Nine questions, asked in the first meeting, will tell you more than any capability statement: three about experience, three about who will actually do the work, and three about the commercials. The worrying answers follow the same pattern in every profession, vague where they should be specific, and specific only about the firm, never about the person. This article gives you the questions and the answers that should make you pause.
Why doesn't the capability statement settle it?
A capability statement describes the best work the firm has ever done, assembled across every office and every decade. You are not hiring the firm's history. You are hiring two or three people for the next few months, and the document tells you almost nothing about them. The questions below pull the conversation down from the institution to the individuals, which is where your risk actually sits. We have covered the underlying logic in Specialist vs generalist: what to actually ask before you hire. The nine questions work for specialist consultants of every kind, and for most of the professions around them.
What should you ask about experience?
1. "What are the last three pieces of work you personally led that look like mine?" The operative words are "last", "personally" and "look like mine". You want recent, specific and comparable: the problem, the approach, the outcome, roughly when. The worrying answer reaches for the firm: "we have deep experience in this space". If the person in the room cannot name their own recent comparable work, you are buying the brochure, not the practitioner.
2. "Can I read a redacted example of the output?" Reports, models, advice letters: whatever the deliverable type, ten minutes with a real sample beats an hour of conversation. Redaction is normal professional practice, so confidentiality is rarely a true barrier. The worrying answer is a flat refusal, or a sample so generic it could have come from a template library.
3. "Who can I call about a comparable engagement?" Ask for a referee from a recent, similar job, and actually call them. Ask the referee what went wrong and how it was handled, because something always does. The worrying answer is a referee from a decade ago, or from work that bears no resemblance to yours.
What should you ask about who will do the work?
4. "Who, by name, will do the substantive work, and what share of it?" Specialist firms commonly sell with their most impressive people. Delivery is a different question. Ask for names, roles and a rough split of hours across the team. The worrying answer is that resourcing will be "confirmed after engagement", which means you are signing before you know who you hired.
5. "Will those named people be written into the contract?" Verbal assurances about staffing do not survive a busy quarter. Ask for the named personnel to appear in the engagement terms, with replacement requiring your consent. This is what contractual involvement means in practice. The worrying answer invokes the firm's need for "resourcing flexibility" as a reason to keep names out of the document.
6. "What happens if that person leaves or is pulled onto something else?" Good firms have an honest answer: a named alternate, a handover process, your right to approve or walk away. The worrying answer is that replacements are at the firm's sole discretion, which converts your specialist engagement into a staffing lottery.
What should you ask about the commercials?
7. "How is the fee structured, and what exactly triggers a variation?" Fixed, hourly, capped or staged all work when the assumptions are written down. What you are listening for is precision about what is included, what is excluded and what causes the number to move. We compare the structures in Fixed fee vs hourly for specialist professional work. The worrying answer treats the estimate as a formality and gets vague when you ask what would change it.
8. "Can you show me your registrations and current professional indemnity insurance?" Verification is fast and free. Engineers on Queensland work should appear on the Board of Professional Engineers of Queensland register, and nationally on the National Engineering Register. Tax practitioners appear on the Tax Practitioners Board register, lawyers on their state register, architects on their state architects register, and quantity surveyors are typically members of the Australian Institute of Quantity Surveyors. Ask for a certificate of currency for the insurance. The worrying answer treats being checked as an insult. Established professionals expect it.
9. "What current engagements could conflict with mine?" You want to know whether they act for your counterparty, your direct competitors or the other side of your dispute, and what their conflict process is. The worrying answer is a blanket "that's confidential" with no described process, which is different from a professional explaining how conflicts are checked and managed.
Which answers should worry you most?
Across professions, the same five tells recur. Answers about the firm when you asked about the person. Refusal to show a work sample in any form. Resourcing "to be confirmed" after signing. Names kept out of the contract in the name of flexibility. And irritation at being verified. None of these alone is always disqualifying, but two or more together is a pattern, and patterns at the selling stage only get worse after the engagement letter is signed.
The encouraging signs are equally consistent: specific recent work, samples offered before you ask, names volunteered for the contract, and fee assumptions in writing. Professionals who operate this way are not rare. They are just hard to find by Googling, because the loudest marketers and the best practitioners are different populations.
Trying to find a specialist worth these questions? Describe who you need at Edelvor. Edelvor searches the network and approaches the right specialist consultants, and the firms behind them, matched to the work you describe. The person you shortlist is the person who does the work, with that involvement written into the contract.
Frequently asked questions
How many consultants should I interview?
Two or three is usually enough if you ask all nine questions of each. The value is in the comparison: the same question, asked three times, produces answers that rank themselves. Interviewing more than that tends to add cost and delay without changing the decision.
Is it rude to ask for samples, referees and proof of registration?
No. Established specialists are asked for these constantly and have redacted samples and certificates ready to go. The professionals who bristle at verification are telling you how they will respond to scrutiny during the engagement, which is information worth having before you sign.
What if all the answers are good and I still cannot decide?
Buy a small scoping stage first: a fixed-fee piece of work that produces something useful, a scope, a preliminary assessment, a workshop. It tests working style, responsiveness and output quality with real stakes, and either confirms the hire or saves you from it at low cost.
How do I quickly verify an Australian consultant's credentials?
Use the public registers for their profession: the Board of Professional Engineers of Queensland and the National Engineering Register for engineers, the Tax Practitioners Board for tax agents, state law society or legal services board registers for lawyers, and state architects registers for architects. Each search is free and takes minutes. Then ask for a certificate of currency for professional indemnity insurance.