...]

Atos has made an unsolicited offer for security, SIM cards, and payment cards technology vendor Gemalto. The offer is sizeable at €4.3bn (plus Gemalto’s net debt of €938m at end of H1 2017) financed in cash. It runs until December 15. Gemalto is another major acquisition for Atos: in its fiscal year ended June 30, 2017, Gemalto generated revenues of ~€3bn, with an EBITD[...]

  Sevenstep RPO held its second annual analyst event last week. In addition to analysts, advisors, vendor leadership, and key service providers, practitioners/buy-side clients also attended for the day, including Commonwealth of MA, Amazon, and CVS. Here I discuss a few key take-aways. Sevenstep RPO overview With ~300 employees, Sevenstep RPO has global delivery centers in three [...]

The gig economy has been a recent trending topic. While the concept of gig workers is nothing new, the attention being paid to it is, especially since this is an area whose growth has been facilitated by the digital marketplace. Here, I take a quick look at the challenges gig workers present for HR. Gig workers present a challenge on several fronts, especially when it comes to managing[...]

  When NelsonHall spoke to Atos earlier in the year about its managed security services, there was a clear push to move clients away from reactive security to a predictive and prescriptive security environment, so not only monitoring the end-to-end security of a client but also performing analytics on how the business and its customers would be affected by threats. Atos’ “S[...]

Atos recently briefed NelsonHall on M-Frame, IP the company has recently launched focusing on model-based testing (MBT) and integrating it with test data creation, performance, and security testing. M-Frame looks to remove several inhibitors that exist around MBT: complexity of the different MBT software tools, and lack of a business case for building and maintaining the UML diagrams used for MBT [...]

  PeopleScout held its annual Client Forum last week, with discussion groups covering employee engagement, diversity and inclusion, employer branding, the talent landscape, total workforce solutions, the impact of industry disruption on best practices, and improving the employee experience. All these HR themes are important, but here I look specifically at what PeopleScout is doing [...]

  ADP’s CEO Carlos Rodriguez began the company’s annual client conference, Meeting of the Minds, by talking about unprecedented challenges faced, including global talent needs, growing compliance burdens, and rising expectations. And though perhaps not the most original of messages, Rodriguez singled out service as the core differentiator that enables ADP to deliver positiv[...]

  Atos’ recent analyst and advisor day in Boston provided further details around the company’s three-year (2017-2019) growth ambitions that the company unveiled in November 2016. In a nutshell, Atos is targeting: CC/CS revenue growth of 2%-3% per annum (2016: +1.8%) An adjusted operating margin in the range of 10.5%-11.0% by 2019 (up from in 9.4% 2016). More he[...]

  Atos’ recent analyst event in Boston provided insight into its roadmap for 2017-2019. This note focuses specifically on its digital roadmap for the banking and financial services sector. While financial services is Atos' smallest industry segment (17% of 2016 revenues), it was Atos' fastest growing vertical in Q4 2016, delivering 10.6% organic growth v[...]

  By Nikki Edwards & Gary Bragar In recent industry discussions around talent acquisition, we have identified a number of interconnected trends that are having a significant impact on talent acquisition markets. Here, we take a look at three key trends, and at how HRO vendors in the talent acquisition space are responding. Socio-economic trends An ageing, yet multi-genera[...]

M&A activity in IT services is set to take a new direction in 2017. Here, I reflect on M&A activity by the largest IT services vendors in 2016, with its emphasis on mega deals, and look ahead to 2017, which is set to be the year of digital & security tuck-in acquisitions. Large M&As in 2016: IT Conglomerates and Defense Firms Divest IT Services Arms Large-scale M&am[...]

Following several years of growth, the HR outsourcing market continues to ride the crest of the wave, and is gearing up for a prosperous 2017 following investments across all service lines. We will shortly be publishing an in-depth blog on HRO predictions for 2017, but first I take a quick look at what happened in 2016 to lay the foundations for things to come, specifically in payroll services[...]

  Seven Step RPO recently held its first analyst event, which featured a select group of analysts and recruitment SMEs, two clients, and six members of the Seven Step leadership team. This made for an engaging dialogue around Seven Step RPO’s services, strategy, and best practices, with both clients (CVS Health and engineered product firm TriMas), contributing to the discussions [...]