For those who’ve not had positive experiences of interacting with recruitment agencies in the past, there’s a natural scepticism about the value they can add and the doors that they can open for you.

Hence I’m going to cover 3 points here and show that:-

1) Recruitment agencies are the gate-keepers to a significant proportion of consulting interview processes.

2) There are some very valid reasons why this volume of recruitment continues to be handled by recruitment agencies.

3) You can quickly assimilate a few pointers on interacting with recruitment consultants.

Recruitment agencies are the gate-keepers to a significant proportion of consulting interview processes

The volume of recruitment that is handled by recruitment agencies remains very very sizeable and if you’re not working with recruitment agencies you are turning your back on a significant proportion of the consulting career opportunities out there in the market.

When I think about the huge range of consulting firms we help to advertise their consulting positions on Top-Consultant.com, I would say that the majority of firms still make 40% to 60% of all their hires via the recruitment agency route. Sure there are some really small niche firms who manage to get by hiring just via their networks or via adverts, but for the majority of the industry that’s just not the case.

Within the consulting industry you’ll find variants of a “cost-per-hire target” in place at most firms. That’s to say a target for the additional costs a business can incur to make each hire. Again at most firms this target is around the £5,000 per hire mark – and most firms struggle to get down to this figure, it’s a target that they are striving for rather than achieving!

That should tell you all you need to know in terms of the importance of recruitment agencies. Even with all the hiring that firms manage to undertake at zero or low cost (ie. direct hires and internet advertising hires) and with all the focus currently on reducing costs and with the reduced hiring volumes at present , they still struggle to get their cost per hire down below this figure. That’s because of the ongoing importance of higher cost recruitment agency hires (rather than newspaper advertising) in bringing up the average.

There are some very valid reasons why this volume of recruitment continues to be handled by recruitment agencies

Anyone who’s spent any time in the consulting industry will groan when they hear commentators talking about the exorbitant amounts that consultants are able to charge per day for their consulting work – even for those fresh out of university! Of course there are a plethora of reasons why it’s very much in the client’s interest to pay these fees – and a lot of hidden value that the client derives from having the consulting team on board that explains why this spend makes sense for them.

Exactly the same is true in the recruitment field.

Let me give you just a few reasons why recruitment agencies are heavily relied upon even in a down market like today’s where consulting employers are desperate to reduce their costs:

i) Political sensitivity – think of all the major consulting brands who’ve had to let some consultants go in the last year. They’ve been loathe to be seen openly advertising for new recruits (for other parts of the business) all the while that redundancies have been taking place. Or indeed even while the option of further redundancies needs to be kept open. Enter the recruitment agency as the means by which this critical hiring can be undertaken discreetly albeit at greater monetary cost per hire. The same is true wher