If the recruitment market is so buoyant, why has this big firm gone into administration?
As everyone should now know, financial services recruitment has been wonderful recently. Year on year vacancies were up 100% in April and front office hiring has been compressed into the past few months by the bonus tax.
This being the case, how is it that GRS Holdings and the Kinsey Allen Group appear to have gone into administration?
To refresh your memories, GRS and Kinsey Allen merged in April last year, in what they described at the time as a "completely synergistic" move, with the intention of becoming, "the leading provider of search driven recruitment services globally within three years."
What went wrong?
Possibly, not much. Notably, Kinsey Allen and GRS haven't disappeared from the radar altogether. Instead, both are operating with almost exactly the same people, under a slightly different name. Such is the joy of pre-pack administrations favoured by recruitment firms.
The reason for the pre-pack appears to have been the large amounts of debt attached to GRS after it was subject to a management buyout backed by private equity firm Penta Capital in 2008.
"Kinsey Allen recently completed a process of re-structuring that now creates a much less complicated corporate structure and a strong, supportive shareholding base," says chief executive Ken Brotherston. "This process included placing some group companies into administration which were then subsequently purchased by the existing management team supported by Penta Capital and Investec.
"The company is now in a much stronger financial position with greater capacity to invest in growth opportunities - be it marketing initiatives, new markets or even potential acquisitions - than ever before."
Other financial services recruiters really are apparently doing incredibly well. "All the people I'm talking to [in financial services headhunting] are making good money and expecting significant bonuses," says Simon Hughes, who headhunts headhunters at High View Search, reassuringly.
