Webinar: why growing your team can be so challenging

Early May, The Consultancy Growth Network’s members attended one of our webinars to find out why it is so hard to hire great people into their consultancy business, and what they need in place to successfully hire talented consultants to grow their firm.

Even in the current climate, recruitment is a popular topic, so we were delighted that Caroline Boston, Managing Director of New Minds, a resourcing company specialising in working with consulting businesses, could host for us.

Desperately seeking unicorns

To kick things off, Caroline unpicked the reasons why hiring great people in consulting can be so difficult. She shared the experiences of some of her clients who had engaged her to help them turn their recruitment fortunes (or lack of) around. Reasons included the disproportionate amount of management time spent on recruiting new team members, the disappointment when, at the end of a long process, someone rejected their offer, and the most common challenge of all: the belief that the perfect candidate they were looking for simply didn’t exist.

Caroline explained why all this mattered, including quoting Professor David Maister, the author of ‘Managing the Professional Services Firm’: “The ability to attract, develop, retain and deploy staff will be the single biggest determinant of a professional services firm’s competitive success”.

The fundamentals to successful hiring

Caroline explained that it is a combination of your role framework, your employee value proposition and your recruitment processes that will achieve successful hiring for your growing consulting firm.

“Sitting above these are your strategy and vision,” said Caroline. “Without shared goals to work towards and to celebrate, it is almost impossible to build a high performing team.​”

During the webinar Caroline took our members through each of these key elements, explaining why the candidate experience is so important and why managing the entire recruitment process, end to end, is so crucial. 

Caroline ended the webinar with some sage advice. “Before you embark on any recruitment,” she said, “ask yourself​ these fundamental questions:

1. How you are different from your competitors? 
2. How you will create a great working experience for your team? 
3. Do you think about candidate experience and ‘selling’ the opportunity when you are recruiting?” 

​Caroline is one of The Consultancy Growth Network’s specialist advisors. She is available to answer questions from members about recruitment and resourcing via our online Slack community, at our online events and via telephone and email. You can find out more about Caroline on LinkedIn and more about New Minds via their website.