In information-intensive companies, using knowledge in an effective and efficient way seems essential to create and maintain competitive advantage. Consultants can add value to companies by transferring their knowledge and thus contribute to companies? sustainable growth, as they ?shuffle knowledge around?. This study aims to explore the role and importance of key factors that affect the identified added value of individual external consultants to the selected information-intensive companies. Deeper insight will be gained into ways to improve the policies for hiring individual external consultants. This will be done by answering the following question: ?What can purchasers of consultancy services in information-intensive companies do to improve their hiring policies with the aim of increasing the perceived added value of individual external consultants that are hired by these companies??. In this explorative qualitative case study, the focus will be on exploring aspects that might be relevant for building a theoretical model for the extensive follow-up research, and on non-comparable cases. A convenient case selection of companies in various industries (telecommunications, energy, and financial services) will be used. Data collection and analysis of the explorative qualitative pilot study are expected to be completed in April 2013.