Aoifinn Devitts: Series 3 is kindly supported by Eagle Point Credit Management. Eagle Point Credit Management is a specialist investment manager principally focused on income-oriented credit investments in niche and inefficient markets. Founded by Thomas Majewski in partnership with Stone Point Capital in 2012, Eagle Point currently manages over $7.8 billion in AUM. Investment strategies pursued by the firm include collateralized loan obligations, CLOs, portfolio debt securities, and other opportunities across the credit universe. Currently, Eagle Point is the largest investor in CLO equity in the world and one of the largest non-bank lenders focused on providing financing solutions to credit funds. You can learn more about Eagle Point at eaglepointcredit.com.
Tory Hyndman: What do you do when people, particularly men, right, say, how can I help? How can I make a difference? I know this is a challenge. What can I do? The best thing you can do, Amanda always says to them, is walk the talk. Put a female into the portfolio management seat, appoint a female to your senior team, make sure that the women around the table in your exec committee meeting or in the mid-management meeting are speaking up, right? So it’s— so much of it is about this not being seen as important for some people, but so much of it is about the leaders in our industry, particularly male leaders, really being allies and being supportive and actually not just talking about all the good reasons to do this, but helping to do something about it.
Aoifinn Devitts: I’m Aoifinn Devitts, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Tori Heinemann, who is a partner at Charter Partners. She’s had a career of 25 years in executive search focused on investment management, having spent time at Heydrich Struggles as well as David Barrett Partners, where she established the London office and the wider EMEA business. She’s passionate about educating women about careers in the city and is a volunteer for Founders for Schools as well as Maths for Girls, as well as an ambassador for the Diversity Project. Welcome, Tori. Thanks for joining me today.
Tory Hyndman: Thank you, Aoifinn. It’s lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.
Aoifinn Devitts: Well, we’ve known each other, it seems, for a very long time, but I don’t think we’ve ever properly traced where you grew up and the arc of your career that brought you to executive search. Can you talk us through that?
Tory Hyndman: Yes, certainly can. I grew up in Vancouver. I completed my undergraduate degree in Canada. And actually, I started my career in executive search a couple of years after I graduated, not in Vancouver or Toronto, but actually in Hong Kong. And this was the sort of mid-’90s, and Vancouver was absolutely booming off of the wave of immigration and investment going on from Asia Pacific. So I thought it might be interesting to go and check some of that out. And live there rather than just travel. And long story short, I was actually interested in a career in public relations or executive search, having thought about the things I like doing and transferable skills and what I might really enjoy. Weirdly, quite strangely, my oldest friend that I knew since I was 2 in Vancouver, who I’m still friends with, her uncle has always owned and run a really successful executive search business in Vancouver. She worked there in the summers. Her mother worked there. So rather uniquely, I grew up actually hearing about this industry called executive search. I was quite intrigued by it. Got to Hong Kong, quickly found out I need to speak Mandarin and/or Cantonese to work in PR. So I ended up working in search, and I was really lucky to find an industry and a career that I really, really loved right from the beginning.
Aoifinn Devitts: It’s really interesting because I kind of thought you might have needed to have a network perhaps within investment management or maybe investment banking in order to then go into search, because it’s quite a common trajectory for someone to work in the industry and then enter search. So how do you then go about, I suppose, the building blocks of starting your career?
Tory Hyndman: Yeah, I really followed what is now quite a classic career path in terms of joining a large global search firm, Heidrick Struggles, many years ago as an associate. I joined them in London. I moved here in 1997 from Hong Kong. And really worked my way up there at the firm to partner, but spent a good number of those early years very focused on conducting research for searches and executing them. And that is really how you build your network if you are entering search from the ground up as a young associate, as opposed to the older school, older style way of doing search, which was of course people retiring from careers in banking, for example, and then turning themselves into hunters. So I probably grew up in the industry just as it was really professionalizing and really, really being run not dissimilar to other professional services firms, other consulting firms, etc.
Aoifinn Devitts: Interesting. And what traits would you say make a successful participant in your area of the industry, make a successful executive search professional?
Tory Hyndman: I suppose I think particularly if you’re joining the search industry as an associate and you’re really involved in research, I always look for this when I’m hiring. Associate and research talent, or when I have done in the past, you have to be curious. You have to be really curious and really, really keen to find the answers. Is that the only portfolio manager on the team who would be appropriate for this role? Are there a couple of others? And if there are, who are they and how can I figure them out? So you’ve got to be curious. You’ve absolutely got to be tenacious. You can’t give up at the first hurdle. It’s not always easy. Linked to that, obviously, resilience is needed, particularly from a broader perspective when the markets are difficult and there’s not as much hiring going on and not as much work from clients. And of course, I I think, think you’ve got to be really positive, right? This is an industry where it’s all about adding value to businesses and actually potentially playing a big role in the careers of people. And I think you have to be positive and really committed that you can get the job done and that, that it is a really great opportunity you’re working on.
Aoifinn Devitts: You’ve always been tremendously positive and filled with joy, which is, is quite a magnetic, I think, force in this industry. In terms of how it’s changed, executive search, over the course of your career, have you seen more retained mandates, fewer? How has LinkedIn changed the game?
Tory Hyndman: LinkedIn has definitely changed the game for junior to mid-level recruitment, no question. It’s played a role in disrupting that. The flip side of that is we’ve probably seen that there continues to be very healthy demand for retained search, but that tends to be more and more for search assignments that are really at a very, very senior level in terms of the kind of people that you’re looking for and/or tend to be very specialized particularly unique searches, unique requirements. And of course, on everybody’s minds at the moment is the challenge of diversity and trying to find diverse solutions. In those instances, we’re finding that there’s still a lot of demand for retained search and for clients being willing to see the value of and to work very carefully with us on specific retained search mandates.
Aoifinn Devitts: And that’s a great segue into the topic of diversity, because before we talk about some of the initiatives that are close to your heart, I’ve seen some executive search professionals almost turn into career coaches when it comes to particularly some of the senior women that they work with and place. Have you seen a difference in how senior men and women approach the search process, approach maybe their suitability for certain roles? What’s going on there in terms of diversifying the high ranks of the industry?
