Of course we love to write great content around the staffing industry on a daily basis here at Staffing Talk. But we are also interested in reading and listening and learning. As a result, we always have our ears to the ground – and the chat rooms – checking out the noise around the staffing industry. And some of you are making plenty of it about Manpower!
Okay, to be fair about this, let’s establish something right up front. ManpowerGroup is a huge, no, make that HUGE company. A $22 billion company, with nearly 3,900 offices in over 80 countries and territories.
According to their press releases, ManpowerGroup connects “over 600,000 people to work each day, training over 10 million people and interviewing over 12 million people.”
When you are talking about those kinds of sheer numbers…employees, former employees, would be employees, temps, clients, vendors and on and on, you will have lots of disgruntled people. Lots. We get that.
But that doesn’t mean, however, that we should dismiss out of hand, some well-formed thoughtful comments about a company just because that company is big.
Let’s turn our attention to the Yahoo! Message Boards: “Manpower Group A Sinking Ship.”
Here it goes.
“The leadership is an absolute embarrassment other than Jeff (editor’s note: presumably Jeffrey A. Joerres, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of ManpowerGroup). Jonas Prising is supposedly the “Sales Messiah” but he couldn’t sell an eskimo pie to an eskimo. Jorge Perez? What does this guy do? All he does is fly into town, give us a 30 minute talk, have dinner with us, and then he flies to the next town. Meanwhile, various VPs (especially the former franchise owners like Botox Babe in SJ and Gomer Pyle in NC) run rampant and do whatever they want while Senor Jorge turns his head and lets it all happen under his watch. Have you seen the VP of Sales who runs the national account team? She has purple hair!
We can’t win any new large accounts so what do we do? We break up the company and create individual staffing companies that don’t and cannot work together. A national account salesperson in our staffing division can’t sell IT or Financial or MSP yet they are supposedly national account salespeople. WTF? Talk about creating barriers!!!
We can’t win any new large accounts so what do we do? We break up the company and create individual staffing companies that don’t and cannot work together.
Then because we can’t seem to get our operating costs down, we come up with this new age concept called “TALENTISM” and “THE HUMAN AGE” to somehow brainwash the sales organization into thinking we can command higher margins and sell more deals. Hello??? It’s not working! We need to get rid of all the dead weight salaries and reduce our operating costs.
Does upper management think we are idiots??? Staffing is Staffing is Staffing. It’s like buying paper clips for Gods sakes. The competitors who can mange their operating costs are going to be the winners. Addecco is kicking our ass because they are able to offer lower pricing because they can manage their expenses better. It’s a total and complete joke!
Staffing is Staffing is Staffing. It’s like buying paper clips for Gods sakes. The competitors who can manage their operating costs are going to be the winners. Addecco is kicking our ass because they are able to offer lower pricing because they can manage their expenses better. It’s a total and complete joke!
The purple haired lady (Dame Edna) with the english accent is supposedly a VP of Sales in charge of national accounts? Heck, I know more about sales than she does. One of my co-workers at corporate told me the national accounts sales team didn’t even get their commission plan until June. R U Kidding Me! What relevant, organized and supposedly sales driven company hands out a sales commission plan halfway into the year? Unbelievable!
Turnover is rampant. VPs fire RVPs because they feel threatend by them and don’t want to lose their own jobs so they find ways to fire them. It’s happening at other Manpower companies like Right Management, Experis and Tapfin. Negativity and low morale is out of control.
WHERE’S THE LEADERSHIP???
I can’t take it anymore. Somebody throw me a life jacket because if I don’t find another job soon, I’m going to drown……
Woa, Nellie. Tell us how you really feel!
In some subsequent comments some people piled on and made some more disparaging remarks about some of the folks cited in the post above.
My attention was certainly piqued, so I started doing some searches such as “Manpower reviews” or variations and found this Yahoo! poster had plenty of company at Glassdoor and Indeed.com and lots of other sites.
