What leaders are prioritising for 2027

Stop sourcing job titles. Start sourcing the work.

A job title tells you what a vacancy is called. It doesn’t tell you what the business actually needs done. Nor will it tell you whether the way you’re buying it will still be compliant next year.

Skills, not titles

At ProcureCon Total Talent we will dig into what changes when you strip away the title and source the outcome instead with a panel led by Dennis Sandner (Diebold Nixdorf), Arianna Vascon (Bayer), Robert Androne (C&A) and Carla Barros Little (Casco Pets) and Tatiana Pavlova (Yara International). Expect straight answers on where paying for results rather than hours has worked, and where it’s been hardest to negotiate.

Fix the front door first

Skills-based sourcing falls over if requests come in through ten different routes. Nicolas Bedard (Novartis) covers the foundations: joint HR–procurement governance, simpler classification rules and a single entry point for sourcing.

Primark’s Joe Fletcher and Laura Edwards, procurement and TA side by side, show how they’re ending maverick buying. They classify demand at the point of request and are piloting AI to steer requesters to the right channel.

The 2027 rulebook is changing, one country at a time

Getting the front door right matters even more when the rules behind it keep moving. Here’s what’s landing:

• Staffing licences: The Netherlands’ new staffing accreditation law (Wtta) is expected to take effect on 1 January 2027, with enforcement starting on 1 January 2028. Fines won’t just hit unauthorised agencies; they also apply to the companies hiring through them.
• Pay transparency: The EU deadline passed in June 2026 with only four of the 27 member states transposing on time.
• Platform work: Member states have until 2 December 2026 to transpose the Platform Work Directive, which introduces a rebuttable presumption of employment for platform workers.
• AI in hiring: High-risk AI Act obligations for employment uses such as CV sorting and candidate screening have been pushed back 16 months, to 2 December 2027.

The rules are heading the same way everywhere, but on very different timelines. One leader we spoke to on a research call said a big part of their job is explaining Europe to the wider business: tenure limits in Belgium, subcontracting limits in France, equal pay, e-invoicing. One global model, many local rulebooks.

How your peers are tackling it

On Day 1’s main stage, Eugene van Berkel (Nike) and Imke Kracke (Vattenfall) share how they build one programme that scales globally without a market-by-market rebuild, and still runs compliantly on the ground.

In Day 2’s Workforce Compliance panel, three speakers talk about how their contractor due diligence has changed as legislation shifted over the last three years, and what they’d do differently: Cameron Smith (Fresenius Medical Care), Julia Paccini Hirigoyen (Dow) and Nicolas Tiercelin (Mediq).

Join us in Amsterdam on 17–18 March 2027. Download the agenda to plan your route, book your place, and benchmark with peers.