Afternoon, everybody. Very warm welcome to the first Hays Investor Day for the last five years since we had our last such event. I think we'd all recognize that the world has transformed absolutely massively since then. The world of work that we operate in is at the very heart of the global economy. With so much fundamental change going on, I feel genuinely privileged to stand here today to describe that story and what it means for us in Hays. Today, I want to paint the picture of how our world has changed, how those changes benefit Hays, what we're doing to capitalize on that and be a winner, and how we'll deliver significant value for our shareholders.
We live now in a world of long-term skill shortages, new job category creation, continual upskilling, higher wage inflation, and changing work habits, and all of those play to our strengths. We also, as we know, live in a world of great uncertainty. Witness the severe initial impact of the pandemic, followed by the sharpest recovery that we've ever seen. Then on the day that we announced what I thought were an excellent set of half-year results, Russia invaded Ukraine. However, over the last 15 years, we've proved that we're highly adept at managing such uncertainties, having tackled so many unexpected events. We sit right at the heart of what economies need most to thrive. That's talented workforces. In telling our story today, there are three things that I want you to look out for.
Firstly, the market for finding the right talent is virtually limitless, and we are already a leader in that space. Secondly, the business that we're building will be characterized by longer-term, more sticky relationships in our markets and focus increasingly on structural opportunities that are less influenced by the cycle. Thirdly, our existing platform gives us more and more diverse opportunities to grow from than we've ever faced, and it's our job today to demonstrate how we'll make all of this real. You can see that we've got a busy schedule. We've got 13 speakers over the next two hours, followed by 30 minutes of Q&A, both here in the room as well as on the online chat. I'll kick off with a backdrop of change in our world of work and the demand that that is bringing us across multiple dimensions, which fuels our investment case.
We'll then deep dive into areas that we believe are genuine dial movers in terms of the shape of our future business, its market position, and our future profitability, showing you in some detail the building blocks for our future. We have very clear ambitions in these areas, for example, doubling our profit out of Germany or delivering GBP 500 million in fees from our technology business, and we'll show you why this is achievable. We'll then bring the story together to show where we believe we can take Hays overall. Let me be clear right up front. This is a business that we believe can double its profits from today's levels, and we've created more options and opportunities from which to do that than we had five years ago.
Of course, nothing gets delivered without a world-class team to do it, so we have over 20 of our senior global management team with us today, as well as the PLC board. We'll all be here at the end to share a drink and conversation with you upstairs, so please take the opportunity to meet the people who are bringing our vision into reality. We have, and we will continue to follow a clear strategy. We have the capability and mindset to make ambitious and bold moves and investments, and we have the leadership to make it happen. Please take the opportunity to meet them and then I'm sure you will share my confidence in what we can achieve in the future. The world of work has changed in so many fundamental ways since we last met, and we're privileged to have arguably the clearest insights as to how?
Changes were underway before COVID hit, but the pandemic has only accelerated those mega trends. They're driven by the changing face of businesses in terms of what they do and how they do it. They're driven by the changing demand of what people want as individuals, and they're also driven by the changing demands of society and the role that business needs to play in a sustainable world. Looking at the business requirements first, every organization is on a journey to reimagine how it delivers value to its customers and its broader stakeholders. That could be digitalization of its operating model, supply chain integrity, data insight, equity and diversity, or sustainability. The list goes on. These issues are becoming more complex by the day, and they're often new challenges to many organizations, and they require access to new skill sets in order to compete in this new world.
By definition, given this rapid change in demand, the world is now characterized by massive skill shortages in many areas. It's getting harder to find and retain the talent an organization needs. For the first time ever, for example, there are now a lot more job openings in the United States than there are qualified people to fill them. As a business whose very essence is to solve this skills mismatch, Hays is therefore working right at the heart of one of the world's biggest economic issues today. At the same time, what people want from their professional life is now permanently different. The Great Resignation, as it's called, has seen a surge in people resigning around the world.
Again, in the States, over 4 million people quitting every month. Our own Hays candidate surveys suggest up to 70% of people are actively considering changing roles in the next 12 months, and there are many factors behind this. Firstly, the pandemic heralded a world of remote working and people as well as businesses have seen the benefit that that flexibility brings, including the ability to work from anywhere. Most people in the white-collar space want to permanently retain some of that flexibility, and they will demand it of their employer. If it's not available, they will leave. There's also significant evidence that individuals are far more focused on the purpose of their employer's business. This is especially important for millennials who now constitute the majority of most workforces.
They want fulfillment and their own sense of purpose from work, and given that the cultural glue between employers and employees has weakened during lockdowns, they will move to find it. Importantly, in an inflationary environment, skilled people are more aware than ever of their own worth. Underlying wage inflation is here for the first time in decades, and again, people have a greater willingness to move if they feel more highly valued and paid elsewhere. All of this means that we're now in a world of more rapid job churn, rising wages, and faster hiring processes and decisions as organizations compete for talent. All of these factors benefit our business, and I believe they are long-lasting. Finally, society is demanding more of the business community. Organizations are rightly being challenged to provide greater fairness of opportunity and to build more diverse and inclusive workforces.
We are addressing this for our clients by reaching into multiple communities of unexpected and often underrepresented talent. We're addressing our own internal challenges too. Most recently, for example, having set targets to increase female representation in our own senior leadership. We also all have a role to play in ensuring we live in a more sustainable world. Again, businesses are struggling with how to deliver this. We became a carbon neutral company last year, and we've just received approval for our science-based targets, and it's our aspiration to be the first global recruiter to reach net zero emissions. That puts us in a wonderful place to help our clients resource their own sustainability needs, which is a whole new market opportunity for us. All of these factors coming together means the creation, development, and retention of workforces is becoming more complex and more expensive.
Finding training and retaining talent is getting harder. Working models and environments are in a state of flux. New job categories are being created faster than ever before. Skill shortages are everywhere, and they'll likely get worse as working age populations decline. That supply-demand imbalance is creating wage inflation, and frankly, internal HR departments are struggling to solve these new problems in our new world. Yet all of these factors around job churn, wage inflation, and skills matching play to what we do for a living, and they will boost our profitability. We've never seen such a rich mix of factors that all drive our business forward, and we've never been so relevant in helping solve these problems as we are today. Why will Hays be a winner in this new world?
Well, we start from a good place because for the last 15 years, we've purposefully been building a business to capitalize on what the world now needs, and we have many competitive advantages. Firstly, we have the broadest and deepest network of capability and infrastructure in the skilled talent market available in the world today. We can deliver for all sizes of clients in every key economy and across all professional skill sets. We're market leaders in the fastest-growing talent markets such as technology, life sciences, and engineering, as well as the support functions that every organization needs, be it finance, HR, or marketing, for example. As a leader, clients turn to us to solve their needs, and as we know, building market leadership is very hard to replicate.
Secondly, the richness of our talent networks of candidates gives us unrivaled access to the scarce resources that everyone is looking for. However, building rich talent pools means we need to add significant value to our candidates repeatedly over time. It's not simply about helping them with a one-off job application anymore. It's about expert advice at many stages in their career, insights into where the best roles or salaries are, access to the best training or presentation of the best opportunities, whether they be permanent roles or contractor assignments. That's why we believe so passionately in providing both perm and temp recruiting in equal measure, why we've provided so much free access to training on our learning portals, and why we publish so much valuable career content on our social media channels to literally millions of people.
This has all enabled us to build millions of long-term relationships with talented professionals worldwide, and that means that we have relationships with the very best people for our clients available in the market today. Thirdly, we've invested over many years to build a business that is balanced between more established recruitment markets and those that are still structurally immature. Whatever the market though, we aim to be the local leader, just as we are in our biggest businesses of the U.K., Australia, and Germany. This leadership means that clients turn to us to find the talent that they need, and it's often the first time they've outsourced their recruitment in the more immature markets across Europe and Asia.
This, in turn, enables us to accelerate the structural opening of these markets, where we see decades of opportunity ahead and where we can build more businesses as large as the ones that we already have here in the U.K., over in Australia, and in Germany. As we'll show later, we also have material structural opportunities to grow in these more established markets too. Fourthly, over the years, we've built a formidable client base, literally in the tens of thousands. Every single one of those clients is facing similar challenges, whether they're the smallest SME or the biggest enterprises in the world. To many SMEs, we are their sole access to the talent market. We supply the majority of what they need, and as their needs change, they need new roles filling. Our extensive networks and local relationships are therefore best positioned to help.
There are also many SMEs that we don't work for yet, and they represent a huge opportunity for us to leverage our network more extensively. Then finally, at the other end of the spectrum, over the last decade, we have very deliberately built a leading position in large enterprise clients. Today, over half of our fees come from clients who spend over GBP 100,000 with us, which means they have real scale. For a number of those organizations, we may do the majority of their recruitment through our outsourced service lines, but for most, we currently only service a smaller proportion of their business, and that's a tremendous opportunity to leverage existing relationships and to take further market share.
Building that global enterprise network and capability that we uniquely have, whether it's through complex outsourcing, project services delivery, or a worldwide network to serve clients across borders, has taken time, money and effort, and as we'll see shortly, offers us opportunities to add more services to meet new demands. Bringing all of those five aspects together, we have all of the building blocks already in place to now move our business to the next stage. From our start in purely specialist transactional recruitment, over the years we've added preferred supplier arrangements, many of which have since evolved to outsourced MSP and RPO contracts, where we're now market leaders, servicing some of the world's largest organizations globally with the bulk of their recruitment needs.
As clients need to future-proof their own business from a people perspective, those trends have accelerated and we have added workforce advisory services to our portfolio in areas such as equity, diversity and inclusion consulting, onboarding, assessment and development, and employer brand development. All of this together means that we are increasingly going to market as an HR and talent services business based on thousands of deep and long-term client partnerships and bringing an integrated suite of services to clients to help them grow and maintain their own competitive advantages. Finally, given our unrivaled access to the best talent, and in partnership with a number of our clients, we have recently added the ability to deliver project services in markets such as technology, engineering, and life sciences.
In these, we create and manage project teams that deliver outcomes for our clients, and we'll hear several examples of this soon. Project services represents a massive market. It's even larger than the recruitment market, and it offers the potential for potentially higher margins. We're scaling up our capability to deliver these services globally. What comes next? Well, those of you who have been on our previous investor days, as you know, we've long based our strategy on industry megatrends and the opportunities that they present, and today is no different. We already have the foundation, infrastructure, and capability into which to invest in order to evolve and grow, and there are several themes to how we will do this. Clearly, in a market with limitless demand, our consultant capacity will increase over time, but we have the infrastructure to absorb that.
For example, we've already successfully added over 2,000 new consultants into the business in the last year alone. We're also further investing in developing our leaders so that they can open new specialisms or develop new operating models, supplemented by judicious recruitment of external experts from outside Hays. Secondly, we've accelerated our strategic growth initiatives, and two years on from the start, we've already achieved more than we originally planned. Our largest business, technology, is now a global market leader with fees at record levels up 30% year-on-year and well above pre-pandemic. We've launched new services in hot markets such as engineering or defense. We've won a list of new and important enterprise clients, and we're servicing them across borders. We've delivered a range of advanced technology solutions to our clients using a combination of onshore and offshore resources.
These are just examples, and going forward, we'll be doing more of the same to continually reposition our business at the heart of what the world now needs. That means, for example, opening new subspecialisms to meet demand in emerging areas such as Salesforce, cybersecurity, or sustainability. It means adding more client management capability to move more enterprise clients from a low-level transactional relationship to a long-term strategic partnership. As clients evolve, it means further broadening and deepening our service lines to support them, whether those be in advisory or project services. We'll do all of this through a combination of building our own, partnering with others, or making modest bolt-on acquisitions to give us the industrial strength that we will require globally. I see this as a natural evolution, leveraging the core infrastructure that we already have in place.
However, given the sheer scale of market demand for talent and associated HR services, our long-term prize for making these moves is enormous. Remember, though, that while the look and shape of Hays may well evolve as we grow, our very essence remains around finding the right people at the right time for the right role. That's what we're world-class at, and that remains unchanged. Clearly, with us headed for a future alongside our clients and candidates as their long-term partner in human capital, our brand also needs to support that positioning. For the last decade, our identity as recruiting experts worldwide, I think, has served us very well indeed. But today, as you've seen already, we're already so much more than just a recruiting business. Our strategy is to become ever more deeply embedded with our clients to enable them to get more good work done.
Hence, we've enhanced our brand proposition to better describe what we want the world to think of when they hear of Hays, and I'm delighted to preview that today. Working for your tomorrow. This simple phrase captures putting our customers, both clients and candidates, right at the heart of what we do. It's about preparing organizations and people to be stronger tomorrow than they are today. It reinforces our ambition to become more integrated partners with our clients and delivering more than recruitment transactions. It supports our ambition to be lifelong partners to millions of the world's top talent and help them in their own development and career journey. It also opens our own eyes and raises our ambition for what we need to provide to get there. It's a powerful statement, and it shows our intent as a global professional services organization.
In summary, the last few years have brought us a new world and the ability to start a new chapter in our Hays story. I think this chapter is going to be our best yet, and our compelling investment case is designed to deliver excellent returns for our shareholders. Companies often assert that their people are their greatest asset, and our job to make sure that they actually do have the very best could not be more relevant in the world today. The market to do that is truly vast, and with a combination of greater job churn and skill shortages that we now live with, it's going to get bigger still. We start our next chapter from a position of strength. We already have built market-leading positions and a global infrastructure to match.
We have opportunities to grow in every single one of our businesses, from the biggest to the smallest. We benefit from the tailwinds of wage inflation, and we have pricing power of our own for the scarce talent that we supply. We have the financial resources to make any investment we may require as we broaden and deepen our capability and pursue structural opportunities. Above all, we have the ambition and the attitude to bring all of this to life. You'll feel that passion from every single one of us who are here today because we all believe we can build something very powerful, unique, and valuable.
