Productising Your Expertise How Newsom Consulting Moved From Placement-Focused to Advisory-Driven

Recruitment businesses accumulate valuable information every day. Consultants know what candidates are being paid, why people move, where talent sits, which employers are struggling to retain senior people and how markets are changing.

Much of that insight is traditionally given away as part of the recruitment process.

In this session, James Osborne, Co-founder of The Recruitment Network, spoke with Jim Newsome of Newsome Consulting about how the executive search business has increasingly turned that expertise into paid advisory work alongside recruitment.

The opportunity is not to stop recruiting. It is to recognise that the knowledge created through recruitment can solve a much wider set of client problems.

Start with the client's problem, not the product

Advisory services do not have to begin with a consultancy product designed in isolation.

They can begin with better conversations.

A client might be struggling to retain senior people. It could be entering a new geography, planning succession, questioning its bonus structure or trying to decide whether an internal leader is ready for promotion.

Those are not necessarily recruitment briefs.

They are business problems involving talent and the labour market.

When a recruitment business understands the market well enough, it may already possess much of the information the client needs to make the decision.

That is where an advisory proposition starts to emerge.

Salary data is more valuable when it reflects the real market

Salary benchmarking is one area where specialist recruiters can have a significant advantage.

Traditional salary datasets can be built around job descriptions, industry codes, geography and grading structures.

That can produce useful benchmarks, but it may not answer the question a senior leadership team actually wants answered.

They may want to know what the equivalent directors in their eight closest competitors are earning today.

A specialist recruiter can often provide a much more precise view because its consultants are speaking to those individuals directly.

The value is not only knowing a base salary.

It can include bonus structures, long-term incentives, pensions, allowances and other elements of the package.

At senior level, where there may be relatively few genuinely comparable people, that depth can be more useful than a broad average.

Your proprietary data is the differentiator

The growth of AI makes this distinction increasingly important.

Public information is becoming easier to find, analyse and package.

If a client can access the same information independently, simply collecting it and putting it into a report becomes harder to monetise.

Recruitment businesses possess something different.

They have information generated through thousands of conversations with candidates and clients.

That insight may never appear on a public website.

It is proprietary data built through relationships.

AI can help analyse it, identify patterns and improve the way a report is presented, but it does not replace the underlying information.

For recruitment leaders, this turns CRM discipline into a commercial issue rather than an administrative one.

Stop allowing valuable information to disappear into notebooks

A business cannot commercialise information it does not retain.

Consultants may discuss salary, bonus, incentives, pensions and benefits every day, but if that information remains in individual notes or memory, it has little value beyond the immediate conversation.

A scalable advisory proposition requires structured data.

That means recording the information consistently, keeping it current and retaining useful historical data when candidates move.

Newsome Consulting reinforces this through regular data quality checks, with everyone in the business participating.

A small element of annual reward is also linked to data quality.

The principle is clear: market intelligence is part of the company's intellectual property.

Know when free insight becomes a paid project

Recruiters are accustomed to sharing information with clients.

Giving a quick view on the likely salary for one position may simply be part of maintaining a strong relationship.

The commercial opportunity appears when the problem becomes larger.

A client may discover that it is not simply underpaying one operations director. It may have a compensation problem across 20 senior positions.

At that point, the requirement changes.

The business may need competitor analysis, multiple data points, written commentary and a report robust enough to be presented to a board or government stakeholder.

That is no longer a small piece of recruitment advice.

It is a consulting project.

Connect advisory work to a decision

One reason these products can command meaningful fees is that they support significant decisions.

A business may need approval to change executive salaries.

A board may be deciding how it wants to position compensation against competitors.

An organisation may need to assess whether an internal candidate is ready for a more senior role.

The recruitment company is not making the decision for the client.

Its role is to provide sufficiently strong evidence for the client to make that decision with greater confidence.

That distinction is important.

The product is not simply information. It is decision support.

Advisory creates value when clients are not hiring

Traditional recruitment revenue is tied closely to hiring activity.

If the client has no vacancies, there may be little to invoice.

Advisory services change that dynamic.

Salary benchmarking, succession planning, leadership assessment, market research and workforce intelligence can remain relevant regardless of whether there is an active recruitment process.

That provides additional revenue during quieter periods and another reason to remain close to clients throughout the year.

It also makes conversations broader.

Instead of meeting only when an executive role becomes vacant, the recruitment business can become part of discussions around future strategy and workforce planning.

Wider services can produce better recruitment relationships

Advisory work can deepen trust.

Once a client recognises that a recruiter can help with problems beyond filling a vacancy, it may begin sharing more information.

Conversations can become more frequent and more strategic.

That gives the recruitment company a stronger understanding of what is happening inside the organisation.

The commercial benefit can work both ways.

Existing recruitment clients can buy consultancy products, while organisations entering through advisory work can subsequently become executive search clients.

