What We’ll Cover in This Piece:
- The necessity of staffing firms in the consulting industry.
- The three major friction points recruiters face in the hiring process.
- How BenchWatch can alleviate all three of these pain points.
Related article: LinkedIn vs. BenchWatch – What BenchWatch is and isn’t, and how to use it in tandem with LinkedIn to power your consulting career.
Estimated Time to Read: 5 minutes
In order to put together a team of high-level business consultants, you need to have several things:
- Access to a talented pool of consultants
- Information about those consultants’ availability
- A reliable way to vet a consultant’s skills and experience
And you need to be able to contract consultants and put new teams together quickly.
This is really difficult. The relationships, data, and processes required to hire consultants effectively don’t come easy, and when you’re talking about $200 per hour consulting contracts, companies want to be certain they hired the right person.
Major corporations—who are rapidly adopting flexible workforce solutions—are not built to handle this process. Without staffing firms to handle the contracting of consultants, big companies simply wouldn’t be able to work with consultants at scale.
But even these staffing firms, who specialize in recruiting consultants and connecting them with projects, face major points of friction in the hiring process.
In this article, we’re going to examine the three highest-friction hiring problems all recruiters face, and show how you can solve them by using BenchWatch.
1. It’s Difficult To Tell Which Consultants Are Available
When a staffing firm is given a project with a list of positions to staff, they usually know dozens—if not hundreds—of consultants who’d be good for each role.
However, recruiters have no way of immediately knowing if a consultant is available or not. As a result, they waste hours communicating with various consultants, trying to figure out who is available for what project.
A central component of every consultant’s BenchWatch profile is their availability. Every consultant has to update their availability with each new project, meaning that a recruiter using BenchWatch can tell at a glance which consultants are available for which jobs,
2. Recruiters Are Flooded With 1,000s of Resumes
Any time a recruiter accepts applications for a position, they inevitably receive 1,000 resumes that they then have to sort through.
Pouring over all of those resumes is a waste of the recruiter’s time, but it also slows the entire hiring process down, meaning consultants who are right for the job still have to wait longer to start their contract.
A recruiter doesn’t want thousands of candidates who are decent fits for a role, they want one candidate who is perfect for the role.
Giving recruiters the one candidate who is perfect for their role is one of BenchWatch’s primary functions. BenchWatch uses a matrix of data including bill rate, skills, experience, availability, travel capability, and a patented trust score to decide which consultants are ideal for your role.
3. Bad Resumes Take Substantial Tailoring
In the majority of cases, when a recruiter finds an ideal candidate for a role, they will take that candidate’s resume and tailor it for the project. This process is time-consuming, and lengthens the entire hiring process.
Most consultants simply don’t know how to write a good consulting resume—and just as concerning, most consultants only have one version of their resume.
Consultants need to have different versions of their resume tailored for different types of roles. BenchWatch doesn’t just offer guides to crafting perfect consulting resumes, it gives consultants the option to upload multiple versions of their resume to their BenchWatch profile.
Recruiters can then easily access and share the relevant resume with the hiring company.
Smoother Hiring Means More Jobs For Everyone
The consulting market is exploding, and there is major pressure on staffing firms to constantly improve their efficiency. The reason for this is that the faster and more effectively staffing firms can connect consultants with jobs, the faster the companies hiring the consultants can move on to the next project.
Flexible workforce solutions have allowed companies to aggressively pursue new projects, and this rapid growth will continue as quickly as the hiring process allows.
Simply put, faster hiring means more contracts for everyone.
