Pros
The Firm is in change on many fronts, HR is being professionalized and many new exciting initiatives come alive, better role definitions have been put in place, clear promotion processes for all executing staff, sure functional staff will follow suit, induction is professionalized and training. The Company has the best proposition in the industry and has intellectual property other’s only dream of. The tool box of Korn/Ferry is incredibly rich and all solutions are connected. Having worked before for a traditional old boys network search firm, I am excited about being able to tap into experts all over the world for talent solutions. It is not always perfect, but I have the opportunity myself to be part of the solution and building of the Firm’s offering. I feel that by embracing the full suite of solutions and embracing colleagues in all lines of business as my colleagues my work has become much richer than before. If I treat executive search as the last cold drink in the dessert, I would die of thirst. The KF solutions are a bottling plant in the dessert and give me a constant supply of things I can talk to my clients about.
Cons
Challenges in change time require tough decisions, sometimes I get frustrated why the Firm is so nice to blocking staff for so long, if they don’t support the change they should at least not stand in the way. Difficulty seems that the functional team supporting processes and systems and HR is very thin, they are well aligned with the management and they have built a very tight informal network across the globe to implement things but the network has also day jobs too, so change is sometimes slow or sporadic which makes the field impatient.