Our partners & our people

We recruited heavily at all levels during the year, from school leavers and graduates through to experienced hires and new partners. Despite having to scale back our overall growth plans slightly to reflect the state of our markets, we are still recruiting at a rapid rate, and our search for the most talented people has become broader and more sophisticated.

Some 4,100 graduates joined the firm during the year. Our graduate recruitment campaigns are tailored to our local markets, yet are consistent in that we are searching for the same high-quality people, and we are continuing to win external recognition as an employer of choice from the people who matter.

We were delighted that for the second year running KPMG were named second in the Universum index of the world’s most attractive employers, coming second to Google. This accolade is particularly powerful, based as it is on 160,000 interviews with career seekers from a business or engineering background at the top academic institutions in 12 leading economies, worldwide.

Despite the high level of recruitment we are now seeing the first clear signs that demographics are changing the graduate market. With ageing populations in many of our markets, the supply of young graduates is tightening and the battle for talent is intense. This will be a major challenge for the future.

To manage this long-term risk we are tapping a number of new sources of talent.

In the UK we have introduced a school leavers’ programme. Backed by a number of leading universities, this offers bright young people the chance to train with us, be paid by us and at the same time study for a certified, degreelevel qualification while they work. In addition to the UK, other country firms are increasing their use of our Global Services Centre in India to find new talent.

Our search for talent is increasingly tied to our global growth strategy and the markets and sectors where we expect to see highest demand for our services in coming years. (You can find a full description of our priority growth areas here).

During the year we recruited some 8,500 talented people made up of partners, experienced hires and graduates.

We place a huge importance on learning and development for two main reasons:

Firstly, to ensure that we achieve a consistently high level of skills across KPMG Europe LLP so that clients always receive the best of what we have to offer, wherever they are.

And secondly, because clear and active career development is highly valued by our people and is a great driver of job satisfaction, staff retention and engagement.

We subscribe to the principle of ’70:20:10’; that is, 70% of learning is on the job, 20% informally through conversation and networks, and 10% through formal classroom training. However we recognise that our effort and learning and development investment is not in similar proportions. To better address the 70%, we have begun to reposition the process of performance management to make it more forward looking, more developmental.

When it comes to formal training, one of our main challenges is to find ways to use technology to deliver ELLP-wide (and global) training initiatives in compelling and consistent ways. They must appeal to a generation comfortable with Facebook, Twitter, smart phones and tablets.

Staying up to speed with technological change is vital if we want our development programmes to have real resonance and we made some good progress on this during the year.

Our new Virtual Classroom — allowing us to train large groups of people across the world, simultaneously, using a live trainer — was rolled out at the end of the year. Already 1,000 people have used it to update their skills in, and awareness of, issues as diverse as US GAAP training, valuations, coaching and supply chain optimisation. Similarly the KPMG Business School — a web-based portal for advanced development courses — is now up and running on a global basis, which allows us to make available consistently high-quality training.

Our development programmes are closely tied to our business strategy and our determination to find better ways to meet our clients’ changing needs.

This is evident in the work we are doing to equip our current and future leaders with the skills, the attitude and the expertise to bring the best insights to our clients while being visible and inspiring role models internally.

Some 700 people across KPMG Europe LLP are now involved in our intensive Emerging Leaders Programme with practical, real time input from some of our key clients, they are gaining invaluable experience by working to resolve some of the toughest issues these businesses face.

We believe that if we can identify future partners early enough in their careers and accelerate their development, they will have the right experiences, skills and mindset to help clients with their broadest business challenges when they become partners. There are other competitive benefits too. Retention levels amongst our emerging leaders, at around 97%, are higher than average.

Our partnership admissions process continues to run on a consistent basis across the organisation. This year 120 internal candidates went through the process, with 101 successfully achieving partnership.

We are now providing new partners with additional development and training in the first 18 months in their new role through our Partnership Essentials Master Class. This focuses on better enabling them to build trusted relationships with our clients and to inspire our clients and our people. Seventy new partners went through the programme last year, and a further 90 will complete it in 2012.

Partners need to be inspirational leaders within the ELLP firms, providing active support to the people within their teams. They are not only the main point of contact with our clients, but the principal people leaders within the firm. When market conditions are tough, striking the right balance between these two crucial roles is more important than ever.

Our last biennial people survey, conducted in 2010, showed that employee engagement had declined and that internal communication was not as clear about our business priorities as it could be.

This is clearly a risk to a business committed, as we are, to being the best for our clients and our people and, from Board level down, we have worked hard to correct the balance in 2011. While national focus groups and small-scale surveys have indicated some positive movement in this regard, we will have a much fuller picture in spring 2012 when we roll out our new global pulse survey.

The focus of our work has been to help partners better engage our people in the global strategy and plans. Examples have ranged from partner/manager conferences in Spain to a series of Connect sessions in the UK run personally by Richard Bennison, our Chief Operating Officer. The ELLP Board went through an in-depth workshop to help all members create a personal articulation of the global strategy.

As we look for better ways to serve KPMG’s key global clients, it is essential that our people have the right support to travel and work alongside clients wherever they need our help.

During the year over 200 people undertook formal secondments across ELLP firms and over 500 were involved in secondments outside of ELLP. These numbers do not of course include the many overseas or multicountry client engagements that we undertook. Although this number is slightly lower than the preceding year, our investment in secondment remains high and is likely to increase as KPMG’s global client strategy develops.

In our view, businesses perform better when they include the best people drawn from a range of perspectives and backgrounds. To us, diversity is about the richness of our whole workforce, the combined contribution of people with different skills, experiences and perspectives who, together, are more able to consider issues in a rounded, holistic way.

Different countries within KPMG Europe LLP face different diversity challenges and are tackling these locally, guided by a consistent and comprehensive array of policies and a wide variety of support programmes.

Our school leavers’ programme is a great example of just one way in which we are supporting diversity in the UK marketplace. KPMG in the UK is one of the founding members of the 30% Club, which brings together chairmen of public and private companies as well as professional services firms. The aim of the Club is to actively promote the benefits and business case for increasing female representation on UK companies’ boards with a target of 30% by 2015.

Nevertheless, despite some very concerted action in recent years and the establishment of support networks, mentoring schemes and specific targets, women remain under-represented at partner and director level in the majority of national practices within KPMG Europe LLP.

We need to make faster progress on this and other aspects of diversity if we are to provide our clients with the people best able to provide the solutions they need. We are therefore concentrating on diversity in the context of succession planning and we will be stepping up our work on this in the year ahead.