<p>I endorse @whuber's answer.</p>

<p>In addition - in my role I am a hirer of consultants rather than looking for such work myself.  I would be unlikely to go directly to someone on SE and ask them to do a consultancy task, as we have other ways of sourcing such people and SE is explicitly not set up for this purpose.  </p>

<p>But hiring consultants (or staff for that matter) is difficult and high risk.  If we were looking at several candidates, and one had a range of consultant-like work available on SE, I would certainly take the quality of this into account.  If they were a high frequency SE contributor whose name I recognised I would certainly do so.  I have been known to search for people on SE (and elsewhere on the web) to see examples of their statistical work.</p>
