Hiring of SAP consultants
- Hiring consultants within SAP during 2010 has polarised with an intense focus on ROI (Return On Investment) budget restrictions, this mean that each hire must be made in the most cost effective manner, which includes hiring at the lowest cost and hiring the most suitable candidates to fulfil the role's scope.
Agency layers?
- After the Y2k slump, the market went from the multiple agency solution to the newer Preferred Supplier List (PSL) where only vetted agencies could provide CV's to a company hiring staff, but in the past few years even these PSL's have mutated to incorporated companies that find consultants through mass mail shots to agents - which, in effect returns to the multiple agency practice of the late 90's.
- However, it also ensures that each consultant that is presented to a customer comes with multiple layers of commission attached to them - which pushes the price of the consultant up and the actual wages of the consultant down.
- With the emergence of the cost cutting solution, companies are selecting to avoid these layers and work directly with consultants - with many of the large consulting houses opening their own internal agencies to avoid the price of commission - however these come with static over head costs which reduce the efficiency of the solution.
- With such facilities as job boards, we many times find that an advertisied job has indeed already been advertised by several other agents, hence a consultant has to be very wary to check that he/she has not already been put forward to an advertised role.
Direct contact and hire solution?
- A solution would be to hire consultant directly for instance when they attend career events or other SAP events, however the candidates you find here are not always the ones you want, those tend to be already hired by someone else.....
- There are now so called ‘direct connect' solutions, which basically mean what it sounds like - it brings both consultants and customers in direct contact and removes the entire agent process. LinkedIn uses this kind of solution, however as we all know it is not SAP dedicated.
- By removing agents from the equation it reduces costs, but to improve ROI it is important to improve expense while also saving time and ensuring that the hired consultants can actually perform the role required - possibly as important as this, is knowing the reputation of the consultant before even contacting them - regardless if they are freelancers or consulting house staff who are only available ‘for rent’ for a project.
Final word and your thoughts.
- Using a 'connect direct' solution does however mean that the hiring managers/personnel manager themselves actually do the search work, something that has become uncommon because there has been a long acceptance of simply farming the work out, even though the amount of work is very minimal, there is a certain amount of resistance so far, but would it be worth their time to search, contact, interview and hire directly, if they could save their company money/budget when the time required to find and assess a candidate is no more than a few minutes? What is your thought?