Tory Hyndman: It has changed somewhat. I think overall search has always actually been quite a good career and career path for women, primarily because so much of what we do is on the phone or over Zoom and not always in person. And as we know, you can take telephone calls and do Zoom calls from a number of places, right? You don’t have to be in the office. So I think the flexibility that it can offer, particularly to young women starting families and not wanting to necessarily be working 5 days a week, That has all developed quite well. A link to that though, and to your comment, as women have continued to look for ways to build their careers, there’s definitely been a move to see more women become billing partners, senior partners in search firms. That’s certainly not just the preserve of men any longer. And linked to that, yes, I think for a lot of women, perhaps it’s some of those values we think about in terms of empathy, relating to people, being very focused on development. A lot of women actually do end up also being coaches or segueing into a career in coaching. So I would say the trajectory has only become even better actually for women to develop a very satisfying career that they can hold on to and work and tweak flexibly as and when they need to.
Aoifinn Devitts: And in terms of some of the senior women maybe that you would approach for positions in the industry, say to be a CIO or a CEO or a Chief Risk Officer, have you seen any difference when you approach male or female candidates in terms of just some of the encouragement maybe that’s required to aspire to more senior roles? Or do you think that that’s pretty even across both?
Tory Hyndman: The aspirations most of the time are quite similar. The way the conversations tend to be different, particularly for senior roles as you mentioned, is it can often be harder to bring a senior female candidate to the table to talk about an opportunity because she will often say, look, that sounds like a really interesting opportunity, but I’ve been here for over 5 years. I’ve built my political capital. To some extent, I work flexibly and it’s working. People understand some of the restraints or the constraints I have, or some of my other priorities. I don’t want to have to rebuild all of that from scratch in a new place. My firm is treating me very well. I feel loyal to them. I feel committed. So there’s a lot of that going on when you are trying to talk to senior women about making a move. And as we know, there’s often more of those kinds of issues, right, are much more real than for men who may not be constrained by some of those things or think they’re constrained by some of those things. And therefore it can be a much more straightforward conversation just about the role and the opportunity itself and is it of interest to them.
Aoifinn Devitts: Really interesting. Of course, the role that you play in, in terms of plugging that gap, in terms of encouraging them perhaps to take the leap. Moving just to the investment industry as a whole, given you’ve seen it, how have you seen the diversity change across the industry, say, throughout the course of your career?
Tory Hyndman: Things have definitely improved in most areas, not all, but in most, in terms of absolute numbers, right? We all know that, for example, we haven’t really improved on the number of women sitting in portfolio manager positions, but there’s a number of initiatives going on at the moment to address that. So there certainly has been some change. I think the other thing that we’ve really noticed in the past few years is that it is very rare for us to sit down with a client to talk about a search requirement and to not have them talk about diversity, right? And 5 to 10 years ago, actually quite often it wouldn’t come up at all. I would say in the past 5 years it comes up all the time. And of course, it’s not just gender diversity that firms are trying to tackle— socioeconomic, neurodiversity, race and ethnicity, etc. So the good news is, is that the diversity challenge is fully on everyone’s radar screens. I think everybody buys into all the reasons why we need to change it. The challenge and the hurdles are still there when it comes to the actual action required around it, changing behaviors and really walking the talk.
Aoifinn Devitts: It’s really interesting to hear that it’s coming up though at every discussion you’re having about senior hires. Very, very good to hear that. Let’s move now to getting at the front end of that diversity challenge and the pipeline and STEM education in particular, because I know this is something very close to your heart. Can you talk about the Maths for Girls and Founders for Schools initiatives what they are, how you got involved in them, and what you hope they’re going to achieve.
Tory Hyndman: Maths for Girls— and actually, I should start with Founders for Schools. Founders for Schools was started by Sherry Kutu as a very high-impact but very simple way for role models to get in front of school children of all ages and to talk to them about their careers. The whole premise obviously being If you can’t see it, you can’t be it. She’s done an absolutely super job building out that platform and that model of volunteering, and it works because it doesn’t require a lot of time on the part of the volunteers. It has a huge impact in front of these young children who ask all sorts of questions. It’s male and female role models at the Founders for Schools initiative and making a high impact by talking to both young boys and girls in schools about the kinds of careers that they could have. So giving them that sort of inspiration face to face. Maths for Girls is linked to that same concept, launched in conjunction with 100 Women in Finance, the focus very much being on maths and on encouraging young women considering their A-level options to stick with maths. Many young women don’t pursue maths at A-level even though they end up getting the same results at GCSE that young men do. And really inspiring them again around all of the things that they can actually do with a career in maths. So Maths for Girls is, given the name, obviously much more focused on really keeping young women in studying maths, and then obviously linked to that, helping to encourage them to pursue graduate studies or undergraduate studies in maths and therefore careers in, in STEM. Linked to that, I should also add Girls Are Investors, or GAIN, is another super organization that I volunteer for. Same concept, but it’s all about inspiring young women to learn about and be inspired to pursue careers in investment management so that we can start building the diverse pipeline right from graduate level into our industry.
Aoifinn Devitts: It’s a— three great initiatives, and of course I know GAIN very well. One of the questions that comes up all the time in investment is impact, how we measure it, whether it’s a word that gets thrown around a lot. And then the other one is engagement. And unfortunately, engagement is a you challenge, know, not only at the student level perhaps, but even at the total other end of the spectrum, pensioners, retirement, it’s hard to get them engaged about something like mathsy around their pensions. It just isn’t perceived as being that interesting. So how have these initiatives had an impact and how do you find you can create that engagement?
