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RecruitKorn Ferry Review
Korn Ferry Review Summary
Score 8 out of 10
Currency
Global and executive recruitment
Monthly fees
N/A
Payment options
SWIFT/ACH
Korn Ferry is a global organizational consulting firm, helping businesses design their structure, roles, and responsibilities while developing strategies to recruit, retain, and motivate talent across industries.
Key Takeaways
- Korn Ferry is a large consulting and recruitment firm with a worldwide presence.
- This agency specializes in hiring for consumer markets, financial services, healthcare, life sciences, industry, IT, and public services.
- Korn Ferry provides permanent placements as well as temporary staffing solutions.
- The agency focuses on high-end professional recruitment and executive search services with a high price tag.
Korn Ferry Company Overview
Korn Ferry is a large global organizational consulting firm headquartered in Los Angeles. Its strange name comes from the surnames of its founders, Lester Korn and Richard Ferry, who started this company back in 1969. Since that time, the business has expanded the world over.
It now employs over 11,000 employees and operates over a hundred offices in over 50 countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific region. While this company has an extensive portfolio of services that range from consulting on organizational strategy to leadership and professional development, it also provides executive search and professional recruiting services.
With a focus on high-end professionals and executives, Korn Ferry is not a normal recruitment agency. Its fees can be very high and most companies will only use its services to find very hard-to-fill executive positions. However, it also provides temporary management-level positions in several industries. In this review, we’ll look into this consulting company’s services with a focus on how it works as a recruiter.
How Korn Ferry Works for Recruitment
Korn Ferry specializes in two main types of recruiting – executive search and professional recruiting. In fact, it has been recognized as the world’s leading executive recruiting firm for seven of the past eight years and was listed as number four on the list of best professional recruiters by Forbes magazine. It does, however, also offer mass recruitment and even RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) services.
Korn Ferry is typically hired on a retainer, meaning that it costs a flat fee simply to engage the company for an executive search. On top of that flat fee, it charges a percentage of each employee’s first-year salary as well as for its out-of-pocket expenses. For professional searches, it may simply charge a percentage of a successfully employed professional’s first-year salary.
To get started with the recruitment process, Kork Ferry first consults with clients to determine their specific needs and create candidate profiles. These profiles describe the ideal skills, knowledge, qualifications, and experience that the client is looking for to fill each position. Korn Ferry will advise the client on appropriate and attractive salary ranges to offer and benefits that are standard for positions at a similar level.
With these profiles completed, Korn Ferry will get to work looking through its talent pool to find applicants that match the client’s needs. In some cases, it will also look eternally, especially for hard-to-fill top-level executive positions.
Within a short time, you’ll receive handpicked profiles to look over and choose to reject or approve. Once you choose candidates, Korn Ferry will help you arrange interviews. You’ll then make your selections and send job offers based on the terms and compensation you’ve worked out with Korn Ferry. After that, you’ll need to onboard your new hires and start them working on your team.
Korn Ferry offers a 12-month guarantee for executive-level placements. If a placed employee is terminated within one year due to performance-related issues, the agency will replace them without charging a new finder’s fee. It may, however, bill for expenses incurred in its new search.
If your organization needs to hire large numbers of staff and you don’t have the resources for this task, you can take advantage of Korn Ferry’s RPO or recruitment process outsourcing service. While this service again begins with Korn Ferry experts consulting with you on your staffing needs, the agency then takes over the entire process of screening, interviewing, and selecting candidates on your behalf.
Key Features
Korn Ferry is a consulting firm and recruitment service provider that works in over 50 countries around the world. The key features of its services include:
Professional Sector Focus
Most recruiters will help clients find workers in any industry but have certain specialties that they can attract well. Korn Ferry is no different and, in fact, is highly specialized in a limited number of areas. These include:
- Consumer Markets
- Financial Services
- Healthcare
- Life Sciences
- Industrial
- Technology
- Government & Public Services
In addition, Korn Ferry’s executive and professional search services are highly targeted at the following industries and areas:
- Corporate affairs: government affairs, corporate communications, investor relations, corporate social responsibility
- Human resources: compensation and benefits, diversity and inclusion, HRIS, organizational development, talent acquisition
- Marketing: digital marketing recruitment, customer experience, social media, content creation, brand development, data and analytics, product innovation, CRM
- Supply chain: lean manufacturing, plant management, quality assurance, distribution, logistics, procurement, purchasing
- Sustainability: organizational design, assessment, succession, talent acquisition, leadership development, rewards, and benefits
- Technology: cloud, big data, mobile apps, social networking
- Finance: financial officers, financial technology
- Risk management: assessment, strategy
- Sales: front-line sellers, industry-specific sales leaders
- Legal: in-house counsel, law firm partners, associates, legal support staff
Temporary Staffing Services
As with most recruitment agencies, Korn Ferry places both permanent staff and temporary workers with their clients. However, this agency leans toward high-end, professional temporary workers and brands its temporary staffing as “hiring interim talent.”
Korn Ferry offers job seekers the chance to view and apply for interim positions either to help them find employment between permanent positions or for flexibility and convenience. For this reason, their recruiters have a pool of pre-screened talent normally ready to start right away. This creates a big advantage for clients trying to scale their businesses quickly and those who face sudden staff departures or other unexpected changes.
Unlike most temping firms, however, Korn Ferry is focused on management-level and executive interim workers. They specialize in legal, marketing, sales, HR and supply chain professionals as well as financial and technology officers.
Hiring for these jobs temporarily can be a chance for companies to try out new employees and new positions before making any long-term commitments to them.
Consulting
While this is a review of Korn Ferry as a recruitment agency, it would be impossible to leave out mention of its consulting services as well. This is, after all, the main service that the agency provides globally.
