A very warm welcome, good afternoon, good evening, good morning to our viewers online and also here in the room for Randstad's Capital Markets event for 2025. My name is Sarah Campbell-Donia, and I'm Randstad's Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, and I'm very lucky to be your guide for the next few hours. Today, you'll have a great opportunity to engage with our leadership, to hear how we've been successfully executing our Partner for Talent strategy, and to learn for the first time how Randstad is going towards a digital-first business model underpinned by the Randstad Talent Platform.
If we move to the agenda, I'll quickly show you that we'll be walking you through three unique Randstad Digital Marketplace examples, each of which will help you understand how Randstad is already specialized at scale, how we plan to deliver superior and seamless experiences to clients and talent at scale, all while delivering value to all of our stakeholders. You will have an opportunity to ask questions at the end of the event, so we ask that you hold those until that moment. Without further ado, I'm very pleased to introduce you to Sander van 't Noordende, the Chief Executive Officer of Randstad, to tell you about the execution of our Partner for Talent strategy to date. Over to you, Sander.
Thank you very much, Sarah, and welcome to all of you, and welcome to all of you online, of course. Great to have you all here. Many familiar faces, some new faces, always a good crowd. As you might imagine, as a CEO, every now and then you sort of sit back and you reflect on how things are going. I was reflecting before this meeting a little bit over the past couple of days, and I had two key reflections here. First of all, it's been a very rocky period, I would say, in our business over the last two years.
The reflection that comes with that is I couldn't be more pleased with how the Randstad team is responding to all the challenges in the business in terms of our adaptability, navigating the rocky environment, making sure we get as much business as possible, we keep the costs in check, all of that. I'm absolutely proud of what the Randstad team has done over the past 18 months. I'm also very proud of the progress we have made in parallel to all of that with our Partner for Talent strategy. Our Partner for Talent strategy is all about specialization. The first key message of this afternoon is specialization at scale is now a fact at Randstad. Specialization at scale is now a fact at Randstad. This is really important because specialization is important for our differentiation and our competitiveness in the marketplace.
Because clients want to talk to someone who knows about their business. Talents want to talk to someone who knows about their field of specialization. It is also very exciting for our people because our people get an opportunity to focus their career on a specialization and do an even better job than they did before for their clients and for their talents. Let me go through each of the pillars here. The first pillars, and you'll recognize them from our previous meeting. I always like to keep strategies simple and consistent for a longer period of time. That is what we're doing here. Growth through specialization. You will remember that 18 months ago we said we're going to move from a generalist staffing company to a specialized talent company.
That means we now have all our teams worldwide focused on one of the specializations: Randstad Operational, Randstad Professional, Randstad Digital, Randstad Enterprise. Dedicated teams with dedicated leadership focused on specific markets and specific market segments. For instance, in Operational, we have focused on logistics and skilled trade, and we have trained over 2,500 people in our new sales approach specifically tailored to manufacturing, logistics, retail, and the likes, with 2,500 more to come. In Professional, we have focused on finance in 19 markets, on engineering in 15 markets, and on healthcare in 11 markets. Those three sub-specializations are now over 40% of our business in Randstad Professional. Digital is in and by itself a growth segment: AI, data, analytics, Cloud, user experience, digital marketing, all the hot skills that our clients need.
It's been a bit of a rocky ride also in digital, but I say, and you know all where I'm coming from, I've been in the technology business for many years. In the end, technology always, always wins and grows. In Enterprise, our growth segments have been life sciences, where we have won three major deals with the largest pharmaceutical companies over the past couple of months in our RPO business. We have done a great deal with Microsoft on candidate services also in our RPO business. Good progress on growth through specialization. Talent and equity at heart is, of course, also all about specialization. We make sure we have dedicated and specific value propositions for talents in each of our specializations. For instance, we have a talent attraction approach with skilling for our forklift drivers and production workers.
There, in that segment, for instance, speed is of the essence. If you find one of those, you need to catch them and bring them to our client. That's sort of the whole name of the game. In finance and healthcare, we have many talent communities in our markets, which is, of course, to connect better to talent and make them part of our Randstad family. You will hear from Mike later that in Randstad Digital, in our Torque platform, we now have over a million talent that have access to job opportunities, but also opportunities to learn and grow and community collaboration. Again, a big Randstad family. In Enterprise, we have client-specific talent propositions through our UX portal. Because in Enterprise, it's all about recruiting at scale for our largest clients, the Fortune 500 clients. Great progress there. Delivery excellence. Delivery excellence is about scale.
Clients buy from Randstad because we deliver. If you deliver to a client what they are looking for, they are open to do more business. Delivery excellence is at the heart of everything we do. We have 18 talent centers in 60 markets with 750 people. These are teams that do nothing else but finding people for the retail industry in a particular country, or logistics workers for the logistics industry in a particular country. In Japan, we have a talent center for operational focused on production workers. In Randstad Professional, in the Netherlands, we have a talent center focused on finance and engineering profiles for the largest banks, for the government, and the large manufacturing companies. That is talent centers. 52 delivery centers.
A delivery center is a team of people that focuses on a client with multiple locations, let's say a big bank in Spain, or a specific sector in a country. We have a talent center, a delivery center for our aeronautics business in France, a group of people focusing on all the aeronautics companies, the whole ecosystem for engineering roles. We have a delivery center for retail in Italy, and we have a delivery center for e-commerce in Belgium. Focus, focus, focus. If you do this right, our fulfillment rates can go up by as much as 10% to 15%. The other part of the good news is here: our talent utilization goes up to over 50%. That means more talent who are in our database actually get a job. When we talk about delivery, of course, we should not forget our in-house locations.
1,800 locations in over 20 countries all around the globe. Delivery excellence, major progress here as well. This is really the heart of Randstad. That brings us to the Randstad Talent Platform. The Randstad Talent Platform is an initiative we kicked off two years ago. We are now pretty much wrapping up the development phase of the Randstad Talent Platform. We have gone live in a few countries already. In the next few years, we will roll that out to the whole of Randstad. Martin will talk to you about that later this afternoon. A key part of the Randstad Talent Platform, and this is the main topic of today, I would say, are our digital marketplaces. This is a new way of doing business.
You will hear all about it this afternoon, but we are very proud that in Q1 alone, we have closed more than 500,000 shifts through our digital marketplaces. Let that sink in. Think about the scale of that. That's 500,000 times a person goes to work for half a day, a day, a week, two weeks. That is the scale that we already operate in this digital world. That means over EUR 2 billion of our revenues is now going through these digital marketplaces. The future in terms of the scale in digital marketplaces is already here today. Very important here, and this is why this also is specialized. These digital marketplaces are going by specialization. The way to engage with a nurse is different from the way to engage with a logistics worker, is different from the way to engage with an IT specialist.
Again, specialization is really important here as well. That brings me to the best team. I told you already 18 months ago we are the best team in the industry. We still are the best team in the industry. Only now, more than 75% of our people in Randstad is in a specialized career trajectory, focused on a specialization in their specific market for a specific group of clients. This is really important because I'm a big believer in focus works. If you wake up in the morning and you think, "I'm in Operational here in France, and I'm going to serve my manufacturing clients, and that's all I do every day," you get better at it. That's the power of specialization and the best team with 75% of our people now in a specialized career trajectory.
We also hired 30 new leaders, especially in our professional and digital business. Because in a specialized organization, we are also more attractive to hire outside talent into Randstad. That's the best team. Whilst doing all of this, our clients and talent are very happy with what we do. They give us—can we go to the next slide? Thank you. They give us, in terms of their satisfaction with us, with how we do for them. We ask this globally every couple of months. They give us an eight. Think about it. We have a very challenging marketplace. We are transforming Randstad in a major way, yet our clients and talents are very happy with how we are doing. You might say, "Well, that sounds great. They're done." No. We're not done. We are ready.
We are ready with specialization at scale, and we are ready to take this to the next level. The next level, I would say, is all about experience. Not just experience. We are Randstad. We are a global company. We are the global leader. It is about experience at scale. If we provide a good experience, we need to do it everywhere, all the time, for all our clients and for all our talent. Experience at scale is the next level. You might wonder, "Experience? What do they mean by that?" Think about whatever you have bought last and why you bought it there. Or think about, and maybe, I mean, some of you may not relate to this because you are a little bit younger than I am. Think about in the old days, if you would call a taxi.
You look like you have had that experience. You call a taxi. "Yeah, the taxi's coming." Fifteen minutes later, the taxi is still not there. You call them again. "Oh, they're on their way now." Some odd Chevy car shows up with a not-so-friendly driver, and he takes you sometimes to the right, sometimes to the wrong place, and you get ripped off at the end of the experience. Now, you all know how taxis work today. You push the button, you see on the screen they show up. You get in, it's a friendly driver. They take you to where you want to go, and at the end of the ride, the payment is taken care of. That's the level of experience that we at Randstad want to bring to our industry. Experience at scale. Because ultimately, clients want specialization, yes, but they also want a good experience.
We need to combine the two for the optimal result. At the heart of this is our Partner for Talent strategy. Again, I like to keep things simple. We're not changing anything. Partner for Talent, it is. We want to be at the table with our clients when the talent strategies are set, and we want to be that trusted partner with them when the talent strategies are executed. We want to be that trusted Partner for Talent in their careers. Partner for Talent is at the center of all of this. What are clients looking for? This is in the upper right corner of this slide, and we call it immediate talent availability. As soon as clients have decided they need someone, they want them now, not tomorrow or next week.
Immediate talent availability is something that we're going to work very hard on with our clients. That means we're going to move our industry, reinvent our industry from event-based—the client calls up and we get into action—into forecast-based. We make sure the talent is already there before the client even knows they need it. That means we need to have, on the upper left side of the screen, we need to have hyper-relevant talent communities. Talent need to be excited to be part of the Randstad family. We need to have added value for them in terms of a job, in terms of learning and growing, in terms of a good experience. Hyper-relevant talent communities. Of course, for our clients, we also need to make sure we have the best talent for our clients.
