Consultant V/S Employees

The one things that you might find most peculiar is the ‘kudos’ that the word consultant can give to a person. Added to that they get paid exorbitantly for their services. But the common notion that is associated with consultants is that they charge for what you already know. So then why is it that we value them more over our employees. What are the differences in these two forms of engagement that make one more appropriate than the other for a given role?

Whether or not it’s desirable, an employee is to some degree “owned” by their employer.  They usually have an agreement that includes not working for competitors (often even covering some period after termination) while consultants enjoy freedom as they aren’t legally owned by their client companies as former are.

What are Professional Conversations?

A professional conversation is a relaxed discussion between the hiring manager and a candidate that is designed to make both the parties comfortable. It enables an equitable, substantive and professional conversation to take place.

A professional conversation has its origins from social science methodologies like discourse analysis and behavioural analysis. A professional conversation essentially centers around what the candidate wants to say about his/her learning experiences in the previous job roles. The candidate also tries to explain how his/her past experiences meets some or all of the assessment requirements for the job that he/she is applying for.

Telephone Interviews – The Preferred Choice

A telephone interview is an interview which uses the telephone as a communication medium.Telephone interviewing is generally not a substitute for a face-to-face interview and is rarely used in isolation.

The type of telephone interviewing used depends both on the nature of the vacancy and on the organization. They can also be used as a way to minimize the expenses involved in interviewing out-of-town candidates. The main objective of this interview is to get invited to an in-person interview.This interview is usually to determine the person’s personality and team work. They are especially undertaken for job profiles  where it is important for the staff to be able to deal well with difficult customers over the telephone (e.g. customer service in call centres or selling technique in a sales department).

Things you need to know before interviewing candidates. – Presentation

What should Interviews be all about?

If all of you think back you will realize how difficult it was to go for an interview, much less conduct one. The whole idea of formal interviews is a tried and tested one and hence has never been improved upon. We shall discuss a somewhat more improved method for conducting interviews that should increase optimum candidates yield.

During the Interview

Stop Interviewing!
Why? You ask! Going to an interview is a daunting task. Often it is viewed by candidates as being equivalent to “going to the dentist”, so it’s not surprising that many firms experience high “no show” rate for their interviews.  HR needs to lead the way in increasing the emphasis on the often under-emphasized goal of selling the candidate.  In order to do this, they need to make the interview into more of a Professional Conversation between two equals. Traditional Interviews are horrible sales Tools. You need to re-think your interview process.  You must begin to treat them in a more “user friendly” way if you expect them to leave their current job.  One of the best ways is to shift away from unexciting formal interviews, and instead hold “Professional Conversations” with the passive candidates!

5 Common Mistakes You Should Avoid While Hiring Consultants

Making the right decisions at work has always been an important part of our lives, but sometimes even that can prove difficult..  Take hiring for instance; it can be a tricky task. Interviewing is an important element of hiring that can either keep you ahead or keep you busy managing the amount of criteria required to assess a consultant. Here are a  few common mistakes made when hiring consultants -

Asking the wrong questions
Usually managers ask common questions like ‘Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” or “What are your strengths and weaknesses?”. These questions are listed as the most likely questions asked at an interview. Interviewees anticipating such questions come prepared with rote learned answers. This won’t allow you to gauge the real potential of a consultant.

6 Steps To Better Recruitment

We know how difficult is to locate, select and hire qualified candidates. This presentation will show you how ConsultGenie’s assessments deliver 30% – 75% selection rates using 6 steps to better recruitment menthod.

Essentials for Success in Consulting

 With a career span of 36 years in global IT industry gained from industry stalwarts like HCL India, HP, and Groupe Bull Middle East Vijay Kumar is a practising Consultant who helps his client companies expand their horizons, literally. Consult Genie gleans some first hand experiences from him to see what it is like to be a consultant:

 

CG: Why did you give up a regular job and life as an entrepreneur to set out on your own as a consultant? What was the trigger? 

Vijay Kumar: I consider myself most fortunate to have worked in companies as an ‘Intrapreneur’ and it helped tremendously when I set up Business Systems Inc for H.E. Sheikh Faisal bin Khaled bin Sultan Al Qasimi in Dubai and managed it for him for 10-years before returning to India in 1996.

 Indian IT landscape in the ‘90s was very hectic. While I was heading IDS, a mid-sized IT product company my KRA was to grow the company’s foot-print across Asia and ME. I realized that many similar IT companies wanted to go global but did not know how. So I decided to set up a practice and emerged as an “Alliance Architect”. My last employer became my first client when IDS entrusted me with an assignment to expand their operations into the USA.

