Human resource consulting is an $18.

4
billion industry (as of 2006)
[1]
that has
emerged from management consulting and
addresses human resource
management tasks and decisions. HR
Consultants are responsible for assisting
clients with strategically integrating effective
HR processes, programs and practices into
their daily operations. Their role is also to
maximize the client's performance related to
human resources by introducing or
marketing "best practice" products or
services as well as to provide periodic
feedback to clients regarding their
performance related to annual management
objectives. To accomplish this, the HR
Consultant may need to perform needs
assessments or audits and make
recommendations or proposals, coordinate
the creation and implementation of an action
or corrective plan, and when required,
organize and coordinate cross-functional
Human Resource teams to assist the client
with developing and implementing
performance improvement corrective plans,
programs or processes. The following are
core fields around which most HR
consultancies are based:
Human Capital,
including remuneration (also called total
rewards), employee rewards and incentive
programs, and talent acquisition and
management. Human capital is the stock
of competencies, knowledge, habits,
social and personality attributes,
including creativity, cognitive abilities,
embodied in the ability to perform labor so
as to produce economic value. It is an
aggregate economic view of the human
being acting within economies, which is an
attempt to capture the social, biological,
cultural and psychological complexity as
they interact in explicit and/or economic
transactions. Many theories explicitly
connect investment in human capital
development to education, and the role of
human capital in economic development,
productivity growth, and innovation has
frequently been cited as a justification for
government subsidies for education and
job skills training
Health & Benefits; i.e., orchestrating
optimal employee health plans with the
carriers themselves
Mergers & Acquisitions, examining fit
across culture, job-type, transaction costs,
etc. Mergers and
acquisitions (abbreviated M&A) are both
aspects of strategic management, corporate
finance and management dealing with the
buying, selling, dividing and combining of
different companies and similar entities that
can help an enterprise grow rapidly in its
sector or location of origin, or a new field or
new location, without creating a subsidiary,
other child entity or using a joint venture.
Mergers and acquisitions activity can be
defined as a type of restructuring in that they
result in some entity reorganization with the
aim to provide growth or positive
value. Consolidation of an industry or sector
occurs when widespread M&A activity
concentrates the resources of many small
companies into a few larger ones, such as
occurred with the automotive
industry between 1910 and 1940.
The distinction between a "merger" and an
"acquisition" has become increasingly
blurred in various respects (particularly in
terms of the ultimate economic outcome),
although it has not completely disappeared
in all situations. From a legal point of view,
a merger is a legal consolidation of two
companies into one entity, whereas
an acquisition occurs when one company
takes over another and completely
establishes itself as the new owner (in which
case the target company still exists as an
independent legal entity controlled by the
acquirer).

Communication, including surveying
employee attitudes, satisfaction,
engagement, and other employee
behaviors
Retirement
Recruitment process outsourcing
Services may also include legal counseling,
global initiatives, investments consulting,
and the implementation of HR technologies
to facilitate human capital management. The
HR consulting industry also employs more
actuaries than any other in order to assist in
their services.
Recruitment Process Outsourcing is a
form of business process outsourcing (BPO)
where an employer outsources or transfers
all or part of its recruitment activities to an
external service provider.
The Recruitment Process Outsourcing
Association defines RPO as follows: "when
a provider acts as a company's internal
recruitment function for a portion or all of its
jobs. RPO providers manage the entire
recruiting/hiring process from job profiling
through the onboarding of the new hire,
including staff, technology, method and
reporting. A properly managed RPO will
improve a company's time to hire, increase
the quality of the candidate pool, provide
verifiable metrics, reduce cost and improve
governmental compliance."
[1]

The RPO Alliance, a group of the Human
Resources Outsourcing Association
(HROA), approved this definition in February
2009: "Recruitment Process Outsourcing
(RPO) is a form of business process
outsourcing (BPO) where an employer
transfers all or part of its recruitment
processes to an external service provider.
An RPO provider can provide its own or may
assume the company's staff, technology,
methodologies and reporting. In all cases,
RPO differs greatly from providers such as
staffing companies and contingent/retained
search providers in that it assumes
ownership of the design and management of
the recruitment process and the
responsibility of results."
[2]

Occasional recruitment support, for example
temporary, contingency and executive
search services, is more analogous to out-
tasking, co-sourcing or just sourcing. In this
model, the service provider is just a source
for certain types of recruitment
activity.
[3]
The distinction between RPO and
other types of staffing is that in RPO, the
service provider assumes control of the
process.
Benefits:- RPO providers claim the method
has lower costs because the economies of
scale enables them to offer recruitment
processes at lower cost while economies of
scope allow them to operate as high-quality
specialists. Those economies of scale and
scope arise from a larger staff of recruiters,
databases of candidate resumes, and
investment in recruitment tools and
networks. RPO solutions are also claimed to
change fixed investment costs into variable
costs that flex with fluctuation in recruitment
activity. Companies may pay by transaction
rather than by staff member, thus avoiding
under-utilization or forcing costly layoffs of
recruitment staff when activity is low.
They also claim higher quality, because the
commercial relationship between an RPO
provider and a client is likely to be based on
specific performance targets. With
remuneration dependent on the attainment
of such targets, an RPO provider will
concentrate their resources in the most
effective way - at times to the exclusion of
non-core activity. Traditional internal
recruitment teams are less likely to have
such clearly defined performance target



IN RACE
HR consultancies vary in their ranges of
services and sizes, with many consultants
and academicians breaking off to form their
own practices. In 2007, there were 950 HR
consultancies globally, constituting a USD
$18.4 billion market.
As of 2007, major HR Consultancy firms
included:
[2]

Aon plc
Deloitte
Hay Group
Hewitt Associates
Mercer
PricewaterhouseCoopers
The Segal Company
Towers Perrin
Watson Wyatt Worldwide
Aon and Hewitt Associates have since
merged to form Aon Hewitt; Towers Perrin
and Watson Wyatt Worldwide have
combined to form Towers Watson.
Some other Smaller HR Consultancies, who
tailor their services for the SME Business
Sector, include:
- HR Solutions (Consultancy) Limited -
Business HR Solutions Limited