Now, as certain consulting firms begin to report a bump in demand for
 |
consulting services, top talent officers say that they are ready once more to engage their rivals in battle. And whether they are pursuing on-campus recruitment opportunities or dishing out plumb consulting assignments, the profession's new weapons of choice are expected to open a new strategic front in the war for talent.
"We were worried that the MBAs would be reluctant to post their resumes on our Web site, but in fact they were okay with it, and now we know whether there's a potential fit before we move to begin a process," says Booz Allen Hamilton's chief personnel officer, Horacio Rozanski, who estimates that Booz Allen will hire more than 3,000 people this year. "This means that we will probably receive half a million resumes on a global basis, and the challenge becomes how to not waste both their time and ours."
By having job candidates post their resumes on the careers component of the firm's site, Booz Allen is able to filter job candidates and at the same time supply interviewing tools for strong prospects.
Another firm once more adding head count is Accenture. Besides enhancing its offshore workforce, the firm's management now boasts of adding 800 consultants within the first two months of its first fiscal quarter.
"There are countless examples of how we have won pieces of business of which 80 to 90 percent is sourced in the U.S. but 10 to 20 percent is sourced outside it. And this is enough to give us the pricing edge to win new business." says Accenture CEO Joe Forehand. According to Accenture management, the firm's offshore component is creating more opportunities for consultants in the U.S. as it empowers the firm to bring more business in the door.
"What we tell our people in the U.S. is that we have to continue to innovate, and to do that we need price points on certain skills to remain competitive," explains Forehand, who adds that another factor impacting where Accenture sources talent is the availability of math and science graduates, an area where American schools have reportedly been steadily slipping.
Consultants Still Carry Sway on Campus
It was back in the late 1930s that McKinsey & Company began to adopt a mindset that would eventually upend its talent model and dislodge its industry recruitment pipeline. Going forward, the firm would increasingly seek to curtail the hiring of experienced business executives, and escalate its efforts to train people in their more formative years.
McKinsey's partners reasoned that such individuals could be located in the same places law firms and accounting firms found talent — on university campuses.
More than 60 years later, many consulting firms continue to look to university campuses as their primary source of new talent, as both graduate and undergraduate students from top schools continue to eagerly pursue entry-level consulting positions. "I think that you'll find there's a more heated competition on campus this year than in recent past years," says A.T. Kearney senior officer Mick Siegel, who recently joined Booz's Rozanski as well as other top human capitalists at a round table convened by Consulting (see round table discussion, page 34).
"We're expecting a big uptick in our hiring of more junior people because we held back here, and the raw number of recruits that we are today bringing into the firm is significantly higher from, say, 2002," says Siegel.
The task of filtering resumes can be an even more formidable challenge for smaller firms, where often the recruitment function is shared by multiple partners. Last year, 13.5 percent of Harvard University's senior class submitted resumes to Katzenbach Partners LLP of New York City. As Katzenbach has grown to be a firm of nearly 400 consultants, its reputation on top college campuses has become one that any of the profession's top strategy firms would envy.
Besides Harvard's senior class, Katzenbach was also a favorite among seniors at Princeton and Yale, where 15 and 11 percent of graduating seniors submitted resumes.
In the end, Katzenbach extended offers to only 0.97 percent of all applicants (11 offers for 1129 applicants).
"If there is some level of human behavior interviewing that could be done using Web tools, we would make good use of it," remarks Booz Allen's Rozanski, who believes that the greatest impact information technology has so far had on talent management is in the area of recruitment. But Web-enhanced recruiting is only one of the weapons being deployed in the talent war's next big battle.
Transparent Staffing
"The real winners are going to be the firms that allow consultants to have control over their own development and their own opportunities," says Russ Campanello, senior vice president of human resources for Keane Inc. of Boston, MA.
"We have an internal set of tools that are enhancing transparency and allowing us now to better gauge consultant capabilities using human capital asset measures so that we have a 360-degree view of individual consultants," Campanello explains.
Still, certain consultants are quick to point out the limitations of applications designed to help identify and deploy consultants.
"When it comes to staffing projects, I have not seen a piece of technology that can make us better at it than we currently are," says Rozanski, who adds that staffing requires a large degree of "negotiation" between parties — something software can hardly replace.
Others say that the shortcomings of the sector's staffing applications are in part due to their origins.
"We first saw applications really emerge at the practice level five or six years ago, and here we saw maybe 300 consultants in Germany buy a solution, or perhaps a practice would build a tool for itself, and these were often crude and rude," says David Hofferberth, an analysts with Aberdeen, who currently track applications development inside the professional services sector. "What's happening now is that we see world-class organizations with five thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand people seeking to leverage a single package."
Hofferberth says that before any software can be successfully adopted, the firms themselves had better define their people development strategies. Too often, the firms have not already defined the portfolios of skills they will need to have to compete in the future.
"We've actually spent a lot of time during the past couple of years defining roles and competencies and career paths," says Wick Keating, chief technology officer for American Management Systems. "We began having something of a meaningful debate around a separate technical career track. Whereas in the traditional professional services path you would start to manage, then be a team leader or a project manager, and so forth, a technical career track would be for those who aren't necessarily leaders, but are critical for solving key technical problems."
The Will to Change
Today, most consultants agree, technology will likely never be able to staff a project without some "internal negotiation" between partners, but it is becoming an effective tool for those firms looking to get a jumpstart on staffing client engagements.
"The technology is going to quickly tell you who is available, and it's going to tell the staffing manager who's affordable," says Hofferberth.
For those firms willing to make the investment, Hofferberth says that it's everyday situations in which the payoff is first likely to come. "You may want this consultant, and this one and that one, but then you'll need to know the profitability, and these tools may tell you, 'Sorry, it's not going to work, given your profitability requirements,'" he explains.
As more firms find themselves once again entrenched in the battle for talent, Hofferberth believes that such transparency is now emerging as a key competitive advantage — one that few firms will be able to ignore.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.