Challenges for HR consultants - US perspective

When I posted earlier on the booming HR consulting marketplace, ex-colleague Kaushik, who's now in the US gave some interesting perspective on the challenges that HR consultants face in the mature US market:

I thought the points were important enough to dedicate a full post :-)

While the human capital consulting market is growing, it is also equally difficult to sell. Some factors are :

1)Value propositions need to be flexible
2) Too many players
3)Boutique & specialized HC firms versus big ones
4) The client is an ex-consultant sometimes. Its so much more harder to negotiate with someone in the same profession ;)

What clients really need are the depth and breadth of expertise and solutions(rather than services). From my experience, Industry specializations play a key differentiator

One of the big market has been in technology and regulatory implementation & adoption. While most bigger human capital consulting firms leverage this opportunity, there is a blanket of opportunities for boutique firms in specialized advisory solutions and services space.

I hope I'll post some Indian perspective too in the coming month.... including mine :-)