Korn Ferry Hay Group adds five senior partners to London team
In recent weeks, Korn Ferry has added five experienced consultants to its ranks in London. All five have an extensive background in the consulting industry: Laura Manson-Smith, Lesley Uren and Rohan de Rozario join from PwC, PA Consulting Group and EY respectively, while Khoi Tu and Stephen Griffiths previously worked for Monitor Deloitte and Transform.
Laura Manson-Smith joins Korn Ferry from PwC, where she worked for twenty years, focused on people and change management and HR consulting in the energy, utilities, mining, defence, pharma, telecom, FMCG, and central government sectors. She specialises in aligning people, organisation and strategy, as part of structuring and implementing transformation programmes that improve efficiency, support growth and increase workforce capability and productivity.
Lesley Uren joins Korn Ferry, a human capital consultancy with over 7,000 professionals globally, following her role as Partner at private equity backed PA Consulting Group. At the UK headquartered consulting firm, where she served for nearly five years, Uren was Head of the talent management team within the People and Operational Excellence practice team. Prior to that, Uren had her own boutique HR consulting and executive search firm (Jackson Samuel) and worked at Towers Perrin (today Willis Towers Watson) for four years, latterly leading the firm’s Human Capital wing in London. In the two decades before serving Willis Towers Watson, Uren held several managerial and HR roles, at companies in the food & beverage, aviation and pharma industries among others.
Rohan De Rozario brings over 20 years of experience in the field of human capital, operations and human resources to Korn Ferry. He joins the firm from EY, where he held the role of Senior Director in the firm’s Global People Advisory Services arm. De Rozario specialises in change management, organisation design and HR functional improvement, having previously held the role of Global Head of HR Service Quality at HSBC Bank. Earlier in his career, he worked for over five years at Deloitte in its human capital consulting division and held HR roles at Eli Lilly and a legal predecessor of British American Tobacco.
Khoi Tu has over 20 years’ experience in leadership and consulting. He is a Director of the Jamie Oliver Group and is the founder of Inverstar, a boutique consulting firm that helps organisations improve the performance of leaders and teams at the top, talent on the front line and those in the creative engine room. Prior to that, Tu worked for Monitor Deloitte (the strategy consultancy arm of Deloitte), Conduit Communications and Razorfish (after it acquired Conduit Communications in 1999) and before that at Shell, working across marketing, strategy development and HR during his seven year period at the firm.
Stephen Griffiths joins Korn Ferry from Google, where he was Head of Digital and Business Transformation for the EMEA region. At the global technology company, Griffiths provided transformation advisory and consultancy services to some of Google’s largest clients, on topics such as digital, business transformation, innovation, ad attribution, agile working, digital capabilities, customer experience and design thinking. He has previously gained extensive experience as a consultant, working over eight years as an interim consultant, serving clients such as BBC, Metro, BT, O2, Fjord (a subsidiary of Accenture), Bupa and Avis. As part of his interim endeavours, he was an associate at Transform, a UK based digital consultancy. Griffiths started his career as a producer/director in the TV-industry.
Based in London
All five professionals have been appointed a Senior Client Partner and are based in Korn Ferry’s London office. The UK division of Korn Ferry also has an office in Manchester. The move comes a few months after the company made another senior hire in Dubai: Philippe De Backer, a 20+ year veteran at strategy consultancy Bain & Company, joined the business advisory as a Senior Client Partner.
Commenting on the additions from the consulting industry, Steve Newhall, a leader at the firm, said, “Organisations today are operating in a more complex landscape than ever before, grappling with challenges from globalisation to the rise of digital, and traditional business models are being turned on their head. To survive and thrive, they’ll need to be agile and innovative – and they can’t be either without having the right, and motivated, people in place. We’re continuing to invest in the best talent to help organisations navigate these challenges.”
Newhall is the UK and Ireland Managing Director of Korn Ferry Hay Group – Korn Ferry’s HR consulting arm founded in September 2015 after the firm bought Hay Group for $452 million. Asked about how the consultancy is operating under the wings of the American executive search recruitment giant, Newhall remarked, “The joining of forces has been a good strategic decision that is reaping benefits for our clients. We are together uniquely positioned to support them across their entire business – from hiring, leadership and change management, through to engagement and reward.”
Globally, Korn Ferry Hay Group is led by Mark Arian, who succeeded Steve Kaye as CEO earlier this year.
