Saturday, December 27, 2014

Blue Elephant and the experience with Accenture - An Update

Running Blue Elephant since 2005 and the experience of working with various corporates and linguists translating content, understanding cultures, languages and in-toto, the process of translation has been an enlightening experience. We also ventured into assisting some companies recruit linguists with specific skill-sets.

In this particular case, like most queries, a gentleman from the Business team of Accenture contacted us stating the requirement of linguists for a few languages. We had a meeting and after several exchanges via Phone and Email, We were happy to assist and looked forward to a great working relationship. 

We were asked to send documents for vendor enlistment which was subsequently completed. 

A candidate was recruited (Initially her offer letter had her named mistyped which was corrected later and a new one issued) and now we are informed that we didn't go through Accenture's HR, the Finder's fee due to us will not be paid. The lady has taken a long time listing out the several processes that a vendor is supposed to go through. I don't understand why the Business team did not inform us. The HR also says that each candidate recruited by them must have a unique CID that is generated by the system. I have no idea under on whose behest a CID was created for a candidate we referred. 

I told them that we were not informed of any of this and through the entire long drawn out process of vetting resumes, that fulfilled the criteria they had asked for in the first place which lasted about 3 months, we had absolutely no idea. I am just informed of the same rules again and again like a tape that is stuck. Two Emails and a couple of phone calls that say 'This is the system here'

I also did not smell anything afoot because this is a procedure normally we have followed with all the companies we worked with and none of them are small ones. In about 6-7 years of doing this, we have understood the process pretty well and it is similar across all corporates we have woked with, if not identical.

I also do not understand this extremely one-sided 'duplicity' concept that I have come to know thanks to them. Vendors really have no way of finding out if the resumes of candidates they refer already exist in a client's system. 

The only advantage of this all is that I have the entire mail exchange, the asking for candidate details,  ID documents and everything else including the offer letter that was issued. 

I blog this experience to find out if someone can shed light on this. Please help and let me know what I can do. 

The issue I had faced with has been verbally resolved by a gentleman from HR as of 30-12-2014. He got in touch with us and we supplied the information he wanted on the 31st.
He was miffed about us posting on social media and said we could either choose a one-time resolution or a long term collaboration wherein we agree to remove all the posts from social media altogether. I said I'd rather not have a long term collaboration after this experience. 
Nonetheless there is a promise of settling what is due to us and for his time and the promise of resolution, we are grateful.

1 comment:

kanna said...

Candidate ID is typically given for those who are referred by Accenture employees .Most of the recruitment is done by contract employees and many such goof-ups have happened in the past.
There were instances when even those who have been given an offer letter were asked to appear for screening process from scratch .
Since you have all those email exchanges ,you can try reaching out to some senior person in the HR department who is an permanent employee and who might have the authority to take a decision