Accenture Awarded Five-Year, €50m Contract to Build “Virtual Job Market” Portal for German Federal Labor Office

NUREMBERG; March 5, 2003 – Accenture has been awarded a five-year, €50 million (US$50 million) contract by the Bundesanstalt fur Arbeit, Germany’s federal labor office, to design, build and operate a job portal that will help link employers and job seekers with officials at Germany’s labor office via the Internet. The portal project is part of a larger package of measures recently announced by the Bundesanstalt fur Arbeit to help the nation’s 4.6 million unemployed citizens find jobs.

The portal, which is expected to create a virtual job market for the German population, will contain listings for job openings that have been posted with the Bundesanstalt fur Arbeit. The Bundesanstalt’s portal also will be linked to select job exchanges to give German citizens a single online resource to search electronic job opportunity databases. Consequently, the site has the potential to become the largest job database in Europe.

The portal also is expected to streamline the job search process by eliminating duplicate listings as the site’s search engine retrieves job openings from the various databases on the basis of criteria entered by job seekers. In addition to searching on the basis of skill requirements or job categories, job seekers may tailor their searches to identify openings on the basis of location.

“There are more than 324,000 vacant positions in Germany on company home pages, in newspapers and on various job exchanges, but as long as the people who are looking for jobs can’t get this information, it doesn’t help them,” said Heinrich Alt, a member of the Bundesanstalt fur Arbeit board.

By the end of the year, with Accenture’s assistance, the German federal labor offices will be able to scan the Internet to retrieve job advertisements tailored to individual job seeker profiles.

“This project marks the first time that leading-edge technology and practices, as described in the Hartz plan, have been used to assist German citizens,” said Stefan Schneider, a partner in Accenture’s Government practice in Germany. The Hartz plan is a comprehensive program developed by a federal commission to speed the job placement process and shorten the average amount of time that individuals are unemployed. Hans-Peter Hartz chaired the commission.

Bundesanstalt fur Arbeit and Accenture will demonstrate a prototype of the new job portal and its job search capabilities at the CeBIT Fair in Germany next month.

About Accenture
Accenture is the world’s leading management consulting and technology services company. Committed to delivering innovation, Accenture collaborates with its clients to help them realize their visions and create tangible value. With deep industry expertise, broad global resources and proven experience in consulting and outsourcing, Accenture can mobilize the right people, skills, alliances and technologies. With more than 75,000 people in 47 countries, the company generated net revenues of $11.6 billion for the fiscal year ended August 31, 2002. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

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Barbara Hohbach

+1 (703) 947 1838

barbara.d.hohbach@accenture.com