Interview. Razvan Patrunoiu (Accenture Romania): We aim to reach close to 3,000 employees this year

In an interview with BR, Razvan Patrunoiu, ‎country managing director at Accenture Romania, says the company is looking to reach close to 3,000 employees across its five locations in the country, in a bid to support the growth of its business lines. He adds that Accenture’s Romanian operations are strategic for the company at a global level, and the skilled pool of talent present here makes the country an attractive destination for multinational companies in the BPO segment.

 Ovidiu Posirca

 What are Accenture Romania’s business objectives for this year?

If I were to summarize, our key objective for this year and going forward is related to the growth of the business. When I say the growth of the business, it’s not necessarily linked to the number of employees and turnover. It’s about how we diversify our portfolio of services, which is very important for us.

Accenture globally, and here in Romania, has a unique portfolio of services, starting with consulting, strategy, digital, technology and operations to business process outsourcing. We constantly diversify the portfolio in each of those business lines.

 What are the main challenges and opportunities in the three divisions – consulting, technology solutions and BPO?

The challenges are different from one business line to another. If you look at the consulting division, the main challenge is the power of the local economy, more precisely the purchasing power. We, as Accenture globally, regionally and in Romania, are focusing on large projects, so for us it’s key to identify those large opportunities together with our clients. Here a fact is that the Romanian market is not that mature, not that developed yet, so for us it’s a challenge to identify those opportunities.

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If you look at technology and process outsourcing, these business lines are much more anchored in the global economic reality. We have big international clients that we are serving from Romania so the model is different and there the highest challenge would probably be the ability of the market to offer talent and skilled resources.

We are not talking only about junior people or graduates. We need experts in these fields and Romania, considering the evolution of the educational system, is for sure an interesting market, with high potential. On the other hand though, it needs further improvements to be able to meet the demand from international businesses.

What are your investment plans? Are you looking to hire new people this year?

The trend for us over the last three to four years has been continuous double-digit growth. This trend will continue in 2016, when we will probably have 25-30 percent growth (in headcount e.n.) in Romania. We have just exceeded 2,700 employees in Romania, in five locations: Bucharest, Timisoara, Iasi, Cluj and Targu Mures. We will reach close to 3,000 people by the end of this year. We are always looking to grow fairly proportionally across all locations where we are present and in all our business lines.

 What’s Accenture Romania’s business footprint in the firm’s international operations?

Accenture Romania is part of what we call a truly global company. Around the world, Accenture has about 375,000 people so it’s a very large corporation.

In the past few years and going forward, Romania continues to be one of the key growth pillars of the organization – in Europe, for sure, but also at the global level.

Accenture in Romania sees the business as a strategic one for various reasons. It’s a location that comes with an interesting talent pool in terms of people and resources. We continue to be competitive from a cost perspective, which is an important element, although the importance of this aspect has been decreasing in the past few years.

Accenture is focusing rather on the quality of services it provides to the clients and Romania is well positioned to provide high quality services.

 What has been the evolution of services required by clients in the BPO segment? What trends are you registering in this segment?

Accenture is one of the global market leaders, with high and recognized expertise and therefore it is leading the industry in a certain direction: we have already moved from transactional services to really high-end services. For example, if you look at the value chain of our services, you will see that we concentrate on how we deliver more value to our clients – it’s about increased revenues, cost reduction, working capital improvements.

So, the first trend is moving away from processes that are purely linked with costs to the ones focusing on the value delivered to the clients.

The second important trend is related to technology, which is everywhere in today’s business. In Accenture, we don’t even call it BPO anymore, but Operations, because at the end of the day it gathers BPO, infrastructure technology, security and cloud. So, we are seeing more technology being embedded in the services.

 What is Accenture’s strategy in terms of talent management and employee engagement?

First of all we are a services company, so obviously people are our key resource. Therefore, attracting the talents from the market, developing those talents inside the company and retaining them for the longest period of time possible is
definitively one of our key strategies.

In the recruitment process, we tend to be very strict, because we want to attract only the best candidates on the market and we want to make them even better. That’s our key focus. Then, their development comes on one hand with all the programs we have in the company: classroom sessions organized in Romania or online sessions in a huge virtual library available at global level; but at the end of the day the development of our people comes together with the growth opportunities that we can offer them.

Being a company that is constantly growing and attracting new clients, obviously this also offers opportunities for growth. Our employees are able to get exposure to and experience all kinds of projects and afterwards they are basically able to grow in the company. The development is tightly linked to the employees’ retention aspect.

There is no better retention tool than the development opportunities that you offer, especially to the young generation, which is looking for a sense of progression, a sense of learning.  We are able to offer that, which is one of our key differentiators on the local market.