Federated Hermes Names Kimberly Craver Global HR Head

Dolores Dudiak has run human resources at Federated Hermes for 41 years, longer than many of the firm's staff have been alive. It has just named the person who takes over when she retires.

Kimberly Craver becomes Head of Global Human Resources on 17 August, arriving from the law firm Reed Smith, where she is Chief Human Resources Officer.

She will report to Ray Hanley, President of Federated Investors Management Company, and take charge of the people function at an investment house that runs some US$903bn in assets across the US, UK and Europe.

"Kim brings a rare combination of legal grounding, operational discipline, and people-first leadership," says J. Christopher Donahue, President and CEO of Federated Hermes. Her record of "building high-performing HR organisations at a global scale", he adds, makes her "exactly the right leader to guide our people strategy as we continue to grow our organisation around the world".

Federated Hermes can afford the investment. Its shares are up around 10% this year and more than 20% over the past 12 months, so the build-out looks like a firm investing in its people from a position of strength, not distress.

From the law to the people function

Kim came to human resources by an unusual road. She started as a labour and employment lawyer, the field that writes the rules for hiring, firing and much in between, before moving into HR leadership across professional services and industrial firms.

At Reed Smith she has run a global HR team of more than 100 people, serving a firm of roughly 3,000 staff spread over more than 30 offices in the US, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

It is a background Federated Hermes clearly prized, a mix of legal grounding and operational discipline for a function that is now as much about compliance and data as about culture.

A function worth building

At Federated Hermes, Kim inherits the whole of it. Her remit runs from talent acquisition and performance management to learning and development, total rewards, employee engagement and the HR technology and analytics underneath, with the firm's reward, resourcing, talent and HR-systems teams all reporting to her.

Naming a dedicated global HR leader, rather than folding the work into another job, marks people strategy as something the firm means to invest in as it grows, at a moment when much of the listed financial sector has made headlines for cutting instead.

"I'm honoured to join Federated Hermes at such an exciting time for the firm as it continues to grow both in its US home market but also around the world," says Kim. She looks forward, she adds, to "building on Federated Hermes' strong culture and to supporting our people as the firm continues to develop".

Dolores has been there through the firm's transformation from a US money-market specialist into a global manager, a shift sealed by its 2018 combination with Britain's Hermes.

Her four decades will be a hard act to follow. Federated Hermes is betting that a lawyer who learned people from the rulebook up is the one to do it.