The best talent means we have to look in all pools of talent that are out there, and we need to make sure that everybody has a fair shot in terms of getting through the process. We need to make sure with our clients that the working environment is such that everybody can be productive and perform as good as they can. That is what we call equity. We get many questions about equity these days, but I will tell you, as Randstad, we are staying the course on equity. It's who we are, but it's also good from a business purpose. Making sure we have the best talent from wherever we can get it from. We're going to do that around the full talent life cycle. Of course, our core business is finding people, placing people, sometimes outplacing people, or placing them into the next job.
That's our core business. We are adding more and more activities where that makes sense in the context of that core business. That can be coaching, that can be training, that can be skilling. The full talent life cycle to make everybody as successful as they can be. We will do this for all work arrangements. We have a very strong position in TEMP. We have a great position in PERM. We will step it up in a major way on freelance work. Last but not least, at the bottom of the slide, it's all about seamless experiences. That means everything transactional will be automated, yet in a personalized way, executed by AI agents, again, for the best experience. It's all about the experience. Some of you may wonder what happened to the human and the human touch. The human touch will still be there.
This is actually the exciting part also for our people. Because if we give our people the best technology in hands to do the best possible job, they can spend more time on what they do best. What they do best is spend time with clients about their talent challenges and how to fulfill those, spend time with talent on their career challenges, and what is the best match for you. Spending quality time with talents and clients, not about transactional stuff. If you want to realize talent at your fingertips or immediate talent availability, you have to completely reinvent your business. We are reinventing our business. This is actually very much in the spirit of our founder, Fritz.
Because Fritz always said, "If things change, you come up with something new." Things have changed in the world, so Randstad comes up with something new. That is what we are doing here. Two key messages on this slide. A, digital first. Digital first meaning all the business that we do will go through our Randstad Talent Platform with a pivotal role for our digital marketplaces. All clients will be on a digital marketplace or sometimes multiple. All talent will be on a digital marketplace. The digital marketplace will be the end-to-end help for a talent from exploring to find a job, to submitting your application, to doing your resume, to do an interview, to get placed, and to go back to the beginning of the cycle again. End-to-end, one-stop shop for talent. That is going to be the future. We have multiple channels.
Of course, we come from a world where our channel was the branch. Then we added our in-house business. Now we will have multiple channels to go- to- market. To go- to- market, we will use our digital marketplace. We will use account leadership. We will use salespeople, and we will use our 360 teams. Those are our channels to go- to- market. To deliver, we will also have multiple channels. First of all, the digital marketplace, again, but we will have our on-site delivery teams, our remote delivery teams, the delivery centers, as we discussed, and we work here and there with partnerships, and we are very proud that we have just launched our partnership with Workday, where Workday clients can actually click a button saying, "I'm doing a requisition.
Do you want talent candidates from Randstad?" They push the button, it comes immediately to us, and we make sure they get talent. Again, immediate talent availability. Very powerful partnership to go- to- market. To engage with talent, we have the digital marketplace. We have our talent centers. We have partners that we work with to get to talents. Of course, we have our 360 teams to connect with talents. Again, multiple channels. I see some of you thinking, "Okay, this sounds great. How is this going to work in practice?" The key message here is not all clients and talents will use all models at all times. No. We are going to have predefined combinations, and we call them talent service models, where depending on the length of the assignment, on the vertical axis and the complexity of the role, we will have different models.
For instance, we have our digital market, 100% digital marketplace, which is a great model for fairly standardized and comparable skills in large volumes. Let's say operational talent for logistics clients in Atlanta. We will have our delivery center. This is a good delivery mechanism for clients who have multiple locations or an industry that has multiple locations. Let's say a big bank in Spain with 100 locations where we need to provide talent. A focused team, again. We have our on-site delivery teams, high volume in one site. We have our generalist 360 sales and delivery, and this is sort of the closest thing to what we call a branch today. There will be changes there, and Marc-Etienne will talk about that, but this is a team in a specific location. Let's say a 360 team in the east of Hamburg.
We have our specialized 360 sales and delivery teams. They are more focused on certain specializations. Let's say the finance team in Milan for the north of Italy. Horses for courses in these talent service models. The examples that you will see this afternoon, they all have a combination of one or more of these talent service models. Marc-Etienne will talk to you about Randstad Operational in North America, and that's a combination of 100% digital marketplace for shift work, for logistics and manufacturing and the like. They have a delivery center for clients with multiple locations. They have very many, actually, on-site delivery teams on those larger locations. They will have more specialized branches focused on skilled trade and engineering. Behind all of this is the Randstad Talent Platform because the Randstad Talent Platform accommodates, facilitates all these delivery models.
That's why 100% of our business will go through that platform. We will have Zorgwerk, which is a 100% digital marketplace model for healthcare in the Netherlands. These roles are fairly standardized and well-codified, so it is perfect for a digital marketplace. Paul will talk about that later. We have our digital team with our Torque platform. Mike will talk about it. They will do a 100% digital marketplace where they can, a delivery center where there is a bit more intervention needed, and they will have a specialist 360 team for those specialized roles, let's say a security specialist in Atlanta. Three models, three examples leveraging these talent service models. The main message, though, here is the future is already here.
The future is already here, not just in the corner of southeast France or in Florida or in the southern part of Amsterdam. No, the future is already here at scale. The EUR 2 billion and the 500,000 shifts, we have already the models that we have here, they have proven themselves. Of course, we will have Martin, our CIO, focusing on how are we going to scale the EUR 2 billion to the EUR 25 billion of Randstad because that is our goal. The goal is to have the majority of our key markets on this platform over the next two years. We're at speed. Now we're going to speed up and accelerate to realize experience at scale. In summary, we have a bold new vision for the future of Randstad that is about specialization and experience at scale. Specialization and experience at scale. That's Randstad.
The reason of all of that is clients want specialization and talents too, and they want a good experience. It is as simple as that. The good news in all of this is the best experience is the most valuable experience for a client and a talent. That helps in differentiation, that helps in growth. The best experience is also generally the most productive one. That helps our consultants in doing a better job and more of it and free up time, quality time. That helps Randstad to drive profitable growth. Again, specialization and experience at scale is what we're going to talk about this afternoon. I'm really looking forward to discussing that with you. Back to you, Sarah.
Thank you very much, Sander. Just to be clear, we launched our Partner for Talent strategy under 18 months ago.
I think the achievements that we're showing you are rather phenomenal, and we're incredibly proud of them. We want to make sure that you see what we're seeing, which is why we're showing you the three digital marketplace case studies today. The first one that we're going to show you is the Randstad App serving our Randstad operational specialization in North America. I'll invite our Chief Executive of North America, Marc-Etienne Julien, to the stage. First, we'd like to share with you a video so you can see the app in action. Let's roll the video.
Meet Sophie and Jake. Sophie is a supervisor at a busy logistics center. Peak season is here, and she needs 15 workers for a couple of weeks, fast. With orders piling up, she can't afford delays. Jake is an experienced forklift operator balancing work and family.
He's between jobs and wants something reliable to keep his income flowing. Luckily, they crossed paths through a unique workforce on-demand platform, the Randstad app. The app makes it faster than ever for employers and job seekers to connect. No ghosting, no scrambling, just instant opportunities and ready-to-work employees. Powered by intelligent matching and built on deep industry knowledge, the Randstad app seamlessly aligns employer needs with job seeker goals, ensuring the right fit at the right time. Here's how it works. Employers can access a network of over 1 million entry-level to highly skilled workers, post shifts directly on the app, no upfront costs, only pay for hours worked. Fill jobs in minutes, not days. 87% of shifts on the platform are filled in under an hour. Manage shifts, time sheets, and even rate workers right in the app.
Enjoy peace of mind with 100% fully verified work authorized workers. Workers can receive real-time notifications for jobs that match their preferences, choose when and where they work, with full job details upfront. Clock in, submit hours, and get paid weekly or even daily, all through a seamless experience that puts flexibility and transparency first. Thanks to the app, Sophie quickly built a full team for exactly when she needed them without wasting time on lengthy hiring processes. Jake gained immediate access to reliable work with a clear schedule and dependable pay. The Randstad app ensures immediate talent availability through strong connected communities, linking you to the right people right when you need them. It is more than a staffing tool. It is your gateway to a dynamic, real-time digital talent marketplace, powered by smart technology and backed by human expertise.
Whether you need workers for a single shift, a full week, or a few months, we've got you covered. Randstad, Partner for Talent.
In the U.S., we have completely transformed the way we work. Not only have we deployed the digital marketplace across the whole country, we've actually moved our business onto it. My name is Marc-Etienne Julien. I'm the leader for the Randstad operational and professional North American business, equivalent to about $2.5 billion in revenue. I am not only very excited to be here, but also proud of sharing with all of you guys the success and the major progress that we've achieved since we were last here at the last capital market event. I am very proud of my team, actually, for delivering on such amazing progress.
The digital marketplace, which we also call the Randstad app, is transforming the way talent and clients are connecting, providing both a seamless and more transparent experience 24/7. Our clients can easily log on the platform, load their shift, manage talent availability, and also rate our working talents. Our talents can, from the comfort of their home, look at all the jobs that we have available, find the one that's most relevant to them, self-deploy themselves, digitally onboard on the platform, and also actually decide if they want to be paid weekly or if they want to be paid daily. We have deployed the platform across the whole of the U.S., as I mentioned. We currently have in the U.S. over a million talent active on the platform. Sorry, I forgot the click. I'm a little too excited. We are in 38 states.
We have about $2 billion revenue currently running on the platform, deployed multiple AI use cases, which are helping us accelerate not only our productivity, but also the experience of both our talent and our customers. We have, with the combination of our central delivery team, really maximized the way we deliver to large customers in a way that we've never done it before. Significant progress that we've achieved. With only three full quarters behind our belt since we are live across the whole of the United States, we have, of course, already identified multiple benefits. From a talent perspective, talents are benefiting from greater flexibility. We noticed that 48% of our talent are actually self-deploying themselves outside of our working hours. These are matches that were not happening in the past as fast as they are today.