 CG: You have had a wonderful time as a trainer in retail, hospitality and IT. What exactly do you do and can you briefly tell us the high point in your life as a consultant?

 Vijay Kumar: Mr. Rakesh Jhunjunwala, a principal investor in IDS who is on several BoD of IT companies was amazed that I was able to deliver a very prestigious alliance between IDS and HVSI the US based Hospitality major in less than 5-months. I consider this appreciation of my deliver-ability as a high-point in my life as a Consultant.

 IDS retained my services to target an entry into Australia and I was able to build an association with E. Horner & Associates, a Sydney based Consulting outfit whose operations cover Australasia. During such assignments and many that followed later with other eminent IT companies, I realized that Indian companies needed to skill their managers rapidly to ensure the success of their alliances abroad. To address this need I started training middle & Senior Execs and now I deliver live virtual classrooms (LVCs) on the internet as a tribute to the industry that enriched me so much. In effect apart from know-how I also provide ‘do-how’.

 CG: Your were the first non-engineer and non-MBA recruit at HCL and have easy access to top brass like Shiv Nadar. How important is a business network for a consultant? Or is qualification coupled with experience good enough to start out on your own?

 Vijay Kumar: In many ways I was very fortunate to have mentors like SS Nadar & Ajai Chowdhry who is the present CMD of HCL Infosystems Ltd and Arjun Malhotra who is the Chairman of Headstrong, USA also a co-founder of HCL. Ajai taught me managerial competence and encouraged me to ‘own’ a branch in Coimbatore when I was just 27! Shiv inspired me to be strong mentally while Arjun coached me on style & finesse in networking. In many ways HCL was my MBA school. Thereafter, it was not difficult to go abroad and build a rich address book of valuable contacts based such a solid foundation. Beyond education, network of contacts and experience, I believe that self confidence is very essential to succeed.

 CG: Your last employer – IDS – became your first client and the success you saw in the US, Australia and Europe with IDS ensured you got consulting assignments with others in doing work related to partners in the Middle East. Clearly, your vast spread of geographies that you are familiar with give you an extra edge. What, in your opinion, should be the qualities that a consultant needs to build in order to ensure they have that extra “edge”?

 Vijay Kumar: As a manager everybody gets several opportunities to build a variety of experience and gain horizontal knowledge. But to succeed as a Consultant one must develop intense focus and very deep knowledge in whatever you have chosen to specialize in. For as long as such specialty is practically applicable it is not a challenge to gain the recognition of one’s peers. Visibility and business referrals are logical consequence that will surely follow. I think result-orientation is the singular edge that will help Consultants differentiate their performance.

 CG: What kind of discipline should a consultant bring to building client relationship in order to ensure that there is a constant pipeline of work, without the bother of becoming an employee? In our mind, the single-biggest issue that consultants face is that their clients ultimately offer them a job, they succumb and an independent life is lost. How do you ensure that the client-consultant relationship is maintained in a healthy state all the time, despite the pressures a client may go through?

 Vijay Kumar: Your question touches upon 3 points; first, the discipline to build (stronger) client relationships to sustain continuous work. A Consultant must possess the ability to think as an investor, manager and an employee of the company that he works for towards developing business intimacy. Only this 360º vision will enable a Consultant to deliver unbiased and an objective advice that can be actually put to practice.

 Second point you make is, the fact occasionally Consultants do end up as employees of their clients. In my opinion, this is not a bad thing. If the passion to deliver results is the singular compulsion beyond money, then why not? I think Consulting is akin to teaching. You will enjoy it best if you are not entirely dependent on the money you make! As in any other form of entrepreneurial way of life incoming assignments may not be steady and regular being a Consultant. So I shall recommend that if one wishes to be an independent Consultant then ensure your economic well being first or join a company of Consultants as an employee or eventually be employed. A desire to be ‘independent’ as in not-having-someone-to-report should not be the only reason why you wish to be a Consultant.

 Finally, strong client-empathy is the key to maintain a good relationship with your client. Clients are people like us with real emotions. It is also much like a doctor-patient relationship. Clients need Consultants to resolve business problems and the results motivate them to refer us to more clients.

Challenges in leveraging a consultant

The first problem that companies face after the sheen of having a cutting-edge consultant on board has worn off, is that it is difficult to make a transition from managing an employee to managing a consultant. It is important to remember that with multiple clients, it is impossible for the consultant to devote the entire work day or week to a single client. This is often hard for organizations that are used to employees being available full-time. Getting around this is simple with some rigour in the processes that need to be setup, chiefly that of scheduling and time-management. Laying down weekly, fortnightly or monthly meetings at specified times that both parties make time for is an effective way to work. If the time you require from a consultant looks like it is about to increase, there needs to be adequate planning built in so that he or she can map out the coming few weeks or month so as to do justice to all the clients depending on his or her services. Managing a relationship with a consultant is quite different from managing an employee. A consultant protects his or her independence like religion, and the organization needs to find a balance between what it may believe is right and what a specialist consultant in the domain feels about the same issue.

