The Adecco Group

Until fairly recently, employment agencies were primarily called to replace an absent employee, or to satisfy an unexpected, albeit temporary increase in workload. Today, Adecco clients consider a flexible workforce as a core component of their business strategy. In today's competitive employment market the key concepts are workforce productivity, reactivity and flexibility. As a central constituent of this strategy, staffing companies are increasingly becoming the long-term partners managing this new workforce. Key Dates: Adia and ECCO merge to form Adecco; company acquires ICON Recruitment (Australia). Adecco S.A. is the world's largest temporary employment company. In addition, since its acquisition of Olsten Corporation in 1999, the company is also the leading staffing services group in the United States, outpacing longtime rival Manpower Inc. A product of the 1996 merger between Switzerland's Adia and France's ECCO, Adecco has built a network of more than 5,000 offices in some 60 countries. Each year the company supplies some 200,000 customers with more than three million temporary and permanent employees. On any given day, some 600,000 people find employment through Adecco around the world. The company's largest business comes under its Adecco brand name. Yet Adecco has also ridden the rising demand for technical skills, especially in the booming telecommunications and computer industries, to become the world's leading provider of specialty staffing services, through subsidiaries including TAD Technical, TAD Telecom, and Ajilon. Adecco is also a leading provider of staffing, executive recruitment, training, and career management to the financial services industry, through subsidiaries AOC (Accountants on Call), Alexandre TIC, and Asia-based Templar International Consultants (TIC). While staffing services continue to produce as much as 84 percent of Adecco's annual revenues, its strong range of specialty services has grown to produce more than 16 percent of sales. The company, listed on the New York, Switzerland, and Paris stock exchanges, has seen strong growth in the late 1990s through acquisitions including those of TAD Resources International, Delphi Group Plc. in the United Kingdom, and Olsten. The company is led by CEO John Bowmer, Chairman and ECCO founder Philippe Foriel-Destezet, and Vice-Chairman Klaus Jacobs. The company's sales neared SFr 18.5 billion (US$11.6 billion) in 1999. In 1961 the company opened its first international office, in Belgium. Adia expanded further the following year, adding an office in Germany. Denmark came on line in 1965, and in 1972 the company moved overseas, opening an office in Menlo Park, California, its first American outpost. By then, Adia has been joined in Europe by another fast-growing company, ECCO, based in France, and founded in 1964 by Philippe Foriel-Destezet. In the 1970s Adia became one of the first temporary agencies to offer its workers benefits such as healthcare and paid vacations. In 1974 Lavanchy recruited Swiss executive Martin O. Pestalozzi to help him run the company; Pestalozzi had spent many years working in the United States for a number of consumer services and manufacturing businesses. Pestalozzi later recalled to International Management that when he came aboard at Adia, 'all the figures were too small. They all needed several more zeros.' Pestalozzi and Lavanchy set out to change this situation through a policy of aggressive acquisitions in countries around the world. During the next 12 years Pestalozzi spent more than half of his time shuttling around the globe, propounding the theory that the temporary employment industry needed to increase its efforts to provide high quality workers in order to improve its credibility. In that time Adia purchased more than 85 companies, tripling its size and operating in more than a dozen countries. This process was aided by the highly fragmented nature of the temporary help industry, which made it easy for a lar