While the company name remains the same, the new Hays tagline is, ‘Working for your tomorrow’.

The business changes include consolidating its sub-brands, offering a wider array of services such as helping design and implement strategies aimed at creating inclusive and equitable workplaces, and helping customers “address new challenges they are facing such as long-term skill shortages, new job category creation… upskilling workforces, higher wage inflation and changing work habits”.

A company statement said Hays is “increasingly going to market as an HR and Talent Services business, bringing an integrated suite of services” to its portfolio.

Hays’s “seven or eight thousand major clients” around the world will be serviced directly by a client director as part of infrastructure that has been under construction over the “last two or three years”, said Steve Weston, Hays chief customer officer, speaking exclusively to Recruiter. “They will be focused on ensuring the client gets the service that they deserve… Those customers are very important to us, and in that way we have to be customer-centric.

“We’re not going to ignore our 30,000 other customers,” Weston went on to say, “but we have to put our solutions for that [major clients] segment of the market in a different way than perhaps other segments of the market. And those segments require time and directors, and we’ve invested in those, and where we have invested in those, we’ve seen great benefit for both sides of that partnership.”

In addition to looking at client services in terms of direct relationships, Hays also is “very close” to launching a ‘train, hire, deploy’ model in which the recruitment firm will “train individuals in a particular skill set” in partnership with customers, Weston explained.

“We will be doing all the assessment, hiring, training, and then we’ll be placing them at those clients and seeing them through the first couple of years of their career,” Weston said.

Research conducted in 2021 with external experts, clients, non-clients and candidates around the world has guided the company’s direction in evolving its practices, the company said.