About McKinley
History of McKinley Group, Consulting and Finance
Paul Beard, Chris Ohlendorf, Kurt Rakos and Tony Sorensen founded McKinley Group in September 2003. The four Partners had previously worked together at the legacy search firm Hayden & Associates prior to it being sold. Today, McKinley specializes in the placement of consumer packaged goods, engineering, information technology, marketing and sales personnel. The firm has been named to the Inc. 5000 for four consecutive years and the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal’s Fast 50 five times. Group has a combined 275 years of recruiting experience. Since 2005, the firm has made 1,800 placements of which 1,746 were Minnesota-based positions.
In late 2003, McKinley Consulting was founded to mark McKinley’s entrance into the IT consulting industry. Today, McKinley Consulting delivers consultants that cover the SDLC (system development life cycle). Consulting delivers these candidates utilizing JIT (just in time) recruiting methods, allowing clients the flexibility to add staff to their projects as needed. The client receives a specialized candidate that can come in and hit the ground running, not a consultant that needs two weeks to come up to speed. Consulting recruiters recruit to specific profiles, allowing them to become experts in each and making them the “go-to” recruiters in the market. Typically, a pre-qualified candidate can be presented to the client within a 24-72 hour window.
In 2005, the Accounting and Finance division of McKinley Group was spun off and became a stand-alone entity named McKinley Finance. This organization places experienced accounting and finance personnel at organizations ranging from small to mid-size companies to fortune 500 companies. Finance is led by Partner Tony Fornetti, who spent the first seven years of his career as a CPA with Ernst & Young LLP.
