“Offer something better than conventional consulting services” is the tag line for every small consulting firm started by a couple ex Accenture/Big-4/MBB/Navigant/Booz Allen/etc. partners trying to differentiate themselves from Accenture/Big-4/MBB/Navigant/Booz Allen/etc.
Are you talking about starting a legitimate firm with employees or basically freelancing?
I have zero interest in hanging out my shingle and eking out a living trying to scrape together enough contracts to pay my mortgage. From what I’ve seen, that is the “retirement plan” of every consultant who reached a point in their career where they were expected to, but failed to generate enough business to not only support themselves, but a staff of managers and analysts/associates. Or it’s basically millennial sitting in a WeWork space with his laptop hustle-culture gig-economy freelance bullshit. Even if I wanted to do that, being that it’s just me, other than possibly creating a corporation to file taxes on, it is effectively doing what I’m doing now. Looking for a job.
I could start an entire thread on my frustrations working in “consulting” as a career.
What I would like, ideally, is to find a job, or at worst a long-term contract, at a company and just do that for a number of years. it could be a consulting firm, but I feel I need some consistency in terms of what my actual job or industry is. Not “smart guy with a great background” and a collection of “skills” constantly trying to figure out where to apply them.
Actually got good news today about an interview I thought I blew on Tuesday. Turns out I didn’t blow it and I have the final round next week. Really, this is just too much of an emotional roller-coaster.
For whatever it’s worth, I also easily recognize the OP’s user name and in my memory bank I label him a seasoned pro with some pretty good insights into the real corporate world. A good friend of mine was laid off about 2 months ago and I know he’s extremely frustrated with his job search. Many of the same complaints. Ghosting after what felt like a good phone interview, spending a ridiculous amount of time filling out the same bullshit on online applications. Best of luck to you, I hope you find something soon.
Ghosting I can kind of tolerate. It’s actually not new and I get that these dumb-ass recruiters and headhunters get paid to fill a position and have a hundred people contacting them.
I think what’s frustrating to me is getting close but then the job goes to someone else. Like I had interview for a long-term (like…indefinite) contract job. Went really well, lots of great feedback from both the client and the recruiters. Came down to me and one other guy and it went to the other guy. And I was really hoping to stick the $200k a year rate in **MichaelEmouse’s **face! Silver lining is that that I impressed the recruiters so much that they might have something else I might be a good fit for.
I have a final round with a fairly senior engagement manager role with a cloud/analytics company next week (this was the one I thought I whiffed). Everything has been super positive so I’m basically spending the next couple of days just interview prepping.
I also received a call back from a large management consulting firm I had been speaking with awhile back. Apparently they want to send me to some new data science boot camp they are forming at the end of the summer. Which I still don’t quite understand. Soooo…are you giving me an offer and it doesn’t start until then? Because it’s a little presumptuous to assume I won’t have a job in three months or that I would be willing to quit it.
Like I don’t really get why everything has to be so complex. None of this shit is rocket science.
Yeah, the ghosting…That annoys me no end, especially after speaking to people on the phone and everything seemed so positive. Then…radio silence. I sent the customary thank you email and still nothing.
I’ve been an adjunct professor for ages, and I applied to all the open FT positions I could find in California (where I live) and the surrounding states. It was a Nope from every single one. Then I applied to one in Michigan and got a SparkHire interview last week (asynchronous screening tool) with them. Yeah. That would be a major uprooting, but at least it lets me know that maybe I’m doing something right after all.*
I am also being considered for a FT editing/proofreading position in L.A.; I’ve been applying for that kind of job as well. There are certainly more of them than FT college teaching jobs.
*A troubling element: before the closing date for FT jobs at the college where I currently teach, some FTs in my dept. told some of the PTs that they had a good chance of being interviewed because “the dept. is looking to hire a woman of color.” A few weeks later, a bunch of us got the rejection email. I don’t know all the people who got interviews or how many there are or where they’re coming from. But I do know that two WoC from my dept. are being interviewed. Coincidence?
I mean, I am a W myself. But I am pinkish-white.
Perhaps being over 50 doesn’t help, either, although sometimes they throw a curve ball and higher someone 50-plus and/or white male after all.
The Cloudalytics company. I haven’t received the details of the offer yet, but they emailed me last night a few hours after the interview telling me they want to move forward with an offer.
I have a call with the Big Consulting Firm and another call with the Small Consulting Firm later today. I’m still not clear don’t understand what the BCF’s deal is.
SCF is promising as well, but I just spent four years in a “boutique” management consulting firm. I have nothing against that, but the problem is that they don’t tend to have a lot of clients, so you are kind of fucked if one or two of them leave.
Probably go with Cloudalytics. Really all three jobs are fairly similar in what I’d be doing (basically conducting the orchestra between the client, sales, project management, and the engineers and data scientists doing the actual work).
I just got promoted at work myself today. (Well, what you’d consider promotion; in my agency you don’t actually ever get promoted, you apply for and get hired into a different job with more pay and responsibilities.) So good luck all around.
But now you can see where you went wrong. Eight months of diligently beating the pavement = bupkis. Two weeks after posting a rant at the SDMB and job offers are raining down from above ;).
Congrats! Don’t be surprised when you get another offer (or two). One of my kiddos is going thru a similar event – once the dam broke there were 3 offers. Hope that’s what happens with you too!
I’ve often wondered/theorized about the “sweet spots” of job hunting/job hopping. I mean, there seems to be a sort of trajectory that these things follow, but your title, your salary and your experience have to be in sync for you to be hot, and if they get out of sync, people get confused or make a bunch of (likely incorrect) assumptions.
For example, people assume that there should be some kind of up or out process going on, and that if you stay doing the same thing too long, there’s something wrong with you that prevented you from making that step.
Or maybe there are… inflection(?) points in job seeking, and if you’re in between these points, you’ll have a harder time. Like in your case, they want more technical experience, or more strategic stuff, and you’re kind of a neither fish nor fowl kind of beast.
I wonder if there are any studies or research on this kind of thing… it seems to be that knowing the patterns or potential strategies would be a very powerful tool. And I’d think that any job posting site could identify them pretty easily through analyzing their job postings.
Picked this one simply because I found it first, but it’s something you’ve mentioned in multiple posts in this same thread. You appear to believe that “bringing in business” is an essential part of consulting: in European locations it tends to be considered a different function. Some people will indeed do them both (usually partners in small firms, and usually they won’t sell and consult/PM the same project), but consultants and PMs find it insulting that certain firms will call their salespeople “project managers”.
