By Eric Krell
Given the inflated compensation packages, consulting firms are throwing at U.S. business school graduates, newly minted MBAs probably feel like they're on top of the world. If so, their initial professional analysis is flawed.
Most consulting firms are hungrier for seasoned consultants and overseas b-school graduates — Indian "freshers" in particular — than for less elusive domestic MBAs, despite the six-figure base salaries and $30,000-plus in total bonuses Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Duke, and other top-tier U.S. business school graduates received this year. With the memory of late-1990s-era large project teams still fresh in mind, many clients insist on working with smaller project teams and more experienced consultants. At the same time, the profession's future growth once again looks bright and new talent is needed. The contradiction illustrates the challenges that consulting firm recruiters face as they strive to balance ever-fluctuating staffing needs with a talent supply that rarely matches their firm's specific and increasingly nuanced talent demands.
A recruiter's job requires constant activity. No firm's talent needs ever stop being recalibrated, regardless of whether the organization is in a growth or belt-tightening mode. Staffing demands constantly change among different practices and geographies. Even when a firm temporarily halts hiring in a particular country, as many companies did in the U.S. during the recession, recruiters often hire in other countries and constantly troll business school campuses to strengthen relationships with placement offices.
While the consulting profession's top recruiting concerns currently include the sustainability of soaring MBA pay, the quest for seasoned talent, and the expansion of overseas recruiting, the only certainty is that those issues will be replaced, sooner or later, by new challenges.
The Farm Team vs. Free Agents
While change is a given in consulting hiring activity, recruiting has been surprisingly steady at many firms — even those slowed by the recession and the swoon in U.S. technology-services spending about three years ago.
"Recruiting has been consistent for us," said Sapient Vice President, Hiring, Austin Cooke, who had just returned from a hiring trip to Germany. Comments like his often raise eyebrows. Sapient, like many other technology consulting firms, halted U.S. MBA hiring for a period in 2001. However, since 1999 Sapient has recruited and hired overseas MBAs to staff its growing number of offices in India. Today, Sapient's U.S. campus recruiting has picked up, and Cooke expects that trend to continue.
"We find that if you can build great relationships with tier-one schools, you can bring in great talent and mold those people over a couple of years," he explains. "That's generally better than having another firm shape them for a few years and then hiring them and remolding them."
Like major league baseball teams, most consulting firms must balance their staffing efforts among farm teams (universities and business schools) and the free-agent market (other consulting firms). Rookies come cheaper and are more malleable, but they also require time and money to develop to the point where clients are comfortable with them joining the project lineup. Free agents are more difficult and expensive to lure away from their current teams. Yet seasoned consultants give a start-up boutique firm much-needed marketplace cachet, experience, and valuable Rolodexes — much like a free-agent all-star acquisition draws fans to an expansion team's new ballpark.
In recent years, Bain & Company, which once relied nearly exclusively on developing its own talent, has increased its veteran recruiting, which Head of Global Recruiting David Sanderson says has helped the firm fill specific industry and functional practice needs. "It allows you to more effectively balance your resource needs and bring in people at different times in the year," he explains.
Campus recruiting occurs at set times: Firms typically analyze their preferred set of feeder schools during the summer, hone their marketing messages in August, and then hit campuses in September, when they focus on second-year MBA students and, in some cases, undergraduates in their final years. The hunt for summer interns begins in late October or November, and firms generally extend internship offers in January.
Brave New Campus
On campus, recruiters split their time between formal "career day" presentations and interviews, and less formal interactions with candidates in academic club meetings and coffee shops.
For every business school on Bain's recruiting list, the firm assigns a lead partner responsible for the relationship. The firm also assigns a lead partner responsible for helping the global recruiting staff fulfill the staffing needs in office locations around the world (specific industry and functional hiring needs are handled in large part by Sanderson's staff).
Lauren Shapiro, director of recruiting at Archstone Consulting, regularly recruits consultants to join her on campus visits. "It's very important that we bring the right people to campus," she says. "The right people are alumni of the school and enthusiastic consultants who are excited to share their Archstone story. They can demonstrate the kind of track a new hire will have at Archstone."
Shapiro also finds value in her informal campus interactions, which include sitting in on meetings of a business school's consulting club. "In that setting, we can use a more personal approach in cultivating our candidates and sharing our message with them," she notes.
Kristen Clemmer, director of recruiting with Katzenbach Partners, finds that top business school students who participate in nonprofit organizations tend to be a strong match for her firm, so she often checks in with those groups. "A major part of my job is sitting down and talking to students in coffee shops," she reports. "Students today tend to be mature in that they understand the value of talking about the profession and of establishing new relationships, regardless of whether they immediately lead to a job offer."
The campuses and nearby coffee shops have grown crowded with recruiters in recent months. "During the past few years, a lot of recruiters were just visiting," says Clemmer, whose firm has been in the hiring mode ever since it opened its doors in 1998. Sapient, for example, held r
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