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Sole supplier agreements – what is the point?

Ten Percent Legal Recruitment offer sole supplier arrangements with solicitors firms, in house departments and local authorities up and down the UK. We have been offering them for a good number of years, and almost every campaign we have ever run has resulted in a successful placement. In recent years quite a lot of firms have tried to avoid them in the hope that they pick up more candidates by going to multiple recruitment consultants and sourcing candidates from various locations, websites and publications.

What is the point of having one agency handling your recruitment for you?

The first benefit is the cost. If you take a retained consultancy with our company (www.ten-percent.co.uk) the fee is automatically reduced by at least 30 percent, if not higher. The actually fee depends on the length of the contract, and also the quality of the type of placement that you are putting with us. However if you consider that our usual fee is 15 percent you are likely to be paying around ten percent, if not closer to 7.5 percent depending on the circumstances, the advertising and the sole supplier arrangement we agree.

Secondly, we handle all the advertising for you. We place adverts across the web on various job boards, forums, chat rooms and with paid advertising as well if necessary, as well as advertising fairly prominently on our own website. We also get discounted advertising from the Law Society Gazette, who give agency discounts with incentives for such arrangements, so that we can offer you advertisements in the journal that your firm might not have been wanting to pay for or been able to consider.

Thirdly, we can design the advertisement for you. This means that you receive our expertise as recruiters knowing what is going to attract a candidate to make an enquiry, both passive and active searchers. Quite a lot of firm place advertisements that we look at and shudder, as we know that the sort of response they will get unless a candidate is desperate is going to be minimal, whether this is because they have included too much information on one issue or whether it is because they have missed off some of the information a candidate would need before they made an application.

Fourthly, all enquiries are handled by the agency, which means that none of your staff get pestered by potential applicants enquiring about the post. This also means that other applicants who would not have otherwise applied can call us in confidence and discuss the application without them needing to be embarrassed that you may find out who they are before they have made a firm decision to apply to you.

Fifthly, you get no telephone calls at all from other agencies, job boards or publications trying to sell you advertising space for your job, which is a fairly regular occurrence – for example, I recently placed an advertisement in the Law Society Gazette and had three telephone calls in two days, one of which was from The Lawyer magazine wanting me to place the same advert with them. This is fairly standard practice and I think that every time I have ever placed an advertisement in the Law Society Gazette, The Lawyer have immediately called me to see if I want to place it with them.

Finally, you do not actually pay any fees at all until the agency has found you a suitable candidate, which means that all the work undertaken is completely free of charge if the eventual agreement does not produce you the results you require. Obviously you have to pay the Law Society advertising costs, but the remainder of the cost, for example the Chancery Lane advertising or the job boards online or the forum work is all entirely free. We may also, if we know anybody in the area who may consider the post, actually telephone and headhunt on your behalf, and again, this is at no cost. The other massive benefit is, of course, that you get the candidate search done through our own databases as well and this is free of charge. The arrangement can be cancelled at any time and you do not have to stick with the sole supplier arrangement for longer than four weeks if you do no wish to. Most of the time, they are successful, but of course, in this game, nothing can be guaranteed and some assignments can be particularly harder than others. It does mean that you can hand over a particular recruitment task to someone externally and sit back and wait to see what happens, without needing to worry about it for the time of the sole supplier arrangement.

If you would like to enquire about a sole supplier arrangement with us, please get in touch either by telephone on 0845 644 3923 or cv@ten-percent.co.uk . Further details can be found on our website at www.ten-percent.co.uk/er.html

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