I&S HR M&A Assistant Manager

Job description

KPMG is a market leader in providing Deal Advisory services to clients when they are buying, selling, or transforming businesses. The HR M&A team is a specialist team within Deal Advisory and has been helping clients with their people related issues in M&A for over 12 years. We work at the forefront of transactions, helping both acquirers and vendors on pre- and post-deal people and organisational issues related to M&A. We provide an integrated and bespoke service to our clients supporting them in delivering full value from their transaction.

The Role

KPMG research routinely shows that one of the biggest reasons for deals failing is people. Our team helps to mitigate this; we deal with all aspects of the employee journey in M&A, from early stage strategy development and organisational design for carve-outs, to synergy cases and cost benefits, employee experience and corporate cultures, developing TUPE transfer processes and Union negotiation strategies. We work together to develop solutions to the issues our clients may face, and understand the financial benefits or risks that may be present from a people perspective.

As an area of focus and investment for KPMG there is an opportunity to be part of a fast growing, dynamic and diverse team, made up of employment lawyers, HR professionals, transaction experts.

The Team

We are looking for superstars to join the team, helping to deliver projects, and working alongside senior team members and the leadership of global organisations. This is a fantastic opportunity to learn more about HR M&A and develop and grow within mergers and acquisitions. We believe heavily in the development of our people. Assistant Managers will have access to significant internal and external courses, coaching and performance management, to help develop them and rapidly build their careers.

Our four key client proposition areas are:
1) Employee experience
2) Organisational Strategy Development
3) Labour relations and compliance
4) HR operations

Responsibilities

In this role, you will work on and help deliver projects, working closely with senior members of the team, who will provide guidance and insight into the deal environment, enabling you to build your transactions knowledge and further develop your people, OD, strategy and HR skills base.

• Providing support on a wide variety of M&A projects from small transactions to global programmes from a people, HR and communications perspective.
• Work with HR professionals to help them plan all parts of the HR function and deal lifecycle and to deliver for Day 1 and beyond.
• Contributing to and reviewing Integration and Separation related deal and transaction reports from a people or strategy perspective.
• Analysing and data mapping to comment on the people elements of the business including cost, numbers, people and legal issues such as TUPE or unions, systems and HR contracts.
• Helping to provide insights on people aspects of the deal that are relevant to the client and readers of the due diligence reports and to be able to explain issues simply, highlighting the impact of people on business strategy, operations and, ultimately, deal valuation.
• Developing an understanding of people benchmarks and qualitative information to provide insights to clients to describe a typical organisational / functional headcount, design and associated cost. Contributing content for sections of reports/deliverables.

Integration & Separation

• Helping to advise and deliver people, strategy and organisational design aspects of integration, separation (carve outs) and optimisation initiatives (e.g. synergy analysis) including the development of target operating models, understanding the current people landscape, defining transitional service agreements, developing detailed plans, and supporting the implementation.
• Helping to facilitate key client workshops and meetings, designing and building materials.
• Helping to identify and/or reviewing client organisational design and people based synergies.

Wider responsibilities

• Interacting with senior client and internal stakeholders
• Responsibility for ensuring engagement management protocols are followed and kept up to date including quality and risk management.
• Provide support to a number of different aspects such as preparation of proposal materials, development of propositions, development of tools, methodologies and templates.

The Person

Experience and skills:
• Enthusiastic and excited about working in M&A and facing different challenges daily.
• A basic understanding of, or background in HR, OD or Strategy.
• Experience of working on M&A projects and understanding of consultation beneficial.
• Candidates must be team players. We pride ourselves on the way we work with and support each other.
• Candidates will have strong interpersonal skills and be able to demonstrable personal impact, flexibility, drive and commitment.
• Financial awareness.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills including reporting.
• Good client relationship skills.
• Analysis and problem solving.
• Report writing.
• Ability to work well under pressure, learn quickly and leverage skills in new situations.
• Comfort with ambiguity, fluid consulting situations and a highly pressured environment.

One of the exciting parts of our jobs is working with a wide variety of clients around the world on different jobs. As such you will need to be willing to travel as we work from both the Canada Square office and client sites. The length of a project can be anywhere from one week to one year, although a typical project will last a few weeks and we would aim to give you as diverse an experience as possible.