Disappointing to see the entire thread about Consulting Point pulled. I guess that we're not allowed to criticise advertisers on this website.

Hello Critic - that's not true at all. If you look at a host of threads on this forum you will see that we do allow criticism of firms despite the amount of moderating this often requires. Unfortunately someone posted a thread purporting to be from Consulting Point last night and I pulled the thread immediately following a complaint from that firm.

If this is the way TC starts pulling threads on receiving complaints, I wonder what will happen to this forum if Acn, IBM, and/or PA complaints?! :-)

Bryan,Why pull the entire thread? At least be honest with us. You pulled the thread for commercial reasons - the phantom post gave you the excuse.If the comment you mentioned was the problem, why did you not remove that comment and leave the - perfectly valid - thread in place?This has happened before. TC should be careful - your business would not exist without a reputation for integrity amongst consulting candidates, swing things to far towards your advertisers and we'll look elsewhere.

I agree with above post. Top consultant has supported consulting point and come to its rescue 'rescue' (trying to put a positive spin on the latter's reputation) far too often in the near past to the extent that I personally feel you behave like consulting point's spokesperson. Why is top consultant supporting consulting point so vigorously? Why is top-consultant not ready to tolerate even mild (and genuine) criticism of consulting point, even though there are other companies that have been criticised more harshly in this forum? Being the moderator of this forum, aren't you expected to be neutral and allow the users to have a healthy and balanced debate on any given topic?I have put consulting point on my banned list long time ago. Now it seems, unfortunately, I have to rethink about this forum as well which behaves in a very biased manner.

The only people who complain about CP are their competitors pretending to be authentic members of this forum.Sad, very sad.

I experienced a terrible service from CP and I would even question the ethics of the business...

If you had a genuinely bad experience and can evidence poor conduct, why not use your real name?I have never had any contact with this firm, so have no reason to support or deny these allegations. They do sound spurious though.

last week I posted a non-too positive comment on Rakesh Pabbi. No insult, I just said it was useless to contact him to find a job. It was deleted.So I re-activated an old Consulting Point thread. Guess what happened? The whole thread has been deleted!!Why can people say awful things on PA, EY, ACN... but can't say they had a poor experience with Mr Pabbi?Reply quiclky before this comment is deleted

cmon now...no one is as bad as acn and ibm

In response to anon, I think people who are criticising CP are not omitting their names because their claims are spurious but for the same reason(s) that you have chosen to put anon (Unless that is because you are CP trying to reinforce your reputation?) – the same reason many other people choose to put anon on any number of the threads on this site.I have had a bad experience with CP (as have a number of my colleagues) and would certainly never use them again or recommend them. However that said I wouldn't necessarily go into the same degree of anti-CP posts that some users pursue (Though not necessarily for spurious reasons). This will be the first and last post in which I put my name (Jason) not because I am making spurious accusations or because I am trying to hide my identity but because as a user of this forum I have that choice.

Agree with a lot of the post above. Now this is a direct question: Mr Restell why do you act as a guardian for Consulting Point by deleting threads on them? As far as I can see, the one that was deleted (which I also contributed to) was not maliciuous nor insulting, but merely an honest professional assessment of a company and it's operating standards. If they are truly as bad as some people say, why delete the posts unless it is offensive. The amount of negative threads towards actual consultancies (ACN etc) is astounding yet they are never deleted, mind you, I imagine they don't pay to advertise on your site, or the subscription fee to access the database you have of people looking for jobs.

Looking at this from TC's point of view: - It is not possible for the people posting the direct strong criticism of CP and more specifically RP to actually evidence what they are writing about. - TC needs to consider the possibility that this is a smear campaign by a single disaffected customer, (ex) employee or competitor. - Don't know where libel law stands on this, but am sure TC would rather not pay a bunch of lawyers to even give an opinion on it if can be avoided by getting rid of a post her and there.As a related observation, 14 out of the 50 adds on the front TC page are from CP so it appears they might contribute 1/3 of TC's add revenues. However, as I've now discounted all CP adds as possibly false its annoying to have to try to filter them out while scanning through the adds.Also, the adds from CP cover: - business dev - change management - aerospace and defence - finance transformation - strats - operational excellence - innovation - finance process and SAP - risk management - procurement and SC - due diligence, M&A, PE - operational stratsTo me this sounds quite surprising: either this is an amazing company with wide reach, is not targeted at all, or is making up adds to gather CVs.Also, 10 of these adds have Rakesh listed as the contact person. Maybe another recruiter could comment on whether this is a normal number of open positions for a single recruiter to be trying to fill at any one time.

