RECRUITMENT INTERNATIONALSeptember 2009Ri

Faro’s Flood and Lythgoe Reveal Their Global Strategy

21 www.recruitment-international.co.uk RI - January 2009

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You may not have heard of Faro Recruitment but this worldwide staffing group is galloping its way through the recession and has grown by stealth to become a diverse recruitment group with a global footprint to die for….

With a track record spanning almost thirty years, 80 offices in fifteen countries in a range of vertical market niches and over 1000 employees, Faro Recruitment Group is the international staffing business of Japanese conglomerate The Okano Group. The business rebranded as Faro after Okano sold its Japanese staffing business to Recruit Co in December 2007. That left a recruitment business spanning Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific and Australia and while the latter two regions are managed by two Okano Group Directors, SuKong Pang and Masairo Nishimura both of whom are industry veterans, the larger part of the business needed some strategic direction and focus.

Fast forward to 2009 and following a detailed strategic review of all its operations Faro appointed Brendan Flood as Chief Executive Officer, previously a senior executive at Hudson, to head up the Europe and the Americas part of the business - by far the largest at 80%. Alongside him, enter Simon Lythgoe as Group Marketing Director with a long pedigree in recruitment with names such as Spring Group, Robert Walters and Randstad. Their task? To further develop a world class recruiter while maintaining a sustainable business which delivers a return to its shareholders.

“Faro is principally a temporary contracting business - a sector which accounts for around 90% of our revenue” explains Flood. “That, coupled with our extensive global footprint, has helped us to ride out this recession through visibility and spreading our risk. We are also increasingly engaging in more

group wide activity from client sharing through to funding. In addition, we have a very well developed training and coaching business which complements our core activities”.

Operating in the professional staffing, light industrial and hospitality sectors, the group operates on a partnership basis with each of the operating units’ former owners retaining minority interests and remaining as the local executive management teams. “In this way, the goals of the group and the local management are more easily aligned than in other traditional buy and build schemes,” adds Flood. “Each business was acquired because of its niche focus, its longevity in its respective markets and its strong customer relationships.”

Faro operates as an umbrella identity for the Group and is the brand name for the Asia Pacific businesses. In the western hemisphere though, the businesses trade

under their pre-acquisition legacy names: People First in the UK; Interiman in Switzerland and Monroe Staffing in the States for example. “We don’t believe in destroying brand equity”, says Group Marketing Director Simon Lythgoe. “Each of these operations - and their stellar reputations - have been built over many years. Rebranding to Faro would simply confuse clients and candidates - and be prohibitively expensive. They all know they are part of the Faro Group - they all have that ‘label’ as part of their branding - and that endorsement provides the best of both worlds.”

So why Faro? “It means ‘lighthouse’ in Italian, Portuguese and Spanish”, says Lythgoe, “an image that is fitting for a group that acts as a beacon - not only bringing together businesses, employers and jobseekers, but also searching out new opportunities to enable us to continually enhance our service offering.”

The New Global Player On The Block - Faro Recruitment Group

Source: Points UK Limited

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New horizonsThe aim over the next few years is to develop a larger permanent business while expanding the existing offerings to new clients and new geographical regions but it’s not all about buy and build. “We will look at strategic acquisitions but will also not be afraid of launching new businesses where we believe there is potential to tap into new profit streams” says Flood.

A great example of this is Faro Digital Media which launched in London, in March of this year and recruits digital account executives, managers, planners and creatives on both the client and agency side. “The digital media market is still in its infancy” says Simon Lythgoe. “But we have recruited a team of real specialists and the business has already developed a steady stream of income which means we are forecasting profitability in its first year.”

