Monday 8th Oct, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Consulting firms have spent millions of dollars in the last few years to associate a specific set of values with their overarching brand. Quality, integrity, expertise, global reach: All the traditionally big ideas in professional services have been linked to one firm or another, or even to all of them. And firms have hoped that, by doing this, they’re having an impact not only on what their clients think but also on how employees and prospective employees see them. In the war for talent, brand is a big gun.
But it’s also a fairly indiscriminate gun. Consulting firms have already found that a firm’s brand doesn’t necessarily help it sell specific services, where messages about quality, integrity, expertise and global reach pale into insignificance when faced with the need for a concrete, “killer” solution that no other firm can boast.
Tuesday 28th Aug, 2018
By Rachel Duk.
If our analyst team could earn a pound each time we heard from consulting leaders that “talent is a big challenge”, we’d all have taken early retirement by now, spending our days swilling Dom Perignon on our superyacht. Unfortunately for all involved, we’re still locked away in a dark basement frenetically examining the consulting industry, while firms are no closer to solving the talent conundrum. We all know the drill: Great people are in short supply, the much-maligned Millennial generation are less committed than Leonardo DiCaprio in a new relationship, and those blasted start-ups are, mysteriously, more alluring to young professionals than the concept of process-mapping in the back-end of nowhere. And while some consulting firms are developing retention strategies for their flighty talent pool, many more accept this situation as the new status quo.
Yet as a Big Four graduate myself, I’m convinced there’s a better way.
Thursday 15th Mar, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
You can tell we’ve entered a new phase in the consulting industry’s perennial “war for talent” when a new term emerges.
In the heady days of the late 1990s, the talk was all about fungibility. Client demand was changing so rapidly that consulting firms were struggling to provide the capabilities the brave, new dotcom world was looking for. They couldn’t recruit fast enough, so had to find ways to re-badge people: “Re-spraying an auditor”, was how one Big Four firm partner put it to me; “lipstick on pigs”, was the rather more trenchant view of a client. “Fungibility”—the ease with which an individual could be moved from one practice to another was the rather more politically correct term that gained common currency. But in today’s consulting firm, fungibility isn’t enough. Digital transformation projects, in particular, require a wide range of skills, only some of which are visible on day one. Specialisation—indeed, hyper-specialisation—rules: Clients aren’t willing to trade quality for breadth, and they certainly don’t believe it’s possible for anyone to be a master of multiple trades.
Wednesday 3rd Jan, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
Over the course of 2017, we’ve interviewed almost 400 senior consulting leaders around the world, usually the most senior person in a territory or industry, picking their brains about the trends shaping their clients’ businesses and the pressures being placed on the consulting model.
Having spent a lot of time writing about women in consulting—why so few make it to the top, the barriers to their progression, and what firms can do to change things—I thought it would be interesting to look at the gender balance of the consulting leaders we speak to.
Wednesday 29th Mar, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
We’re only three months into 2017, but it’s already clear that the word of the year in consulting will be robotics.
It’s rapidly becoming—some would say has become—the catch-all phrase for the use of new digital technologies, including cognitive computing and artificial intelligence, to automate parts of the consulting process. It’s a huge opportunity: as a previous article on this blog argued, there are aspects of strategy consulting—to name just one example—that could be done better and more quickly by machines, leaving people to spend more time analysing and interpreting the data. But inevitably it’s also a challenge—or rather two challenges.
Thursday 23rd Mar, 2017
By Alison Huntington.
This article was originally published in HR Review on 20th March 2017
The definition of success is different for everyone. For some it’s a lofty title and six-figure salary; for others it’s feeling like they’re making a difference. Others want a fulfilling career alongside the other important things in life: friends, family, and generally having a life outside work.
While each person has their own vision of what success looks like, the £100bn+ global consulting sector has a very set measure of success for its staff: revenues generated. Assessment of staff at consulting firms from manager grade (the middle of the consulting ladder) upwards can broadly be summed up as “bigger is better”—the more work a consultant has brought in over the course of the year, the higher the rating in their appraisal.
Wednesday 21st Dec, 2016
By Fiona Czerniawska.
*At Source, we’re used to hearing the phrase, “a war for talent”, but recent interviewees have talked about “the war on talent”. We report back from the frontline.
[THE SCENE: 1917. A PATCHY MIST ROLLS ACROSS A MUDDY FIELD, POCKMARKED WITH SHELL HOLES AND STUDDED WITH THE STUMPS OF DEAD TREES. IN A TRENCH, TWO MEN COWER, WHILE A THIRD TRAINS HIS BINOCULARS ON THE RIDGE AHEAD OF THEM.]
Captain: [REMINISCING] … the jolly old days when you’d be positively tripping over decent people. Recruitment was like shooting fish in a barrel…
Corporal: [SHOUTING] Sir! Business analysts coming over the top!!
Thursday 24th Nov, 2016
By Edward Haigh.
That’s the deliberately slightly playful question we’ve been asking consulting leaders recently, as part of our research into what’s going on from a talent perspective. And it’s already elicited some interesting responses.
The one that caught my attention the other day was someone saying that they’d build more relationships with small specialist firms.
Thursday 5th Nov, 2015
Consulting’s eternal war for talent has only intensified of late as rapid growth in some large markets and a need to recruit for digital skills has left many firms feeling short staffed. But perhaps the more daunting challenge comes from new sources of talent competition: whereas firms previously competed primarily among themselves and with investment banks to win the brightest recruits, they’re now facing a challenge from tech companies and start-ups, which many job seekers consider more exciting and possibly less brutal places to work.
|