ELiN
Partners
Sector spotlight · Staffing & HR

Executive search for the staffing industry.

Most search firms study the staffing world from the outside. We built companies in it, led them through scale, sale and succession, and never really left. That changes what we see in a candidate, and what we can tell you about your next leader.

We come from this world. And we never really left.

01

Two founders, one industry

 

The ELiN story begins in the middle of the staffing world. Ineke Kooistra and Elbrich Batstra met in 2013 at YoungCapital and worked side by side for ten years: one as CEO, the other as CHRO. Two completely different roles, two completely different perspectives, and precisely because of that one complete picture: the commercial engine and the human architecture of a company in hypergrowth.

In those ten years YoungCapital grew from €60 million to €600 million in revenue, from 190 to 1,400 internal employees, with 26,000 flex workers at work through the company. Anyone who has worked in staffing knows what that means: people are the product. Every leadership lesson was learned twice over, on the own organisation and on those of thousands of clients.

The CEO perspective

Ineke: scaling, change, and what is happening now

Ineke led YoungCapital as CEO for ten years and then became CEO of Switzerland-based Circle8 Group, one of Europe's fastest-growing IT staffing firms, toward €1.3 billion. She knows the trade from the inside: the margin pressure, the scarcity math, the MSP dynamics, and the difference between growing and growing well.

And she never left. To this day Ineke works inside the staffing world itself, including as interim CEO through Intermanage, on strategy and transformation mandates in the middle of the sector. So she does not know what the industry used to look like; she knows what it looks like this month: which firms are consolidating, where private equity is stepping in, and how AI is rewriting the economics of matching, sourcing and delivery.

Ineke Kooistra
Ineke Kooistra · co-founder ELiN Partners

Staffing is not a market we serve. It is where we come from.

Elbrich Batstra
Elbrich Batstra · co-founder ELiN Partners
The CHRO perspective

Elbrich: the human side of scale

Elbrich spent her career in the rooms where staffing scales or stalls: international growth at Monster.com, the hyper-growth phase of YoungCapital as CHRO, and culture and organisational design at The Works. She knows what happens to an organisation when headcount doubles every year, and what does and does not keep leaders standing.

In early 2024 she founded People & Business Boutique, her own HR advisory practice. The common thread in every assignment turned out to be leadership: how to bring people along, how to align management layers, and who you need in which seat. Exactly the questions ELiN was born from.

02

Still in the room

 

Sector knowledge ages fast in staffing. So what counts is not only where we come from, but where we sit now: at the table with founders, boards and investors, where the real conversations happen about scaling without breaking culture, professionalising founder-led firms, consolidation and private equity, and the AI transition of the trade.

Why does that matter for search? Because staffing leadership is easy to describe and hard to verify. Every candidate can claim growth. Insiders hear who actually carried it. We hear that difference in the first hour of a conversation, because we have sat on the other side of that table.

03

AI: we build, not just talk

 

Every staffing conversation in 2026 touches AI. Ours starts from practice: we built our own AI-supported search platform that carries our research, reflection and shortlist work every day. So when we assess whether a leader can take a staffing company through the AI transition, we are not testing buzzwords. We are comparing notes.

04

The proof, briefly

 
  • Scaled it ourselves. YoungCapital from €60M to €600M; Circle8 Group toward €1.3 billion in IT staffing.
  • The people side included. Monster.com, YoungCapital and The Works on culture, organisational design and HR-tech innovation.
  • Twenty years in other people's kitchens. Thinking along with companies in finance, industry, SME, government and private equity on searches, organisational design and growth.
  • Track record in the industry. Many CEOs, C-suite and senior leaders in staffing placed and guided, with active searches running continuously. See our open leadership positions.
  • Still active every day. Ineke through Intermanage, Elbrich through People & Business Boutique.
  • Own AI platform. Built in-house and used daily in every search.
05

Twenty years inside every other industry

 

There is a paradox in staffing that outsiders often miss: it is the industry that looks inside every other industry. Lead staffing companies for twenty years and you have seen hundreds of organisations from within: from finance to manufacturing, from SME to government, from family business to PE portfolio.

And that was never a spectator's seat. From that chair we thought along on searches and organisational design, built relationships with founders, boards and investors, and followed each sector's developments closely: how finance is changing, what SMEs run into, what government and private equity ask of their leaders. Our sector expertise is precisely the source of our range: we recognise leadership patterns across sectors, and therefore see faster what an organisation really needs.

Staffing, then, is where our judgment was formed, not where our work ends. The same method serves founder-led businesses, PE portfolio companies, scale-ups and purpose-driven organisations across sectors. See what we do, or start the conversation about your leadership question.

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