EY elevates Justine Campbell to UK & Ireland Leadership Board
Big Four professional services firm EY has installed company veteran Justine Campbell as its new Managing Partner for Talent in the UK & Ireland. The move comes as EY looks to boost the diversity among its partner team across the country.
Companies in the UK are under increasing pressure to improve the notoriously “white, male and stale” make-up of their senior management teams, following decades of pressure to promote workplace equality, while countless studies now highlight the positive impact that diversity can have on business operations. Recently, this prompted Big Four firm EY to voluntarily release its pay-gap data on gender and ethnicity – data which revealed progress in some regards, and future challenges in others. While the pay-gap had narrowed at the firm, a lack of diversity in the upper echelons of the firm lingered.
As EY bids to change the make-up of its partner regime, the firm has appointed Justine Campbell as its new Managing Partner for Talent in the UK & Ireland. Campbell – who is a more than 20 year veteran of the EY HR team, having re-joined in 1998 following a spell in industry – will sit on the professional services giant’s leadership board and will be responsible for developing EY’s talent strategy to ensure the business is fit for the future and cultivates a reputation as an employer of choice in its industry.
The role follows Campbell having spent the last six years shaping EY’s global talent strategy, working with the Global Executive team to ready the organisation for the workplace of the future, having first joined EY’s talent team in the early 1990s. Campbell takes on the Managing Partner for Talent role from Partner Maggie Stillwell – an acting Fraud Investigation & Dispute Services (FIDS) Partner with over 20 years’ experience – who, after completing her three year tenure on EY’s UK & Ireland Leadership board, returns to her client portfolio that she has retained in part since her board appointment.
Commenting on the change on the board, Steve Varley, EY’s UK Chairman, commented, “Our talent strategy, led by Justine, is crucial to the long-term success of our business; it will help to ensure that we are fit for the future. We want to be at the forefront of how we can use technology to achieve our own ambitions as well as those of our people and our clients. At the same time, we want to help drive diversity and inclusion in UK business by stepping up our efforts to particularly increase the representation of female and BME (Black or Minority Ethnic) talent at all levels of our organisation, and also play our part in improving social mobility.”
EY recently embarked on a new wave of expansion by creating a further 71 new equity partners at the firm, as it bids to improve diversity in that aspect of its business. Of the new positions, 30 were poached from competitors in the industry, with the remainder coming from internal promotions. 15% of those taken on are classed as BME – three times the proportion of the last intake. In addition EY also promoted 63 Associate Partners taking its total promotions since 1st July to 134.
Justine Campbell commented on the changes at the firm, saying “the future of our business, and others, depends on our ability to be innovative in an incredibly fast paced world. To make that happen we must have a workforce that has diversity of thought, perspectives, experiences and skills. There is a real desire within EY to effect change on this important issue.”
