Here’s her complete speech

Dear Stefano, Assolavoro members, guests, Ciett members, ladies and gentlemen,

Bentornato a casa! Welcome home!

Thank you dear friend Stefano Scabbio chair of Assolavoro for opening this conference, for your nice and kind words to Ciett and for explaining the current labour market environment in Italy to us. Italy is in the last stages of a very thorough labour market reform program. I hope it works as well for the economy here as the drastic reforms in Germany did more than 10 years ago, of which we will be hearing more about later this conference from the main architect at that time, Mr Hartz.

It is a great pleasure to welcome you all to this conference. Each year we get together as Ciett family, with people coming from all corners of the world, and it always feels a bit like coming home. We all have found our ways to Rome! We indeed have representatives from all Ciett regions: Europe, North America, South America, Africa, North Asia and Asia/Pacific. It sure is a privilege and a pleasure to have you all here in Roma!

I especially extend a warm welcome to all our high level guests and speakers. I look forward to hearing more from you today and tomorrow! And I am grateful to our two loyal sponsors Bond and Careerbuilder for supporting us again. Thank you.

Over the past 10 years we have met in all corners of the world. Next year we will be moving outside of Europe again to the East this time, to New Delhi, India. Ciett is most thankful to Assolavoro for organizing and hosting this year’s conference in such a wonderful Renaissance, Romanesque venue. The welcome event yesterday evening was awesome. We feel the full weight of centuries and centuries of culture and wisdom upon us….And I am sure we’ll profit from that.

I have been present at all our conferences in the past 10 years, and these 10 conferences tell us a tale of how Ciett has grown and professionalized. In our past conferences we not only have had great geographical diversity, but we have also addressed a broad range of topics. But there certainly is a “red thread”. By the way this expression originally comes from Greek mythology Ariadne, the Minotaur and all that – not a Roman myth, so I’ll stop….. Apologies!

The red thread of all our conferences, and in fact of the work Ciett does, is showcasing the useful role that private employment services play in the changing world of work.

You can call it “Adapting to Change”, as our 2012 report was. Or you can brand it as the Way to Work, as we have done for the past few years. Or you can name the Ciett conference “Fast forward to the future of work”, as Federgon did last year in Brussels…… This year, our theme is the “Triple Win of the employment & recruitment industry”. Three gains: mobility, inclusion and competitiveness. And our added value to the three parties involved! Our employees, our clients and the society at large.

You’ll see that this red thread is fully reflected in the program of the coming two days. As you may have seen, after a general scene setting this morning, we have three thematic sessions scheduled for you.

The first session will focus on our own industry. What is the future of employment and recruitment services around the world? Where should we be heading?

In the second session, we will take a closer look at our clients and strategic partners. Why would they hire us? And how can we help them make sense of a world that becomes increasingly complex, volatile and fragmented?

Tomorrow, we will have a session looking at our agency work, the triangular employment relation that still is our core business. We strongly believe that agency work offers good quality, decent work. It’s standard, secure and regular…. It fully belongs in the range of decent contracts fit for purpose for today’s and tomorrow’s labour market.

The labour market is facing an employment crisis today, as well as an increasing skills gap, and in the longer term a demographic shift is looming.The ingredients of a rather complex picture. Today there are 201 million unemployed globally, of which 74 million are young people looking for a job. We know we need to create 280 million jobs over the next 5 years to absorb all. Jobs that require skills our current talent often doesn’t have. 38% of companies cannot find the right skills sets today. The prognoses is, that this will become worse. We also know that the demographic shift is looming, we are all getting older and grayer while in Europe our working population is shrinking….towards a shortage of 35 million in 2050.  Meanwhile the world of work is changing in numerous ways under the influence of technology. Predicting the future, even 10 years ahead is risky business….Just think: ipads have only been around for 5 years, and look at how they have changed our world. A good time to remind you of social media…., I would encourage you to twitter a lot about our conference, the hash tag is Ciett2015. Let’s beat last year’s high score!

There are no easy solutions to today’s and tomorrow’s labour market challenges. However, we are lucky to have a room full of experts – you! – that can contribute to the discussion, finding solutions. The contribution our industry can deliver, we know from experience, is:

The Employment & Recruitment industry can make a difference”….A positive difference.

The role of our industry is to support business and workers to find their way in an ever changing landscape. We can’t do this alone. It is truly a pleasure for me that we have so many representatives of our strategic stakeholders present at this conference to join in our discussions. The ILO, the IOE – the international organisation of employers, WAPES representing the public employment services around the world, and partner organisations such as ECSSA for executive search, and of course our friends from Staffing Industry Analysts.

Let’s have a closer look at some of the changes taking place. ILO published the World Employment & Social Outlook 2015 last week. It provides an excellent overview of the changing nature of jobs. Among other things, ILO data shows that over 60% of workers globally work without a formal employment contract. I repeat: without a contract….They are working independently or in family work, or worst of the worst: in undeclared work. This means that a maximum of 60% of workers are in the red circle on the right of this diagram. The diagram shows a job quality rating by the London Metropolitan University. An EU financed research done in 2012 comparing different types of employment contracts (open ended, fixed term agency work, seasonal work, zero hour contracts, informal work) and rating them on a 1 to 5 scale, 5 being the best.

