But I’d say as we continue, it’s hard to say. In this environment, perm’s been holding up better than anyone would have ever imagined if we would have went back a number of quarters, and it’s still holding up fairly well despite some of the pressure we’re seeing in staffing volumes in some of the markets. Will that growth rate continue to edge down? Yes, but it’s hard to say if it will come down into negative territory anytime soon. We’ll just have to monitor those trends, but so far we’re very encouraged by the fact that it’s holding up in many of our key markets.
Mark Marcon: That’s great. Jonas, you were just in Europe, you were at Davos. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re hearing from clients and just generally speaking with regards to in the key markets – France, U.K., Italy, Germany, what you’re hearing with regards to areas that seem to be holding up a little bit better than what we here on this side of the pond would imagine as it relates to Europe, and what areas of caution are there? How are you thinking about things, not just for the next three months but over the course of the year, broadly speaking?
Jonas Prising: Sure Mark. The conclusions of discussions with clients is clearly their hiring intent is softening somewhat, but despite what you read in the papers in terms of both big tech companies pulling down and other larger corporations also having workforce reductions, most of our clients are continuing to hire. They may not hire the same skill set, so they take longer to hire, the sales cycles are a bit longer, recruitment times are going up, and they’re very specific about the skills that they feel they’re going to be needing heading into the year. But they are continuing to hire, and that speaks exactly to this dichotomy in terms of demand. On the one side, we feel that some of the skill sets, notably in logistics, are becoming softer.
Construction has been softer due to the interest rate environment. You have others, financial services and tech companies, where demand is still holding on really in Europe as well as globally, so we’re in this time where we are balancing between customers that are tapping the brakes, they’re not hitting the brakes, they’re tapping the brakes. Some have their foot over the brake and thinking about what they would do if they see the environment deteriorate further, to many clients saying that they’re working through the pandemic supply chain issues and they have a big order book that they need to fulfill during 2023. It’s quite uneven, but at the same time quite encouraging because you can tell all of this is reflected in still very strong labor markets, and what’s not unusual, as you all know, is that our industry leads the way in a softening economy but it has yet to translate into the broader labor market.
We don’t know to what degree it will. We note of course the reduction in demand for some places with Manpower skills in particular as we see industrial outlooks come down, but overall it’s still a constructive environment but it is difficult to predict where it’s going. Most companies we spoke with and are speaking with still are looking to bring on talent because they have the memory of the pandemic very, very fresh. You think back over past recessions, and this may be the most pre-announced recession that we have ever experienced, be it technical or otherwise. Employers in the past really absorbed most of the slowdown in reduced productivity because they wanted to hold onto the workers, and that means we may well, as Jack has alluded to, still see reasonably good perm activity, some parts of the business feeling more of the softening and others still see very good demand.