42% of our talent are not only using the platform to test our service, but are actually working thus far multiple jobs. They stay engaged with Randstad longer, and they stay in the family for a longer and better period of time. The digital onboarding process is more flexible, and it's more accessible, and it's a better experience for them. Hence why we benefit from a 4.7 rating on the different app stores. Clients are thrilled by our enhanced delivery capability. We've seen our fill rate go up by about 10% to 15%. More importantly, a significant impact on our time to fill. We used to be measuring in number of hours or days the time it takes for us to fill a requirement. We're now measuring it in minutes. In the U.S., it's hundreds of thousands of shifts that we're filling on the platform.
On average, it takes 47 minutes only for a talent to be dispatched on a job. It is significant as an improvement in our productivity. We have also seen multiple benefits in our ability to scale large blue-collar operations. I have a great example to share with all of you guys. With Randstad in our services, one of our customers, only three weeks after we went live in their state, we had 500 temporary workers on site working for them. The client had a challenge with one of their incumbent suppliers and in an emergency called us and said, "We really need you guys to staff 600 new roles, and we only have three weeks available.
Otherwise, it's going to disturb our operation." In normal time, in the traditional model, we would have had to hire somewhere between 20 and 30 recruiters, have them work not only full-time, but multiple hours of overtime in nights and weekends to potentially get even close to be able to fill 600 positions in only three weeks. We actually did it with one additional FTE and a few thousand dollars of marketing advertisement. It is significant in its ability to unlock our potential as an organization. Obviously, the benefits for Randstad are quite significant. We're reducing because talents are staying engaged longer with us. We are reducing our cost of acquiring talent. We are optimizing our cost of delivery.
We are now, in combination with our national delivery center, capable of delivering for large multi-site customers, and we have a lot of them in the U.S., in a way more effective way by leveraging the power of the app and our centralized delivery center. We do hope we will actually have 20% of our revenue by the end of this year that is going to be centrally delivered. That has two important benefits. Number one, with larger accounts, we usually have a little more challenge with the margin. That helps us optimize and decrease our cost of delivery. Number two, obviously, it frees up capacity from our local sales team to focus on the higher margin business and the growth of our specialization.
From a commercial point of view, the app has shown another significant benefit, and that is because people, as Sander mentioned, spend less time on operational tasks. I have now more time available to be in front of customers. Of course, we've seen a significant impact to our commercial activity with about twice the volume per person of client visits. It is a game changer for us. The capacity that we are freeing up now because we rely on the app to support our delivery is reinvested in the growth of our specialty business. A great example of that is Skilltrades and industrial management, where we see significant growth potential on the back of our existing client portfolio. Significant progress. It is not just about the technology, of course. It is also about the evolution of our operating model.
The U.S. market is a significant—it's a large market in terms of size, but also in terms of geography. We are now very excited about the evolution of the business model. Now we are transforming the way we work. We've identified 25 key markets where we are in a position of strength, and that we're going to further double down on and saturate. In those 25 markets, we are rationalizing our real estate footprint. We go from a lot of small offices to fewer offices, but bigger and better ones to provide a more stimulating working environment for our sales team, but of course, maximize the way we go- to- market together. Within those offices, and if I take Atlanta as an example, we have about 10 small offices, and we're going to rationalize to four or five.
Within these larger sales offices, you're going to find three specialties working together: our manufacturing and logistics team, obviously powered by the Randstad App in the way that they deliver; our Skilltrade teams; and also our industrial management team. Those three teams are working very closely together in the way we go- to- market and are leveraging opportunity within our existing client portfolio. The benefit of that is that we are upgrading the quality of our revenue with higher margin opportunity discovered within our existing client base. That is an important part of our strategy. At the local level, we are also in manufacturing and logistics, shifting from a 360 model to a full sales dedicated model. Our people in those sales offices will be 100% dedicated to sales.
We will have a few dedicated delivery coordinators helping us, making sure that we on an ongoing basis improve our delivery processes. Separating those two roles is really helping us, driving more attention and focus to the sales activity and making sure that we have a dedicated team improving on an ongoing basis our delivery processes. We also have a regional delivery coordination layer, which is going to help us in multiple ways. Sanders earlier talked about how we're going from reactive to now proactive in the way we forecast demand. That regional delivery oversight is going to help us achieve this. This is where, in a given MSA, we will be able to now forecast what the demand is based on our sales pipeline and based on our data-driven approach, and then make sure that we have the available supply.
Where there's a mismatch, that team is going to help us trigger and activate the digital marketing campaign that will help us make sure that we have the right balance between the supply and the demand. The other advantage that we have with that regional oversight is that we also want to create maximum opportunities for our talent in our multi-channel approach. Whether the job order comes from one of our local sales offices, one of our in-house locations, or our national delivery center, that team is going to make sure that the talent in that given MSA are being advertised with maximum opportunities. That's also an important way for us to improve the talent experience and also our effectiveness at matching them with the right job.
Within the region, we also have actually within the region and outside the region, as I mentioned, we also have large national accounts that create a big opportunity for us. Now we are scaling our national delivery capabilities. Our central delivery team is now going to be taking over for some of our large multinational accounts across the whole of the U.S. and leveraging the power of the app to make sure that we deliver in the most effective way. As I mentioned earlier, it has the benefit of reducing our cost of delivery, of improving the quality of that delivery, but also, more importantly, freeing up capacity for the people in the local level to focus on their local markets and, of course, on the higher margin business. This operating model is already well on the way, and we're already seeing the benefits of it.
As I mentioned, our commercial activity is up significantly. We are redeploying people to our specialization, and we also have seen a significant uplift in our productivity in Randstad in-house services. We are exiting Q1 in Randstad in-house services with 13% improvement compared to last year in our TW, our talent working ratio per FTE. 13% improvement in productivity with only three quarters under our belt is a significant progress for us. I want to leave you with a few additional thoughts. Not only are we fueling our Partner for Talent strategy, accelerating the growth of our specialty, and providing better experiences at scale, but we are unlocking a better future for Randstad. The talent, the digital marketplace is giving us the platform to significantly scale the usage of AI in the way that we have never been able to do before.
It also allows us to free up capacity to reinvest in creating higher value. That is the growth of our specialization. That is also the evolution of our service offering. Outsourcing is a great example of that. It also ensures that we build a capability to support customers with all work arrangements. The platform is freeing up capacity for us to be able to do these things. It is unlocking a lot of market opportunities for us. Of course, we want to grow faster because we love growth. It also fuels our commercial engine and allows us to free up capacity for our people to spend way more time in front of their customers and for us to have way more dedicated salespeople. This is the significant progress we have made in the U.S. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Marc-Etienne.
I can only say, wow, that's a lot of progress that you made, and I can see how excited you are about it. It's definitely a triple win, a win for our clients, a win for talent, and of course, a win for Randstad. I can imagine that you're all thinking, okay, yes, I understand how this can work for operational talent. What about the Randstad professional specialization? How are we using digital marketplaces there? I'm very excited to introduce you to Zorgwerk by Randstad, our digital marketplace for healthcare and care talent in the Netherlands. We welcomed Zorgwerk to Randstad just last year, and we're very pleased that we have our Chief Operating Officer, Paul Bisseling, who is going to tell you more about this incredible platform matching care professionals with healthcare, childcare, and other aged care roles in the Netherlands.
Let's roll the video so you can understand more before he begins.
Zorgwerk is transforming the healthcare staffing industry. Our innovative digital platform connects healthcare professionals with opportunities, providing flexibility for both clients and talent. It's a seamless experience designed to meet the growing demand for healthcare professionals and the need for more efficient, effective solutions.
The Zorgwerk platform is a thriving digital marketplace where healthcare talents meet healthcare providers. Healthcare providers have instant access to our talent pool of 75,000 professionals. If a healthcare provider has an instant emergency shift for even this afternoon, our talents will instantly see that in their app, and they can respond, and we are able to plan those shifts within minutes.
Clients see Zorgwerk as a trusted partner, praising the time saved, the quality of professionals, and the ease of integration. Their words speak for themselves.
The benefits are autonomy and flexibility.
Our talents can choose with their app when and where they work and even how often they work.
I was a student, and I could not combine it with my other job. I had fixed hours, and it was really hard for me and also exhausting to combine those two. Now I found Zorgwerk. The flexibility was a true game changer for me. Now I can balance my personal life with my work life.
Our platform is powered by advanced matching algorithms we have been refining for over 20 years. We connect the right talent to the right shift quickly, trustworthy, and transparently.
The shifts are truly for me. Based on my competences and based on my education, I can see if I can park there, how many colleagues are at the location, also how to get there and if the public transport is nearby.
I know everything that I need to know before I go to a shift. The best part is that I get paid weekly, and they never miss a week. That's great. I'm in charge of my own schedule. I decide when and where I want to work.
Zorgwerk, delivering seamless experiences in healthcare with immediate talent availability. By Randstad, Partner for Talent.
Hi everyone. My name is Paul Bisseling. I'm the COO of Zorgwerk. You just saw this amazing video about Zorgwerk. Zorgwerk is the leading digital marketplace in the Dutch healthcare market. I'm very excited to tell you more about it. Let's first start with which problem do we actually solve at Zorgwerk? In the Netherlands, you have increasingly shortages of qualified personnel. These shortages are growing rapidly.
It is our mission to use all capacity available in the market to fulfill shifts. That could be our own community, our own talents, but it could also be talent pools of other suppliers or even talent pools of our clients themselves. We want to use this capacity to fulfill the shifts. The opportunity is big. In the Netherlands only, the flexible staffing market is EUR 4.6 billion. We are the market leader. This market is growing. It is growing because healthcare demand is increasing due, for example, to aging, but also due to the fact that people want to have flexibility and autonomy and do not want to have fixed contracts anymore. We are active in a large and growing market. How do we grasp this opportunity? We offer to our clients the complete infrastructure for their flexible staffing.
It is a one-stop shop, which includes all the solutions. It is short-term urgent shifts, even for tonight, but it could also be long-term assignments. It offers different contract types, for example, temps, but also could be freelancers. We could even add other talent pools. We have integrated with suppliers or have integrated with the flex pools of our clients themselves. On top of that, if clients want it, they can completely outsource their staffing to us. That is called the MSP, in which we take over all administrative and communication and everything which has to be done for flexible staffing. This results in a fully automated, what we call end-to-end digital platform. On one side of the platform, we have over 300 clients spread over 40,000 care locations in the Netherlands from childcare, disabled care, elderly care, home care, etc.
