A PE recruiter's post on why a strong candidate got passed over — "felt like a consultant, not an operator" — gave me words for something I'd long noticed in India. And then turned the lens back on my own working life.
I've watched it happen for years without a clean way to name it. A company here — often founder-led, often a family business, but increasingly startups too — meets a genuinely brilliant outsider. Sharp, articulate, the right pedigree. And then quietly declines to bring them in. Not because of the skill. Because of a word. Consultant.
There's a flinch around that word in a lot of Indian companies. A consultant is the person who arrives with a deck, charges by the day, tells you what's wrong, and is gone before anyone has to live with the fix. What these companies want instead is someone on the payroll — a full-time badge, present every day, in it for the long haul, with their name on the outcome whether it works or not. I used to read that as conservatism. A morning on LinkedIn made me read it differently.
The post was from David Mackey, who places technology and product leaders into private-equity-backed businesses. A client of his had just rejected a strong candidate. The feedback was one line.
Our client rejected a strong candidate last week. The feedback: "Felt like a consultant, not an operator."
Consultants diagnose. Operators fix. Consultants present options. Operators make a call and own it. Consultants talk about what should happen. Operators have lived through what does happen.
The candidate the client passed on was smart. Articulate. Strong CV. But every answer was structured like a presentation. Hypotheses, options, considerations. Not once did they say: "I've seen this before. Here's what I'd do."
— a recruiter, watching a board choose judgment over a framework
That last distinction is the whole thing. Hypotheses, options, considerations versus I've seen this before, here's what I'd do. One hands you a menu. The other makes a call and stands behind it.
What the flinch is actually screening for
Reading it, I realised the Indian preference for a full-time hire over a consultant was never really about employment status. It was a clumsy proxy for something harder to test in an interview: will this person own the outcome, or only describe it?
The full-time badge feels like a guarantee of ownership. You can't hand over a deck and disappear if your name is on the org chart and you're in the building every morning. The clock is running, the team is stretched, the founder is still in the building — and what a board actually wants is someone who has been in that mess before and will get moving, not someone who will spend ninety days discovering it and then recommend a phase two.
So the word consultant becomes shorthand for the wrong posture: advice without consequence, diagnosis without the staying-around to fix. And full-time becomes shorthand for the right one. But they're only shorthand. The real variable underneath both is ownership — and ownership doesn't actually come stapled to the contract type. That's the part the flinch gets wrong.
The badge was the wrong thing to read
Here's where it turned personal. For most of my working life I have, on paper, been a consultant. By the logic of the flinch, I'm exactly the profile those companies are wary of.
And yet the way I worked never matched the word. I behaved like an employee with an unreasonable degree of ownership — sitting inside the mess rather than presenting on it, making the call and carrying it, staying long enough to live through what does happen rather than leaving once I'd said what should. I was, in Mackey's language, an operator who happened to carry a consultant's contract.
That's why the post landed the way it did. The line a board is really drawing isn't between a consultant and an employee. It's between someone who diagnoses and someone who owns. The contract is just the easiest place to look — and it lies in both directions. There are full-time employees who behave like the most detached consultant in the room, clocking in, covering themselves, never quite putting their name on a decision. And there are consultants who would take a bullet for the outcome.
I was lucky. The label said one thing about me and I spent twenty years quietly proving it wrong. If there's something I'd say to the companies that flinch — and to anyone deciding how to show up in a room they were hired into for a season — it's this: don't read the badge. Watch for the sentence. I've seen this before. Here's what I'd do. That sentence has no idea what kind of contract you signed.
Prompted by a post from David Mackey on LinkedIn, June 2026, quoted here with thanks. The framing of operator versus consultant is his; the part about India, and about my own contract, is mine.