(Bloomberg) -- Frits Goldschmeding, who turned an idea for his college thesis into Randstad Holding NV, the world’s largest employment services provider, which made him a billionaire, has died. He was 90.
He died on July 26, Randstad said in a statement on Monday. The company’s chief executive officer, Sander van’t Noordende, called Goldschmeding “a great visionary and a wonderful, inspirational personality” whose “impact on our industry and contribution to the advancement of flexible work and HR services more broadly can be seen across the world.”
Headquartered in Diemen, the Netherlands, Randstad has about 40,000 employees in 39 countries and had revenue of €25.4 billion ($27.6 billion) in 2023.
Goldschmeding led the company from its founding 1960 until 1998, when he retired as chief executive officer. He joined the company’s supervisory board a year later and retired from that position in 2011. He was the company’s largest shareholder in 2022, with a 33% stake.
His net worth was estimated to be $5.2 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
“I didn’t invent the flex worker,” he was quoted as saying in a 2017 company publication. “But as an entrepreneur, you’re the one who takes the risk of turning it into a large-scale phenomenon, because you see its potential. You then have to convince others of your vision and inspire them to work hard to achieve it.”
Over more than 60 years in the staffing business, Randstad’s presence grew buoyed by acquisitions including that of local competitor Vedior NV and US jobs site Monster Worldwide Inc. Randstad’s commentary on corporate hiring patterns now often signal the health of the global economy.
In an oft-told story, Goldschmeding was cycling home with a fellow economics student, Ger Daleboudt, at Amsterdam’s VU when he came up with the idea of setting up an agency for temporary work in Amsterdam. He had written his master’s thesis on temporary employment, “which hardly existed in Holland at the time,” according to the company’s official history.
The two set to work from his dormitory room at 3 a.m., kick-starting the business that was called Uitzendbureau Amstelveen in 1960 before taking the name Randstad, a word that had come into being to describe the crescent-shaped grouping of major metropolises in the Netherlands.
First Worker
Lacking money for stamps, Goldschmeding delivered letters personally to would-be client companies. He said he took his first temporary worker to her new job on the back of a bike to make sure she got there on time.
By the end of year one, he said, the business had 15 or 20 temporary workers in its employ.
Randstad went public in 1990 and entered the US market three years later by buying a Georgia-based employment agency, Temp Force. In 1996, Randstad was the staffing sponsor of the Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
Frederik Johannes Diederik Goldschmeding was born in Amsterdam on Aug. 2, 1933. In a company video made to celebrate his 80th birthday, he said he had been expected to study medicine but decided to pursue economics after reading Robert Heilbroner’s 1953 book about great economists, The Worldly Philosophers.
In 2015, he founded the philanthropic foundation called Goldschmeding Foundation which supports programs aligned with its three goals: a humane economy, sustainable work and an inclusive labor market.
“Obviously, I saved quite a bit together, but that is not your own. And you should try to give that back,” Goldschmeding said in a video on his foundation’s website.
He held the nation’s highest civilian order of chivalry, the Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion.
--With assistance from Ben Stupples, Wout Vergauwen and Ellen Proper.
(Adds quote from CEO in second paragraph.)
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
