"Lay off a third of the workforce."

I remember a book amount management consulting and it mentioned one firm (only referred to as the "Butchers") who only ever recommended this one action regardless of the actual state of the company. Of course they spent vast amounts of chargeable time analysing operations to produce data that supported the conclusion they had already made.

http://www.amazon.com/Rip-Off-Scandalous-Management-Consulti...

I love this book "exposing" management consulting:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rip-off-Scandalous-Management-Consul...

I'd like to read an equivalent for recruiters and as more people encounter recruiters than management consultants I expect the audience would be much larger!

I remember reading in a book "exposing" management consulting business practices that one major firm of consultants (known as "The Butchers") always recommended the same thing to companies: sack 25% of your workforce, regardless of the real problems the company had, the answer was always the same (of course, as they were being paid to come up with this answer they pretended to do a lot of detailed analysis to justify this conclusion).

This actually worked - for most companies (especially ones addicated to management consultants) you can sack 25% of the workforce and see immediate gains in profitability - which the consultants can then use as references to get more victims/clients. Of course, in the long term this does a lot of damage to companies but as long as the short term figures look good nobody really cares.

The book is:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rip-off-Scandalous-Management-Consul...

I can recommend this book - it covers the same topics but is written by someone who spent decades in consulting rather than a few months:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rip-off-Scandalous-Management-Consul...