Tom, I'll come back to you on this as I have been moderating the forum rather than Tony Restell. You'll surely appreciate that for legal reasons we are obliged to moderate the forum and make the occassional intervention if, for instance, we learn that spurious postings are being made (eg people posting under others' names to stoke up the fires) and/or the subject of the postings complains. Where its not possible to verify individual postings, we have to pull the whole thread. It's ridiculous to suggest we don't allow criticism of firms on this forum (as other have done) and we intervene as little as we possibly can because we know that where we are obliged to intervene we'll receive no end of flack for doing so. Bryan@top-consultant.com

Regular readers will know I&apos;ve been away from work for much of the last couple of months owing to personal circumstances, so I&apos;ve been out of the loop on this.I have two points I&apos;d like to make on this subject:1) I&apos;m quite sure that some readers have genuinely had unsatisfactory interactions with Consulting Point, the nature of recruitment agencies is that they delight candidates they are able to help and disappoint those they are not able to help. However the overall weighting of criticism in their direction is very suspicious...As you know, in our annual candidate survey we collect feedback from ~1,000 readers on the recruitment firms they have had great experiences of working with; and have had terrible experiences of working with. <b>This is real "dish the dirt" stuff</b> and certainly opens our eyes to who are the advertisers we should be most reticent about encouraging onto our jobs board. For legal reasons we don&apos;t publish the individual responses from readers, but they are aggregated to produce the league table of readers&apos; preferred agencies. What I can tell you is that Consulting Point have consistently over the last years attracted only small volumes of complaints in this survey - with many other recruitment firms scoring far far worse in terms of negative feedback. It does therefore seem very odd that they should singularly generate so many negative posts on this forum.Let me put it to you that Consulting Point were probably the fastest growing recruitment agency of the last few years (in consulting) and so there are a lot of people who would quite like to see their credibility undermined and their success reigned in. Unfortunately an anonymous forum provides a good vehicle for achieving this if it is left unmoderated.2) We all know there&apos;s huge value to keeping this forum as an anonymous posting facility. The "insider scoops" we all get on what&apos;s happening in various firms simply wouldn&apos;t appear here if we went down the forced registration route. Of course anonymity does open the system up to abuse and our very limited censorship of the forum is the balance we strike in keeping the value of the forum content without our reputation being harmed by spurious postings. We have had lots of instances of things being posted on here that were malicious, untrue, misrepresentative, etc. We have to follow up on all such complaints and try our best to steer the right line between openness and legality.On occasions we&apos;ll overstep the line, not least because we&apos;re stretched as a team and sometimes have to take snap decisions on these things. But what I would say to you is that we have a team here which is comprised of people with real integrity and who strive every day to serve our readership. So you will never see decisions like this being taken for commercial reasons but rather in the interests of portraying an accurate view of the market.Tony RestellTop-Consultant.com

Tony,I think you totally missed the point.The question is “why is it possible to have strong criticisms towards certain high profile consultancies and not towards your main customer?”You say that “the overall weighting of criticism in their direction is very suspicious...”. Well no considering they can be so poor. What is suspicious is your behaviour.Considering how you protect CP I have now serious doubts about your annual survey. If you delete all negative comments like you do on this forum, no surprise they are always in the TOP 5!As for people not giving facts behind their bad comments that’s simply ridiculous. When someone describes his/her experience with Mr Pabbi you discount it as a personal experience. When many people complain you delete the thread.That’s conflict of interest, period!Personnaly I had an excellent contact with Craig Milbourne a few years ago. But I don&apos;t answer Mr Pabbi&apos;s emails any more.

Oliver - your assumption is flawed I&apos;m afraid. There are dozens of companies coming in for stick on this forum who are bigger customers than this one and whose negative comments we&apos;ve left intact on the site. So your assertion that we delete negative comments as a favour for our "main customer" is just plain wrong. If we were that misguided in the way we ran the business then there&apos;d be no negative comments about the vast majority of major brand consulting firms and the forum would cease to have any value.Tony RestellTop-Consultant.com

So my question stands: why can we post negative comments on consultancies and recruiters... except CP? Pretending negative comments are from jealous competitors is simply preposterous.I counted yesterday 27 ads from them. I&apos;d be very much interested to know who are the "dozens" of recruiters that are bigger customers!!

