HeadFirst Group's HR tech company ProUnity wins comprehensive framework agreement with Smals for external hiring in Belgium
The ICT services organization of Belgian public institutions Smals awards the framework agreement for finding and managing external ICT professionals to ProUnity, the Belgian HR technology company that is part of HeadFirst Group. The framework agreement is effective January 1, 2023 and has a term of four years. Simone Groeneveld, Director MSP services at HeadFirst Group: "This offers great opportunities for freelancers and secondment companies in the Benelux to offer their knowledge to dozens of Belgian government organizations."
"Belgian governments are investing heavily in technology and innovation, with a view to providing better services to citizens and businesses. To support this, Smals will be looking for some 400 new employees this year. At the same time, we are supplementing our projects and services with temporary ICT expertise. With ProUnity we give a large group of professionals a gateway to work on challenging assignments, in all kinds of domains, with equal opportunities for everyone," explains Donald De Keyser, Management Controller at Smals.
Great opportunities for professionals
Already about 50 government organizations publish daily assignments on the ProUnity platform. Current users include the Federal Parliament, the federal government departments of Finance, Justice, Interior and Development Cooperation, the Walloon government, as well as Sciensano, RIZIV, RVA, Forem, Actiris, the Federal Police and the Center for Cyber Security.
ProUnity makes access to these assignments quick and easy for a range of professionals, self-employed and employed by secondment companies, in the Benelux. Smart use of the combination of its comprehensive marketplace and VMS platform allows them to deploy their talent to Smals and its members. The ProUnity platform monitors the entire collaboration, from the publication of new assignments and the management of contracts and time registration to reporting and invoicing, in strict compliance with Belgian tax and social legislation.
"ProUnity is an innovative tech company, with a sense of personal touch. This perfect balance between tech and touch is essential in our service and industry," explains Simone Groeneveld. "When we welcomed ProUnity into our group in July 2022, we knew they were capable of this kind of commercial success. A big compliment to the ProUnity team. This is an important step in our further reaching strategy towards an international platform organization."
IceLake Capital invests in HeadFirst Group to accelerate future growth
HeadFirst Group, the leading HR-tech service provider for professionals in the Benelux, announces it has reached an agreement with IceLake Capital to join as a new investor. With this, HeadFirst Group aims to enable the company's future growth in Europe.
HeadFirst Group provides a diversity of tailored HR services for large and medium-sized companies in the private and public sectors, employing more than 20,000 highly skilled professionals every day. The company has a proven track record of strong organic growth and expansion through acquisitions. For example, it doubled its size in the past two years to more than two billion in revenue. HeadFirst Group's core market segments Managed Service Providing (MSP) and mediation of STEM profiles are also developing well. With the strong market position in the Benelux as a basis, the company sees plenty of opportunities to expand in Europe. With IceLake's involvement, solid financing is in place to realize these ambitions.
Financing for growth
HeadFirst Group has found in IceLake a pragmatic and highly ambitious shareholder that fits the company and its entrepreneurial culture. IceLake was founded by private equity professionals and entrepreneurs who have extensive experience in growing companies. IceLake's initial investment is part of a broader commitment to HeadFirst Group's international M&A roadmap.
Han Kolff, Chairman of the Board of HeadFirst Group, commented, "We are very pleased to welcome IceLake as a strong financial investor, alongside our existing financing partner Kartesia and our founders. This confirms the great performance of our employees in professionalizing our organization and achieving solid growth over the past years. With IceLake on board, we will be able to realize our growth strategy in Europe."
Bastiaan Hagenouw of IceLake added: "We are very excited to invest in HeadFirst Group. We are impressed how they have developed into a company with a unique and market leading position in HR services. We look forward to working with their experienced board and management team to realize their ambitions for future growth and to offer their innovative value-added solutions to an even larger group of clients, suppliers and professionals."
Jean Diercxsens, managing director at Kartesia, agrees: "We have seen HeadFirst Group more than double in size and profitability in the two years we have been involved as a financial partner and remain committed to being part of this. Kartesia is pleased to have IceLake as a new investor, allowing HeadFirst Group to continue its profitable growth and international expansion."
The transaction is subject to customary approval by competition authorities.
About HeadFirst Group
HeadFirst Group is a leading, international HR technology service provider and the largest platform for professionals in the Netherlands. The organization offers a diversity of HR solutions, such as Managed Service Providing, Recruitment Process Outsourcing, intermediary services (matchmaking, contracting) and HR consulting. Every day more than twenty thousand professionals work for over five hundred clients in Europe, with which HeadFirst Group realizes an annual turnover of over two billion euros. The main brands of HeadFirst Group are the MSP (including intermediary services) labels HeadFirst, Between and Staffing Management Services, RPO and recruitment specialist Sterksen and IT talent sourcer StarApple.