Tory Hyndman: The impact can be very difficult to measure, as you mentioned. I think the really exciting things with the initiatives like Girls Are Investors is that we are starting to be able to compile figures around, for example, we have this number of young women pursuing internships this summer with these number of firms. We then have had this number of women pursuing full-time roles once they graduate from university with firms in the investment management industry. So that pipeline of talent actually going into the industry, having been part of a program like GAIN, is actually starting to be able to be measured. Similar to that, the Pathway program that the Diversity Project has launched, which is specifically aimed at getting more women into portfolio management seats. Again, if that program is successful, which I’m sure it will be, we will be able to measure and see the increase in the number of actual named female portfolio managers that we have in the industry. I think it’s a bit harder to measure with things like role modeling, Maths for Girls, or Founders for Schools, but there’s no question that when you’re there and you’re volunteering and you hear and see the questions coming from these young people, you do see firsthand the impact you’re having. You can literally see the wheels turning. You can literally see the thoughts that they’re developing through the questions that they’re asking. And so I think we have to be positive that actually that’s got to start having a good impact, which can be measured of course in due course in terms of the number of people sticking with maths in sixth form and hopefully pursuing STEM-related subjects at university.
Aoifinn Devitts: It’s interesting, I’m thinking of other role models like say Dario the CEO, and he would have the founder’s energy, I suppose. That always seems to be very attractive for young people. I suppose if we can make money and managing it seem a little more exciting, we will probably increase the throughput there. But really great to see these many different initiatives. Would you say we’re doing enough? Do you think more can be done?
Tory Hyndman: I think more can always be done. I think the initiatives we’ve just talked about are extremely important to help fill the pipeline appropriately with enough diverse candidates coming through and therefore hopefully applying to be part of the investment management industry. As we know, that’s only one part of the challenge. So there is still lots to do to then retain the diverse talent that you are able to recruit. And then of course, to be able to role model internally so that your senior executive team, for example, is also diverse. I think it’s tricky, and I talk with clients a lot about this, If I recruit a female C-suite individual from Fidelity and I put them into BlackRock, it’s a bit of a zero-sum game, right? One for BlackRock, they’re up one, Fidelity’s down one. We haven’t really actually fundamentally addressed the broader issue in the industry apart from numbers looking a bit better at the senior ranks at one firm. So I think in terms of game-changing, what we need more of is walking the talk. I had a great chat with Amanda Pullinger, CEO at 100 Women in Finance, about this recently. What do you do when people, particularly men, right, say, how can I help? How can I make a difference? I know this is a challenge. What can I do? The best thing you can do, Amanda always says to them, is walk the talk. Put a female into the portfolio management seat. Appoint a female to your senior team. Make sure that the women around the table in your exec committee meeting or in the mid-management meeting are speaking up, right? So it’s— so much of it is about this not being seen as important for some people, but so much of it is about the leaders in our industry, particularly male leaders, really being allies and being supportive and actually not just talking about all the good reasons to do this but helping to do something about it.
Aoifinn Devitts: And it’s interesting because immediately to fix some of this gap or avoid the zero-sum game, we could think of encouraging more lateral hires, maybe even from different parts of the industry, more returnships, which I know have been quite successful. And I did speak with Amanda Pullinger before, fantastic work she’s doing to raise the profile and amplify so many senior women. Well, I suppose I’ve also heard about a juniorization going on across some parts of the industry where increasingly many senior ranks are being replaced with more junior. And I suppose if we want— there’s no reason to say women can’t be executives perhaps at a relatively more junior stage than previously, because that’s happening in the tech world. So maybe it’s just about trusting them, giving them the confidence to rise to these challenges.
Tory Hyndman: Absolutely. And that is so much part of it. And this is again where I often see clients really grappling with making diverse hires because it can be very uncomfortable. Because nobody means to operate through the way the paradigm of the way they’ve always recruited top talent or mid-level talent and the way they’ve done it. But you all of a sudden have to start thinking about transferable skills and not just about, well, have they done this role before? Can they actually do this role? I only want to hire that person if I know they have done this before. And it’s a very different mentality to say I’m hiring this person because they have the transferable skills. I believe they have the ability to get up the curve. This is the program we’re going to put in place to make sure this hire has all the support that they need. It is definitely a different way of hiring and looking at hiring and interviewing and calibrating talent again through a much, much different paradigm. But to help solve the diversity challenge, that is a really, really important part of it, but it’s not easy. It is hard because it requires not only a senior leader to buy into it, but actually, as we all know, for hires to be successful at almost any level in investment management, you have to have buy-in across the firm, right? And that’s what can take a long time to really get solidified.
Aoifinn Devitts: And that’s actually— gets to my last question on this whole search arena, because some of our listeners will be aspiring to senior positions. And two things I want to ask is whether the hybrid working environment we have now is changing things that much at the senior level? Because as I said, you need buy-in, you need networks, you need strong relationships, which maybe can only be kind of crafted in person. And then the great resignation, has that been a phenomenon that’s been real across the senior ranks?
Tory Hyndman: So on the great resignation, we have seen that to a certain extent. At the senior ranks, particularly when we were just coming out of COVID and people definitely wanted something different, or it was time to go home to Australia, or time to go home to Canada, or time not to be working so hard. Flip side of that is I was having a really interesting conversation with somebody at PGym about this. In many ways, it’s made some senior people stickier, right? Because I’m not commuting every single day in and out of the city an hour and a half each way, 5 days a week. My work-life balance is actually better. I don’t feel I have to retire next year or when I thought I might. I actually am really enjoying this. I’m still really productive. My work-life balance is better. It’s not quite as much of a grind. So that’s sort of an interesting flip on that particular angle. We certainly saw quite a bit of the Great Resignation when recruitment activity was really busy, sort of mid-2020 through to mid-2022, and there was a lot of early to mid-stage career individuals resigning to do something completely different or to literally have a change of scene because they had been doing so much— well, all their work on a screen via Zoom. They’re at the early stages of the career and they actually need a change of scene. So we saw quite a bit of that from the younger individuals. Given how challenging the markets have been in the past 6 to 12 months, a lot of that has calmed down and gone away actually, because there’s been much less hiring. And actually, I think at the moment, most firms have had a certain degree of restructuring going on, and most people are actually quite happy just to still have their job in certain circumstances.
