It wasn't immediately obvious to everyone: HR service provider Inspire becoming part of VANAD Group. But things are now falling into place, says Julien Hellebrekers. A broad service provider is starting to take shape in the fields of BPO, HR, and technology.

 

It's no coincidence that Inspire was acquired by VANAD Interactions over a year ago. The HR service provider now has ample opportunity to expand and expand its services in multiple areas. One of the most recent steps: the appointment of Julien Hellebrekers as director of staffing services and partnerships.

In fact, the expansion of this service provision actually began earlier, namely with the launch of Inspire's offshore activities in Suriname in 2021. Ilya Gleiser, currently CCO at VANAD Interactions, reflects: “Inspire started as an HR brand: staffing and recruitment. The ambition was always to expand our HR services, but that didn't happen because of the transition to BPO services in Suriname.”

360 degree service

"Merging Inspire and (at the time) VANAD Engage was obviously a strategic decision: we could offer a 360-degree service. Engage gained a sourcing location in Suriname, creating opportunities for managed insourcing through staffing," says Gleiser.

"Now it's time to further grow Inspire's services with staffing, recruitment, and interim management, including at a strategic level. To achieve this, it's essential that we focus on the HR department; everything related to BPO is now our responsibility." VANAD Interactions“By hiring Julien Hellebrekers, we have laid the foundation for Inspire's further growth.”

Pioneering work Suriname

Julien Hellebrekers knows HR inside and out. He was also involved in developing BPO activities in Suriname, including under the auspices of TP. He still vividly remembers his first visit to the country.

"That was with Norbert van Liemt, on the eve of Suriname's success. At the time, a few dozen employees worked at TP's first location: a small, single-floor building intended for Samsung. When I left TP, the company had grown to around 1.500 employees, spread across several locations. I look back on that time with pride. We've given the Surinamese labor market and the prospects of young people a tremendous boost in recent years."

 

Director of Staffing Services and Partnerships, does your work area extend to Suriname or will you focus solely on the Netherlands?

"The focus is on the Netherlands, but I have over fifteen years of experience with both BPO and in-house contact centers. So, from Inspire, we can also find the right profiles internationally, including in Suriname."

Inspire can also supply staff to VANAD Interactions' competitors, Hellebrekers confirms. "A fifth of the recruitment will be for VANAD, and the rest will be for other clients," he estimates. "During my time at Olympia, I had a number of facility management companies as clients." He also has a strong network of contacts, partly due to his involvement in the COVID-19 projects.

 

To what extent do sourcing and AI influence the profile of managers?

"That's definitely true. In any case, when I started, I toured VANAD's departments to get a feel for the network. A lot has changed for agents recently: in a growing number of organizations, agents are facing a transformation where they no longer have to navigate twenty different systems, but are supported by AI tools. This transformation demands different skills from managers."

Add to these changes all the reports of layoffs, and in a few years, the contact center will look completely different again – and it will be like Africa, so to speak. The contact center manager who starts a new role now and stays for a few years will have to manage all of this. What does that mean for the manager's profile?

Managers must be able to adapt to strategic changes and sourcing challenges: permanent or flexible staff. At Inspire, we want to play a bigger role in this by doing more than just filling vacancies. Our clients will also face other personnel challenges. Consider temporary support in the form of an experienced interim manager.

Gleiser adds: "Support can also be provided by the VANAD Group. We can adapt to our client's needs across the board. If HR shrinks while digital needs to be scaled up, we can combine the two."

Different customer contact job, different leadership profile

Hellebreker: "The customer contact representative's profile will be higher in the future, and teams will be smaller. If customer contact representatives handle a relatively large number of complex conversations, coaching will need to be different. And managers will increasingly need to be better at handling sourcing and technology issues and the interplay between the two. Capacity planning alone will become less and less of a one-off exercise. It's now becoming intertwined with other technology issues."

“We all need to go back to school more often, just because instead of supervisors, you'll be managing CX engineers.”

Gleiser: “In two years, I've seen conversations shift from occupancy and a tight labor market to prompting and AI-based routing, where skills play a role. As a manager, you have to be able to meaningfully participate in these kinds of conversations. It's all becoming increasingly technical, while that took relatively little effort over the past twenty years. We all need to go back to school, simply because instead of supervisors, you'll be managing CX engineers. They have very different KPIs.”

 

Suriname is facing a growing shortage of middle management. Is it possible for Dutch managers to work in Suriname for a year?

"That happens regularly. Sometimes a candidate expresses a preference, sometimes there's a need for specific knowledge that needs to be developed in Suriname, because the rapid growth is indeed creating a shortage. There are vacancies in Suriname, but also in Turkey," says Hellebrekers.

 

What does Inspire do differently from Dutch recruitment agencies in this sector?

Our proposition is broader – we offer staffing, interim, permanent positions, and insourcing – and we mediate across a wider functional area. Besides customer contact specialists, we also provide professionals who are related to or work closely with that field: think of professionals in compliance or technology. A key advantage for our clients is that we look beyond the vacancy itself. We can also support multi-year strategies, not only from an HR perspective, but also from a technology or BPO perspective.

"We're not a small executive search firm, but we offer a comprehensive solution when needed," says Hellebrekers. "Even after we've placed a professional, questions can arise that require a different approach. And of course, our own processes are powered by AI solutions—think searching and data enrichment. With this, we aim to provide a seamless service for ourselves and our candidates. But the most important thing is the synergy between the VANAD Group's divisions, which is proving to be very effective."

(Ziptone/Erik Bouwer)

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