On the other side of the platform, we have over 75,000 fully screened and qualified professionals in our own community and access to several other talent pools. This results in that these days we match between 3,000 to 4,000 shifts per day, fully automated. We are well on our way today to realize a million shifts in one year. Let's take a deep dive to the benefits for our talents, clients, but also for our own business and for society. Let's start with talents. For talents, we offer the most important benefit is that they have control and autonomy. As you've also seen in the video, talents want to work whenever they want, where they want, and how much they want. Let me explain by an example.
You're sitting at your couch in the evening, and your friend calls you, and she says, "Sorry, I cannot go shopping with you tomorrow." Instead of shopping, you think, "I want to work." You open your Zorgwerk app, and based on your criteria, based on your competencies, but also based on your education, you can see shifts to work. You can look at a map, for example, "Hey, these are nice shifts around my house," or you can look for other search functionalities. You click on the shifts, and you get all the information you needed, also the protocols of the healthcare organization. You get information on how to get there and how to travel there, and you confirm, and your shift is planned. It's extremely user-friendly, and it works very, very well.
On top of that, you get weekly paid, which people really like, and you're part of a community. We have, as Sander called it, a hyper-relevant community. As a talent, you can connect with friends, you can make friendships, and you can also invite other friends to work on the same shifts. Really working on a digital community. On top of that, to complete the full cycle, we have personal growth through our in-house academy. You can train yourself or learn new skills. By doing that, you can see even more shifts which you can work on. Now take a look at the clients. For clients, the key benefit is that they get access to a huge community of professionals, and that realizes in high utilization rates, but also low cost to operate, as we call it.
For example, you are working in an elderly care home, and tonight your employee gets sick. You need someone. You need someone urgently. You open the Zorgwerk app for clients. You can put on a shift immediately, and the platform knows, "Okay, for this person, we need these competencies, this education," and it will go to look for people to work. It can even attend people. "Please come to this shift." You, as a client, have immediate access to our community of 75,000 talents. To make it even more seamless, the experience we have with clients, an automated API with their scheduling systems. They can work in their own familiar scheduling systems and say, "Look, I'm looking for flex shifts," and automatically go to a platform 24/7 a day. We put back the shifts in their scheduling systems.
That's the perfect seamless experience for clients, and we are unique with this in our market. This results in high fulfillment rates, which are very important in a market with shortages, but also results in low cost to operate. What are the benefits for Zorgwerk and for Randstad in this? Our talents are very happy to work with us. You can see it in our app store, but also our NPS scores are very high. It also results in that our sickness rate of our temps is very low. It's even two and a half times lower than the industry average, which is good for the margin. On the other side, we have a very high customer satisfaction. I think the true evidence of that is that only 1% of our sales churns.
If clients stay with us, if we get new clients, they will stay with us, and we have long-resisting relationships with our clients. We keep them happy. That's good for us. We're also good for the society because by offering our platform, the society can benefit in that we do everything we can to fulfill the shifts, which is important in the healthcare market. On top of that, we also train our talents and improve the quality of care. For our clients, we help them to operate at lower costs, which is important because a lot of government spend goes to the healthcare, and we need to make it efficient as well. Everyone is benefiting. What have we accomplished so far? Zorgwerk already exists for 27 years, and we really focused on the healthcare.
We know this domain, and we know everything about it. Already 20 years ago, we started to digitalize the core of our business. The most difficult business rules of staffing and temporary staffing, we digitalized it with our own software. What results have we accomplished? In 2013, the human involvement was relatively high. We had 27 branches across the Netherlands. By introducing our full end-to-end digital platform, for example, by adding to our core also an app for talents or an app for clients and all the applications, we were able in 2014 to close all branches except our headquarter and did not lose one single client. We are the evidence that you can work from one office with a 100% digital marketplace. Next to that, in 2013, we had 5,000 talents working for us.
Today, we have a community of 76,000 talents, and it's growing every day. We had 2,000 locations across the Netherlands in 2013, and today we have 14,000 locations in which we provide care. To give you a feeling about the matches, in 2013, we did around 300 matches a day. Today, as I explained earlier, we do 3,000 to 4,000 automated matches. As I'm speaking, our algorithm is making matches, and we're further growing. Obviously, by introducing a digital marketplace, this growth has also been scalable and resulted in higher productivity. There is more to come. What's next? Our strategy is based on specialization on the marketplace, but we're also adopting new technologies. One of them is AI. We use AI, for example, in our customer services, but also in our talent services. We use it to create job posts automatically.
We use it to screen diplomas, which you cannot do by person, but AI can. By really applying AI, for example, in our recruitment process, we are able to add over 300 new talents per week to our platform, which is mostly done fully automated. This year, we will introduce voice-to-shift. Increasingly, talents want to talk with their phone. For example, you are saying to your phone, "Zorgwerk, please help me to find a shift with babies in Damsco." The Zorgwerk app will structure this data and knows Damsco is slang for Amsterdam. If you want to work with babies, you preferably want to work in childcare. The AI knows you are located in Amsterdam and knows your diplomas, so it immediately pops up with shifts which you can work tomorrow, and you just need to say confirm.
This makes the experience even more seamless, and we can further attract more talents and increase the matches. As you can imagine, Zorgwerk has a very attractive flywheel. We win more talents, we win more clients, and we are able to make more matches. The nice benefit of it is that it also lowers the cost of the matches, and we have more margin to even further improve our proposition. We are also really showing scalability. For example, we are three to four times more predictive than a traditional staffer and also almost four times more profitable than a traditional staffer. That is very nice. In summary, I think Zorgwerk is a great example of the clear strategy Sander explained. Specialization is the name of the game. We are focused on healthcare. We know everything about healthcare, and that gives us a really strong competitive advantage.
We combine it by our own software and digital marketplace, and this results in very strong profitable growth. By the acquisition of Randstad of Zorgwerk, we will be able to grow even faster, and we are very excited to do that. Thank you very much.
Yep, well done. Thank you very much, Paul. We are also very happy to have Zorgwerk in Randstad because we all know whether we are parents of young children or children of aging parents, when you need care, there is nothing more important than getting the care that you need. The fact that Zorgwerk is being able to provide immediate talent availability in a talent-scarce market is absolutely invaluable. Thank you so much for that.
Now we have talked about Randstad operational, we have talked about Randstad professional, and now I would like to introduce you to our digital platform for Randstad digital, which is Torque. Torque is an AI-powered solution which also entered the Randstad family about a year ago, and we are very excited to have Mike Morris, who is the leader of Torque, here to tell you more about how we are providing, also in a talent-scarce industry, the digital talent that organizations need. Let us show you again a film to learn a little bit more about Torque.
In today's dynamic market for digital talent, connection is key. Randstad's Torque digital marketplace creates a vibrant ecosystem in which digital talent and employers find each other. For digital professionals, Torque is a hyper-relevant gateway to personalized opportunities, skill enhancement, and an active community. It provides instant access to jobs, career guidance, and the skills needed to thrive.
Being a member of the Torque community has really transformed my career path. It's like a personal guide. I can connect with mentors, which has been really big for me, see what job opportunities I have, and which training modules I have to take to kind of level up my skills. There's also personalized job alerts, and that's instant communication with the recruiters. The really cool thing about the Torque platform is I know that they use an AI tool to match my skills with the potential job roles that I'm looking at. What's really awesome is they still use a matchmaker who is a human on their end to ensure that I have all of the tools and resources I need to make sure that I am the exact fit. One of the reasons why we love using Torque is because of the streamline of the hiring process.
We don't have to filter through hundreds or thousands of resumes. When we reach out to Torque for a need, they provide us with talent almost on demand because their community is engaged. What that means for us is that when Torque reaches out to find a candidate for us, the community already knows about Torque, and they're actively engaged, and they're excited about the opportunity to work on projects for Torque. They actually send us talent profiles. This shows specific GitHub contributions. This shows us exactly the technologies and the projects specifically that the talent has been working on lately, which allows us and my hiring teams to have a better conversation with the talent.
Torque is Randstad's marketplace and hyper-relevant community for digital talent, empowering careers and driving business growth. Torque, specialized digital talent at scale and speed. By Randstad. Partner for Talent.
Hello.
My name is Mike Morris. I joined the Randstad team via the acquisition of Torque nearly 12 months ago. I've spent my career since 2002 in building, operating, and scaling digital marketplaces for technology professionals. What we're going to talk about in the next 10 minutes is what is Torque, how does it work, and how are we currently integrated into Randstad Digital to provide access to local, near-shore, and offshore talent, bringing immediate talent availability to our customers. Now, before we talk about Torque, let's introduce Randstad Digital. Randstad Digital, we represent 25,000 billable digital experts that generate EUR 2.8 billion in revenue. We span 20 different markets globally, and we're across specializations that include software development, customer experience, data analytics and AI, Cloud, and product engineering.
Torque is the community-powered AI marketplace that is powering the transformation of Randstad Digital by addressing talent scarcity with our viral and growing talent community. The Torque platform seamlessly connects our customer demand with our engaged talent community. Let's talk a little bit about the talent lifecycle and how that looks. Starting with the top right of this chart, it's all about talent acquisition. Currently, we have over 1 million talent on the Torque platform, and we're growing by over 50,000 per quarter. The primary asset for talent on the platform is their digital profile. This is a representation of their career experience, their skills, and their achievements in a best-in-class, fully digital, interactive, and real-time profile. We believe it is best-in-class, and it is certainly a far jump from the traditional resume process that we're disrupting. Next, once we've acquired the talent, it's all about engagement.
Our community team is engaging with that talent, having them do technology assessments, having them do e-learning, doing badging, and certifications. Each one of these interactions allows us to deepen the talent profile and find out relevant information such as availability. This all leads to a centralized data model which provides faster matching via our agentic AI search and match capability. It allows us to take the talents, put them on jobs very quickly, and fill those positions for our clients seamlessly. It does not stop with placement. We keep an ongoing relationship with that talent via our proprietary on-the-job productivity tooling, our peer mentoring services, and our internal talent success team. The result is a superior talent and customer experience driven by network effects, including growth and referrals.
