Human Capital for Public Private Partnerships (P3s). New talent for new ventures. Governments and private equity firms around the world are aligning and using P3 financing and operating ventures to upgrade, replace, or build essential infrastructure assets for a specific time period and with an expectation for attractive financial return. Because these projects create new sources of financing at a time of chronic infrastructure underinvestment, it’s expected that their use will grow in all major industrialized countries. Korn Ferry’s Public Private Partnership sector offers the industry’s first interdisciplinary approach to the human capital requirements for these new ventures. By combining the global reach and depth of the Firm’s Private Equity, Real Estate, Transport/Logistics, Energy, and Construction practices, the P3 team offers investors and municipalities an integrated talent strategy that covers organizational design, assessment, recruiting, onboarding, and leadership training. Because P3s have unique human capital needs. © In a typical search, a departing executive is replaced by a new one. In a P3 arrangement, it’s not uncommon for several members of the management team to be recruited at once. This usually requires rigorous assessment to determine which combinations of candidates will yield the strongest team. © Because P3s have specific timeframes for their operations (after which the venture reverts to government control), they must have precise organizational alignment at the start. Ambiguity will result in failure at the organizational level. Roles and responsibilities need to be precisely engineered to ensure all functions are covered and no coverage is duplicated within the leadership team. © In a study of successful and failed P3s, the Korn Ferry Institute found that in ‘demand- risk’ P3 projects, a Chief Commercial Officer is recruited early in the P3 formation. For ‘demand-risk’ and ‘availability-payment’ P3s together, successful projects have a Project Manager operating at the senior-team level. © P3s have more constituents than either a public or a private venture. Thus, the senior team needs to be particularly agile as any underserved constituency can wreak havoc on financial and operational outcomes. P3s are further challenged by the need to operate in a ‘bond-like environment’ while producing ‘private equity-like’ returns. Few professionals have both sets of skills.