Aoifinn Devitts: Well, absolutely fascinating. And of course, I immediately think of the stickiness you mentioned, some people being less likely to leave Flip side, that can also be a problem because then the top-heavy nature doesn’t change and then there’s no path forward. So that, of course, is another reason for frustration at mid-level. So one last point on the senior recruiting, and we hear a lot now about the integration of environmental, social governance issues and risks across all the investment industry. Do you find that that’s coming up now in job descriptions and in profiles?
Tory Hyndman: It is. It’s certainly not going away. It is still a massive challenge for so many investment management firms to address and to figure out. It feels a bit like now we’re in version 2.0. The common themes I hear around that at the moment is regulation and all the work to do to ensure that firms are on the right side of that regulation, that they are definitely not greenwashing. The focus is almost really, really wrapped up in the governance and the regulations and the compliance at the moment. Whereas version 1, I think, felt much more creative and off we go and we can do much more around sustainability and sustainable investing. Linking to diversity, the great news is that it’s probably a separate conversation as to why, but it’s traditionally been an area where there’s been a lot of great female investors around sustainable investing, ESG, etc. So in terms of firms continuing to be able to build their slate of diverse talent. That area will continue to be a rich seam for that. But as I say, I think at the moment it’s a tougher time for firms to really, really figure out what their proposition is and how they are positioning it and how they’re going to get there. So still a lot of heavy lifting around that.
Aoifinn Devitts: Very complex. I think our human capital in investment management is clearly our absolute greatest asset. So I could talk to you about this all day, but I would love to move to some closing questions just to go back to reflections. So you’ve had a long career and sure, some high points, low points, maybe setbacks in there. Was there anything that you learned from any of these low points or any, any high point that you can share?
Tory Hyndman: High points and low points. High points, definitely becoming a partner at Hydrokin Struggles, having spent 11 years there and having joined as an associate. Low point, without a doubt, then being made redundant after my first year as a partner in the wake of the global financial crisis. Definite high point: joining Charter Partners and really creating the opportunity for myself to be fully in the driving seat and to completely bring my whole self to work. And that can sound a little bit corny to some people, but I do believe in most instances it is such a key to working productively and happily. And without a doubt, being able to raise a family while I’ve had the privilege of working in such a wonderful industry that I have absolutely loved every moment of.
Aoifinn Devitts: And your industry in particular, your kind of segment of the industry, is filled with some very strong, impressive characters, including yourself, of course. Have you had any mentors throughout your career that have maybe had an impression on you?
Tory Hyndman: I would love to have had more mentors, and my advice to anybody starting out in investment management, or indeed any career would definitely be get yourself a mentor, possibly more than one. I worked with a wonderful individual at Hydrogen Struggles for many years called Daryl Adachi, who was really the first person who understood the value I could add to him and to the business overall, was a very good person to work with and for, and who really sponsored me and supported me in a way that I really hadn’t had. So that was a real privilege to work with him. And when I look back, I think, you know, if only I’d had more of that earlier on. So getting yourself a mentor and understanding that particularly in a large organization, you need to have somebody that has your back and that can guide you accordingly and be there for you. Very, very critical for success.
Aoifinn Devitts: And given some of the— I’m sure the executives you’ve mixed with, placed, or chatted with to place somebody— have you come away with any word of wisdom, any creed or motto that you found particularly inspiring?
Tory Hyndman: I had this great conversation with a head of distribution. I’ve known her for a number of years, Sarah Aitken, who is at Legal General Investment Management. We were talking about hybrid working, new paradigms of management coming out of COVID She’s always been a really open-minded thinker, but she said, why does it always have to be and/or? Why can’t it be and/and? And I thought that is an absolutely great question to pose, that quite often we just don’t— we think it’s this or that. I also think that for anybody at any stage of their career, Dr. Grace Lordan at the LSE who founded the Inclusion Initiative, she has a, a great phrase, which is that you need opportunity, you need visibility, and you need voice if you are going to enjoy your career, have a successful career, and be able to be effective in your career. And actually, when you think about it, that is so, so true. So I would also say to people that those are the questions you need to ask yourself. The flip side is if you’re not enjoying where you are or you feel like you’re stuck in your career, ask yourself on this platform, do I have opportunity? Do I have visibility? Do I have voice? And if you don’t have those three things, that may well be why you don’t feel that it’s necessarily at that moment in time the right or ideal place for you.
Aoifinn Devitts: Really powerful. I love those three— opportunity, visibility, voice— that those three key characteristics. I suppose also as leaders, the onus is on us to ensure that that is created for our teams because they may not know it yet, but that’s what they need. So I think that that’s a very good reminder. My last question is whether you have any advice for your younger self, maybe for that young Canadian graduate embarking on a new life in Hong Kong. Anything you know now that you wish you had known then?
Tory Hyndman: I would say don’t be afraid to speak up. It took me a long time to realize that when you’re in one of those meetings or you’re sitting around the table with a lot of people and you’ve got a question or something isn’t quite right or you want to clarify something or you’re, you’re not clear on something, most of the time, 99% of the time, everybody else is confused as well. So I would say don’t be afraid to speak up. Put up your hand, ask the question, have that confidence to do that. Listen to your inner voice and bring your whole self to your work. Find a role, find a career where you truly do feel that you can be yourself because that’s one of the keys to success that will allow you to really flourish and really enjoy what you’re doing.
Aoifinn Devitts: Well, Tori, it’s been such a pleasure to have this conversation. I’ve mentioned before that human capital is our industry’s greatest asset, and we talk a lot about stewardship, but I see you very much as a steward of that human capital, not only at the senior end where we’ve been having most of this discussion, but also at the very, very early stages before we even get into the pipeline. So thank you for the work you’re doing and for being such a great asset to our industry.
Tory Hyndman: Thank you, Aoifinn. It’s been super to chat to you today. Thanks ever so much for having me on as one of your guests.
Aoifinn Devitts: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring investors and their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.
