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Consulting & Advisory Recruitment — TopHeads

AI-matched recruitment for management consultants, strategy and advisory professionals — partner, principal, engagement manager — and for consultants moving into industry roles.

Consulting careers are unusually hard to read from the outside, because the title ladder is standardised while the actual experience behind it is not. Two people who both made engagement manager in the same year may have spent that time on entirely different problems, in different industries, with different degrees of client ownership. TopHeads reads the engagement record rather than the rung — the sectors served, the type of problem, whether the person sold the work or delivered it, and how large the client relationship was — which is what determines whether a consultant is right for a partner track, for a strategy seat inside a company, or for an operating role.

The consultant-to-industry transition is where this matters most, and where conventional matching is at its worst. A firm's alumni are frequently the strongest candidates for a corporate strategy, chief of staff, transformation or general management role, but their résumés read as a list of client names rather than a record of ownership, so keyword screening scores them poorly against a job description written in operating language. Because the matching reasons across that translation and states its reasoning, the hiring team sees the argument for the candidate rather than an unexplained absence.

It runs in the other direction too. Firms hiring experienced professionals out of industry — the operator who becomes a senior advisor, the specialist brought in for genuine sector depth — need to assess a record that looks nothing like a consulting CV. Independent consultants and boutique advisory practitioners sit on the same rails, matched on the substance of the work rather than the size of the letterhead.