I’m a recently laid-off recruiter/HR/People person. Should I pivot to consulting?

I’ve been getting this question a lot lately. And I get it — the boom-bust hiring cycle in our field is OLD and it feels great to get out of the game. Here’s a little about why I chose that path, how I got started and some of the tradeoffs along the way.

How it started

I got laid off at the literal beginning of the pandemic (March 2020, the week of WHO’s declaration and the week before San Francisco issued lockdown orders). It was awful timing — there were no COVID-related public support systems built out yet, very few companies were hiring, and the world was in panic mode. It sucked.

Searching for a job seemed futile, so while I maintained my EDD-required application quota, I focused my mental energy on staying busy and engaged in the field through education and networking.

One activity was Jennifer Kim’s Startup Recruiting Bootcamp. I’m so grateful Jen allowed me to do a work-trade when I couldn’t afford the fee outright. This training was a bright spot in an otherwise dark time for so many. For the first time I felt community among founders, interviewers and recruiters who all knew there was a better way to hire.

That was also where I met my first client — a fellow participant liked my commentary in our breakout sessions and asked if I could consult on talent strategy at her biotech startup.

Building momentum

By this time I had a mentor. I supported some of her consulting work to build up my experience with more established startups and to find my voice under her wing and credibility.

I distill my “momentum-building” activities into these buckets:

Learning and iterating

This sounds obvious but… a growth mindset has been critical. I see every engagement as a learning opportunity — about people, the work, teams, industries, etc. I iterate on what I learn and I’m confident it makes me a better consultant with every client.

Referrals

This is currently the vast majority of my business. I should really diversify that but it hasn’t felt like a priority. They come from several sources:

• former clients, colleagues and students
• people I met at conferences, trainings, or general networking
• “chain” networking: I speak to a direct referral, who during conversation mentions someone else I should talk to.

Paying it forward

I spent about 10% of my work hours offering value to others without expectation of a return on the investment. That can look like:

• free and/or discounted coaching or negotiation advice (the job search coaching side of my business is heavily subsidized by all the company consulting I’m talking about in this post, because I want it to be accessible),
• volunteering my time/skills/materials to select nonprofits,
• writing this blog post!

Some of this is just good networking strategy, but it’s rooted in one of my guiding principles that society receives and thrives through generosity.

Challenges

No worthy journey is without difficulty! Here are my four biggest challenges of self-employment:

Loneliness:

I’ve always been good at working alone or in groups (I was the kid reading on the playground… and persuaded to lead group projects) and I’m an introvert through and through, but I didn’t realize how much I’d miss having a team when I set out on my own. I’ve worked on this in a few ways:

• I work in public places when I can (my local branch of the public library is a personal favorite, but coworking spaces and cafes work, too!). For me this is best suited to solo work like research, writing or editing, so I avoid meetings on those days.
• I work collaboratively with my clients. Some early engagements were too transactional and siloed. Now, we build together. Early clients were often too busy or uninterested in discussing problems — they only wanted standardized templates or data. Today I decline to work with these clients. I’ll still build templates, but more often at my suggestion and only once we agree why that’s a meaningful solution and how it can enhance the underlying process changes. Not only does this solve my loneliness, the results are more likely to succeed long-term because they are well-integrated and customized to the contexts of those workplaces.
• I partner with other consultants. Despite shifting toward a collaborative style, working with clients feels more like a cross-team relationship rather than one with a direct colleague. More recently I’ve worked on a few client engagements as a partner to other consultants, and it’s been some of my most rewarding work: we can tackle larger projects than we might want to do alone, I can bounce ideas off someone, vent about challenging moments, and focus my time on areas of strength (for example, I love editing but often struggle with blank page syndrome). Shout-out to my current partner, aedHR!

Inconsistency:

One week can be wildly busy with projects for several clients. Another week or longer could be total crickets while in between clients or waiting for feedback. Some people thrive on that unpredictable lifestyle, but it’s a tax on both my finances and schedule. I’ve adapted in these ways:

• Financially, I learned to let go of a pathological need for independence and allow my spouse to handle the majority of household expenses (more on that later).
• I reframed quiet times as an equally productive opportunity for rest, learning and administrative work so that I am better-equipped for those busy moments.
• Life routines: I schedule weekly milestones to build a rhythm to each day. It changes sometimes (see: aforementioned busy weeks!), but in a given week I take a walk with friends, check in virtually with other solo entrepreneurs, and design my household’s meal plan with specific nights for new recipes, takeout, leftovers, or old favorites.

