I've tried searching for this before and found discussions about firm employees going to clients but not the other way around.
How "off-limits" are the employees of clients for the firms? I've spent the past few years at a Fortune 50 company in their internal consulting group. Have known for awhile that I did not want to become Director in my group as that is the level where you are no longer in a primarily client-facing role and become responsible for running an office (VPs win the work).
Over the past few months I've been getting the itch to go back to a professional services firm. The problem is, my company is large enough to have contracted work with most of the Top 20 at any given point in time - usually with my group as their direct client. My question is: how off-limits is it REALLY to hire me? What are the general rules with regards to that?
Might I be ok with quitting and THEN pursuing employment with them (probably with a month or so "off work and traveling" to enhance the optics of it)? Or is there a "cooling off" period of sorts which would be a few years (I can live several months on savings but not years)? I'd prefer to be with a top firm but if it's going to take a few years to be eligible I would need to develop an interim plan.
I have a pretty solid resume and could not figure out what the problem was until one firm explained that they cannot engage in recruitment discussions with employees of clients. Did the math and realized the ones who HAVE been calling me to set up interviews are the ones we have not contracted. It's not a reputation thing, I am clearly regarded as one of the highest performers in my group and have some very plum projects on my resume. Not going to discuss this with their project leadership since it would really put them in an awkward place.
Would you guys have any insight? Thanks!
I worked at an MBB for 4 years. Did not see many (if any) instances of clients joining us. I do believe there was some worry about any optics that we were poaching from a client. The risk there far outweighed the reward of even a rock star like you.
One time, though, there was a client employee who applied who had nothing to do with the work we were doing, and I believe even before final rounds the recruiters had to talk with the lead partner on that client to make sure it was ok. Definitely a case by case thing.
Thanks. Yes, I didn't realize this was a problem until I was recruiting with a Top 5 firm. Responses started getting very slow. Eventually, after a series of interviews, I got a response that they did not engage in recruitment discussions with employees of clients. Lo and behold, the same group I was interviewing with showed up on the floor of another one of our offices... my department had engaged them while I was interviewing.
I spoke with a partner about two weeks ago (after posting this). He confirmed this is definitely a no-no at their firm as well. An exception might be made in an instance where there may be a significant restructuring or some other reason which could be handled with kid gloves.
Looks like the closest I'd get to any of these firms for awhile is hooking up with their staff. Too bad I don't shit where I eat.
Hires from industry are just super rare in general, so it's really hard to point to examples based on precedent.
Read the title and thought this would be about hooking up with client employees lol.
Yeah me too. Nice job, @managerette" for getting lots of idiots like me to click
interesting convo
There are usually clauses included in NDAs that say you cannot directly solicit client employees directly, but that usually doesn't pertain to any client employee seeking out new employment on their own or responding to a general, public solicitation - linkedin posting for example. Sometimes the firm losing the employee will receive a % of first year comp in return, but I'm not sure if that's always the case or not.
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