Making the Most of your HR Consulting Firm

A number of companies choose to outsource one or more of their HR processes to an HR consulting firm because doing so can help them save on time, money, reduce staff hours and other peripheral costs of handling the processes in house and let them focus on other priorities of the company such as sales, customer service, product launch and the like. Some companies also find that for certain issues, like those handled by change consultancy, it’s better to get the insights of experts from outside the company to get a better, more objective view.

HR service providers or consultancies handle a number of human resources, or HR, management functions like employee recruitment and onboarding, employee assessment, employee training, feedback and rewards, employee health and other benefits and other employee relations functions; as well as building and maintaining a company culture, organizational leadership, compliance and, in unionized companies, acting as the representative of the organization and working with the labor union representative during collective bargaining agreement. These processes fall under the HR consulting core fields which are typically classified as human capital, mergers and acquisitions, health and benefits, communication, outsourcing and retirement.


Options
These services are being offered by a wide variety of human resources consultancies, from the smaller firms to the bigger ones so there a number of great options. Of course, the first way to get topnotch HR service is to choose well, hire the services of the consultancy that best suits your company’s needs. Some consultancies are well-known for their expertise in specific core fields. If you constantly need assistance in these core fields, it’s smart to go for the HR consulting firm that are regarded as one of the best in these areas.

Some companies, for example, are more interested in or are in need of experts in Human Capital. In “Why Did We Ever Go Into HR?,” posted in Harvard Business Review, authors Matthew D. Breitfelder and Daisy Wademan Dowling explained that “the staggering cost of finding and hiring top talent today—not to mention the millions of dollars’ worth of productivity that can be left unrealized when a company’s employees aren’t engaged with their jobs—highlights the need to devote more time and resources to developing and managing this greatest asset.”

Other Services
You should also consider the additional services that the HR consulting firm offers because they might give you an insight on which consultancy is a better fit for your company. Some of the services that may prove to be important to your company down the road are: support on human resources technologies for managing human capital, advice on investments, legal counseling and additional training services.

Consider the training, education and experience of the consultants. They should have the appropriate qualifications and certifications. Also, a reliable consultancy should be able to provide you with a good analysis of some of their past projects, the outcomes as well the consultants who worked on these projects. This is called having a good corporate memory. And this allows you to get – in as little time as possible – a list of qualified consultants for the next project that you have in mind.