Let’s talk about recruitment.
We’ve been fortunate here at QFactorial to have weathered the storms of the last few years. It would be a good time to bandy around the terms ‘agile’ and ‘pivoting’ or perhaps ‘unprecedented’, the buzz words surrounding growth have come thick and fast and we’re pleased to announce we’ve survived nearly all of them.
Obviously, as a business grows, so too should its team. Thus begins the gentle balancing act of having enough people to support the incoming work and then enough work to keep all the people happy. We are not a typical employer; all our consultants are freelance or working in partnership with us, we’re fishing in different pools than traditional recruitment.
Consultants, you’ll forgive us for saying, can be a strange breed. They drift in and out of corporate corridors, straddling your world and their own, but never comfortably belonging in either. Although their expertise is required, quite often they are parodied as the grey-suit wearing, elder gentleman who is half way to retirement. And Quality consultants? Good grief. Book a meeting when you fancy a nap.
When you’re out on the fringes trying to break the mould, it can be a lonely limb. We often talk about finding a unicorn when we’re recruiting – a consultant who understands business, can engage with SMEs in the science, technology and sustainability arenas, and who doesn’t speak ISO gobbledegook. We know they exist though; we’ve had the pleasure of working with some members of our team for many years and they fit this description to a tee.
In the past 12 months we’ve welcomed 11 new Associate Consultants into the Q!Network, each with their own specialisms and expertise. Despite being in different fields, working with different standards and being in different areas of the UK, there is one striking similarity. Nearly all of them are coming from a much younger age bracket. As we touched on earlier, the consultant is often portrayed as the post-middle-aged male in his boring suit and tie, on the brink of retirement and very much set in the ways of the past. But our newest consultants? They are coming in at an age where you begin to hit your career stride, having spied opportunities in or around the great changes of 2020, they are entrepreneurs, go-getters, and optimists. The Pandemic Period has seen a seismic shift in the relationship between employer and employed with more and more workers demanding different from their jobs and many who seem to have taken the opportunity to leave the rat race altogether. Suddenly younger people are looking at the pit falls of corporate life and saying a firm “No, thank you” and walking away. Consultants used to set up shop when the kids had grown up and the mortgage was paid and the risk of failure was lower. But now? There is a definite mood of wanting to master your own destiny, captain your own ship and other similar metaphors. This new breed couldn’t have come at a better time.
Living through unprecedented times sees the arrival of unprecedented changes, the world is not as it was 5 years ago. Perhaps looking towards an uncertain future, in the shadow of plague and war, many have lost trust in traditional career paths. They can see businesses are changing, becoming more concerned with sustainability and environmental issues. Consumers are demanding better. Technology is advancing at unheard of rates and there’s a renewed energy in medical and scientific research. These industries are attracting the newest, brightest, and most ingenious of our working population. We believe that, if we’re going to be consulting for SMEs in the science, technology and sustainability arenas, you bet your bottom dollar that those consultants should be cut from the same cloth as the business owners and CEOs they’re interacting with.
There is an old trope that time equals experience. You do, after all, need experienced hands to steady the ship and weather the storms. People who have both breadth and depth of knowledge are vital to any organisation as experience very often teaches youth. But we also recognise that youth can have experience, too. We don’t assume that those new to consulting cannot have any meaningful conversation with CEOs and MDs on Quality Management and how it fits into the broader context of their business and the impact of world events. Very often these people are exactly those who are shaping the conversations – just look at Greta who spoke truth to power at barely 16!
Looking to the future – as a company, an industry, or a society – we must be willing to listen to the voices of those to whom the future is so important. It is their future after all. Those with the benefit of experience (and dare we say, hindsight) have lived through a fair share of unprecedented times themselves, after all. So if we combine their pearls of wisdom with the idealism of youth, we may find a better way forward.
Recruitment has taught us a lot about ourselves these past few years – about our market, our customers, our consultants and our competition. It’s been a wild ride but buckle up ‘cos we doubt the world is going to slow down any time soon. We can’t wait to see what these younger, rising stars of consultancy are going to teach us next!
Harriet Fussey
Operations Manager
QFactorial
