Consultant, Workforce and Governance Advisory

Orchard Talent Group; Sydney; On-site; AUD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Orchard Advisory seeks a curious, meticulous consultant to join its advisory practice. You will work with an experienced partner across engagements, turning workforce, financial and regulatory data into actionable board-level advice.

You will build models, conduct field work, draft reports, and present findings alongside the partner. The role involves client workshops and expanding benchmarking datasets with a focus on governance and care sector outcomes.

Qualifications

• Two to five years in management consulting or related advisory work.
• Strong quantitative skills and the ability to publish assumptions.
• Clear writing and confident interaction with executives.
• Willingness to travel for engagements, including interstate travel.
• Interest in Australian industrial relations, workforce compliance and governance.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain workforce costing models and ratio analyses.
• Conduct field work and interviews to inform modelling.
• Draft board-ready reports and present findings with the partner.
• Contribute to client workshops and stakeholder interviews.
• Collaborate with partner across engagements and leverage AI workflows.

Skills

Management consulting

Quantitative skills

Executive communication

Field travel

AI tools

Industrial relations

Tools

Claude

Claude Code

Job description

About Orchard Advisory

Orchard Talent Group is one of Australia's leading social purpose executive search firms. We are reimagining talent for impact. Aged care, disability, mental health, healthcare and community services are changing fast. Funding reform, tighter regulation, workforce shortages and rising scrutiny of leadership and pay are reshaping how these organisations are structured and governed. Roles designed for one funding model are still carrying functions the next one cannot pay for. Boards and executives have to decide what their roles can now contain, at what ratio, and at what cost to care. Orchard Advisory exists to answer those questions with evidence. We advise on workforce modelling, organisation and role design, remuneration and governance. Our search and solutions practices place several thousand people a year across the care economy, from frontline coordinators to chief executives. That gives our advice a current view of what roles cost, how they behave in the labour market, and whether a role as designed can actually be filled. Most of our clients are in the care economy. We also work with government and public purpose organisations, and with investor-backed providers.

The role

This is the first dedicated appointment into the advisory practice. You will work alongside an experienced partner across whole engagements, from scoping through to the board presentation. The partner leading this practice has held chief executive roles running organisational reform, and has led workforce and operating model design inside a major advisory firm, so this is work you will learn from someone who has both recommended these decisions and been accountable for making them. Your work will turn workforce, financial and regulatory data into advice boards can act on. You will build the models, do the field work, draft the reports, and present findings alongside the partner.

The work you will deliver

• Workforce modelling and cost optimisation: costing what roles actually do, reallocating functions across adjacent roles, setting sustainable ratios, and testing them against a range of price, funding and utilisation assumptions
• Organisation and role design: designing roles and structures that the funding model can sustain, the handoffs between them, and the success profiles that follow
• Remuneration reviews: benchmarking executive and director remuneration so boards can set pay that is fair, affordable and defensible
• Board capability and effectiveness reviews: skills matrices, board dynamics and governance frameworks, so boards know whether they have what the organisation needs next

What you will do

• Build and maintain the quantitative models behind workforce costing, ratio analysis, labour cost modelling and remuneration benchmarking, documented so a client can re-run them after we hand over
• Get out into the field, because how a service model is executed is rarely what the documentation says
• Write board-ready reports and presentations that make complex findings simple to act on
• Take part in client workshops, stakeholder interviews and board presentations alongside the partner
• Grow Orchard's benchmarking datasets and methodologies from every engagement, so each piece of work makes the next one faster
• Use AI tools and environments, Claude and Claude Code in particular, to automate research and accelerate analysis

What you will bring

• Two to five years in management consulting (Big Four human capital or workforce advisory, a remuneration or governance boutique, public policy, or organisational psychology), or related experience and the curiosity to apply it here
• Strong quantitative skills, and the judgement to turn data into a commercial narrative. Comfort building a cost or ratio model from the ground up, and publishing your assumptions so others can test them
• Clear, confident writing, and the presence to hold a conversation with a chief executive or a director
• Willingness to spend time in the field, including interstate travel where an engagement calls for it, and the manner to be welcome wherever care is delivered
• Genuine interest in Australian industrial relations, workforce compliance and corporate governance
• Comfort in a practice still being built, where you move between deep analysis and open team discussion

Who we are looking for

You are curious and meticulous, and you enjoy problems that have no playbook yet. You are as happy inside a cost model as you are reading governance literature or working out how an AI workflow could take a week out of a project.

You are analytical and pragmatic. You know data matters only when it helps someone make a better decision. What motivates you is seeing your work change how an organisation is led, in a sector where that shows up in the care people receive.

Our values are passionate, accountable, collaborative and empathetic. We look for people who recognise themselves in those words.

What success looks like

We measure this role on three things:

• The clarity, accuracy and usefulness of the advice our clients receive
• The growth of Orchard's benchmarking datasets and methodologies
• The workflows you design that let the practice take on more work without losing quality

Why this role

You will be the second person in a practice with a clear market and an established firm behind it. You will see whole engagements, not slices of them. You will be in the room with boards and chief executives from your first month. And you will help decide what this practice becomes.

The Orchard Talent Group acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work. We pay our respect to their Elders past, present and emerging, for they hold the memories, traditions, culture and hopes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.