And against a backdrop of economic gloom, this recruiter does certainly seem to be bucking the trend by tailoring its service to respond to a market known to have an appetite for less traditional ways of doing business. “This is a market that is not really telephone based,” says Manager James Nicholls. “I’m more likely to get hold of my clients via twitter than I am by phoning them. It’s also a market that has a requirement for very

niche skill sets - these people don’t look for jobs in a traditional way - sourcing this sort of talent is much more about getting involved in their networks.” “We have already looked at other geographies for the roll out of this business such as Hong Kong and New York”, adds Lythgoe, “both of which have a ready market place which is virtually untapped and we will use the success of the UK business as a platform for the aggressive expansion of the brand.”

In terms of other new markets, Faro has already established strategic alliances with US based FA&OWorks (Finance); SiriusWorks (IT) and Barrister Works (Legal). “This not only works as a valuable revenue generator but also helps to build our experience in potential future market sectors” says Brendan Flood.

Across the PondIn fact the USA is already a market where Faro has a strong presence through its Monroe Staffing Services brand. “What started in 1969 as a small one office firm specialising in contract design engineering, has now grown into a full-service consulting and staffing partner with multiple locations throughout Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York”, says CEO Matt Briand. “And from our niche beginnings in engineering, the last four decades have seen us build a business which caters for our clients’ additional needs in the finance, accounting, office support and IT sectors.”

But Monroe goes beyond just filling jobs. “It may be a cliché,” says Briand, “but we truly act as a partner rather than a supplier and believe that we are the benchmark for other staffing firms in the area.” And according to Briand, being part of a global brand really

gives Monroe that extra edge: “Many organisations talk a good talk about ‘extensive networks’ and ‘tapping into international talent pools’” he says. “The difference is that we actually have that global capability which gives us that extra credibility.”

The French (and Swiss) ConnectionBack in Europe, The Partner Finance Group based in France, joined the Faro family in 2006. Established in 1999 by ex Michael Page Consultants Samuel Tamagnaud and Herve Savy, initially as an accounting and finance recruiter, the group has two distinct offerings: James Partner for permanent recruitment within accounting and finance and Partner Interim for temporary staff. Today it has 50 staff across four divisions covering finance; sales & marketing, supply chain & logistics and PAs.

Faro Digital Media Team - LtoR James Nicholls, Borz Farahani, Roy Hailstones, Kate Hughes

Matt Briand - Monroe Staffing

Herve Savy & Samuel Tamagnaud - The Partner Finance Group

The New Global Player On The Block - Faro Recruitment Group

23 www.recruitment-international.co.uk RI - January 2009

“There are many benefits of being part of Faro,” says Tamagnaud. “It has allowed us to accelerate our national growth while still retaining our own set of values which contributed so much to our initial success. Consequently we now have operations in Neuilly sur Seine; Versailles, Lille and Lyon. Additionally, it gave us that international dimension that so many clients are now looking for. The cross selling opportunities with other partner recruiters both in Europe and globally give us a real competitive edge. It’s that ‘large enough to cope - small enough to care’ philosophy that really sets us apart”.

And just across the border in Switzerland,

Interiman, founded in 1998 has carved an enviable reputation for itself in the field of temporary and more recently permanent recruitment across a range of diverse commercial and industrial sectors. Interiman operates as a network of agencies - Interiman itself is dedicated to the service sector while Interima services the industrial and construction sectors. Albedis, also part of Interiman, specialises in executive appointments. “Becoming part of Faro allowed us to think locally but act globally” says Director Robin Gordon.

“It’s about connecting the local with the global, connecting individuals with the worldwide system in which they operate. For Albedis, the Faro network is invaluable. It’s now supported by an international network of companies and offices, giving it rapid access to expertise from different regions and resulting in an excellent knowledge of the economic fabric of local communities. That’s a great differentiator in a competitive market.”

“Faro as a group operates very much as we do”, continues Gordon. “All the agencies within the Interiman network are organized as small, independent teams - all the partner companies in Faro

operate as independent entities even though they are part of a greater whole - and so when Faro approached us to join them in 2006, there was a natural synergy.”

