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With the UK management consultancy recruitment market having witnessed a dramatic turnaround in the last 6 months, managers at Top-Consultant have been addressing how the site can better meet the needs of both candidates and recruiters.
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| Consulting-Times E-zine
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Twelve months ago the challenge was very much to seek out additional consulting opportunities so that readers could still access a range of career opportunities – despite the depressed consulting market.
Since then the situation has changed quite dramatically. The number of opportunities being advertised has more than doubled and candidate numbers have reached a record 155,000 in July 2004.
The problem is now very much one of matching candidates up with the most appropriate consulting jobs – and helping them decide between the myriad of UK opportunities now being advertised. A three-pronged approach is being adopted to address both clients' and candidates' needs and the following initiatives have now been launched:
a London Careers Event on 24th September to give candidates the chance to meet recruiters from the top consulting brands
a Jobs-by-email service that allows candidates to receive a personalised weekly briefing of the latest jobs being advertised in their area
a downloadable Top-Consultant Toolbar that allows candidates to save job searches and keyword search the site for new opportunities, wherever they are in the World
London Careers Event on 24th September
The chance to meet recruiters from the likes of A.T.Kearney, the Boston Consulting Group, Booz Allen Hamilton, Accenture & IBM Business Consulting has created a surge of interest amongst the Top-Consultant readership. Browsing a job board is one thing but it seems readers still value the chance to meet high-profile recruiters face-to-face. 70 consultants have already registered to attend and as many as 250 are expected to attend on the day. On the recruiter side, this is the first such event to be held in London in several years and the enthusiasm consultancies have shown to take part in the event is clearly a reflection of how much tighter they expect the recruitment market to become in the coming months.
Jobs-by-email service
The rapid growth in the number of consulting vacancies being advertised on Top-Consultant had clearly created the need for greater segmentation of the job postings, as well as a mechanism for alerting candidates when suitable new opportunities had been posted. Both recruiters and consultants requested such a service in a poll carried out earlier in 2004.
The result is the launch this week of the "Jobs-by-email" service, which allows readers to pre-define their search criteria and then be alerted each Friday to any new opportunities that have emerged on the site matching their particular needs. Multiple alerts can be set up to monitor different criteria on the site, and the alerts are received just in time for the weekend when time can be devoted to applications.
The Top-Consultant Toolbar
With spam becoming an ever-increasing problem, the team also wanted to create a means of delivering newsletters to readers and allowing them to save search results for the jobs board that would not be dependent on consultants receiving email. The toolbar – similar to those developed by Google, Alexa and others – is a free downloadable resource for Top-Consultant readers and gives consultants access to advanced job search functionality and salary survey data. Anyone using Internet Explorer can take advantage of the toolbar functionality.
Is this enough or is a War for Talent inevitable?
By increasing the likelihood that recruiters will make a successful hire through Top-Consultant's services, these initiatives should clearly increase the number of placements recruiters make in any given market conditions – and increase consultants' success in finding their ideal next career move. However, the reality remains that there is a limited supply of top-calibre consultants both in the UK and abroad – so strong growth in demand for consultants will almost inevitably ignite a War for Talent scenario.
"All Top-Consultant can do in this respect is attract more quality candidates from outside consulting to consider a career in consulting" commented Top-Consultant Director Tony Restell, adding "if this increases the pool of available talent then we can clearly help to delay the timeframe in which a War for Talent emerges in consulting. But beyond that, our main role will be helping firms to attract and recruit new hires at as low a cost – and in as short a timeframe – as possible. In this respect we can reduce the costs associated with a War for Talent scenario, rather than eliminate the problem altogether."
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