Business and Professional Services

For services organizations, human capital is the single most important source of competitive advantage. The quality of the service offering, and therefore the potential for growth and bottom line profitability are first and foremost driven by attracting and developing truly excellent people with the right experience, competencies, passion and culture fit.

As a consequence, services organizations increasingly turn to top-tier executive search firms to assess their leaders and senior teams, fill gaps in their succession plans, and help them accelerate growth in particular markets.

The global Business & Professional Services practice at Russell Reynolds Associates has worked extensively with clients in the following areas:

• Strategy and operations consulting, for both integrated global firms and specialized niche players
• Firms specializing in Accountancy, Audit, Assurance, Tax advisory and Corporate Finance
• Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) such as Finance & Accounting, Facility Services, Accounts Receivable Factoring, Insurance Claims Processing, etc.
• Business Information Services, such as credit ratings, market research, etc.
• IT Services, including System Integration, Outsourcing, Managed Services and IT Consulting
• Human Capital firms providing staffing and employee benefits services
• International and regional/national Law firms

We consistently serve privately held, publicly listed and private equity backed clients in these areas, conducting search and assessment assignments for partners, general managers, senior commercial executives, business development and service delivery executives and corporate officers. We offer our clients specific areas of expertise:

• First-hand Business and Professional Services expertise: Many of our consultants have had careers within top tier services firms, and bring an in-depth understanding of the culture, leadership style, structure and dynamics of these firms.
• Collaboration: We are a global firm with an integrated culture, incentive schemes and information systems, giving our teams access to and knowledge of candidates across the globe, significantly enlarging the number of highly qualified candidates who meet our clients’ requirements.
• Breadth and depth of expertise: We bring the relevant knowledge of our entire firm to every client by involving colleagues with specific sector, geographic or functional expertise. Time and again this proves extremely valuable, for instance with taking confidential references from the market early on in the process.
• Our supplement assessment capability offers psychometric testing and a proprietary culture assessment offering that can provide profound insights into candidate fit and enhance the likelihood of a candidate’s long term success with your organization.
• Our systematic, transparent search process is based on designing a specific strategy for every search.We have a dedicated Diversity practice, with experts who can help clients identify a strategy for developing leadership teams with diverse business, cultural and functional expertise – a critical component of talent management within the organization and the board of directors.