Think of us now becoming the global company at the heart of so many organizations, large and small, and all around the world, helping them solve for all their talent issues and delivering them the skilled workforces that they need as their long-term strategic partner. What will this deliver for shareholders? Higher quality of earnings as our relationships become stickier and more valuable, including a range of higher margin services in fast-growing markets. The doubling of our profits and doing so from more diversified revenue streams. Significant free cash flow, far in excess of our investment needs, and distributed to shareholders in the most appropriate way. In my 15 years as CEO, I've never seen so many opportunities in front of us. Our business is stronger than it's ever been, and it's proved its resilience through the pandemic and the subsequent recovery.
We've also learned a lot in recent years, and we've raised our ambition for our business. Our job this afternoon is to make that real for you so you can also see how genuinely exciting that is. Let's turn to that, and let's start with our customers. What they're looking for has changed, and they're looking for partners to work with them to solve more complex workforce challenges than ever before. Let me hand over to Steve Weston, our Chief Customer Officer, who can tell us that story on what we are doing to reimagine the relationships that we have with our clients and candidates.
Thank you and good afternoon. Alistair has explained the many complex challenges our customers, and by which I mean clients and candidates, are facing. Their expectations and demands of our industry have significantly increased. Moving away from transactional relationships towards much deeper partnerships. The pace and complexity of change has accelerated significantly, and they want us to help. This represents a major opportunity for Hays, allowing us to fill more jobs, deliver more services, and make more profit. As you know, we have many thousands of customers and millions of candidates to whom we communicate daily. We wanted to gain a far greater insight. Using a respected third party, we recently completed the most comprehensive ever research program to truly understand our customers' needs in this new post-pandemic world. The results of this program clearly demonstrated that our customers are demanding far more tailored and personalized services.
They want a partner who drives their thinking forward, who offers access to the data and insights they need to inform their thinking for today and, of course, for the future. A partner who can challenge them on their strategies and who understands their business to such an extent that they are able to help them improve and accelerate decision-making. They want way more than a transactional delivery partner. They want us to redefine our role as a leadership partner, advising them how to solve complex HR issues. This is now the basis on which we base our customer service. We believe transactional excellence alone now falls way short of customer needs, and that by becoming leadership partners, we offer a wealth of new opportunities to move up the value chain. Leadership partner status is now setting Hays apart from the competition.
In addition to our delivery excellence, which of course is a given, it means the following four things, highly personalized services for both clients and candidates, driven using technology at scale to inform and enhance the human elements of the process, deep expertise and best practice of today and of course of the future, scale and breadth and depth of insights to better drive decision-making, and building very large but highly focused and engaged talent network communities. We have now defined three pillars to frame and inform our strategy, and they are knowledge through scale, deep understanding, and meaningful innovation. Examples of what we mean by these are shown on the slide that you can now see. I will talk to how we are redefining customer service in pillars one and two, and my colleagues will later demonstrate our progress in pillar three.
Clearly, the market is looking for insights, and our network and data is perfectly set up to supply these. However, we would not have been able to embark upon this strategic shift without our significant historic investment in our technology and operational practices, putting data at the heart of everything we do. We set out our ambitions to drive greater value from our data back in 2019. Those of you who were at our technology seminar may remember this data funnel slide, which itself was an evolution of our find and engage marketing model. This represented our data capture ecosystem at that time. I'm excited to say we have now created an enhanced, practical, and highly automated solution to answer the rapidly growing list of client needs.
This allows us to process tens of millions of data points daily, turning them into meaningful signals and actionable insights at a scale and depth previously impossible, and I think unrivaled in our industry. First, let me show you how our insights are driving better engagement with both clients and candidates about the roles that they are looking to fill. Clients have told us that the scale of information we bring is a key differentiating asset. We truly add value here, presenting customers with real-time information to significantly enhance their decision-making and ultimately their ability to engage the right talent at the right time. Combining our data, signals, and trusted third-party capability, we've created an in-house app for our consultants. This delivers market data at a scale and depth that's very difficult for any of our competitors to match and near impossible for in-house teams to match.
We launched this capability in our technology business in July 2021. You can see here that if I'm a consultant, I can demonstrate on our platform to a customer in real time exactly where their role sits in terms of supply and demand. How does the salary they're offering compare to the market, and what do they need to pay to genuinely compete in that market? And also, of course, what is happening locally in that market. In the candidate context, we give confidence that we have the expert knowledge about the market and the job opportunities that are relevant to that candidate at this time. Secondly, we have redefined the way that talent engage with us via Hays Talent Networks. This has a significant benefit for the client, candidate, and of course, our own consultants.
The transition from delivery excellence to leadership partner relies upon us identifying and connecting with the right candidates at the right time. Ensuring we really understand what's right for them and their careers. As Alistair said, in a skills-short market, having the right access to talent is a major advantage to us. We address this through our Hays Talent Network, which is the community ecosystem we built to support our consultants on top of our vast digital data lake, significantly optimizing our digital candidate sourcing strategies. A major benefit of Talent Networks is that we are far less reliant on external job boards to find candidates in our major markets. Our alternative program of digital engagement has a new-to-Hays candidate rate that is two to three times what we have ever seen coming from traditional job board channels.
The diversification of our marketing is attracting new, high-quality candidates into our ecosystem that frankly simply did not come through job boards. Within the Australian market, for instance, we have reduced our job board advertising spend across our key traditional job boards by up to 90% despite our fees increasing by well over 20%. For our consultants, all that is required is for them to set the parameters of the talent network that they need to populate. In real time, the ecosystem is constantly evaluating the vast array of signals we receive via a variety of channels and is constantly updating the availability and approachability signals of suitable, available, and engaged candidates. The powerful Talent Networks ecosystem is then automatically delivering the Talent Networks to the consultant, which of course reduces our time to shortlist.
For example, let's say I'm a consultant in Sydney and I recruit for digital marketeers. This requires a broad range of skills, but I can easily set up a Talent Network to comprehensively scout across our existing data lake and any new applications. The system dynamically adds candidates who match my parameters and who are flagged as highly approachable. I've effectively created a community that I can engage with far quicker than ever before. This has been in place at scale since September 2021, and I'm delighted to say we have seen a 15% reduction in time to fill roles. We believe Talent Networks are the new standard for our industry, delivering the right outcomes for all operational stakeholders. This is truly knowledge through scale using technology as the enabler, putting our partnerships and relationships first.
We now have 25,000 of these Talent Networks live today, with many new ones constantly coming on stream based upon the emerging demands for different skills, roles, and opportunities as they enter our digital ecosystem. Looking ahead, I expect Talent Networks to be an important tool in driving new consultants up the productivity curve faster. This new method of accessing and engaging with the best candidates sets us apart from the competition. Thirdly, we built a specific ecosystem to help candidates upskill. This has only been possible due to our deep understanding of career journeys made across hundreds of thousands of roles. It is no longer just enough to offer candidates advice. Leadership partner status means you need to demonstrate personalized insights on how they can thrive and how they can better equip themselves for future success.
Our proprietary ecosystem uses millions of data points amassed over many years, coupled with our complex algorithm and unique Hays ontology to enable us to map skills against roles dynamically. We can offer candidates a range of pathways for their careers based on the successful careers of others who followed a similar path. We can also give candidates access to training and upskilling resources through our global partnerships, allowing them to consume that data or those courses in the format best suited to their learning style. To bring this to life, let me assume I've applied for a role, but I didn't unfortunately get that job. When the consultant lets me know this, they can also connect me as a value add to a learning playlist they curated for me. This may be technical skills or indeed soft skills such as problem-solving.
I can then choose from a huge array of content and consume it in my own time as a free value-added service. We initially launched this, the first stage of this ecosystem, in May 2020 in response to the pandemic. In the past 18 months, more than 26 million minutes of training have been consumed, and we have created over 5,800 unique pieces of content. The reskilling of workforces throughout the world is one of the biggest challenges facing every country, and we intend to constantly evolve our ecosystem to be the leader in insight-driven reskilling. Only possible because of our deep understanding of how the market is actually reacting. In conclusion, our customers are rightly demanding more of us and the industry that we sit within. However, these demands create major opportunities to win market share by us by delivering outstanding market, outstanding service.
We have significantly enhanced our offering to customers by creating market-leading ecosystems which support deeper and more meaningful partnerships. Our Talent Networks allow us to engage with far more people, fill more jobs, and build stickier long-term client relationships. These networks work at a speed and scale driven by the breadth and depth of millions of data points that we capture in real time. The investment to build these data points began many years ago. It is simply not possible, in my opinion, to short-circuit that process, and I believe this is a tangible competitive advantage for Hays now and of course, into the future. It allows us to build more and stronger long-term partnerships with the talent our clients need.
It also enables us to bring real-time insights to our clients on what is happening right now in the market and how we can jointly solve their talent challenges. To me, that is partnership in action. I firmly believe we have the data, insights, people, and processes to be the industry's leadership partner of choice, and we will continue to enhance our ecosystems to set the bar even higher. I will now hand over to Matt and Alex, who will explain the many structural opportunities we see in the enterprise client market.
Thanks, Steve. Good afternoon. I'm Matthew Dickason, global head of our outsourced solutions business, and I'm here with Alex Heise, who's head of enterprise clients for Germany and also EMEA COO. The global enterprise market for recruitment and HR services is huge, and we've built a fantastic platform on which to grow and take market share. Before I set out our strategy and ambitions, it's worth defining exactly what we mean by enterprise. When we talk about enterprise clients, we mean the provision of structured recruitment and other HR services to blue chip government and other large organizations. These services tend to be delivered under more complex agreements. As you heard from Alastair, our market share has increased significantly, and we now generate over 40% of group fees from clients who spend over GBP 250,000 per annum with Hays.
This represents our top 400 clients, circa 150 of which have full outsourced arrangements with us. These are typically managed service provision for non-permanent or recruitment process outsourcing for permanent. These contracts will generate an estimated GBP 200 million in financial year 2022. The other 250 clients in our top 400 are predominantly preferred supplier or PSL arrangements where we are one of several providers supplying into them. The next 800 clients spend between GBP 100,000 and GBP 250,000 per annum and represent circa 14% of group fees. Again, predominantly PSL arrangements. Since 2016, we have doubled the size of our full outsourced solutions business through a greater share of client spend and a 60% increase in the number of clients that we service.
That's why we believe these PSL clients described represent a major upsell opportunity for us for deeper partnerships. For example, if we moved 1/3 of the 800 customers in the GBP 100,000-GBP 250,000 per year band into the average fee that we generate out of the 400 clients, we would generate an incremental GBP 110 million worth of fees by this upsell alone, which is almost 10% of Hays current group fees. Over many years, we have deliberately built a large business to focusing on enterprise clients. These clients are looking for broader and deeper partnerships which add real value. They are dealing with elevated talent supply mismatch, higher staff turnover, wage inflation, and an increased focus on and delivery against an ESG agenda.
As Steve set out, they are demanding higher value add advisory services delivered from a position of deep knowledge and insight, set out with a level of consistency and visibility that defines customer service, leading to much deeper partnerships which will grow over time, and increased customer stickiness and higher competitive barriers. The global staffing market is huge, with a predicted spend of $600 billion in 2022, up an estimated 9% year-over-year. 86% of the spend is unsurprisingly in non-permanent recruitment. Interestingly, the EMEA region is now larger than the Americas, accounting for 40% of the global opportunity. The MSP and RPO market accounts for roughly 1/3 of global revenues and is growing at twice the rate with improving price points as customers look to quality and talent supply tightens.
Delivery in this market is complex and requires a different operational model to be successful. A model we are now really expert at delivering and capturing market share, increasing volumes and driving profits. Breaking down the global staffing market, the Americas accounts for 32% of staffing spend. However, it represents 58% of the global MSP and RPO market. This is a sign of the structural shift to greater formalized outsourcing partnerships that is increasingly evident across EMEA and Asia Pacific, where we believe there are decades of structural growth opportunity ahead. As an example, the use of vendor management systems used for managing non-perm recruitment spend in the U.S.A., which is a good proxy for outsourcing, is 85%. However, it's only 29% and 13% in EMEA and Asia Pacific respectively.
We see this gap closing, but it will take many years in our core markets and provides a prime beneficiary opportunity for Hays. Hays is also in a strong position to win when you consider our core recruitment specialisms, including technology, engineering, and life sciences. Outsourced non-perm solutions are dominated by technology with 31% of all spend, followed by 22% in accounting and finance and professional, and 21% in engineering and life sciences. Essentially, this means 74% of outsourced contingent spend is in our sweet spot, which provides Hays with great opportunity, geographic and domain strengths. Customers increasingly want their workforce services, elements of their HR advice and execution provided by one trusted partner.
This has created the ideal platform for us to leverage our deep-seated relationships and respond to customer demand in broader services that realize the opportunity that's presented by this $87 billion HR advisory market, which is expected to grow to $110 billion by 2026. The solutions the enterprise clients need and the way that they procure them has expanded both geographically and across service type. We have spent the last 10 years building the leading specialist enterprise platform. That is why we globalized our outsourced solutions business in 2016, bringing universal best practice and consistency of service to customers around the world. We created sales and solutions teams that apply a method and approach that means we now win an excellent 47% of all the outsourced opportunities that we participate in, up from 27% in 2016.
Our win rate in structured PSL opportunities is much higher, which is evidence of the market's understanding of the value that we bring. To ensure this consistency and provide certainty in delivery, we have developed a hub and spoke model with eight dedicated lower cost shared service centers covering the globe. They integrate account management with best practice sourcing, and we far exceed the competition in fulfillment. We typically capture 50%-80% of all the jobs in an MSP and well over 90% in an RPO. The result is a highly profitable business, overall in line with group conversion rates and in some cases above. As importantly for our future growth, we generate high customer satisfaction evidenced by our outstanding customer retention rate of over 98%.
