"It's Never 'I'. It's Always a Team"
Most temp staffing agencies in Belgium are built around star consultants. The desk owns the client, the desk owns the candidate, the desk owns the bonus. Forum Jobs has spent the last two years dismantling that model from the inside.
Its CEO, Marjolein Geens, pays her teams collectively. She runs a single open database across 61 Belgian offices and two French ones, so a candidate registering in Geel might be placed in Veurne by someone they have never met. Individual heroics are quietly discouraged.
"Nobody in our industry can do anything alone," she says. "I wouldn't want to be a client putting all my eggs in one consultant's basket."
It is an unfashionable bet in a sector that still rewards lone operators. It also won them Temp Staffing Agency of the Year at the 2025 Talent Business Awards.
TLDR
Marjolein Geens never planned a career in staffing — she trained as a labour sociologist studying youth unemployment in Brussels and stumbled into the industry through a statistics role.
Forum Jobs, founded almost 30 years ago in West Flanders, has grown into a significant HR group that houses: 61 Forum Jobs offices in Belgium (blue-collar temps), in addition to the brands within our group: Merit (non-technical profiles) and TecQuality (technical profiles) for recruitment and selection, WorldWideTalent for international recruitment, Recrutement Francophone for French recruitment, G-Jobs for talent with a health disability, and Beez4U (HR Project Sourcing)
Its differentiator is collective: team bonuses over individual ones, an open shared database across branches, and a deliberate refusal to let any single consultant own a client relationship.
Winning the 2025 Talent Business Award for Temp Staffing Agency of the Year was recognition for a strategic repositioning that took the firm from classic blue-collar temping into international technical scouting.
How a labour sociologist ended up running a staffing firm
Marjolein did not grow up around recruiters. Her parents were both scientists in the medical sector, and when she announced she wanted to study sociology at the VUB in Brussels, the question at the dinner table was the obvious one: what exactly are you going to do with that?
The answer, for a long time, was research. She held an FWO grant to study youth unemployment in Brussels, visited hundreds of small non-profits, and came away struck by how much money was flowing in for how little measurable output. Then she saw a job advert at Ago Interim — a staffing firm — for a "statistics manager." One client, one pivot table a month, and the entire company would go into a spin to produce it. "That was my way in," she says.
She stayed almost ten years, moving from statistics into marketing, then into client-facing work defending big tenders. Somewhere in that process, the labour sociologist discovered she actually liked the business. "You realise you can make a real difference for companies with what we do."
The phone call that changed everything
The turning point was not strategic. It was personal. The founder of Ago died unexpectedly, and Marjolein stayed on for a year out of respect. Then the founders of Forum Jobs — Luc Caenepeel and Kristof Sanders — called.
The pitch was: come and join the directors' table. Ten offices. From West Flanders, where Forum Jobs is rooted, even Ghent felt distant. Marjolein said yes on one condition. "I told them: I want to do this, but I want to be in a growth company. I want to actually be able to make a difference."
She spent her first year in the back office, learning the machinery from the inside. Two years ago, she moved into the CEO role on what she describes as a natural progression after the founders' exit. The shareholder structure shifted along the way — Christian Dumolin, an early backer who has been with the business almost since its inception, remains involved, and a family office, Straco, came in eight years ago. "For me it's still, today, a very good choice. They lived through the wild years after Covid with us, professionally, calmly. I can imagine that was harder for other organisations."
Why the bonus is collective, not individual
Ask Marjolein what makes Forum Jobs different and she does not start with verticals or tech stacks. She starts with how people get paid.
"Personally, I always say: my daughter has never been given a sweet or a carrot for doing or not doing her homework. So a bonus system goes against my nature. But as CEO, I decided: as an organisation, we need one."
The system she built two years ago is almost entirely team-based. Only the permanent placement consultants work on individual bonuses. Everyone else — the temp staffing teams across all 61 Belgian offices and the French branches — earns collectively. The reason is operational, not ideological. "I don't want energy lost internally. A client gives us a problem. Three offices in their region work on it together. That's how it should feel for the client: their problem is now ours."
