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“Accenture Needs People With Management Skills With Industry Expertise”
“Accenture Needs People With Management Skills With Industry Expertise”
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| Deeper specialisation in industries and processes as well as professional skills are required to be able to interact effectively with the clients. This will help in solving their problems and is a key skill that is considered from a hiring perspective, said Unmesh Pawar, HR lead India BPO, Accenture.
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Wednesday, July 04, 2012:
Indian BPO industry has grown and evolved. Gone are the times when people used to consider this industry a stop-gap arrangement. BPO is now a serious career option. Attrition rates in the industry have reduced and companies are now evolving as employers of choice. Accenture is one such company which absorbs the best of talent. We spoke to Unmesh Pawar, HR lead India BPO, Accenture on the hiring policies of the company and how they are the employers of choice. Excerpts:
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What skills do you look for in a candidate apart from his basic qualifications?
If you are talking about meeting the clients' outcome, clearly company expects its people to have the ability to move from just transactions to having meaningful interactions with clients. People need to have the ability to be able to dialogue effectively with the clients, to be able to understand clients' expectations effectively and to be able to work with our clients to help them get better. Those are not the skills that typically companies look for. What companies look for these days is a standard check list... people would ask questions and candidates would just respond to that. But ideally there should not be any check list because it is about working with your clients and solving problems of the clients. Therefore, ideally we need people with management skills, industry expertise and deeper understanding of the processes that they are deployed to. So, deeper specialisation in industries and processes as well as professional skills are required to be able to interact effectively with the clients. This will help them solve clients' problems and is an important skill from hiring perspective.
The BPO industry is evolving from voice to some high-end processes. What according to you are the new-age BPO career options?
I think data and analytics will be important elements for the future in addition to fields like pharma, healthcare management, learning etc.
Can you share some of the best practices in terms of hiring and retaining talent in your company?
From the hiring standpoint, we have a very rigorous hiring process. We follow what we call 'glocal' hiring model where we have a local hiring manager and a global hiring manager partnering together effectively to ensure that we really hire people who can meet our client's business outcomes, leveraging technology effectively to look at testing and other methodologies. We have Accenture Standard Interviewing Framework and approaches around looking at behavioural aspects, which allows us to ensure that we hire the right set of people.
The functional recruiting model of Accenture allows us to be able to hire from whichever part of the country and outside in a hub-and-spoke model. If I talk about retention, I think what has allowed us to be able to be an employer of choice is the aggressive investment in talent. We have mature talent management practices where our line-leaders take very high ownership for the people, aggressive focus on building next generation of leaders, high-potential development, where we invest in our high-potentials in a manner where they see differentiated training, they see differentiated exposure to leadership, differentiated projects and assignments which gives them a true flavour of almost running a business and helping them become business leaders of future.
I think when people feel empowered, when people develop larger connections, when they feel that they can shape things in and around it and get an opportunity it make an impact makes them grow.
When you recruit people from outside the industry, what are the methods adopted to attract the desired candidates?
I think the trick in the entire business is to know what is the value proposition. It is imperative to understand the value proposition and to be able to communicate and craft a value proposition that that is meaningful for people and something that Accenture can honour. When we look at the kind of work we want to do, an important element is really figuring out what kind of people would you want to do this work. So we don't want to bring people who are over-qualified or under-qualified. Over-qualified people will feel cheated and under-qualified people will not be fair for the clients. It's important to get the right kind of people and craft a value proposition which is meaningful for people and in a manner that we can really honour the proposition. And that value proposition is what I call as the Accenture career experience and each of our leaders today strive to bring to life the Accenture career experience. The Accenture career experience is around the people that you work with, the rewards that you get, the kind of work you do like the opportunity to learn and grow. That is the reason why we have all variety of people from doctors to scientists, clinical scientists, research scientists, learning guys, recruiters. I mean the diverse portfolio being offered today allows us to hire people who do not find place in traditional BPO set-ups. |
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