Korn Ferry provides consulting services in a number of areas including leadership, business growth, workforce management, organizational transformation, and employee experience, as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion. It also, of course, provides consulting services related to talent acquisition.
Global Reach
As we’ve mentioned previously, Korn Ferry works in over 50 countries around the world, supporting local businesses with consulting and recruitment services. This extensive reach also means that it’s possible for a US company to find talent in Singapore or a Swiss business to connect with Mexican talent.
While Korn Ferry can search its international talent pools to help you find employees around the world, it doesn’t help you hire them. You may, instead, need to work through an EOR (Employer of Record) to enable you to hire employees legally in another country.
Platform
Korn Ferry invites job seekers to register with its website and then take assessments or search for interim positions through its job board. It also includes a mobile app for Android and iOS devices called Korn Ferry Advance, which helps professionals advance their careers through coaching and courses.
Employers have only the website to peruse to find information and contact the agency. After this, most contact they have will be through private communication channels like email, messaging, and phone calls.
However, Korn Ferry also offers its Intelligence Cloud suite of software solutions that can help clients manage multiple aspect of their businesses.
- Korn Ferry Architect provides you with organization and talent planning architecture plus helps to create job descriptions and performance evaluations quickly with AI assistance.
- Korn Ferry Assess helps you perform performance reviews and collect data on leadership styles, role profiles, and potential development areas for your staff.
- Korn Ferry Career lets organizations manage development and upskilling for their employees.
- Korn Ferry Listen is used to design, develop, and implement employee experience programs that help boost retainment and productivity.
- Korn Ferry Pay helps clients to make salary choices based on extensive employee compensation and benefits data.
- Korn Ferry Sell integrates with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics data to indicate sales actions that can drive success.
Resources
To add value to its website, Korn Ferry provides visitors with free resources related to business management, recruitment, and professional development. These resources include a blog, research publications, events, and webinars that both job seekers and employers can use to gain insights.
Pricing
As with most of the competition in the recruitment industry, Korn Ferry does not provide any prices online, not even its basic starting prices. It asks clients instead to contact it for consultations first so that it can assess each client’s specific needs and then offer its prices accordingly.
For these reasons, we haven’t been able to uncover its regular prices for permanent and interim recruitment, though user reviews state that this company’s fees are higher or much higher than average.
Our research has uncovered some executive search pricing, however, which indicates some very high price tags. While it’s normal for executive search fees to be assessed at roughly 33-35% of the employee’s first-year salary, Korn Ferry charges a 33% retainer on both salary and anticipated bonuses.
However, it also charges up to 12% more for administrative costs and also bills for out-of-pocket expenses like travel and advertising. This means it adds at least 55% to the employee’s salary, and indeed, Korn Ferry requests a minimum of $80,000 for every engagement.
Korn Ferry Customer Reviews
The average scores (as of the time of writing) were:
- Korn Ferry G2 = 4.2/5 (29 reviews)
- Korn Ferry Glassdoor = 3.5/5 (4.4k reviews)
- Korn Ferry Indeed = 3.4/5 (486 reviews)
Korn Ferry Pros and Cons
All recruitment service providers offer different services and specialties. Korn Ferry’s particular strengths and weaknesses include:
- Pros
Targeted industries
If you work in one of the industries that Korn Ferry specializes in, it can be very fast and easy to find appropriate candidates for your open positions.
Extensive global reach
This provider has offices in more than 50 countries around the world and is able to support local hiring through all of them. It can also help clients find talent anywhere in the world they require.
Personalized, guaranteed services
As a consulting firm, Korn Ferry closely consults with employers to provide them with precisely the employees they need. It offers a 12-month guarantee on executives, replacing them for no fee if they’re not the right match.
- Cons
High prices
Korn Ferry charges at least $80,000 for engagement of its executive search services, and costs can add up to a lot more if it bills for a lot of expenses or if the employee has a very high salary.
High-end only
This agency works with professionals from the management level up and doesn’t help employers find lower-level workers.
Korn Ferry's Unique Selling Point
Korn Ferry’s unique selling point is its executive search service that allows businesses to find perfect candidates for their exclusive and hard-to-fill top-level and C-suite positions. This provider has won numerous awards and rankings for this service and has gained a solid reputation as one of the best providers in the world.
Remote People Score for Korn Ferry
8.0/10
Our expert score for Korn Ferry
Our team came to this score by considering the following components in the following weightings:
Talent Acquisition features
25%
RPO features
10%
HR features
10%
EOR features
10%
Platform features
10%
Pricing
20%
User reviews
15%
For each component, Korn Ferry received the following score:
Talent Acquisition features
20/25
RPO features
8/10
HR features
8/10
EOR features
7/10
Platform features
7/10
Pricing
12/20
User reviews
12/15
Overall Assessment: Korn Ferry
Korn Ferry is a consulting firm that also does recruitment. As such, it has chosen to focus on high-level staff and executives so if this is what your organization is in need of, this provider is a good choice. Its fees are relatively high but its reputation suggests that these fees are worth it for companies in need of professional drive and direction.
Frequently Asked Questions
Korn Ferry can help you hire interim (temporary) employees remotely by treating them like leased workers or contractors, depending on what’s appropriate for their roles. It does not, however, offer permanent hiring of employees in other countries, and you’ll need to partner with an EOR instead to make this happen.
No, Korn Ferry does not run outsourced payroll for its clients. If you choose to hire an interim employee, however, you pay Korn Ferry’s invoices which include its fees and your worker’s salary. The agency will then handle payroll for you, paying the employees and managing their tax and benefits requirements.
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