Find a consultant who has deployed this before

Each listing carries the firm or individual name, the certifications actually held and their dates, the tier, the markets and languages served, and the specialisms the partner works in: contingent permanent placement, contract and temp staffing, retained executive search, RPO delivery, in-house corporate talent, or a vertical such as IT, healthcare or blue-collar staffing.

It also carries the practical detail a buyer needs before making contact: the size of the deployment the partner typically handles, whether they run data migrations, whether they offer ongoing managed configuration or project work only, their typical engagement shape, and how to reach them directly. Contact goes to the partner, not through us; we are not inserting ourselves into a conversation between a firm and its consultant.

Buyers ask the same three questions. Can this person actually do the work, which is tier and certification. Are they in a position to work with us, which is geography, language and time zone. And do they understand our kind of desk, which is specialism. The filters map to those three and nothing else, because a directory with fourteen facets is a directory nobody filters.

Specialism is the filter that matters most and is easiest to get wrong. A consultant who has deployed the product for six contingent permanent agencies is not automatically the right choice for a contract IT desk running timesheets and extensions, and a retained executive search practice needs a different data model again. The specialism tags describe deployments completed, not markets a partner would like to enter.

Within a filtered result, ordering is by tier, then by certifications held, then by recency of completed deployments. Placement is not for sale. There is no sponsored slot, no featured tile and no arrangement by which a partner pays to appear higher, and if that ever changes it will be labelled on the listing rather than quietly introduced.

This matters because a directory whose ordering is purchasable is an advertisement wearing a directory's clothes, and buyers can tell. The value of this page to us is that a staffing firm can trust it. That value disappears the first time the ordering is sold, and it does not come back.

A listing is a statement that the partner completed our training and passed our assessment, and that they have deployed the product. It is not a warranty of the outcome of your project, not a guarantee of availability, price, responsiveness or fit, and not a recommendation of one partner over another. We do not supervise partner engagements and we are not party to your contract with them.

It is also not a claim about the partner's other services. A consultant listed here may sell recruitment advisory, training, interim resourcing or other software, and their listing says nothing about any of that. The certification is narrow on purpose, and the directory describes exactly that narrow thing.

If an engagement with a listed partner goes wrong, tell us. We will help where we can on the product side, and a pattern of complaints is grounds for reviewing a certification. What we cannot do is arbitrate a commercial dispute between two other parties, and we would rather say that here than imply otherwise.

Shortlist two or three partners rather than one, and speak to all of them. Consultants differ enormously in how they scope, and the difference shows up in the first conversation. Ask each to describe a deployment they have completed for a firm structurally similar to yours, and listen for the specifics: how many records they migrated, what broke, how long the cut-over took, what the client had to do themselves.

Ask directly about the status board. A partner who understands the four-state vocabulary and can tell you which of your requirements are met by shipping features and which are met by in-build ones is a partner who will not oversell you. A partner who answers every requirement with yes has either not read the product carefully or is not telling you the truth, and both are expensive.

Then agree the scope in writing with the client-side work named. The commonest cause of a failed deployment is not consultant quality; it is that nobody said out loud that the client has to define custom fields, clean the source data and free up recruiters for training.

Listings are reviewed on the certification renewal cycle. A partner whose certification lapses is removed from the directory rather than shown with a stale badge, and can be reinstated on renewal. A partner who stops taking new work can mark themselves unavailable rather than being delisted, because a consultant at capacity is still a useful data point about a market.

Certification can be revoked, and revocation removes the listing immediately. The grounds are set out on the certification page: misrepresenting what the product does, misrepresenting the certification itself, mishandling client data, or using the Surhires name outside what the partner agreement permits.

For some time there will not be one in most markets. In that case, ask us. We will say whether a partner is close to certification in your region, whether a partner working remotely in your time zone is a reasonable fit, or whether the honest answer is that we cannot help yet and you should plan your own deployment.

Planning your own deployment is a legitimate route, particularly for a smaller desk. The implementation curriculum that partners work through covers the same ground, and the parts of it that are documentation rather than assessment are available to customers. A firm of three recruiters coming off spreadsheets does not necessarily need a consultant; a fifteen-desk agency migrating eleven years of history off an incumbent system generally does.