What is a consultant?

A consultant is an expert or an experienced professional in a specific field and has a wide knowledge of the subject matter(s).  A consultant can work permanently on site, a remote office location or a combination of the two.  Maybe you only need remote support for a few hours a week with a quick weekly office visit at one or multiple locations.

Solving Business Problems

Businesses have a variety of problems that normally can’t be solved by conventional job requestions postings.  A consultant agency works with the business to not only identify the problems or pain points, but also the skills that the business is looking for.  Agencies should not only want their consultants to solve initial problems but continue to provide value and help solve new business pain points.

What are the benefits of using a consultant?

Save Time and Money

How many hours are spent by a Manager or HR professional reviewing resumes, setting up and conducting interviews?  How many individuals are included in the initial screening calls and first and second round interviews on applicants that would not have made the cut and what is that total hourly rate cost?  A consulting agency filters out 80% of the applicants and gets you the 20% that you want to interview.

When a business looks at using a consultant vs hiring an employee it is typically related to managing liability. When an employee is hired, employees receive benefits such as stock options, health benefits, paid training, paid sick days and holidays, etc.  When you hire a consultant, all of the benefits, paid off days, training etc that are presented to the consultant are paid by the consultant agency.  In the unfortunate event that the consultant is not the right fit for the business, the consultant agency handles the communication and your business would not have to pay unemployment costs.

Get Qualified Resources

Our approach is simple.  With your pain points and required skills identified we sort through our resources to find the qualified candidates vs applications.  A lot of talent attraction is aimed at attracting applicants, whether they are responding to an advertisement, applying on special board, or through your website. A lot of these people may not be good matches for the role hence a lot of time will be invested in filtering, assessing, matching and communicating with them. When we talk about a bad candidate experience it’s normally an application experience that we are referring to. Time and resource-poor recruitment teams may not be able to run a thorough matching process. Using a recruitment agency should mean that you see only candidates – job seekers who have been pre-selected to match all the criteria that you are looking for and who are worthy of consideration and interview.

Managing Candidates

Another added benefit is a consulting agency manages the candidates.  When HR professional has to directly call a passive candidate this often results in an offhand behavior, unreasonable demands and a lack of showing up for interviews.  Candidates often have the upper hand at this point and that is not what we want.  We a candidate is referred to the HR professional, all of the wrinkles should be ironed out.  At this point, there have been several interactions to increases the percentage of intent.  This also put the HR professional back in the position of power, which can save the business thousands and it’s much easier to manage candidates.

Time to Decide

Most business can determine if a consultant is going to work for their business or team within the first 90 days.  If it’s not going to work out for the consultant after the desired term, we will do our best to find a consultant that will.  Consultant agencies offer a couple of models.  Models offered are Contract to Hire (CTR) or Contract for a term.  In both models, the agency is paid a rate usually with a standard finder fee and everything else is handled by the consultant agency throughout the CTR period or the full contract term. With the contract to hire model, the same conditions apply and a buy option when the consultant is hired as an employee.

Knowledge of the Market

The best recruiters will have their finger on the pulse of their specialist markets and can give the hiring team insight into what is happening. They should know the available talent, where they are and how to reach out to them, salary rates, career expectations, available skill-sets and current hiring complexities. If other businesses are struggling to find the same people as you, they should be able to advise on alternative solutions. The best will act as partners and collaborators, and should still be your eyes and ears in the market.