Hi I'm Jenny Rae the Managing Director of Management Consultant – and today I'm
here to bring you another part of our networking series about consulting.
Specifically today I'm going to talk about why consultants respond, and the
converse of that is why they don't respond, when you're going through the
networking process. Networking for consulting, for me before I went through,
was a big black box – but it's actually kind of scientific when you look at it
from the inside. And so I've broken it down in order to help you better
understand how to approach consultants, so that you can make sure that your
chances of getting a response from them, not only a response, but active
assistance is the highest probability. So what I'm going to do is break down the
reasons that consultants respond to you in networking into four different areas.
In these four areas, i'm going to highlight both what is compelling for
them, also how you can do this in the best way possible. So the first thing
that I'm going to walk through and why consultants respond, is that consultants
find it very important to enjoy who they work with, and networking is one way that
all of us stood as gatekeepers for who came into the firm. The people that we
were really passionate about bringing into the firm, the people that we
really enjoyed, we worked very hard to bring into the process. The people that
we didn't enjoy in the networking process, we use as a pre-screening
process, in order to keep them out. Consulting is a very people oriented
business, consulting firms are people oriented firms. And because of this,
because we're not selling anything particular, we're building a custom-made
solution for each client that we work with– it was really critically important
that we got all the right people on board. So because of this, every single
person who's going through the networking process is serving as a
filtering mechanism for the firm. It's really important that as you're going
through the networking process, you're not just about business, you want to be
professional, you want to be clear, you want to be well articulated, but at the
same time you don't want to be too pushy, too direct, or too dry – because they want
get the sense that they would really enjoy working with you. It's important at
the end of the day that you early yourself in the process. The second thing
that's very important is that consultants use networking to protect
the brand and the future of that brand. So when I was working at Bain it was
very important to us that Bain had a specific culture that we wanted to
continue to cultivate. Bains culture is very collegial, it's very fraternal, it's
very supportive, but it's also full of incredibly motivated and talented people.
And so because with the future of that brand being so important for us, as we
were both a part of the firm and later as we went on to leave and go on and do
other things as alumni, the brand still remained important to us. So it was
important to use the networking process to assess whether somebody would fit
culturally into the firm. Had a lot less to do with some of the things that you
evaluate in the interview process, like will this person be good at solving
cases, will they be good at leading themselves, will they be good at managing their
interactions with other people. Those are a lot of the things that you assess in
the interview. Here we're just trying to decide are they a cultural fit – do they
fit the brand, will they be likely to be an impressive advocate of the brand, both
when they're at the company and into the future. The third thing that was
important was understanding that each one of us as consultants had received a
lot in the process. We usually had at least one person who had poured their
life out for us in order to get the offer at one of the top three firms.
But not only that, there were also many other people on the way who had contributed.
So each of us felt an ethical responsibility to pay forward what we
had already received. The people that were the most likely to pay forward to
were the ones that were specifically really excited about getting into our
firm in particular, as well as the most likely to get in. And that brings me to
my fourth point. The fourth and potentially most contentious, but also
maybe most important to understand, is that many firms
did and will into the future give compensation when someone who is a peer
of someone who's currently working at the firm was brought on board
successfully. And what I mean by this is that the person had to drop their resume,
go through the interview process, get an offer, and accept the offer. And when that
happened when we were at Bain, they would pay us, we would get a payout for that
process. They considered every single person an important part of the
recruiting and networking team. And what this meant was that we were willing to
invest the most and people who are likely to go the distance. So we didn't
just want to pay it forward, or look for people who we thought could do an okay
job. We didn't just want to get resumes in the door, because there wasn't any
benefit to us tied to that. What we wanted was to make big investments in
the people who are the most likely to be successful with the company. So that's
one reason that it's incredibly important to go through the process of
networking. With that in mind if you are actually doing a good job throughout the
networking process, you're going to help someone else. And that's helpful to
remember across all four of these things. It's important to assess whether or not
you're going to enjoy working with the people, whether or not we're a good
cultural fit, whether or not you would be willing to sit in some these shoes and
pay it forward, and finally whether you're going to be the best type of
person to make an investment in. If that's true, then it's important
throughout the networking process that you're communicating that you are a
likely candidate, that you came from a grade school, that you've done really
well in your jobs – focus on all the positive things so that somebody can really
serve as an active advocate for you in the networking process. If you've enjoyed
this we've got lots more where it came from on our website at managementconsulted.com