The BDO Unicon Outsourcing company, jointly with the ACCA association, held a roundtable entitled "Financial Services: Management and Development during Turbulent Times". In the course of the meeting, representatives of such companies as The National Media Group, Tele2 CSI Vostok, the Otkrytye (Discovery) bank and a number of others shared their experiences and outlooks on the present market situation.
Gleb Lebedev, the CEO of the Head Hunter research center, presented the latest review of the market of financial professionals. Alexei Semenov, a Deputy Economics and Finance Director of the National Media Group, Ltd., related the particulars and secrets of the successful recruitment of accountants and financial service employees, starting with instructing the human resources to close the available openings and ending with determining priority criteria when deciding between several suitable applicants. As the contributor noted, the dismissal of employees during their probation periods was an indication of the negligent selection of applicants. This is why managers should be impressed upon that there are no small things to pay attention to when selecting and hiring.
Ekaterina Potapova, the HR manager of the shared servicing center of Tele 2, shared her experiences handling personnel at the insourcing centers. She said that when selecting prospective employees, the shared servicing center preferred diligent professionals to those aiming at rapid career growth. This is because working at shared servicing centers often requires not as much great skills as the ability to fast and well perform monotonous operations over prolonged periods of time. Ekaterina gave examples of the most interesting instruments used by the Tele 2 shared servicing center to find, select and retain employees and related the organization of the work of the center's financial professionals.
Lyudmila Shusterova, the Strategic Development Director of BDO Unicon Outsourcing, continued the personnel selecting and hiring topic. She related the problems encountered by outsourcing companies often in need of a large number of variously skilled financial professionals. Lyudmila used the example of BDO Unicon Outsourcing to demonstrate the most efficient methods of organizing the selection, adaptation, training, grading, motivation and evaluation of personnel used by similar companies.
Gayane Asatrian, the Financial Director of CSI Vostok, expanded on the requirements chief financial officers must comply with during crises. She said that layoffs during complicated market periods were not the way to cut costs but rather the indications of the incorrect overall organization of the financial department. The ability of a smaller number of employees to successfully do more work shows that the organization of the department was not optimal to begin with.
On the whole, the attendees of the roundtable noted that the changes in the economic situation were already felt by the market. Yet despite that the pessimistic forecasts of the previous years were beginning to come true, most managers preferred to look at this as the next challenge and a chance to show their skills managing their companies' finances under complicated conditions.
