Judith M. von Seldeneck

Judith M. von Seldeneck is the founder and chair of Diversified Search Group, headquartered in Philadelphia. A pioneer in the search industry, she has been identifying and placing senior-level executive talent around the country for more than four decades. A born-and-bred North Carolinian, she began her career as an executive assistant to then-Senator Walter F. Mondale in Washington, D.C. Her road into executive search commenced in the early 1970s when she bought into a small Philadelphia firm founded to find professional roles for women. Buying out her partners in 1974, over the next several decades, von Seldeneck built Diversified Search into one of the top ten executive search firms in the nation.

During the course of her career, von Seldeneck has been recognized by the executive search industry as setting the standard for retained executive search and has been active on numerous public, private and not-for-profit boards of directors. Some of these include Citizens Financial Group, Tasty Baking Company, Teleflex Incorporated, CoreStates Financial Corporation, Meridian Bancorp and AAA Mid-Atlantic. She has also served as chair for the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors. She formerly served on the Comcast NBCUniversal Joint Diversity Advisory Council and as chairperson of the Women’s Advisory Council. She was also a founder of the Forum of Executive Women, the largest association of women business leaders in the Philadelphia region, and recently created the JVS Philadelphia Fund for Women, providing funding for women-owned startups and early-stage companies.

In 2022, she was included on the Forbes 50 Over 50 list, highlighting groundbreaking women who are making an impact and have achieved remarkable success in their careers. She has also received dozens of awards and honors recognizing her achievements both professionally and philanthropically. These include the William Penn Award, the highest honor bestowed by the business community of Greater Philadelphia; the Business Leader of the Year Award from Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business; the Association of Executive Search Consultants’ Eleanor H. Raynolds Award for excellence in executive search; being designated as one of BusinessWeek’s top fifty most influential executive recruiters in the world; and induction into the Philadelphia Business Hall of Fame. She is a global board member of AltoPartners. She was also the second woman chair of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce and the only two-time Lifetime Achievement Award winner from the Association of Executive Search Consultants.