What leaders usually conclude
The instinctive response is to treat this as a training or quality-control gap — one consultant simply performing to a higher standard than the other, fixable with clearer guidelines or closer supervision. Individual variation in performance is real, but this framing assumes a shared, well-understood standard already exists and one person is falling short of it. Often, no such shared standard was ever made explicit; each consultant developed their own version of “good service” independently, during a period when the firm was too small for anyone to notice the versions had diverged.
What the evidence suggests
Larry Greiner’s research on organisational growth describes how the informal coordination that works at small scale — where a founder or small team can directly observe and correct behaviour across the whole organisation — becomes unworkable as headcount rises, without the organisation necessarily building an explicit replacement for that informal oversight. A recruitment firm’s early consultants often absorb “how we do things” through close daily proximity to the founders. As the firm adds consultants faster than that proximity can scale, later hires absorb a thinner, more secondhand version of the same standard, and small variations compound with each new hire who trains from an already-diluted version of the original.
Jay Galbraith’s work on organisation design adds a further dimension: growing organisations face rising information-processing demands that outstrip what informal, proximity-based coordination can carry, and require deliberate investment in lateral relations or shared information systems to compensate. Recruitment firms rarely make this investment explicitly, because the erosion of consistency happens gradually and rarely produces a single dramatic failure that forces the issue — it shows up instead as a slow accumulation of candidate and client feedback that is individually minor and collectively significant.
Steven Kerr’s research on reward systems suggests a further reason this particular gap is so persistent. Recruitment consultants are almost universally measured and rewarded on placements made and fees billed — a fast, visible, easily comparable metric. Candidate experience consistency has no equivalent natural metric; it is diffuse, slow to surface, and rarely attributed back to a specific consultant’s individual approach. A firm can say, sincerely, that it values a consistent candidate experience, but if nothing about what is actually measured reflects that value, Kerr’s research would predict exactly what tends to happen: each consultant optimises for what is counted, and the uncounted dimension — consistency of experience — drifts according to whatever standard each individual happened to absorb, unchecked by any reward or correction that would pull it back toward a shared baseline.
Competing explanations
A firm might conclude the answer is simply hiring more experienced consultants who need less guidance. This can help at the margin, but experienced hires bring their own prior standards from previous employers, which may differ from the firm’s own — adding a further source of variation rather than necessarily reducing it, unless the firm has a genuinely explicit standard for new hires, experienced or not, to calibrate against.
A related but distinct explanation attributes the variation to differences in client or role type — one consultant’s roles simply requiring a different communication style than another’s. This is sometimes genuinely true and worth checking before assuming inconsistency is a training gap. But it is a separate question from whether the firm has ever articulated what “good service” means independent of role type, and firms that have never done the latter tend to see variation attributed to role differences that, on closer inspection, exists even between similar roles handled by different consultants.
There is also a compounding effect worth naming: once inconsistency becomes visible to clients or candidates — through comparison, referral, or simply working with two different consultants over time — it can start to shape expectations in ways that make the underlying variation harder to correct. A client who has experienced the firm’s best-case service will judge every subsequent interaction against that standard, and a firm unaware of its own internal variation has no way to manage that expectation deliberately.
Growth rate itself is a further variable worth separating out. A firm adding one or two consultants a year has more natural time to socialise each new hire into whatever informal standard currently exists, even an unwritten one, simply through sustained daily proximity to more experienced colleagues. A firm doubling its consultant headcount within a year compresses that socialisation dramatically, meaning a much larger proportion of the firm, at any given time, is operating from a thinner, more recently and more secondhand absorbed version of the standard — which helps explain why consistency problems often become suddenly more visible during periods of rapid hiring, even when nothing about the firm’s underlying approach to training has changed.
Where this shows up
People working in recruitment businesses will probably recognise this pattern first. The wider Professional and Knowledge-Based grouping and the other sectors page show how it presents elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- Does this firm have an explicit, shared standard for candidate experience, or has each consultant developed their own version independently?
- How many “hops” of secondhand training separate the firm’s newest consultant from its original founders’ standard?
- Would the firm notice gradual consistency erosion before a client or candidate raised it directly?
Your team is facing similar challenges?
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