The Covid-19 pandemic is, of course, dominating the news, and rapidly curtailing much of the recruitment activity we saw early in 2020. Overall business confidence in the management consultancy sector remains very strong, and across the industry from boutiques to the biggest global firms, the strategy is to ensure they are ready to respond as soon as the crisis has passed.
Boston Consulting Group, for example, has warned customers to prepare for a steep recovery trajectory, and those organizations which are unprepared will be at a significant disadvantage in a marketplace where customers are impatient to begin recovering value from operations which will have been in caretaker mode for weeks, perhaps months.
For now, organizations which moved at pace, the proverbial hare, need to behave more like the tortoise. But just like the tortoise, they have to keep moving.
Whether you are actively seeking a new role, have been considering exploring a move before the pandemic, or are a hiring manager who has had to place talent growth plans on hold. the quieter market does present opportunities, and the most prepared will be taking advantage of them.
For hiring managers, this is the time to dive into the data and understand more about what successful hiring looks like in detail. What channels brought the strongest talent engagement to your business, and what has been the ROI on that channel? It is worthwhile looking at each channel individually, and not only from a cost basis. Is that channel providing a two way engagement? Is enabling you to build future relationships with the people you will need in the market surge which will follow this pandemic?
Advertising for example, long-established as the go-to and first action when looking to recruit has some advantages in the current situation - it certainly has more of a captive audience right now. But most advertising is poorly written, often unintentionally exclusionary, and passive. While these caveats are well established and can be overcome with some effort and attention to good copywriting, the hidden cost of advertising (taken as the stand-alone or primary strategem) is the loss of the network which sits around each candidate. As the saying goes, good people know good people.
The quieter market is an ideal time to assess your talent sourcing partnerships with search firms and recruiters, whether taking the opportunity to talk with your recruitment collaborators, or to identify and engage with new ones. A good search firm can help you to develop a strategy for the upturn in the market, to benchmark compensation against competitors, and build and nurture talent pools and communities which will meet your hiring criteria. They will be able to advise on how best to position your offer in your target demographic, and - critically in the current environment - be able to proactively build and maintain your value proposition as a destination of choice for the future.
We strongly anticipate that attitudes and behaviours among experienced professionals in the industry will follow the lines of consumer behaviors more broadly - those firms who are continuing to engage and communicate will win the inevitable race to secure value adding hires, while those who retreat to their bunkers without wider market engagement will find a disengaged talent community who are heavily networked, expert users and conspicuous consumers of social media, and with a very changed sense of what constitutes a destination of choice.
Remember it was the tortoise which won the race. But to do so it kept moving.
Consulting Point is a talent strategy and acquisition consultancy founded by former management consultants. We provide talent search and advisory services on talent strategy, and detailed insights into remuneration, diversity and inclusion, inflection points at which talent moves firms and why, and much more.
Written by Kevin Acourt - Head of Healthcare and Life Sciences Practice