Body snatchers and winged warriors in the information age
It's not just today's job seekers who have to be internet-savvy. It's the headhunters as well.
The new country manager of the U.K.-based Antal International is Richard Smith. Smith came to Poland in February from Budapest where he was a marketing executive for Swedish software company Scala.
Antal opened its Polish office in 1994 and specializes in finding executives for jobs in the fast-moving-consumer-goods (FMCG), sales and marketing, finance, venture capital, human resources and IT sectors. "And within that (IT), we will be focusing teams on e-business," Smith said.
"E-business is still young everywhere and in East-Central Europe even more so," he said, "but I definitely think a lot of entrepreneurs here are going to make a lot of money out of it."
In some ways "Poland is still a little way behind Budapest in terms of Westernization. Budapest has a larger expat community, from what I've seen here so far. It's also a very diverse expat community different nationalities, different cultures but that is something I can see growing in Warsaw, especially with the number of companies that are already here," Smith said.
Multinationals have preferred Budapest and Vienna to Warsaw as sites for regional headquarters.
But Poland's potential is vast. "You would not see this amount of construction underway in Budapest. There are some major developments (in Budapest) but not as many as here, both residential and business. The amount of residential construction is staggering," he said. "I only wonder how they're going to fill all these buildings since I don't see that much of an expat community here."
There is however a growing pool of homegrown Polish entrepreneurs and managers.
In fact, Antal is focusing on body-snatching these "high-value nationals" highly skilled Poles who get jobs that until late in the last decade were filled by expats. In some sectors their benefit packages match those of expats.
Angelo J. Pressello, a financial institutions specialist who joined Antal last October after years with the U.S. Commercial Attache's office here, says they also look for what he called "re-pats" Poles who emigrated or are working internationally but could be tempted home or placed in another overseas job.
"Our company recently placed a Pole living in Turkey," he said. "The Pole was placed by the China office of Antal into a country-manger's position in Vietnam."
Antal's web site (Antal.com) already generates lots of applications. "We get about 200 resumes a day over the internet," says Pressello.
Earlier this month, Antal expanded its online job-search service to folks with mobile phones, through an agreement with Nokia that Antal claims is a first, internationally, for any recruitment agency. The Antal specialist who made that happen was Kelley Tedd from the Budapest office.
This lets job-seekers use their WAP-enabled mobiles to get information about Antal job searches for upper-level management positions in Asia, Europe and Central and North America in Polish, English, German, French, Dutch, Spanish and Hungarian. Russian and Chinese will soon also be options.
In the United States, many "internet millionaires" invested early in fledgling dot.com businesses. But the wealth generated by those companies has spread far beyond the executive suites through employee stock-option programs.
That could happen in Poland, too.
Agora, publisher of Gazeta Wyborcza, owns broadcast interests and will launch an internet portal later this year. It has seen its stock triple in value, which is benefiting far more than management.
Chief Financial Officer Jerzy Thieme says 1,532 employees and 96 managers hold shares in the company as a result of a restructuring that occurred before Agora went on the Warsaw Stock Exchange a year ago.
"Agora had been a holding company. After the restructuring, Agora SA was created, linking all units of the company," he said. The shares are paper profits at the moment because they must be held for at least two years before they can be sold. But that deadline will expire within six months.
The Royal Castle is scrambling to put plans in place for its Aug. 15 "Land of the Winged Warrior" exhibition, which has drawn rave reviews and many visitors during its five-city tour in the U.S.
Castle director Andrzej Rottermund said more than 350,000 people have seen the exhibition. The exhibit focuses on baroque art during the "Golden Age" (1572-1764) when Poland was the largest country in Europe.
The challenge, of course, is to raise enough money to mount the show in a way that will do justice to the thousands of items collected from the Royal Castle, Wawel Castle and other Polish museums and churches.
One of Rottermund's biggest boosters from the sidelines is Donald M. Bohler, Lockheed Martin's Central European chief. His company helped finance the show at one of the museums in the U.S., but can't help out here because the Royal Castle is a government entity and Lockheed is competing for government defense sector contracts.