Self-motivation:

I’m sensitive to “where the energy flows” and where it doesn’t. I love client work, collaborating with and strategizing on how best to help clients. I find purpose and opportunity in their problems.

And… I tend to drag my feet or put off things where I am only accountable to myself, like updating my website, marketing my services, figuring out retirement savings, or filing for an LLC (ok, ok, I do have an EIN — just as a sole proprietor).

I haven’t figured out a good long-term solution for this but my fellow consultant friends are great accountability buddies for some of those tasks.

Overhead:

In a full-time job, you are usually paid for time you spend related to your work but not connected to a specific deliverable (conferences, reading a research paper, books, free thinking time, etc). Clients do not pay me for this. They also don’t pay me for time I spend crafting custom proposals, in meetings, designing workshop curricula, noodling on their problems, or reading research specific to topics we’re covering in their work. It’s all in service to best support them, but they only pay for the deliverables.

Many consultants bill overhead to clients by inflating their fees, either as an administrative line item or part of an all-inclusive fee. I broadly worry fee inflation contributes to even more confusion for clients in a sector already struggling to communicate what the work costs and the value delivered. Until I feel reconciled on that point, it’s not something I’m comfortable doing.

The closest I come to this is I buffer a few bonus hours for contingencies and “while I’m at it” add-ons. I’m transparent about how I calculate my fees when asked, and so far I have used all bonus time in every engagement (and then some — I’m working on better boundaries around this!) — but in my case it adds up to less than 1% of a given project, which is why I only dive into it when requested.

On the plus side, doing a lot of “free overhead” means I can embrace business expenses guilt-free as tax write-offs for relevant books and paid newsletter/community subscriptions like Tech Ladies, Amplify Academy, and Opsy.

Benefits

The good bits — aka, the reason I love work again.

An employed partner:

This is a pretty foundational privilege that makes my consulting situation possible: My spouse’s W2 job provides our healthcare, a steady income, and common tech company benefits. I also know other consultants with their own “side” day jobs for the same reasons — so I know it’s possible to manage both solo, but that would add time management and energy challenges.

Time flexibility:

Goodbye, green Slack status! I can usually arrange my schedule around my own priorities. In a week I might get coffee with family or friends, take my cats to the vet, volunteer during a hard-to-fill time slot, and run errands during quiet midmorning hours. I communicate to stakeholders if I’ll be unexpectedly absent, but most critically, I do not need to communicate my presence to anyone.

Autonomy:

I’ve always valued autonomy, but I never truly achieved it until working for myself. I design my own processes, rates, schedule and work product. This can be its own (sometimes overwhelming) challenge, but for the most part it’s exhilarating to work on my own terms!

Simpler hiring/onboarding, less politics:

For a typical full-time job, you interview for several cumulative hours over several weeks or months, negotiate an offer, and sit through an often-long and tedious onboarding — not just the paperwork and training, but simply learning the landscape of your new colleagues’ working relationships — before you can do the work. It could be months between the first introduction and settling into productivity!

In consulting, it’s a bit more like a vendor relationship. Clients come to me already aware of my skills and eager to get started. We may have up to two conversations, usually about their goals and my approach, before we mutually decide to move forward. I do consider the politics and working dynamics between client teams to best strategize and execute my work, but I remain an outsider who can choose whether and how to engage.

I’m a bit conflicted about how fair this reality is, but if client satisfaction is any indication, the problem isn’t with the consulting hiring process.

How it’s going

Ok, so nowhere have I mentioned being hugely profitable. By gross figures I’ve earned less annually than I could as a full-time employee. But per hour I earn quite a bit more than an equivalent W2 role, I work part-time, and I feel more empowered and fulfilled by my work than I have in a long time. That feels like my version of success.

I mentioned my spouse earlier; the lifestyle we share is simply untenable without his support. It works out equitably to us for now because we are a team; he pays most of our bills, and I have time to be the primary manager of our household. We would be far more stressed — in energy or finances — to either manage those tasks while working full time (which we used to do, and not terribly well), or hire them out.

All of this is to say, I don’t think this way of working is for everyone. Probably my biggest area of opportunity is learning to market myself to gain more consistency and diversity in my client portfolio. But the model works for me — for now. If the last few years are any indication, life can change on a dime, and the best we can hope for is the resilience to adapt.

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Krista runs KLane Consulting, a small firm focused on an interdisciplinary approach to most things HR, Talent Acquisition and Operations. Krista is also a job search coach who uses a values-driven strategy to help clients approach their search confidently toward opportunities where they can thrive.