She is sharper still on the cultural point. "Nobody in our industry can do anything alone. I wouldn't want to be a client putting all my eggs in one consultant's basket. The organisation is there to take the weight off — from A to Z." The shared database is open across branches. A candidate registering in Geel might be placed in Veurne. There are no fiefdoms.
This kind of collective architecture is rare in temp staffing, where most firms reward individual desks and live with the politics that follow. It is also, Marjolein argues, why Forum Jobs has been able to reposition itself so quickly.
From blue collar to international technical scouting
For most of its history, Forum Jobs was a classic blue-collar temp specialist — production, food, cleaning, textile, metal construction. It still is, with a healthy mix of large, mid-market and small accounts. But the strategic centre has shifted.
The first move was geographic. As a deeply West-Flemish player, Forum Jobs had always understood the labour shortage problem — and from the start, it looked across the French border. The old French frontalier tax status that made cross-border work attractive has gone, but the underlying logic has not. "The French still don't have a thirteenth-month payment, no immediate payout, no health insurance, no hospital cover, and their base salaries are a bit lower. They still cross the border." A dedicated team does nothing but recruit French workers into Belgian roles every day.
Post-Covid, Belgian clients started doing the same in reverse, opening operations in Northern France. Forum Jobs followed them with two French offices, growing to five by year-end, staffed by native French speakers. "We learned the hard way that going to Lille from West Flanders is not the same as going to Limburg. It's a different culture. You don't underestimate that in our business."
The second move is harder. Forum Jobs now scouts technical talent from India, South Africa and the Philippines on behalf of Belgian industrial clients. "If you read the newspapers, it's not hard to see. The big volume of low-skilled blue collar demand isn't going to disappear tomorrow, but in the long term it will shrink. The growing need is for technically trained people. And we have to be honest — we're not finding them in Belgium any more."
They also launched two other notable initiatives:
Beez4U: This service deploys HR specialists, referred to as 'bees,' to various companies. These specialists operate as a collective, sharing their knowledge within a central 'hive.'
G-Jobs: This project provides highly personalized coaching and support to talented, motivated individuals with health limitations, helping them successfully reintegrate into the labor market.
Why she still believes in HR
The question Marjolein hears most often, she says, is whether she still believes in HR at all. Her answer is unhesitating.
"Yes. Of course. We embrace AI and everything that helps us do our job better. But people will always need somewhere to land in companies, and the creativity Belgium needs to keep making a difference — that has to come from somewhere."
She is sharp on a cultural point that recruitment leaders rarely raise out loud. The technical level of the international talent Forum Jobs brings into Belgium, she says, is often higher than what the domestic system is producing. "We need to look critically at ourselves. Because at the end of the day, these are the people industry is going to need." She also flags interregional mobility — and a quiet arrogance she sometimes hears from Flemish regions about Brussels — as a missed opportunity. "Young people in Brussels are routinely four-lingual. They can do things. They have motivation. An East or West Flemish kid often doesn't speak French any more."
What winning the award actually meant
Forum Jobs took home the Temp Staffing Agency of the Year title at the 2025 Talent Business Awards in front of 250 industry leaders in Brussels — recognition that landed at a moment of genuine strategic transition rather than at a comfortable peak. For a business that has spent two years deliberately moving away from being defined as a classic blue-collar specialist, the timing matters. External recognition is one of the few ways a repositioning becomes legible to the outside market — to clients, candidates, and the wider industry — before the numbers fully catch up.
Marjolein is characteristically collective about it. The award sits with the team, not the CEO. But she is clear-eyed about why participating mattered: in a market where 86% of buyers struggle to tell agencies apart, an independent jury saying this one is doing something different is a credential no sales pitch can buy.
She does not call this a destination. She calls it a stretch of water on a longer journey. The frigates keep moving.
Marjolein Geens is the CEO of Forum Jobs, winner of Temp Staffing Agency of the Year at the 2025 Talent Business Awards. This conversation was recorded with Jeroen Van Ermen, founder of Talent Business Partners, the workspace where companies find staffing and recruitment agencies on verified reviews and proven results.
Submissions for the 2026 Talent Business Awards are open until 30 April attalentbusinessawards.com. If you are building something genuinely different in staffing or recruitment, this is the room you want to be in.