Interview with the management board of LeasingTeam Group - from a start-up to the top HR consulting companies in Poland

LeasingTeam has been present on the Polish labour market for 15 years. You have become the 5th largest force in the HR consulting industry in our country. How did it start?

Andżelika Majewska, Vice President of LeasingTeam: We started our business at a time of record-high unemployment in Poland, which reached 20%. To counteract the difficult situation, on 9 July 2003 the government passed the Act on Temporary Workers. In April 2004, no one was yet convinced to work temporarily, so we offered the first largest customers the service of dispersed nationwide training. However, after just a few months, we received an offer from one of the clients that we could not refuse – he offered us to lease over 100 employees. It was a huge challenge for us, but also an opportunity that we could not miss.

So what did the company’s growth look like in individual years?

Maciej Majewski, President of LeasingTeam: We started as a startup, with no connections in the industry or external financial support. We owe our success primarily to consistent pursuit of goals and taking care of the highest possible level of service. The market noticed this and after 5 years we have grown by 1000 percent. Every year we doubled our turnover to reach PLN 100 million in revenue and 100 internal employees in 2010, and after the next 6 years we significantly exceeded PLN 200 million in revenue and already employed over 150 employees. Today, we are a full-fledged competitor of the largest international corporations providing HR services in Poland, which have been building their experience for several decades based on foreign capital.

You provide services in many areas of HR, how have you expanded the scope of competence in the industry?

A.M.: Initially, the main activity of the company was temporary employment services and HR and payroll services. However, the labor market began to change and existing customers increasingly needed permanent recruitment services. In response to this, in 2011 we established a company specializing in recruitment for middle and senior level positions called LeasingTeam Professional.

In the following years, the market began to experience a strong shortage of IT specialists. Therefore, the company’s development in this direction was a natural consequence. In 2015, we established a dedicated company providing services for the IT industry – IT LeasingTeam. In the adopted strategy, we did not stop only at looking for talents, but went a step further, providing clients with specific IT services/products, and even as part of outsourcing, entire IT departments, including building HR strategies.

In 2016, the group of our companies was joined by the Wrocław-based company CPC Consulting Group, dealing with cross-border posting of workers from Poland to Germany, Austria and Norway. In the meantime, we have also strongly developed our parent company LeasingTeam, which, in addition to temporary work, has started to provide process and function outsourcing services and recruitment of foreigners from the East.

So what does LeasingTeam Group specialize in today? There are a lot of areas, how do you manage to combine them?

M.M.: In 2016, we established the LeasingTeam Group to emphasise the comprehensive range of services we provide. Our competences allow us to carry out strategic, multidimensional projects that involve experts from various companies of the Group, but also to carry out one-off recruitment orders. In other words, each company is specialized in a specific area of HR, and together they form a dream team that will carry out even the most demanding and multi-threaded order. Thanks to this approach, we provide services for companies of various needs and sizes – from smaller Polish enterprises, through public companies, to international corporations.

Which projects do you consider the most interesting so far?

A.M.: Over the past 15 years, we have completed many projects of varying complexity. For example, in the years 2009-2017, we provided outsourcing of services for a leading telecommunications company in Poland and Europe, ensuring the implementation of tasks at nearly 150 different positions in showrooms, call centers, administration departments and technical departments, throughout the country. Initially, we outsourced 50 people, to finally reach the number of nearly 1800 employees.

Another important step in the company’s history was the public tender won in 2014 for the outsourcing of over 400 employees of one of the state-owned companies. The 2-year contract had a complicated and multi-faceted dimension and required extensive legal knowledge, high organizational skills and extensive experience. As a result, the assumptions were implemented in 100%.

And one more project worth mentioning, i.e. year-round customer service from the FMCG industry, whose seasonal fluctuations of employees are at the level of 100 to even 800 people per month. This is quite a challenge for employment agencies, especially when the lead time is several hours, and the basic areas monitored by the client are timely implementation and reactivity. When we add that the service includes temporary work in the production plant and outsourcing of processes and functions in the field of warehouse work and loading and unloading of high warehouses, we can fully see the level of advancement of the project.

To implement such demanding projects, you need not only knowledge and experience, but also tools. So what does modern HR mean to you?

M.M.: Today, modern HR means effective strategies, innovative tools, forms of employment, flexible solutions and dynamic activities. This can be seen in the example of permanent recruitment, where modern recruitment methods and innovative tools supporting recruiters in acquiring talent are necessary. The use of automation helps in searching for candidates, selecting them, publishing job offers, planning the recruiter’s work and monitoring the entire process, verifying its effectiveness.

Finally, where do you see the LeasingTeam Group in the next 15 years?

A.M.: In the future, LeasingTeam Group will become the leader of the HRM market in the area of intelligent solutions, but you will certainly not wait 15 years for this. To achieve this, we are already working on an innovative platform for candidates and clients that will significantly speed up the recruitment process and increase the accuracy of selecting employees for individual organizations. But it doesn’t stop there. We plan international development by opening branches in Europe (Germany, Ukraine) and expanding the network of directions for recruiting employees. We are already increasingly hiring people from distant countries, such as Moldova, Nepal, India, Azerbaijan and even Vietnam. In which directions we will move next, the market will find out soon.