Joined Up Thinking But no matter how independent the individual brands are, what is absolutely key with a business as globally and sectorally diverse as Faro is a group infrastructure that works. As Lythgoe puts it: “The trouble with most global players in diverse markets with differing brands is that they talk about cross selling but rarely get their act together to do it properly - mainly because there isn’t the commitment at group level to put the systems in place to really make it happen. Our view is that you have to have an infrastructure that evolves with the group. That’s why, as the organisation expands its services, we are also expanding and improving the infrastructure. By utilising the information we gather during extensive financial and IT reviews, we are able to implement a centralised reporting model which allows all management teams to make informed fact based decisions.”

“This is already resulting in a growing number of cross border initiatives,” says Lythgoe. “Our US businesses are currently speaking with partners in Brazil about a possible deal with a common blue chip client. Additionally Switzerland and France are working together on resourcing roles across borders.”

But it doesn’t stop there. Lythgoe is also working on the development of a new internal communications platform which will encourage further cross selling and greater company interaction. An ambitious new recruitment website is in the pipeline which will centralise the advertising of all global vacancies in different languages ranging from

Reymond Knigge - Interiman Group

Robin Gordon - Interiman Group

Thierry Jacquier - Interiman Group

The New Global Player On The Block - Faro Recruitment Group

24 RI - January 2009 www.recruitment-international.co.uk

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Portuguese to Vietnamese. “We’ve appointed 4Mat to work with us on this complicated development project”, says Lythgoe. “It will entail both front end and admin/consultant translation to allow all our offices to use it.”

Lythgoe adds that face to face communication is also high on the agenda. “We have a twice yearly international summit where all our brands get together - this not only helps people understand the group ethos and strategic direction - but also gives them a breadth of knowledge and perspective across industries and geographies that would be difficult to achieve anywhere else.”

Speaking Your LanguageAnd that joined up thinking is very much on the agenda of another UK based Faro Group company, People First, which recruits in the office support and supply chain sectors as well as specialising in the provision of multilingual staff across a range of industries. There is also a specialist Japanese desk ‘Team Japan’. The firm was set up by co-directors Kate Ferguson and Katie Bevan in 1997 as a response to a changing recruitment

landscape. “We saw that the London marketplace was really changing and was being chosen as a prime location for international companies to site their global headquarters”, says Kate Ferguson. “Consequently, organisations were looking at recruiting language skills - and as that market developed they were also looking at agencies which had a global not just a national reach.”

Cue Faro Recruitment, who approached People First in 2002. “It was serendipity”, recalls Ferguson. “ Both Katie and I had said that within five years we needed to be looking for a partner and Faro approached us at just the right time and gave us that global reach that our clients were looking for.”

Ferguson says that People First is an ideal example of cross selling initiatives with other international partners in the group. “One of the partner companies in Indonesia is currently trying to source a general manager for a client in Singapore. They are resourcing through talent pools in the USA, Canada, the Middle East and here in the UK through ourselves - we have someone at second interview next week - it’s a great example of what can

be achieved with the power of the Faro global footprint.” And closer to home People First is also working closely with Partner Finance Group in France on projects in the supply chain and logistics sector.

A Shrinking WorldThe world is getting smaller, and where once the thought of recruiting someone from another country was seen as a major task, today we are just one big global market place- a fact that Faro has been quick to capitalise upon. “Operating a global network of recruitment companies means that we have a massive international talent pool”, says Flood. “That’s a very powerful proposition for a recruitment group working in a market where most organisations, no matter what their size, are now able to operate on an international scale.”

So what about the future? What’s next on the agenda? “Well we’re still in a recession and there’s no magic bullet”, says Flood. “But, our geographic spread of risk, coupled with a heavy bias towards contract recruitment, means that we have a springboard for developing permanent business as global economies improve. At the moment, it’s about keeping lean and winning one contract at a time but if the right opportunity comes along - we’ll be first in the queue!”Kate Ferguson - People First Katie Bevan - People First

The New Global Player On The Block - Faro Recruitment Group