The whole thing is highlighted by each run-through this cycle, each new talent that we acquire, each interaction that we have with that talent deepens the data and the insights that we have that makes us more productive and builds more intelligence into the Torque platform. Currently, we have 50% of the matching for U.S., India, and Latin America talent being done through the Torque platform. Let's talk a little bit about the benefits we're seeing. At our current size, we're seeing tremendous network effects. First, with our talent experience driven by the community model, we're realizing an 8/ 10 NPS score. Operationally, our speed to match has gone from what was traditionally weeks and days down to hours and eventually minutes, providing, again, talents getting that exact right job faster and customers fulfilling those seats quicker.
We've also increased customer visibility via the real-time data and analytics inside the platform, which translates into recruiter productivity because now our human touch can move from administering a process to having more valuable conversations with our clients and talents, advising them on their next steps. How are we rolling this out? Similar to how Sander presented our talent services model, all of the Torque channels are underpinned by our technology platform and our Randstad Digital Community of Talent. Starting on the top right of this chart, the specialized sales and delivery, this will represent our very complex high-touch roles. These are still going to be sales and delivery team-led and platform-supported. As we move towards the middle of this chart, our delivery center will handle the bulk of our volume, and this will be platform-driven and human-supported.
As we move to the bottom left of this chart, our 100% digital marketplace will fully automate going from the customer demand all the way through the delivery. What's coming next? AI is definitely the thing these days. One of the things that we're rolling out is an AI Recruiter. The AI Recruiter will take everything that we do from a match point of view all the way through the onboarding of that talent to their job. Our AI career coach is embedded in everything that our talent does on the platform. When they show up to Torque, they will know, "Hey, this is an assessment I should take. It's going to open me up to 25% more jobs. This is something that I can do to improve my career." Ultimately, we want to help them do that. It's better for both of us.
On the customer side, it's all about demand automation. We're currently building a new generation of our self-service portal for those customers that want that fully digital experience, that want to push that button. We're also building integrations with VMS systems for our high-volume clients. If you put together this AI Recruiter with our customer demand automation, you have a full end-to-end digital experience. Where does that leave us? Our goal is that we'll have 100% of our matching through the Torque Platform, but delivered with 80% of it coming from the Randstad Digital Community of Talent. Currently, we're working on the U.S., India, and the U.K. We will have full deployment of that complete by the end of 2025. We will have all markets complete by the end of 2026. This is the Randstad Digital implementation for Partner for Talent. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mike. It's great to see that we have an AI-powered platform serving our digitally savvy talent and also our clients, so it's all very congruent at Torque. There is more because, of course, these three examples are only one piece of the Randstad Talent Platform, and that's that they're examples of digital marketplaces. We want to tell you a lot more about what the Randstad Talent Platform is. For that, I'm very excited to welcome Martin de Weerdt, our CIO at Randstad, to the stage. Over to you.
Thank you, Sarah. Thank you all for being here. Nice to see you again because some of the things will come back from a year and a half ago, and I hope you recognize them. As Sander already said, Randstad is going to be digital first, not digital only, but digital first.
What you see in this picture is very important. There are many, many permutations through the Randstad Talent Platform that involve people. If you, for example, as a client, are looking for an accountant for a nine-month job, you probably do not want to do that in a fully digital way. If you are a talent and you are looking for career advice, you probably do not want to do that always in a fully digital way. There will always be, or in many cases, there will be people involvement where it adds value. For the rest, we aim to be very much digital first. The Randstad Talent Platform covers many, many elements of what we saw. Let's dive into it a little bit.
The Randstad Talent Platform is going to be specialized on the outside for a perfect experience for everybody, a great experience at scale, as Sander always calls it. I always call it almost a specialization of one. It needs to feel as if Randstad knows you, is doing the best for you, and it can be fully digitized. It will also be harmonized on the inside. We do not want all kinds of different processes. We do not want all kinds of different data. We want to make sure we are harmonized on the inside because that helps us use AI and expand AI. That helps us to have robust processes because in our business, exceptions create issues. It gives us also a benefit of cost because scale means that we can, right, sure, automate, make things cheaper.
It also helps us to innovate at scale, to have the core unified. Because if we make an innovation, we innovate once. And that innovation works for digital. It works for Spain. It works for Norway. It works for everybody. Imagine if we bundle the IT spend for Randstad into one backbone with a very specialized front end. We will be able to do many, many things that we cannot do with a scale of 39 different markets. If we harness and harmonize, we have a huge opportunity to either save money or invest massively in this hyper-personal experience. Let's look at the Randstad Talent Platform and the first layer, the digital marketplaces. You've seen three great examples, but they have three similarities: digital validation, digital ordering, and digital matching.
What you will see over the coming years is that we will converge on those marketplaces. It will start creating synergies and converging on one technological basis. That way, if we innovate once, we innovate for all. We improve our matching. We improve it for all. We make a cool, funky stickiness app. We can use it for all. What we're looking for is scale with a great experience. It can be very varying. It may be that we have 10, 12, 15 digital marketplaces that all feel different, look different. If you look at the similarities under the cover of the engine, there's a lot of similarities. We can use that scale again to innovate at speed at the right cost. We're learning from examples.
If you see what we've learned from Zorgwerk, if you see what we learned from Torque, it gets the imagination going. You see the results. The proof is there. It's working. My job is now with my colleagues, let's scale this to become a new version of Randstad and do this at a global scale. Now, what is important to make a digital marketplace work that is very much driven by AI? Two things: a robust backend process and uniform data. If you want to use AI at scale, the one thing you need is data that is somewhat congruent because the thing needs to learn from data. It doesn't have its own mind. It needs to learn.
If we can harmonize our data and if we can have a robust process, we can have a great experience at the front and a great experience after you've accepted the job. Because at the end of the day, this is about work. If we don't pay people in time, we can have a glorious experience on the digital marketplace. They won't be back. If we don't predict the need for people very, very precisely and we cancel your job four hours before you start, you're never going to be back. The digital marketplace exists by the grace of data and a robust backend process.
On the backend process, our front of the system, which we call R1 because it's one Randstad, that's going to drive a seamless experience when you're talking to our people live because they work in the system, but it also powers the Randstad digital marketplaces. That's where our talent data sits, our client data sits across countries, across specializations to make sure that if you're a client using multiple specializations, there's one view of you. If you are a talent and there are many that actually have multiple specializations or different jobs, it's all about you because it's one database. That's where we have cross-market specialization, cross-talent specialization, a bundling of 39 budgets in one front-end system, data on which we can build AI, but that will also help us to predict the need, to predict how many waiters are needed in Marbella in November.
That's good to predict because you don't want to be disappointed. You can assume there's always enough people. If you promise people a job and you don't have a job, then you have a problem. We need to be super good at predicting. Also here, this is also where search and match engines live, predictive engines. Innovation is going to be key. If we innovate once, we innovate for everybody. We do this together with Salesforce and Bullhorn. Those are standard solutions that most of the industry uses. We also have a number of what we call domain services, search and match engine, job description writers, all kinds of tiny things that make this process exceptional and that is also visible in the digital marketplace that we call the secret source. We build it ourselves together with our partners. I will talk about that later.
We very deliberately create something with standard software because it's reliable and cheap. We have some elements that are very proprietary to Randstad. The second part of the backbone is the mid-office. The mid-office is crucial to our existence. This is where the billing is generated. More importantly, this is where the payments are generated to our people. You know this industry well because you've been in this. If we pay late, that's a real problem. If we don't pay, that's a real problem. We have to be consistent in our payments, consistent in our billing. That's driven by the mid-office. This is where we store our contracts. This is where we store our collective labor agreements. This is where we have the timesheets of our talents.
If we unify that and create a functionality that serves our clients across markets, across specializations, we again have to scale. We can again innovate at speed and at scale. We can again make the cost savings that make our business better. At the same time, moving the time of our people to the front of our organizations, talking to clients, talking to talents. We want to standardize this. It's a solution that we are co-creating with Bullhorn. It's very configurable because every country has its own rules. I mean, for the people that are Dutch, there's no Dutch company that doesn't have a company bicycle scheme. Very proprietary. We need to be able to configure that. We're creating that together with Bullhorn. That way, we can actually use the same engine for all the various markets and for all the various talent segments.
That means we can also scale the way we run that engine. It doesn't have to be in 39 countries anymore. We can consolidate that to do it better and cheaper. Also here, predictive AI is driving the experience. We're always chasing people to fill out their time report. I don't know whether you fill out time reports. You probably don't. I used to do when I was in my previous employer. I was always on time, and I always got an annoying notification that I had to fill out my time report. Imagine that we know that you're always on time and we don't get the notifications. But my friend who was always too late, he does get the notification. It's all experience. You don't want to be bothered with stuff that is not relevant. You want to be bothered with stuff that is good for you.
Because if you forget the timesheet, you don't get paid. Also here, the mid-office drives the experience in the front end. At the very, very bottom, finance and HR. You'll say, well, it's all very internal. Finance is our billing engine that creates the bill to our clients, that does the dunning, that makes sure we get paid. Currently, we have many, many finance systems around the world. We're going to unify them. The same is true with HR. It's very hard for Randstad to offer a consistent career path because all those career paths are in 39 markets. We're bundling it all in Workday. Workday has a great benefit to us, the kind of company we are. Finance and HR and Workday are one thing. It's a perfect selection for a company like Randstad because people and business is one thing for us.
We're deploying that. That will also help us to scale these functions to a global scale. It will mean that we can consolidate. It will mean that we can automate. It will mean that we can right-shore, which I think is a good thing for our cost level in the industry that, you know, is not necessarily very high margin. Also important, it will massively improve our employee experience because if we have consistent job profiles internally, job catalog, payment schemes to be equitable, it will also be predictable. We'll have clear careers, and the experience will be better. That's the total stack of what we're going to do. You may think, well, that's quite a lot. I sometimes have these moments that I think, well, that's quite a lot. Let's not forget one thing. All this stuff exists.
