While the global recruitment company’s half-year results underscored tough conditions in key markets, “particularly towards the end of the half in perm”, Hays said, the financial report also revealed progress in productivity increases and resource allocation by moving consultants from less active to more dynamic sectors.

The company’s “sector leading” 4% year-on-year consultant fee productivity increase in H1 25 gave Hays a strong achievement to crow about, including a 40% year-on-year productivity increase in the US and 12% in Australia-New Zealand. 

The company also saw a 12% net fee increase in Q2 with enterprise clients. “Temp & contracting was more resilient than perm and included strong performances in several of our Focus countries [all of which are Austria, France, Italy, Japan, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and the USA],” the company said.

In H1 25, temporary placement markets generated 62% of the group’s net fees, with permanent responsible for 38%.

“A prolonged feature of our key markets over the last 18 months has been relatively high activity levels and solid levels of job inflow so our consultants remain busy and have worked extremely hard,” Hays said. “However, closing placements has been harder with a significant impact on our average placement volume per consultant, or volume productivity, which currently sits below normal levels. This has created a headwind to group profitability and conversion rate.”

Non-fee earner employee headcount fell by 18% year-on-year, which included speeding up the company’s back-office efficiency programme, the restructuring of operations in several regions and “delayering” of management or reducing the number of management levels within an organisation. This generally aims to cost-cut by eliminating unnecessary layers of leadership.

The company said: “These projects drove a further c.£25m structural cost reduction in addition to the c.£30m savings delivered in FY 24. Overall, our actions have structurally lowered our costs by c.£55m per annum since the start of the last fiscal year.”

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