Mapping Global Talent: Essays and Insights - Heidrick & Struggles

Professional Services
Rising
temperatures
Krishnan Rajagopalan
Business & Professional Services practice
krajagopalan@heidrick.com
Heidrick & Struggles Mapping Global Talent: Essays and Insights
The professional services sector is
developing a split personality. On the one
hand, it is made up of internationally-
known US and European firms with
thousands of employees and years of
experience, ready to perform almost any
task for a corporate client. On the other, it
incorporates a myriad of young firms, from
call-centers in Croatia to large, fast-growing
Indian outfits, all of which are low-cost and,
in most cases, highly competitive in terms
of basic skills and business processes.
Historically, the two sides have co-existed fairly
peacefully: increasingly over the next five years, the
competition will start to heighten. With the outlook
for global economic growth slightly less buoyant, the
traditional professional services industry will find quick
wins harder to come by. Clients will increasingly pick
and choose services by price and value, as opposed to
reputation, depth of experience and international reach.
At the same time, the young offshoring companies
will continue to migrate into higher-end services,
encroaching on more of the core activities of their well-
established competitors.
As a result, offshoring – “hiring” another company’s
talent to cut costs – is expected to show compound
annual growth rates of more than 15%. By contrast the
traditional professional services sector, will grow at
around half that rate.
Given this, both sides of the sector will need to make
the procurement of talent a top priority in the next five
years. Both will depend on similar methods for finding
their new hires – vigorous recruiting at the university
level and strong networking skills for identifying
managers from other professions who might be
persuaded to change careers. Both sides of the business
will also need to develop strong internal recruiters who
know how to promote the firm and who are adept
at building networks of qualified candidates in the
communities where their companies operate.
The first stop will be universities. Both at home and
abroad, the reputation and quality of a country’s
universities will be a key measurement for recruiters.
The Global Talent Index’s ranking of the quality of
universities and business schools – which assesses the
number of universities ranked globally among the top
five-hundred, the number of business schools ranking
in the world’s top one-hundred and the spending per
student on higher education as a percentage of GDP
per capita – shows a number of important developments
in this regard.
In 2012, for example, the GTI score shows that the
top five countries measured by the quality of their