our strategy driving our growth.

Our strategy consists of four building blocks: strong concepts, best people, excellent execution and superior brands.

They are our response to the external growth drivers and market trends in our industry. However, these building blocks only work in unison. Strong concepts are of little value without the right people to make them work. Excellent execution is impossible without the right concepts and the best people. And once these blocks come together, you can create the fourth building block: superior brands. Our strategic building blocks enable us to not only serve the interests of our stakeholders, but to create lasting value for all of them − our clients, our employees, our candidates and society at large.

To identify key material matters in the dynamic world of work, we take input from both inside and outside Randstad. In the first half of 2018, we did a re-assessment of our most recent materiality analysis (2016). The assessment was conducted by independent consultants in order to validate our current material matters and identify new topics. The stakeholder groups included clients, candidates, employees, authorities, shareholders, trade unions, civil society, and sector organizations. The relevance of these topics was assessed through an online survey filled by clients, candidates, employees and shareholders. The business impact of each topic was assessed by internal representatives of different departments, functions and regions.

We identified 23 key material matters in the social, economic, and environmental domains. These matters are captured in a materiality matrix, where relevance for stakeholders is plotted on the y axis and the business impact is plotted on the x axis. The materiality matrix does not reflect regional or cultural differences. We report on our key material matters, at least annually in our Annual Report.

The matrix below shows the top 10 (red dots) and top 20 (yellow dots) distribution.