Human resource consulting

The human resource consulting industry has emerged from management consulting and addresses human resource management tasks and decisions. HR Consultants can fill two typical roles (1) Expert Resource Consultant (2) Process/People consultant. These two roles are defined by Steele F. (1975), Kubr,M. (1993, 1996); Niedereicholz (1996), Curnow-Reuvid (2003) and Kipping, K. and Clarck (2014).

The Expert Resource Consultant suggests solutions based on expertise and experience and assists in the implementation. The role is very typical in information benchmarking and design consulting (see examples of actual design practices in the subsequent section below).

The Process/People consultant assists in searching for solutions with methods that facilitate and raise creativity of the client company so that they will be able to implement solutions themselves. The role is traditionally demonstrated by organizational development and change consulting.

The following are core fields around which most human resource consultancies are based:

Employee engagement: measure employee engagement levels through surveys and interviews, define and improve performance in employee engagement and retention. While this area of HR consulting is necessarily broad, encapsulating total rewards strategy, employee performance management, leadership transformation, and organisation structure design, most companies do have very specialised independent practices.

Compensation: design and manage compensation programs related to basic salary, bonuses, and stock plans. Evaluation of positions and building of salary structures, bonus plans and stock plans for clients are common. Specialisations are often based on employee types (eg. Executive compensation consultants and sales compensation consultants).

Employee benefits: optimize benefit plan design and administration (inclusive of health-related benefits) by assessing competitiveness and effectiveness of benefit plans (analytics and design), and cost-effectiveness and quality of vendors (brokerage).

Actuarial and retirement: provide actuarial and administration services to manage cost and effectiveness of retirement programs, including defined benefit and defined contribution plans.

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