We all have a responsibility to bring as many employees as possible in a better quality form of work – if they so want to. It is clear that policy makers can only achieve this, if they allow for a diversity of labour contracts to be used. Any of the four employment forms on the left side should be fully endorsed and promoted: open-ended full time and part-time, fixed term and agency work. Their rating is on par when it comes to quality elements like equal pay, health & safety, representation and training. There simply is no “one size fits all” contract wise! Diversity should rule on the labour market too!

The role of our industry is being able to offer this contractual diversity to workers & user companies alike, offering workers decent quality employment and offering user companies the ability to adapt to change. And we know that the bonus of allowing for appropriately regulated decent flexible contracts as agency work is, will lead to the creation of more and better jobs. We hope that our stakeholders – governments, policy makers, labour unions – take this message into account. We can only play our positive role on the labour market when there is balanced legislation in place for our industry. Legislation based on ILO Convention 181. The convention on private employment agencies. We now have 31 ratification – a nice number, 3 new ones gained last year, but our ambition reaches higher. Talking about ambition, let’s have a look at our strategic ambitions in the last part of my opening speech.

Last time we met, in May 2014 in Brussels, Ciett members had just elected a new board, with me as its President. As you may remember, we set out several strategic priorities for Ciett in the years to come. In my speech last year I summarized these as ABC:

A. for Alignment of our messages among members, and sharing our positive stories with the world and with our key stakeholders.

B. for Broadening of our membership base, as well as of the HR services we as a confederation represent. And of course broadening our cooperation with partner organisations in the HR services.

C. for Compliance, which is a prerequisite to delivering good quality work as an industry.

So where do we stand today? I’m very happy that today I have the opportunity to tell you that a lot of progress has been made. Of course parts of it are still work in progress. Back to Allignment.

Our industry offers many contributions to the economy and society. The only way we can continue and expand our role is by making sure that public perception of our industry is realistic and positive. This means we will have to know, to show and to tell stories. So join in and share positive stories and contributions, such as the facts and figures listed on this slide.

Since the election of the new Ciett board, we have visited many of our members, over 24 last year. Almost half our membership. We try to help out where we can with public affairs and public relations work, meeting with national policy makers. In some cases, we were also able to offer advice and support in building national federations. On the slide you see pictures of our ABC road show, spreading the ABC messages in countries as Argentina, Brazil, China, but of course also India, and many many more. Finally the C of Compliance.

Compliance is an important part of capacity building in our federations and in the conversations we have with our stakeholders.

We are doing more than just talking, we achieve concrete results. In terms of Compliance, I would like to highlight some of the things we achieved in the area of fair international recruitment.

Ciett has been an active participant in the ILO Fair Recruitment Initiative, improving recruitment practices in India, Bangladesh and Nepal where this picture was taken in December last year. These days they unfortunately have other worries than fair recruitment. Linked to this ILO project, we have also revised the Ciett Code of Conduct, which approved during the Ciett General Assembly yesterday.

Alignment, Broadening and Compliance all collide in the new branding and positioning that we are developing for Ciett. A taskforce chaired by Ciett Vice-President Hans Leentjes, and supported by several board members and experts, has been discussing what language we could best use to describe ourselves and what we do. As you will understand, this is a delicate process. It needs to be future proof. It needs to bring our members together, while leaving enough room for national and regional preferences and diversity. It needs to reflect the broad range of HR services that we offer today being: agency work, permanent recruitment, RPO and outplacement/career development, but should still be specific and recognizable enough. And finally it needs to reflect how our industry overall offers quality work.

When you ask the question what language you use, this is more than just a cosmetic exercise. This question goes to the heart of who we are. What does our industry have to offer to the world? I’m very grateful to the taskforce and the experts that they have been able to find that common langage, and I’m happy that the Ciett General Assembly agreed with the chosen path yesterday.

I am proud to say who we agree we are:

“We are the work and employment specialists industry, providing meaningful work to millions of people and creating jobs with thousands of organisations. Our role is to drive people and organisations to navigate a changing world of work, by enabling work, adaptation, security and prosperity.” As a result, we give hope, develop confidence, built trust and deliver pride. Our values.

As I have already touched upon our role in enabling work, adaptation and security, I would like to conclude my speech by giving some facts about how we enable prosperity. We are growth drivers, working in a €415 billion industry, offering employment to 1.66 million people in our agencies, not mentioning the 60 million people who last year, found access to work via us. We contribute considerably to the global economy by making labour markets more efficient, by reducing informal work and by decreasing unemployment.

For me, this is reason for all of us to take great pride in our work each day!

Now that we have established what we represent, what our values are, we will look at branding, an appropriate name, tagline, logo etcetera. In two years, we will celebrate our 50th anniversary. May well be under a new name. Stay tuned to and involved in this progress!

The following two days promise to offer you a prime opportunity to discuss work and employment with top speakers and guests, and with your colleagues from around the world. I want to thank Assolavoro again for hosting this year’s edition of the Ciett World Employment Conference. So with that, I will hand over to our host of today, Dario Laruffa.

Thank you.