Productisation changes who you can sell to

A recruitment service usually has a familiar set of buyers.

An advisory service can introduce different stakeholders.

Salary and reward work may be relevant to HR directors, remuneration committees or boards.

Succession planning and leadership assessment may involve other members of the executive team.

As the proposition broadens, the go-to-market strategy should broaden with it.

That does not necessarily mean abandoning consultative recruitment sales.

It means identifying which business problem each product solves and which stakeholder owns that problem.

Be part of the client's industry

Advisory credibility is also influenced by how the market perceives the recruitment company.

There is a difference between supplying recruitment into a sector and genuinely participating in it.

Industry associations, professional groups and sector events can help recruitment businesses become part of the conversations shaping their clients' markets.

That may involve attending briefings, contributing to member groups, sponsoring relevant initiatives or simply being consistently present where industry leaders meet.

It creates opportunities to understand problems before they turn into recruitment briefs.

It can also change how clients perceive the business.

Price according to the value and complexity of the project

Newsome Consulting currently prices advisory work on a project basis rather than through a subscription model.

That reflects how many requirements arise.

A client may have a board meeting approaching, an annual compensation review or a specific strategic decision requiring evidence.

The price therefore depends on the scale of the work, the number of roles involved, the depth of research required and how much supporting explanation the report needs.

A small but highly scrutinised assignment can require more work per role than a larger exercise where most of the data is already available.

The important point is that advisory pricing should reflect the work required and the importance of the output, rather than being treated as a free addition to recruitment.

Professional presentation matters

Recruiters may have strong data but initially lack confidence about how to package it.

That should not stop the business developing the service.

Clients receiving board-level consultancy expect information to be presented professionally.

Recruitment businesses can learn from established consulting firms by studying how reports are structured, how evidence is displayed and how commentary supports the data.

AI can also accelerate this process by helping organise information and improve presentation.

The strongest proposition combines consulting-quality presentation with specialist market data that the larger consulting organisation may not possess.

Free insight can still support the paid proposition

Not every piece of research needs to sit behind a paywall.

Publishing lighter market reports can demonstrate expertise and give potential clients evidence that the business understands its market.

The distinction is specificity.

A free report might describe a broad set of companies.

A paying client may want a detailed analysis of its eight closest competitors, complete with compensation structures and interpretation specific to its situation.

Useful free content can therefore create demand for deeper bespoke analysis rather than undermine it.

Look beyond what your own team can deliver

Productisation does not mean every service has to be delivered internally.

Clients may raise problems that sit adjacent to the recruitment company's expertise.

A strong network of external specialists can allow the firm to help solve those problems without pretending to possess capabilities it does not have.

Newsome Consulting has already introduced external expertise into client projects where specialist business development support was needed.

The recruitment business can diagnose the issue, shape the brief and connect the client with the right expertise.

That can strengthen the client relationship while creating another commercial opportunity.

You may not need a separate consultancy team

One of the barriers recruitment leaders can create for themselves is assuming that advisory work requires a new division before anything can begin.

It does not.

The initial work can often be delivered using existing research and consulting capability.

What needs to change is the mindset around how that capability is used.

Business development conversations need to focus on the client's underlying challenges.

Data needs to be captured systematically.

The business then needs enough confidence to package that expertise and charge appropriately for it.

Diversification can reduce recruitment risk

Advisory work also carries a different risk profile from placements.

An executive search can progress successfully for weeks before a candidate withdraws or rejects an offer.

A research report does not make that decision.

There can still be delivery challenges, particularly where information is difficult to obtain, but the commercial dependency is different.

For recruitment businesses looking to create a more resilient revenue mix, that matters.

The next step is becoming part of strategic decision-making

The longer-term opportunity goes beyond creating an additional revenue line.

It is about changing where the recruitment business sits within its clients' organisations.

Instead of arriving after the decision to recruit has already been made, the firm can participate earlier.

It might help shape reward strategy, assess leadership capability, provide market intelligence or advise on the structure of a new programme.

For Newsome Consulting, that development includes the possibility of working alongside larger management consultancies on major infrastructure programmes.

The ambition is to build a significant advisory capability alongside executive search and increase engagement at board level.

The expertise already exists

Many recruitment firms do not need to start by asking what new service they could invent.

A better question is what valuable expertise already exists inside the business.

The conversations recruiters have every day contain market intelligence that clients use to make consequential decisions.

Captured properly, analysed carefully and packaged professionally, that intelligence can become a standalone commercial product.

The shift from placement-focused to advisory-driven therefore starts with recognising that recruitment businesses do not only find people.

They understand markets.

And that understanding has value in its own right.

Speaker: Jim Newsome - Managing Director, Newsome Consulting
Host: James Osborne - Co-founder and CEO, The Recruitment Network