Aoifinn Devitts: Series 3 is kindly supported by Eagle Point Credit Management. Eagle Point Credit Management is a specialist investment manager principally focused on income-oriented credit investments in niche and inefficient markets. Founded by Thomas Majewski in partnership with Stone Point Capital in 2012, Eagle Point currently manages over $7.8 billion in AUM. Investment strategies pursued by the firm include collateralized loan obligations, CLOs, portfolio debt securities, and other opportunities across the credit universe. Currently, Eagle Point is the largest investor in CLO equity in the world and one of the largest non-bank lenders focused on providing financing solutions to credit funds. You can learn more about Eagle Point at eaglepointcredit.com.
Tory Hyndman: What do you do when people, particularly men, right, say, how can I help? How can I make a difference? I know this is a challenge. What can I do? The best thing you can do, Amanda always says to them, is walk the talk. Put a female into the portfolio management seat, appoint a female to your senior team, make sure that the women around the table in your exec committee meeting or in the mid-management meeting are speaking up, right? So it’s— so much of it is about this not being seen as important for some people, but so much of it is about the leaders in our industry, particularly male leaders, really being allies and being supportive and actually not just talking about all the good reasons to do this, but helping to do something about it.
Aoifinn Devitts: I’m Aoifinn Devitts, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Tori Heinemann, who is a partner at Charter Partners. She’s had a career of 25 years in executive search focused on investment management, having spent time at Heydrich Struggles as well as David Barrett Partners, where she established the London office and the wider EMEA business. She’s passionate about educating women about careers in the city and is a volunteer for Founders for Schools as well as Maths for Girls, as well as an ambassador for the Diversity Project. Welcome, Tori. Thanks for joining me today.
Tory Hyndman: Thank you, Aoifinn. It’s lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.
Aoifinn Devitts: Well, we’ve known each other, it seems, for a very long time, but I don’t think we’ve ever properly traced where you grew up and the arc of your career that brought you to executive search. Can you talk us through that?
Tory Hyndman: Yes, certainly can. I grew up in Vancouver. I completed my undergraduate degree in Canada. And actually, I started my career in executive search a couple of years after I graduated, not in Vancouver or Toronto, but actually in Hong Kong. And this was the sort of mid-’90s, and Vancouver was absolutely booming off of the wave of immigration and investment going on from Asia Pacific. So I thought it might be interesting to go and check some of that out. And live there rather than just travel. And long story short, I was actually interested in a career in public relations or executive search, having thought about the things I like doing and transferable skills and what I might really enjoy. Weirdly, quite strangely, my oldest friend that I knew since I was 2 in Vancouver, who I’m still friends with, her uncle has always owned and run a really successful executive search business in Vancouver. She worked there in the summers. Her mother worked there. So rather uniquely, I grew up actually hearing about this industry called executive search. I was quite intrigued by it. Got to Hong Kong, quickly found out I need to speak Mandarin and/or Cantonese to work in PR. So I ended up working in search, and I was really lucky to find an industry and a career that I really, really loved right from the beginning.
Aoifinn Devitts: It’s really interesting because I kind of thought you might have needed to have a network perhaps within investment management or maybe investment banking in order to then go into search, because it’s quite a common trajectory for someone to work in the industry and then enter search. So how do you then go about, I suppose, the building blocks of starting your career?
Tory Hyndman: Yeah, I really followed what is now quite a classic career path in terms of joining a large global search firm, Heidrick Struggles, many years ago as an associate. I joined them in London. I moved here in 1997 from Hong Kong. And really worked my way up there at the firm to partner, but spent a good number of those early years very focused on conducting research for searches and executing them. And that is really how you build your network if you are entering search from the ground up as a young associate, as opposed to the older school, older style way of doing search, which was of course people retiring from careers in banking, for example, and then turning themselves into hunters. So I probably grew up in the industry just as it was really professionalizing and really, really being run not dissimilar to other professional services firms, other consulting firms, etc.
Aoifinn Devitts: Interesting. And what traits would you say make a successful participant in your area of the industry, make a successful executive search professional?
Tory Hyndman: I suppose I think particularly if you’re joining the search industry as an associate and you’re really involved in research, I always look for this when I’m hiring. Associate and research talent, or when I have done in the past, you have to be curious. You have to be really curious and really, really keen to find the answers. Is that the only portfolio manager on the team who would be appropriate for this role? Are there a couple of others? And if there are, who are they and how can I figure them out? So you’ve got to be curious. You’ve absolutely got to be tenacious. You can’t give up at the first hurdle. It’s not always easy. Linked to that, obviously, resilience is needed, particularly from a broader perspective when the markets are difficult and there’s not as much hiring going on and not as much work from clients. And of course, I I think, think you’ve got to be really positive, right? This is an industry where it’s all about adding value to businesses and actually potentially playing a big role in the careers of people. And I think you have to be positive and really committed that you can get the job done and that, that it is a really great opportunity you’re working on.
Aoifinn Devitts: You’ve always been tremendously positive and filled with joy, which is, is quite a magnetic, I think, force in this industry. In terms of how it’s changed, executive search, over the course of your career, have you seen more retained mandates, fewer? How has LinkedIn changed the game?
Tory Hyndman: LinkedIn has definitely changed the game for junior to mid-level recruitment, no question. It’s played a role in disrupting that. The flip side of that is we’ve probably seen that there continues to be very healthy demand for retained search, but that tends to be more and more for search assignments that are really at a very, very senior level in terms of the kind of people that you’re looking for and/or tend to be very specialized particularly unique searches, unique requirements. And of course, on everybody’s minds at the moment is the challenge of diversity and trying to find diverse solutions. In those instances, we’re finding that there’s still a lot of demand for retained search and for clients being willing to see the value of and to work very carefully with us on specific retained search mandates.
Aoifinn Devitts: And that’s a great segue into the topic of diversity, because before we talk about some of the initiatives that are close to your heart, I’ve seen some executive search professionals almost turn into career coaches when it comes to particularly some of the senior women that they work with and place. Have you seen a difference in how senior men and women approach the search process, approach maybe their suitability for certain roles? What’s going on there in terms of diversifying the high ranks of the industry?
