It's not about talent acquisition. It's about leading customers.

When we started TalentBee, I thought we need highly skilled recruiters & employer branding professionals.

I have changed my mind a bit - This tells me about a personal growth story and the ability to change my opinions. In my opinion, this is an essential skill for CEO's & Founders.

Now I think that it's enough to be at a good level at recruiting & employer branding.

The key to success is the ability to lead customers & communicate effectively with them.

Here's what it takes to be a good consultant based on my learnings & something that we look closely in our recruitment process:

Communication skills

For customers to be happy, it's important to communicate with them what we are doing.

Most of the time we also need to be sharing with customers why we are doing this - consultants need to be able to have discussions like this.

Ability to lead your work

Currently, our consultants are typically working with 2-4 customers at a time. Maybe at some point, we will have customers where one consultant uses 100% of their time.

In the current situation, it's crucial to be able to lead your own work, change the customer and make sure that you can handle the work within the available hours.

This also comes a lot to project management skills because you typically need input from other stakeholders as well, both from customers & internally from TalentBee.

People person

I don't even know what people person means and if that's the correct term here.

What I mean is that our customers are very different and you need to be able to go to their level.

Just to give an example:

- Some of our customers are Founders who have a lot of things on their table and talent acquisition is just one of them. They are not experts in recruitment.

- Some of our customers are recruiters or people leaders who are only focusing on these things, and the TA maturity is high.

These kinds of customers are so different to work with & communicate with.

Ability to ask for help & identify hard situations early on

We of course try to identify when someone needs help, but it's a crucial skill to ask for help when you need it.

For example, I don't have clear visibility for all the details of our customers - if a consultant needs help, they should be able to share it with the team.

This also goes down to being able to handle hard situations - I think consultants who can handle those are extremely valuable, especially from a scaling perspective.

Ability to challenge & be a change leader

When you are trying to renew the industry like we are, it means that you need to be challenging the status quo quite a lot.

Recruitment has been quite similar for a long time - When you try to do something new, you need to be able to explain to the customer why you are doing something.

This is a lot about negotiating and understanding the customer's opinion & beliefs on things.

Conclusion

If you are running a consultancy, you should, of course, have great domain expertise on the things you are offering to the customer.

But to scale the business, you need good communicators who can lead customers.

Most likely, you won't find people ready for these, and it takes a lot of coaching from your end to get people there.

It's a journey where you will learn a lot. At least, I have learned a lot.