You've seen three fantastic digital marketplaces. We have 39 at least front offices. We have 39 mid-offices. We have 39 finance systems. I think we have like 50 HR systems. This is not new to Randstad. We've done this before. The trick that we're going to do now is we're going to do it at scale. Not because we want to, but what we need is the digital marketplaces because that's where the future of Randstad is. To be able to deliver that in a consistent way, experience at scale, digital, we need to consolidate those solutions and do this once more, but then collectively. It's just once more. We've done it 39 times. The 40th time should be successful. We're not doing this alone. We're doing this with a proven partner ecosystem. Clearly, we need very good people to do this.
Randstad people with our way of working. We are also working with Exentia, we are working with Cognizant, and we are working with DCS to make sure we have the best partners to deliver this. We have successfully deployed. The front office and the mid-office, they are live in multiple markets: Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium. We are slowly expanding into the additional digital marketplaces in Belgium, for example. It is working. We see that it is stable. The billings go out. The payroll go out. We are making this decision. As Sander said, the build is sort of over. We are now in a sort of a 90% stage. We will always be in a 90% stage because we will always be innovating at scale. There will always be 10% more we can do.
The good news is we can consolidate our rather large IT budget into one investment rather than 39 investments. Then on top, you will imagine there's a bit of a spike in the IT spend as we build this. All these investments are in our numbers already. What we've done is we've reduced our run cost in the various markets and actually used that money to fund these investments. It's, I wouldn't say self-pay, but shareholders pay, but it's more we're converting run cost into long-term investments to reduce the run cost in the long term. Actually, yeah, we will see some things where we will maybe have difficulties. All in all, I think we can definitely do this. We're on the right track. We've got the right partners. We have success in what we do.
It is all baked in our budgets already. If we push on, this will definitely be delivered. Why does my clicker not work? There we are. What will this bring? As a short summary, it will bring lower cost. If we move from 39 times to once, it is better. It is not just IT cost. It is also the cost of HR. It is the cost of finance. It is also our operational cost. If we have fewer people doing operational work because it is taken over by a digital marketplace, it will dramatically change our cost profile. The people that we keep will be focused on value-added activities rather than creating a job description that is already written 20 times. That is one. Second thing, rapid innovation.
If you have to innovate and everybody's talking about AI, AI, AI, imagine you're going to build the same thing on a different data set multiple times. It's going to take forever. AI is going to make a huge difference in how this business is run. That's why we can rapidly innovate AI, but also in terms of experience, a new color, a new little thingy. In Zorgwerk, they have fantastic examples, and I'm personally very fond of that. If you're a medical worker and you select a job, you get GoFed in your screen. Now, it may be a bit childish, but people love that because that makes it feel like a nurse app. Truck drivers will want something else. We need to be hyper-specialized on that. We can do that if we have one backbone. We can innovate rapidly.
If it doesn't work, we innovate again. Last but not least, world-class experience, consistent, not just in the digital marketplace, but a very robust backbone, no mistakes on your payroll, no mistakes in your billing. Nobody needs that. It's painful and it's problematic. Frankly speaking, my job so far has been quite easy because Randstad is incredibly good at this. In the two and a half years that I've been here, I've never had a crisis on the payroll. I've never had a crisis on the billing. We're going to keep it that way. We're just going to make it scalable so we can harvest the benefit, innovation, cost, scale experience. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Martin. It's clear the Randstad Talent Platform is the backbone to our digital-first strategy.
Your plans are very ambitious, but as you said, incredibly achievable, and we know they're going to deliver really significant benefits to Randstad. Now, I know I don't need to introduce the next speaker because I think everyone in the room and online knows Jorge Vazquez , our Chief Financial Officer. Jorge we'd love to hear how all of this comes together in delivering further growth for Randstad. Over to you.
Thank you. Let me start by saying thank you. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you to my colleagues. How happy I am to be here today because two years ago, we talked about a bold vision. We worked together in London, and we talked about a bold vision we had.
Having been 14 years in this industry, I was excited about what this could mean about Randstad rewriting the future of our industry. Every quarter, we talk about how excited I am and how excited we all are at Randstad with the examples we're starting to build. Today, you actually saw this already. That is not a vision only. It is actually here at scale. Yesterday, we talked about many of the things we are doing already at Randstad, also with our quarter numbers, which sets the tone for the year. I wanted to bring you back now to two years ago and see how we are starting to see a lot of these things materializing into our P&L and into our value creation. Remember this slide? This was basically what we introduced two years ago, our value creation flywheel. We said there are three components in it.
Basically, we believe Randstad is onto something, and we can accelerate growth structurally. We also know we can expand conversions. By having more growth in a scalable conversion, we can actually free up a lot of resources to invest in growth. It's a flywheel. It feeds on each other. Today, what I want to do is reflect a little bit on everything we've done and we've learned since these two years and then bring you back on how we are looking forward and looking ahead at the exactly same growth algorithm, the algorithm we presented two years ago. Let's start with growth. Probably the biggest question, and also following on yesterday, how are we in terms of business cycle? How is economic activity? The reality is we don't know how the business cycle, I think Sander referred, was a very rocky last two years.
We don't know how the business cycle will evolve. There are a couple of things we know. One, we are much more positioned for recovery, better positioned for recovery than we have ever been. Think about it. Today, Randstad is a much more diversified company than it's ever been over the last five years. Geographically, we are much less dependent on any block or any economic block in the world. From a product perspective, you heard it before, we have more RPO. We have more in-house. We have more PERM. We have more MSP. We have way more basically specialization at scale than we have ahead of Randstad. Randstad is firmly positioned to basically benefit and lead on the recovery. We also know that talents and clients are facing a lot of uncertainty, and they also need a partner to help them to manage that.
That is where Randstad comes in. Where even in this world, either being through freelance, either by being the right Partner for Talent, Randstad is operating in a world that can actually support much more. Now, the next recovery, we do not know exactly how and when it will come. We are better positioned. We also know things are different. If you think about it, I yesterday talked a little bit about it in the call. We do not know how things will evolve in the next few weeks and few months, but it is a very different environment than it was five years ago or even in 2008, 2009. Penetration rates at the moment are quite low. Many of our clients are basically only working with us either for peak and seek or for the things they really need to support the seasonality.
Permanent levels are extremely low, and we're still doing and still trying to pursue growth on each one of these situations. Better position for growth, better position for a cyclical recovery. What I'm perhaps more excited about, and we talk about it almost every single quarter, is that we're not necessarily only dependent on cyclical recovery, as we always tend to perhaps to be. Randstad, and you heard it today, Sander spent quite a lot of time talking about not only how we have already rolled out specialization in, let's say, across all our 39 markets, but also how this specialization is actually being built into much stronger promises to our talent and our clients, meaning we can finally start seeing a path where Randstad structurally wins market share because it is still a very fragmented market.
There's still a lot of opportunity for us, regardless of economic activity, to continue to gain market share quarter after quarter, year after year. You heard it today, and you heard it yesterday, we've been gaining a lot of momentum over the last year. In most of our markets, we are already either at market growth or already above market. Marc-Etienne Julien alluded to an important number earlier on. In the United States, where we only have three quarters we've actually been operating under the new models, we are already structurally ahead of market, and we continue to gain market share. Our propositions have more promises and have more value than anyone in the industry, and they will only continue to get better. Randstad is onto something in terms of gaining structurally market share. It doesn't stop here.
I think two years ago, we also introduced this notion of growth segments. It was about reflecting, hey, the labor markets are continuously in flux. There's always needs for new talent. It's a talent scarce world. We know that. There's always needs for new skills, new capabilities, new competencies. We've talked about skilled trades. We've talked about engineering. We've talked about digital, Sander alluded to earlier. We talked about healthcare. We also said Randstad is not yet positioned enough to capture that structural growth. What we've been doing, even though the last two years have been somewhat adverse, as many of you know, we've been investing in this, not only inorganically, and obviously, we saw one or two acquisitions here today, but also organically. Last year alone, we've put 500, we've invested or we've hired 500 colleagues just to focus in these growth scales.
Normally, we have quite a, let's say, a six to nine-month ramp-up period. We were right in getting this because these colleagues, in four to five months, they ramped up much faster in terms of productivity than we've ever been able to ramp up. Randstad, not only is capturing or well-positioned for a cyclical recovery, is now positioned to gain market share structurally, and it's positioned to continue to expose itself to structural growth in growth segments. Let's look at the second part of it. How can we structurally and continuously continue to expand our conversions? Here is perhaps where I am CFO, I'm more busy with because I want to capture a lot of these benefits that you heard today. I want to capture them into our P&L. We talk about it in our quarterly calls.
Today, you heard some of these numbers. I wanted to take a step back and reflect at our P&L and see what that means in practice. I have two slides here. The first one is about the largest cost we have in the company, our delivery cost. Approximately 65% of our cost is basically our teams working with clients, working with talent every day. What I believe we are onto something, and you absolutely heard it today, and I'll bring you home in a little bit with some numbers. We start now cracking the productivity code. Two years ago, we said, yes, our growth typically goes like this. When I started as CFO, I had this reflection. Wow, it's a fantastic company in terms of growth and converting when we are growing as well. Our delivery cost walks hand in hand.
We even had a chart with that correlation, let's say. What we then concluded was, if we continue to work on talent, basically on experience at scale and delivering through different talent service models, we can aspire to crack the productivity code of the industry. Once we keep growing, we keep delivering more and more productivity through scalability. That is exactly what you heard today. Think about it. We talked about basically evolving the company from primarily one or two delivery models, we used to call them, around in-house locations and branch locations. We said we are going to move from this structure to a much more optimized combination of talent centers, delivery centers, digital marketplaces, even global delivery centers. Yes, still where necessary, 360-degree branch units. By doing that, you also start finally leveraging economies of scale from a lot of what we do.
You have been seeing through our numbers the productivities we have in Japan, the productivity we have in Spain, even some of the numbers we heard in many of the other markets where we have been rolling out these talent centers. We have approximately 1,600 colleagues, and we will continue to roll them out and delivery centers. We start to basically crack out the productivity. As we grow, we can convert more. You also heard Marc-Etienne t alking about, yes, now that I have these different talent service models, I was able to put the Randstad App and a lot of the technology of the Randstad Talent Platform to play in these particular structures.