We have delivered market-leading growth, and since we globalized, have more than doubled to over GBP 200 million a year in our outsourced business, a compound annual growth rate of 14%, which includes the COVID period. Our location strategy, technology leverage, and placement productivity mean that while our business has scaled, our cost per placement has reduced, driving profitability into the model. We have multiple routes to winning new outsourcing contracts, not least by upselling to the over 1,000 preferred supplier clients we already have. We can also expand existing outsourced clients across geography, sell additional high-margin services to existing customers, and continue to build a targeted sales network and develop and win new clients. Customers increasingly want more from us, including broader recruitment services, human capital advice, and expansion across geographies. We have invested to support a much bigger enterprise business.
Implementing Sales Cloud globally and integrating it with our marketing, operational, and finance systems to provide a single holistic view and understanding of the customer. We're laying the foundations for deeper and more significant partnerships into the future. Our business is highly resilient. Even through the depths of the COVID pandemic, our outsourced solutions business grew as we supported our customers in organizational change and introduced additional services. Understandably, customers like Roche and AstraZeneca had elevated demand and increased spend. Other organizations expanded the suite of services we provide, like Arm, who added early careers, insight into diversity, equity, and inclusion, and also managed services. Of course, some clients' volumes did drop during the period, but this was balanced by increased working hours and elevated demand for technical skills with businesses like Commonwealth Bank of Australia, IBM, and Birmingham City Council.
Our customers increasingly look for HR advisory services in workforce management. These include supporting their ESG agenda by designing and applying diversity initiatives to redesigning customers' employee value proposition. We've been delivering these services for years. However, we are now looking strategically to add capability via build, buy, or partner approach in order to meet customer demand. Advisory work can be summarized in five key areas, people, process, technology, brand, and analytics. Within people, we see demands for talent acquisition strategy and structure across early careers, lateral hiring, and executive. We also advise on balancing non-perm and permanent workforce dynamics in a much more flexible total talent management environment. Our knowledge and unrivaled talent networks drive our customers' competitive advantage. Fundamental to the success of any people strategy are effective processes that are supported by properly implemented and integrated technology solutions.
We have technology deeply embedded in our systems, processes, and also in our partnerships, combining with some of the world's most recognized HR technology providers to develop solutions for our customers. Of course, in our current tight talent market, and with a workforce that is increasingly focused on purpose, we must also design and deploy effective employee value proposition for our customers and maximize their brand's impact in the market. Our ability to draw on the deep insights provided by our proprietary Hays systems, coupled with selected third-party data, means our analytics and insights add genuine value to our clients. Alex, I wonder if you could bring it to life for everybody.
Sure. Good afternoon. When I took over the enterprise business in Germany in 2019, it was already a big business in our organization with good productivities and good results. We needed to deepen and broaden our partnerships. From this point in time, we focused on the share of customer wallet as the key measure of our success. Surprisingly, our market share in 2019 was only 20%. That means we had to make a few changes to our organizational structure, and we also introduced key account plans for each client, including a C-level engagement plan.
We also adopted a much more centralized approach with dedicated teams in sales and key account management, and we introduced a completely new approach in sourcing with a big center in Essen in the northern part of Germany, delivering all the recruitment into these clients. After only a short period of time, we saw improved results. We delivered more consistency, more transparency. We saw better productivities in sales and in recruitment. Higher fill rates led to significantly increased market share and finally better client satisfaction, what makes it today even harder for our competitors to enter our markets. Even the satisfaction in our employees or for our employees was better, because we were able to offer them new career opportunities, different career paths after the reorganization.
Our share of wallet increased by 10% to 30% in only two years, representing an incremental fee growth of GBP 20 million per year. There's a lot more to come because when I look at the fill rates right now, we have a real opportunity in the next three to five years to increase our share of wallet to 50%. This change we made in 2019 was timely because in the times of uncertainty with pandemics and geopolitical crisis, we see and saw that this business is much more resilient, much more stable. As you know, in Germany or Germany as a country with high conversion rates above 30%, I'm really delighted to say that today the enterprise business is the most profitable, most innovative business we have.
We are establishing ourselves as the platform, as the knowledge partner who shares best practices across different industries. Matthew and I, we are heavily working on expanding these relationships to Continental Europe, U.K. and Ireland, Americas, and Asia Pacific. Our trusted C-level contacts we have helping us in these initiatives. Internally, we are making sure that we are leveraging the expertise and the know-how we built for so many years to our international colleagues to deliver to our clients this consistent approach with the global operating method. Do you wanna summarize it now, Matthew?
Thanks, Alex. Hopefully, you can see why we're so excited about enterprise clients as a growth driver. Structured recruitment services that address broader client requirements are growing at almost twice the rate of the broader industry. Moreover, the structural shifts that are accelerating in our key markets, like Continental Europe and Asia Pacific, coupled with our now recognized capability in North America and our customers' desire to globalize and broaden services, puts us in a fantastic position to capitalize. We are poised to reap the benefits from many years of investment in people capability, technology, and physical infrastructure. We have a scalable and flexible business that improves in effectiveness and efficiency as we add customers. We have seen this in action, and our model has been tested and proven to be resilient and highly profitable through the cycle, including the pandemic.
We are well-placed to support our customers in addressing the changing world of work and in turn realize structural opportunity for growth. We have the footprint, we lead the market. By continuing to evolve our services to address our customers' needs, I'm confident we can take market share and double our GBP 200 million outsource solutions business over the next five years, just as we have done over the last five. We will do that through the strength of our customer partnerships. With that, I'll now hand over to David and James to talk about our global technology business.
Good afternoon. I am James Milligan, Global Head of Hays Technology, and this is David Brown, the CEO of Hays US. Today, we're going to talk to you about Hays Technology business. We'll share with you our fantastic track record over the last 10 years, the transformation of our core business from a legacy to high-growth technologies, and most importantly, how we're going to continue to grow and outperform the market to become a GBP 500 million net fee business over the next five years. Hays Technology is a global leader in a market of limitless opportunity. As of today, the global technology recruitment market size by contract revenue and permanent fees, according to SIA data, is about $100 billion. Hays has a 3% share of this market.
As you can see from the U.S. market data, which is reflective of global trends, the market is big and has grown 63% over the last 20 years, with significant growth to come. Most importantly, jobs are being created at a far faster rate than candidates are becoming skilled, and hence there is a growing talent gap. Over the past decade, Hays Technology net fees have increased from GBP 100 million to GBP 300 million in financial year 2022. Our core business has been built on a strong foundation with a mix of 80% contracting, which has a nine to 12 month visibility and 20% perm in core areas of project and change management, including product management and customer success, software development in DevOps and cloud. To further accelerate our growth, over the last two years, we've made a significant investment in scaling the business.
I appointed myself as the global head of technology and establishing a clear global growth strategy. We have augmented the strong existing leadership team with a lateral hiring from the competition to ensure that we have a management infrastructure in place for accelerated growth. We increased our consultant numbers from 1,800 to 2,500, with a focus of growth in IT contracting and exponentially growing technology sectors where demand significantly outstrips supply. We have repositioned the technology business so it resonates with the talent and the organizations who are key to our growth, creating a new vertical structure with a much fresher tech-oriented tone of voice and engagement strategy that is content and community-led. The result of these investments has been to accelerate our growth over the post-pandemic period and position ourselves for future growth over the next few years.
The talent mismatch is particularly acute in certain areas of the market, and this slide demonstrates some of the technologies where the gap is widening and demand is far outstripping supply. This picture is not a static group of technologies, but an illustration of a dynamic of a fast-moving market. This supports our strategy of focusing on markets where there is exponential growth opportunities. Today, we will share with you our growth strategy to outperform the market and become a GBP 500 million net fee business by 2027. The strategy has five core pillars. Number one, continue to grow our existing IT contracting and core technology business. Number two, geographically expand our core technology business across all 32 countries. Number three, investing and growing practices in high growth technologies, of which we'll share some of those successes with you today.
Number four, deepen our client relationships, moving up the value chain by broadening the services we offer. Number five, by growing our technology project services business, which I'll cover in detail later. There are significant opportunities to grow in all markets, even where we are the market-leading position as we launch new products and services. We have a market-leading position in Germany, the U.K. and Ireland, and Australia and New Zealand. We experience significant growth in countries where Hays has a footprint but hasn't historically focused on the technology sector. For example, we've doubled the size of our technology tech business in France and Spain since financial year 2019 to GBP 11 million and GBP 7 million net fees, respectively, in financial year 2022. We have done this by scaling IT contracting with a focus on our core markets.
As a result, we have a top three position in most economies we operate in, with an aspiration to become number one. In the U.S., we've become a top fifty player and have big ambitions for the future. I'll now hand you across to Dave Brown to talk to you about some of our initiatives that are driving growth in the US.
Great. Thanks, James. I'm Dave Brown, the CEO of Hays U.S., and technology represents 60% of the U.S. business. As James mentioned, a key part of our growth strategy is based on building out additional practices in high-growth tech areas that are structurally very attractive to us for a few reasons. First, these are skills that are in high demand today and expected to grow at an even faster rate than the overall tech job market over the next 10 years. Second, although there is a job candidate disparity, there is a large enough supply of candidates in the market for us to deliver to our clients and to build a significant business. Finally, the average salaries for permanent hires and margins for contractors exceed those of our core technology business.
An additional benefit of these specialist skills is that our ability to deliver in these high-growth areas opens the doors to new customers to service their needs across their technology stack. I'll present a couple of examples today of where we've started to build these practices and talk about how big a part of the overall technology business we believe that these can become. First, we'll look at our cybersecurity practice, where our U.S. business is our largest globally. As you can see, cyber has all of the attractive characteristics that I previously mentioned. The average salary is higher than our core technology business, and our average fee in the U.S. is 3% higher as well.
This is certainly no surprise to anybody in the room, but cybersecurity professionals and their skills are some of the most in-demand areas right now, and jobs are expected to accelerate at a rate of nearly four times the overall tech job market. Now turning to performance. In just two years, this specialism has grown to over GBP 9 million this financial year and is forecasted to reach over GBP 15 million next year. We're now in the process of opening additional cyber practices throughout the group. This is unquestionably a massive opportunity for Hays globally. Another example of our transformation into high-growth areas is the build-out of our Salesforce practice. Salesforce's ecosystem generates billions of revenue and millions of jobs annually and is expected to grow at a rate of over twice as fast as the overall tech market.
Salesforce has an even higher average salary than cyber and equally strong contract margin opportunities. We began building talent networks in Salesforce in 2021, and from a standing start, we expect to deliver GBP 5 million in fees globally in only 18 months. We are now positioned to accelerate our growth and to build a much larger Salesforce business globally. Additionally, we have launched practices in Workday, ServiceNow, intelligent automation, and AI, which we expect will follow the same growth trajectory. We've already applied these same principles to data science and cloud, which combined generate GBP 25 million in fees today.
What's the most exciting part of this story is that this practice led strategy is that there are 10-15 other technologies that meet the criteria that I outlined, each of which we believe can be GBP 20 million fee businesses within five years of launch. This approach is a key growth driver for our technology business. Now moving on to our fourth pillar, that's around deepening and broadening the relationship that we have with our technology customers. Increasingly, clients are looking for a leadership partner who can work with them to solve their problems across a variety of areas, which is heightened with the acute skill shortages in technology. We have an opportunity to be that partner. Now, building on today's presentations, here you see a representation of the types of services that clients are increasingly looking for a partner to provide.
Contingent recruitment has been and will continue to be the predominant entry point for us to build world-class relationships with our larger clients. Our goal is to establish an even greater level of partnership by managing supply chains and projects, by providing advisory services, and becoming a technology talent creator through our innovative Hire Train Deploy program. The benefits to our customers will be clear. All of their needs will be met by one partner versus having to manage a supply chain of companies. They'll have better access to the data and strong insights that we offer to help their business grow. They'll have access to the Hays Talent Networks. Finally, all of these will deliver strong cost efficiencies for our customers. The benefits to Hays are equally as clear.
We will gain market share, and revenues will become stickier as we move up the value chain with our customers, and we will be able to leverage these customer relationships globally. Now, there's just one example where we have done this is with a major client of ours in the U.S. Over the last four years, we've moved from being one of many suppliers to an exclusive partner, having now filled over 1,000 roles. This strategic partnership led to us being awarded their MSP program in the U.K. in FY 2021 and in Germany this past year. We believe that we can replicate this type of relationship throughout our technology business around the world. Back over to you, James, to talk about project services.
Thanks, Dave. We've established a rapidly growing presence in project services, an area that Alistair mentioned earlier. We've seen a shift in buying patterns in major economies over time from pure time and materials contractors to more project-based solutions. Our focus is on small contracts, typically between GBP 1 million and GBP 5 million in revenue with a low risk profile where we're primarily providing project management services and staff augmentation. This segment has a market value of GBP 40 billion. One of the attractions of this market is that it allows clients to transfer traditional revenue expenditure and headcount towards CapEx projects, spreading the cost of the project. Clearly, this is a huge global market, and we're targeting a relatively small part of it.
However, we're very excited by the growth potential and investing to scale a business in the U.K. a nd Germany and launching in Australia and New Zealand and France. We've seen our net fees grow from GBP 2 million just in the U.K. in financial year 2020 to GBP 11 million globally in financial year 2022, targeting enterprise clients and public sector organizations. Project services businesses talk more about revenues than fees, but for consistency, we've expressed our scale and targets in fees. We expect that the project services will deliver a material growth contribution as part of our roadmap to GBP 500 million in technology fees. We are targeting GBP 50 million in fees by financial year 2027, and we've made a great start. Any tech growth strategy is dependent on accessing talent.
