Why hiring you is a high-stakes investment for consulting firms
Short-term gaps and long-term growth: are consulting firms hiring you as "investors" or "speculators"?
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This post is a collaboration between The Management Consultant and Jean-Baptiste Vaujour, Professor of Practice in charge of Consulting at emlyon business school.
When you stand in front of an internal recruiter at a consulting firm, it is easy to feel like the process is entirely one-sided.
They are testing you, evaluating your every move, and putting up hoops for you to jump through. This isn’t false, but here is the part many candidates overlook: consulting firms are also putting on a show.
They are spending significant resources trying to attract the best talent, and that is required of them because recruitment is a bilateral process. They need you just as much as you need them.
In fact, in some cases, they need you even more.
Let me explain.
Reactive recruitment
Consulting firms are often forced into hiring for a specific skill set because they have already sold a project where that expertise is missing.
Imagine a firm has secured a multi-million dollar deal for a digital transformation. They have the strategy mapped out, timelines agreed upon, and a room full of executives ready to go. They have all of that, but they are lacking an important skill in the team, maybe someone with deep knowledge in cloud architecture or advanced data analytics. Now the clock is ticking. They are scrambling to find the person who can come in and deliver results immediately.
This is what I call reactive recruitment: hiring driven by immediate project needs. In this situation, consulting firms become “speculators”.
They are laser-focused on the short-term, and the hire they make is more about plugging a gap than building for the future. They are not worried if you will become a future leader in the firm, what matters is whether you can hit the ground running and solve the immediate problem. It is a “just-in-time” hire, driven by urgency, not by long-term potential.
Proactive recruitment
However, this is only half of the recruitment story. The other half is where you, as a junior consultant or an intern, a fresh graduate, or an early-stage MBA, come in.
For this group, the dynamic is entirely different. There is no immediate project need that forces the firm to hire you, instead, they are looking for long-term value. You are not being evaluated based on specific expertise because, frankly, you do not have any yet. You are not walking in with a decade of industry experience in telecommunications or supply chain optimization. The firm is looking at you as a long-term investment.
This is proactive recruitment: hiring with the future in mind. Here, consulting firms take on the role of the “investor”, thinking about the long-term potential you bring.
They are not betting on your ability to deliver a short-term win: they are investing in your growth over time.
Just as an investor is not concerned with the day-to-day fluctuations of a stock but rather its trajectory over the next five or ten years, firms are not simply interested in whether you know the latest tech tool, but they care about your ability to learn, adapt, and evolve into a consultant who can thrive in their environment over the next decade.
Think about it this way: speculators care about short-term gains. They buy a stock today and sell it tomorrow if it makes them a quick buck. This is how consulting firms operate when they hire experienced professionals to fill urgent gaps in a team. It is about immediate payoff, not future potential.
With investors, the game is different. They are looking at the bigger picture - evaluating whether you will grow into a future leader, someone who will not just solve problems but drive the firm forward.
This brings us to the crux of the filtering process for juniors.
Since you do not have a specialist skill that immediately fills a gap, firms have to evaluate you differently. The focus is on who you are, not just what you know. They are looking at your mindset, your curiosity, your resilience. They want to know if you have the potential to be molded into the kind of consultant they can rely on five years from now.
Can you handle the pressure?
Will you fit into the firm’s culture?
Are you proactive in your own learning?
Can you think critically under uncertainty?
Do you have the raw ingredients that they can shape into a seasoned professional?
Many candidates believe that consulting firms are primarily focused on finding “the best” candidate in an absolute sense: the one with the most accolades, highest GPA, or most impressive résumé. Let me tell you: this is not entirely true.
Consulting firms are searching for the right candidate. The “right” candidate is not always the most skilled or accomplished one: it is the one who fits their specific needs at that time. Sometimes, firms will pass on a candidate who looks brilliant on paper because they sense that the individual would not thrive in their culture or client environment.
It is a subtle, yet important distinction: being the “best” does not always make you the “right” fit, and consulting firms know this better than anyone.
The two-way street
When you are sitting in that interview room, remember that the firm is not just assessing you, they are also trying to make themselves attractive to you. They want you to be excited about working for them, just as much as they want to be excited about bringing you on board.
This is a two-way street.
Hiring a freshly graduated student involves a significant mobilization of resources. The firm probably bought its way into your university’s job fair to talk to potential candidates and to promote its brand. It dedicated time and money from the HR and business departments to set up the application and screening processes.
Importantly, that Partner who is grilling you on your fifth and last interview has taken an hour of her precious time to talk to you: that hour is not being billed to a client, and this also applies to the consultants and managers you met on the four previous rounds!
At the end of the day, the total cost of hiring a junior consultant, including any lost revenue, can easily add up to tens of thousands of euros. While that might sound like a lot, remember that the firm also incurs costs for all the candidates who were not hired and for those who declined the offer at the last minute.
Hiring you is definitely an investment for a consulting firm.
Whether you are a seasoned professional or fresh out of university, remember this: consulting firms are playing both the short and long game. If you understand that, you will know how to present yourself in a way that resonates with what they are looking for.
✍ The Management Consultant and Jean-Baptiste Vaujour
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Nice way of describing the dual motions/ incentives around new hires. It also points to what firms will still look for in the future (potential to learn and perform), even as folks reflect on and futureproof for what it will mean to work with AI
My sense is that McKinsey uses their analysts and associates as a business development tool is some respects. Oftentimes overhiring and over delivering on experience (and support on exit) so that these people go onto to rehire McKinsey. They also seem to hire based purely on likelihood of the person going onto be in a large leadership role.