What that has enabled to do is not to capture necessarily almost the impossible mission of capturing five minutes of productivity in every single one of our operations, but to actually concentrate a lot of those gains in places where we have benefits at scale. We mentioned it quite openly. We've been now gaining 10% to 15% of our conversion of productivity, excuse me, in the United States exactly because we are rolling out technology in a much more optimized delivery or talent service model framework. That's the second thing. The third one you can now think is take it one level further. Paul mentioned the productivity of a digital marketplace. We have other examples in Australia. We have our care business as well, where we have actually a 100% digital marketplace.
We can aspire in an industry that has never been able to crack the productivity code to actually double or approximately our productivity when we do a full digital 100% marketplace. We know now the art of the possible in the spectrum in terms of productivity and what was a belief two years ago. It's actually now a reality that we are starting to capture in each one of our P&Ls. It doesn't stop here because there's another 35% of our cost base, which is where we spent a lot of time optimizing, which is basically all our indirect costs. You can think a little bit. They are listed there. These, for a company that goes through ups and downs in the time of cyclical, is where we have to put a lot of headache because it tends to be a very fixed cost.
Here you think about it. Think about IT costs. I'll come back to that in a minute. Think about marketing. Think about accommodation costs. Think about head office costs. These are all the costs we have to basically support our business in being in front of our talents and in being in front of our clients. What I am excited about, and we talked about yesterday in the call as well when we presented our Q1 numbers, is yes, this is very fixed, but exactly because we are focusing on experience at scale, exactly because we're building end-to-end journeys and we're trying to digitize a lot of what we do, we can now actually start relooking at each one of these categories and start optimizing them and continue to optimize them as we roll out our strategy. Think about it a little bit.
Last year, we talked about reducing our footprint in accommodation. Our cost base reduced approximately. I think we spent approximately EUR 200 million in accommodation. We reduced it by 10% already last year, and we are on track again to reduce it again this year. Why? Because we're rolling out a lot of these talent service models in our markets. As we continue, we're going to continue basically releasing more resources. Martin talked about our IT investments. Yes, they are high at the moment. At the same time, they are peaking. They are plateauing because a lot of the development we've been making, we do not have high CapEx, as you know. A lot of the development you're making is from cost to investment. As we start rolling out and basically in our markets, rolling out the Randstad Talent Platform, what happens?
We start sunsetting, on the other hand, our local systems in a very fragmented different system 39 times per country. Our costs in IT, yes, they are plateauing, but they will continue to reduce over the next years. Also, Martin alluded to it, all our head office costs. Randstad has grown traditionally from basically a few acquisitions and a lot of organic growth. It has also grown by having 39 different finance teams, as an example, or 39 different HR teams. Last year, we started basically saying, no, it is time to now start optimizing a lot of this. We start having the Randstad Talent Platform being the backbone of everything we do, and we can now start freeing up a lot of productivity from this. Marketing, the last one, typically a very fixed cost at Randstad, is now much more embedded in our delivery.
It's much more variable. Why? Because instead of doing big campaigns, we can do much more personalized, talent and smart campaigns or basically one by one, embedding it in our journey. What does that mean in practice? If you look at these two slides, we reduced significantly our indirect costs already. We've been freeing up capacity from all the things we already implemented this year. Yesterday, we talked a little bit about our cost structure. Today, as we enter 2025, we structurally reduced already by EUR 100 million of our cost base that will never come back. This cost is already freed up either from indirect costs, as we just talked about, the majority of it, and even from productivity gains in how we deliver.
As we continue to roll out this strategy and roll out everything we're doing around the world, you just saw a little bit of snippets where we are. We will continue to free up these resources and we'll continue to gain productivity as we progress. It is exciting because not only are we cracking the productivity code of the industry, we are also shifting the cost paradigms of what is supposed to be to operate in the industry. Not yet to the level of Zorgwerk and some of our digital marketplaces, but at least a large step forward. Now, looking from a helicopter view, we are onto something big. We are at the cusp, I believe, of rewriting the industry. From a growth perspective, it's clear Randstad is better positioned for recovery than it has ever been. We have a much more diversified portfolio than we have ahead.
We have a much more talent and client-ready specialization in Randstad to support on the recovery. Number two, on growth, we have a very, very, very, very clear focus on four specializations. It's not about a portfolio play. It's about winning market share by developing the best propositions in the industry. Number third in growth, we are exposing Randstad to what we believe are growth segments. These growth segments today already represent 40% to 50% of our gross profit internally. We are structurally positioning ourselves to make sure that we paddle to where the currents and the fast currents are. Secondly, we're doing this by basically cracking the productivity code of Randstad exactly because we're building these best propositions and by being able to take resources and be able to invest them after. That means from a conversion perspective, last year, we talked two years ago about 5% to 6%.
We have examples already at that scale in Randstad. We have markets already at that level. We continue to target 5% to 6% in the medium term. More important, we have the financial discipline and the financial power to be able to fuel this with organic growth and inorganic growth. You saw two fantastic examples of that already last year. You'll see more as we come in terms of organic growth and potentially more bolt-on acquisitions. That means, let me wrap up a little bit here now, I see a Randstad today that is much more resilient on the downside. I see a Randstad today that is much more profitable on the upside. I see a Randstad today that is much more future-ready and rewriting the industry along the way. With this, thank you.
Jorge , you can stay up here.
We're going to move into the Q&A portion of the program. We have about 15 minutes to do questions here in the room. For those of you that are in the room that do not have a chance to ask your questions here, you can also ask them as we are over refreshments in a few minutes. Jade in the back of the room has a microphone. We ask that you raise your hand, wait until she gives you the microphone for the benefit of our audience online. Please state your name and where you are from before you ask your question. Come on, Sander.
I'm waiting.
You're coming up, and I'm going down. Yeah, good luck.
In good Randstad spirits, let's do one question each at a time. You know I'm strict at that. Let's go here. Suhasini, if you know. Yeah, that's.
Thank you. Hi. Good afternoon.
Your name so everyone knows.
Sure. Suhasini from Goldman Sachs. Thank you for taking my question. Maybe one for Jorge , actually, because your slide was very interesting. You've delivered maybe a EUR 100 million reduction in indirect costs in the last one year. How much further can you go? And how many years will it take for you to achieve this? Thank you.
It's a midterm target. We can continue to go forward. I think for now, Suhasini, what we clearly have a line in sight is for 2025, the EUR 100 million. That is clearly hard as in we have the line of sight into that. We'll keep working and rolling out everything we're rolling out to achieve more. Yeah.
Steve from Deutsche Bank. Just in terms of the specialization and how it combines with Zorgwerk, is the plan now that's a specialist healthcare platform. Is the plan now to roll out more specialist platforms in each industry and in each country? You have got 10 Zorgwerks in each country, each dealing with one with logistics, one with finance, one with so where does the branding go from that that is currently ranched out?
Yeah, so let's start. That's a very good question. You have seen Randstad Partner for Talent with the four sub-brands. That's one. We foresee a limited number of marketplaces. Don't ask me exactly how many. Martin said maybe up to 15, but that's probably it. If you just sort of look at operational marketplace, digital marketplace, we know what we want. We know what it looks like. We're going to roll that out as we do it in the United States into our other markets. There's probably just going to be one digital marketplace with some country specifics. On digital, you've heard Mike talk about we're on our way. We're going to roll that out to all our markets. We have healthcare. We already have three or four platforms today. The thing with healthcare is it's a very specific market in each country.
We have Appel Médical in France. We have Zorgwerk in the Netherlands. We have our healthcare platform in Australia. We need to see to what extent we can converge there because it's a bit more complicated market. On the professional side, we are still strategizing, if you will. We definitely can leverage what we have already done in digital. That's probably the way to go there. You would end up with three to six, in the best possible case, with three to six marketplaces. Don't forget that the secret sauce of all this, and that is the yeast of Martin's presentation, there is a global backbone that sits behind all these marketplaces. In fact, the functionality of everything sits in the backbone, and the presentation layer is the digital marketplace, so to speak. That's the flexibility we're building in. Does that help? Okay.
I saw a few questions here.
Rory McKenzie , yeah.
Hello, it's Rory McKenzie from UBS. Really interesting digital marketplace demos. Can you talk about just how open-ended you envisage those as being? How could that change your addressable market? Do you think any corporate could download the Randstad app in the U.S. and post any job? Do you see your clients posting jobs that they've never historically seen you perform in the past? Maybe specifically that 500,000 shift number for Q1. Could you talk about how many of those you think were just kind of transplanted in the business and what was actually additive? What did it bring in?
Yeah. Two very good questions. Let's say there are lots of opportunities to do more. I'm always telling our people at Randstad, we have many great clients. We have many great talents. We have EUR 25 billion of business. Let's get those businesses that we have on the platform that we are putting in place now. That is the number one priority because probably already today with our EUR 2 billion, we are the leading marketplace in our industry, if not it could be one of the leading. We're already up there. We need to scale to those EUR 25 billion. This will come with different ways to grow. I was spending time with Mike and the team the other day. You have seen Mike's focus areas. We could say tomorrow, well, the SAP.
The way to grow will almost be like create a talent pool and start marketing it. It is a different way because the old way to grow is I'm going to talk to you. You're like, oh, can you maybe give me an order? Then I'll start trying to see what we can do. No, the way to grow will be different. Those 500,000 shifts are obviously all from our existing business and our existing clients. Yes, we have won clients that we might not have won otherwise. Mark and Jorge talked about the fast ramp-up that we can offer. Some clients, they have a problem and they have it now. They need 400 people next Monday. Not everybody or hardly anybody can do that. We can.
If we show the technology and we show that we can do it, you win more work because it's faster. I think these days, especially in North America, compliance is extremely important, making sure we have people in the family that have the right paperwork to work and guarantee that to the client. I think it's really, really important these days as well. Of course, health and safety, the whole audit trail. You know who was on site and where, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Mark Fletchenberg, ING. Maybe the question is for Mark and Jorge, but in the U.S., can you share some anecdotal evidence from one of your large clients? How they now operationally work with your platform, the digital marketplace versus your competition, the likes of Manpower? How do they approach now the market? Because you have MSPs, are you connected to that? How does it work? Are clients now going to less suppliers in the end? Can we also share some timelines, maybe, Jorge , or Sander, on the rollout?
