Jan 20 2021 24 mins 1
Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by the leading recruitment automation platform. Max: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm Max from Talkpush and today I'm delighted to be welcoming on the show Cristina Mihai, who is VP of HR and communications for, I don't want to butcher the name, Cristina, it's Conectys. Thank you. Welcome to the show, Cristina. Cristina: Thank you for having us and having me here. Lovely to be here. Max: Lovely to have you. And Cristina is well, I said what you're doing but you were telling me before we got on about your very international team. Around some very exotic and lovely destinations with people in Turkey and Taiwan and the U.S all over the world. Could you maybe start by introducing us a little bit to Conectys what you do and what makes this workplace special? Sure Conectys is a very, very special place. It's a very successful entrepreneurial endeavor with you know, just a guy who 15 years ago, decided to move from the corporate world to the entrepreneurial world and start a contact center, BPO business in a country that is not so, let's say familiar to everybody on the BPO map, which is Romania. And it's been a very successful story of growing from 10 people, 15 years ago to 3,000 plus in 10 different sites right now. And now the sun never sets on Conectys people. Max: I noticed before we started our chat that you kept on growing in 2020 while others were retrenching, Conectys continued to grow through 2020. So it's been a good year for the business. I mean, I'm sure traumatic in many ways, but you managed to get something out of this traumatic experience, some growth. Cristina: Yes. So we really partner with our clients and even if this year was a very difficult one for some of our client partners, the good risk distribution within our portfolio allowed us to, you know, get some hits together with our clients but also grow very, very steeply with some others. So we were also lucky, obviously. We did adapt. Max: Only the good ones are lucky. Cristina: Yeah, you make your luck within a degree, but you have to have luck as well. And we capitalized on our ability to move very quickly. I mean when the COVID situation hit us, we moved everybody in work from home in six days. And I think this is the story, you know, working very closely with the clients and making this really entrepreneurial move, taking some risks, adjusting. I think that's the story behind it. Max: And now we're in December. And those six days, they sound like the most fun time we ever had. Right? When it was like everybody was moving was exciting. And now we're all stuck at home and we hate it. Actually if you go back in time and you remember those six days, they were not so much fun, I think. Cristina: No, they were not, there were legal technical implications. You name it. And everybody was happy to move from home, and now everybody's saying, can we go to the office pretty please, you know? Max: Yeah yeah. The grass is always greener on the other side. That's why I'm back in the office now because everybody's stuck at home. I'm like I'm going. Cristina: Yeah. And I want curly hair, but yeah. Not going to happen. So what can I say? Max: So Conectys is a wonderful entrepreneurial success story from 10 to 3000 in 15 years. Well done. And you talked about the distribution of risk. I think in the BPO sector, there's a distribution of risk on both clients where you don't want to have all your eggs in one industry, but also geographical. Right? The clients are looking at the political risk and the cost of labor and how that changes with the currency rates exchange and things like that, for our audience who don't come from that world. Can you tell us how that factors into the decision from going for one BPO or another? Cristina: Yeah. So in the latest years clients have been shopping for right shor [...]
