Maybe it’s just something odd about me, but all too often, I find myself in a passionate conversation with my Sunday newspaper.

This doesn’t mean I have lost my mind and am talking to the actual newspaper. No, what it usually means is that I find myself worked up and sometimes even yelling about something I can’t believe I’m actually reading in the paper—usually because it is ludicrous, amazing, or both.

Here’s what got me going this week: I’m rolling along through the Sunday business section of my local paper, reading through the syndicated Wall Street Journal pages that seem to be more of a staple in business sections everywhere, when I run into a regular column written for people just getting started in the workforce called Starting Out. Its headline caught my eye: “Where’d My Job Go?” It’s a good question in these troubled economic times, so I read the beginning of the story:

“Michael Moses landed a job as a human-resources consultant in Chicago straight out of college. He moved to the Windy City from New York, signed an apartment lease and was ready to work. But then he got a call that more job hunters have been dreading—the company could no longer afford to hire him. ‘I was ready to go, and they just pulled the carpet out from under my feet,’ says Mr. Moses, who is 22 years old.”

And that’s what got me shouting at my Sunday newspaper. A 22-year-old, straight-out-of-college HR consultant? How can someone who has just graduated become a consultant on anything, much less HR? What kind of wisdom and expertise do they bring to the table? And what client in his right mind would look for advice from a consultant with no work, business or significant life experience to draw upon?

This gets back to my blog post last week about “How Much Does Experience Matter?”

I was writing then about companies such as Circuit City and Tribune Co. that seemingly don’t care about experience and view workers with a few more years on them as just a bigger dollar sign they can cut and roll to the bottom line. While that’s true, it misses an important business truism: that experience matters. Experience can bring smart, time-tested thinking to difficult business problems—the kind of thinking that can help organizations perform better during a time of economic upheaval.

That’s not to say younger workers don’t have their place in the workforce, because they do. Millennials and other younger workers get dumped on (unfairly, I think) as self-absorbed slackers, when my experience has been that they really bring a much-needed vitality and different mind-set to the workplace.

But having said that, I’m back to my original question: How can someone straight out of college become a consultant? What can someone like that advise me, Mr. Business Executive, about HR?

This is one of the issues I have with business consulting: that it all-too-often is a “buyer beware” proposition  where newly minted MBAs and others jump directly into consulting without a single scrap of real-world experience. These people have no business telling you how to fix or run YOUR business, so it makes me wonder, what consulting firm in their right mind would hire them?

Is there anyone who can make a case for a 22-year-old HR consultant, or someone right out of college consulting anyone on anything? If so, I’d love to hear about it, either as a comment posted here or sent to me directly at jhollon@workforce.com