BusinessMagazin

Tag: human resources

  • Are Romanians studying abroad willing to come back?

    Although they do hope that things will get better in Romania,
    few of them actually want to return now, “with the definite purpose
    of changing things for the better in Romania,” as one of them
    says.
    Mihai Dudu]= is a student of one of the best universities in the
    world, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has a
    full scholarship, works in the campus, in research; he is a member
    of the schoolís dance team and wins invention contests.

    He has a promising future and is happy with his life as it is now.
    Would he be willing to return to Romania? “No. I am not tempted to
    go back to my country. I for one want to become as good as I can in
    what I do and I would not have the resources for that in Romania.”
    This is his answer and the answer of many other Romanians, either
    students or people who completed their education abroad and chose
    to stay there.

    Both the business community and the government want to find
    leverage to make experts trained abroad return home. The problems,
    however, come up when trying to figure out what positions could be
    given to these young people upon their return. The state granted
    approximately 150 Special Scholarships of the Romanian Government
    (BSGR) from 2004 through 2007, with 100 students completing the
    programme already. To qualify for the scholarship, the students
    were required to return to Romania to take management positions in
    the public sector for three to five years. Only a mere 20 students
    are working in the local public sector for the time being, and such
    scholarships have not been very tempting for Dudu]= or for the
    friends he talked with, either. That is because, he believes, it is
    hard to choose what you want to do between 22 and 28 when you are
    18.

    Andrei Caramitru, managing partner of the local office of
    consultancy firm McKinsey, pointed out in a previous conversation
    with BUSINESS Magazin that attracting Romanian elites from abroad
    is a joint responsibility, of the state and private companies. As
    far as the latter are concerned, they not only do not try to get
    such a graduate, but most of them, except for multinationals, do
    not even realise how important such a thing is.

    The consultant said that what is essential for education is the
    cooperation between the public and the private sectors, using the
    Canadian or Swiss model (Caramitru went to college in Switzerland
    and lived there for 13 years), where the government thoroughly
    researches what fields need personnel, disseminates the data to the
    educational system and always adjusts supply to meet demand. To do
    that, however, Caramitru went on, we would require more practical
    and vocational schools, which could supply personnel exactly where
    the economy needs it.

    In some cases, though, the need to recruit staff for a specific
    company leads to greater initiatives. In August, the Dinu Patriciu
    Foundation and the League of Romanian Students Abroad launched the
    joburilaorizont.ro project in order to get Romanian graduates
    abroad to come home. The foundation has been granting 100
    scholarships worth 15,000 dollars for master or doctoral studies
    abroad every year since 2008.

    The students are bound to come back and work in Romania either in
    the public or the private sector for a period equal to that spent
    studying. This year 32 students who got a scholarship are expected
    to come back until December. Out of them, says Tincu]a Baltag, the
    general manager of the foundation, 16 have already returned and
    some have even managed to get a job with multinational companies.
    “One of them informed us he would start his own business, which
    will create several tens of jobs,” Baltag says.

  • Reality check: Welcome to Romania

    There ís nowhere like home, and the economic growth of the last few years made todayís Romania different from the Romania of the nineties: sufficient premises for a Romanian who left the country to want to come back. Still, the gap between reality and expectations of those who returned after a few years in London or on the Wall Street is still wide.

    ”If I did not leave the country on business trips once every few months, I think I would go crazy. This is my chance, being able to travel a lot,” Andreia Stavarache, 36, says frankly. She left for the United States through a programme of internship with audit and consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) at the beginning of 2000.

     

    Stavarache had applied for an internship with PwC in Bucharest and had been turned down for being insufficiently experienced. “Those at Stamford, Connecticut, accepted me as a trainee for six months,” she recalls. What had started as a half-year internship was later extended by one year and, in mid 2001, the company hired her as a tax associate.

    “When I returned, what I disliked most was the squalor and the “Romanian issues”: people, regardless of whether they have any money or not, complain. Romanians whine instead of looking for solutions. We want the idea to come up, to implement it and get results right away and always envy others for their success. We donít know how to apologize, nor say thank you,” Stavarache says.

     

    The first and most abrupt difference for those that had management or senior positions at the offices abroad of major multinationals is how people work in Romania.

    “In the States, they had some standards I donít see in Romania. Respect and attitude towards the client always came first,” Andreia Stavarache says. Any email from a client that the company received had to be answered within two or three hours at most; that was the organisationís policy with only one exception to it, which stipulated that the answer might be given in 24 hours if it needed thorough research. Even so, one still had to confirm the receipt of the message within three hours.

     

    She believes that the idea of Romanians working harder than others is untrue. “They work at a crazy pace abroad. In Romania, there is no results-oriented management and employees follow the lead of the managers.”

