Roger Philby

Roger is the CEO and Founder of Chemistry. He has 14 years experience of hiring and creating best in class resourcing and development solutions in some of today’s toughest talent markets and geographies. A true resourcing practitioner he started Chemistry after finding the recruitment and talent consulting market in general bereft of any new thinking or customer centric solutions. Bottom line, he thought talent management was being done so badly, the only way he could change the market was to do it himself!

Roger led the people re-engineering of Energis communications with Archie Norman (Chairman) and Jon Pluthero (CEO), as Head of Resourcing he was responsible for creating a business centric resourcing function, hiring 650 people in 12 months, including the management team that turned Energis round and created £950M of value in 2 years.

As Director, Europe for Maple Optical Systems, US based telecoms vendor, Roger created and developed a European software testing team and commercial function to create a market for a breakthrough telecoms product set. Creating board levels relationships with the likes of BT (cold calling Ben Verwaaen in the process!), Deutsche Telekom, Colt, C&W, Telefonica, Roger once again took a blank sheet of paper and delivered $10’s Million of value, (unfortunately not for himself, although he made some mad VC types very happy!).

As Head of Resourcing, EMEA for Nortel Networks Roger led a team of 100+ recruiters to deliver 3,000+ hires in the late 90’s. He single handedly created and delivered the Nortel Sales Academy, hiring 100 Account Directors in 10 European countries simultaneously, combating comprehensively the War For Talent that existed in the telecommunications market at the time. He holds the proud record of being fired and re-hired twice by Nortel, (broke brand guidelines in delivering innovative resourcing solutions, apparently the result didn’t count!) he consistently (as he does now) pushed the thinking behind how you hire, retain and develop talent in to new realms.

Prior to Nortel Networks, Roger was fast tracked through consultant and management levels at Michael Page Sales & Marketing, an organisation that taught him as much about how not to do recruitment as it did how to do it. An experience he would never have missed for the world! Brilliant hedonistic, red brace wearing times…(he didn’t really wear red braces).