Tony: presumably you know who the people complaining are as you have their email address in the same way you could find out who I am? Yes, other agencies could be targeting them from home email accounts but I doubt it. I agree it seems a bit odd but the most likely explanation is that either there are a lot of hacked of people out there (because they are a big advertiser and therefore have large numbers of people contacting them) OR that there are a small number of very vociferous ones. I genuinely have no axe to grind but can see that CP/PB won’t be everyone’s cup of tea and could generate strong feelings. There but for the grace of God....I am still not sure why TC can’t simply remove a single offending entry rather than the whole lot. PS I am sure running a blog is a thankless task and we both have a real job to do too!

Tony,I have watched this item/debate for a while now and you have referred us all to the TC candidate survey results. However there is one aspect which i don&apos;t think has been discussed; isn&apos;t it possible that Rakesh Pabbi/Consulting Point quality has changed since that time?I had contact with Mr Pabbi last year in which he was, not exclusively i suspect, looking after B4 roles in a number of industries. I had a brief conversation with him and it was agreed my details would be sent across. Several weeks later after a period of silence & some chasing by me I received an email back from someone else at CP stating that the client felt I did not match their requirements. Full stop. My requests for further clarification did not receive a reply from CP.Strange then that i am now talking to that consultancy directly, same dept/industry focus, who state that they never received my resume in the first place and would have wanted it. I accept recruitment consultants need to make a judgement based on their knowledge of you/their client, the manner in which it was handled was unprofessional & a little unethical in my view. Ppl are quite able to take bad news when the process is fair and they can see they have been treated fairly. This was not the case.So there you are. Some actual CP detailed experience, and a new direction for this thread. Perhaps CP have behaved well in the past, but their quality and processes have slipped somewhat?

Oliver - the job board is just one aspect of what we do. Our services include newspapert advertising (in consulting supplements), annual careers fair, virtual careers fair, careers evening campaigns, newsletter advertising, consulting times advertising, pay per click advertising... the list goes on. So you can see there&apos;s plenty of scope for firms to rack up a spend with us that far exceeds that of a firm with a large number of job postings.As regards it being "preposterous" that others might post falsely on the forum, I think quite the opposite - it&apos;d be preposterous to think that no-one would post falsely when there&apos;s scope to do so. Fortunately we see the email addresses of those posting (albeit unverified) and also the IP addresses of the computers used to make the postings. So we might reach conclusions about posting behaviour on the forum that a casual reader without access to these things might not reach. As "recruiter too" comments, it is a pretty thankless task running a forum though as you&apos;re never going to get a pat on the back for intervening, only ever conspiracy theories about your motives for doing so. Hence it comes down to trust.I wasn&apos;t at work at the time when this whole offending forum thread was removed - and usually where we censor things it&apos;s individual comments rather than whole threads that are removed. But as I said in my earlier comment, it&apos;ll have been a decision that was taken based on the information available to the team and a judgement about whether the bulk of the thread was genuine or not. If anyone&apos;s been offended by that or genuine material has been lost then my apologies.Tony RestellTop-Consultant.com

The whole problem of "spoof" postings under false names could be easily avoided if you had some form of user authentication.With anonymous email accounts, I could still maintain my anonymity, but at least there would only be one Village Idiot. Those who wanted to post under their real names could do so as well.

Village Idiot what are you doing posting under my name?!

To But...More or less the same happened to me. I applied to a consultancy and Mr Pabbi sent me a form to fill in, however:1) this form should have been filled by him after he interviewed me (which he didn&apos;t)2) the form was for another consultancyOf course I never heard from him, even when I tried to have feedback.So I applied directly to the consultancy for which I had filled in the form and guess what? I had interviews...Amusingly I&apos;ve just received an e-mail from RP: he looks for Russian speaking consultant with lean/6 sigma experience. Totally me: strategy consultant with no experience in operational effectveness and I don&apos;t speak a word of Russian!Granted this bad behaviour does not happen only at CP and not all CP recruiters are like that. But we talk of someone who is among the top 5 recruiters according to TC survey...There used to be a thread just about him, with many similar comments before it was deleted... Can&apos;t believe they all were from competitors.Too bad Mr Pabbi doesn&apos;t answer us on this forum... Maybe I should answer his e-mail and suggest him to do so :-)

I quote &apos;Amusingly I&apos;ve just received an e-mail from RP: he looks for Russian speaking consultant with lean/6 sigma experience. Totally me: strategy consultant with no experience in operational effectveness and I don&apos;t speak a word of Russian!&apos;.Their strapline reads &apos;Executive Search and Selection&apos;. Ha ha ha.

