Translated material
Personnel decides everything
The ANCOR company has assembled a unique base of qualified workers in Russia
The growth of the Russian economy has led to the rapid development of the country's personnel services market. According to experts, in 2006 the volume of the recruitment market amounted to $300 million. This year it should grow by more than a third and amount to $500 million. Igor KHUHREV, president of the ANCOR holding, talks about the prospects and features of the development of the personnel business in the country .— How did you come up with the idea of creating a recruiting company in 1990, when few people in Russia had any idea what kind of wonder this was—recruitment?
— At the end of the 80s, foreign companies flocked to our country and began to create joint ventures here. It was they who brought the innovations of a market economy to domestic soil. As a professional psychologist, I was offered to recruit personnel for the Soviet-British joint venture Icon. Therefore, I had to learn Western HR technologies, applying them to the specific conditions of Russian reality. Then the thought arose: why not sell recruiting services to other companies? This business, unexpectedly even for us, turned out to be attractive and in demand. After all, foreigners had no idea how to use their achievements in their pure form in our market. A group of my scientific colleagues proposed that the owners of Icon jointly develop this promising area, but they did not meet with understanding. Then we decided to create an independent recruitment agency SPARK, which in 1990 received a new name ANCOR - “Analysis. Consulting. Recruitment". Having gained fame, the company's trademark was no longer decipherable.
-- Who are your main clients and service consumers?
-- At the very beginning of its activities, ANCOR worked mainly with foreigners who knew almost nothing about our nascent market. With the beginning of the revival of the domestic economy, Russian business structures increasingly began to use our services, especially in the eastern regions of the country, in Siberia and the Far East. And in the central and northwestern regions, foreign companies continue to make the difference, which today make up about 60% of our total clientele. The list of our partners includes the largest Russian and international companies from all business sectors.
-- Your main competitors operate in Moscow, while ANCOR from the very beginning relied on the regions where it is now the leader. Do you think you have guessed the direction of the “main blow”?
- I would not like to evaluate our work in military terms. In our business, everything happens quite peacefully and civilizedly, otherwise foreign players would not have come to our economic field in such large numbers. At the same time, ANCOR began forming its regional network in 1992. It should be taken into account that from 1993 to 1998 the company operated as a franchise structure of the largest American recruiter - RWJ/Express Personnel Services. Having mastered Western HR business technologies, we began to create our own similar network in the regions. And when clients increasingly began to move to the regions, this direction became a priority in the activities of ANKOR, which was the first to come to the outback of Russia. I don’t think that we guessed the development of events; rather, we calculated their course. After all, Moscow cannot satisfy the growing demands of business, for which the expanses of Russia are becoming increasingly attractive and profitable for investment.
-- ANKOR refused franchising because it had “worked up” its strength?
- Not only for this reason. In 2004, we realized that this business organization had already exhausted itself. At that time we had 15 similar offices, in which it became increasingly difficult to control the standards and quality of corporate services. As a result, it was decided to develop only our own regional business. As a result of the new policy, we bought or created from scratch 33 branches that have been operating since 2006 as part of a single holding. Today the company is present in all cities with a population of over a million, and its database contains information about employees in all areas. The next benchmark is to cover all cities with a population of over 500 thousand people.
-- Do these intentions correspond to the growth rate of the national recruiting market?
-- According to our estimates, in 2006 large regional markets, such as St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, showed growth rates of up to 30%. At the same time, the dynamics of development of markets in cities with a population of less than 500 thousand people sometimes reached 50 percent growth. The fact that the trend continues is evidenced by the holding's data for the first quarter, when income growth in Moscow amounted to 40%, and in most regions of Russia reached the level of 67%. Therefore, we have decided to increase our branch network to 44 offices over the next two years. We plan to spend more than $1 million to solve this problem.
-- Will ANCOR expand its expansion abroad?
— In the coming months, we are going to open our own office in the business capital of Kazakhstan, Almaty, and another one in Ukraine, in Lvov. Despite the fact that today we already have three offices in Ukraine (Kyiv, Dnepropetrovsk, Odessa) and one in Belarus (Minsk). If the situation continues to develop as successfully, ANCOR will expand the geography of its activities abroad.
-- In which market segments, according to your estimates, is ANCOR a leader today?
— I don’t want to seem immodest, but independent experts give us the palm in the oil and gas sector, pharmaceuticals, automotive industry, information technology, telecommunications, hotel business and a number of other key sectors of the national economy. Our competitive advantage lies not only in our length of service and experience in the domestic market, but also in the provision of comprehensive services. The holding is engaged in the selection of personnel at all levels, from ordinary employees to management positions. In addition, we prepare salary and compensation reviews, audit and evaluate personnel, provide temporary personnel for various periods, and remove them from company staff.
— Then what was the point of merging with Unistaff?
-- Merging with the Unistaff group of companies will lead to business diversification and create solid competitive advantages for us. At the same time, clients will receive a wider range of services. After all, our partners are leaders in payroll calculation. Thus, by complementing each other, the merged companies will receive obvious strategic advantages and will be able to seriously change competitive relations in the industry. It should be noted that with the growth of the Russian economy in all sectors there is a process of consolidation and consolidation of business structures capable of solving increasingly large-scale projects. In these conditions, the old slogan “Personnel decides everything” received relevance and a fundamentally new content.