Announcement HGI – Meet our new head of Executive Search and Recruitment, Christine O’Donnell

11 Aug 2014

The appointment of Christine O’Donnell to head up HGI’s award winning* executive search and recruitment business adds another experienced executive to HGI. HGI’s co-founders will continue to serve as executive directors focusing on strategic initiatives and business development to accelerate growth in executive learning sets, emerging and top tier thought leaders programs and harnessing HGI’s technology platform.

Christine will lead the executive search team to ensure customers receive value and service which will maintain HGI’s customer experience and results focus and trigger further growth as competition in the market for access to global talent pools of top talent for leadership roles in private and public Health, Not for Profit and whole of government sectors.

Co-founders, Jean Fagan and Kevin Hardy said – “Our whole business model is about building our capability to value-add and provide trusted advice to clients. HGI has always been about building long term relationships, skilling staff to provide high level consulting advice and purposefully developing Executive Search along with complementary Executive Learning Sets and action learning focused Leadership Development Programs to support clients through rapid, real time and relevant capacity building solutions.

Christine’s experience and values align strongly with our business. We are very fortunate to have someone who is so committed to the customer experience and has a career track record that demonstrates enormous capability in building and leading high performing search and recruitment teams.”

Before joining HGI, Christine spent just over 3 years with Talent 2, firstly as GM Talent Partners Canberra then adding senior executive search for the NSW Government to her Federal responsibilities. Prior to that Christine was Associate Director for 15 years in a Wellington (NZ) based boutique agency specialising in the government sector.

She also had stints that include operational management in a treasury function, strategy and analysis, and marketing management for a major multi-national financial institution. She worked for a blue-chip corporate organisation in a business marketing management role and as account director of a full-service advertising agency servicing both private and public sector clients.

Christine is highly skilled in recruiting for culturally sensitive roles (she was responsible for national Maori recruitment in a previous role) in addition to her mainstream executive search experience and success.

She is a graduate of Massey University Palmerston North, where she completed a Master of Arts with Honours in Social Science.

*HardyGroup International – winner of the Thompson-Reuters Best Boutique Agency Award (2011)