I have had only limited contact with CP and in fact I chose to ignore a LinkedIn invitation from Rakesh a while ago following comments about the company I&apos;d seen on here. However there are few things we appear to be overlooking:It&apos;s reasonable to assume by now that CP and Rakesh are well aware of the stick they are attracting on this forum. That they choose not to respond should tell us something about the company (a small minority of grumblers on here compared to many satisfied candidates perhaps). Who knows maybe one of the posters is even Rakesh Pabbi himself? (if he really exists)On another note however, I&apos;m sure the TC website incurs substantial costs to maintain so instead of knocking the forum moderators, it&apos;s entirely reasonable they partly protect the interests of their advertisers. Otherwise we&apos;d find ourselves having to pay a subscription to access the website.Criticism of a small company and one named individual is very different to criticising a faceless monster like ACN, PA or IBM. I wouldn&apos;t like my name plastered all over the forum when all I have tried to do is help out other people (and make money in the process). How often as consultants have we ignored requests from clients that were a bit difficult or random?And I repeat my first line, I have had no contact with CP and, frankly, wouldn&apos;t choose to use them right now, but maybe we should all be a bit more balanced about it and look at ourselves first.

Come on Rakesh - I think its time you defended yourself and your firm&apos;s reputation in the face of this criticism.Personally I don&apos;t think you are any worse than any other recruitment company.

Consulting Point - the WORST ever recruitment firm I have ever seem - if at all CP could be classified either as a recruitment or firm. Mr RP is a ridiculous professional.

Saying CP is the worst may be a bit too far.Unfortunately there are many other recruiters who behave like this (send you untargeted e-mails, waste your time, never give feedback... )Try EM Consulting if you want to have a good laugh!

Dont f-up, CP is the WORST ever, I agree with the other comment.

Oliver, you seem to be one of those innocent people who still believe in miracles. Grow up and behave as a mature professional my dear...

Tony, you should stop playing censure. This has outdated, freedom of speech is wide spread around the world. If you are not prepared to allow people to voice their opinion, I think that your website should be discontinued. It is unfair to play a moderator who defends the interest of your dear ones...

I&apos;ve posted several negative posts about CP on this thread so I&apos;m not innocent.I just don&apos;t put in the same basket Rakesh Pabby and all the other CP employees. As I said above I had very good contacts with Mr Milbourne. Granted, he may be THE exception...And if I said I don&apos;t believe they are the worst I don&apos;t mean they are good. I think they are very poor... as many other recruiting firms.

what&apos;s wrong with untargeted emails? If you are not interested surely you can just hit delete?

To recThat&apos;s what I do. Delete CP&apos;s mails.But they have my CV is their database, they interviewed me in the past so they should know by now what are my 2-3 main areas of expertise. Their e-mails are totally out of range, with not even my name on it! Just "Dear"I regularly receive e-mails from their competitors, most match my profile. Why can&apos;t a "top recruiter" according to TC survey can&apos;t do it?

Hey thanks for the positives. Ive had much excellent feedback and some of which can be found on LinkedIn (30+ recommendations). Ive also probably annoyed candidates myself as everyones viewpoint is different. Some are great to work with others can really turn your own client against and unravel some very strong work on occassions if a senior figure takes on board one insular and singular viewpoint out of the blue fm nowhere. What Im stating is we are dealing with people who are prone to human error. I have seen cleints offer the wrong candidate many times and fail to offer a stronger candidate for all the wrong reasons. Think about it, a decision maker on 80K or whatever it might be a year may know their job very well but if they were beyond error then they wouldnt be in that job themself, they&apos;d be mage several hundred 000 or even millions.Its all swings and roundabouts.As for CP - as with any organisation their are good and bad experiencesd once you reach a certain size. I know Raklesh has an impossible job - as its 3 jobs in one - Running a business, Managing staff and still being one of the highest billers. Despite the occassional complaints I have to admit I couldnt do Rakesh&apos;s role to the satisfaction of all the plates he needs to spin. He&apos;s one opf the hardest working peopel Ive ever met and his volume is mind blowing. I take my hat off to some of the things that he has doen with Zero recruitment background starting up a firm but its an impossible job to please everyone.Like I say I couldnt do it myself and Ive been recognised as a top performer in my field and Ive been th e#1 supplier to many of my clients over the last 6 or 7 years.Recruitment is seriously taxing intensive work!!Craig

Would someone be so kind to tell us, the beginners on this site, what exactly is wrong with Consulting Point? They certainly advertise substantial amount of job vacancies here-are they all for real? Thank you all.