Yeah. There's multiple. I don't know if my mic is on.
Yeah, it's on.
It is? Okay. There are multiple components in what you just said. I think of all of the big players, we're the one that has actually moved the whole business on platform and the only one thus far that I'm aware of. Many of our competitors are running platforms on the side. We've taken we were not the first one attacking this market with such a strategy, but we're the one that did this with the biggest boulder move. From a VMS integration perspective, it's a journey. We have three quarters behind our belt. We made significant progress. We had a first layer of integration with VMSs that is already done. We don't have the full end-to-end integration going both ways. That's still on our dev roadmap. That's going to unlock additional abilities to compete for us in the VMSs.
The large blue-collar customers, I shared an example, but I could go on for an hour. We had a client that had 150 temps on site. We won them through an RFP. The incumbent, when they found out that they lost the RFP, they actually had the whole workforce walk off the site. The client showed up on a Friday morning. They had to shut down their operation. There were no workers there. We got them back online by Tuesday, 150 resources in two business days. It's incredible. The clients are still wanting for those large-scale engagements to have Randstad present because we bring the value. We help them maximize the workforce. They definitely see the benefit of us now being able to get the operations up and running way quicker than we ever did in the past.
Thank you, Marc and Jorge.
From a P&L perspective, I just want to say because the three questions are connected. Imagine the immediate availability of talent, what that means from a revenue perspective, because we do not, to the point of Rory, we do not post jobs. We have talent. It is very different. The talent is immediately available. That means we have talent ready. To the point of Suhasini, what this also means is, as Marc and Jorge explained, we are just now rolling out the whole change in our model associated with this. Think as well what do we mean in terms of cost structure going forward. The three are actually quite connected.
Shall I give the answer?
Go ahead.
Talent faster for the client, job faster for the talent, revenue faster for Randstad. Just think about it. That's the name of the game.
We're writing the industry. Yeah.
A lot of exciting opportunities in terms of efficiency gains, both in terms of delivery and overhead costs. I think the 5%-6% operating margin is not completely different from what we've seen in the previous cycle. What is the headwind or the offset which is preventing you from guiding higher than that?
Good question. At Randstad, we have a tradition. We do what we say, and we say what we do. It's true. If we add up a lot of the things you saw today, if we bring digitization and digital first to an industry that is still, compared to many others that have been ahead of us, still very analog and still not able to make the promises that Sander just alluded to, we should expect even more productivity gains. You just heard Paul on Zorgwerk what the level of productivity is compared to the rest of Randstad. Many of our countries are already today at 5%, 6%. I will concentrate first in getting Randstad at 5% to 6% to then talk about where we go next. Yeah, it's a good point.
Maybe go there first.
Simona?
Yes. Hi, Simona Sarli from Bank of America. A quick question, first of all, on the digital platforms. Clearly, it's clear now how you can improve productivity with these digital platforms. How do their gross profit margin compare to other service models? With these platforms, do you see the risk that higher pricing, transparency, and potentially create pressure you see on the salary to build spreads?
Fantastic question. This is a question I get asked a lot also by our people. My point here is, for a better experience, you should pay more, not less. If I provide you something you need tomorrow as opposed to in two weeks, you will be willing to pay the price for that because it's a value proposition. We're not implementing a low-cost model here. No. It's a value proposition for our clients to provide them with the best experience to give them what they need when they need it. That's where the value is.
Don't you see the risk that there is a realignment in pricing with the larger global accounts with the SMEs? Because now everybody can see.
Simona, I think.
No, go ahead.
I think the point is more, as an industry, we've never been able to get scalability and therefore free up productivity as we grow. If we can, productivity will give you the chance of paying our people better. It will give us a chance to invest in growth. It will give us a chance to compete for business perhaps that we couldn't compete before. I think our point here is very simple. This is not a tool. This is not a model. We are basically making promises that we will not be able to make before. Because of that, it's not that clients are getting a different service or worse service. They're getting a better service. We do not have any request to decrease prices because we are introducing this way of working. If anything, we are increasing fill rate.
If anything, we actually have a reason to talk to clients and say our service is better.
Can I squeeze one more? Very quick.
No, we gave.
You'll be able to.
Let's say if they're up.
As well.
We have a few for a second question.
Yeah, Simon.
Simon van Oppen, Kepler Cheuvreux. I was wondering, you're consolidating from a few smaller offices in the U.S. to 25 larger metropolitan areas. For example, it was mentioned that in Atlanta, you're going from 10 small offices to four or five. What is the scale of this operation, not only in the U.S., but also on a larger global scale?
We will be doing the same in every market where we roll out the talent service models supported by the Randstad Talent Platform. As we go in the next two years and we continue to roll this out, the same scale of, let's say, optimization of our footprint will continue to exist. Yeah. That's why I'm also quite comfortable to say if we look at 2025, I even have more line of sight into further accommodation savings going forward. Remember, we had a restructure already last year as you think ago. This is basically about freeing up and reoptimizing the network. Yeah. Simply Netherlands, France, Netherlands, Belgium, all the big counts, we still need to come.
T wo years ago, you launched this program focusing on growth, digitalization, et cetera, et cetera. Coincidentally, when you look at the organic growth of Randstad as of the beginning of 2023, it has been lagging the one of Manpower and the one of Adecco. So what happened there?
That's a good question. I would argue take it a little bit of a step back and go back to 2019 to 2020 and compare our growth rates in 2021 to 2022. Then indeed what that means from a percentage perspective to 2023, 2024. If we look at market share and if we look at what we've been doing now in 2024, we've been either gaining momentum in organic growth rate, even though we are larger. We've been gaining momentum in most of our markets, or we are already at above market. Yes, there was a flip side effect from the growth we had in 2021 and 2022, as many of you have discussed with me. However, if you look at the last year, we've already been regaining that momentum and things have converged quite a lot, actually quite clear.
I'm more excited about us now continuing to actually build on that momentum and gain market share. I'm just going to repeat the question for the people there. Your question is, do we now expect to outperform our peers? In the medium term, I absolutely expect to outperform our peers and starting already this year in many of our key markets. Even more so as we roll out the specialization with the propositions we have. Yes.
Now we have two last questions, one for Suhasini and one for Simona.
Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question again. It's Suhasini from Goldman Sachs. When you think about the next three to five years in Europe, in particular, how would you position Randstad to benefit from maybe the higher fiscal stimulus, defense spending, for example? It's not a vertical that has been discussed today, so I would love to hear your thoughts on that. Thank you.
Yeah, so one of the areas that we have been focusing on as of late is the defense industry, of course. It's now about 3% of our business. We have, under Jesus's leadership, our CEO's leadership, we have an attack plan for the defense industry, primarily in France, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium. That's where sort of the big players are for the top 25 players and their supply chains. We have already won some pieces of work. Too early to say to name the clients, et cetera, but we're definitely very much focused on that part of the business.
Yeah. Suhasini, you and me talk about this every now and then on a quarter call. Think about the structural labor market, the structure of the labor market in the European Union. Think about talent scarcity and how that compares, for instance, to much more agile labor markets like the United States or some of the Anglo-Saxon markets. Think about what, for instance, Paul of Zorgwerk said today. It's about making sure that everyone that wants to work can work as fast as possible to Sander's point, but also to make sure that organizations in Europe, in particular, where penetration rate is still low than many markets, or at least the Anglo-Saxon markets, can actually benefit only from the capacity that they need. That role, that Partner for Talent role is what Randstad will continue to leverage, and especially with this strategy. Yeah.
Hi, this is again Simona. A high-level question on the specialization strategy. You mentioned that now 75% of the employees, they have a clear specialization. How do you balance that with the need of remaining agile and rebalancing quickly consultants across different industries dependent on macro, but also specific sector dynamics?
No, very good.
Yeah, a great question. Let me first reiterate how important specialization is because specialization in operational is a different profession than specialization in digital. It's a different type of people with different types of characters, with different types of payment. It's not that you can just move some people around from one place to another. There are limitations there. Specialization is really important. Within the specialization, we will need to ramp up and down and redirect people where needed. That's what we've always done, and that's what we will continue to do. With that, we're getting to the end of this exciting afternoon.
I'll leave it to you.
Thank you very much, Jorge . A couple of comments to summarize here. One, our Partner for Talent strategy stands as a rock. We put it in place. It's going to stay in place. We're going to stay the course there. We're going to move from specialization at scale to specialization and experience at scale. Why? Because that's what our clients and talents are looking for. To realize that, we're reinventing our business model, digital first and multi-channel, with a very exciting proposition for our people at Randstad because we give them the best tools in hand in the industry so that they can do a better job and they can do more of what they really enjoy and are very good at, and that is spending quality time with clients and talent.
Because we will be more differentiated in the marketplace, this will position us in a major way for profitable growth. The last thing that I want to leave you with is what you have seen this afternoon is that the future of this new business model is already here and not in small bits and pieces, no, at scale. EUR 2 billion of business going through these models. It is here at scale. The future is already here. You have heard from Martin that the rollout of this is well on its way. We are going to ramp up to have the majority of our markets in this new model over the next two years. The execution is going to be critical. The very fortunate thing for Randstad is that we have the best team in the industry.
You have seen them at work here this afternoon, and there are 40,000 more out there. They are there day in, day out for our clients and talents to do the hard work, but they're also there to transform and take Randstad to the next level. That is what we're going to do over the next two years. We'll stay in touch, and we'll see each other in various calls and meetings. For now, we're going to wrap this up. I would say thank you all for joining today. Thank you all online for joining today. I would say thank you, Randstad team, for doing an excellent job. Let's give them all a big hand. Back to you, Sarah.
Back to me.
Yeah, for the logistics.
Okay. I'm not sure if we've said goodbye to our online audience, but we'd like to do that now. Thank you so much for joining us, everybody online.