Three businesses providing human resources services were amalgamated today to form Bermuda?s largest employment services company.

HR Associates, BermudaJOBS and Accounting Solutions along with new training and development business Prot?g? are now all part of the company Expertise. ?Expertise is the only company of its kind in Bermuda,? said partner Simon Turner. ?No other service provider in Bermuda offers HR management, recruitment, training, payroll and qualified accounting personnel all under one roof.?

Previously, the businesses saw a lot of collaboration since Douglas Soares, who founded Accounting Solutions and BermudaJOBS with Mr. Turner, was also a partner and founder of HR Associates which he shared with Belinda Chiaramonte.

The launch of Expertise however legally binds the three businesses as well as the partners into a one-stop human resources shop.

?There has always been a high degree of co-operation but certainly from the clients perspective it is more disjointed if they are contracting with separate companies to provide those services which are really all employment-related services,? Mr. Soares said.

Mr. Soares added that the different divisions now have integrated services delivery.

The amalgamation also reflects a recent evolution of human resources in Bermuda. The traditional concept of most businesses taking care of all of their own human resources needs has, in the last five years or so, given way to many businesses outsourcing some if not all of the HR function.

Mr. Soares said the trend stems from the fact that HR management has become a lot more complex in recent years with increased regulation as well as increased complexity around such things as performance based pay. Enterprise is able to provide experts in every field whether they are needed to do such things payroll, recruitment or immigration processes.

?In a service based economy we have to ensure that we are not just hiring the right people but that we are motivating them through incentive based compensation. Hiring the right people in the labour shortage and also developing and training skills in a a labour shortage, those complexities have increased over the last few years so you are not going to find just one hr manager in a company who is going to have all of the skill sets required to run an HR department like they once did ten-15 years ago,? Mr. Soares said adding that the HR Associates division which deals with HR consulting is 100 percent Bermudian.

?When people think of outsourcing, they think all jobs are going to India. Outsourcing doesn?t mean that all jobs go to India. It can mean that they actually transfer to other jobs in the local economy done by Bermudians and we?re able to service many more organisations in this way,? he said.

The newly launched Prot?g? , through a strategic partnership with Eagle?s Flight and Collaborative Strategies, has expanded the range of training and development courses previously offered through HR Associates and will provide customised programmes to support the development of leaders managers and employees. The management consultants have developed training programmes that are practical experiential and based on proven strategies for improving workplace productivity.