Rick Martino, executive vice president of global human resources, has been with BearingPoint for about seven months, and in that time, he has helped the consultants at the firm find more and more reasons to stay, among them a relatively new partnership with Yale, where current employees can develop their leadership skills. His goal is what he calls an "all-volunteer army," where employees "wake up and choose to work for us." Martino recently spoke with Consulting about BearingPoint's retention strategies going forward. Consulting: Obviously, BearingPoint had its challenges. Can you share with me the current human capital situation?
Martino: Certainly we've had our challenges from a business standpoint, and so in the midst of that, the question is: Why are people still here? And they say the reason they come to join us now and the reason they're here is because of the work that we do, the clients we have, the reputation for great work and the people that they work with. And what's exciting about this place is with even the challenges that we've had, people are here and they're here because of what we can do for our clients and then the work environment that we create and give them an opportunity to work in.
Consulting: How is your specific role evolved in light of all the business challenges BearingPoint has been facing?
Martino: It's kind of interesting. I joined just seven months ago; I knew the challenges going in. The great thing about the role that I have an opportunity to play here is that our business is getting stronger. And as it gets stronger, that provides me with I think more opportunities as we talk to employees about what the future holds in BearingPoint, both in terms of opportunities with customers and opportunities within our business. So we're in a position now I think where we're making again strides becoming a business that is going to be just increasingly healthy and vital and vibrant as we move forward. So my role coming in when I spoke with [CEO] Ed Harbach before joining was to really look at what we can do with our people basically to ensure that we are attracting but also retaining world-class talent.
Consulting: Tell me about the program with Yale.
Martino: Over a year ago we set up an agreement with Yale where we would work with their school of management in providing opportunities for our employees to learn. And what we have there is opportunities for our senior consultants and senior managers and soon-to-be senior managing directors as well to have the opportunity both to work on things that are relevant to BearingPoint and also have the opportunity to work with the world-class faculty at Yale. And learn in terms of many different areas based on teaming, strategy, just specific leadership and so forth. We talk about mentoring. It has provided just an extraordinary opportunity for us to have employees come from all over the globe to work together and to do it in an environment—Yale—with faculty and a group of people they certainly feel they can learn from. And what's most exciting I think about the Yale program is when we look at our attrition for people who have gone through the program at Yale, our attrition is significantly less for those people than others in the business.
Consulting: What is the goal of this kind of program?
Martino: I think one of the things that are very important for us is that our folks understand that we value and want to invest in them. The reason for that obviously is one, it's a good way to retain people certainly, but more importantly it shows up in our clients' offices. So we're investing in them, but there's a return I think hopefully in terms of them staying and what they do with our clients.
Consulting: What other retention strategies do you have in place?
Martino: Last year one of the things that we rolled out was a pretty robust career path for employees, and that is something that has not been I think as clear for folks in terms of the different paths people can take within BearingPoint, and we rolled out basically paths for the technical side and the business side and then some of the consulting areas as well, and what we did is we put that model up for folks and then behind that now what we put is: What are the things that are expected in each one of those different positions in the hierarchy? What things should you be doing in order to be in a position to be promotable? And also now what we've added this year is an opportunity that when you click on those on our intranet, you'll see things that are available from a learning standpoint so that folks have an opportunity to see what's available to them in terms of their learning. We call it the Star Model.
Consulting: Are you looking to add human capital programs?
Martino: Yale is one piece of the investment that we're making in training. That's the key one that we're focused on. It's not looking for necessarily the silver bullet that makes it all better; I think my challenge coming in was to really drive some of these things and continue to grow our programs and give our folks an opportunity to do great work here in what we feel is a great environment.
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