Legal Recruitment Blog

Ten Percent has been issuing the Legal Recruitment News - a newsletter for law firms and solicitors looking for work - since 2009. Click here to read the December edition . Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and a non-practising Solicitor. Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment provides online Legal Recruitment for Solicitors, Legal Executives, Fee Earners, Support Staff, Managers and Paralegals . Visit our Website to search our Vacancy Database.

We’re often contacted and asked, “should we post our CV onto a job board so that we can attract employers and potential jobs to us rather than us having to go and find work ourselves?” This may seem a really good idea – if employers can access a bank of CVs they can see that you fit a job and come and headhunt you. You could find yourself in a new role without actually having to apply for any jobs, as employers will be contacting you. This is often marketed as the easy way to recruitment and the modern way of finding a job, and for employers to find staff. In reality it is our experience that often the opposite is the case. The CV banks we have access to are generally made up of candidates desperate for work who have little experience or no experience, or have something to hide in their background. We rarely see candidates with CVs stored on job banks that are actually those we think would fit a specific vacancy. There are very often issues with these types of candidates and in almost...

 Legal Recruitment News November 2019 can be read here: http://www.legal-recruitment.co.uk/november-2019-legal-recruitment-news/  Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and a non-practising Solicitor. Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment provides online Legal Recruitment for Solicitors, Legal Executives, Fee Earners, Support Staff, Managers and Paralegals . Visit our Website to search our Vacancy Database.

I took a call today from someone who had read one of our reports on what we perceive to be high pay in the charity sector dating back a few years. We had identified a number of charities that we felt we could not support via the Ten Percent Foundation with any charitable donations, because we felt that their executive pay was too high and inappropriate for the size of the charity. The Ten Percent Foundation incidentally is our vehicle for donating profits generated by the Ten Percent Group, as we donate 10% of our profits to charity every year. We do this by distributing the funds to charities we deem worthy and fit in with our criteria for donations. One of the key criteria is a demonstration by the charity that they are not overpaying their senior staff. There are a large number of charities in the UK who pay salaries to their senior executives that we feel is out of proportion for either the size of the charity or the very nature of the charity being underta...

A client has recently asked us for some market data in order to determine where to open a new office. We thought it may be of interest generally so have published the information below. Some years ago, we fielded a number of calls from firms around London wanting to open offices in Liverpool and Manchester. It took a while, but I eventually worked out that there was a management consultant based in the South East who had advised law firm partners that conveyancers in the North got paid less than office cleaners in the South! It is a myth of course and in fact one of the lowest salary areas in the UK for conveyancing is probably East London. So here is our market data on candidate numbers for residential conveyancing. We have 2,912 conveyancers of all shapes and sizes registered with us on our database out of a total of 11,973 candidates. 603 of these are located in London postcodes. 332 are located in Midlands postcodes. 217 are located in North East postcodes (...

Click the link below to read the September 2019 Legal Recruitment News August Legal Recruitment News from the Ten Percent Group Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and a non-practising Solicitor. Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment provides online Legal Recruitment for Solicitors, Legal Executives, Fee Earners, Support Staff, Managers and Paralegals . Visit our Website to search our Vacancy Database. Our Legal Careers Shop has eBooks on CV Writing for Lawyers, Legal Job Interview Guide, Interview Answers for Lawyers, NQ Career Guide, Guide to Finding Work Experience or a Training Contract and the Entrants Guide to the Legal Profession.

The Case of the Unsuitable Candidate We recently sent out a vacancy to the paralegals on our database. Ten Percent Legal Recruitment maintains a database of about 11,000 solicitors and legal executives, together with a good number of experienced paralegals. The vacancy was for a business immigration paralegal who had completed the LPC, had a minimum of 12 months business immigration experience, spoke Cantonese or Mandarin and was able to deal specifically with a specialist area of immigration usually linked to companies. It was clearly going to be quite a hard vacancy to fill but we were particularly interested by the response from one of the candidates. The interesting candidate emailed us as follows: "Dear Ten Percent Legal, I am not sure whether I should apply for this vacancy or not. I have not finished the LPC, I do not have a year’s business experience, I don’t speak Cantonese or Mandarin and I have never worked in the specialist area you refer to. Sho...

Click the link below to read the July 2019 Legal Recruitment News.  http://www.legal-recruitment.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/July-Legal-Recruitment-News-2.pdf

We recently took a registration from a new candidate who indicated that he was looking for work in a high street law firm covering general practice fields. As it happens, we occasionally recruit on behalf of an offshore law firm recruiting general practice solicitors and we included the candidate in a mailout in case of interest. He initially sent back a message "please remove me from your database so I stop getting this utter nonsense". We emailed back to clarify that we had only sent him one email and he replied "I applied for specific positions about which I have heard nothing. Instead I get some utter guff about [an offshore law firm]. I have NO relevant skills for that post whatsoever, as any even slightly completed (sic) agency would immediately appreciate. In spamming all those whose applications you have completely ignored, you have simply identified yourselves and (sic) yet another c.v. harvesting member of the bottom feeding fraternity of the...

I was recently telephoned by a journalist who wanted a discussion about a brain drain that was supposedly happening in the UK. Working on behalf of a couple of banks and their news feed, the journalist had been handed a brief to write an article about the supposed brain drain that was occurring from rural and town locations into a couple of large cities, which is where most lawyers were based. The journalist wanted to know if we had come across this phenomenon and if I could give him a quote about it.    Thinking back, what I ought to have done was immediately record the conversation so that I did not have to dictate this and produce a new article entirely! But unfortunately I was not that fast in thinking. As pretty much any solicitor in the UK will probably tell you, this particular assertion by the banks is virtually impossible to have occurred and is a non-news story, simply because of the wide divide between corporate and high street law. The journalist had been i...

Here is our guide of what not to do when sending a vacancy to a recruitment agency in the hope of them finding you someone suitable. I appreciate from the outset that you may well be reading this thinking why would I want to instruct a recruitment agency anyway! 1.Do not send an email to twenty five recruitment agencies and cc. them all in to the same email. Do not address your email to Dear All, and if my name is Jonathan, please do not say “Hi Kevin”. We have heard it said that if you send a generic email to lots of recruitment agents, it makes them work all the more harder to recruit the right person for you. This is completely wrong. What actually happens is your email comes into the office; we read it, groan inwardly and then almost certainly ignore it unless we have anything better to do. We don’t want to work a vacancy with twenty four other recruitment agencies. The most desperate of the bunch will work the vacancy and the rest will have better things to do....

   We probably come across this issue a couple of times a year, and it is a lot less prevalent than one may imagine it to be. You arrange a job interview and it’s all set to go but on the morning of the interview the candidate telephones to say they are not feeling very well and what should they do? My gut instinct as a recruiter is to tell them to attend the job interview come what may, unless they are utterly incapacitated by the need to sit on a toilet or lie in bed with a broken limb. Sometimes this pays off but on other occasions it does not. Candidates go along to interviews feeling dreadful and are pleased they did so because they have been able to hold it together for the duration of the interview and everything has gone well. Other times the candidate has attended the job interview feeling utterly dreadful, performed really badly and not got the job. So the dilemma is; if you were an employer would you recruit someone who had telephoned in ...