Lawrence Stephen Partners was founded by Larry S. Imely, a 20 year veteran of talent acquisition and executive search. Larry’s experiences include serving as a partner at Christian & Timbers (today CT Partners), at the time, the seventh largest search, and pre-eminent technology search firm in the US. While there, he initiated the firm’s Engineering & Consulting  and Financial Services Practices, leaving to join a college classmate to form and lead The StratfordGroup, the executive search entity of Spherion Corporation, formerly Interim Services.

Serving as one of a handful of individuals managing a publicly-held search firm, Larry and the consultant team he assembled over a five year period, built StratfordGroup into a top 12 US executive search firm with 15 offices while maintaining a large search practice of his own. While at StratfordGroup, Larry developed a series of hybrid services to broaden the service offering to the firm’s clients. These services included commercializing research and sourcing, providing competitive intelligence, outsourcing recruiting services and developing recruiter training programs.

In 2001, Larry was instrumental in starting yet another search and talent acquisition organization, paul/lawrence associates, serving a broad array of Fortune 500 firms, higher education, not-for-profit and healthcare organizations worldwide over a 13 year span. Consistently serving as the firm’s most significant billing consultant, as an innovator of new programs in talent acquisition, he also started highbridge associates, a support service to clients that provided research and sourcing support, qualifying services, competitive intelligence, contract recruiting and recruiter training.

Larry is the architect behind providing an industry-unprecedented 30 month guarantee for candidates placed under executive search; benchmarking candidates early in the process, providing performance-based approaches to search fees and creating a bevy of hybrid services to ensure a more client-focused set of programs.