Legal Recruitment Blog

HAPPY NEW YEAR FOR 2010 - We hope that you all have a prosperous and peaceful New Year and look forward to working with you in 2010. Best Wishes from the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment Team (Hannah, Pete, Sara, Jonathan, Pearl and Clare). I hope to update the blog more often in 2010, and plan to add sections both to the blog and also to the website in 2010, with toolkits for CV preparation and checks, marketing and speculative search plans, interview guidance including online interview practice tools.

Christmas is almost upon us, and I take the opportunity to provide a list of possible Christmas presents for lawyers and recruitment consultants, as well as shamelessly plug our own Christmas present ideas for solicitors, barristers, paralegals and anyone else. Firstly, www.ten-percent.co.uk/cv.html Gift Vouchers for Careers & CV Writing Services, ranging from £25 to £500. What could be a better present than one that could last a lifetime... www.cafepress.co.uk - lots of interesting T Shirts and cups and things - including a baby outfit with "my mummys a lawyer" - would anyone really be brave enough to send their child off to nursery in this? http://www.carbolicsmokeball.com/catalog/287/Large_Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_Advert_(Unframed_Print)/ This is by far the best present I have seen - a large poster sized version of the Smoke Ball advert - I bet this gets sold to loads of 1st year law students every year.. A bargain at £20.00. (incidentally we dont get any commission for t...

This Article ought to be subtitled “permanent recruitment” as opposed to “temporary recruitment” because as far as I can see the temporary recruitment side of the business is very unlikely to suffer many effects under the recession. Permanent recruitment has always been the more risky end of the business in relation to effects of recession. I can remember starting my consultancy Ten Percent Legal Recruitment back in April 2000 and speaking to an educated lady who was working as a police station visitor at the time, who when I said that I had set up a recruitment agency replied “you had better hope there is not a recession if you are doing permanent recruitment”. At the time I did not think much of this as we had just about finished the Dot.com bubble burst and things were on the up, but I have always remembered her words and wondered if they would ever come to fruition. Of course in the recent recession they clearly have. Permanent recruitment dropped off dramatically as soon as the re...

A recent phenomenon has emerged in the world of recruitment and it relates to candidates looking for work. In the last four weeks we have had a number of vacancies in and a number of interviews set up, but we have also had a number of candidates not attend interviews or decide that they do not wish to proceed. The percentage of these is extremely high at present, and very unusual compared with our normal ratio of failure in this area. The first one of these candidates was a specialist solicitor who had expressed a keen interests in a role, sent us a detailed explanation as to why she fitted the bill and when we finally managed to arrange an interview for her decided that it was going to be too difficult to take time off in the short term, and she would only be able to attend an interview in the medium term. Unsurprisingly the firm had a number of applicants and did not bother interviewing her. The second candidate was an experienced commercial solicitor who expressed an interest in a j...

A Forum recently had a post on entitled "Boycott Recruitment Agencies and Greedy Bosses!!" The post reads "Recruitment Agencies are cherry picking their clients & have no courtesy to reply back to your messages unless you call them!! They say they have hundreds of applications to review but by the time they have looked at your CV it’s too late - the dream job you desire is long gone." As a recruitment consultant I have to say that this probably appears to be the perception at present (we cherry pick the best solicitors and ignore the rest including most NQs). The truth is that we are being hit very badly by the recession as businesses. Think about it - there have probably been over 15,000 redundancies amongst solicitors in England & Wales since April 2008. This is just less than 10% of the workforce. There are no conveyancing jobs at all anywhere. There are no wills & probate jobs anywhere. Crime jobs are disappearing at a rate of knots as firms close th...

A training contract applicant has very kindly given us a detailed description of an assessment day that recently took place in the North West. It gives a flavour of the typical sort of day you will get in most medium and large law firms.. Here's what happened at the (North West Firm) assessment day. Introductions - we had to write a few facts about ourselves on a side of a4 paper, screw it in to a ball and throw it in the centre of the room, we all then had to go grab a ball and discover who it was and then use that to introduce the person to the group. We then had a group exercise. We were a group of four hikers, lost in a snow storm - in a tent -and had to decide on how many people should look for - and then from a list of 19 items decide which ten should be taken by the people who went for help and what items should remain for the people staying in the tent. I then had a competency based interview. First question 'what is your unique selling point' (i nearly fell off ...

The DWP have awarded Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited a 2 year contract to provide jobsearch support for newly unemployed professionals. At present, the scheme is very much in its infancy, but we have already provided the service to professionals based in the West Midlands and the North West. The scheme works by the Jobcentre Plus Adviser referring their clients through to us, and within 24 hours we arrange an appointment, usually over the telephone as the service is nationwide. This appointment is about 45 mins long, and we cover a whole range of topics, concentrating as required on particular areas. At the end of the consultation we provide an action plan to the job centre and the client, and continue to provide support as required by email. If you want to take advantage of this service, you need to be unemployed, and also speak to your adviser rather than ourselves as the referral has to come from them. Jonathan Fagan is MD of http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/ and senior career coach at http...