Human Consulting Agencies - Admission/Application Essay Example

Develop a personal consulting capability audit, together with an action plan for how you might add value to those capabilities and experience over the next five years. Human Consulting Agencies The chosen sector is Human Consulting services and more specifically recruitment and training. The place is a small European country (Greece) where due to the size of the market the Human Consulting Agencies are not specialized by sector, they are generalists. The competition is quite intense and all the companies specialized in this field offer more or less the same services. They are divided into two categories: Human Resources companies specialized in recruiting low and medium level employees and Human Resources companies specialized in recruiting top level executives. Some of them are local and others are multinationals that provide recruitment services as part of their business whereas their core business is mostly financial auditing and controlling. A small part offers on an ad hoc basis some services like company human performance appraisals. A lot of them offer some training seminars in order to increase their product portfolio but these seminars are not specialized in a particular sector i.e. accountancy, marketing etc. They offer seminars according to the current market demand needs. A small number of them has expanded to Balkan countries offering the same range of services and have the same organizational structure. None of them has a distinguished competitive advantage. Even the recruitment process is done the same way i.e. only by using repetitive unstructured interviews and checking references. The companies specialized in low and medium level employees use in many occasions psychological tests but these are not adapted to the specifications of the different positions and the local requirements. They are just translations of foreign tests. Another issue concerns the type of employees / consultants they use. In order to keep employee costs low, they hire employees with minimum experience or no experience at all. They prefer graduates of Human Resources or Psychology but with non existent professional experience. These graduates receive no training and perform interviews and selection of candidates rather from the start. Due to the fact that they have no professional experience or understanding of the market, they cannot communicate effectively with the HR Directors and fill the positions with the right candidates. In many cases, employees are obliged to act as salespeople and this results in a low quality recruitment and selection processes. The situation becomes even worse in cases where the HR agencies offer more specialized services like human performance appraisal and training. On the other hand, there are some local small companies offering training seminars. The seminars they offer are not adapted to the specific needs of the companies, there are ready made packages from abroad. In addition, they offer a wide variety of seminars ranging from accountancy to personal communication without specializing in specific areas. Also in this case they employ non-experienced or with limited experience employees as training managers. These people select instructors based on their personal acquaintances rather on instructors’ real qualities and skills. Personal background My first degree is in economics and then I specialized in marketing. My professional experience is in marketing in IT and Telecom companies both local and multinationals. I am also a lecturer of Marketing Management and a certified sales trainer of Dale Carnegie and Sandler systems. From my professional experience I realized the problem of selecting and organizing salespeople as well as the lack of having adequate partner i.e. human consulting companies to help resolving the above issues. I noticed the negative opinion that people have about salespeople and the high turnover of salespeople although a salesman job is very well paid. This opinion was formed not only from my professional but also from my academic experience. The students are executives coming from a variety of sectors. Even though some of them were marketing graduates the idea of working as salespeople was repellant to them. In order to understand the issue and improve my knowledge and consultancy I decided to follow a doctoral program in HRM and Marketing at Middlesex University. The doctoral thesis concerns Recruitment, Selection and Training of Salespeople and their effect on Salespeople performance. At the same time in order to see how Human Resources agencies work from the inside, a made a career move and I got employed as Director of Executive Services at a local company. So I developed my functional expertise such as marketing by adding the human resources perspective and at the same time I extended my professional experience from marketing to human resources and from IT and Telecom to the whole market. My other job (lecturer and sales trainer) gave me the opportunity to understand executives needs and acquire a general knowledge of the market. The plan is to offer strategic human resources consulting services as an HR consultant in a big HR consulting company to organizations and to be specialized in salespeople and this way I will combine my academic and professional experience and at the same time I will extend it to the other aspects of human resources i.e. mentoring/coaching, leadership, empowerment, high performance, talent management and reward. I would like to focus on organizations where sales and sales team are very important. After having conducted a mini research to the local market I found out that the companies are really eager to find good salespeople but the training they provide is limited to product knowledge and they get no training on sales skills. The market sectors that are particularly interested in acquiring good and talented salespeople are the banking sector, telecommunication services and the pharmaceuticals. My plan for the next five years is to enrich my knowledge by attending high quality seminars in the above mentioned human resources issues and delve further from my current position (executive search director) into the banking, telecommunication and pharmaceutical sectors. I plan to attend all major events organized by the above sectors in order to get to know more people and the particular environment better. 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