Psychic Predictions for 2020 - how did he do in 2019?

Annual Predictions - how did the professional psychic do?

We have been following the predictions of Craig Hamilton-Parker of psychics.co.uk for some years now - it is fascinating to see how he fares every year with his previous year's predictions.

Here are a selection of Craig's 2019 predictions together with our scores: 

THERESA MAY GOES - She survives until Brexit on the 29th March but resigns immediately afterward. (correct - sort of)
HARD BREXIT BUT NO IRISH BORDER
The Irish border is left open. A ruptured border allows the free flow of international goods into Europe. Ireland eventually enforces the border. (incorrect - so far...)
POUND SOARS AFTER BREXIT
The City of London sees unprecedented activity and a general improvement after a sharp initial fall. (incorrect - no brexit yet!)
NEW POLITICAL PARTY FORMED
I have spoken about this in the Sun newspaper psychic predictions in 2017. I believe it will happen this year and will draw politicians from all parties. (correct!)
BORIS JOHNSON BECOMES TORY LEADER
In a close fight with David Davis, Boris eventually becomes PM (correct!)
GENERAL ELECTION CALLED
Late in the year, maybe in September, there will be another election. Tories win we see the rise of a new political party. (correct and incorrect but title is accurate..)
PROPERTY MARKET IGNITES: FIRST TIME BUYERS REWARDED
The government offers huge incentives to first time buyers. Incentives for tenants to buy from Landlords. (incorrect)
BUSINESS BRIBES
A top company is accused of fixing an international deal using bribes. There is a Scottish influence connected with this story. Nicola Sturgeon implicated. (incorrect)
UK FLOODING
Large swathes of the country see record flooding. Hardest hit are the West Country and Lancashire. (incorrect)
INDUSTRIAL EXPLOSION (the UK and or the USA?)
A large factory explodes. Initially I ‘saw’ in my psychic predictions a Gas Works but I feel that there are chemicals involved. (incorrect)
RUDI GIULIANI BETRAYS TRUMP
Trump promotes Rudi Giuliani to a high office. Giuliani turns on Trump when a new scandal hits the fan. Rudi Giuliani will one day run for president. (incorrect - so far..)
RIOTS IN CHINA: DEBT BUBBLE BURSTS
China plunges into recession and people take to the streets. (incorrect)
RUSSIA HIT BY METEORITE
A large meteorite hits Russia and makes the international news. This is not a threat to the world but a wakeup call that we pay more attention to avert future problems. (incorrect).

If we have inaccurately marked any of the above please let me know, but we reckon Craig's predictions were correct on the basis of 4 out of 13...

Here are a selection of his predictions for 2020:

War in the Middle East
Trump Reelected
Boris Marries Carrie Symonds
Meghan Markle Pregnancy
Revolution in China
European Economic Crisis
After some temporary leaders and a period of strife, Yvette Cooper becomes the leader of the Labour Party.
Prince Charles will be hit by an egg.
Elizabeth Warren will be the Democrat Presidential Contender

We will revisit in January 2021 with a score! Incidentally psychics are available now to speak to at £1.50 per minute on the website above...

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.

Views on Local Authority Locum Solicitor Rates

Local Authority Rates for Locums - a view from a local authority locum

A locum with experience of the local authority market very kindly emailed us over an outline of their experience of the locum market during their career to date."I am responding to your request for feedback on locum rates. I worked as a locum employment solicitor for local authorities [for 10 years]. All roles were through an agency. I often worked on large employment tribunal cases and would be involved in recruiting other locum solicitors so I have some insight into their hiring processes.My initial roles (Northern England) were paid at £18 and £21 respectively although this was because the agencies concerned misled me about market rate. I found out that [one council] had initially taken me over other locums as I was so cheap!I then worked at [a West Midlands Council] for around £32 per hour, although I was able to negotiate a higher rate due to the need to live away from home.

I eventually ended up at a [North West Council] for around £40 an hour and then [a Yorkshire Council] for £45 per hour. The feedback from agencies was that I was at the top end of local authority rates for employment work.The bottom fell out the locum market (for employment solicitors anyway) around 2008. I had managed to negotiate the high rate at [a Yorkshire Council] as they knew my work but procurement took over the management of hiring locums and tried to force everyone onto setrates. I was offered £28 per hour which I refused. I then worked at [a West Midlands Council]. I was on £28 as a senior solicitor and a junior locum solicitor was paid £24. Most local authorities were offering similar rates at the time - this was the first time I had periods of no work since I'd first started working as a locum. I was offered a job at an [East Anglian Council] for £28 and I think I was offered a similar rate to return to [a West Midlands Council].My last locum assignment was in 2014 in [a Northern England Council] and I was paid around £32. At that point I decided to stop working as a locum because it was no longer lucrative.There had been some scandal where a local authority had paid one of their locums around £90 (allegedly!) as he was a friend with a senior officer at that council. It seemed to have some impacton scrutiny of local authority pay although in all honesty, the recession was the bigger factor in pushing pay downwards and those rates don't seem to have recovered.

