AlixPartners announced the appointment of Theodore “Ted” C. Bililies as managing director and chief talent officer (CTO) for the firm. Bililies, a Ph.D. with 28 years of professional business experience, was most recently a partner at the management assessment and development firm ghSMART & Co.

In his new position at AlixPartners, Bililies will report to CEO Fred Crawford, and will help the firm fulfill its commitment to profitable growth coupled with continued excellence in client service by focusing on finding, assessing and selecting top-notch talent, and also on ongoing talent development inside the firm.

“This newly created CTO position is a key part of our ongoing commitment to a growth strategy that refuses to compromise when it comes to recruiting anything less than the highest-caliber professionals in the world to join the AlixPartners team, and that also refuses to compromise on offering all of our people the very best in career-development opportunities,” said Crawford. “Starting over three decades ago, AlixPartners has grown from a firm of one person to a firm of more than 1,000 professionals all over the globe, and the primary reason for that has been our ability to attract and keep truly extraordinary people. With Ted’s deep expertise and experience in talent assessment and development, we are demonstrating our commitment to maintaining that excellence.”

Bililies spent nearly 10 years at ghSMART, headquartered in Chicago, where he specialized in executive leadership and talent management for hundreds of private-equity firms, alternative-asset investors, and corporate boards of directors and CEOs globally. His clients included some of the largest private-equity firms, global banks and organizations in the world, and he was consistently a top producer financially for the firm throughout his tenure.

Prior to ghSMART, Bililies was a managing director and senior vice president at Manchester Consulting in Boston, a firm specializing in executive and organizational development, senior career transition and corporate board governance. While there, he managing a staff of 25, and helped double the office’s revenue in consulting services.

Earlier in his career, Bililies was vice president and the first director of executive and organizational development for State Street, also in Boston, where he was responsible for designing and implementing a comprehensive, global blueprint for the assessment, development and deployment of that company’s senior leadership talent.

Before that, he was vice president, general manager and founder of the Boston office at Personnel Decisions International, a management consulting firm; and managing director at Powell Associates, a diversified human resources consulting firm.

Bililies began his business career in 1985 as co-founder and managing partner of Wellspring Consulting in Boston, a firm focused on various human resources and organizational development solutions.

In addition to his business career, Bililies has held a variety of teaching positions over several years at Harvard, in that university’s medical, business, arts & sciences, and extension schools. He has taught on the topics of leadership development, talent assessment and organizational behavior.

Bililies said, “AlixPartners is the kind of firm high-performance players dream of working at — one where you’re surrounded by terrific people, where your contributions really do make a difference and where the standards are very high, yet the culture is lacking in pretention and instead celebrates common sense — in fact, common sense is even one of AlixPartners official core values. I very much look forward to helping the firm build on its already-successful model to accomplish even greater things in the future.”