Column

’Reversing’ consultants

A tight market requires a creative approach

By Frederik van der Zeeuw

An accelerated shortage of highly qualified consultants for professional management consultancy firms forces us to be creative in our search for suitable candidates. The ‘consultancy crash’ which has bedevilled the market for some years seems to be on the wane. With the economy recovering and the market having to deal with an accelerated demand for high-level consultants, the advisory industry is faced with a recruitment problem.

Let's consider the situation. On the one hand there is a frantic demand for consultants on a partner-level, who have become scarce. During the recession, many seasoned consultants sought refuge in the corporate sector without any intention of returning to the consultancy trade. On the other hand, the reduction in recruitment efforts during the past few years has lead to the current shortage of internal resources that are needed to keep leverage at middle management level in balance. In fact, leverage relations – that is, the pyramid of experience structures which a sound consultancy organisation should have available – are more often than not seriously unbalanced. In particular, there is a shortage of consultants with between, say, 7 and 12 years’ experience.

Good consultants are scarce at the best of times. The profession attracts many people, but few are, in the nature of things, suited to joining the higher echelons towards partnership level. The reason is that the required qualifications are high, and that the profession calls for a balanced personal development profile. The consultant should be well-developed in the competency area in which he advises clients, should have management skills as well as a relevant network, and should be able to generate new business. Moreover, the consultant is faced with a situation in which his personal performance is permanently transparent, challenging him every day anew. A good consultant is in competition with himself rather than with others. This requires personal characteristics which not everybody has. The professional role makes the consultant’s position relatively vulnerable and therefore less appealing to many.

Back to the problem of shortages. In order to meet market demands, we will have to operate with a good deal of inventiveness and imagination. First, both the consultant’s personal development and his professional development within the specific discipline will have to be accelerated, to be followed by a process of in-depth consolidation. The out-of-the-box recruitment approach, or, to put it somewhat irreverently, the ‘reversing’ of consultants, is a solution that has proved its success. For example, an experienced manager with his own network and exposure in his sector could turn his acquired expertise to consultancy. The crucial condition in the process would be the possession of (innate) consulting skills, and an ability to resist the temptation to take over the client’s chair. In this way the would-be consultant, from his specific perspective, could make a valuable contribution to ‘refloating’ the ship and, in the wake of that, would allow innovation, inspiration and creativity to flourish.

These qualities constitute the very basis of the consultancy profession: a permanent search for renewal, development of new product-market combinations and in-depth exploration of special areas of expertise. In short, keeping ahead of the market at all times is the consultant’s strong point as well as his fate.