Generally most local authorities had set rates after 2008 and there was less flexibility to push those rates for an exceptional candidate. One of the ironies of public sector work is that generally the legal teams are able to get the client teams to pay the cost of instructing counsel whereas the costs of a locum are met by the legal department which is working to a tight budget - therefore the legal team will get a locum as cheaply as possible in the knowledge that they can use counsel for more complex work."We would like other comments from current and former local authority locums - what hourly rates have you come across in local authority locum roles and in which general locations in the country? You can email us at jbfagan@ten-percent.co.uk. All correspondence received in strictest confidence by Jonathan Fagan, Managing Director of Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited.
 

Family Solicitor Locum Rates - a view from a family law locum

A locum with experience of family law locuming in both private practice and local authority has kindly emailed us over an outline of their experience of the locum market during their career to date. This includes their local authority experience but also rates in the family law market.

"When I started 5 years ago I was charged at £28 per hour. This was through an agency. I qualified [over 20 years ago] and am an accredited mediator and children panel lawyer but also do finances and private law for which I also have accreditation . This carried on for about 3 years on different contacts at roughly the same rate .

I took on a local authority contract direct. This paid £40 per hour. They were a total nightmare. Didn’t pay on time. Wouldn’t pay if the IT wasn’t working and I couldn’t do matter related time. The worst employer ever. I did 10 months as it was local but I would never go back.

I’ve done numerous contracts since then all at £40-£45 per hour mainly for private client but some care. I have a different agent and feel that the rate reflects my many years of slog and getting accredited. I see my “ old “ agency is still offering roles for senior people at £24-28 per hour which makes my blood boil as they depress the rate for everyone. Transport and parking is so expensive these days rate that the first and sometimes second hour of my day represents my travel costs and parking for that day so I feel £40 is reasonable."

We would like other comments from current and former local authority locums - what hourly rates have you come across in local authority locum roles and in which general locations in the country? You can email us at jbfagan@ten-percent.co.uk. All correspondence received in strictest confidence by Jonathan Fagan, Managing Director of Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited.


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.

January 2020 Legal Recruitment News

January 2020 Legal Recruitment News is available here to read:

http://www.legal-recruitment.co.uk/january-2020-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.

Legal Recruitment News December 2019

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.

Posting your CV to a job board - a good idea? We don't think so.

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 20 years I don't think we have ever been able to recruit by sourcing a CV from a job site CV bank.

An incident this week has led us to issue strong advice on not posting your CV onto a job board of any description, but instead to apply directly for specific vacancies as and when they crop up. I should add that there is no problem submitting your CV to reputable recruitment consultants of course..

One of the problems with putting your CV onto a CV bank is that you have absolutely no control over who sees your details. So for example if you are working at a small company in London who decide to take out a subscription for the job board that you are registered with, then there is nothing to stop them from seeing that you have your CV lodged on the CV bank, and furthermore that you have been applying for jobs. You may not know this but certain job sites log when you last looked at vacancies or logged into your account, and they display this information to any potential employers so that they can see how fresh you are in your search for work.

This means that potentially your employer can also see when you were last looking for a job and they may not be overjoyed to find that you were last logged in 24 hours before, when they thought you were quite happy in your current role.

There are just too many risks involved with CV uploading and storage because there is so little control for you over exactly who sees your details and when.

A few years ago we took the decision with our own job board Chancerylane.co.uk that we would not enable CV uploads onto the system. Instead CVs are only sent directly to vacancies you apply to. Whilst Chancery Lane is a small and fairly specialist legal job board used primarily by Ten Percent Legal for its own vacancies, we think this is the best policy.

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.

Legal Recruitment News November 2019

 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.

Why are we so passionate about high executive pay in the charity sector?

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 undertaken. For example a charity paying more than £75,000 to anybody is, in our opinion, paying too much money, and should not be permitted in the sector.

One of our arguments for this is that a good number of charities are out on the streets fundraising off the general public, or telephoning to raise funds, but if a charity is generating income of say £1 million per year but paying their chief executive £200,000 to run the charity, then clearly there is something wrong here as individuals on the street are not paying to fund that particular senior executive’s lifestyle.

What makes us particularly passionate about executive pay in the charity sector is that we donate via other charities as we are not set up to distribute the funds directly to where they are needed ourselves. Because of this we give money to charities to support particular projects. When we first started donating money to charities we found that some charities were almost reluctant to take our money as they were suspicious as to why we were giving it to them. Others actually wanted to charge us money on top of the donation we were making for things such as using their logos or for mentioning them on our website. Others, when we asked for information as to where the money was going, were more than a little bit shirty about telling us.

We started to look at the various accounts for the larger charities which are available at the charity commission website, and soon discovered a bit of a pattern emerging. There are charities out there who seem to solely exist to generate an income for the staff who work for them but don’t actually appear to do a particularly large amount of work with the money they are given. There are other charities out there that seem to have high levels of administrative costs that seem to outweigh the size of the income and expenditure that the charity is dealing with.

