About Us
People are your greatest asset and your most complex variable. Accord Human Capital was founded to challenge the transactional nature of traditional staffing, with an African foundation and international relevance.
The Name
Why Accord
Human Capital?
An accord is a formal agreement between parties. In music, it is the coming together of separate parts to form something coherent and complete.
The distinction is important. In an orchestra, every player may be exceptional. The conductor does not add to their technical ability. Their role is to hear and recognise where the balance is lost, where parts have drifted, and how each element should come together.
Organisations are often much the same.
The challenge is rarely a lack of individual capability. More often, it is alignment. As businesses evolve, structures develop organically. Responsibilities overlap, gaps emerge, and critical knowledge can become concentrated in a few individuals rather than embedded in the organisation.
That is a structural risk, even before someone leaves.
Accord exists to bring greater alignment to the capability already within your organisation. We do not replace what is there. We help you understand it, connect it and strengthen it so that decisions move more easily, responsibilities are clearer, duplication is reduced, and people become productive sooner.
The result is not simply better people. It is a better-connected organisation.
Understanding first.
Delivery second.
01
We listen
We interview beyond the budget holder. The people who will work alongside the appointment consistently hold information the specification does not carry.
02
We diagnose
We read your structure, not your job specification. If the brief in front of us is not the problem worth solving, you will hear that from us before you have paid us anything.
03
We design
We build the response around the diagnosis. A recruitment mandate, a redesign of the reporting lines, a capability intervention, an analytics baseline, or a sequence of them with dependencies mapped.
04
We measure
We set the measure and the review date before we start. Retention at twelve and twenty four months, time to productivity, and whether the function around the appointment improved.
A supplier who only sells
recruitment will always
conclude that you
need to recruit.
That is not cynicism, it is structure. A firm with one product has one recommendation available to it, and the incentive runs in a single direction.
We hold five capabilities under one engagement: strategic recruitment, HR advisory and support, training and capability building, workforce analytics, and employee wellbeing. That breadth is what allows us to act on what the diagnosis finds. Where the assessment attributes your attrition to one reporting line rather than to your hiring, we can address the reporting line. Where the gap closes faster through capability than through appointment, we can scope that instead.
In practice it means we will sometimes recommend something smaller than you asked for, sometimes suggest you correct something before you hire at all, and where the work falls outside what we do well, say so and refer you on. None of that is generosity. An appointment that fails in month seven costs you considerably more than it earned us, and it costs us the relationship as well.
There is a second effect that becomes visible only over time. The party that made the appointment also holds the exit interviews, the attrition data and the time to productivity figures, so each subsequent mandate is briefed on evidence rather than assumption. Divide those functions across three suppliers and the reasoning is lost at every handover, and when retention fails each of them can point at the other two.
Why specialisation
matters?
Our assessment is technical, and it is carried out by people who have worked the discipline.
A paper screen confirms that the title matches, the dates align and the qualification is registered. It cannot establish whether the candidate carried the responsibility or sat adjacent to it, and that distinction is where first-year failures commonly originate.
A project controls candidate describing how a claim was handled on an NEC contract reveals within a minute whether they were accountable for it. A mining engineer discussing a 2.13.1 appointment reveals whether they held it or reported to the person who did.
The result is a shorter shortlist, and fewer appointments that do not hold.