How a global beverage company launched a GBS center in five months, then kept us for the hard roles

Roles covered — GBS launch: Executive / Leadership Team (5) · Accounts Payable · Accounts Receivable · General Ledger · Record to Report · Order to Cash · Procurement · Master Data · Project Management · Support functions Roles covered — Digital & IT: Salesforce Developers · Salesforce Architects · Senior Salesforce Developer (CloudCraze) · Solution Architect Salesforce · SAP Functional Consultants (IM) ·

Senior Solution Designer SAP FICO · Senior Solution Designer O365 · ServiceNow · Solution Designers · RPA Developer · DevOps · UI/UX Designers · Senior Scrum Master

Engagement 1: A Business Services Center From Zero, in Under Six Months

The Challenge

A global FMCG leader decided to establish its Global Business Services center in Romania — the operation that would centralize and standardize finance, procurement, and data processes for business units across multiple continents. A GBS launch is a different animal from a tech-center launch. The talent map spans an entire back-office universe: accounts payable and receivable, general ledger, record-to-report, orderto-cash, procurement, master data, project management, support. Many roles require multilanguage capabilities and process expertise specific to large multinational environments. And the sequencing is unforgiving: without credible local leadership, you cannot attract the operational layer; without the operational layer in place quickly, the global migration timeline collapses.

Our Approach

Leadership first — always. We began with a dedicated search for the center's executive team: five senior leaders who would own the center's strategy, operations, and culture. Only with this board in place did we cascade downward. Then the cascade. With leadership installed, we moved wave by wave through the functional towers — finance and accounting (AP, AR, GL, RTR, OTC), procurement, master data, project management, and support — sequencing hires so that each team had its lead before its members.

The Result

The center was launched with approximately 60 people — executive team included — in roughly five months. From an empty org chart to a functioning, led, multi-tower business services operation in under half a year.

Engagement 2: The Digital Center — Recruiting in Romania's Scarcest Talent Pools

As the center matured, its scope expanded into digital and IT — and the client kept coming back to us, specifically for the roles that are hardest to fill in the Romanian market. Over time, we delivered around 20 highly specialized positions, concentrated in two of the most competitive ecosystems in local tech recruitment:

• Salesforce — developers, architects, solution architects, and CloudCraze specialists. The Salesforce talent pool in Romania is famously small: a niche community where genuinely senior professionals are counted in the dozens, not the thousands, and where every experienced architect is being courted by multiple employers at once. Recruiting here is less about sourcing and more about long-cultivated relationships.
• SAP — functional consultants and senior solution designers (FICO, IM), another chronically supply-constrained market. Alongside these: ServiceNow, O365 solution design, RPA, DevOps, UI/UX, and senior agile roles. Individually, each is a difficult search. As a portfolio, they are a stress test of a recruiter's network depth — one we are proud to have passed, repeatedly, for the same demanding client.

Engagement 3: Twenty Senior UI/UX Designers. Three Weeks.

Then came the mandate we still talk about. The client needed to build an in-house design capability — a complete team of 20 senior UI/UX designers — and needed it operational almost immediately. Timeline: three weeks. For context: senior product designers are among the most sought-after profiles in the market, they are heavily courted by product companies and studios, and they are notoriously selective about where they work. Convincing twenty of them — at senior level, with portfolio quality vetted — to join the same company, in the same three-week window, is the kind of project that does not appear in recruitment playbooks.

We delivered the full team of 20, on time. And here is the part that matters most: nearly three years later, that team is almost entirely unchanged. In a discipline where designers change employers with the seasons, near-complete retention of a 20-person senior team is extraordinary — and it is the clearest evidence that speed and selection quality are not opposites when the process is right. The story doesn't end there. On the strength of this team's success, the client is now exploring bringing additional marketing- and advertising-adjacent services to Romania — meaning a three-week recruitment project became a proof point for expanding an entire service line into the country.

The Long View

The center we helped launch with its first ~60 people has grown into one of the most successful business services operations in Romania — expanding from a small proof-ofconcept into an organization of several hundred employees serving business units across the globe, earning Top Employer certification, and continuously widening its scope from classic finance processes into digital, data, and technology services. From the executive team of five to the design team of twenty, we are proud of every layer we contributed to that structure.

The Relationship: Chosen by a Client That Measures Everything

This client has a defining trait: every decision is justified with data. Vendor performance is tracked, compared, and reviewed — continuously. There is no incumbent advantage and no relationship immunity; you are exactly as good as your numbers. Our collaboration with them is continuous to this day. For a client that measures everything, being retained year after year is not a compliment — it is a verdict.

Key Takeaways

• Full-spectrum capability, one partner. GBS launch, executive search, finance and procurement towers, scarce IT niches, and a rapid-fire design team build — few recruitment partners span this range for a single client, over years.
• Leadership-first works in business services too. The same principle we apply to tech centers — board first, then cascade — is what made a sub-six-month GBS launch possible.
• Scarce-market recruiting is a relationship business. In talent pools like Salesforce and senior product design, you cannot "post and pray." You either know the community or you don't. We do.
• Speed with retention is the real benchmark. Twenty senior designers in three weeks is a headline; the same team intact three years later is the proof. And when a delivery is strong enough that the client considers moving new service lines into the country because of it — recruitment has become business development.
• Data-driven clients keep the honest scoreboards. Being continuously retained by a company that justifies every decision with data is the most objective endorsement we can offer.