HR consulting software that handles your firm and your clients

Stop running BambooHR for your own people, a separate ATS for client searches, and Excel for advisory billing. One chat, one source of truth.

Why HR consultancies have the worst tool stack

HR firms sit on both sides of the table: they hire for themselves, they hire for clients, they advise clients on policy, and they bill all of it. Most run three or four disconnected tools and reconcile in Excel.

Internal HR (your team) and client-facing ATS live in different systems with different rules
Advisory billing (retainer, day rate, project) is tracked in Excel by the practice lead
Consultants spend 4-5 hours a week switching between BambooHR, an ATS, and the time-tracker
Compliance work for clients (GDPR, employment law, ED&I) leaves no audit trail in the firm system
Onboarding handovers between recruiter and advisory consultant lose half the candidate context

One tool for your firm and your clients

hice.ai handles your own people, your client engagements, your candidate pipelines and your advisory billing in one chat. Internal HR processes and external client work share data securely where they should, and stay separate where they shouldn't.

«Do we have a senior compensation consultant free for a 3-month engagement at Acme?» → ranked list with availability, rate and prior comp projects
«Pipeline status for the Hartmann HRD search and the Diageo D&I review» → both engagements in one view with next steps and owners
«Compute the April retainer to invoice for Acme HR advisory plus the two ad-hoc days» → billable amount with backing time records, ready to export

Try it in chat

Examples you can ask:

Static demo of hice's AI chat.

What you get

Dual-mode workspaces

Your firm's internal HR runs in one workspace, each client's data in its own — with shared resource pool and unified billing across the top.

Advisory billing models

Retainer, day rate, project fee, success fee — hice.ai handles every common HR-consulting commercial model out of the box.

Integrated ATS for client searches

Manage candidate pipelines for client searches with the same tool — no separate ATS subscription, no data sync gymnastics.

Compliance project tracking

GDPR audits, pay-transparency reviews, ED&I assessments — each is a project with deliverables, time logs and audit-ready documentation.

Practice-level margin

Real-time margin by practice (executive search, comp & benefits, employment law, organisation design) — drill down to consultant or client.

Advising on people while employing them: the wall that has to hold

An HR consultancy holds two categories of personal data that must never mix: its own employees' records, and data about its clients' employees and candidates. The obligations differ, the lawful bases differ, and in a dispute the firm has to demonstrate which was which.

Designing that separation into the system is far cheaper than retrofitting it. In practice it means a client's data sits in its own space with its own retention clock, the internal HR record is never joined to a client dataset, and any export states which population it covers. The consultants who move between the two see only what each engagement entitles them to.

Client data isolated per engagement, with its own retention clock
Internal employee records never joined to client datasets
Every export labelled with the population it covers
Access granted per engagement, revoked when it closes

Pricing advisory work that has no natural unit

Recruitment has a unit everyone recognises: a placement, a fee, a guarantee. Advisory does not. A pay-gap review, a policy rewrite and a restructuring support engagement consume wildly different effort, and firms that price them by feel discover the variance only after delivery.

The fix is unglamorous: record estimate and actual on every advisory engagement, categorised by work type, and look at the ratio once a quarter. Within two or three quarters the pattern is clear enough to price from history rather than instinct, and the engagements that consistently lose money become visible while they can still be repriced or declined.

Estimate frozen at proposal and compared at close
Work type recorded so like is compared with like
Retainer consumption visible to both sides
Out-of-scope requests logged when they happen, not at invoicing

Handovers between search and advisory

The most common internal failure in a mixed HR firm is the handover. A recruiter who has spent six weeks understanding a client's culture passes the engagement to an advisory colleague, and most of that understanding is transferred verbally in a twenty-minute call, then lost.

What survives a handover is what was written down against the client record rather than against the person: who actually decides, what the last restructuring did to trust internally, which policies are contested, and what the client has already tried. Making those fields part of the engagement rather than optional notes is what turns a firm's experience into an asset it keeps.

Client context recorded against the account, not in someone's notes
Decision-makers and their positions mapped and kept current
What the client has already tried, and how it went
A short written handover required before an engagement changes owner

Real case: 35-consultant HR advisory in Sydney

Rebecca, managing director of an HR consultancy serving ASX-listed clients, was juggling BambooHR for her own team, JazzHR for client searches, Toggl for time, and Xero for billing. After moving to hice.ai, her practice leaders save 7 hours a week each, she launched a fourth practice (employee experience) without adding admin headcount, and her partners can see real-time margin per client for the first time in the firm's 15-year history.

hice.ai vs BambooHR + ATS + Toggl + Xero

Feature	hice.ai	BambooHR + separate ATS + time + billing
Tools to manage your firm + clients	One chat	Four or more, with manual reconciliation
Switching internal HR / client work	Same chat, different workspace	Different tool, different login
Advisory billing models supported	Retainer, day rate, project, success	Whatever you can hack in the billing tool
Practice-level margin	Real-time	Quarterly, if anyone has time
Compliance audit trail	Native, immutable	Word docs in a shared drive
Cost	One subscription	Three to four, plus reconciliation time

FAQ

Can we keep BambooHR for our own employees and use hice.ai for client work?+

Yes. hice.ai integrates with BambooHR if you want to keep it. Most firms eventually retire it because hice.ai covers internal HR natively.

How do you handle client data confidentiality?+

Each client gets an isolated workspace. Cross-client queries are blocked by default. Data is EU-hosted and encrypted, meeting strict data-residency requirements.

Does it support contingent and retained searches alongside advisory work?+

Yes. Engagement types include contingent search, retained search, retainer advisory, day-rate advisory, project-fee work and success-fee mandates.

Can it generate client-ready compliance reports (GDPR audit, pay-gap analysis)?+

Yes. Define the deliverable template once, hice.ai populates it from the engagement's data — drafts ready for partner review in minutes.

What about candidate GDPR consent and right-to-be-forgotten?+

Built-in: consent capture, retention periods per jurisdiction, automated purge workflows, and audit-trail export for DSARs.

How does it compare with Bullhorn or JobAdder for the recruiting side?+

Those are pure ATS tools — they don't handle your advisory practice, your own HR, or partner-level margin. hice.ai covers all of it in one place.

Can junior consultants and partners see different things?+

Yes. Role-based views: consultants see their projects and time, practice leaders see their practice P&L, partners see firm-wide. Same chat, role-aware answers.