EY: The promise of an exceptional experience

Receiving the Top Employers Romania and Europe award certification proves that EY’s HR processes are up to par with international standards. Irina Mînzală, HR Director at EY Romania & Moldova, tells us how the company manages to keep its team highly motivated even in challenging times.

How would you describe your HR policy?

At EY Romania, we are focused on empowering all our colleagues to build an exceptional EY experience for themselves, every day and throughout all vital career milestones, from hiring and onboarding to retirement or exit, an experience that builds transformative leaders regardless of their role in the organisation. There are four main pillars of the Exceptional EY Experience: the first is Recognition, Rewards, and Empowering Careers through diverse experiences, learning and development opportunities, as well as a Focus on Wellbeing as primary drivers; the second is Culture, including Teaming, Learning, and Productivity in a hybrid work enviornment; the third is Attracting Diverse Talent and a sucessful onboarding experience—getting the employee experience right from the start; and the fourth is Rentless Focus on the D&I agenda by ensuring fair representation, no dilution, and no regression of a balanced workforce.

What were the main initiatives the company dedicated to its employees last year?

One of last year’s key initiatives was the implementation of the hybrid working model, something new for all of us, a cultural shift that still requires us to think and act differently, as well as commit to new behaviours. Our hybrid working model is not merely a new work schedule or employee perk; it is an entirely new way of working together, whereby we all benefit from flexibility in terms of work location (client site, office or home), but also have predictability in what we do and when we do it. It was defined by listening to and factoring in the needs and preferences of all our employees. Most EY employees spend between 40-60 percent of their time working remotely and the rest of their time working together in person on client sites or in our offices. We do in-person work, either at our clients’ offices or the EY office, for projects or activities that require connection, collaboration, and creativity. Deep or shallow individual work, be it admin, e-mails, reports, team updates or formal learning and development are best performed from home, so we continue to do that. Through an employee survey and several focus groups, we have learned that some activities are location-agnostic, meaning they can be done well either from home or from the office.

What is your strategy in terms of attracting and retaining talent?

From an employer branding perspective, we focus on the right mix of strength, stretch, localisation, and differentiation of our employee value proposition across all talent profiles and engaging with talent through all the right channels. From a sourcing perspective, our emphasis is on maximising the impact of employee referrals and alumni channels and diversifying our sourcing channels, including tapping into talent markets outside Romania or outside Europe. We are focused on providing an exceptional candidate experience across the complete cycle of selection and adjusting our tactics to talent market dynamics by consistently embedding market intelligence outputs into our talent attaction strategies.

3 HR challenges for the consulting services sector in 2023

Meeting talent acquisition targets (quality, volumes, and hiring speed) on a highly competitive talent market;
Onboarding and integrating Gen Z colleagues and deploying learning and development programmes to address technical and soft skill gaps;
Balancing the company’s needs with employee engagement & retention.