This particularly annoyed us because there we are earning the money to pay to charity, and discovering that the money we are earning and then donating to charity is actually going to pay someone else’s earnings. Whilst I have no qualms at all about supporting the earnings of say a youth worker in a deprived area, or a specialist nurse working in a particular type of cancer, we do object to paying considerable sums of money to a business development executive or marketing manager in a charity. Some of the charity accounts actually refer to the charity’s performance over a year, and the targets they have for fundraising, linking pay of their executives and staff to their performance over the year, and talking about improving the amount of money they have raised or received in donations.

We feel that all of this is dreadfully wrong and at some point we suspect the charity sector is going to be closely examined. It is not often the small charities that are the issue, but rather the big multi-nationals that have grown in time into huge organisations and fundraising vehicles.

It is not that long ago that charity fundraising was in the spotlight, and being examined for the shocking amount of sales that was going on, and the exploitation of people’s generosity. Whilst this seems to have calmed down a little bit, we still feel that the sector is regularly overlooked, and the government have not undertaken any investigations into the structure of charities for some time.

Senior executive pay in some organisations is set by committees or linked to external bodies that have prepared reports, which are always written by people at a similar level working in the same sectors, and therefore quite easily justifying the salaries they are receiving. We know of one charity that a few years ago was paying a chief executive almost as much as it was giving out in funds to worthy recipients, and that was not a lot of money for the size of the charity that it was.

We maintain a list of a selection of the largest charities and their salary spend - the most recent is taken from their 2018 accounts. For details please visit:
https://www.ten-percent.co.uk/10-percent-campaign/

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.

Conveyancing Staff Numbers in the UK - a recent study

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 (NB this includes Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire).
189 are located in North West postcodes
419 are located in South Central postcodes (NB this includes Hampshire, Berkshire and counties west of London).
365 are located in South East postcodes (NB this is the area south of London - Kent, Surrey and Sussex).
136 are located in the South West.
102 are located in Wales.
497 are located in Anglia. This includes north London counties, Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk. Majority are Essex and North London).

If I was going to open a conveyancing office and wanted to recruit 20 experienced fee earners, I would almost certainly aim at an office in and around Greater London. Costs may be higher, but recruiting staff will be considerably easier than a lot of other areas of the UK.

The figures above are for candidates who have registered with us and have active update settings on the system. I should add that it doesn’t mean that they are all looking for work at any time or that they would be necessarily interested in new vacancies.

So which are the hardest areas to recruit for? I would say the North East, the South West, North West and East Anglia (Norfolk, Suffolk). These areas have a low number of potential candidates.

Towns we would expect to get good responses for: Leicester, Birmingham, Cardiff, Bristol, Chelmsford, Ilford, Romford, Dartford and E/SE London postcodes, Bromley, Croydon, Wolverhampton and Southampton. Leeds tends not to be too bad and Manchester is fairly average.

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.

Legal Recruitment News September 2019

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

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. Should I apply?"

You can imagine our surprise at receiving this application. The only qualifying feature of this particular candidate was that he lived in the UK and had got prior paralegal experience (without this he would not be on our database).

It is very common for recruitment agencies to receive lots of utterly irrelevant applications for vacancies we advertise. This is particularly so at paralegal level and legal support level including secretary roles. For example we only have to use the word “cashier” and you can just about guarantee that for a legal cashier role we will see an army of Tesco checkout operatives suddenly wanting to enter the legal profession. Similarly for a role in a specified geographical location such as Norwich, we can virtually guarantee that for every application that is relevant to the role we will see at least five coming from bar staff, hairdressers and social workers, all looking specifically for jobs in a geographical area and going for the scattergun approach with their job applications.

I often hear people complaining that they have applied for 100s of jobs but got no interviews and find this frustrating. I suspect that for the majority of time the scenario above applies. If you apply for a job that you are clearly utterly unsuitable for you can hardly expect a fairly small company to go to the trouble of emailing back to point out why you are unsuitable for it, when it should be clear to anyone that this is the case. I once worked out in a normal working day that if I replied to all the people who had been in touch to send a wholly unsuitable CV, I would probably spend most of my day simply typing out ‘sorry you are not suitable’ emails.

It is one thing to apply for a job when you might well just about fit, so for example if somebody puts out an advert for a conveyancing paralegal with 12 months experience and you only have 3 months, it is possible that in some cases they may consider you for the role if they don’t get enough applications from the actual level of experienced fee earners they are seeking. However, if you apply for a job where the firm want 12 months conveyancing experience and your only link to the job is that you worked in a pub in the same town for 6 months, then there is absolutely no point at all in you making an application to that job. Firstly, you have wasted your own time because it is unlikely you will get a response, secondly you will annoy the employer or agency you are applying to, and thirdly you would be much better off looking around for jobs that you can actually work in and are suitable for.

In the case of the unsuitable candidate we all had a look, decided to keep the email because it would make a good blog article, and here it is.

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.