🔷 Korn Ferry FY’25 Q4

A Strategic Reading for Those Who Lead

+15% in Executive Search

+5% in RPO

+4% overall growth

Solid results, on the surface.

But surface is no longer enough.

What the numbers hide is becoming critical.

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▪ Executive Search: Apparent Growth — Underlying Fragility

77% of revenues come from existing clients.

Productivity per consultant is up.

New client acquisition is down.

This is no longer expansion — it’s densification.

Performance driven by repetition, not innovation.

When the core portfolio becomes the sole engine, strategic room for manoeuvre shrinks.

▪ Advisory: Short-Term Decline — Long-Term Shift

–7% revenue in consulting.

But missions are evolving: longer, more complex, more political.

Fewer operations, more systemic analysis.

The real challenge now lies in understanding invisible dynamics.

Advisory becomes an interface between data, behaviour, and power.

▪ RPO: Underestimated — But Strategically Positioned

+5% growth. +230 bps in margin.

77% of Q4 RPO revenues come from new clients.

A discreet yet expansive segment.

RPO installs itself, captures signals, observes patterns.

It enters processes, maps resistance, detects misalignments.

It’s a tactical gateway — to understand before the need is even expressed.

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▪ EMEA: A Unique Dynamic

+9% in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

A region where traditional search still holds.

But where behavioural reading of ecosystems is gaining ground.

Trust is no longer won on profiles — it is earned through fine-tuned analysis of internal systems.

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What this quarter reveals is not a score — it’s a trajectory.

– Search is becoming an access point.

– Advisory is evolving into a complexity sensor.

– RPO infiltrates through operational flows.

– Digital is no longer a lever — it is the ground beneath.

Meanwhile, warning signs are:

Financial. Operational. Human.

Often discreet.

Sometimes imperceptible.

Always decisive.

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• What you don’t see yet may already be in motion.

#StrategicLeadership #ExecutiveSearch #SilentTransformation

#InternalInfluence #BehavioralGovernance

#HumanDueDiligence #HUMINTscan #Belbin #QuietPower

#SurgicalHiring #BehavioursBeforeSkills