Avancos, the company
The company, founded in the Netherlands and Spain in 2001, has experienced rapid growth across all its’ service offerings in staffing solutions, leading to the re-branding exercise to Avancos (in 2008 The Netherland and in 2009 Spain). A powerful combination of proactive products and solutions designed to meet clients’ staffing and hiring needs today, has meant that Avancos has gained a reputation for delivering worldwide results.
The Avancos delivery and partner program is able to deliver results in every continent ensuring that our global clients will receive the same level of service delivery and commitment as those we service locally.
Delivering services from the Northern European Solutions Centre in Amersfoort, Netherlands and the Southern European Solutions Centre in Madrid, Avancos is ideally situated to cover the various cultural as well as business demands of our clients.
Avancos is the company that best understands the human capital needs of companies, and delivers the best solutions.
Culture and values
For us our culture and values are important elements in helping us deliver an advanced and consistently high quality of service.
We firmly believe that a company culture runs throughout an organisation from the management down, and that it is important for the organisation to have clear internal and external expectations of ourselves, our clients, our suppliers and partners. The Avancos core values are:
- Professionalism
- Responsiveness
- Transparency
- Respect for the individual
- Mutual trust
- Strength through diversity
Our goal each day is to live these values in all we do.
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CEO – David J Roots
Located in the Headquarters in Amersfoort David has the responsibility for overall management of the European operations in particular sales and major project development. Educated in Marine Navigation at the University of Southampton, and after serving a term at sea with the British Mercantile Marine, David developed a career in International Trade, and qualified in International Trade Management.
He developed interests in IT/Software development, which culminated in him founding a software development company for International trade systems in 1987. With three offices located in US, UK and Continental Europe, David’s company delivered large scale global projects to clients for international trade management.
After the company was acquired in 2001, David returned to Europe from the US and shortly afterwards established a new company based initially on IT recruiting for international candidates/companies offering solutions on a global basis. That company grew to become Avancos in 2008.
SVP – Operations – Dave Hickman
In 1996, following a successful post college career as an entrepreneur and business owner, Dave Hickman joined PrincetonOne, a top 10 nationally ranked US recruitment firm. He immediately assumed managerial responsibility for the company’s Pharmaceutical Search Practice, and within two years, spearheaded a remarkable 160% growth in revenue, making the practice one of the dominant talent acquisition firms in the Pharmaceutical industry. Sustainable growth continued in excess of 50% per year.
In 2003, he became Managing Partner of a new venture called HirePursuit, a recruitment process outsourcing division of PricetonOne. Hickman and his team transformed the business by integrating recruitment services to drive over 1600 hires per year for Fortune 1000 companies. In 2007, Hickman became VP Global Operations for PricetonOne overseeing global service delivery and strategic growth initiatives.
He joined Avancos in 2008 as Senior Vice President of Global Operations, where he is responsible for the growth and delivery of integrated recruitment services worldwide.
Dave Hickman graduated from Indiana University School of business with a degree in Finance.
CFO – Jan-Pieter Gommers RA
Jan-Pieter graduated as a Chartered Accountant in 1991 and worked 19 years as an auditor at PricewaterhouseCoopers (of which 3 years in Curacao- Dutch Antilles) and at Witlox.
At Witlox, Jan-Pieter was a partner for 7 years and set up a branch in Tilburg. He was specialized in mid-sized companies and mergers & acquisitions.
Jan-Pieter started in 2005 his own consultancy and investment company Zuidstroom management.
Zuidstroom invested in 2008 in Avancos and Jan-Pieter became responsible for the financial management of the company.
CFO – Frank Schikarski
Frank has his office in Hamburg. He is responsible for finance, controlling, governance, procurement legal and IT. Already in his last positions as CFO, director Finance and Interim manager, he was responsible for these areas in an operational sense.
As a consultant with Performance Focus and MBB consult, he supported a number of companies in their restructuring and for specialised projects for strategic as well as operational finance. During his stay at Accenture, Frank Schikarski has successful executed a variety of complex change initiatives in both English as well as French speaking environments. He brings deep IT and SAP R/3 knowledge to the table. Within Accenture his main focus was the Energy sector. Frank has a dual masters degree in Engineering and Business.
MD EMEA – Mark van Dongen
Mark has responsibility for the EMEA region working. He has been educated at the Royal Military Academy in The Netherlands and has fulfilled a number of operational officers position in the Dutch army. After a combination with a distance learning education at the Open University of The Netherlands in psychology, he became the youngest major of the army at that moment and was given the responsibility for defining and implementing modern concepts of leadership for the Army.
After closing his military career he moved to PricewaterhouseCoopers as consultant and afterwards to JTI (former RJ Reynolds; Camel Cigarettes) as head of HR for the Benelux, and subsequently Global Supply Chain Europe. After an interim management position to restructure one of the largest call centre companies in Germany, he took over the position of head of HR EMEA for Belkin electronics and for the Global Technology group within Suzlon, the Global 3rd windturbine manufacturing company.
Mark holds a bachelors degree in Business, a masters in Psychology and is alumni of the London Business School where he successfully absorbed the General Management curriculum. He currently holds domicile in Switzerland.