Finding and engaging these skills has become increasingly difficult over recent years, and we've adopted the talent network strategies Steve outlined earlier, including integration of 12 global partners into the ecosystem. Using this approach has enabled us to build communities using the strength of our people and technology by one, establishing lower cost sourcing centers across the world. Two, Extensive use of marketing technology to nurture these networks with relevant content. Three, Building strong real-time approachability signals which gives us first mover access to engaging the best talent. Four, High visibility of candidate availability in the non-perm, perm market, which is a key differentiator. Five, Borderless identification of talent. Alongside the adoption of talent networks, we are building and nurturing external communities such as our exclusive partnership with Showcode by creating a white label platform called CodeCo.
This allows us to create a global community of curated software developers who will ultimately become Hays candidates. The platform pre-validates their skills, and as the partnership progresses, we will drive suitable candidates and signals into our ecosystem based on real-time skill information derived from their portfolio, coding challenges, hackathons, and GitHub repos. We believe that our clear strategy will deliver GBP 500 million of fees and beyond in a market where there is unlimited growth potential. To recap, we will do this by executing on our key pillars. Number one, continue to grow our existing market-leading core businesses. Number two, scaling in countries where technology has not been a core focus for Hays historically. Number three, investing in and growing practices in high growth technologies. Number four, deepening our client relationships by moving up the value chain. Number five, by growing technology project service businesses.
Why will Hays Technology do this better than our competitors? Well, we have the best quality talent networks delivering the highest level of candidate engagement within the market. We have the breadth of customers in the public and private sectors from large enterprises through to ambitious startups and scale-ups. We have the market-leading global experts in each geography, sector, technology, and service line. We are collaborating with partners who are driving the most exciting growth technologies. Finally, we have the global leadership team to deliver. We are confident in our ability to exceed GBP 500 million of fees, and our ambition is limitless. I'll now hand you over to Dirk and Christoph to talk about our exciting Germany ambitions.
Hello, everybody. My name is Dirk Hahn. I'm the CEO of Hays Germany, and this is Christoph Niewerth, our COO. We will show you why we are so successful in Germany and give you insights on why we will be even more successful in the future in Europe's biggest economy. Let's start with my favorite slide, which shows the incredible long-term success story of Hays Germany. We have an excellent track record of growth. Even with the impact of the COVID pandemic, we have quadrupled our net fees since 2010, representing a 12% CAGR. This growth is clearly driven by the structural opening of the German recruitment market, but it is based on our market-leading position, our strong management team, our brand, and our excellent client list.
Encouragingly, we have rebounded very strongly from the pandemic and expect to deliver record fees in financial year 2022. What is the reason for this success? We are by far the market leaders in white-collar run rate recruitment with nearly 15,000 contractors and temps working with our clients. Our year-on-year increase this financial year in contract and temp volumes is 3,200. In contracting, this means we have grown our volumes in one year by more than the total size of our second biggest competitor. What is the secret behind this? Our excellent track record of diversifying our business from our historic platform in technology recruitment, where we are the clear market leaders. We have successfully diversified and built large businesses in engineering and accountancy and finance and launched other specialism.
As you can see, all our specialisms have grown with a double-digit CAGR since 2010. I'm most proud of the 17% CAGR of the other specialisms, including life science, construction, property, sales and marketing, and our latest success story, HR. We perfectly diversified our business based on our market-leading position in terms of specialisms and contract forms. The German recruitment market is highly fragmented, and we have a different set of competitors in different contract forms and specialisms. Hays is the only company offering all contract forms in all highly qualified specialisms. Let's dig a bit deeper in the contract forms and start with our perm business, 14% of our net fees. The German specialist recruitment market is under-penetrated in comparison to the U.K. and the U.S..
More than 80% of our vacancies are filled by internal HR recruiters who are our biggest competitors. Out of the 34 million perm employees, we are operating in the sweet spot of the market of an annual salary between EUR 60,000 and EUR 150,000. In this segment sits the real skill shortage, and we expect high staff turnover and wage inflation in the next years. We are a top two player in perm with a market share of 1%. This means huge potential for us to grow. Let's move on to our temp business, 25% of our net fees. Again, we operate in high salary areas of up to EUR 90,000. Our target market is around 150,000 white collar temp workers out of a total market, including blue collar, of 900,000.
In this sector, we are the clear market leader with 4,000 temps and less than 4% market share. We are the only specialist recruiter ranked highly in the respected Lünendonk survey of the overall temp market. The temp market is strongly regulated by the government, which creates barriers to entry. Temp was significantly impacted by the COVID, particularly as factories were closed. I'm pleased to say the market has rebounded very strongly. As market leaders, we are perfectly positioned to exploit this rapidly growing white collar temp market. By far, our largest business with 61% of our net fees is contracting. It is the heart of our business and our DNA.
We operate in the highly qualified part of the market with an annual income of up to EUR 200,000, and we see an addressable market of 250,000-300,000 freelancers for our business. Today, we have 11,000 contractors working with our customers, and with these 11,000 contractors, we are by far the market leader with less than 4% market share. The next slide shows how big the gap to our competitors is. Our revenues are as big as the next five competitors combined. The growth rate of the contracting markets in this calendar year is forecast with 13%. In this context, our growth rate of 27% in the first nine months of our financial year is excellent and more than twice the market rate. The market will further grow.
Lünendonk believes the contracting market will grow by a CAGR of 14% until 2026. This growth story is based on three megatrends, digitization, more demands for flexible working, and outsourcing. We are convinced that we have many decades of structural growth opportunities to come. I have demonstrated to you that we are positioned as clear number one on client and candidate side. Christoph will show you now our clear growth strategy to extend our market-leading position. Christoph.
Thank you, Dirk. You have seen our ability to drive high growth rates in the past. We absolutely plan to continue doing so in the future. I will explain how we have set up our business to grow, aspiring to double our profits again in the next five years. Our strategy falls into five pillars. As you have heard from Matt and Alex, developing strategic relationships with enterprise clients is central to our group strategy. This is our pillar one. In Germany, Hays is the only specialist recruiter offering both a highly skilled white collar approach in combination with a corporate large scale focus. As evidence, we have over 40 active MSP programs at these clients, and most of them in the technology field. Around half of our fees today are derived from our top 100 clients.
We work with every single DAX 30 organization and are gaining market share every day. As evidence, we have, as you heard from Alex, three years ago, we set up a dedicated enterprise client business unit, and this strategy is paying off. To give you an example, GSK, the U.K. pharma company, has chosen us as their MSP provider. Why? They have explicitly chosen us because they trust not just our ability to find the right experts, but to handle them in the complex German freelancing law environment. Moving on to pillar two, the SME markets. We focus on organizations between 200 and 2,000 employees. Here we are driving greater market share penetration via a more regional setup. These customers don't just look for a single spot support. They want trusted advice, just like the big corporates around the external workforce, as Alistair has mentioned earlier.
Also, our SME business units are driving excellent growth. As evidence of this, last year we added more than 2,000 customers to our client list, hitting new record levels. As Dirk has described, we also have a track record of launching additional specialisms in the hotspots of the market, our pillar three. Two years ago, we launched HR, and this year it's gonna hit over EUR 10 million of net fees in the second year. This is on the back of trends like war for talents and flexible working and all the related project work in HR. I will come to other opportunities, other sweet spots, as we call them, on my next slide. Pillar four. Hays has the strongest brands by far in the German white-collar contracting market. Our presence and awareness in the graduate community is also growing. These are our candidates of tomorrow.
To deliver on all this, number five, we finally need the best people within Hays. It is therefore vital that we are today and will be in the future the most attractive employer in our industry. We listen to our employees, and we have record participation levels in our internal survey, Your Voice. We continuously invest in staying extremely attractive. As promised, let us take a deeper look at other market opportunities, our sweet spots, such as the banking sector. Deutsche Bank is Germany's only financial institution of real international scale. Yet most of the German economy, which is mainly based around SME businesses, is financed by those smaller local banks. Most of these institutions are in the middle of a huge change process due to things like IT security and digitization.
While banking sounds relatively mature, we've seen a 40% increase in fees during the last 12 months. We have 1,000 temps and contractors today with a realistic long-term target of 4,000-5,000 of t he IT service sector. The trends towards outsourcing and towards focusing on corporations is huge. Yet we in Germany are decades behind, say, the U.K. or the U.S. Given our strength in technology and engineering contracting, hey, we're the natural partner for these project-driven organizations. Last year we saw a 40% increase in our contractors, but again, we are only at 1,000 contractors today and can grow that number three or four times in the future. Additionally, we have very successful businesses in life sciences, public sector, and automotive, the backbone of the German economy.
In each of these industries, we have positioned Hays as the natural partner for clients seeking white-collar non-perm projects. We have developed the blueprint and the agility to address future opportunities, further driving our Hays Germany growth story. Of all the work megatrends, the shortage of skilled labor will be the most important one for Germany over the next decade. At this point, our unrivaled brand strength steps in. It allows us to enjoy an incoming flow of 1,500 new specialist candidates every week. That leads to us filling an amazing number of more than 90% of placements directly from our own contracting talent network. That is much higher than the competition. Why is that important? Because that way we fill every placement a lot quicker, and speed is still the game-changing factor in contracting.
Secondly, our candidate-centric approach leads to very high satisfaction rates and high willingness to work with us again. Even more importantly, we are driving new ways of supplying talents to our clients quickly. Example of this include our nearshoring projects. During the pandemic, we established a channel of Southern and Eastern Europeans working remotely for our clients. This is now live with more than 200 projects. E.ON, for example, the leading German utility company, is working with IT development contractors from places like the Baltic countries or Romania. We have found them for them, and we handle them. Also, our newly established project services location in Romania. We started it just six months ago, are on track to have more than 100 tech experts working for our clients by June this year. All at very attractive margins, by the way.
Let's take Volkswagen as an example. They used to focus purely on our temp engineers. Now we started developing software for their e-mobile future in Bucharest for them. I will now hand over back to Dirk to wrap up our Germany growth story.
Thank you, Christoph. We have shown you our market-leading position and our clear growth strategy in a structurally growing market. We have delivered material growth over the last 10-15 years. Based on this track record, our aspiration to double our profits again by financial year 2027. I firmly believe that we have more growth opportunities today than we had ever before. I would like to leave you with five key takeaway points about the Hays Germany business. Firstly, we have highly scalable business models with a strong track record of profitable growth. Secondly, we are addressing the sweet spots of the market and are always watching for future specialism. Thirdly, our brand reputation gives us excellent client and candidate support. Fourthly, we are developing a competitive project services offering. Finally, we have the most experienced management team with the best track record.
This is what sets us apart from the competition and will continue to drive our success in the future. Thank you. I will now hand over to Nick and Simon to talk about our many opportunities in ANZ and U.K. and Ireland.
Hello, everyone. My name is Nick Deligiannis. I'm the managing director for Hays in Australia and New Zealand, and I'm joined by Simon Winfield, Managing Director of Hays in the U.K. and Ireland. It's a pleasure to be with you today. We're here to talk about two of our largest businesses, which we have great ambitions for, businesses that operate in more mature markets, but where we see clear, attractive structural growth opportunities, and we'll walk you through some of those today. Hays is the clear leader of the Australian recruitment market with 10% market share. It is more than twice as big as our next three specialist competitors combined, with industry-leading profitability and conversion rate, and recognized as one of the most profitable and efficient recruitment businesses in the world. A truly unrivaled position.
It's a great place to do business with good economic fundamentals, strong jobs growth, and Australia will be a long-term winner in the global economy. Whether it be the scale of our consultant numbers, the breadth of our office and regional networks, or the 20 specialisms that we operate in, we are better placed than anyone to leverage the significant market opportunities that exist now and into the future. We've got a strong track record of delivering growth over many years, and we're on track in FY 2022 to deliver our second-best fee result ever after a strong rebound from the pandemic. The business has many key advantages, including market-leading expertise and delivery capability. Enterprise clients wanna use Hays because of our strong reputation and brand presence. During the pandemic, there's been a flight to quality across all sectors, and we're exploiting that opportunity.
We have the deepest and broadest talent network with over 4 million active candidates on our database. In the candidate skills-short market, that's a priceless competitive advantage. Two important reasons for the success of the business are, firstly, our experienced management team with strong know-how and track record of delivering growth. Secondly, our relentless focus on consultant productivity as the key metric of driving profitability enforced by man-management discipline. It's embedded in our DNA. Against that backdrop, there are four strategic imperatives in driving growth and profitability. Firstly, driving perm growth. We're benefiting from increased job churn as candidates have become more confident to move, and that's creating greater job vacancy volumes. We're better placed than anyone in the market to source candidates given our brand strength, and together with wage inflation, this allows us to charge them out to our clients at a premium.
As a result, our year-to-date average perm fee is up 5% year-on-year. Secondly, driving temp margin and volume growth, which is fueled by skill shortages. Demand for flexible working and increased hybrid working arrangements in the new world of work plays into the hands of strong demand for interim temp and contractors moving forward. With over 20,000 temps working with our clients, we are number one in the market by a country mile. Thirdly, our client base is unrivaled, whether that be spot or contracted, with no overdependence on any one or any group of clients, and great opportunities to increase our market share and share of wallet with all of them. Over the last four years, we've increased the number of clients billing over GBP 1 million per annum by 18, and the number of clients above GBP 4 million from two to seven.
If we move 20% of our existing contracted clients up one spend category, we would generate an extra GBP 60 million and 11% increase in total fees. There's a huge opportunity to grow these clients and, of course, win new clients as well. Finally, there's our market-leading multi-channel delivery models, which provide our clients with a full service offering from a spot recruitment through MSP and RPO, and increasingly, the HR services that our clients are demanding, all supported by appropriate and efficient delivery models. I mentioned earlier we have several attractive structural growth opportunities, and here's four prime examples of that. Firstly, technology, now our second-largest business. Alistair spoke earlier about megatrends. Well, technology is right at the center of that. Demand is huge, and it's driven by digitization across the board.
