The game has been your passion. It has also been your profession. It has largely defined who you are, or at least how people perceive who you are. And you are good at it too. Good enough to turn professional, good enough to play at the highest level. And to play at that level, you have committed fully, making sacrifices that few others could really understand. But just what happens when the game stops? In your early thirties, are you ready to start at the beginning once again?

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Bob Casey knows how it feels. A towering rugby player at 6 feet, 8 inches, he was good enough to play professionally for both Leinster and London Irish, and good enough to earn seven caps for Ireland. But, when time caught up with his body, he had to ask some hard questions also. Was he ready to start over? What did he want to with the rest of his life? Could he ever replicate the success he had achieved on the field in another environment?

Casey was one of the lucky ones when he announced his retirement from London Irish. Armed with a commerce degree from UCD, he joined Powerday, the recycling and environmental waste management group, as a senior business development manager, before returning to London Irish as operations director in 2014. A year later, he was promoted to chief executive of the club at the age of 37.

His transition was smooth. Others were not so lucky.

“If you just think about it, you’re 32 or 34 when you’re leaving something that is your passion and that you’re paid really well for, but you don’t actually have a profession. Your profession is rugby. So, it’s not like you’re an accountant, a solicitor, or an engineer, or a carpenter,” he said.

“So, you’ve either got to be prepared to start at the bottom, which is difficult, given you might have certain outgoings, family or mortgage or you need to try and find a job that’s going to pay you something similar that you’re going to enjoy and that you’re going to be good at. Because it’s very hard to go from something that you excelled at to something that you’re either learning the ropes or you’re not that good at.”

Bob Casey in action with London Irish

That transition is something that has been on Casey’s mind a lot in recent years. Now back in Dublin and recently promoted to chief executive of the Irish operation of Korn Ferry, the management and recruitment consultancy, Casey spends much of time putting the right people with the right companies and helping to build teams. His own experience with professional sport helps inform his views.

“One of the things I really enjoy doing is trying to help past players navigate retirement or players who are coming close to retirement. Because it’s so daunting,” he said.

“It really is. It can take a year. It can take five years. I know a friend took five years to find a career that he actually wanted. That’s five years of really struggling to find your purpose in life.”

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Casey’s own post rugby career is a case in point. He had never intended to return to rugby until London Irish came calling. “I couldn’t say no,” he said. “But my plan was never to stay in sport. And I’ll be honest, my concern was that if you stayed past a certain time in sport, I think it’s much harder to transition into the corporate world that I’m.”

However, the CEO role helped him define what he actually wanted to do with his life, and also helped prepare him for it. The job was to assemble the right team to help the club achieve success on the pitch, and to ensure there was enough money in the bank to make it happen. He had retained firms similar to Korn Kerry, a global giant listed on the New York Stock Exchange, while working for London Irish, and he became fascinated by how people performed in, and adapted to, an organisation.

In 2017, after 15 years living in London, he was also keen to move back to Ireland. Korn Ferry, meanwhile, had been working with Irish clients for 10 years, but was launching an Irish office at the time.

He initially joined as a client partner, before being promoted to managing director three years later in October 2020.

“I had no desire to work on my own and go off and just be this solo head. It’s all about putting teams together for the clients. So that is what we do at Korn Ferry,” he said.

“Whilst we’re predominantly known for headhunting, which is the exec search side of things, that’s only part of our business. But we’re a full human capital business and it’s all about working with clients. It’s everything around people and performance, which is what I’ve done for all my life, really, when you think about it.

“It might be anything from organisational design to how do they assess and develop their people? How do they pay and reward their people? And then how do they attract people? So it’s that whole human capital piece and that’s what we do with our clients here.”

There have been some nice synergies, however. Casey led the Korn Ferry team charged with the appointment of a new director of rugby for World Rugby, a role ultimately filled by former Ireland head coach Joe Schmidt.

“I loved that process. This was one where I was like, okay, I can add value here, not just because I know the candidate, but I know what will work and what won’t work,” Casey said.

“It was a great one to work on with the team here because it’s a really pivotal role for World Rugby and rugby’s going through a real change at the moment. So, then to get someone of the calibre of Joe, in the role who’s making a huge difference was great. So, it was a really thorough process, challenging. He was in New Zealand at the time so that we were working late nights making sure we got it all across the line.”

Recruiting during Covid and emerging trends in C-Suite

Casey’s tenure as managing director has coincided with successive lockdowns, remote working and a global pandemic. Yet the recruitment firm’s revenues have not been largely impacted by the crisis.

“Our financial year is April to April. So, we had a full Covid year. And thankfully, we were pretty much flat, which is incredible given what happened to the market initially. But it rebounded and we’re very busy and in fact, we’re hiring at the moment,” said Casey.

Casey states one of the most interesting trends in recruitment during the pandemic is the move away from “command leaders”, which Casey says are becoming less effective in working environments.

“It’s really leaders who have empathy, who are agile, and really good communicators who give real clarity. We’re seeing that more and more. It’s about the top teams they’re putting together as well,” he said.

There is also a heightened interest to have sustainability represented in the C-suite, especially PLCs, according to Casey. “We’re actually seeing an increase in a leader of the diversity element to an organisation. So, we’re seeing a head of diversity or chief diversity officer,” Casey said.

Casey states that his time as CEO of London Irish provided him with some of the knowledge he needed to lead as managing director of Korn Ferry during Covid-19.

“I think the CEO experience at a young age of a premiership rugby club that was struggling for funding and for performance, really, I think, taught me a lot and helped me deal with hardships and challenges, and people challenges. So, I felt really equipped to deal with it. But look, you’re still having to learn a little bit because it was just such a hard time,” said Casey.

Leading a team of 40 staff, Casey has seen the importance over the last year of making sure his own team avoids burnout.

“They’ve seen friends lose their jobs and getting redundancies, and maybe that’s driving it, but people in our organisation have gone above and beyond. Like at times I’ve been looking at them on Zooms and thinking, you need to go to bed. Obviously, we want to drive performance, but we’ve got to look after our people and to make sure I look after myself because I’m no good to anyone if I’m burned out and frazzled,” he said.