Legal Recruitment Blog

Just released. Visit http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/legal-job-market-report-march-2012 for details. Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment - Online Legal Recruitment for Solicitors, Legal Executives, Fee Earners, Support Staff, Managers and Paralegals . Visit our Website to search or download our Vacancy Database or view our Candidate Database online. 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. To visit our Sale/Clearance section please click here . www.ten-percent.co.uk/careersshop

If you could conduct the perfect job interview how would it go? Here is our suggestion. If you have any others, let us know via www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.com or our facebook account. 1. Set up the interview room with the interviewee's chair in an odd position. 2. Get one of your employees to sit in the waiting room and engage the interviewee in conversation about anything non-work related. 3. When greeting the interviewee, shake their hand for a minimum of 5 seconds. 4. See what they do with the chair. 5. Interview questions as follows: a. If you were conducting this interview, what would you want to find out about yourself? b. Tell me about yourself in 30 seconds. c. Tell me about myself in 30 seconds. d. If I was to go onto the internet and find out about you, what would I find? e. If I was to tell you that there is no salary offered for this role and I want you to pay me to work here, what would you say? f. Tell me a joke. g. What is 24 x 67? h. If man had three legs, what a...

As well as recruiting solicitors, we also coach solicitors on the careers side. I have recently been working with a number of entrants to the legal profession on their training contract applications to the larger city law firms. It is quite fascinating to see the application forms and the sheer length and complexity of them. As a recruiter, I am starting to question why the process cannot be shortened somewhat for everyone concerned. I know it will put a few administration assistants out of a job, and ruin a few dinner party conversations amongst senior partners at some of the larger London law firms as to who has the longest form, but what about adopting the following strategy for recruitment at training contract and vacation placement level? Surely this will save time and costs? 1. Get each applicant to go online and fill out a form consisting of: a. Their name, address, postcode, telephone number and email address. b. Their A Level grades or equivalent. c. Their degree class or a...

We (Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment ) were called today by a student with a very interesting proposition. In view of the Alternative Business Structures, if your plan is to run your own law firm once qualified, why bother getting a training contract? I started to reel off the usual stuff about training contracts and becoming a solicitor before thinking this through. She (the student) has a very valid point. Why bother getting a training contract and going through all the hassle of qualifying as a solicitor if you can set up your own law firm, recruit a solicitor to be a partner (and after all in the current market law firms seem to think that solicitors don't need to be paid a salary anyway!), get them to give you a training contract at some point and qualify whenever you feel like it? Furthermore, you can use the Law Society/SRA exemption for any work that you have done already that is at training contract level? How much money could be saved? Professional Indemnity insurance is lik...

A Day out in Court It is not often that I spend any time in Court these days. As a director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment (and the usual person responsible for suing errant clients who fail to pay) I have made regular forays into County Courts across the UK over the years since I stopped practising to make applications for Charging Orders on blocks of flats, houses, office blocks. I also regularly apply for Summary Judgement when the inevitable happens and solicitors’ firms fail to turn up to small claims hearings. I don’t think I have ever been in a case involving a defendant who has actually turned up! However I am involved in a larger case at the moment as a witness. The case is fast track and hence large enough to warrant the use of Barristers and Solicitors, although Ten Percent’s related case is a small claims matter. I am dictating this on the way home from Court after spending a frustrating day observing just how much better the County Court service could be operated. Ther...

It has been reported today in the Recruitment Press that recruitment agencies across the UK are failing at a faster rate than seen since 2007/2008 according to a new report. It is estimated that a first two quarters of 2012 will see a record number of recruitment agencies go into administration and get brought out by larger rivals. At particular risk are those with large public sector contracts and medium sized businesses with large overheads. Recruitment agency client bases are disappearing as more and more firms start to use and develop their own internal networks and cease to use conventional recruitment agencies to conduct their general hiring for them. In one large multinational company it was recently reported that just 2.5% of their recruitment spend was through employment agencies and the remainder was done using internal mechanisms and external networking. Recruitment agencies have seen an unparalleled reduction in the amount of business they are able to deal with. Unless a r...

We have recently had about 30% of all CVs sent in by candidates in Adobe Acrobat pdf format. Please think twice before converting your CV and sending it in this format. It drives us insane! Adobe appears to be one of the most unstable platforms around and crashes our computers when it clashes with Firefox and Windows Explorer and anything else thrown into its' path. I know that some law firms ask for CVs in pdf format - simply because it makes it easier to read and reduces the risk of viruses, which Microsoft Office appears to be highly susceptible to. However, as a legal recruitment agency who invested in technology some time ago to enable automated upload of CVs onto our system quickly and efficiently, .pdf files are the bane of our life! Every time one gets sent, we have to reformat it into a word document, and if we want to use it to send out (*with your consent of course), we have to remove all the text boxes that our specialist converter software throws into the mix for us. T...