Tory Hyndman: It has changed somewhat. I think overall search has always actually been quite a good career and career path for women, primarily because so much of what we do is on the phone or over Zoom and not always in person. And as we know, you can take telephone calls and do Zoom calls from a number of places, right? You don’t have to be in the office. So I think the flexibility that it can offer, particularly to young women starting families and not wanting to necessarily be working 5 days a week, That has all developed quite well. A link to that though, and to your comment, as women have continued to look for ways to build their careers, there’s definitely been a move to see more women become billing partners, senior partners in search firms. That’s certainly not just the preserve of men any longer. And linked to that, yes, I think for a lot of women, perhaps it’s some of those values we think about in terms of empathy, relating to people, being very focused on development. A lot of women actually do end up also being coaches or segueing into a career in coaching. So I would say the trajectory has only become even better actually for women to develop a very satisfying career that they can hold on to and work and tweak flexibly as and when they need to.
Aoifinn Devitts: And in terms of some of the senior women maybe that you would approach for positions in the industry, say to be a CIO or a CEO or a Chief Risk Officer, have you seen any difference when you approach male or female candidates in terms of just some of the encouragement maybe that’s required to aspire to more senior roles? Or do you think that that’s pretty even across both?
Tory Hyndman: The aspirations most of the time are quite similar. The way the conversations tend to be different, particularly for senior roles as you mentioned, is it can often be harder to bring a senior female candidate to the table to talk about an opportunity because she will often say, look, that sounds like a really interesting opportunity, but I’ve been here for over 5 years. I’ve built my political capital. To some extent, I work flexibly and it’s working. People understand some of the restraints or the constraints I have, or some of my other priorities. I don’t want to have to rebuild all of that from scratch in a new place. My firm is treating me very well. I feel loyal to them. I feel committed. So there’s a lot of that going on when you are trying to talk to senior women about making a move. And as we know, there’s often more of those kinds of issues, right, are much more real than for men who may not be constrained by some of those things or think they’re constrained by some of those things. And therefore it can be a much more straightforward conversation just about the role and the opportunity itself and is it of interest to them.
Aoifinn Devitts: Really interesting. Of course, the role that you play in, in terms of plugging that gap, in terms of encouraging them perhaps to take the leap. Moving just to the investment industry as a whole, given you’ve seen it, how have you seen the diversity change across the industry, say, throughout the course of your career?
Tory Hyndman: Things have definitely improved in most areas, not all, but in most, in terms of absolute numbers, right? We all know that, for example, we haven’t really improved on the number of women sitting in portfolio manager positions, but there’s a number of initiatives going on at the moment to address that. So there certainly has been some change. I think the other thing that we’ve really noticed in the past few years is that it is very rare for us to sit down with a client to talk about a search requirement and to not have them talk about diversity, right? And 5 to 10 years ago, actually quite often it wouldn’t come up at all. I would say in the past 5 years it comes up all the time. And of course, it’s not just gender diversity that firms are trying to tackle— socioeconomic, neurodiversity, race and ethnicity, etc. So the good news is, is that the diversity challenge is fully on everyone’s radar screens. I think everybody buys into all the reasons why we need to change it. The challenge and the hurdles are still there when it comes to the actual action required around it, changing behaviors and really walking the talk.
Aoifinn Devitts: It’s really interesting to hear that it’s coming up though at every discussion you’re having about senior hires. Very, very good to hear that. Let’s move now to getting at the front end of that diversity challenge and the pipeline and STEM education in particular, because I know this is something very close to your heart. Can you talk about the Maths for Girls and Founders for Schools initiatives what they are, how you got involved in them, and what you hope they’re going to achieve.
Tory Hyndman: Maths for Girls— and actually, I should start with Founders for Schools. Founders for Schools was started by Sherry Kutu as a very high-impact but very simple way for role models to get in front of school children of all ages and to talk to them about their careers. The whole premise obviously being If you can’t see it, you can’t be it. She’s done an absolutely super job building out that platform and that model of volunteering, and it works because it doesn’t require a lot of time on the part of the volunteers. It has a huge impact in front of these young children who ask all sorts of questions. It’s male and female role models at the Founders for Schools initiative and making a high impact by talking to both young boys and girls in schools about the kinds of careers that they could have. So giving them that sort of inspiration face to face. Maths for Girls is linked to that same concept, launched in conjunction with 100 Women in Finance, the focus very much being on maths and on encouraging young women considering their A-level options to stick with maths. Many young women don’t pursue maths at A-level even though they end up getting the same results at GCSE that young men do. And really inspiring them again around all of the things that they can actually do with a career in maths. So Maths for Girls is, given the name, obviously much more focused on really keeping young women in studying maths, and then obviously linked to that, helping to encourage them to pursue graduate studies or undergraduate studies in maths and therefore careers in, in STEM. Linked to that, I should also add Girls Are Investors, or GAIN, is another super organization that I volunteer for. Same concept, but it’s all about inspiring young women to learn about and be inspired to pursue careers in investment management so that we can start building the diverse pipeline right from graduate level into our industry.
Aoifinn Devitts: It’s a— three great initiatives, and of course I know GAIN very well. One of the questions that comes up all the time in investment is impact, how we measure it, whether it’s a word that gets thrown around a lot. And then the other one is engagement. And unfortunately, engagement is a you challenge, know, not only at the student level perhaps, but even at the total other end of the spectrum, pensioners, retirement, it’s hard to get them engaged about something like mathsy around their pensions. It just isn’t perceived as being that interesting. So how have these initiatives had an impact and how do you find you can create that engagement?