  • Hunting for Managers

    Secretaries and assistants of executives in some of the large multinationals on the market receive clear instructions when they are hired: they are not to give any phone number, email address to someone who phones and uses an argument of the type ”I am a former college mate of your boss, I am getting married and didn’t know how to contact X” or ”I met your boss at a selling presentation, I was supposed to make him an offer but I lost his business card.”

    One of the main sources of such a strategy is the companies’ fear of losing their top employees, who might end up in the headhunters’ databases. Indeed, one of the sayings that best define top executive recruitment is ”It doesn’t matter what you know, what matters is who you know.” Any consultant with a few years’ experience on the market has a considerable list of contacts, which is essential when they get a recruitment mission from a client.

    ”I have 2,000 phone numbers in my agenda – people I have recruited, people for whom I have recruited, or people I have worked with over time. Sometimes they phone me to ask for advice,” says Razvan Soare, who worked for two years for Stanton Chase, one of the largest executive search companies on the Romanian market. Soare set up his own firm, Gerissen Strategic Solutions a few months ago, which also specialises in headhunting.

    After the database, the second option when searching for an executive is through personal relations. ”One tries to get to people using an honest approach, by phoning them directly at their office. Secretaries in some companies act as watchdogs, and sometimes it’s very difficult to reach the manager you are looking for, in order to suggest a meeting or an opportunity,” says Radu Manolescu, managing partner of executive search company K.M. Trust & Partners.

    Challenged by some, approaching managers directly is considered by consultants to be a guarantee that the clientcompany which does the recruitment will have the best possible candidates to choose from. ”On a market such as the Romanian one, extremely good executives are very rare and in order to serve your client, you need to scan the market as much as possible. Basically all variants and all companies on the targeted market need to be explored,” says Manolescu.

  • Programmers can no longer dictate employment terms

    „The balance of power between IT employers and employees is starting to change,’ says Alexandru Costin, the general manager of Adobe Systems Romania, who has grown accustomed, like many managers in the field, with a great negotiating power of employees in terms of employment conditions and salary package over the last few years. ”Now both the employer and the future employee have a say in the employment contract.

    The dictatorship of the demanding candidate seems set to end,” Costin continues. Adobe Romania’s boss wants to suggest that the market will normalise this year, given the difficult economic situation. Until now, many companies have had to accept inexperienced people and pay to train them or attract specialists by putting sizeable salary packages and a wide range of benefits on the table. On the other hand, the lack of sufficient human resources allowed IT specialists to become some kind of ”mercenaries” willing to frequently change their job in exchange for greater and greater rewards, as Radu Georgescu, Gecad chairman said not so long ago.

    ”Salaries in the IT industry have had the highest growth of recent years, and Romania is seeing one of the widest gaps between the average salary in the IT sector and the average salary in the economy,” says Liviu Dan Dragan, general manager of TotalSoft and chairman of the Association of Software Industry Business Owners (ANIS) – although compared with the salaries in most European countries, the income level in the IT industry is lower in Romania. A programmer with a three to five years of experience, who works for a software company in Bucharest earns an average of 1,100 euros per month, while programmers in the rest of the country earn around 850 euros, reveals a survey conducted by GhidulSalariilor.ro about salaries in the IT industry last year.

  • Good managers are hard to come by

    ”No more than 3% of the top managers in Romania are really good,” Radu Furnica, president of executive search company Leadership Development Solutions (LDS), said in an interview to BUSINESS Magazin.
    ”The rest are all impostors, to some extent,” believes the head of LDS, who has, for over 13 years, been the Romanian partner of one of the world’s largest executive search companies, Korn/Ferry International.

    Coming from Furnica, one of the oldest and most expensive head hunters on the Romanian market, who has clients such as Lafarge, Nestlé, Renault, Unilever, Heineken, MasterCard and Millennium Bank in his portfolio, the conclusion is all the more shocking. ”In Romanian companies, the number of top managers able to add real value to the business they run is extremely small,” says the head of LDS, who has recently distinguished himself by handling one of the most widely media covered placement contracts on the Romanian market. In mid-January, Radu Furnica acted as an intermediary when Petru Vaduva replaced Anca Ioan at the helm of Tiriac Holdings, a group whose turnover is estimated to stand at around 2.2 billion euros. Top management abilities are all the more important in difficult economic times, like those we are going through now, says the head hunter, and some companies, whose management has been left in the hands of executives unable to cope in times of crisis, may never weather the crisis.

    The situation that Furnica describes is hard to explain, if we consider that, after several years of sustained growth, salary packages of top managers at the helm of large corporations have reached sixdigit sums, and, in some cases, even one million euros per year. On the other hand, the majority of multinationals that have entered the Romanian market over the last few years, entrusted the management of their local subsidiaries to foreign managers, whose experience on other markets should have served as solid proof of their skills. Over the last few years, there has been talk of a tendency to progressively replace foreign managers with Romanian ones, including in many companies that in the 1990s had to resort to foreign managers as there were no Romanians good enough for the job.