BusinessMagazin

Tag: managers

  • Why caution is good

    The performance of the private pension market in Romania turned out to be remarkable under the very difficult conditions in the economy and on financial markets, says Crinu Andanut, chairman of the Association of Privately Managed Pensions in Romania (APAPR). The managers of the Pillar II (mandatory private pension) funds achieved an average yield of 7% in the first half, slightly higher than the voluntary pension funds (Pillar III) yield of 6.94%. These results were achieved at a minimal risk for participants, considering more than half of the investment portfolios of the managers comprise government securities, the safest and most prudent investment instruments, at the moment.

    Mandatory private pension funds’ investments in government securities accounted for 55% of the total investments six months into the year, while corporate investments got 26.6% of the managers’ investments. ”We behave like a group when investing, which is why investment portfolios are so much alike. Too much alike for my taste,” Andanut says. As far as he and the other managers on the market are concerned, both the courage or and the options to create ”bold” portfolios are lacking now, otherwise investments in stocks would account for a significant percentage of the total, approximately 20 or 30% or more. According to Dorin Boboc, investment manager of Allianz-}iriac, we should not expect big changes over the next three to five years. The hierarchy and weight of investment instruments will remain very similar to what we are seeing now. He adds that until then, one of the new elements to generate diversity is that funds now have the option of investing in foreign government securities, which, in most cases, provide better yields than the Romanian securities. An encouraging, though not that visible, sign is the shift of funds towards new growth drivers compared with the end of last year: from government securities and bank accounts, they are now more open to investments in bonds issued by companies and shares. This openness was accompanied by a cautious strategy, focused on getting very good yields at minimum risk.

    TRADUCERE DE LOREDANA FRATILA-CRISTESCU SI DANIELA STOICAN

  • The New HR

    The new HR strategies no longer have anything in common with what has been happening until now: no one is hiring, but instead making people redundant, salaries are no longer going up, but down, and skills for which training is held have changed. ”I think that now, more than ever, the general manager needs the human resources manager for strategy and involvement. It is crucial that they should work together,” says Calin Tatomir, general manager of Microsoft Romania, a company that recently came out fourth in the Best Employers ranking compiled by human resources consultancy firm Hewitt Associates and Monday Insight Romania.

    After a long time during which human resources managers had been complaining that they were not regarded as strategic partners in companies, but rather as mere performers of administrative tasks, the top management is now giving them their rightful place back. The main reason is that the recent restructuring cannot be done without the help of the human resources department. Similarly important is stimulating those that stay and have to work harder than before, but are paid the same or even lower salaries. At any rate, the role of the human resources manager at this time is more important and more novel than ever. ”The crisis has made us creative and stimulated us to move faster than the workforce market. A context was created for us to carry out activities we would have done at a different scale if circumstances had been different: interdepartmental trainings, internships for students, outsourcing of certain operations,” says Anca Iancu, human resources manager of ING Asigurari de Viata.

    This is not a first, though. Human resources departments have always seen hectic activity. Until last year, that meant hiring people en-masse, fierce negotiations, the rush for the best contracts with various suppliers of products or providers of services that could be included in the perks package of the employees, training programmes as sophisticated as possible. Now it is all about the exact opposite. Amid constant cost cutting steps, the priorities and goals of the human resources managers have radically changed.

  • 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.

  • 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.