Gary Burnison: The interim business is looking good, Mark. On an organic basis, looking very good as recently as November. So no pullback at all on the Interim which isn’t — that’s — I think given career nomad landscape. In Pro Search, we’re seeing the same thing that we’re seeing in Executive Search. The — what I want to go back to your question because when you look back at the last 3 recessions, they were all event-driven. This one seems to be a slower leak and there’s massive changes that are happening under our feet from the inflationary pressure to changing global trade lanes, to near shoring, a lot of companies are making moves around transformation. But the one thing that’s substantially different this time around and I’ll just take the U.S. as an example, is the labor force.
And the reality is the labor force, 164 million Americans in the workforce hasn’t changed in almost 3 years. And the labor participation rate at 62%, as you know, is a historical low. So you can talk about uncertain times and you can talk about recession but that’s a huge, huge difference. And I think companies are going to be pretty hesitant in doing any kind of massive downsizing of the workforce. And you’re seeing the quit rate falling, you’re seeing job openings falling which you would expect. But I think the general makeup of the labor force is a substantially different and new variable compared to past cycles. And the firm today is a much, much different company. When I look at the Q2 results and I compare them to the quarter before the pandemic, our revenue is up 40%.
And our EBITDA is up 70%. The Q3 guide to that same period of time, going back to pre-pandemic at the midpoint of the guide it’s suggesting revenue up 30% and EBITDA up 22%. So you have a completely different firm today, where Executive Search clearly gives us a tremendous access in the marketplace. But you’ve got a firm now that has broader capabilities. I mean our consulting new business, I mean I don’t want to take 1 month and make it a trend. But in November, our consulting new business was up 20% at constant currency. Now for the quarter, it was in an elevated level but it was still on the positive side. So I think you’ve got just a completely different paradigm and then you throw in the RPO business, where this has been unbelievable the new logos we’ve put on.
And as a firm overall, this new — in the quarter, I mean, our new business was almost $1 billion. I mean, this is the highest in the company’s history.
Mark Marcon: Congratulations on that with regards to the RPO side, particularly. Can you — the 2 big contracts that you ended up winning during the quarter, adding $200 million in annualized revenue. Were those brand new to RPO? Or were those switches that you gained from other players? And then you mentioned that you’re going to try to become a bigger player in health care on RPO. Is that going to be organic? Or are you looking at some things?
Gary Burnison: Well, we’re looking at both. Those were both taken — they were taken from other firms that operate in that space. And they’re — it’s really because of our account strategy. That’s really where it began. And so those are takeaways. Our health care business, one of the things we have to do is with this movement around near shoring, you could call it nationalization, however you want to characterize it, we have to be much more agile with our regional accounts. And we’re putting a tremendous amount of focus on how we should rearrange resources in our portfolio to match changing global trading partners. So one of the areas that we’ve targeted is health care. Health care today represents about 7% of Korn Ferry globally. And clearly, in the RPO area, we think we’ve got an enormous opportunity. So clearly, we’re going to pursue that on an organic basis. We’ve got a fabulous team. And if we could do something inorganically, we do that as well, Mark.
