Almost Perfect Contracting Opportunities - Recensione dipendente - CSV Consultant presso Validant

First of all, let me begin by saying that I was a full-time salaried employee for over 13 years before moving on to the world of Consulting. I found salaried jobs extremely disheartening. You work for years waiting for small raises that do not keep pace with the rate of inflation, ephemeral vacations where you may even be on-call, being passed up for promotions by newly-arrived management cronies, and working 60 hours every week with the promise of "comp time" (but never actually getting it!). Well, I decided to quit the salaried world and move into consulting, and it was the best move I could have ever made. Validant made the transition very easy by doing the following: 1. Covering all expenses: Flights home every 2 weeks, hotel (or furnished apartment with all amenities covered), car rental (they even provide their own rental insurance!), tolls, and even gasoline. 2. Providing benefits packages to their consultants on W2 (no 1099's, who would want these anyway!) 3. Providing a per diem for food and incidentals 4. Not haggling for all-inclusive rates (like other recruiters do) 5. Not providing a geographic per-diem (which usually only covers half the potential expenses), but covering all expenses (of course, it is the client that is covering these, but Validant ensures that these are covered with a highly detailed contract) 6. Being available to answer any and all emails and phone calls should any problems arise during a contract 7. Sending Validant managers to review the status of one's work and speaking on behalf of the hard-working consultants to the functional managers 8. Their recruiters will not consider you for a job that you do not feel 100% confident that you can do, and they will negotiate higher salaries for you instead of just accepting the lowest pay possible, which is what most other recruiters will do. 9. "Locality" of contract is not a factor since they negotiate, with the client, contracts that cover all expenses. 10. Their managers actually take the time to procure a contract with opportunities for multiple consultants, instead of just finding the job on a job board and not knowing anything else about it...not even the pay! You would be surprised as to how many other firms work in this manner. I have tried to work with at least 20 other firms in the 3.5 years that I have been consulting, and Validant is by far the best one. They have always managed to come in at the last minute and offer me a contract with a pay that is higher than my last contract. This is truly the only time in my life that I am beating inflation, and my take-home pay is considerably more than it was when I was a salaried employee. The only down-side with working under Validant is the number of available opportunities. However, everything else is fantastic. They even provided personalized support on an international opportunity to consultants who had never worked abroad; I was one of them!