Evolving HR was set up by two Irishmen and a Polish woman. Based in Krakow and Luban, it is a success story as its multinational clients seek linguistic solutions, writes MARK HENNESSY, London Editor
SIX YEARS ago, a recruitment company set up by two Irishmen and the Polish wife of one of them began a recruitment company in Poland that sent Polish workers to Ireland, then enjoying its economic boom, and elsewhere.
Corkman Brian O’Brien says, “We were getting fantastic feedback from clients in Ireland and in the UK, saying, ‘We love Pavel or we love Agneska – do you have any more?’”
Besides Ireland and the UK, Evolving HR – the creation of O’Brien, college friend Trevor Coyne and Coyne’s wife, Gabriela Ziolkowska-Coyne – supplied staff for “Canada, Saudi, Qatar, all over Scandinavia” as well as for vacancies in Poland itself.
It became clear Poles working in Poland could supply outsourced services to other Polish firms, but also to companies globally, particularly to those within a two-hour flight – a business concept known as “near-shoring”. Evolving won two contracts handling telesales for two Polish firms. “Not sexy; it is the tough side of the outsourcing business. You are cold-calling, selling to people. We felt that if we could make a name for ourselves on that then we could crack anything,” says O’Brien.
Last June, a UK private equity company invested in Evolving, which now has 140 people in Poland – with Krakow handling international business and Luban in western Poland handling contracts within Poland itself, along with sales office in Cork, London and Warsaw.
Today, O’Brien spends “three to four days a week, sometimes” in London seeking outsourcing contracts from British firms that want to cut the costs of their back offices, but maintain quality.
Ten years ago, companies such as Dell began to move customer services to India and elsewhere, where they benefited from huge savings, but, equally, met with irritation from western customers who struggled to make themselves understood.
“Language and cultural problems are things about which we could talk all day. It is one of our challenges. In India, there has been a huge backlash with enormous amounts of work being pulled back by multinationals.”
Businesses that shifted part of their operations to India enjoyed “an initial honeymoon period where all the bean counters could see there were savings and they were going, ‘Wow’, but then people began to focus in on the true cost.We have US, Irish, British clients, as well as Polish clients, but everything we do is serviced from Poland and will be for the foreseeable future. We have never had somebody say, ‘Where are you? You’re in Poland. I don’t like that’.”
Krakow is “ranked the No 1 spot in Europe for multilingual skills. We currently support seven or eight languages,” says O’Brien, adding that the much larger outsourcing firm, Cap Gemini, offers 21 languages from its offices in the city, including Hebrew.
“It is a huge language hot spot, supplied by locally-based Poles. We are an Irish company delivering services from Poland for a US client’s Canadian division in French. The Polish education system is fantastic, absolutely fantastic, with multilingual skills.”
“Luban is different. I would be stretching it to say that it goes beyond Polish and German: it was German three times in its history, so we offer that, Czech and English from there,” says O’Brien, who lives in Crosshaven, Co Cork.
Though Evolving guarantees fluency, O’Brien, who studied commerce at University College Cork, says “accent, rather than fluency, is the issue that most irritates callers to repeat questions about their bill, for example. This is counter-intuitive, but people make allowances if fluency is not absolutely perfect, if a tense gets mixed up. But accent drives people absolutely crazy. But we don’t want things too polished, so we don’t look for Oxbridge, or BBC accents.”
The migration by hundreds of thousands of Poles – many to Ireland – after joining the EU in 2004 has created a pool of accent-equipped Poles, as many of them have returned home.
“Initially, we found we were hiring just Polish natives, particularly those who came from Ireland or the UK. We have one who is called ‘Scottish Mike’, because he has a Scottish accent. He’s like Andy Gray. It overcomes some of the ‘foreigner’ stuff, but it also gives the caller some cultural understanding.” Another Polish colleague speaks “in a flat, sloping Meath accent, where every second word is ‘like’ or ‘grand’”.
Equally, Evolving has a number of Irish and British employees in its Polish operations, who moved to Poland with the Polish women they met at home “for whatever reason – economic or because of their girlfriends’ family ties”.
Costs have risen in Polish since EU membership, but Evolving can offer “40-50 per cent savings on an apples-for-apples basis” from its Krakow operations and, even more, from the more remote Luban centre, he says.
Evolving has just one client in Ireland, a dating agency, “but even if we have 200 people in a few years’ time working on Irish clients, I won’t feel that I have contributed negatively to the Irish economy. I don’t think that we as a country are going to get out of our current travails by thinking locally. The work we do for our Irish client has helped to build his business. He pays his taxes in Ireland. If we win work, we contribute to keeping costs down.”
In any event, Ireland is not Evolving’s main target: “We are looking primarily at the UK, but we are also looking at the Polish domestic market which is a hugely underlooked part of what international outsourcing companies are doing.”
Even though he runs a business centred on languages, O’Brien is himself no linguist: “I can do my hellos, thank you, meals and receipts in Polish, but one man recently apologised to me for his English.
“I said to him that I am an Irish guy in your country. I always find it humbling and embarrassing that people are apologising to me for not speaking their language.”
