The Fast Track Way to Hiring a Consultant
Spend months just to find the right consultant? “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”
If you stay up-to-date with pop culture, you’d surely get the joke.
Truly, hiring can be a lengthy process. Whether you hire employees or freelance consultants, not following the right steps or just wanting fast-track services will result in wasted time or bad hires.
In this article, we’ll discuss a process that’ll help you find a consultant as fast as possible. The first step of the process is having a clear purpose behind hiring a consultant. You should start the hiring process by asking yourself some questions. Let’s find out what they are.
- Do you really need a consultant?
Hiring a consultant makes sense in the following cases: You need a person with a particular set of skills that your company lacks; you want someone to share the workload temporarily; you need expert advice on an important business decision; your business needs a professional problem solver; you need an external perspective on your company’s internal situation.
- Will you and your team offer the consultant all the support they need?
Not only you, but your entire team should be optimistic about hiring a consultant before you bring one on board. This will ensure that the consultant gets all the support they need internally and their advice is taken seriously.
- Will you actually implement the consultant’s recommendations?
Hiring a consultant means there will be a lot of changes in the company. These changes will help you achieve your business objectives—provided that you implement the consultant’s recommendations. Sometimes, some businesses hire consultants and hardly follow their advice. You don’t want to be one of them.
Once you have answered these questions, it’s time to find the fast track consultant based on the nature of the problem. Let’s understand this in the next point.
You don’t always have to go for a generalist consultant. Fortunately, there are several freelance platforms these days that can connect you with a fast-track freelance consultant from almost any niche. So, if your goal is to increase your business’s revenue by adjusting the price, you can either hire a generalist or a pricing consultant. The difference is that a pricing consultant must have already helped quite a few businesses in setting the right price for their products before.
And this is just one example. Whether it’s management, marketing, sales, organizational culture or operations, there are consultants out there who have ‘been there, and done that’. That’s why it’s crucial that you list down all your business problems in writing and select a consultant who is best suited to solve a particular type of issue.
Navigate the Talent Pool to Find the Best Consultants
Once you’re sure that you want to hire a consultant, and you have also decided what type of consultant you want to hire, it’s time to actually find one—and it can be easy if you do it the right way. Let’s discuss the different ways of finding a top freelance consulting platforms and decide which one is the fastest.
Consulting platforms (also known as online consulting marketplace)
There are several recruitment agencies out there that can help you find full-time or part-time employees based on your requirement. Similarly, there are freelance consultant platforms that can help you find the best fresh track consultants. Freelance platforms conduct a consultant’s background check and initial interviews on your behalf, so that you don’t have to worry about these things.
They will scour the talent pool and interview the top candidates. And as a result, you don’t have to spend your precious time interviewing the candidates who might not be a good fit for your company. Once the consulting platform has chosen the best candidates for you, you can have a personal interview with the top few candidates and choose the one you like the most.
Social media
You can post your job requirements on several social media platforms. For example, a LinkedIn post that says, “I’m looking for a freelance management consultant. Please spread the word and message me if you’re interested.”
Sounds easy. However, simply posting an advertisement on social media might restrict your reach. You might also get a lot of messages and emails from the wrong candidates—which will waste a lot of your time. But if you’re lucky, you might be able to find a right fast track consultant from your social media network easily.
Online job boards
There are several general job boards that are visited by thousands of ambitious candidates every day, including consultants. But this also means that you could receive a lot of copy-pasted CVs and cover letters from desperate, unqualified candidates who aren’t even consultants. Not to mention the hefty fee you have to pay to even post an advertisement on these job boards. But if you have a dedicated human resource team who can actually sift through the unwanted CVs and handpick the best ones, you might want to give it a try.
So, what’s the fastest way to find a consultant among these three?
Well, it’s up to you to decide. Social media and online job boards will help you put your message in front of hundreds of candidates. Chances are, you might find a consultant within reasonable time and chances are, your inbox might get bombarded with unqualified CVs which will cause a lot of stress for sure. Consulting platforms, on the other hand, will do most of the work for you and only introduce you to consultants who are the cream of the crop.
Before you even begin your search for a consultant, you should check whether you really need a consultant, and if your business is ready to hire one or not. Clarity of intent will surely help your search.
Choose the right method to find and hire a consultant. Some methods might or might not help you find the best consultant, but a freelance consulting platform surely will. You could save a lot of time and money by letting the consulting platform find a consultant for you.
on a weekly basis.