Accenture hires back 100 retrenched employees

Consulting firm says more to be brought back

AFTER CUTTING 500 jobs earlier in the year, global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing firm Accenture has started rehiring personnel.

In a briefing yesterday, Accenture Philippine country managing director Beth Lui said the company had so far rehired close to 100 people, with more to be taken back in the near term.

“These are all tech people. We’re hiring them back because they have the skills that we need,” she said.

While the official admitted that some aspects of Accenture’s business in the country had to shed some manpower these past months, she said none of these were of the same magnitude as the one implemented earlier in the year.

“I’m sure other companies have also been shedding manpower these past months. That’s not unique to us. What’s important is the future and the fact that we’ve started to rehire. We’re also hiring new people,” she said.
“It’s similar to how a grocery store works. You stock [up on] the goods that sell. [In the same way], we’re hiring people with the skills that we need.”

She said there were no big job cuts planned for the near future.

The job cuts implemented in January affected around 500 employees, representing around 3 percent of the company’s total headcount based locally.

That redundancy program, the company said then, was “about rebalancing our resources to match our skills sets with our clients’ needs. The requirements created by clients’ needs are constantly changing and, therefore, from time to time, we need to reshape our workforce to continue to meet their requirements.”

Accenture currently has more than 177,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries.

In the Philippines, it is one of the largest outsourcing companies, providing systems integration, application, infrastructure and business process outsourcing—both back-office and contact center services—to its clients.

It has more than 15,000 employees working in nine locations in Metro Manila and Cebu. –Abigail L. Ho, Philippine Daily Inquirer