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Customs and Border Protection Paid Firm $13.6 Million to Hire 7500 Recruits; It Hired 2

posted by martyb on Monday December 17 2018, @07:37AM   
from the Meet-your-goals-by-moving-the-goalposts dept.

stretch611 writes:

From NPR:

The audit found that as of Oct. 1 CBP had paid Accenture Federal Services approximately $13.6 million of a $297 million contract to recruit and hire 7,500 applicants, including Customs and Border Protection officers, Border Patrol agents, and Air and Marine Interdiction agents. But 10 months into the first year of a five-year contract Accenture had only processed "two accepted job offers," according to the report.

[...] When it became clear the company would miss a 90-day deadline to reach the "full operation phase" outlined in the agreement, the agency modified the contract granting Accenture another three months to ramp up operations to meet the terms of the contract.

CBP also allowed the company to use the government agency's applicant tracking system when Accenture failed to deploy its own, leading to another contract revision.

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Original Submission

• Re:Another Accenture Success (Score: 4, Interesting) by Mykl on Monday December 17 2018, @11:40PM

  by Mykl (1112) on Monday December 17 2018, @11:40PM (#775625)

  I worked for Accenture for a few years - some of your comments are spot on, but there are a couple of things I think need clarification:

  • The rebrand from Andersen Consulting was due to a fight with their sibling company Arthur Andersen on partner profit shares. It ended up being incredibly good luck for Accenture in the end, because it was Arthur Andersen who were in bed with Enron and who very quickly went out of business. Accenture did suffer a little bit of blowback from it, but not nearly to the degree it would have if they had kept the Andersen Consulting name

  1. Spot on. That's one of the key reasons I left. You were essentially in competition with your peers 24/7, and this competition was a strong disincentive to help others out. The other 'problematic' element of promotion was the main KPI used to measure your performance, number of hours worked...
  2. To each their own. However, if you are going to sign up to any consulting company at all, you acknowledge that you may be working on projects that are unknown at that point. In fairness, you _did_ get a chance to say no to projects at Accenture, but not too many! Back when I was there, you were allowed to refuse 2 projects before you were just assigned. There was an overriding exemption at the time though for Defence and a large cigarette manufacturer - you were allowed to refuse to ever work for them on moral grounds
  3. That's because techies are second-class citizens at Accenture. Their whole recruitment and promotion model has one objective - to produce Partners who will sell work and manage people, and winnow out everyone else. That's why there are no career landing points - they want everyone to either work up to Partner level or leave.

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+2
  Interesting=1, Informative=1, Total=2
  Extra 'Interesting' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		4