Kent Taylor graduated in 1973 with a Masters Degree in Labor and Industrial Relations from Michigan State University, following a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Economics from the same institution. His career has focused on human resources management, first within corporate America and since 1980 in employment consulting.



For the first six years of his career, Kent worked in human resource management within the professional services sector; first with Lester B. Knight and Associates, a major Consulting/ Engineering firm and subsequently with a multi-national architectural/engineering firm Perkins and Will, both in Chicago. There his last corporate position was World-wide Human Resources Manager. A subsequent move to a high-level executive search operation, Newpher, Baas and Company, provided invaluable first- exposure to the techniques of executive search based on the Booz Allen Hamilton model, the originators of the search industry and its methodology.



In 1980 Kent formed Taylor Search Associates, Inc., a boutique search firm specializing in high tech employment consulting. It was the first such specialty firm in the Chicago Area. This firm applied high-level search techniques to technical recruiting assignments, a radical departure from the contingency approach that dominated this sector at the time. The firm specialized in hard-to-fill, you might say esoteric requirements usually avoided by the competition due to their difficulty.



After 15 years Kent decided once again that the market demanded a new approach to employment consulting and opened an affiliate called Prairie Resource Group. This business model was based on an hourly fee-for- services model that allowed clients to partner in the process to a greater extent than thought possible before. The logic was simple: the easier the assignment, the less it cost the client. The more assignments performed for a given client generates economies of scale that serve to continually lower costs to that client while improving efficiencies. This business model has taken off and now constitutes the vast majority of his business within virtually all employment sectors. Currently he is concentrating on expansion of services into the broader arena of business consulting.