About IceLake
IceLake is a private equity firm focused on forming partnerships with entrepreneurs and management teams to support their (international) growth ambitions.
About Kartesia
Kartesia provides tailored credit and capital solutions for leading mid-market companies in Europe. The group manages more than EUR 5 billion and operates from local offices across Europe.
Signing of Diversity Charter
We see diversity and inclusion (D&I) as an absolute added value for our organization. We are therefore very pleased that we were able to sign the Diversity Charter yesterday, during the Week of the Entrepreneur. We did this during a meeting of SER Diversity in Bedrijf and T-Mobile in The Hague. With this Charter we pledge to deploy strategic means to promote D&I in the workplace.
The initiative to sign the Charter came from the D&I Taskforce. This group was set up by colleagues who consider D&I very important and are working hard for it. As an organization, we support this initiative and are proud of the fact that we were one of the 24 employers who participated in the signing ceremony. Within six months of signing, we will submit a Plan of Action, describing our D&I policy and linking targets to it. In addition, we will report annually on our progress.
Marion van Happen, CEO HeadFirst Group, on Diversity & Inclusion
"We are a learning organization in the area of Diversity and Inclusion. It's about learning and evolving together so we can build a future where workplaces are more diverse and equal. Numbers are not our goal, but effectiveness. As an HR technology service provider, we see a role for our organization in creating a fair labor market."
HeadFirst Group acquires successful IT talent sourcer StarApple
HR technology service provider HeadFirst Group Adds StarApple Group, consisting of the brands StarApple and StackOps, to its organization. Both companies are specialized in sourcing IT and digital specialists. HeadFirst Group thus takes another step in deepening its portfolio of solutions for labor market issues in the professionals segment: the current high-tech solutions of HeadFirst Group are enriched with the services with a great human touch of StarApple Group.
StarApple Group, is an ambitious and young organization, founded in 2008 and has since grown into a successful IT talent sourcer. StarApple Group has already successfully connected more than 10,000 specialists to a variety of organizations. Caner Hamamioglu, General Director at StarApple Group: "Growing talent is our mission. We do this by carefully connecting professionals from our network to assignments, where professionals not only do what they have done before with other clients, but are also challenged to take a step forward in their development. Design your career, we call that. With the cooperation with HeadFirst Group we can do this on an even larger scale and we are looking forward to that enormously."
Responding to dynamic market
HeadFirst Group foresees that combining various services is necessary to continue to solve all the issues of clients in today's dynamic labor market. Marion van Happen, CEO at HeadFirst Group: "The scarcity in the labor market will not disappear in the coming years. This requires creativity in opening up the market. We believe that combining high-tech solutions with services with a great human touch is the key to customer success. For us, those customers are both clients - whom we continuously provide with mission critical talent - and professionals, whom we actively help from assignment to assignment with the most attractive clients."
StarApple Group remains independent
StarApple will become an independent brand within HeadFirst Group, maintaining its own identity. The current management will continue to lead the organization in its growth strategy into the future. Hamamioglu: "HeadFirst Group will be the driving force behind StarApple. With our enthusiastic team of over eighty colleagues, we will continue to offer a full service recruitment solution for our clients and professionals. And we get access to the group's platform, which gives us extra power to realize our growth ambitions."
Gender equality in the workplace is not a women's issue
Over 300 companies participated in the SER Diversity in Bedrijf initiative - Diversity Day - on Tuesday, October 4, to draw attention to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. It is important that organizations continue to work on this even after this day.
Alliance and advocacy
Among other things, gender equality is not yet commonplace for many companies. For more women to reach the top, male role models are needed to influence the behavior of other men. Men hold the majority of leadership positions, so the power lies with them to change things. We need their support to help and make a real difference in closing the gender gap and achieving equality in the workplace.
Together with BrandedU, we gathered inspiring stories and experiences from men who have taken the steps and influenced change within their own organizations. From these, we formulated five strategies:
- Strategy #1 - Use Privilege: use it to open doors for women.
- Strategy #2 - Create a safe space to be authentic: hold yourself accountable to create inclusive spaces.
- Strategy #3 - Start breaking the rules: use your position as gatekeeper to change the rules, or better, break them.