Within region, we've gone really hard at building out our scale across attractive market opportunities, including pivoting to new areas such as cybersecurity, cloud, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and project services. Secondly, HR is a rapidly growing specialism. Growth in core recruitment services has been excellent, but back to Alistair's earlier points around broadening our services beyond recruitment, well, that includes HR services offerings. We're driving that through our assessment and development brand, covering capability mapping, career transition, early careers, framework design, onboarding, and engagement. We'll continue to build out our HR services offerings and specifically in the enterprise client space, where we've expanded our relationships and become more indispensable to our clients. For example, New South Wales Government, where we're the number one recruitment supplier and build GBP 8.5 million in fees year to date.
We've also added nearly GBP 1 million of HR services fees, undertaking redeployment, assessment, and onboarding HR services work. Thirdly, defense is an exciting startup in a structural growth sector with highly attractive features. The candidates are highly specialized, skilled and technical, and very well-paid. Thus, this is a profitable market for us, especially in engineering, systems, communications, and logistics. Government spend in this area is increasing, and global blue-chip defense firms have established themselves in Australia to win their share of the contracts on offer. Finally, construction and property, our largest business. We don't shy away from the fact that it's cyclical in nature, but it's playing catch-up post-pandemic in a serious way, and there is a strong structural opportunity in infrastructure.
The federal government has committed GBP 120 billion over the next 10 years in infrastructure spend on major city and regional Australia projects, and that will have a knock-on effect on demand for recruitment in the construction space more broadly. Also, given our market-leading position in the construction sector, we're better placed than anyone to take advantage of another mega-trend being the green economy, whether that's through construction, redevelopment, or facilities management in the energy and construction sectors. In conclusion, we're confident we can get back beyond peaks in FY 2023 and aspire to deliver fees in the range of GBP 500 million by 2027. We have an ambitious growth mindset to further build out our core specialisms and pivot to new attractive structural growth opportunities.
All of this is underpinned by our people agenda, whether that be training and development, building our consultants' capability and skills, and pivoting to new digital formats of delivering these programs, or our engagement programs around ED&I, wellness, and our flexible work arrangements. Whether it be career development opportunities for our people, both domestically and internationally, which are unrivaled, or the greater purpose in what we do through Hays Helps and connecting with our communities. Our people are at the heart of our success. I'll hand you over to Simon now.
Thanks, Nick. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Simon Winfield, and having worked with Nick upon joining Hays into our Australian business in 2006, it's a great pleasure to be standing up here with him today presenting on our U.K. and Ireland business. Much like our business in Australia and New Zealand, here in the U.K. and Ireland, we have a market-leading position, albeit in a somewhat more crowded marketplace. With the U.K. staffing market alone estimated to be worth GBP 38 billion, it is a large, diverse, and fragmented marketplace where we are one of an estimated 32,000 recruitment and staffing businesses. Today, we have 2,000 customer-facing specialist consultants in 88 offices across the U.K. and Ireland, covering 20 specialist industry sectors and professions.
Our 5 largest businesses are accounts and finance, technology, construction and property, office support, and education, where we're either number one or number two in the market. While our full year financial year 2022 will fall short of our best post global financial crisis performances in financial years 2015 and 2016, we are now tracking on a period-on-period basis at those previous high levels of performance and the best of the last 12 years, with productivity levels the best since the global financial crisis. We have a highly active and dynamic database of over 1.5 million candidates, 1.5 million customer contacts across 600,000 different organizations, which combined with our scale, sector, and geographical coverage and a reputation spanning 53 years gives us a very strong baseline position for the next phase of our growth.
Following my appointment in 2018, we set out a very clear set of strategic priorities, building on that good foundation and track record. We identified sectors where we saw significant structural growth opportunity to scale or where we were underweight versus the market. Secondly, we expanded our range of services. As part of our broader technology strategy, we repositioned and pivoted our product solutions business to the tech sector. As a result, we've won a number of significant projects in both the public and private sectors, delivered a 600% increase in fees, and invested heavily to build far greater levels of sales, program management, and governance capability. We broadened our range of services in response to the demands of our customers, covering services such as ED&I consulting and assessment and development.
We're on the cusp of launching a re-engineered Hire Train Deploy business, allowing us to access the apprenticeship levy and avoiding the widely publicized and onerous exit fees for learners. With a focus on undiscovered talent, we have already had excellent engagement for a number of enterprise customers and expect our first cohort to go live this summer. In our education business, over 6,000 schools now have full access to Hays-provided paid and free training for their staff, covering a multitude of topics from safeguarding to wellbeing. In addition to that learning content, they can host all learning via our learning management system and manage all staffing needs digitally and dynamically through the latest iteration of Hays Hub.
We've recently partnered with a number of our larger customers and our schools to launch Inspire, a program to provide structured lesson plans to primary and secondary students in years six, seven, 10, and 11, not only reaching over 1 million pupils, but supporting schools to link the curriculum to careers and reach the Gatsby Benchmarks. Thirdly, we've invested heavily in our technology tools. Digital Manager is one example, has seen us create a real-time sales tool for our managers and leaders, giving easy access to a myriad of performance data. It allows our teams to interpret and take action in a more impactful way and continues to drive better performance outcomes across our customer-facing sales teams. We've been able to access and utilize differing resources.
One example being our superb team in India, where we've integrated them into our U.K. teams, and they've supported us on building specific talent databases and networks. Finally, our people agenda has been completely rewritten. We've made market relevant every single one of our L&D programs. We've digitalized learning under the concept of learning anywhere across all levels and functions. We've introduced a full balanced working agreement to the entire U.K. and Ireland business with key success metrics and no detrimental performance impact. We set ambitious midterm targets for diversity across gender, ethnicity, and disability. We set up well-organized and meaningful groups across all areas of inclusivity, and we've made good progress on our wellbeing agenda from the introduction of technology tools to having 180 wellbeing ambassadors across the U.K. and Ireland business.
We set all these priorities out in a pre-pandemic world, and while some months later our attentions were dramatically diverted to dealing with the world in lockdown and the implications of that, it became very clear our plan stood firm in a post-pandemic world and have subsequently been the cornerstone of our post-pandemic rebound. The U.K. and Ireland markets today have so many opportunities for significant structural growth. Leading this has been our targeted investment in technology, where we are the largest player in the market and have made significant investment to widen this gap versus the competition. As part of our strategic growth program, we brought in over 200 new consultants and far deeper and broader leadership capability in the last three years. We've now clearly identified 10 specialist subsectors and further microsectors, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, our RPA/AI practice, none of which existed two years ago.
Technology grew by 50% in the first half of the year and is on track to continue its substantial growth going forward. We've taken our engineering business and sixfold increased our period-on-period fees in the last three years to a business now making a meaningful, periodic, and annual contribution by focusing on specific skill shortage areas where there are high levels of ongoing investment. In addition to the core engineering business, we now have subsectors in rail and defense and are building sectors in emerging technologies and alternative energy. We've recently added significantly to our life sciences business, where we see vast long-term growth potential.
In part, leveraging our market-leading C&P business, we recently launched our sustainability business to capitalize on the rapidly evolving world of the built environment, corporate sustainability, and the circular economy, where we fully expect to embed our first-mover advantage. In summary, and I'm sure you can tell from both Nick and I's presentations, there is no shortage of opportunity for us. As well as our start-up and scale-up businesses, we still have any number of significant opportunities in our core businesses of accounts and finance, education, office support, and construction property. Businesses like sustainability give us direct access to the green economy, and we'll further leverage our C&P business to target more deeply markets like civil infrastructure, where we see significant long-term growth.
We have performance headroom through continuing to improve and leverage technology tools, different models, wage inflation and pricing policy, and we have the opportunity today to raise the benchmarks on productivity and improve our conversion rates. We'll continue to improve our customer experience through different models and new products and services. We'll continue to look at utilizing resources in different delivery models and integrated teams, regardless of location. To Nick's point, with people as our biggest asset, we continue to understand why people join us and how they get in, and why they stay with us and how they get on.
We have successfully integrated a number of experienced hires into the U.K. and Ireland business in the last three years to supplement or support specific skills or knowledge gaps, and we plan to continue to do that, reinforcing our existing teams with that experience in new and existing businesses, products, and services. We have a far clearer view today of what is really possible in our U.K. and Ireland business. There are countless opportunities for us, and we have the belief, ambition, and talent to deliver on our future goals and objectives. Our aspirations to financial year 27 see us growing our net fees to GBP 350 million, with a longer-term vision to return the business back above GBP 450 million in fees and beyond our pre-global financial crisis peak performances.
Thank you very much for listening to Nick and me, and I'll now pass you over to Sandra Henke, Global Head of People and Culture, who will cover how we're going to capitalize on our opportunities through our people.
Thank you, Simon. Good afternoon, everyone. Earlier, you heard Alistair set out the opportunities that this new world of work presents to us. You've heard about the changing and more complex needs of our customers. You've heard about our commitment to being a true leadership partner to our clients and our candidates. Excitingly, this presents us with more opportunity than I have seen in my 25 years at Hays. To capitalize on that opportunity, we need the very best people working for us and who are very well equipped to deliver knowledge through scale, meaningful innovation, and deep understanding. Today I'm going to share with you how we're equipping the business to deliver on our ambitions through our people and through our culture through three key areas.
By enhancing our leadership capability, by putting equity, diversity, and inclusion at the center of our culture, and by evolving our employee value proposition to ensure we have the very best talent working for us. Let's start, rather importantly, with leadership. The quality of our leadership has always been a key strength in our business, but now we recognize that our leaders are leading more complex businesses, delivering increasingly innovative solutions to customers at pace in a hybrid matrixed and global environment. We've made a significant investment in our leadership programs to equip our leaders with a very specific set of skills, mindsets, and behaviors.
These specifically include building a more shared and inclusive leadership approach, building more support and confidence to challenge the status quo and to innovate more, to lead both small and large scale change, and I have to say that has stood us in very good stead these last two years. Putting ED&I and inclusion at the center of our culture, building more trust in our relationships, and building high-quality critical thinking skills. Now, the flagship of our leadership development is our world-class international leadership and management program. It has been described by many as transformational, personally, professionally, and organizationally, and we are absolutely thrilled with the profound impact of this investment on our business. We can see it manifesting in a number of ways. We can see it in stronger change management capability, whether that be introducing a new operating model or driving our ED&I initiatives.
We can see better quality thinking in our business, which has meant much better problem-solving for our customers, and we can see it in our relationships, both with our people and with our customers. Now, as a result of this development, we have the strongest depth and breadth of leadership talent than I have seen. Almost every participant in the program is leading significant strategic initiatives or has been significantly promoted. A great example is shared on the slide behind me. One of our top performing rising stars in Australia, Eliza, who shares with us how her ILMP experience has accelerated her development. To date, we have 120 leaders on or completing the program, some of whom you're going to meet today, with plans to roll out the top 550 by FY 2027.
Now, honestly, the real challenge with programs of this nature is to deliver true long-term, deep skills development at scale and quickly. We designed this program to have a far-reaching impact, not limited simply to the individuals in the program. To build even more capability quickly further into the business, we identified the skills that would unleash the most potential and delivered these skills virtually to over 1,000 leaders in our business in the last 18 months. Moving on to ED&I, which I'm very proud of our achievements in this space. Just like many of our customers, our commitment to building a more inclusive culture and attracting more diverse talent into Hays is stronger than it's ever been. This is not just about doing the right thing. Importantly, it's about unleashing the full potential of our talent.
Our customers are demanding that we solve their problems in increasingly creative and innovative ways. It makes absolute sense to have a diverse range of experiences and perspectives to add richness to the solutions we provide our customers. We continue to invest in our ED&I infrastructure. Some examples include, first up, gender targets. Now in terms of female representation and senior leadership, we're well ahead of our biggest competitors. This is evidenced in the latest Hampton-Alexander review of the FTSE 250. We start from a strong position compared to the industry with 42% women in our top 550, but we are of course, committed to getting that into balance by 2030.
We've invested in a partnership with an external specialist to identify any barriers, real or perceived, to getting in and getting on at Hays, and those insights are shaping our global and regional strategies into real action on the ground. We've hired ED&I specialists into roles across the business, and we've established diverse hiring strategies and inclusive recruitment practices. We grow our employee groups and networks, and we invest in partnerships with specialist organizations that represent every pillar of diversity. Now, by progressing our own ED&I agenda, not only do we strengthen our culture and our own capability, it means we're really well-positioned to partner with our customers to help them address their ED&I challenges. Finally, to our employee value proposition. Having the right talent to enable our ambition starts with a great EVP, and our EVP starts with our culture.
We have something very special in the culture at Hays. The tenure of the people you meet today, including me, will attest to that. We talk a lot about the Hays spirit. You've seen some of it in action today. When we ask our people to define it, they use terms like high energy, growth mindset, achieve great things together at pace, supportive and great people. Our culture is valuable, it's precious. It is by definition unique to us, and of course, it continues to evolve as the world of work changes. It is absolutely the right time for us to take stock about what's important to our people and those we want to work with us in the future. We're in the middle of a comprehensive review of our value proposition.
The agency we've partnered with to help us has started with a deep dive into why people work at Hays, and they have been surprised at the strength of our culture. I thought it worth sharing that with you. They describe us as one of the most culturally coherent global organizations they've ever worked with, telling us that whoever they've met from whichever part of the world at Hays, they see these common attributes of energy, positivity and growth mindset. That's a valuable asset indeed. The talented people joining us wanting to be part of a great culture, of course they do. On top of that, they want to work with the very best people, supported by the best brand and market-leading tools, technology and infrastructure. They want great careers and great development.
