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Celosvětově | Z celého světa | 2009-11-03 Consulting Market Shrinking but Primed for Hiring Recovery The consulting industry will decline 10-15%  Bildquelle: sxc.hu Recent results announcements by Accenture and IBM were a wake-up call for anyone thinking the consulting industry has been able to shield itself from the effects of the global downturn. The reality looks more like the consulting industry will have declined 10-15% by the time the industry emerges from recession. However, extensive research just published by Top-Consultant.com shows that hiring will be kick-started within the coming months following an 18 month period in which recruitment activity slumped. The majority of consulting firms believe a hiring upturn will be underway by early 2010.
An industry shielded from recession? As recently as May of this year, the MCA’s annual report showed the UK consulting industry growing revenues at 5% per annum. Could it be that the scale of restructuring and turnaround opportunities were powering the consulting industry ahead in spite of the general economic malaise? Certainly the mass redundancies and collapse in hiring activity made this story seem hard to swallow. However these figures were based on financials to the end of December 2008 and with hindsight clearly masked the deterioration that firms have seen in their order books since late 2008. The reality now looks more like the consulting industry will have declined 10-15% during the recession, following more than a decade in which the growth rate has rarely dipped below 10% Announced within the last weeks, Accenture’s Consulting net revenues for their fourth quarter 2009 were $2.91 billion, a decrease of 12% in local currency terms from the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008. Similarly IBM’s Global Business Services unit reported its latest quarterly revenues were down 11% compared with 2008. Both firms’ order book figures suggest the industry will see stabilisation over the coming quarters rather than a return to stratospheric growth. Whilst the Top-Consultant team are certainly seeing many niche consulting firms thriving in the current climate, from an industry growth perspective the importance of firms like Accenture and IBM is overwhelming. With consulting revenues slipping at other leading brands like Atos (-23%) and Capgemini (-13%), the inescapable conclusion is that consulting as a market will have declined by 10% or more by the time the industry returns to growth again. Consulting hiring primed for recovery Against this backdrop and the significant redundancies that have been undertaken over the last year, Top-Consultant surveyed 122 recruiters from a wide range of consulting firms and agencies to determine when we can expect an improvement in the consultancy recruitment market. The results were mixed in that a hiring upturn is expected imminently, but it will be at least 3 years before we see anything like the hiring frenzy that has characterised much of the last decade. Overall the findings paint a picture of a modest recovery in hiring activity that is only just now starting to get underway, which would explain the difficulties that consultants have experienced in securing new positions up until now. Only 7% of respondents believe the market began picking up earlier this year; 45% believe a hiring recovery is either already underway or is just getting underway now. This leaves the majority (55%) expecting to see a hiring upturn only get underway from 2010 onwards. Set against the terrible hiring climate of the last year it’s a positive to see that 79% of all recruiters believe a recovery will be underway by early 2010. Respondents were also asked to quantify how their hiring volumes for 2010 and 2011 were likely to compare with the hiring volumes they had seen during the most recent boom. For 2010 the respondents expect hiring volumes to be 45% of what they were during the last boom, with this figure growing to 60% in 2011. These figures compare with the ~25% of previous volumes figure that Top-Consultant estimate the market had dropped to at its low. The key message from the above is that hiring activity will increase steadily over the coming two years, but that the “War for Talent” seen during the boom will not return until 2012 or beyond. In the meantime, candidates will need to be shrewder in their choice of application strategies – and potentially consider career moves outside consulting too.
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