This person at Glassdoor said they were glad to see Manpower “finally investing in training that was so lacking,” but the compliments kind of end there.
“Rolling out so many changes in such a short time frame and with high expectations. Trying to play catch up without realizing the impact on the field offices. Admire them for finally realizing how behind they were but rolling out so many things at once with field office shaking their heads… who’s on first, whose on second….etc. To much to fast for some and to keep up with daily business. Compensation needs to be reviewed and updated. High expecations, low compensation.”
This next paragraph was under the heading Advice to Senior Management.
“Update our technology, equipment in the field offices. We’re on the front lines, clients visit the field offices not corporate and we should present ourselves as the first class organization we lead them to believe we are. Our telephone systems are so old it’s an embarrassment, some of the common software to make several aspects of our jobs easier and more professional is not available to us, such as Adobe Pro. Ergonomics… is unheard of. Also, look at compensation packages, your way behind on that also.”
And this is from another Glassdoor poster.
“Culture of fear. Top down management, where co-workers work against one another to promote themselves or only talk the talk in order to secure their jobs. Employees that mislead candidates and associates regarding jobs just to get the fill. Internal negative feeling from employees that are held in because they fear retaliation from the company. There is no time to actually recruit most of your time is answering phones from potential candidates or upset associates because they were lied to about assignments and the potential for those assignments to become permanent. Most of the recruiters / staffing specialists use deceptive tactics to get fills (placements at companies). While there I don’t think they ever did do a employment verification and companies working with them should also be alerted to this fact.”
And their Advice to Senior Management.
Change your culture of fear. Better protect your talent ensuring fair evaluation from management. Don’t just talk the talk. Come in through the process and see what is going on. Come in and evaluate on all levels. Too many yes men and women in the company that have learned to take advantage of saying the right things to the right people.
The new Human Age movement sounds great, but when even Manpower isn’t hiring the temps that are doing the work but hiring VP after VP to sit in meetings, something’s not right.
The new Human Age movement sounds great, but when even Manpower isn’t hiring the temps that are doing the work but hiring VP after VP to sit in meetings, something’s not right.
There’s a lot of negativity among employees because management doesn’t do anything about people who slack off, instead making the people who don’t pick up the extra work. You want to get promoted, don’t worry about having skills, just know the right people. Some managers prefer to keep people they can outshine versus people who know what they’re doing.”
I read through pages and pages of comments/reviews at Indeed.com, and won’t cite any more here. You get the idea.
For Manpower’s part, they actually have a section on their website called out as “Social Responsibility.” Here is the first line in that section: ManpowerGroup has a reputation for operating at the highest level of integrity.
Manpower has also been named one of America’s Most Admired staffing companies by Fortune Magazine for the ninth consecutive year in 2011, and named to Forbes‘ 2007 Platinum List of America’s 400 Best Managed Companies for the fifth time.
So there seems to be a divergence there between what we read at the top of this post, and what we read at the bottom. Which is it?
We’d love to hear your comments about the “real Manpower.”
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Nothing new here. It’s the same at all the national companies.
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Really? I hope that’s not the case. From my personal experience these descriptions do not apply to all – or even most – of corporate America. I would be surprised if there was something along these lines particularly endemic to the staffing industry, but maybe there are some anomalies. Thanks for the comment “same.” Anyone else care to comment?
David,
Actually, none of this particularly surprises me (although the complainer is witty at times). My experience with very large and/or publicly held companies is that there is almost always a big disconnect between the front line/on-the-ground folks and the brass at HQ. I believe it’s a combination of size, geographic separation, and ‘hey, we’re getting paid the big bucks, so we can’t be wrong, can we?’. Just my experience.