I'm incredibly proud of the fact that we have always been the leader in investing in training and developing people in our industry. That investment in training speaks to our strategy of hiring mostly at entry-level. Increasingly, we're supplementing that with hiring more experienced talent in parts of our business that benefit from it. Hays Technology is a fantastic example, where recently we've hired a number of experienced people from our biggest competitors across Europe. When I ask them why they chose to join us, there are common themes, namely a commitment to innovation for their sector at Hays, the energy and the growth mindset of the leaders they are working with, and a world-class infrastructure that enables them to execute top-class delivery. We are surgically selective with this strategy for a reason.
This speaks to our unwavering commitment to nurturing and not risking the dilution of this very valuable Hays culture and spirit. Interestingly, we've also seen a recent increase in the number of people choosing to rejoin Hays. Their feedback? Well, they are describing us as increasingly future-focused and innovative and more inclusive in our leadership and in our culture. Talented people also want to do interesting and meaningful work, increasingly in an organization that is purpose-led. This is demonstrated through our social purpose platform and our commitment to ED&I, Hays Helps and Net Zero. Hays Helps, including our recently established Ukraine fund, has had a really significant impact on our people. For years, we've supported our people to help communities, but last year, we aligned all of our volunteering and charity efforts with our purpose and with the UN sustainability goals.
Hays Helps was really created to use our core skills to help those who are disadvantaged in the world of work. Now, these are all great initiatives, but what's really important is the impact on our people. We're delighted that our continued evolution as a great place to work is reflected in what our employees are telling us in our engagement scores. Of course, just as importantly, what is the impact on our organization as a whole? Well, I can confidently say we have the strongest leadership pipeline I've ever seen, better trained and better equipped than ever. We have a strong and really valuable inclusive culture at the core of our EVP.
We have the best in industry, world-class careers and training, and increasingly, purpose-led commitments to making a broader contribution in the societies in which we operate, which makes me very proud to work at Hays. We are, without doubt, strongly positioned to deliver on our strategic ambition and for the next chapter in our Hays story. In fact, the best positioned we have been in my time at Hays. I'm very excited about our future and equally excited to invite James Hilton to join us on stage. Thank you.
Thank you, Sandra, and good afternoon, everyone. My name is James Hilton, and I'm currently the group financial controller at Hays, and from October, will be taking over from Paul as our group finance director. Our presentations today have set out our view of the rapidly changing world of work, our ambitions to capitalize on the many long-term growth opportunities. In this presentation, I want to cover how these ambitions translate into our net fee aspirations for the Group over the next five years. I will cover the actions we are taking to drive consultant productivity and operational efficiency that will return our conversion rate back to and then beyond pre-pandemic levels. We will continue our strong cash conversion that will drive material levels of free cash flow, creating the opportunity for significant capital returns to our shareholders.
Finally, I'll set out the financial aspirations we will measure our performance against over the next five years. As a recap, our presentations today have set out our ambitious plans for our three largest countries, Germany, the U.K. and Ireland, and Australia and New Zealand, as well as the scale of opportunity in our technology specialism and outsource talent solutions business. For clarity, our overall group fee aspirations is not an aggregation of these ambitions, as clearly there is overlap of the fees between each of these. This year, we expect our technology business, our largest specialism, to reach GBP 300 million in fees, substantially ahead of pre-pandemic levels. Our technology business grew its fees by an average of 9% per annum over the last seven years and at 11% per annum pre-pandemic.
Given our strong momentum and having accelerated our investment through the SGI program, we expect to achieve a growth rate of at least 11% per annum going forward, which would see us grow to 500 million fees or beyond by FY 2027. Our total group net fee aspiration is a range of 6%-10% per annum over the next five years, with a midpoint of 8%, which is in line with the Group's fee growth pre-pandemic. We expect substantial growth in each of our businesses, underpinned by the long-term structural growth opportunities we see in our markets, such as technology, engineering, life sciences, and the green economy, and by leveraging our enterprise client relationships on a global basis.
While we remain mindful of the many macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties in the world right now, as we stand today, our clients and candidate confidence remains strong, and we continue to see skill shortages and rising inflation globally. In pulling together our growth aspirations, we have assumed that we will continue to see reasonably benign economic conditions with consistent levels of GDP growth across our markets. Importantly, while we expect regular economic and political challenges over the period, we assume no significant downturn in any of our major markets or material movements in any of our key exchange rates. The shock of the pandemic and our rapid recovery underlines the impact that the broader economy can have on our business. Should a major downturn occur, then we could see achievement of our aspirations pushed out by one to two years.
Similarly, if market conditions continue to stay at their current strong levels, we could also see material upside. This year, we expect to see the Group's conversion rate, which is the conversion of net fees into operating profit, to be around 18%. For each of the three years prior to the pandemic, we achieved a conversion rate of around 22%, and it is our goal to drive this key performance measure back to and beyond pre-pandemic levels over the next few years. We have three key routes to achieving this. Firstly, we will drive consultant productivity higher and leverage the significant investment we have made in the business over the last 12 months, where we have added around 2,000 consultants, including 650 into our S-SGI markets.
This has been our greatest ever level of investment, and we've yet to realize the full benefits of this as these consultants work their way up the pro-productivity curve over the course of one to two years. As Steve and Sandra set out earlier, we remain focused on providing our consultants and leaders with the best technology and training. Our Talent Networks access to candidates will improve job fill rates and reduce our average time to fill, meaning that consultants complete more placements per month and can improve their overall level of productivity. Secondly, we are living in a world of inflation and expect this to persist for some time. Overall, we see that it's a net benefit to the business and to our conversion rate. As the salaries of the candidates we place increase, so too do the fees we earn on each placement.
In a skills-short market where demand is outstripping supply, we have the opportunity over time to increase our fee percentage on each perm placement and our average temp margin. We are already seeing the benefit of inflation in our pricing with our average per perm fee up 3% and accelerating and underlying temp margin up 90 basis points or 9%. These together are expected to deliver a GBP 40 million increase to fees in FY 2022 alone. Clearly, we need to carefully manage our own cost inflation. However, put simply, each 1% we gain on pricing is today worth around GBP 12 million in additional fees, and this is set against a 1% increase in our costs worth around GBP 9 million. Therefore, we are confident that we will be a net winner from inflation.
Thirdly, we will continue to focus strongly on cost management and delivery of efficiencies in our back office. We set out last year our ambition to deliver GBP 30 million a year in cost savings versus our pre-pandemic cost base over the next five years. We continue to right size our property portfolio and video technology is now firmly embedded in the business, providing quicker access to clients and candidates and importantly, a sustainably lower level of travel. We've also targeted a minimum 10 million per annum saving in our back offices globally through greater use of RPA technology and process automation. Additionally, we will continue to increase our use of lower cost service centers. All three of these projects are on track, and delivering these savings will improve our conversion rate by around 2% over the forecast period.
Putting all this together, we see the opportunity to drive our group conversion rate back to and beyond our pre-pandemic level with a range of 22%-25% by FY 2027. We have an excellent track record of converting profit into cash. In the 2015-2019 cycle, we converted 102% of operating profit to operating cash flow through dedicated management of our working capital. This positioned the group in a strong net cash position and generated significant dividend payments to our shareholders of GBP 455 million. Over the next five years, we are targeting a cash conversion of 90%+. As firstly, we expect our current debtor days of 35 days to expand modestly over the next year as payments from clients continue to normalize post-pandemic.
Secondly, and more materially, we expect significant levels of growth in more working capital intensive areas of our business, most notably in our high salary temp and contracting businesses, particularly in technology and with our enterprise clients. Importantly, though, this will make us a more resilient and higher quality business with stickier and more visible earning streams. Our aspirations will generate cumulative free cash flow of GBP 0.9 billion-GBP 1.1 billion over the plan period. Our priorities for free cash flow remain unchanged. Most importantly, to fund organic growth, primarily by investment in our headcounts and training, supported by ongoing investment in our systems and in our brand. We have set aside a GBP 100 million pot for potential bolt-on acquisitions to supplement our expanding capability in the broader HR and project services businesses.
We'll continue our pension deficit contributions at current levels and expect to reach a buyout position on the scheme in the forecast period. After deducting CapEx, pension contributions, and M&A, we see the opportunity for GBP 550 million-GBP 750 million of surplus cash generation through the plan period. We will distribute to shareholders through the following routes. Our core dividend, which is designed to be sustainable, progressive, and appropriate over the cycle, and we maintain our target cover of 2x-3x earnings per share. We will continue to maintain a strong balance sheet and subject to a supported economic outlook, return surplus cash over GBP 100 million at each year-end to our shareholders by a combination of special dividends and disciplined share buybacks.
As announced this morning, we've now launched an initial share buyback program of GBP 75 million. Importantly, we expect the combined value of core and special dividends to represent the majority of capital return in normal years. In summary, subject to supportive economic backdrop, we expect to deliver material organic net fee growth over the next five years. We will improve our conversion rate over time, back to and beyond pre-pandemic levels through focus on productivity, ensuring we are a net beneficiary of inflation, and delivering our back office efficiency and cost-saving plans. Putting this together, the midpoint of our fee and conversion rate aspirations would see us broadly doubling group profitability by FY 2027. We will continue to convert the vast majority of profit into cash, and this will drive material cash flow in the region of GBP 1 billion.
This will provide the opportunity for significant capital returns to shareholders through core and special dividends and through share buybacks. In summary, I firmly believe we have more opportunities today than ever before. Our aspirations are ambitious but also realistic, and I'm excited to embark on the next five-year journey. I will now hand you over to Paul to conclude today's events.
Thank you, James. It's my honor to recap and conclude the 2022 Hays Investor Day. Alastair began by summarizing how the world of work has changed post-pandemic and explained the challenges that our clients and candidates face. These include long-term skill shortages, new job category creation, the need for continual upskilling, higher wage inflation, and changing work patterns, all of which play to our strengths. At Hays, we have a unique and privileged position to work right at the heart of one of the world's biggest economic issues today. My colleagues then set out why Hays will win in this world of work.
The main points of which are, firstly, over the last 15 years, we've built market-leading positions and a global infrastructure in many of the fastest-growing talent markets, including technology, life sciences, and engineering, as well, of course, as the support functions that every organization needs, such as finance, HR, and marketing. Secondly, we've got the broadest and deepest network in the skilled talent market, and having built millions of long-term relationships with talented professionals worldwide, we know the very best people available for our clients in the market today. Thirdly, we have a formidable client base and strong relationships with SMEs at one end of the market and large enterprise clients at the other, all of which are looking to Hays to help steer them through the complex world of work and become their leadership partners.
They want us to provide a broader suite of HR services and are happy to pay for them. While the look and shape at Hays may well evolve as we grow, our very essence remains around finding the right people at the right time for the right role. That's what we're world-class at, and that remains unchanged. Achieving our plan will make us a more resilient and high-quality business with stickier and more visible earning streams.
We've had deep dives into some of the many opportunities we have, including growing our enterprise clients, delivering GBP 500 million of technology fees, doubling our German profitability, and the significant opportunities in our ANZ and U.K. businesses, all of which are driven and supported by our innovative customer strategy, the creation of talent networks, and critically, our ability to recruit, develop, and retain sufficient world-class leaders and consultants to fuel and deliver on our growth opportunity. James summarized our financial aspirations for the five years to 2027 with a clear route map to materially grow our business and generate significant shareholder value. The opportunity to drive material fee growth combined with improving our conversion rate back to and above pre-pandemic levels can double Hays' profitability over the plan period.
This, combined with our relentless focus on converting profitability into cash, has the potential at the plan's midpoint to generate GBP 650 million of shareholder returns to be distributed via core and special dividends and disciplined share buybacks. With the important principle that we expect the combined value of core and special dividends to represent the majority of capital returns in normal years. Clearly, all of this assumes a broadly supportive economic backdrop over the plan period. Of course, there are some large macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties in the world today. It was important to demonstrate the material growth opportunities available for Hays over the medium term. Finally, on a personal note, I'm incredibly proud to be part of this excellent Hays management team, and I've thoroughly enjoyed my 16 years with the business.
It's made easier by the supreme confidence I have in Alistair and the team to drive the business forward over this next chapter of our Hays story. I'm absolutely delighted that I've got such a strong successor as finance director in James, who has my complete confidence.
Importantly, I'll remain a large shareholder in Hays and look to benefit from the significant shareholder returns generated by executing on the clear and exciting plan we set out today. Thank you very much. With the formal part of presentations now over, can I invite Alistair to come back to the stage, and we'll take the next 20 minutes or so answering any questions that you may have before we move upstairs to share a drink and enable you to continue discussions with the wider management team. For those of you in the room, can you put your hands up and one of our colleagues will bring you a mic?
Can you start with your name and organization before you ask your question? Alistair will be the moderator. For those of you online, could you submit your questions in the box at the bottom of the page, and David will read them out to us. Thank you.
Thank you, Paul. Sea of hands. Rory, should we kick off?
Great. Thank you very much. It's Rory McKenzie at UBS under the lights. Firstly on wage inflation, can you say how much you estimate inflation was part of your 8% CAGR pre-pandemic, and what you're assuming it continues to run at in your five-year outlook from here? And then secondly, and a bit broader, DE&I is in focus in all aspects in this new world of work. From your point of view, what's the gender pay gap and ethnicity pay gap that you see across the market today? And what role do you think recruitment and HR services should play in that kind of evolution and that equity? You know, for example, is it about pay transparency? Should candidates see the same data and information on pay rates that you offer to your clients? Some thoughts there, please.
Thanks, Rory. I'll hand over to Sandra for the second point in just a second. I would say that, as you've quite rightly said, the whole ED&I agenda is something that's front and center of so many organizations around the world, not just here in the U.K., obviously. People are struggling to come to grips with what is the current situation, why is it the way it is, and most importantly, how do we move it to a better place. That's a very fertile ground for us to work a lot with our clients. Not just to help them figure out how to move from A to B, but then how to actually get there. Remember, finding the right people is what we do.
