[Podcast] BTG and Heidrick & Struggles CEOs on Bloomberg Businessweek

This week global advisory firm Heidrick & Struggles announced its acquisition of Business Talent Group (BTG) in response to rising demand for speed, agility, and flexibility in closing critical leadership gaps. This comes after a successful two-year exclusive collaboration between the firms and enables Heidrick & Struggles to expand its suite of executive talent solutions to address new and ongoing client demands.

Following the announcement, Heidrick & Struggles President and CEO Krishnan Rajagopalan and BTG Co-CEO and Co-Founder Jody Greenstone Miller joined Bloomberg Businessweek’s Carol Massar to discuss why and how their companies are combining forces, trends they are seeing in the market, and what this all means for the future of work. Listen to the interview on Bloomberg Radio or read on for highlights below.

Rajagopalan began the interview by noting that Heidrick & Struggles is the first global leadership advisory firm to enter the on-demand independent talent space, which allows the firm to offer a full spectrum of executive and high-end talent solutions, from on-demand leadership to interim executives to permanent placements.

“BTG is the high-end independent talent space leader, and that combination just made sense to us,” Rajagopalan said. “A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work for our clients, and the addition of BTG and the on-demand capability allows Heidrick & Struggles to meet all of our clients’ top talent needs by offering a full range of executive and high-end talent solutions.”

He continued by pointing out that changes over the past year have accelerated the future of work and underscored the need for agile workforces.

“Clients want agility, they want flexibility, they want speed,” Rajagopalan said. “All of that’s only accelerating. They want the right talent and the right solutions, and they want it now. There’s a lot of research out there that says that trend has been going on for a while. Publications such as HBR have shown that 90% of business executives believe that on-demand talent will be critical to their future. What this pandemic has done is accelerated that—not only acceptance of the fact that people can work where they want, but also how they work.”

Miller noted that Heidrick & Struggles is a visionary company—historically as a pioneer in the executive search industry, and now in its recognition of the tremendous growth and potential in the on-demand talent space.

“We are just thrilled to be joining forces with Heidrick & Struggles, which is—as you probably know—one of the leading brands in executive search and leadership consulting, but it is also a pioneer and actually created the industry,” Miller said. “So it’s appropriate they are now taking the really bold step of recognizing that on-demand high-end talent is going to be an important piece of the future.”

Together, BTG and Heidrick & Struggles plan to offer top companies even more innovative ways to get critical work done.

“We’re creating a platform for a global market that will identify the best immediately available talent—people who are former executives, subject matter experts, project managers, and make that talent available in an accessible way to the world’s best companies,” Miller said.

Read more about the acquisition and what it means for the future of work from BTG Co-Founders and Co-CEOs Jody Greenstone Miller and Amelia Tyagi. Or reach out today to learn how BTG can help with your talent and project needs.

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