HeadFirst Global, a leader in work orchestration, today announced it will become Vertage, as it builds a global technology platform that dynamically curates the right mix of expert talent and AI agents to deliver the work outcomes enterprises need.

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Edzard Overbeek, Group CEO at Vertage

Edzard Overbeek, Group CEO at Vertage

The €10 billion group is bringing its 11 operating businesses together under the Vertage name, platform, and operating model.

Vertage starts with a foundation few can match: 1.5 million specialists, more than €10 billion in gross invoice value from multi-sector enterprise customers and governments, and delivery across 80 countries. The capabilities come from the 2024 integration of HeadFirst Group and Impellam Group, which combined technology and data with leadership in global managed services and specialist talent communities, and from the group’s subsequent expansion into India.

What Vertage will do

Vertage is building one engine for work outcomes, bringing together specialist talent, AI, and data. Enterprises will define the outcome they need rather than the headcount or the rate card. AI will match the right specialist to the right work at a speed and scale manual processes cannot reach, drawing on a global community of specialists who keep building new skills as the work itself changes. Every deployment, whether of a person or an AI agent, will be governed, visible, and compliant through a single platform, in place of the disconnected systems, partners, and suppliers most enterprises manage today. Because each engagement adds to what the platform knows about how work gets delivered, the advantage compounds over time.

“This is more than a rebrand. It’s a new way to build advantage,” said Edzard Overbeek, Group Chief Executive Officer. “Introducing Vertage brings to life a company dedicated to helping talent and businesses move faster, think bigger, and stay ahead in the intelligence era. Businesses must integrate AI to compete and survive but face real risk in how to invest successfully while staying compliant. Specialist talent faces uncertainty of its own, and needs support to re-skill, re-train, and stay valuable. Enterprises, talent, and partners all need a trusted guide. With the heritage and expertise of 50 years in this industry, we are best placed to play that role.”

A market being reshaped

The way organizations plan and deliver work is being reshaped by several market forces converging at once. Work is increasingly borderless, talent and skills are growing scarcer as workforces age, and clients now expect the same real-time, consumer-grade experience they get everywhere else in their lives. The workforce solutions industry, worth an estimated $650 billion annually, was built for stability rather than speed.* High-touch, fragmented workforce models leave talent under-engaged while enterprises struggle to govern work across a maze of disconnected systems, driving risk, inefficiency, and compliance exposure.

Many customers have already moved from planning around headcount to planning around skills. Vertage intends to take that further, designing around outcomes and deploying the mix of human talent and AI agents needed to deliver them. Extensive customer research shows clear demand for this shift. As one customer put it: “I don’t care how many people you put on the dance floor – the dance needs to look like this.” In practice, that means re-wiring work around the result: defining what good looks like, choosing whether to build, bot, buy or borrow the capability, and putting the right governance around delivery.

“The workforce solutions market is being reshaped: AI entering the workforce as a source of labor, talent scarcity deepening across every major economy, and buyers demanding outcomes instead of headcount. The providers that can combine deep talent networks with AI-enabled delivery are the ones positioned to lead,” said Arkadev “Arko” Basak, Partner, Everest group.

What comes next

Overbeek and the full senior leadership team are now leading a significant, multi-year business transformation. The ambition goes beyond unifying 11 brands under one name. It’s the foundation for building Vertage as a single model over time, not a portfolio of separate businesses.

The group’s operating brands – Comensura, Carbon60, Lorien, Guidant Global, Bartech, SRG, HeadFirst, Sterksen, StarApple, Striive, and Prounity – will be retired in Q1 2027. From that point, all customer and talent interactions globally will take place under the Vertage brand. Existing contracts, delivery teams, and day-to-day points of contact continue unchanged through the transition.

The new brand was announced to colleagues worldwide at a global celebration earlier this month. The name carries the idea of vertical advantage: not a one-off win, but an edge that builds with every engagement.

* Source: Talent Intelligence

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