We're in a wonderful position to help them get to where they aspire to be once they've figured out what the issues are. We'll come back to that. I think, Paul, maybe you could take the wage inflation and James.
I think it's time to start to hand the baton. James covered the modeling.
Okay, James.
James, do you wanna take the inflation question?
On your feet.
I'm on the mic. Okay. Thanks, Rory. I'll just pop over here. Yeah. As I set out, we do expect a world of wage inflation over certainly the next couple of years. Obviously, we're projecting over a five-year time horizon there. We do expect some wage inflation, but similarly, we expect our own cost inflation. That's why I tried to set out today what we see as the overall sort of net impact on the business. Perhaps helpfully, if I sort of split that conversion rate sort of analysis down a little bit further, might give you a bit of a feel for where we came from. We set out about 2% of that conversion rate impact would be from delivery of the cost plans and the cost efficiencies.
We see about 1%-2% of that conversion rate improvement being the result of wage inflation, i.e., being a net beneficiary at the top line more than we are on the cost line. The third part, and I guess that's where it creates the range, is around the consultant productivity and how much further we can drive that over the next few years. As I mentioned there, that's really from two things. It's driving the return on the investments we've already made in the business. We've put substantial consultants into the business, but also longer term, how much we can drive the business forward from the, you know, the tools that Steve explained earlier and the training that Sandra explained as well.
I think on the past, which was the other first part of your question, Rory McKenzie, minimal is the answer. Because I think most of us in the room will understand that most companies kept a really tight discipline on the base salaries they were giving and really tight control. I think it would be no more than 1% of the benefits over the previous year's growth categories.
Sandra.
Sure. Can pick up. Am I on the mic here? Great.
Yep.
Great question, Rory, about gender pay gap. It's complex. I'll try and answer it in a couple of ways. If I take our own experience at Hays with the setting of gender targets, for example, and the exploration around how to accelerate the number of women in senior levels, there's quite a range of complexity, otherwise this problem would have taken care of itself, some of which is out of our control, societal, parental challenges, for example. I think on the second part of that, more broadly, there is a greater journey towards overall transparency, whether it's broadly in the market or certainly in our own organization. I think transparency is absolutely key to being able to then identify two or three key strategies to help shorten that pay gap. You're right, transparency is the key issue.
I think just to your left. Thanks.
Hi, it's Andy Grobler from Credit Suisse. Just one from me. I have heard a number of times from presentations that you feel you're in the best place you've ever been, and the markets are as exciting as they've ever been. If we make the assumption, and maybe quite a bold assumption, that economically things are gonna be pretty good as laid out in your pack, and that inflation is gonna be higher, why aren't growth rates g oing to be above historic levels. What's holding you back from those kind of higher expectations?
Well, let me kick off, and then Paul and James, you can dive in. There is a lot of uncertainty in the world today, and that's why we decided we will break down where is our future financially into the key constituent elements. Where do we think fees could go? Where do we think conversion rates could go? Because that's gonna be driven by different factors. As you've seen in the last couple of hours, they come from such a multitude of sources. I think it would be wrong for me to stand up here today and say, every single one of them will shoot the lights out, because we all know life's not like that. Over the last five years, we've had to deal with things that came out of left field.
I'm sure in the next five years, something will come along that gives us some sort of hiccup. Clearly, we're not basing any of our plans on a major global or country slowdown. You've got to start somewhere, so we started with the most recent IMF forecasts around GDP for the next five years, which are broadly supportive. I think it's more sensible now to break down our business into the constituent elements. You, Andy, will be able to form your own view. Do we think that those economic forecasts are realistic, or is there upside? Do we think that we'll get the consultant productivity to where it should be? Do we think the wage inflation is sustainable or it might peter out?
You'll have your own view, just as we have our view, and that's why we wanted to more give you the building blocks as opposed to, "Here's a firm number on either cash or fees or on profits." Clearly, we've tried to be as plausible as possible in putting everything forward here. We've not said we're gonna hit the maximum on everything that we've set out to do. I do believe that hitting the maximum in each individual constituent element, whether it's Germany, whether it's tech, whether it's the structural opportunities in the more established markets, like the U.K. and Australia. I absolutely passionately believe that individually, all of those are achievable.
I think for the sake of today to state the art of the possible, if you like, it's not a five-year budget, it's an art of the possible, what's available to us in our five-year future in Hays, what can we unpack and where could that take us financially? We've tried to put something up that is very plausible, and it is based on doing, in the future, something like we've done in the past. We have doubled in the last five years, as Matthew said, our outsourced fees. We have doubled Germany. We've doubled Germany several times, actually, over the last 10, 12 years, as Dirk's favorite slide showed.
We're saying we'll do more of the same, but off a bigger platform with more opportunities. Clearly, it's my ambition that we beat those midpoint growth rates, but I also want to put up something that you believe is plausible with upside.
I'll add three points to that, Andy, and we've known each other for a long time over the years. The first is, you know, I think there's quite a bit of difference if you looked at the previous periods from just the 2013-2017, and then the 2017 just pre-pandemic. Certainly, pre-pandemic, there started to be a few more regular shocks, and we've actually built that into this. We haven't assumed a material downturn, but we have assumed more regular shocks that happens. Therefore, we want to make sure that whatever we put in front of you is credible. Secondly, I would bank my house that the technology numbers we put up today, we will achieve whatever happens. It's not just to get to GBP 500 million and stop.
It's to go to GBP 750, and it's to go to GBP 1 billion. Over the next five, 10, 20 years, that's the area you can take to the bank with the biggest growth opportunity. Finally, we wouldn't do your numbers for you, and the beauty of this is, for all the analysts in the room, you've got to step back and reflect on this yourselves. Andy, if you wanna put higher numbers out there, that's up to you. We're happy with that. Higher share price target, we're happy with all of that. The key for us is that we've tried to give as much depth today, so you can see where it's coming from.
We've been much more granular rather than just looking at a high level in geographies. We've taken you into specials and into countries and so exactly which areas we think are going to grow at. We think there's a real lot of opportunities to go to over the long term.
James, you're gonna be the one that's reporting on this, in the future. Anything you want to add?
Not really, Alistair. I think you covered it as well with, you know, this is it's not supposed to be a firm set of numbers. It's a set of building blocks of how we see our business and setting out the scale of opportunities in different parts. Then how you put all that together and kind of come up with an answer, I think that's, you know, obviously, you know, everyone else's job to kind of come up with. We've just set out what we think is the art of the possible in many of our markets and kind of brought that together as a sensible midpoint for you.
Does that answer your question, Andy?
Thank you.
Thank you. At the back.
Yeah. Na.
Thank you. Yes, Kean Marden here from Jefferies. I have three, if I may. The first of which is regarding enterprise client on slide 20. There's GBP 200 million worth of long-term contracts there. I was just wondering what the duration is of those contracts on average, and if there's a particular direction of travel. Are they getting longer? Are they shortening or staying similar length? My second question was on technology and that growth from GBP 300 million to GBP 500 million of fees.
Clearly, slide 33 is very useful in that it shows the white space. But is there any one particular geography or couple where you think that growth is going to be the fastest? My third and final question is quite simple, which is slide 81 mentioning doubling profits in FY 2027. What profit metric is that? Is there a specific one that is applied? Thank you.
Thanks very much. I'm going to hand these out to my colleagues, to Matthew on enterprise, to James on tech, and to the other James on what basis are we gonna double our profits. Matthew.
Yeah, just briefly, in terms of the contract length on that, it's typically between three to five years, and we haven't seen that shortening or indeed lengthening, kind of remains the same in the market currently.
James?
In relation to which areas it's gonna come from, I think I wouldn't say every area is equal, but I think there is opportunity across all of the various different areas. In terms of a lot of the growth that's come in the course of the last five years, that's come from a focus on IT contracts, and I see significant upside in IT contracting, particularly in territories. As we continue to scale the business, we'll get continued growth in the U.K. and Germany and Australia and New Zealand, but I see significant opportunity across the broader EMEA in IT contracting. I think in the emerging technologies where there's a talent mismatch, there's a lot of opportunity to grow there. I think the numbers up on the slide deck are conservative.
I agree with Paul. I think, you know, we are likely to outperform those numbers. I also think in the project services space, we've made a really good start in that area, and our ambition is to get to a GBP 50 million business in the next five years, but again, I think we can go beyond that. I see significant opportunity across all those pillars, but I think those areas are the ones where we have the levers that are the strongest of all.
Thanks, James. I think the other point I'd make about tech is it's an ever moving feast. In the next five years, there will be skill sets and mini industries in the tech space that will be invented that don't exist today. You look at some of the opportunities we've showed today, cybersecurity, Salesforce, RPA, and AI. These are pretty new subspecialisms and pretty new industrial sectors themselves. Five, 10 years ago, some of those did not exist. It's not just about exploiting what's currently there. It's having an open-mindedness to what's gonna come next, which will itself be a huge market, but we come into it from a position of strength. James, do you want to talk about from which basis we're doubling our profits?
Yeah. Thanks, Alistair. Just quite simply, that's operating profit, which for us is our kind of, I guess, our key metric. That's why I talk around conversion rate, which is the, you know, the translation of net fees into operating profit. Yeah, that's that.
Does that answer your questions? Great. Maybe if we can just come forward. There we go. Then I'll catch you next.
Hi, this is Anvesh Agrawal from Morgan Stanley. Two questions, please. First, I think at the beginning of the presentation, you said that internal HR teams are clearly finding it difficult to manage. Can you give a sense of where the penetration rates of use of third-party, and where do you expect them to grow, to give us a sense of structural opportunity? The second question is around M&A. GBP 100 billion pot, like 5% of your market cap. In which areas you're looking to spend? It looks like a bit of a step change. Historically, it's mostly been organic. What drives the decision of buy versus build for you?
Let me take that first one first around M&A, and then Matthew, if I could come back to you about the conversations you have with clients and their HR functions about the challenges that they're facing in this new world. As you know, we're not a highly acquisitive company, but we do make modest bolt-on investments where we feel as though that's gonna give us a competitive advantage and an opportunity to leverage up and invest into that platform more quickly. We made an investment into the States, as you know, and David's with us today. He came with that acquisition, seven, eight years ago now. We made an acquisition in Germany back in 2003, and Christoph, Alex and Dirk came with that acquisition.
All of that growth since that acquisition in 2003, in Germany, for example, has been organic and phenomenal growth at that. Nothing's changed. We are not changing our strategy whatsoever. However, if we're saying that we expect our clients to demand more services from us, and we don't today have the global strength of those required services, we'll have them as a point solution in one of our markets, for example. Everything that Matthew described about the broader advisory services, we do today in some way, but we don't do it everywhere, and we don't have the industrial strength. If we're going to build those and acquire those capabilities, I think it's only right to put in a five-year aspiration. We reserve the right to look for modest bolt-ons.
If you said any of these might be of the order of about GBP 10 million, GBP 20 million, for example, you can imagine the scale of business that you're buying for that. It's not huge. We just feel it's appropriate and credible to say, "We'll put something to one side. We may not need it, but we may need it." Our acquisition strategy has absolutely not changed as we go forward to what it was in the past. How do we think about build, buy, partner? Well, the vast majority of what you saw today in terms of our growth is organic growth. That's been our approach for the last 15 years while I've been the CEO. It'll be the approach going forward. We can build what we need.
It may take a little longer, and it's a little more linear than an acquisition, but it doesn't bring some of the associated risks and value destruction that you can get with acquisitions. However, if we felt that it was a real competitive advantage to, for example, acquire a business that brings some of those advisory capabilities at scale. As opposed to partnering with somebody, because we think that owning that capability gives us a much stronger position with our clients, that's when we'll consider it if we can't build it ourselves. I just want to be clear that we have a balanced view on this. We're very thoughtful about it. It would be wrong to say in the next five years we will never consider anything, and that's why we put the placeholder in there to the level that you can see.
Please don't think that we have changed our approach to how we think about M&A and the part it plays. With that, let me hand over to Matthew again to talk about the challenges our HR clients functions are giving us today and why they're struggling.
Thanks, Alistair. I mean, organizations pre-COVID and now probably increasingly so, dealing with skills access and actually finding the skills to drive some of the change that they need within the organizations, and it's really been exacerbated post-COVID. They're looking at it both from a permanent perspective and also a non-permanent perspective within the organizations. Historically they've been, you know, had a fairly high proportion where they've got dedicated internal teams to be able to do permanent themselves, but are very reliant on across a distributed chain of people for non-permanent.
Increasingly, we're seeing from a non-permanent perspective, them becoming more concentrated in key providers that they can rely on for support to be able to access those skills, and particularly also looking cross-border geographically as well, because they can't access the skills within their single territory, and we spoke about in our presentation a bit about nearshoring opportunities and that as well. Internal HR departments and recruitment departments just can't do that themselves. They don't have the stretch and reach and capability to be able to do that, so they're increasingly reliant on organizations such as ourselves.
To give you a percentage of what their reliance is wouldn't be accurate for me to say 'cause it's dependent upon the industry that they're in, the organization they are, the split between their perm and temp or contract departments within their businesses as well, but they're increasingly looking at it in a total talent management environment. Hope that answers your question.
I think it really comes down to some of the points Steve articulated around looking for real depth of insight. In a world where there is a lot more going on and a lot more challenge now, organizations are saying to ourselves, because we have that insight around the availability and the cost of talent, and if it's not available here in London, is it available in the U.K.? If it's not in the U.K., is it further afield? What are resources like further afield? What is the cost of that? What's the availability? What's the skill base? What are the churn rates? There are not many organizations in the world that can give anybody that kind of depth of insight into so many professional skill sets in virtually every key economy in the world. That's where we're winning in today's world.
I think there's a question right next to you, then I'll come over to you.
