Accenture wins $50 million portal contract in Germany

Accenture Ltd. has won a five-year, $50 million contract with the German federal labor office to implement a job portal, the company announced today.

Under the contract, Accenture of Hamilton, Bermuda, will design, build and operate a job portal that will link employers and job seekers via the Internet with officials at the Bundesanstalt fur Arbeit, the German labor office.

The portal will create a virtual job market that will serve as a single online resource to search job opportunity databases. The site will contain listings for job openings that have been posted with the country's federal labor office and will be linked to select job exchanges.

The portal project is part of a larger package of measures recently announced by the German federal labor office to help the nation's 4.6 million unemployed citizens find jobs.

The portal will allow the labor office to consolidate upward of 324,000 job vacancies scattered across company home pages, newspapers and various exchanges, said Heinrich Alt, a member of the federal labor office board.

"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.

Accenture, a provider of management consulting and technology services, has more than 75,000 employees and annual revenue of $11.6 billion.