--Competitive Pressures Drive Increased Complexity In The HR Role--

LOS ANGELES, August 4, 2015 — Korn Ferry (NYSE:KFY), the preeminent authority on leadership and talent, today released its 2015 CHRO Pulse Survey, which finds that 61 percent of the 250 participating CHROs and senior HR executives believe that their organization's employee base lacks in experiential and intellectual diversity.

While creating gender and ethnically diverse workforces has been a longstanding focus at many organizations, there is another diversity need emerging that is perhaps slightly more nuanced: it's the desire to cultivate a workforce that has a varied representation of ideas through employing people of different educational and professional backgrounds.

As companies across the board face increased competition from direct competitors and quickly emerging newcomers, achieving intellectual and experiential diversity and the right talent mix can be an integral factor to securing market share. CHROs are tackling the talent-mix issue by working more closely with department leaders during the hiring process, developing more robust external networking opportunities and utilizing new HR tools to assess current and potential talent (54 percent).

“In an unforgiving business environment—which only promises to demand more of organizations if they want to maintain or grow their footprint—CHROs are keenly aware of how workforce gaps in diversity, knowledge and experience impact their ability to do so, ” said Ellie Filler, Senior Client Partner and Managing Partner of Korn Ferry International’s Human Resources Center of Expertise for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). 'Through client conversations and my deep knowledge of the function and business landscape, it has become clear that CHROs must possess the competencies to navigate and adapt to uncertainty, as well as build a responsive, effective and differentiated workforce.

Closely linked to intellectual and experiential diversity and the talent mix, building the right culture in which people are fully engaged is the area that CHROs feel is most crucial to meeting their organization's long-term, bottom-line goals (49 percent). Within their own department, CHROs, however, find it challenging to hire strong HR talent—a critical piece of achieving overall workforce optimization. As HR faces increasing demand to play a strategic business partner role, the large majority of CHROs say finding HR talent with business acumen is the biggest barrier to making strong hires (38 percent). To a large extent, HR is so focused on the other lines of business they serve that they often do not address their own needs. But, in order to chip away at the HR talent gap, they need to create a paradigm shift, where they are also able to invest in developing the desired competencies in the upcoming generation of HR professionals.

For additional information and survey findings, please visit http://www.kornferryinstitute.com/reports-insights/chro-pulse-survey-2015.

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