Dear all beginners on the site…Searching for a new job, particularly under forced circumstances, is a stressful activity. All the more so for management consultants, many of whom rely heavily on their self-esteem for their drive and confidence on the job (in the absence of a certificate of trade competency). Being out of work or being “on the way out” at your employer, destroys self esteem.The antidote to this is HOPE. Each CV despatched, each telephone interview, each 1st round interview, etc – they all provide the applicant with a reason to believe that a new job is imminent and that contrary to their earlier concerns, they remain an attractive employee.HOPE is fragile and will be dashed by each genuine decline. What really gets people upset is when HOPE should never have been raised. This happens when…1. Agencies put out ads that are not for real jobs and consultants apply2. Agencies conduct interviews in order to fish for contacts3. Agencies over-submit candidates just to pad a short list where they already have a preferred candidate.4. Agencies tell candidates that they are just what they are looking for, and then never contact them again.5. etc.SOME applicants believe Consulting Point stand out amongst agencies as being more guilty of some or all of the above. To be fair, many agents would suggest that many consultants treat headhunters like dirt until they are desperate for a job, then get angry when they can’t magic one out of thin air for them.

@Craig.I&apos;m surprised you&apos;ve stuck you head above the parapet on this thread to be honest, but fair play to you.I have actually been a paying client to your business (never a candidate) and I have to say, my experiences have been generally positive. That being said, I can point to a couple of occassions where your company hasnt covered itself in glory, but I can say that about every company I work with.I think the bashing your company gets on here is harsh, and I&apos;m willing to bet nearly all of the moans come from &apos;Consultants&apos; whose self belief and aspirations were never going to match the reality.Still, no-ones perfect.

Assuming he has high billing rate then that suggests he is good at getting people jobs. That&apos;s what you want isn&apos;t it?It would be nice if recruitment agents made sure all advertisements were current; returned all calls; were polite to all candidates. But all that detracts from the main objective. I would judge a good agent by his placement rate. If RP gets good billings then that is an excellent indicator he can help you get a job.

Talking about their dubious practices look at their job posting "Financial Services Consultants - Do you want to work at Board level with Top Banks and Insurers ?", which is clearly for the FSAAmong the info candidates have to submit you&apos;ll find "Details of which companies you have sent your CV to and which companies you are currently interviewing with and at what interview stage (1st, 2nd, 3rd, Final Interview etc) "is that not contact fishing?This "recruitemnt criterion" had disappeared after people complained here. And then it&apos;s back.no comment

are people living on another planet? why should someone plaster their real name to a comment having a dig at an outfit that potentially is a channel to a job - we all know some knows someone that knows you! Especially in this crappy economic climate. Personally I did have a bad experience with CP. Tried to contact Rakesh numerous times without luck...

Hello Shoe Polisher,Thanks for your view point. Id probably comment much more on here if I used the forum more and had more time.Im not afraid to say what I think as I know what I stand for - my own personal ethos and values. I wish the industry was regulated more to prevent or reduce the corner cutting and under handedness aspect of the industry (bot recruiter and client side in some cases). As I work, harder, longer and more diligently than most (Its 7pm on Saturday night here - get a life Craig :) then my actions also speak for themselves.I think its always easier and its human nature to remember bad experiences easier than just &apos;good experiences&apos; or normal experiences how it should be- worthwhile experiences standing out moreso.I personally run my business and Im commission only. No luxury of base salary and so my mortgage, food on the table, and income in contingency recruitment, purely rests on RESULTS and nothing else. Im my own judge jury and executioner. But is the choice I make.So to me its all about value and benefit to clients and candidates. I will make money according to as much or as little value I add to my clients and candidates - no more no less. Same as a Consulting company will stop using a consultancy if there is no value or benefit. (politics and contracts aside).To that end Im sure Ive disappointed some candidates and clients out there somewhere along the way. However I work like a dog, get millions of emails and can often be stretched too far.Despite this, I try to build up a good reputation with your peer group clients and candidates alike.But I encourage candidates and clients that consider working wit me not to take my word for it, but to research your peer group client and candidates and what they say.For me, those that go on record and are prepared to shout from the roof tops about their experience is the ultimate proof in the pudding.To that end, please see my new Video of testimonials. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TMXQgT1KNk(Hope the link works on here)Its my first attempt at embracing Social Proof with Social Media technology. (of which I truly advocate and have a passion for).In contingency recruitment we really dont have it easily. I get paid for about 5% or 10% of the work I do. I.e. only on placement results accepted, started and invoiced. So it can take me 6 months to get paid for a new role I take on which I have ZERO guarantees of making money on.So often I can build up a client&apos;s pipelines, it covers them on bids, project wins and give excellent comparable candidates to compare and choice all for free. As I will only be paid anywhere if a client chooses to hire. So for all the bad name of recruiters, a client ultimate decides our fate and need never pay for our service if not satisfied.Best wishes everyone,Craig.