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Diane Martyn has been busy ensuring Randstad and Select businesses gelled from the moment they merged. DeeDee Doke went to meet her
Diane Martyn was leaving for a holiday as this article went to press. And following the whirlwind 90 days that she has just experienced, this break was clearly well deserved.
As the new chief executive of the combined Randstad and Select (Vedior) traditional generalist staffing businesses in the UK, Martyn has spent many a day and night on the road since mid-May, taking the message of integration to hundreds of employees around the country.
"I feel I've got to know nearly every hotel in the UK," Martyn says with a laugh. "But I love being on the road anyway."
On 16 May, Randstad and Vedior executives reached a settlement to form a single recruitment company from the massive global holdings of each. Just three days later, Martyn and Fred van der Tang, then managing director for Randstad in the UK, led a "communications offensive" to explain to employees what the new order in the UK - or at least much of it - would look like.
Martyn's chief executive role includes overseeing four distinct business lines within the newly integrated company's UK presence: the Randstad and the corporately-owned Select branches, Randstad's onsite division and Contact Centre Solutions and the Select franchising arm (see box, overleaf). Combined, her territory represents a pound 300m marriage, with Randstad contributing pound 160m in annual turnover and Select about pound 140m, by Martyn's estimates.
In the new structure, van der Tang has been appointed managing director of UK Professional Services, Randstad UK Holding. His new role means he will oversee the enlarged group's IT, finance & accounting, and Origin HR recruitment process outsourcing businesses.
"If you asked me what's been the greatest success, it was that people knew on day one [19 May] what was going to happen to them and where they were going to belong," she says, early on in a conversation with Recruiter at her Luton office. "We did a 'communication offensive' on day one, as you can imagine."
Then, she says, "we had a 90-day programme,...