- Strategy #4 - Practice curiosity: ask questions, even the uncomfortable ones.
- Strategy #5 - Respect: be the one to show your emotions.
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of actions that can be taken by male leaders to advocate for women's visibility and gender equality. Most of all, we hope it spurs inspiration.
HeadFirst Group is a learning organization in the field of diversity and inclusion. It's about learning and evolving together so we can build a future where workplaces are more diverse and equal. Numbers are not our goal, but effectiveness. As an HR technology service provider, we see a role for our organization in creating a fair labor market.
Documents:
WhitepaperBrandedUHeadFirstGroup.pdf
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HeadFirst Group included in 'Soonicorn Club of the Netherlands Tech 2022'
Tracxn, a global platform for tracking innovative companies, has included HeadFirst Group in the Soonicorn Club of the Netherlands Tech 2022. It annually publishes an exclusive list of the most promising Dutch Tech startups, which have reached important milestones in the past few years. We have been named Soonicorn, placing us alongside leading organizations such as Otrium, WeTransfer and Bux.
The Tracxn Soonicorn Awards is an initiative by Tracxn to publicly recognize the best companies in different regions and sectors. In addition to the well-known Unicorns, they also identify companies that may soon become Unicorns (the Soonicorns) and those that have the potential to become Unicorns in the long term (the Minicorns). These ratings are based on detailed analysis by in-house teams of industry specialists, combined with multiple publicly available signals such as market size, investment by major investors, execution excellence and future growth prospects.
Tilt toward platform organization
We've been making strides as an HR service provider for years, but we're also taking big steps toward becoming a platform organization. For example, in the past year we have achieved major milestones, such as the migration of all Between Staffing Group agreements, accelerating Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to robotize labor-intensive processes with many repetitive tasks, and setting up a central service desk to register incoming contacts. We also invested heavily in developing our platform, technology, security and user experience to optimize our core processes. This has not gone unnoticed and has led to a spot on this exclusive list.
Soon to be a UniCorn
As far as we are concerned, it doesn't stop at a Soonicorn designation. This year, we are continuing to build a perfect balance between tech and touch, which is essential in our services and industry. Our group already consists of our own hiring platform Select and collaborations with external VMS partners, recently we further broadened our HR tech portfolio by adding ProUnity. An innovative tech company, a digital native platform organization, with a sense of personal touch. Just a first step in our goal to surpass the already great result next year with a Unicorn designation.
HeadFirst Group acquires Belgian HR tech company ProUnity
Mutual reinforcement of tech and touch opens new perspectives
HeadFirst Group acquires Belgian award-winning HR technology company ProUnity. With this, the group takes an important step in its internationalization and platform strategy. With the acquisition, HeadFirst Group triples its existing business in Belgium, gaining a prominent place among the major service providers in the hiring field.
Platform Organization
ProUnity operates in the Belgian market as a Managed Service Provider (MSP), with its own marketplace and Vendor Management System (VMS). With its unique combined offering, it helps organizations quickly and efficiently find and manage remote employees through a single platform. The addition of ProUnity to HeadFirst Group broadens the Dutch group's HR technology portfolio, which already consists of its own hiring platform Select and collaborations with external VMS partners. In this way, it increases flexibility in solutions for its clients. ProUnity retains its name and management team.
Marion van Happen, CEO at HeadFirst Group: "ProUnity is an innovative tech company, a digital native platform organization, with a sense of personal touch. That has earned them a Deloitte Technology Fast 50 award two years in a row. HeadFirst Group is originally an HR service provider, which is just now making the tilt towards platform organization. The perfect balance between tech and touch is essential in our service and industry. ProUnity will be an accelerator in this."
David Muyldermans, founding partner at ProUnity, is excited about the partnership with HeadFirst Group: "After our rapid growth, this new step together with HeadFirst Group comes at the right time for our team, our clients and our partners. ProUnity already works for large and international companies and we see their demand increasing. Now we can offer them an even more powerful answer. We make each other stronger and will continue to blossom, as people and as organizations, while respecting each one's identity."
Internationalization
ProUnity serves over forty clients, mostly large profit companies and Belgian organizations in the public domain. HeadFirst Group has already had a Belgian office since 2016. With the addition of ProUnity, it triples its existing business in Belgium. With this scale, HeadFirst Group can serve clients internationally even better, which fits its further-reaching strategy towards an international platform organization. Van Happen: "In that respect, too, ProUnity fits well within our group. Just as we are now growing abroad with our Dutch clients, we aim to do the same with Belgian clients. Above all, by adding value in organizing talent in this scarce labor market. Through smart use of platforms, with an international supply of professionals - on location, remote and hybrid - where the boundaries have been blurred by corona, literally and figuratively."
