ManpowerGroup has elected Becky Frankiewicz as Chief Executive Officer, promoting the company's President and Chief Strategy Officer to the top job at one of the world's largest staffing and workforce solutions groups. The board announced the decision on 15 October 2026 and the appointment takes effect from January 2027. She will also join the ManpowerGroup board of directors.
Frankiewicz succeeds Jonas Prising, who has led the company since 2014 and who moves to the role of Executive Chair of the board. Prising said that leading ManpowerGroup over the past twelve years had been a great honour. Julie Howard, Lead Director of the board, extended the board's gratitude to him, framing the change as a planned transition rather than a break.
The internal promotion is the notable feature. Frankiewicz joined the company in July 2017 as President of North America, became Chief Commercial Officer and President of ManpowerGroup North America, and was elevated to President and Chief Strategy Officer in June 2025. That is three steps in eight years, and the strategy brief she has held since last year reads in hindsight as the closing stage of a succession plan rather than a lateral move. Boards that run a public external search often do so because they lack an internal answer; this one evidently had one.
Her background outside staffing is unusual for the sector. She led Quaker Foods North America, one of PepsiCo's largest subsidiaries, and began her career in strategic consulting before moving into industry. She has also served on the board of Energizer Holdings since January 2020, which gave her listed company board experience on the other side of the table before taking a seat on her own.
ManpowerGroup describes itself as the leading global workforce solutions company and says it helps organisations transform in a fast changing world of work by sourcing, assessing, developing and managing the talent that enables them to win. That phrasing is doing a great deal of work. The staffing industry has spent three years absorbing a soft permanent hiring market across Europe and North America, and the structural question hanging over it is what happens to volume based recruitment as employers automate more of the sourcing and screening that firms like this have historically been paid to perform.
For a chief strategy officer stepping up, that is an inherited problem rather than an abstract one, and it is presumably the reason the strategy role existed. The Prising years covered a period in which the group's scale was its principal defence. Whether scale remains the defence, or whether the business has to be rebuilt around something closer to advisory work and workforce design, is the question on which the new chief executive will be measured.
The move to Executive Chair rather than a clean exit is worth watching in governance terms. It keeps a long serving chief executive in the boardroom in an executive capacity, which can steady a handover and can equally crowd a successor, and the distinction usually turns on how the two of them behave in the first year rather than on anything written in the charter. The board has given itself more than two months before the change takes effect.