Hi. Sanjay Vidyarthi at Liberum. Just one question on the skills shortage, which I completely get the demographic trends and the challenges that companies face. Are you seeing in any of your markets, any of your companies or other institutions that are trying to tackle the problem differently, maybe in terms of grassroots training? I know it's p robably a much longer-term process, but ultimately in, rather than spiraling wages and staff churn, that has to be the solution. Are you seeing any signs of any company successfully doing that?
I think there are many point solutions, whether it's by company or by country. Every economy in the world is facing a challenge to upskill and reskill its existing workforce. It's not just about how do I bring people out of college and get them ready for their first job? It's about what do I do with somebody who's 40, 50, or in my case, over 60? How do you upskill yourself to be relevant in the world that we're continually re-becoming? When I look around the world, many countries have started to embark on that sort of journey, some more advanced than others.
Singapore, for example, has quite recently established a network of institutions and accreditation and government funding to citizens to encourage citizens throughout their career, young and old, to look for the relevant skills that the Singaporean economy and its industries need now. They're incentivizing people to go off and do that. It's not just about a company or a government, it's also about personal accountability as well. People want to have to find the new market-relevant skills to make themselves active participants in the market. When you look at companies specifically, there are so many examples around the world, and you see examples even in this country.
A lot of the engineering businesses, whether it's Dyson, whether it's Rolls-Royce, designing their own almost bespoke schemes, sometimes going and working with a local university to co-build courses and hopefully build a pipeline of younger talent coming into the business. Nobody's cracked it. Nobody's cracked it yet, and that's why I think we live in a world where we know what skills you need for jobs. We know what jobs are in demand. We know where they're in demand, by who, at what price, and that's a very valuable asset for us to be able to bring those insights to organizations and help them understand how do you best position and provide in training so that people can move along those journeys. One of the things that Simon mentioned is our launch of the Hire Train Deploy model.
This is one element of how we think we can help organizations tackle their own individual skill shortage. This is around entry-level jobs. We'll kick off in technology, but I could imagine there's other areas in the future as well. How can we partner with our clients to go to a very diverse community of potential talent? It's not just about going to school leavers and college graduates. It's about maybe going to ex-armed forces personnel moving into the commercial world. It may be older demographics reskilling themselves. It might be working moms coming back into the workforce, but they don't have the skills just yet. How can we work with partners and our clients to bring a cohort of people together, give them the skills necessary, whether it's in Salesforce, cybersecurity, whatever it may be, and then put them into our clients.
I think that does two benefits. It solves the client's skills problem for the immediate future. Come back to the diversity question. What a wonderful way of helping a client move its dial on the diversity conundrum that they're facing across so many different dimensions. That's just one example of the sorts of things that we're now contemplating doing, and as Simon said, we're on the cusp of launching this summer.
Like an FDM model.
Sorry.
Something like an FDM model, you'd consider doing something like that?
Yes, exactly. On, with our own competitive advantages and our own secret sauce, if I could put it that way. I think there's a question right at the back there.
Yes, two questions from my side. Hans Pluijmert, Kepler Cheuvreux. On your own personnel, on page 69, you indicated a little bit shift in where your own personnel are coming from, so partly also now more experienced people. Could you maybe give some background from which competitors they are coming? Is it more, let's say, the smaller competitors or also of your direct larger competitors? Secondly, looking at the future, also in a market of candidate shortage, do you expect any material shifts in where you will recruit your own personnel? Again, is it still mainly just leavers from university, or also do you expect more experienced people coming in to your workforce?
Thanks very much. I'm gonna hand the second one to Sandra in a moment around where we're gonna find our own people. I'd like to maybe kick off here in the U.K. because I think Simon has done a superb job at supplementing our homegrown workforce with some specific expert talent that we brought in from outside in niche areas around technology and project services, for example. Simon.
As Sandra said, and Alistair's alluded to, I mean, typically the model has been biased towards bringing in untapped potential and then training them ourselves. You know, one of the things that James and I were very cognizant of as part of our technology plans here was trying to create the technology business for Hays in the U.K. as a destination brand. I think that's certainly what we've been able to do, and that's. We've now got experienced people working for our competitors that are coming to us and saying, "We love that. We love your story. We love what you're doing. We love your ambitions and plans going forward.
We wanna work for you." That's been born out of, A, us socializing broadly our ambitions, and B, being able to, over the last two or three years, attract some really good talent. That's come from a variety of our significant tech competitors. Early doors, I'll hold my hands up. I perhaps approached some of those guys. But more latterly, they've certainly been coming to us. I think that's testament to the business that we built in the U.K. from a technology perspective, and we'll continue to do that. Not only have we done that in technology, we've done that in our engineering business. As Alistair just said, we've done that in terms of scaling our project services business, whether that's sales, project and program governance. You know, I think people are very compelled by the ambition and the story we have to tell.
Thank you, Simon. I think we've got examples as well in Germany. You know, clearly, the automotive industry is a key plank of the German economy. As they've gone through their own strategic shift towards electrification, there is huge demand for new skills in that industry. Dirk and the team in Germany have gone to market to find people who are the world expert in how do you create teams that design a lot of the systems that go into electric cars these days. That's what we're building to be able to take to our clients in partnership and at the behest of some of the biggest car companies in the world. That's behind the story of Romania.
As Christoph said, we'll have 100 engineers of our own in Romania by mid this year who are designing exactly those future-proof systems for the automotive industry. Can I turn then back to our own people and where we go fishing for our own talent, Sandra?
Sure. We continue with that core strategy of primarily hiring at entry level, and there are a few reasons for that. The first is we have a commitment to diversity and inclusion, and by hiring at entry level, we have a really great opportunity to broaden the kind of people coming into our organization and offering opportunities to a broader range of people to grow their careers and invest in their training and development. That's part of a broader community commitment, if you like, and that's the best pathway to do that internally. Secondly, we want to offer people great careers. That's who we are. Have a look around this room. There's plenty of evidence of people who've had incredible careers at Hays over a long period of time.
Being able to offer that pathway and that development from entry level continues to be a core strategy for us, and it certainly has strengthened our leadership capability and stability over the years and paid off. There's one really key reason. I spoke to this in my presentation. There is something very special, secret sauce, to use Alistair's term, about the culture that we have. I would say this, of course, but I firmly believe it's a key pillar in our success. Hiring at entry level enables us to build a really strong culture. We, as I said earlier, are increasingly hiring where we need the specialist skills and experience, but we protect that culture fiercely.
There is a risk with excessive hiring of experienced people that that special culture starts to get diluted. We maintain that strategy. As I spoke to earlier, we've also got an increasing number of people rejoining us. Entry level will remain our core strategy.
Thanks, Sandra. Any more questions? Yeah, right at the back, and then I'll come to you.
Hi, it's George Gregory from BNP Paribas. I just one question please, Alistair and Paul and James. You've laid out a lot of the areas that you've hit some pretty lofty targets over the course of the last five years, doubling the German fees, doubling enterprise. Other headwinds have prevented you from hitting the targets that we talked about five years ago. Is there a way to unpack those detractors? You know, do you think the shocks, I think that Paul alluded to, that you've built into your targets are substantial enough, given the experience of the last five years and the clearly uncertain environment that we sadly find ourselves in? Thanks.
Yeah. Thanks, George. I'm gonna hand that over to Paul in just a second. You know, clearly when we stood up here five years ago, we, none of us saw what was coming. It wasn't so much as a headwind from a pandemic. It was a roaring hurricane that came out of nowhere and basically shut down the world economy for a period of time. We got through it. We learned a lot. We've come out of the other side of it, you know, very quickly out of the blocks. This financial year that we're about to finish, almost back to previous peak profit levels, actually on a currency adjusted basis, probably pretty much there. Who could have forecast that even just two years ago?
We just don't know what the world's going to throw at us, so we have to build a business that can flex with whatever's coming. We can scale it up fast when the environment is there. Witness what we've done in the last 12 months. We can throttle back when the headwinds become just too strong. One thing I do want everybody to recognize, though, is there'll have to be pretty strong headwinds for the world to say, "We don't need any more tech talent," or, "We don't need any more help on building inclusive workforces." It may slow down a little bit, but I don't think anybody in this room will work for an organization that gets rid of their cybersecurity personnel if there's economic slowdown. Clearly, some parts of our business will remain more cyclical than others. You know, Nick mentioned his biggest business, construction property.
That is one of the more cyclical industries in the world. Always has been, probably always will be. Something like tech or life sciences or the shift towards the green economy, personally, I think those are undercurrents, if you like, in the world of work that are going to be strong and growing, maybe at different growth rates, almost come what may. That's why I think we're gonna be more resilient as we go forward. Paul.
Yeah. I've probably got five points to make, really. First, we are a lot more diversified. Let me give you a couple examples of that as kind of sub points. If you take Germany, when we set out the last plan, automotive was 20% of that business. As we know, when the trade war unfolded between the U.S. and China, it hit the automotive sector quite significantly, as well as diesel scandals and everything else. Today, our German business, 8% of our business in Germany is automotive, and it's growing really quickly. I think that's an important part. If you look at Australia, when we did the plan last time, construction property was 28% of our business in Australia. Technology was about 10%. Today, construction is 18%.
It had a tough pandemic, but there was a lot of opportunities, as Nick said. Equally, tech is now 15% of our business and growing quite quickly. If you take those two together, it adds into two or three other points. Not just the diversification, but really the strength in tech. If you think about the tech part of it, we delivered on the plan. It may have taken a year or more to have got there, but we're 20% above where we were pre-pandemic, and we've grown really significantly. You know, if I put it in my context, when I joined, our tech business was about GBP 70 million in fees. Today, it's gonna be GBP 300 million.
Importantly, all of these small subspecialisms that we've set out today, think about what Dave talked about in the U.S. in what they've done with cyber, what Simon's done in the U.K., those are gonna mushroom. I mean, that. There's such the opportunities there, and that's pulling it together where we've used this really good part of bringing some really experienced leaders in from the competition. Nothing wrong in doing that. But putting a hell of a lot of investment. We've used the pandemic incredibly well to be very aggressive in our revenue investment in the right areas, of which tech is the biggest one. So I think all of those set ourselves up really well. And while we may not get back to, you know, the pre-pandemic profitability this financial year, you know, we're in a really strong position to get there next year.
Absolutely, you know, things can happen in the world economy, but what do you want us to do? Not set out targets? I think what James did a really good job of this time is saying, "Look, if something nasty comes and it's big, it might delay us for one to two years." As I try to sum up, the long-term opportunities are unbelievable in this business, and we should set that out, we should celebrate it, and now we have to go after it.
Thanks, George. There's a question down here at the front.
Steve Woolf from Numis Securities. Just one for Sandra, if I may. In terms of the initiatives that you've put in place over the last three to five years, where do you think it's had the biggest impact in reducing your churn rates? Or is it more been about retaining people rather than actually reducing it? Is it the consultant level, mid-tier and above? Thanks.
I think one of the most significant. Well, there's several that I spoke to today. One of the most significant is the work we've done with our leadership, which in turn has had a really significant impact on our culture. What I mean by that is we have been an organization that's been extremely well structured to deliver growth over the years. I've been part of it for 25 years. The work we've been doing in the last three or four years has been in readiness for significant change. Fortunately, we did it before the big change, big changes happened, so we were very well prepared. What impact that has had on us culturally is an ability to innovate and change and challenge and be future-proofed in a way that we were not prepared for quite so well a few years back.
What that's meant is people are engaging more with leadership. They are having more engaging and compelling conversations about what's possible. We're seeing that as the key reason that some people are joining us from our biggest competitors. They are seeing a shift in our culture to being more agile, more innovative, more prepared to do things differently, and a particularly strong growth mindset. For me, the biggest change is through leadership, but impact on culture and how we operate. Thanks.
Thanks, Sandra. Thanks, Steve. David, I think we had a question online.
Yeah. Thank you. Just one online from Karl Green at RBC. He's asking, and he caveats this by saying he hopes it doesn't happen, materialize, but in the event of material share price weakness in the planned period, would we accelerate the share buyback and potentially divert some of our M&A fund to do an enhanced buyback?
I think I'd take that one. I can answer it two ways. First of all, why have we announced the buyback program? We should start with that. I think there's three main reasons for it. If you look across the support services, if you look across the recruitment stocks, including our own, they're at very low levels. At this level, it's almost a no-brainer not to commit some of our capital resources to rebuying those shares at this price. It's a great deal. Secondly, I think it also starts to concentrate over a period of time. It concentrates the shareholder register around the kind of long-standing, loyal shareholders, and they will benefit out of this concentration. I think finally, we've given the commitment, and it answers the second part of your part.
We gave this commitment in normal years that dividends will be greater than buyback. Why we do that? We're also very conscious, we've got some big income funds that are big supporters. Of course, we've talked to them as part of setting this policy out, so we set that commitment. We said in normal years, and clearly what that might mean is, you know, if our share price is at very, very low levels or it stays flat for a long period of time, absolutely, it'll make sense to commit more of the buyback. I think on M&A, if I just add two points. Reiterate what Alistair said, we've put GBP 100 million in here. We've put none of returns from that into this. We've just put it in the cash flow part of it.
Of course, if it's a very uncertain world, you know, that tends to lead to doing a little bit less M&A. I think in the HR services we would continue. I think in other areas, it would make a lot of sense to use some of those funds to do buyback. We'll be flexible on that. With our long-term policy of dividends are greater than buyback.
Any more questions in the room? No. Any more online, David? No? Okay. Well, thanks so much for coming along today. I hope you see why we're as genuinely excited about the next chapter as you've seen so many examples of what we're doing and what the opportunity and the art of the possible in Hays is over the next few years. I think the bar is now open. I could do with a drink. I'm sure you could too. Please take the opportunity to meet and talk to all of our management team here. All regions around the world are represented, and look forward to seeing you upstairs in just a moment. Thanks again for coming.