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Hi Jeff, thanks for the comment. Always nice to hear from you. I think I got kind of sucked into the specifics of these Manpower complaints. But when you back up a bit, and couch the complaints broadly, as you did, then you are right. There is almost always a disconnect between the front lines and upper management. The gap is even wide enough to form the premise for a TV show. In “Undercover Boss” the whole point is that it’s nearly impossible for upper management to know what it’s like to perform the tasks of lower level workers until they try it themselves. So we laugh as the hotel chain CEO cleans the pool in 100 degree weather, unclogs toilets, and changes sheets. I really wasn’t trying to pick on Manpower in our original post. I was however trying to raise the question, and determine the answer partly through comments, of whether there are specific “ship sinking” problems going on at Manpower at the moment, or if this is simply part and parcel of being a $22 billion company with thousands of locations and clients and temps and employees.
The fact that the Manpower employee thinks staffing is like buying paperclips probably goes a long way to explain why they are not winning any deals. The leadership is obviously not helping but if the average employee thinks the market is comoditised and customer service isn’t a critical factor then they will carry on disappointing customers. Good news for the competitors…….
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Good post, the commenter on the message board leaves only a shred of credibility after a statement like that. I maintain a very high operating margin backed by exemplary customer service. “Price only matters in the absence of value”.
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you build a $22 Billion company with 4000 branches in 80 countries and then you’ll have the right to criticize Manpower’s leadership. Believe me or not, you can’t build a company like that without knowing what you’re doing (at least better than you!!)
Hot debate. What do you think?
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You have to build a $22 billion company before you can criticize one? Interesting theory you have there.
In my experience, Manpower does offer many elements of greatness and lots of room for disappointment. Personally, I am disappointed with the performance in the U.S., which actually is responsible for a rather small piece of the $22 billion and almost none of the innovation and leadership.
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Anonymous (re ‘you build a $22 billion company’) doesn’t realize that he/she pleads the case that Manpower’s leadership has pursued a failed strategy of volume in place of quality, commoditization in place of differentiation, and bombasity in place of building a healthy employee culture. Stock holders have clearly voted their estimation of disastrous financial results that ruinous acquisitions have only scarcely been able to hide.
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I must admit, after the first couple of comments I was kind of second guessing the article a bit. I thought maybe we had just found a couple of odd, random, dissatisfied people which isn’t a hard feat considering the size of Manpower.
But these last two comments really reinforced our premise, and the reason for writing the piece.
The former Manpower franchisee offers a great take. Of course we are kind of quaint and provincial here in the U.S. in terms of our world view, so his was a good reminder to look more globally at the story. Interesting line that the U.S. provides a small part of the worldwide revenue and little of the leadership and innovation as well. I have no way to know if it’s true or not, but this person would presumably know more than most of the rest of us.
And this last commenter? Wow. What a great job they did framing and verbailizing some of the issues, and so succinctly at that! Seemingly spoken by someone with both business knowledge and apparently specific subject matter expertise about Manpower as well.
And again, if true, this description…volume in place of quality, commoditization in place of differentiation, and bombasity in place of a healthy culture…goes beyond the “we have problems simply because we are so big” and “it’s the same at all big companies” take where we kind of started with the comments section.
This post may well set the all-time reader record for a Staffing Talk article before it fades away, as it is already near the top.
I would love to hear from a Manpower corporate executive on all this. Anyone from Milwaukee reading?
David, they are reading but will never respond to this kind of thing. And really, what would you expect them to say?
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In the old days they could bury this story and promise to buy a little more advertising in any publication tempted to carry it further, but today PR works differently and they have a choice between ignoring it or using it.
“Although we’re prevented from sharing more publicly, we here at XYZ Inc are always looking for opportunities to improve our employee culture and consider online forums like the ones quoted here as an important source of potential problems that do receive serious attention within the company….”
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You are exactly right, both Sara and “what they should say.” As much as we all might want a “real” response from Manpower about these comments, for lots of reasons that will never happen. And that’s too bad, also for a lot of reasons. So we are left with either nothing in most cases, or at best, some corporate PR speak. But honestly, as sara says, what do we expect? That an officer of a publicly traded company comes out and says stuff like, “Yeah, we did get too big, and the bottom line is the most important one, and we’re not the company we used to, either for our employees or our customers” and so on. And in that vacuum we all share our opinions.
