Talent

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.

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. 

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.