Tory Hyndman: The impact can be very difficult to measure, as you mentioned. I think the really exciting things with the initiatives like Girls Are Investors is that we are starting to be able to compile figures around, for example, we have this number of young women pursuing internships this summer with these number of firms. We then have had this number of women pursuing full-time roles once they graduate from university with firms in the investment management industry. So that pipeline of talent actually going into the industry, having been part of a program like GAIN, is actually starting to be able to be measured. Similar to that, the Pathway program that the Diversity Project has launched, which is specifically aimed at getting more women into portfolio management seats. Again, if that program is successful, which I’m sure it will be, we will be able to measure and see the increase in the number of actual named female portfolio managers that we have in the industry. I think it’s a bit harder to measure with things like role modeling, Maths for Girls, or Founders for Schools, but there’s no question that when you’re there and you’re volunteering and you hear and see the questions coming from these young people, you do see firsthand the impact you’re having. You can literally see the wheels turning. You can literally see the thoughts that they’re developing through the questions that they’re asking. And so I think we have to be positive that actually that’s got to start having a good impact, which can be measured of course in due course in terms of the number of people sticking with maths in sixth form and hopefully pursuing STEM-related subjects at university.
Aoifinn Devitts: It’s interesting, I’m thinking of other role models like say Dario the CEO, and he would have the founder’s energy, I suppose. That always seems to be very attractive for young people. I suppose if we can make money and managing it seem a little more exciting, we will probably increase the throughput there. But really great to see these many different initiatives. Would you say we’re doing enough? Do you think more can be done?
Tory Hyndman: I think more can always be done. I think the initiatives we’ve just talked about are extremely important to help fill the pipeline appropriately with enough diverse candidates coming through and therefore hopefully applying to be part of the investment management industry. As we know, that’s only one part of the challenge. So there is still lots to do to then retain the diverse talent that you are able to recruit. And then of course, to be able to role model internally so that your senior executive team, for example, is also diverse. I think it’s tricky, and I talk with clients a lot about this, If I recruit a female C-suite individual from Fidelity and I put them into BlackRock, it’s a bit of a zero-sum game, right? One for BlackRock, they’re up one, Fidelity’s down one. We haven’t really actually fundamentally addressed the broader issue in the industry apart from numbers looking a bit better at the senior ranks at one firm. So I think in terms of game-changing, what we need more of is walking the talk. I had a great chat with Amanda Pullinger, CEO at 100 Women in Finance, about this recently. What do you do when people, particularly men, right, say, how can I help? How can I make a difference? I know this is a challenge. What can I do? The best thing you can do, Amanda always says to them, is walk the talk. Put a female into the portfolio management seat. Appoint a female to your senior team. Make sure that the women around the table in your exec committee meeting or in the mid-management meeting are speaking up, right? So it’s— so much of it is about this not being seen as important for some people, but so much of it is about the leaders in our industry, particularly male leaders, really being allies and being supportive and actually not just talking about all the good reasons to do this but helping to do something about it.
Aoifinn Devitts: And it’s interesting because immediately to fix some of this gap or avoid the zero-sum game, we could think of encouraging more lateral hires, maybe even from different parts of the industry, more returnships, which I know have been quite successful. And I did speak with Amanda Pullinger before, fantastic work she’s doing to raise the profile and amplify so many senior women. Well, I suppose I’ve also heard about a juniorization going on across some parts of the industry where increasingly many senior ranks are being replaced with more junior. And I suppose if we want— there’s no reason to say women can’t be executives perhaps at a relatively more junior stage than previously, because that’s happening in the tech world. So maybe it’s just about trusting them, giving them the confidence to rise to these challenges.
Tory Hyndman: Absolutely. And that is so much part of it. And this is again where I often see clients really grappling with making diverse hires because it can be very uncomfortable. Because nobody means to operate through the way the paradigm of the way they’ve always recruited top talent or mid-level talent and the way they’ve done it. But you all of a sudden have to start thinking about transferable skills and not just about, well, have they done this role before? Can they actually do this role? I only want to hire that person if I know they have done this before. And it’s a very different mentality to say I’m hiring this person because they have the transferable skills. I believe they have the ability to get up the curve. This is the program we’re going to put in place to make sure this hire has all the support that they need. It is definitely a different way of hiring and looking at hiring and interviewing and calibrating talent again through a much, much different paradigm. But to help solve the diversity challenge, that is a really, really important part of it, but it’s not easy. It is hard because it requires not only a senior leader to buy into it, but actually, as we all know, for hires to be successful at almost any level in investment management, you have to have buy-in across the firm, right? And that’s what can take a long time to really get solidified.
Aoifinn Devitts: And that’s actually— gets to my last question on this whole search arena, because some of our listeners will be aspiring to senior positions. And two things I want to ask is whether the hybrid working environment we have now is changing things that much at the senior level? Because as I said, you need buy-in, you need networks, you need strong relationships, which maybe can only be kind of crafted in person. And then the great resignation, has that been a phenomenon that’s been real across the senior ranks?
Tory Hyndman: So on the great resignation, we have seen that to a certain extent. At the senior ranks, particularly when we were just coming out of COVID and people definitely wanted something different, or it was time to go home to Australia, or time to go home to Canada, or time not to be working so hard. Flip side of that is I was having a really interesting conversation with somebody at PGym about this. In many ways, it’s made some senior people stickier, right? Because I’m not commuting every single day in and out of the city an hour and a half each way, 5 days a week. My work-life balance is actually better. I don’t feel I have to retire next year or when I thought I might. I actually am really enjoying this. I’m still really productive. My work-life balance is better. It’s not quite as much of a grind. So that’s sort of an interesting flip on that particular angle. We certainly saw quite a bit of the Great Resignation when recruitment activity was really busy, sort of mid-2020 through to mid-2022, and there was a lot of early to mid-stage career individuals resigning to do something completely different or to literally have a change of scene because they had been doing so much— well, all their work on a screen via Zoom. They’re at the early stages of the career and they actually need a change of scene. So we saw quite a bit of that from the younger individuals. Given how challenging the markets have been in the past 6 to 12 months, a lot of that has calmed down and gone away actually, because there’s been much less hiring. And actually, I think at the moment, most firms have had a certain degree of restructuring going on, and most people are actually quite happy just to still have their job in certain circumstances.