Perfect growth partner on the road to international and optimal data-driven organization
Geert-Jan Waasdorp, Rotterdam native and entrepreneur at heart, is founder and owner of labor market data specialist Intelligence Group (IG). IG and HeadFirst Group work together in the field of data exchange and providing unique data insights to the market. In addition, IG guides us in the path to an optimal data-driven organization.
In addition to his role within IG, Waasdorp is (co-)responsible for many other companies and brands, including Werf&, Academie voor Arbeidsmarktcommunicatie and SkillsCV. "The common thread is always labor market and data," Waasdorp says. "Everyone with a professional recruitment team, comes to a point where they need our data. The ambition is to make data really indispensable for organizations. In addition, we want to further expand and stimulate data exchange in Europe." This makes Intelligence Group a perfect growth partner for HeadFirst Group on the road to becoming an international and optimal data-driven organization.
Predicting with data
Every year at Werf&, Waasdorp traditionally presents his recruitment trends for the new year. "Embrace platform technology," was one of Waasdorp's advice to organizations in late 2021. "Candidates are a consumer of labor. They want to be able to compare easily. Platforms make comparison possible." A second piece of advice reads, "Give the candidate the choice of contract type. The role is the same, so don't limit that on the front end in this scarce labor market by putting out a job posting with one contract type as a focal point." The role of trend watcher that Waasdorp takes shows his knowledge of the labor market, but also his ambition to be predictive with data. And that is precisely where HeadFirst Group's ambition lies as well.
"We started building a house, the foundation is there and now we are building the floors."
Growth Partners
Trust is the most important foundation for Waasdorp to build on. "With HeadFirst Group we have built the trust that allows us to develop together in the role of data in the organization and beyond," says Waasdorp. With the partnership launched in 2021, the foundation has been laid and the first successes have been achieved immediately: the exchange of data on the permanent and flexible labor market has been started, we presented the first editions of the Talent Monitor, which from now on will appear quarterly, and we presented - to a long-cherished wish - a rate forecast for 2022. In 2022 we will continue on this footing. We are taking a step towards further data maturity, which we are going to see reflected in, for example, next level client reports, and more predictive power based on data.
This interview appears in our Annual Report. Curious about other interviews or our results and strategy? Then read the entire report.
Male role models needed for women to reach the top
Gender equality is not yet commonplace for many companies. Just a women's quota for European corporate executives is not enough. In fact, this will change little for the Netherlands, as a women's quota has already been in place here since Jan. 1, 2022. For more women to reach the top, male role models are needed to influence the behavior of other men.
Men hold the majority of leadership positions, so the power lies with them to change things. We need their support to help and really make a difference in closing the gender gap and achieving equality in the workplace.
Gender equality in business
When men participate in gender equality programs, progress is made three times faster than when they do not, Boston Consulting Group United Kingdom research shows. This is the focus of the Men as Advocates for Women's Visibility summit on June 27. It is an initiative to engage men in the conversation about gender equality in business.
As an HR service provider, we see a role for our organization in creating a fair labor market. I am not just talking about gender, but also about work ability, cultural diversity, age and lhbti+. It's about learning and evolving together so we can build a future where workplaces are more diverse and equal.About the summit
The Men as Advocates for Women's Visibility summit organized by personal branding institute BrandedU and HR services provider HeadFirst Group will take place at HeadFirst Group's headquarters in Hoofddorp on Monday, June 27. Our goal is for diversity to become part of companies' DNA. An afternoon full of connections, stories and panel discussions to get inspired with the people who take this topic seriously contributes to this.
Nancy Poleon, founder BrandedU, presents the summit along with Maarten van Rossum (VP of public affairs at Lightyear). They will engage with men active in promoting gender equality in the workplace. Some examples are Baba Touré (Founder & Managing Director at Hammerfest), Clayde Menso (Director at International Theater Amsterdam), Dirk van Zon (HR Business Partner at Rituals), John Olivieira-Siere (Publisher at OneWorld), Melchior de Ridder (CEO at Nationale Nederlanden Next), Michael Kimmijser (Small Medium & Corporate Business Lead at Microsoft), Philippe Stulens (Chief Marketing Officer at Randstad), Rafe Rosato (Chief Innovation Officer at DLL) ánd Han Kolff (Chairman of the Board at HeadFirst Group).