Accent Jobs is Belgium’s high-volume staffing agency. Their Dedicated division places thousands of people every day across hundreds of locations — for food producers, cleaning companies, and retailers that need dozens of workers at unpredictable times. The challenge was not filling shifts. The challenge was the cost of filling the shifts.
Accent Jobs is one of Belgium's largest recruitment and staffing agencies. The Dedicated division, run by Operational Director Ben De Block, is their high-margin, high-complexity segment: they take on the largest accounts (food producers, cleaning companies, major retailers) with the highest shift volumes and the tightest margins. These are the clients that operate 24/7, need workers on short notice, and require flawless coordination across multiple locations. For Accent, managing these accounts profitably meant solving the operational cost of coordination — not the skill cost of hiring, but the admin cost of connecting clients to workers.
Margin erosion — at low staffing margins, every administrative hour re-entering data instead of generating revenue is a direct hit to profit, every miscommunication is a missed shift.
As Accent’s portfolio grows, the ceiling becomes clear: you cannot scale manual coordination.
“We were spending all our time bridging gaps between systems. The client’s spreadsheet, our ATS, the worker’s phone — three separate worlds that someone had to keep aligned manually.”
Accent went live on bookU's Staffing platform starting with food and retail clients, then extended to cleaning, the most complex use case.
One unified planning layer, from client to worker
bookU connects to Accent's CRM, ATS, and back-office in a single unified layer. Client requests flow in via shift intake. Automatic matching identifies the right candidate for each shift. Contracts flow out. Candidate notifications follow automatically.
Contracts generated automatically
No re-typing. No manual entry. The planning data flows straight through to contract generation.
Worker notifications in thirty minutes
Once a contract is ready, the worker gets a notification in his employee app within thirty minutes — no SMS chains, no follow-up calls.
Digital work instructions per location
For cleaning clients managing multiple sites per day, workers now receive detailed instructions per location: where supplies are stored, which products to use, navigation details — all in the app. No more SMS chains or verbal handoffs.
Candidates see the full picture
Workers receive shift confirmations, location details, and instructions in one place, any time. For the "multi-jobbers" (workers deliberately combining a primary job with flexible side work), this makes Accent's jobs significantly more attractive than competitors still running on SMS and phone calls.
The admin cost drops immediately
At each client account, the planner saves approximately half a day per week by eliminating double data entry. Across 40 Dedicated clients, the aggregate admin capacity freed is substantial — and it scales without adding headcount to the planning function.
| Area | Before bookU | With bookU |
|---|---|---|
| Client planning | Spreadsheet, email, paper | Imported into one system |
| Data entry | Manual re-entry into ATS | Automatic from bookU |
| Contract generation | Manual, error-prone | Automatic in the same flow |
| Worker notification | SMS, WhatsApp, phone calls | App notification in 30 minutes |
| Work instructions | SMS chains and verbal | Digital instructions per location |
| Source of truth | None — three separate systems | One unified layer |
| Admin time per client | Half day per week lost to re-entry | Recurring capacity freed |
| Candidate experience | Scattered across SMS and email | One app, one source of truth |
| Margin per placement | Eroding under admin costs | Protected by automation |
| Scalability | Ceiling hit at X accounts | Scale without adding headcount |
For Accent's low-margin accounts, the math is straightforward: half a day per week saved per client × 40 accounts = significant recurring capacity freed, with no headcount increase.
The candidate experience improves too — workers see shifts, locations, and instructions in one app instead of scattered across SMS and email.
By the end of 2026, Accent will have rolled this out across all 40 Dedicated clients, followed by Master Vendor Distribution to compete for large multi-agency tenders.
“Do the math: half a day per week per account, times 40 clients. That recurring admin capacity is what lets us scale without hiring more planners.””
Ben De Block is not a technology enthusiast who got excited about a new platform. He is an experienced operational leader who spent over a year evaluating tools before committing, and who has spent fifteen years learning where the real margins in staffing are won and lost.
His observation about the industry is worth sitting with: the entire staffing sector still largely operates the way it did 20 or 25 years ago. A vacancy arrives. Then the search begins.
The agencies that break from that reactive model, that build the infrastructure to find the right worker before the vacancy even exists, are the ones positioned to win the next decade. The planning layer is where that shift gets operationalised. bookU is the infrastructure that makes it possible.
Share
TMI replaced its outdated manual planning process with bookU’s Connected Staffing solution. Cutting shift fills from 5 – 6 manual steps to one click and planner onboarding from three months to just thirty minutes. The result: TMI’s childcare division now runs with just two planners, who spend their time building relationships with care workers instead of chasing admin.
