Why Accenture is an incubator for top HR talent

For up-and-coming HR professionals eyeing the C-suite, professional services firms aren’t a bad place to cut your teeth.

Of the top 10 companies where more than 16,400 current CHROs and CPOs worked prior to holding the top role, four—Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, and EY—are consulting firms, according to a data analysis provided to HR Brew by employment data provider Live Data Technologies.

After freelance or self-employed roles, a job at Accenture was the most common work experience for this cohort prior to entering the C-suite, with 0.64% of CHROs or CPOs spending time at the firm.

Accenture’s former CHRO, Jill Smart, can attest to this. Smart, who led HR at Accenture from 2004 to 2014, keeps in touch with some two dozen company alumni who went on to become CHROs or CPOs at other firms. Current and former Accenture staff say the nature of professional services work—where your product is people—helps prepare employees for top HR jobs elsewhere.

Selling talent. If you want to become a CHRO, professional services is “the space to do it in,” Gene Raffone, an Accenture alum who now leads HR at advisory firm Riveron, told HR Brew. At firms like Accenture, where Raffone spent more than 20 years, “your asset is people, and that is a very different dynamic than if you’re in a manufacturing firm,” he said.

Accenture employed 733,000 people as of the end of the 2023 fiscal year, according to a company fact sheet, with the workforce serving some 9,000 clients across more than 120 countries. The firm cites its “industry expertise” as a “key competitive advantage,” as employees advise clients on everything from banking and capital markets to health and public services.

The relationship between Accenture’s people and clients is so important that it’s the first thing incoming HR professionals get exposure to when they join the firm’s Talent Accelerator Program (TAP), said Betty McCormack, a managing director for leadership appointments and development, who serves as a US sponsor for the program.

TAP, which recruits aspiring HR pros out of college, assigns participants to a series of rotations over two years, and starts them in a business- or client-facing role, McCormack said. “As a professional services company, we’re not selling a product…this is not Apple and its iPhones,” she added, explaining the thinking behind this first assignment, which lasts three months. “That really gives them the power of understanding Accenture and seeing, very frontline, how we serve clients, the type of work that we do.”

Staying close to the business. When explaining how Accenture trains aspiring HR leaders through its TAP program, which started in 2016, McCormack echoed a common refrain among alumni like Smart and Raffone. “Proximity to our business, and/or our clients,” she said, is the number one experience participants gain that can serve them later on in their HR careers.

While TAP employees do develop expertise in HR-specific areas like compensation and employee experience through their rotations, the program is designed to produce HR generalists, rather than “niche specialists,” she continued. In developing future HR leaders, Accenture has come to believe “you must understand the business” by working as a business partner or with clients, “understanding accounts and our structure and how we make money at Accenture.”

When Raffone was at Accenture, he transitioned from an internal role to a business partner role at the advice of Smart to get more exposure to the client-facing side of the business. While serving as HR director for Accenture’s Global Centers of Excellence from 1997–2009, Raffone designed programs focused on issues like compensation and performance management that consultants would then use when advising their clients. While he developed expertise in specific areas of HR in this role, he didn’t get much exposure to Accenture’s “day to day” business operations—something that Smart said he’d eventually want as an aspiring CHRO.

When he took on a business partner role with Accenture in 2009, Raffone was able to “get in the trenches and really help the people who are running the business,” he said. Whereas he was creating platforms for talent management in his previous role, this job allowed him to execute them, and “support the people who do serve clients…hand to hand.”

It was this experience that ultimately set Raffone apart when he interviewed to become chief human capital officer for consulting firm Navigant in 2013. Navigant’s former CEO, Julie Howard, later “confided in me that it was the business partner experience that convinced them I could be successful as their CHRO,” he said.

Navigating polycris(es). Given the cascade of major events in recent years that have demanded a response from employers—from the #MeToo movement to the Covid-19 pandemic to protests against racial injustice—it’s perhaps no surprise that the number of firms that count an HR professional among their top five highest-paid C-suite executives is on the rise, according to recent research from Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economics professor.

Corporate boards are also seeking out expertise from CHROs at a higher rate than they did previously, according to an analysis of Russell 3000 firms by executive intelligence firm Equilar. Between 2020 and 2022, the share of new directors with CHRO experience rose from 1.1% to 2.7%, Equilar found.

These trends illustrate how the public perception of HR has come a long way. In the 1980s and 1990s, the assumption was that HR leaders were simply there to plan the company picnic or fulfill administrative tasks, Raffone recalls. But today, “leaders like Jill have given the function great credibility by broadening how you approach it and where you can add value.” For Smart, it’s no surprise Accenture alumni have been up to the task.

“Being able to adapt and turn on a dime…they grew up in an environment that was very good at it,” she told HR Brew.