Predicting the Future of Employment

Thought Leadership for ManpowerGroup

“Reputation Leaders has helped us produce world-class thought leadership on critical labor market issues, providing excellent insight and analysis as well as strong media angles.” – Ruth Harper

ManpowerGroup’s Employment Outlook Survey (MEOS) has become a staple of thought leadership for the past 65 years. The global insights and trend tracking have allowed ManpowerGroup to present regular insights and recommendations across the globe in their local markets and at international conferences.

40+ markets, 29 languages, over 40,000 interviews with hiring decision makers – every quarter.

Always on time. Always high quality. Always fresh insights. Always localized and customized. Always news-worthy.

Revitalizing Thought Leadership

In 2021, the long-running MEOS tracker was running out of steam. Local markets were dropping out due to rising costs of telephone survey engagement, falling sample sizes and static, uninteresting results.

ManpowerGroup partnered with Reputation Leaders to reimagine and breathe new life into the MEOS program.

Global partnerships for faster, higher quality, lower-cost B2B thought leadership.

Working with a global network of partners, we moved the methodology online guaranteeing sample sizes, and opening up the survey to a larger range of respondents. Costs also came down as we utilized technology to standardize and optimize the setup and reporting.

We were aware of concerns about quality, and questions raised by changing methodologies. In the first quarter we ran a side-by-side comparison using the old method, against the current method in the UK. Even we were surprised to see that the outlook number for the UK was exactly the same for both methodologies.

Up to the minute insights – every minute.

Ever since 2021, even through the turmoil of Covid-19 and global unrest, our global and local results have been born out by reality after a few months.

For example, as most organizations predicted falling employment as the US flirted with recession, our data showed hiring staying positive. ManpowerGroup made a brave call to stand by the data in the face of many load and derisive voices.

As history has shown, employment has stayed surprisingly strong throughout the last few years in the US, and has certainly contributed to the economy’s soft landing. ManpowerGroup’s bold thought leadership was picked up by news outlets like Forbes as a trustworthy voice to help understand the world of work.

With our new methodology we were able to add fresh questions in every wave to the study, allowing ManpowerGroup to get the opinions of hiring managers on their most time sensitive issues. With Covid-19 wreaking havoc on employment expectations at the time, these additional sources of insight were invaluable to help Manpower lead the employment conversation in a tumultuous world.

Global insights, local actions.

The Employment Outlook results are published globally, supporting ManpowerGroup’s position at conferences like Davos and VivaTech.

The results are also produced in detail for each of the 40+ markets that now take part. Reputation Leaders supports this truly global research every wave by

• advising on questions that are culturally relevant and appropriate across the world,
• providing local translators with detailed glossaries that give the meaning of words and questions for more accurate interpretation,
• allowing individual countries to add questions for their market as needed for more locally focused insights,
• local reporting for every country, including local regions,
• localized insights on local industries and company sizes,
• video calls with local markets to discuss the results and expectations,
• a one-page highlights document for every country that includes local analysis and the statistics that matter most for that country, localized to the region,
• support for local markets to ask questions and get timely answers to support the findings.

Since the beginning of this partnership, the number of participating countries has risen again to 42 markets (as of Q1 2024).

The interaction of high-powered technology and high performing teams.

It may seem incredible, but we turn all of these results, data, insights and findings around in 2 weeks each quarter. That includes the analysis and insights for 40+ markets! We are able to do this because we have a high-powered, senior team who own this project and have the authority to make crucial decisions when needed, and we have cutting edge technology to crunch the numbers and distill the most interesting insights in minutes, not days. This interaction allows us to bring true thought leadership at speed and scale that seems almost impossible.

Powerful Partnerships

This kind of thought leadership doesn’t just rely on Reputation Leaders.

For this level of success, we cultivate a close, trusted partnership with an incredible client: ManpowerGroup and their Global Insights team trust Reputation Leaders to get on with providing the data and insights, so that they can turn those insights into action, recommendations, and knowledge to propel their business and their clients into a successful future.

And to achieve the data we rely on our main research services partner Borderless Access to help us achieve over 40,000 interviews every quarter in 40+ markets and 29 languages. Working side by side we’re able to minimize the friction of deliverables and hand-offs to achieve an incredibly smooth process which enables the entire project.