How to Successfully Hire an External Consultant: Our Tips and Solutions to Try

Clearly Define Your Needs Before Hiring an External Consultant

The main mistake companies make when they fail to hire the right consultant is not having properly defined their needs. You must implement a recruitment strategy to achieve the expected results.
Bringing in an external consultant is not a trivial decision for your activity nor for your employees. Sometimes, your consultant’s technical skills won’t be the only criteria to consider. Clarifying your expectations upfront is essential to ensuring a successful collaboration.
Start by precisely defining the scope of the mission: What is its objective? What role will the consultant play? What tasks must they accomplish? Who will they work with? Do you need an executor, someone to manage client relationships, or someone who will deliver training?
Evaluating all these elements will help you select the consultant who fully meets your needs. You must also anticipate the practical aspects: mission duration, weekly workload, and whether the consultant must work on-site or remotely.
These details will also help you determine a realistic budget based on your ambitions, requirements, and financial capacity. Note that budgets vary significantly depending on the profile — junior vs. senior consultant — as well as the industry, position, and area of expertise.

How to Successfully Recruit a Consultant

Select the Right Candidate

Once your needs are clearly defined, you’re ready to find the ideal profile among the applicants. To identify the best external consultant, several channels are available: your professional network, recruitment agencies, or specialized freelance platforms.
During the selection process, it’s crucial not to limit yourself to evaluating the consultant’s technical skills.
Indeed, the consultant must adapt to your work environment. Review their past experiences to check whether they’ve already worked with companies similar to yours — in size, industry, or structure.
You must be able to picture how they will integrate into your organization before hiring them. Ask concrete questions about their past achievements and working methods. This discussion is a crucial step in determining whether this candidate is the right fit.
Finally, don’t forget to verify that the candidate meets all required legal and administrative conditions to operate within your company. Then you can follow the classic recruitment process, either with a recruitment consultant or your internal hiring team.

Legally Framing the Mission

Whatever the working arrangement, the legal framework must be carefully studied and established when hiring an external consultant.
Choosing the wrong consultant can make your project harder to deliver. But a legal issue can have even more serious consequences — even if you hired the best consultant available.
This is why it’s essential to define a clear, comprehensive, and legally compliant contract tailored to the consultant’s status. The contract must include:

• The purpose of the mission
• Mission conditions (duration, location…)
• Renewal and early termination conditions
• Compensation and payment terms
• Deliverables and expected deadlines
• Evaluation criteria
• Intellectual property rights related to the mission

Of course, this contract must be personalized based on your needs. You may, for example, include a confidentiality clause or a non compete clause.

Organize Internal Follow Up

Not all companies think about this — yet proper internal follow up is essential to successfully integrating an external consultant.
Designate a dedicated internal contact to supervise the mission. Communication is key: discuss their needs, their working style, and progress to ensure smooth collaboration.
Set up regular reporting to confirm the mission is moving in the right direction.
It is entirely possible to hire a great consultant but still fail on execution due to poor communication or a lack of follow up.
Don’t hesitate to ask the consultant for feedback on their mission. Their external perspective can help reveal internal inefficiencies, improve your strategy or organization, or even enhance employee well being.

Anticipate Administrative and HR Management

Hiring an external consultant can save significant time. However, you must still anticipate the administrative and HR workload — which can quickly become demanding. Invoices to process, expense reports to track, compliance checks, document verification — tasks can pile up fast. Administrative delays can harm your relationship with the consultant and even slow down the mission. Try to anticipate this administrative burden by checking all necessary documents at the beginning of the mission and automating as many steps as possible.

Simplify and Secure Consultant Recruitment with a French EOR Complete Solution

Hiring a consultant offers many advantages, but it can quickly become a legal and administrative challenge.
Using a French EOR complete solution can be a very effective way to ensure you hire an external consultant correctly. Specialized companies like 2iPortage handle all administrative and legal aspects.
Not only will you be able to recruit with complete peace of mind, but you’ll also enjoy all the benefits of external consulting — without the drawbacks.
Choosing a French EOR complete solution to hire an external consultant allows you to operate in a fully secure framework without wasting time. Need advice? A dedicated contact at 2iPortage will always be available to assist you!

Hiring an external consultant is often a clever way to develop your business. However, it’s important to follow the right steps during recruitment and throughout the mission — especially regarding administrative and legal aspects. Short on time? Unsure about your internal HR or legal capabilities? Working with a French EOR complete solution is a smart, beneficial choice on every level!