As an industry executive with quite a bit of tenure I could certainly throw some additonal wood on this Manpower fire, however to be brutally honest, many of the issues raised within this string are common across many global staffing organizations. If the discussion is about trying to optimize on the model that built a 22 billion dollar company, then folks are wasting their time here, unless venting helps relieve some pent up angst. Unfortunately the real issue is the traditional branch based staffing model as practiced by the majors has probably reached the end of its lifecycle. Due to their market leadership positions, the corporate towers of companies like Manpower feel immune to the realities of the marketplace, an all to common arrogance that historically ends badly. They are big, bad, and think they have the power to manage the status quo into eternity, clinging to a “push” orientation which is breaking down in general. This is a fallacy any field person can recognize because they live market reality every day at street level. This business is commoditized. When you are big, profit is made and grown by volume, and operational efficiency (aka cost containment) first and foremost. Even the efforts to go up market in the skilled professions have been commodiitized, the only exception being where the laws of supply and demand heavily favor the supplier. In todays world profit is achieved at the cost of valuable high touch interaction with candidates and capital investment in the core business, ultimately sacrificing quality and driving employee dissatisfaction. This is an industry which measures success almost exclusively on the basis of size (volume or hours, which are becoming increasingly empty from a profit perspective). Besides being primitive, it is out of step with market reality which is telling all of us that for human capital its not size, but substance which matters today, for the customer, the candidate, and the delivery mode itself.
The entire way traditional staffing services are delivered needs to be re-invented and, given the stressers in the marketplace for talent, that re-engineered model probably has a substantial workforce skills development component associated with it. I expect this industry, which has experienced a measured amount of change relative to others, is headed for a period of susbstantial change soon, and when it happens, it will be fast.
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That could be one of the best written comments we have ever received here at Staffing Talk. Thank you so much “Anonymous.”
There is no reason for me to recount all of your points, other than to say I agree with you, including your assessment that the staffing business is both commoditized and ripe for a reboot, or wholesale reinvention.
In a story we just posted on another large staffing company, Command Center, I quoted from a website commenter who identified themselves as an ex-Command employee.
They also said “the day labor industry should NOT be made up of large corporate entities,” and that locally-run staffing companies are the better alternative. “By removing the unnecessary overhead of such corporate structures which exist solely to make money, better wages and benefits can be provided to the workers, and better rates and customer service can be provided to customers.”
It is an interesting time for the industry. Thanks again for your addition to the conversation.
Brutally true comments about culture of fear. Also, take a look at what they have done recently, there were seven field VPGM, all three of the women over 50 years old have been managed into made up jobs that were quickly eliminated. Replaced by 30ish kids with no background. Only over 50 left is in TX and his retirement is suddenly this summer. they fancy themselves as a glamorous company but will be lucky to remain competitive at all in the next few years. They are alive today in spite of their best efforts to implode.
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Thanks for the comments Suzanne. When describing a healthy company, the words “culture of fear” typically don’t enter the conversation. And I also look at the line, “They are alive today in spite of their best efforts to implode.” That’s what some had been saying about Kodak for the last 15 years, right up to the time they filed bankruptcy.
The genesis of the US cultural change at Manpower can be traced to early 2002-03 when an executive from the Canadian operation took control of the US field operation. Mr. Fromstein (CEO prior to Mr. Jorres) had great respect for the field, he accepted and encouraged input from regional leaders. He understood that regional input was critical information to have when developing long term business strategies. The new approach, was simply that corporate knew everything and that the field leaders were only there to implement corporate direction, and it was made clear that you did not question corporate leadership. If you did you were “reorganized” out.
The “reorganizations” of Manpowers US field operation over the past several years has clearly targeted those over 50. Good severence packages and non-disclosure agreements, along with sacrificing a few under 50 people to make a case that it wasn’t aggressively targeting older workers, has helped to keep the action under the radar.
I hope Manpower self corrects, it was a great organization and could be again.
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