Legal Recruitment Blog

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 ...

The background: Ten Percent Legal Recruitment is a recruitment agency specialising in the recruitment of solicitors mainly for locum and permanent roles. Here’s what happened: Ten Percent Unlimited We received a vacancy from one of our retained law firms using the www.tenpercentunlimited.co.uk service. This service basically acts like an insurance policy – if one of our clients needs to recruit anyone within 5 years then the monthly fee paid to us will cover all the recruitment costs. This particular law firm had a vacancy for maternity cover for about 9 to 12 months, and the field of law was the fairly standard residential conveyancing - one of the busiest areas of law for locum work. As you may or may not realise there are a lot of locum conveyancers out there and getting a 9 to 12 month assignment is fairly lucrative both for the locum and for the recruitment agent. As this was a retained firm I was confident that I had plenty of time to deal with it, because the mat...

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.