One on One with Diamond's Ed Brady

Brady: On the undergrad campuses, I think that the quality is just continuing to go up. The amount of experience you're seeing in undergrads is significantly higher. Now, mind you, we have a fairly small undergraduate recruiting program, so we're going after the top of the top. We're seeing some very experienced people coming out of undergrad, which is really impressive.

CM: Do you rely on executive search firms to help find people?

Brady: We use executive search firms just like everybody else, but we try to limit the number of firms we work with, so that they know us better. Obviously, it's an expensive proposition to use them, but to the extent that we have a few and we're focused in our relationships with them and we have a very strong partnership, we think that this helps us a lot. Ultimately, it does kind of cut down on the cost, because we can separate the best candidates more effectively.

CM: What about referrals from within?

Brady: Yes . . . well, our referral program has improved over the past couple of years. We don't do what I would call referral bonuses, or what certain firms might call bounties or what-have-you. But we do encourage our people to participate in a referral program. We run little contests where there are prizes, which are nice things. We tend to recognize the people at our companywide meetings who have referred people and then their name gets pulled out of a hat to win prizes.

But, quite honestly, because we are a publicly traded firm and everyone in our firm is a shareholder, it's certainly in all of our best interests to make sure that we have the best people here. When we do what I'll call our internal satisfaction survey, and ask our people, "What are the biggest reasons why you came here and why you continue to stay?," it's the people. The people and the work. So, you know, everyone's very invested in ensuring that we have the right people here.

CM: We hear more and more that people are entering consulting not as a career, but as a place to learn and move on . . .

Brady: Well, lifestyle, as an industry metric or issue, is always one of those things that tends to lead people into industry after some period of time. And when we interview people on campus, particularly at the business schools, they'll often say, "I want to get a couple years' experience in consulting where I can get great experience, and then I want to start my own company or do something else."

From our perspective, we're obviously trying to hire people who want to make a career here. The flipside of that is that, like other firms — particularly very, very respected firms — we want to improve our alumni program. Now, we're a firm that's coming up on 14 years old, so our base is going to be, obviously, much smaller than some. But we want to help people transition, because we recognize, on the one hand, that, you know, consulting is not going to be the career choice for everyone.

We're quite pleased that when people do leave us, only a very, very small percentage go to other consulting firms.

So we try to ensure and particularly have taken up initiatives of late to improve our alumni program, which really has a lot to do with helping people transition. Because it's in our best interest to help them get placed at clients or potential target client organizations.

CM: Do you try to rein in your people from traveling so much?

Brady: We have a policy, internally, of 4-1, which means four nights or four days at the client and one day either in our offices or at home.

Now, we've got a little different model. We've got two main offices in the U.S., in New York and Chicago, being our headquarters. We also have small offices in Hartford and Washington, DC, largely to serve our base of clients in those locations. But, for us, it's a virtual model this tends to mean that people are traveling.

CM: Do you try to encourage your people to manage their travel?

Brady: Our focus has been on ensuring that we operate on the 4-1 model. We've had it for a number of years. We've really been tracking it for the last couple and, quite frankly, very, very few of our people travel what I'd call 5-0. You know, leave — you know, either leave Sunday night or leave Monday morning and come back Friday night. In fact, it's based on client demand, and 5-0 is only 5 percent of our people.

So people are either staffed locally — which is about 30 percent of our people — or traveling 4-1. And then you have the people who are working remotely, and we also actually have a very small percentage, almost equal to the client demand, who travel 5-0 by choice.

CM: Are there alternative work arrangements for people?

Brady: Yes. We have flexible work arrangement programs that we instituted about three years ago. And these include short-term, no travel. So when issues come up in people's lives, we want to help them. Generally, they can — we try to get them to work remotely for our clients, but they can also work on intellectual capital development, business development, etc. So we try to, and we also have other things like part-time programs and leave of absence programs and things of that nature, meant to help people get through life. As life happens, we don't want to lose people, and it's also recognizing some unique natures — you know, unique features of our model.

But, so, from a travel perspective, we track it. We try to be very attentive to it, when we're staffing people. We have people who live on the West Coast, people who live on the East Coast. We try to take into consideration their geography.

During the past six months, we have launched an initiative internally to capture more explicitly people's staffing preferences, which can include the type of work they want to work on, the location where they want to work — it can be, a variety of different things. But, as you might expect, one of the leading things that people care about is working locally or working in a particular location.