The FINANCIAL — Founded in 2001, Pedersen & Partners is an executive search company operating in Central and Eastern Europe.
“The success for us was the ability to develop our firm’s operations from scratch”, Igor Kabuzenko, Country Manager for Ukraine at Pedersen & Partners says. “Our company is young and when we came to the Ukrainian market, we could not leverage a well-known brand name, but had to build it ourselves. It was a tough and challenging job, however very rewarding as now we have clients and long-term partners who are happy with our performance”.
FINANCIAL: What’s the company’s mainstream strategic development policy in Kiev and what’s the way you lead business in foreign markets like, for instance, Georgia?
Igor Kabuzenko: “This question is not applicable to Pedersen & Partners, as we work as one company and one regional team across all the 30 countries where we operate at the moment. The company is privately held, all our offices are wholly owned and are concentrated around one profit-centre. None of our offices serve as a headquarter. At the moment we have 5 partners, based in different offices, who develop the company’s strategy for the whole region.
We have a well-defined search process and we apply this technology in all of our offices.
Our company culture encourages consultants to move freely within the region and perform searches in various countries and practice groups. In fact, the majority of our clients are regional and they prefer working with us due to our ability to provide consistent high quality service in all the countries where we operate”.
Pedersen & Partners entered Georgia last year.
Kabuzenko says Ukrainian market is extremely competitive and recruitment companies are very active. “We had to act quickly and aggressively to gain our share of market in the short period of time since we started our operations in Ukraine in 2005 and we are happy with our results”.
“The Ukrainian market is characterised by a high demand for qualified managers and a low supply of them. Since the economy became open and investments started flowing in, the market has been developing faster than the people. The educational system is still lagging behind the market demands, peoples’ experience, skills and qualifications also. On February 5, 2008 Ukraine officially became a member of the WTO, which will inevitably increase the demand for internationally minded managers”.
According to Kabuzenko, Ukrainian market is definitely an employee market and the appearance of a few executive “stars,” especially in such fast growing industries as finance, banking and real estate definitely drive the salaries upwards. “Also new investors that are coming to the Ukrainian market and want to get hold of skilful experienced managers are ready to pay increased salaries”.
“Executive search companies that want to succeed in this market need to have local presence to build and maintain close ties with the clients and executives, and need to act flexibly and quickly to resolve their client’s recruitment needs”.
“We are working in very fast growing markets where the demand for candidates is much higher than the supply”, Kabuzenko explains. “This also applies to the searches for our human resources. We do not refer to head hunting, but rather use our network combined with advertising in the mass media”.
Offices of Pedersen & Partners
“We have one office in Kiev; in fact, we have one office in each country where we operate. The only exception is Russia, where there are 2 offices. Our operations in Kiev started in September 2005 and we quickly started gaining a strong position in the Ukrainian market”, Kabuzenko says.
“Pedersen & Partners occupies leading positions in the region of Central and Eastern Europe due to the number of offices and our regional work strategy”.
Statistics
“We would prefer not to provide concrete statistics or success stories”, Kabuzenko says. “Our business is highly sensitive in terms of ethics. We work with people in very senior positions and when we successfully implement an assignment resulting in a candidate starting a new job, it usually means s/he left the previous job”.
“One of the examples of creative solutions where we make a big difference with our competition, is this: we were assigned to recruit a general manager for a very big energy supplier in one of the markets where we operate. The client was a foreign company. They wanted to come to the local market. They were looking for a general manager with access to heavy industries because they were using a lot of energy”.
“After two weeks of market research we decided that we could not find such a person, because many of these guys have no idea of modern business practices. We managed to change the entire profile by finding a head of an industrial company and a guy working for a national supplier. We combined these two and made a perfect general manager”.
“This is not something that fits the job profile, it is someone thinking outside the box and helping the client adjust the profile. In the end, working separately these two people could not achieve the necessary results, but by putting them together we provided the perfect manager”.
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