Aoifinn Devitts: Well, absolutely fascinating. And of course, I immediately think of the stickiness you mentioned, some people being less likely to leave Flip side, that can also be a problem because then the top-heavy nature doesn’t change and then there’s no path forward. So that, of course, is another reason for frustration at mid-level. So one last point on the senior recruiting, and we hear a lot now about the integration of environmental, social governance issues and risks across all the investment industry. Do you find that that’s coming up now in job descriptions and in profiles?
Tory Hyndman: It is. It’s certainly not going away. It is still a massive challenge for so many investment management firms to address and to figure out. It feels a bit like now we’re in version 2.0. The common themes I hear around that at the moment is regulation and all the work to do to ensure that firms are on the right side of that regulation, that they are definitely not greenwashing. The focus is almost really, really wrapped up in the governance and the regulations and the compliance at the moment. Whereas version 1, I think, felt much more creative and off we go and we can do much more around sustainability and sustainable investing. Linking to diversity, the great news is that it’s probably a separate conversation as to why, but it’s traditionally been an area where there’s been a lot of great female investors around sustainable investing, ESG, etc. So in terms of firms continuing to be able to build their slate of diverse talent. That area will continue to be a rich seam for that. But as I say, I think at the moment it’s a tougher time for firms to really, really figure out what their proposition is and how they are positioning it and how they’re going to get there. So still a lot of heavy lifting around that.
Aoifinn Devitts: Very complex. I think our human capital in investment management is clearly our absolute greatest asset. So I could talk to you about this all day, but I would love to move to some closing questions just to go back to reflections. So you’ve had a long career and sure, some high points, low points, maybe setbacks in there. Was there anything that you learned from any of these low points or any, any high point that you can share?
Tory Hyndman: High points and low points. High points, definitely becoming a partner at Hydrokin Struggles, having spent 11 years there and having joined as an associate. Low point, without a doubt, then being made redundant after my first year as a partner in the wake of the global financial crisis. Definite high point: joining Charter Partners and really creating the opportunity for myself to be fully in the driving seat and to completely bring my whole self to work. And that can sound a little bit corny to some people, but I do believe in most instances it is such a key to working productively and happily. And without a doubt, being able to raise a family while I’ve had the privilege of working in such a wonderful industry that I have absolutely loved every moment of.
Aoifinn Devitts: And your industry in particular, your kind of segment of the industry, is filled with some very strong, impressive characters, including yourself, of course. Have you had any mentors throughout your career that have maybe had an impression on you?
Tory Hyndman: I would love to have had more mentors, and my advice to anybody starting out in investment management, or indeed any career would definitely be get yourself a mentor, possibly more than one. I worked with a wonderful individual at Hydrogen Struggles for many years called Daryl Adachi, who was really the first person who understood the value I could add to him and to the business overall, was a very good person to work with and for, and who really sponsored me and supported me in a way that I really hadn’t had. So that was a real privilege to work with him. And when I look back, I think, you know, if only I’d had more of that earlier on. So getting yourself a mentor and understanding that particularly in a large organization, you need to have somebody that has your back and that can guide you accordingly and be there for you. Very, very critical for success.
Aoifinn Devitts: And given some of the— I’m sure the executives you’ve mixed with, placed, or chatted with to place somebody— have you come away with any word of wisdom, any creed or motto that you found particularly inspiring?
Tory Hyndman: I had this great conversation with a head of distribution. I’ve known her for a number of years, Sarah Aitken, who is at Legal General Investment Management. We were talking about hybrid working, new paradigms of management coming out of COVID She’s always been a really open-minded thinker, but she said, why does it always have to be and/or? Why can’t it be and/and? And I thought that is an absolutely great question to pose, that quite often we just don’t— we think it’s this or that. I also think that for anybody at any stage of their career, Dr. Grace Lordan at the LSE who founded the Inclusion Initiative, she has a, a great phrase, which is that you need opportunity, you need visibility, and you need voice if you are going to enjoy your career, have a successful career, and be able to be effective in your career. And actually, when you think about it, that is so, so true. So I would also say to people that those are the questions you need to ask yourself. The flip side is if you’re not enjoying where you are or you feel like you’re stuck in your career, ask yourself on this platform, do I have opportunity? Do I have visibility? Do I have voice? And if you don’t have those three things, that may well be why you don’t feel that it’s necessarily at that moment in time the right or ideal place for you.
Aoifinn Devitts: Really powerful. I love those three— opportunity, visibility, voice— that those three key characteristics. I suppose also as leaders, the onus is on us to ensure that that is created for our teams because they may not know it yet, but that’s what they need. So I think that that’s a very good reminder. My last question is whether you have any advice for your younger self, maybe for that young Canadian graduate embarking on a new life in Hong Kong. Anything you know now that you wish you had known then?
Tory Hyndman: I would say don’t be afraid to speak up. It took me a long time to realize that when you’re in one of those meetings or you’re sitting around the table with a lot of people and you’ve got a question or something isn’t quite right or you want to clarify something or you’re, you’re not clear on something, most of the time, 99% of the time, everybody else is confused as well. So I would say don’t be afraid to speak up. Put up your hand, ask the question, have that confidence to do that. Listen to your inner voice and bring your whole self to your work. Find a role, find a career where you truly do feel that you can be yourself because that’s one of the keys to success that will allow you to really flourish and really enjoy what you’re doing.
Aoifinn Devitts: Well, Tori, it’s been such a pleasure to have this conversation. I’ve mentioned before that human capital is our industry’s greatest asset, and we talk a lot about stewardship, but I see you very much as a steward of that human capital, not only at the senior end where we’ve been having most of this discussion, but also at the very, very early stages before we even get into the pipeline. So thank you for the work you’re doing and for being such a great asset to our industry.
Tory Hyndman: Thank you, Aoifinn. It’s been super to chat to you today. Thanks ever so much for having me on as one of your guests.
Aoifinn Devitts: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring investors and their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.
