New Reservoirs of Old Blood

The empire strikes back

The fact is often that the grass has not been so green, which is one reason Deloitte Consulting this September took out a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal urging those consultants who now count themselves among the rank-and-file of e-consultancies to reconsider their career options. The ad suggests that as e-consultancies brace for what appears to be a shake-out in the Web services sector, consultants should leap back to a well-established firm — one that will survive the calamities that lie ahead.
"We believe this [shake-out] represents a turning point in the market, and we now offer a superior opportunity for talented people," exclaims Deloitte's global director of strategy and innovation, Stephen Sprinkle, who aggressively began courting the press upon the ad's debut to better amplify Deloitte's notion that Web consulting was hitting a wall, and more well-established firms would now be stepping in to dominate the space.
 It was similar thinking that prompted Andersen Consulting's U.S. managing partner, John Kelly, to earlier this year send out a letter to approximately two thousand ex-Andersen consultants who went out to seek new fortunes in the brave new world of start-ups and dot-coms. The letter, sent out shortly after Nasdaq's April slide, began, "A lot has changed since you left. I encourage you to take another look at building a long-term career with us."
Jack Wilson, managing general partner of Andersen Consulting's year-old venture capital company known as AC Ventures, says that the consultancy has a greater variety of opportunities to offer consultants today than it did a year ago.
 "Yes, we are reaching out to former Andersen consultants who went to dot-coms," confides Wilson. "What we realized is that one in ten dot-coms that get funded gets it right, and so if you think of the learning curve, some of these people and all they have already probably experienced, they are great candidates to work at Andersen Consulting or to work in one of our AC Ventures portfolio companies."
Similarly, KPMG has been busy reaching out to its alumni.
"It is really just about keeping the lines of communication open," says Sean Huurman, national director of recruiting for KPMG in Dallas. Huurman explains that human nature dictates that the firm take the initiative in maintaining contact.
"It may just be a simple sense of pride that keeps an ex-KPMGer from picking up the phone and calling us," says Huurman. "It isn't easy for someone to say, 'Hey, I left to try this great new thing, and it didn't work out.' So we try to make it easy for them, and get the message out there that there are no hard feelings and we would love to have them come back."

Huurman says that the firm won't call everyone — only the top performers — but if you are one of the chosen, you can expect to hear a special message from KPMG touting the company's new identity as an LLC (Limited Liability Corporation). "We pitch how the environment has changed here," says Huurman.
"We are no longer an LLP (Limited Liability Partnership). We like to think of ourselves as a two-billion-dollar start-up, and we have redefined ourselves as an e-business integrator. We are no longer the ERP and Y2K consulting partnership that we were," says Huurman.

Keeping tabs on your alumni

Kathleen Gioffre, Americas director of recruiting for Deloitte Consulting in New York, says that her firm does make an effort to keep track of "good performers" who left for greener pastures. "We call them every once in a while," she says. "We keep it subtle."
According to Gioffre, Deloitte takes care not to send the wrong message to those who have remained loyal. "We know it is a tight market," she says, "but we want to strike the right balance with the people who have stuck it out and remained."
Deloitte maintains an alumni database, but a good deal of the firm's re-recruiting efforts rely on informal channels. "A lot of managers just use their own notes," says Gioffre.

She does say, however, that Deloitte plans to get more organized about recruiting alumni. "In two months, we plan to have a new streamlined HR system that will track a person from initial contact all the way through to alumni status. We expect to leverage this as a recruiting tool."
PricewaterhouseCoopers plans to launch an alumni Web site in the fall. "This will not be just for recruiting," says Tracy Anabile, partner in charge of HR for the American theater in New York. "We view it as a means to keep the lines open. For example, we use our alumni to develop focus groups that can help us better understand our external image."
Anabile says that alumni can contribute in other ways as well. "We want to use our alumni as contractors and temporary employees where appropriate. And, of course, in some cases, we want to recruit them back. Sometimes all it takes is a casual conversation, which is why it is important for us to make that first call — it can be tough for someone who left to take that initiative."
PwC still operates as a partnership and remains tied to the accounting side of the business. But Anabile says that all this could change. "We are looking at restructuring, and also at ways to enhance wealth creation for employees."

Easy -com, easy go

Disenchantment with the partnership model is not something that CSC Consulting has to worry about. But CSC, like its peers, was hit hard by start-up fever. "We really got attacked in the marketplace," says Rob Ayers, vice president of human resources for the consulting group at CSC in Waltham, Mass. "We have always specialized in technical depth, so we became a good target."
He says that the pressure has eased somewhat with the cooling off of the stock market. "It has really tracked the Nasdaq," says Ayers. "The salient issue was that everyone thought he or she could become a millionaire. Since January, that expectation has been lowered."  Which is something CSC hopes to exploit to win back some of that lost talent. "We have four people who do nothing but mine the Internet every day," says Ayers. "They look for dot-coms that didn't take, got de-funded, crashed, or got booted off the Nasdaq. These can be good places to go recruiting."
All these efforts show just how hard the consulting giants have felt the pinch. Some folks in the dot-com world like to predict the end of the line for the likes of the Big Five. But Andrew Nash, CEO of Collaborex, a business-to-business e-commerce company in Fairfax, Va., isn't one of them.
"I was at ICS for four years, before they were acquired by Deloitte," says Nash. "I have seen all these changes. The big firms have had a tough time hanging on to good people. Now they are trying to lure people back with some success. The bottom line is that people are looking for alternatives. The big firms will have to make changes, but they will survive."

Sidebar: PowerPoints:

• Having lost ground in the battle for talent to hundreds of fledgling dot-com companies, numerous large consultancies are turning the tables and using everything from specially targeted recruitment ads to personally addressed letters to snatch back their best people.

• It may just be a simple sense of pride that keeps a former consultant from contacting his or her old firm to discuss opportunities, but certain firms help make it easy for them by spreading the word that there are no hard feelings and that they'd like them to come back.

• As their stocks continue to slide, e-consultancies have become a prime target for firms looking to recruit new and experienced talent.