Recruiting employees with strong technical skills is only part of the challenge for a technology consultancy.

The people representing your business need to build relationships, communicate with stakeholders and add value in customer-facing environments. Technical capability gets someone through the interview, but it’s their ability to work with clients, partners - and as part of a team, that makes them successful.

A growing technology consultancy came to us because they needed a recruitment partner who genuinely understood that distinction.

Previous recruitment support had focused heavily on technical capability, but consultancy hiring requires a much broader assessment. The client needed an agency that understood what good looked like in a consulting environment, where communication skills, commercial awareness and the ability to build trusted client relationships are just as important as technical expertise.

For us, this wasn't a new challenge.

Around half of our client base operates within the consultancy sector - so understanding the difference between hiring a technical specialist and hiring a successful consultant is part of what we do every day.

Alistair Cooke, Co-Founder of Accelero, said:

"The best consultants combine technical expertise with the ability to build confidence with clients. That's something you only really understand if you've spent time recruiting for consultancies. Skills can be assessed on paper, but understanding whether someone will represent a client's business well takes a different approach. That's where experience makes a real difference."

Our partnership began by supporting a single office based in Bristol. As we consistently delivered the right people, the relationship continued to grow.

Over time, we expanded our support across more than 20 offices throughout the UK, recruiting across the full range of Technology and Change disciplines as the consultancy continued to scale.

Importantly, we weren't working instead of the client's internal Talent Acquisition team - we worked alongside them.

Operating as an extension of their recruitment function and providing specialist market knowledge, candidate networks and additional delivery capacity whenever it was needed.

Our partnership delivered more than 50 permanent and contract placements, helping the business grow while maintaining the quality standards they expected.

The strongest recruitment partnerships aren't built because an agency can fill vacancies. They're built because they understand the business they're representing, the people who succeed within it, and the standards that clients expect.

If you're looking for a recruitment partner that understands the difference between hiring technical talent and hiring successful consultants, we'd love to talk.