5y
Thank you for this review. I am sorry to hear you feel that way. As a company, receiving feedback is essential to ensure a long lasting development, so please be assured that your feedback does matter and we do have an interest in improving. I wanted however to address a few of your specific points here as they seem to be the result of a lack of information or communication.
When it comes to recruitment, we believe in 2 complementary approaches: the project-based hire and the profile-based hire (or direct hire). No one is forced into the direct hire process, however for people willing to move forward with this approach, they are informed of how it works and accept that they can be offered a variety of different projects, potentially with different clients, across different locations. Flexibility is thus a key element to be able to progress in that process. This approach is not suitable for everybody; hence, we also offer and alternative system for people who prefer to have information on their first project from the very early stages of the recruitment process.
All business managers in Alten have 3 equally important responsibilities: developing business to help the company grow, recruiting engineers and managing the career of these engineers. Career development is actually at the core of the Alten approach and is managed thoroughly by dedicated Career Managers ensuring the development of every consultant. This Career Management scheme starts with an Integration Meeting, and is then followed by an individual quarterly follow-up in order to ensure both your career and your project are going in the right direction. Each year is wrapped-up by a formal Annual Appraisal during which several topics are tackled such Skills Development, Salary, Career Progression, Training...
Developing and retaining our talents is one of our top priorities, this is why we offer the opportunity to our employees to develop throughout one our several of our career paths, which cover: Expertise, Management, Business and Support Functions. This wide range of possibilities enables our employees to benefit from a bespoke career plan that is built together with their manager. Progression along these paths is supported through training and development.
We see retribution as something global, not limited to base salary. Alten offers an attractive package to all employees, who get an extensive set of benefits (including but not limited to: health insurance, travel insurance, life insurance, pension, cycle to work scheme, and a long term sickness policy: our policy has actually been upgraded 2 years ago to include long term sickness, and is thus not limited to 5 days). We also offer a bonus system based on performance, or to reward added value brought to company (through recommending people from your network for example, which I think is not about being “desperate”, but on the contrary an opportunity to involve our consultants in the company’s development and reward them for that. Referral programmes are actually quite common in many companies). As per UK employment law, overtime, when agreed upfront between the client and Alten, is being paid. However, a consultant should not unilaterally decide or agree with the client to perform overtime without involving Alten in the discussion for obvious contractual and payroll reasons. Once again, this is a matter of communication.
2020 was a very challenging year for a number of businesses, and unfortunately, Alten was no exception. We lost close to 60% of our activities in the frame of 8 weeks and had to adapt to a new context with little to no visibility of a recovery in some areas of the business. Most of our consultants, which projects unexpectedly ended, could benefit from the furlough scheme. Nevertheless, we had to make the difficult decision to go through a redundancy plan for some of them, in particular for those involved in the aerospace and automotive sectors where we had absolutely no visibility. To set the record straight, a bit less than 30% of the workforce was made redundant, and we have since then re-hired 15% of the people who were initially made redundant thanks to our efforts to keep looking for project opportunities for these people.
I would like to conclude by saying that employee and client satisfaction are some of the top priorities for the company, and that they are not incompatible. The most important thing is to establish an honest, transparent communication, which I believe is lacking here. I actually take this as an improvement opportunity.
Going forward, on top of this review, there are several ways for you to address your feedback to internal stakeholders (by discussing with your Career Manager, or through the monthly satisfaction survey, or by speaking to our Career Management Advisor or someone in the HR team). I recommend you do address your concerns and frustrations internally as well, in order to work together to make your Alten experience better.
