List of the 200 largest recruitment consultancies & leadership advisory firms Germany [2023]

List of 3 large German recruitment consultancies and headhunters

Personnel consultancies support companies and other institutions in the search and selection of personnel. Mostly it is about highly qualified specialists and executives. The service personnel consulting is in demand. The companies we have written news about are part of our list of the largest personnel consultancies in Germany.

1. Egon Zehnder International Germany: Düsseldorf

Egon Zehnder is a Swiss personnel consultancy named after its founder, which has existed since 1964 and has its headquarters in Zurich. Today, Egon Zehnder operates on a global scale. The consultancy has 62 locations in 35 countries and employs approximately 2,300 people. Turnover in 2021 was CHF 804 million. Egon Zehnder International Germany is based in Düsseldorf and has additional offices in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Munich, Berlin and Cologne. The HR consultancy has focused on the search for CEO’s, board members and TOP executives as well as on advising corresponding management levels on personnel issues.

Update 2023: The international executive search firm wants to strongly increase its US presence and duels with its biggest competitors (Russell Reynolds, Heidrick & Struggles, Spencer Stuart) at the same time. The reason for this – according to the new CEO Michael Ensser – is the high dynamics in the North American personnel market, which is really booming.

2. Kienbaum Consultants International: Cologne

Immediately after the end of the war, in October 1945, Gerhard Kienbaum founded a consultancy for medium-sized companies in Gummersbach near Cologne. This has developed into one of Germany’s leading HR consultancies, which is also active internationally. Today, Kienbaum Consultants International has a total of 22 offices in 13 countries (including eight European countries) on four continents. German offices are located in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich and Stuttgart. Executive search, personnel organization, compensation consulting, and management consulting – these are the central Kienbaum business fields. More than 70,000 projects have been supported in a consulting capacity to date.

3. Korn Ferry Germany: Frankfurt am Main

In 1968, Richard Ferry and Lester Korn founded the personnel consultancy Korn Ferry in Los Angeles. Today the enterprise is with approximately 7,000 coworkers and 88 offices in Europe, America, in the Near and Far East one of the prominent personnel consultations world-wide. Korn Ferry has been active in Germany since the end of the 1970s. Korn Ferry (DE) GmbH is based in Frankfurt am Main and employs almost 300 people. German annual sales amounted to more than 70 million euros in fiscal year 2019/2020. Korn Ferry offers organizational and management consulting in addition to classic headhunting.

Picture source: Cytonn Photography via Unsplash (26.09.2023)

Database of the most important German HR consultants

Personnel consultancies play a central role in the German economy. Every company, from global corporations to hidden champions, uses experienced recruiters and headhunters to fill vacant positions. The expertise of executive search consultants helps to fill highly specialized roles competently and replace departing managers with the right executives. But which executive search consultancies are active in Germany? What is the ranking of the most important headhunters? What are the competencies of the most important consultancies? All these questions could not be answered clearly until now. Listenchampion changes that by having our research team identify, list, rank and provide contact information and the consulting focus of the largest executive search firms. The list can be easily purchased through our online store and is available for immediate download as an Excel file. Regular updates of the list ensure that the data contained is always up-to-date.

Valuable partners for global players, hidden champions and co.

Our customers include players from very different industries. Large consulting firms work with our databases as well as corporations, medium-sized companies, smaller consultancies, startups and many more. The list of the largest HR consultancies in Germany is especially helpful for companies looking for outstanding (management) personnel. Thanks to our exclusive list, you can identify the best personnel consultants with just a few clicks and easily find the right partners. In this way, you reduce the time spent searching for the perfect headhunter enormously and can focus on your actual tasks. The list of personnel consultants is particularly valuable for German medium-sized businesses and the many hidden champions who are looking for highly qualified employees and managers.

Picture source: Christin Hume via Unsplash (26.09.2023)

Executive Search, Interim Management, Board Services etc.

The range of personnel consultancies in Germany is very wide. The services offered by the personnel consultants in our list include in particular topics such as executive search, board services, interim management, CEO succession planning, organizational consulting, management audit or career coaching. For each listed personnel consultancy we indicate the service focus in the database, so that you can immediately pick out the optimal partners for your project. If the consultancies have an industry focus, this is also stored in the list. In this way, we would like to relieve you of as much work as possible and really give you a helping hand. In addition, the list contains a column in which we have entered a ranking from A to E. The ranking is subjective and is not binding. The ranking is subjective and should help you to roughly classify the size and relevance of the individual firms. Recruiters with an A ranking are particularly large and established, while companies with an E ranking tend to be smaller and more specialized.

This information is included in the list

• Company name
• General contact data (address, e-mail address, telephone number, URL)
• Serial letter suitable for addressing the management (e.g. “Sehr geehrter Herr Dr. Müller”)
• Name of the management
• Range of services (executive search, board services, interim management, etc.)
• Subjective ranking from A to E to classify the size of the consulting firm

Picture source: Sam Moghadam Khamseh via Unsplash (26.09.2023)