Commando Consulting: August 2009 - Four Fundamental Flaws of Recruiting New Consultants Through Recruitment Consultancy Agencies

By Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

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Over the last few years it has become increasingly popular for companies to use recruiting consultants for finding and hiring new workers. And while the method is a bit of a disaster in terms of finding quality people, most companies continue in blissful ignorance to keep using it.

The sad reality is that this practice has also become the way for consulting firms to hire new associates. When manual workers are hired this way, it may be a reasonable approach, but it's a huge mistake, even a cardinal sin of biblical proportions for consulting firms to acquire talents this way.

Sadly, when Friedrich Winslow Taylor, the world's first self-appointed management consultant, was peddling his "Scientific Management" concept, and basically said that in the past people came first, but in the future systems come first and people become tightly-controlled, fungible expenses.

And far too many consulting firm have been acting out Taylor's prediction, while failing to realise how much profit they leave on the table year in year out...

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Recommended Reading

Bad Medicine

Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates

By David Wootton

I've decided to include this book in this review because, just as doctors provide physical health to their patients, consultants provide financial health to their clients.

Or at least they're supposed to. But do they?

It turns out over the years doctors have done more harm than good to their patients. Doctors have been so busy worrying about their image and prestige that they pushed the interest of their patients to the back burner.

Doctors have always ahd their own "Best practices", and even new and better practices have been invented, the old "tried and tested", although useless, practices have remained in operation. And what was the best of best practices: Bloodletting, of course.

Consider the experiment of an Italian doctor, Antonio Durazzini in 1622. After the epidemic of a deadly disease, he started tracking the victims, and he concluded that the people who could NOT afford medical treatment had a better chance of survival than those who sought out "professional" help. Again, the treatment was the one-size-fits-all method: Bloodletting.

• Although the microscope was invented by 1677, most doctors refused to use it because, as they had said, they already knew everything that might be happening under the lenses. Basically, the cocky bastards said there was nothing new under the sun for them.


• In the 18th and 19th centuries, childbed fever killed about 10% of women. The range was between 5 and 30%. In May 1847, a fellow Hungarian, Ignaz Semmelweis advocated that doctors wash their hands between examinations. This little act reduced fatality rates to 1-2%. Nevertheless, the medical profession turned him into a laughing stock. He was fired from the hospital and the medical community pushed him out of Vienna. In 1865 he was locked up in a lunatic asylum where, 14 days later, the guards beat him to death.


• The pain-killing effects of anaesthesia was discovered by 1795. Who do you think adopted it first? Veterinarians and dentists. What about the doctors? What about? They were laughing their arses off at this stupid idea of reducing pain. Doctors even called it as the "Yankee dodge". Eventually, in 1846, doctors too accepted anaesthesia.

Why is this important?

Because this is happening in consulting too.

In 1964 Peter Drucker coined the phrase "knowledge worker" and "knowledge work", but in 2009 many (most?) consulting firms are still selling time chunks of manual labour. Is it surprising they become commoditised? Not really.

When I was doing my Certified Management Consultant accreditation, in one of the assignments I mentioned the dirty "V" word: Value. The instructor (Some MBA guy) almost ripped my head off for wasting the client's time on such a nebulous concept as value. As he said...

"The consultant's stock in trade is his time. Consultants sell their time, and get paid for the time units they sell. The more time chunks they can sell, the more they can earn. It's that simple."

I believe both the medical and the consulting industries suffer from hard core complacency: There is only one correct way of doing things, and anyone who tries to deviate gets punished.

I encourage you to get this book and how similar practices that hinder progress in the medical industry may hinder progress sin your consulting firm. After all, medicine is a form of consulting.

Place your order with Amazon.com for Bad Medicine. You'll be glad you did.