Pros
Korn Ferry definitely has a strong reputation and a good brand. However, they lack a lot of transparency and does not practice what they preach. For an organisational consultancy, they only ran an engagement survey for parts of the business, so that they can avoid negative results. Well, that didn’t happen. The survey still showed that staff were disengaged and had low job satisfaction. They have no strategy whatsoever and any organisational change is done quickly with no consultation or communication to staff. This has created an environment of uncertainty, fear and lack of job security. They make redundancies/firings within a day yet want those staff to still work their notice period. Managers are not even told when their team member is being let go, until the day of. According to them, their decision is not due to performance, so how have they made the decision to let someone go? I’ve observed that there is an ‘us vs them’ culture between departments e.g Advisory and Products team. Senior partners definitely get their way by shouting the loudest and junior staff just have to follow and do as they say. HR team is non-existent as well, so if you’re looking for some help, there is none. There are some nice and clever people at KF, though with the waves of cuts and redundancies, I don’t know who else is left. The culture has definitely transformed in the last two years from a friendly to a corporate, robotic environment. Pros: -nice Central London office. -quite social, the office runs a monthly drinks for all staff. There are also other clubs being run like squash, badminton and netball. -you get a bottle of wine or prosecco if you get a shoutout in the weekly newsletter. -good products with great scientific research from previous acquisitions: Lominger, TalentQ, HayGroup.
Cons
Cons: -due to the new acquisition and everyone coming to one office, it is very difficult to get a room for a client call, especially when you need a quiet environment. Office also gets very full and can be hard to find a desk, especially with most people hot desking. -while a bottle of wine is nice, why not just pay the staff a better salary and bonus? -lack of pay structure. There are junior members of staff that are being paid more than those who have been at the company for many years and at a more senior level. How does that work? -lack of transparency. The senior leadership team did not specify that they will be doing a restructure. We only found out when there was a hiring freeze then a couple of months later, global firings were made. This was only addressed in a virtual town hall meeting two weeks later, in which they assured us that this would be the last redundancy. Alas, 3 months later this was not the case (pre-Covid). I’m sure more redundancies were made during the Covid-19 pandemic which were unavoidable, but the redundancies prior to that were not carried out in an honest manner. Please note that not all who were made redundant got a severance package even though they have worked there for more than a year, whereas some people who have worked there under a year received a severance. -differences of cultures between departments. -sales people do not know what they are selling and it is up to those delivering it to ensure what was promised to the client can be delivered. Not always possible! -new talent platform definitely has a way to go and staff need to be constantly updated with new releases. -many managers do not know what they are doing, what products there are and how to manage people. -lack of a work-balance. There seems to be an ‘on’ culture here because consultants will email you past an appropriate hour or even at weekends. There seems to be an expectation to work beyond your contracted hours to make sure the client gets what they have bought. However, teams are highly under-resourced and over stretched! There are associate consultants leaving the office at 2am (no joke) just to get things ready for assessments and interviews. -everything requested by consultants and internal clients are ‘urgent’ and always needed ASAP when they could have requested it a couple of days before. -everything is about money and the engagement. There really isn’t any sense of corporate social responsibility apart from donating to Mind. -management does not care about your mental health. Ironic because they made the mental health charity, Mind, their charity of the year to donate to. Even if managers do care, many do not know how to manage those experiencing work stress and those coming back from sick leave. -they like to say that they have a flat structure but it’s very hierarchal. They claim that they are like a family at KF but they’re not. If so, they really treat their family like dirt. -there is no development or progression. You have to be at the company for a minimum of 2 years to be up for promotion and salary increase is poor. They have recently released a career architecture program but it’s not very in-line with the employee’s aspirations. It is more subscribed to their current job. So if the job the employee is currently in is not what they want in the future, then what is the point? It is also very difficult to move across departments or other KF locations. -KF keeps churning out new versions of the existing product but not providing proper training only web based training. -Lack of diversity. There isn’t anyone that comes to mind who is not white on the senior leadership team. The London office doesn’t reflect any diversity and there are only a handful of POC. All in all, the organisations before they were acquired by KF but all the hard work that those employees made have been erased by KF’s super corporate management style. Please note that 1 star is very generous in my opinion. If I could, I would give it none.