Some organizations face resistance within their teams in trusting an outsider to do a job that they couldn’t do themselves. This is largely a mindset issue and needs to be addressed with conviction from the higher management that sees the value in bringing in a specialist. This is one of the reasons that lead to the consultant not receiving inputs adequately. However effectively scheduling interactions with stakeholders in the assignment should address the issue. Defining project variables such as scope, deliverables, timelines fall under the same umbrella as well.

Understanding what a consultant does is frequently a challenge especially if it is related to a domain that falls outside the core area of the organization’s competence. How do you measure something you do not understand? This is when setting rational milestones and targets become challenging. Though it is fair to say that the consultants themselves need to take the lead in setting up the project deliverables and how to measure them, organizations need to take the time and put in the effort to be on the same page as the consultant in these scenarios.

While monitoring a consultant’s deliverables and execution can be a hurdle, sometimes the stage following that poses an even larger problem: measuring the consultant’s impact on company bottom-lines. Not all the results of an assignment can be immediately seen, as some actions may begin to bear fruit in the medium to long term. To address this, both consultants and organizations need to keep in view both the short term and longer term goals in terms of numbers that the project will achieve, before the start of the project so that there are no broken dreams of promises at the end of the engagement.

How to get best results from the consultant?

If the NASSCOM 2008 IT/BPO report is to be believed, the trend of consultants in the workplace is set to increase as more and more organizations look towards consultants to meet staffing needs on a temporary basis – rather than increase the numbers on the payroll. What’s more, about 5% of the non-permanent workforce is in senior positions; which only goes to show that an increased amount of faith is being reposed in specialists who consult with a number of companies rather than work for just one. Be that as it may, company personnel (especially those supervising consultants, or responsible for the success of their projects) need to be aware of how to get the best out of a consultant, in terms of providing an atmosphere conducive to his or her working as well as being aware of common pitfalls in an assignment’s lifecycle.
 

Milestones and checkpoints need to be setup before the assignment begins. This means investing enough time with the consultant and the client team to chart out the roadmap that the assignment will follow. In the eagerness to get the project on the road, this task is often treated with less importance than it deserves resulting in needless heartache. A process-orientation in a consulting project’s approach ensures that issues are flagged off well in advance, before they become flame mail trails.
 

One common complaint many consultants have is that some sections of the client’s team is not able to provide enough time or resources that are critical to the success of the assignment. This happens for a number of reasons, the more serious ones stemming from resistance to an outsider’s involvement in a company’s affairs and absence of the ‘brownie point’ system of work (as the consultant neither appraises or is appraised by anyone in the organization he or she is dissociated from one of the company’s main workforce dynamics). While there could be genuine reasons for delays, it is important that there be enough top-management conviction in the purpose of the consultant’s involvement that ensures minimum hitches in his or her work. Clearly laying down responsibilities and relationships that the consultant will share with the client’s team should take care of this.
 

Organizations often find themselves second-guessing the consultant on various counts. While healthy debate of a consultant’s approach or solutions is essential it takes on a different hue when companies find the consultant deviating from what is considered the ‘organizational belief’. Change being something we are all resistant to, at least initially, client teams may feel discomfort at radical changes, which could actually be beneficial to the company. The client team needs to recognize that toeing the organizational line is not why the consultant has been hired. A good consultant will base solutions on experience, knowledge and skill that are specific to the task at hand and independent thinking of this nature needs to be encouraged. Such instances prompt organizations to revisit their decision on whether they took the right step in hiring the consultant in the first place. This is sheer waste of time, as the same rigour should have gone into it before hiring the consultant. Once on board, the consultant is an integral part of the team and needs to be treated as such for him or her to deliver the best results.
 

Last but not least is the critical issue of assignment scope. When project variables are not properly defined, (a failure both on part of the consultant and the client) it leads to a lack of clarity on where the responsibilities of the consultant end. Often the scope of a project is like a slowly expanding balloon as more deliverables get added without either party realizing the risks associated with it. Scope creep that is often a result of ambiguity leads clients to believe that the consultant was incapable, whereas the truth may be far from it. It is important to know exactly what to expect from the consultant and measure his or her efficacy in a project purely on what was promised would be delivered.