How to Succeed at Legal Job Interviews - a guide for would-be trainee solicitors, paralegals, solicitors, legal executives etc..

Legal Recruitment News May 2019

Things not do when instructing recruitment agents

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. The reason we do not want to compete with twenty four other recruitment agencies is because everyone has access to the same CV banks, the same job boards and you can virtually guarantee that even if we were to find someone on our system that other recruitment agencies didn’t have, then someone somewhere will have sourced the same CV at some point and sent it over to the firm in question. In my experience in recruitment we have never once successfully placed a candidate with a company where they have given us a list of recruitment agencies they are working with.

2.Do not include the words 'client following’ anywhere on your job description. Asking for a solicitor or lawyer with a following (i.e. their own clients) is like asking for a solicitor who is a qualified plumber and able to speak fluent Lithuanian whilst standing on her head. The vast majority of employers have restrictive covenants in place that expressly prohibit any member of staff from approaching clients and taking them with them to a new firm. There are a few here and there who have sources of work that they can tap into and loosely count as a following, but generally these do not exist. If you send us a vacancy asking for a conveyancing solicitor with lots of description, and then add ‘and a client following’ then the chances are you will not get much of a response.

3.Do not set us out a list of strict expectations for a vacancy where there are likely to only be one or two applications. Here is a quick example: a firm based in Swindon looking for a residential conveyancing solicitor on a full time basis, starting as soon as possible with specific experience of a certain case management system - no applications from anyone who has not. The problem with this is that there are lots of different case management systems and the chance of finding someone looking in Swindon at any particular time working on one particular type of these is very difficult indeed. Try to be as broad as possible to attract the candidate. After all, you can always reject unsuitable candidates but if you have restricted the field so much that you don’t get any candidates to reject, the whole exercise becomes a little bit pointless.

4.Do not send us a vacancy and underneath include the amount you are expecting to pay the agency to work for you. There are certain law firms out there who are notorious for doing this, and they tend to be based in the most difficult areas to recruit, and have the most outlandish expectations when it comes to sourcing staff. Why not wait and see what applications you get in before you start considering how much it is going to cost?

5.Don’t send rude emails. Recruitment consultants are mostly human and some of us even have a bit of pride in our work. I don’t particularly like working for clients who email us to say that we are a scourge on humanity but they are prepared to use us anyway.

Recruitment consultants (or at least professional ones and not the type who act like estate agents) want to help you, because that is their job. If you send me a vacancy and don’t recruit one of our candidates I still take professional pride in dealing with you and also with the candidates who get details of your vacancy.

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 April 2019

Legal Recruitment News March 2019

Legal Recruitment News - February 2019

Recruitment dilemma – a candidate telephones to cancel a job interview because they are sick. Would you recruit them?

 

 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 sick on the morning of an interview and tried to rearrange it? Would you accept that it is perfectly human and quite normal to be ill from time to time, or would you think it was a sign of things to come and refuse to re-interview them?

We come across both approaches from our clients, some of whom are more than happy to rearrange and understand entirely when somebody is ill, but others simply thank us for notifying them but never actually get back to rearrange the job interview.

Our managers were sat having a conversation about this the other day, and out of the 4 of us in senior management roles at Ten Percent, only one of us would actually rearrange the job interview regardless of the circumstances. The others would take a more cynical approach and decide that because the person has been unreliable on this occasion it is unlikely we would want to employ them in future. I appreciate this is utterly cynical and completely heartless as well as terribly brutal! What would you do?

You could take the nice approach and send your understanding to the candidate that their illness has precluded them from attending your job interview and wish them well, telling them not to worry about rearranging until they feel much better. 

This is surely the nice approach.

But what if you had gone to the trouble of arranging for three interviewers to attend, all of whom had cancelled appointments, one of whom had travelled 300 miles to attend the job interview from an external office and you had booked a meeting room and arranged for refreshments? Would you feel quite so understanding and nice towards the person then?

We recently had a job interview arranged where a candidate failed to turn up but the senior partner of the firm had been so keen to impress this particular solicitor that he had arranged a dinner at lunchtime for her to meet all his staff and discuss the role, the location and the future prospects in a more social environment. Unfortunately the candidate was a no-show - how would you have felt if you had been the senior partner and arranged all of that for the prospective candidate?

You can see that it is not as easy a dilemma to solve if you are the boss. If it was just you attending the job interview as the owner of the business and you had gone to no trouble to do this, simply putting aside 30 minutes during the day to conduct the interview, then you may not be too inconvenienced if somebody did not attend, and it may not necessarily bother you too much in these circumstances. However as soon as you go to any trouble at all in relation to the interview and then somebody cancels on you, I think it is a whole new ball game.

I could write a nice answer to say I would be entirely understanding and accept that these things happen and agree to rearrange, but in reality I may well be seriously annoyed that the candidate hasn’t made the effort to attend in any event. After all, bear in mind that like most directors or partners in small businesses; in 20 years of running my company I have never taken a day off sick, mainly because I haven’t been able to (cue tales of sitting in A&E emailing clients, not being able to answer the phone for a week due to coughing fits etc..etc..!). If you think about this mentality from the employer’s perspective then you can perhaps see why our standard advice is to advise candidates to attend interviews for jobs they are keen on unless its physically impossible.

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.

Unscrupulous Behaviour by a Legal Recruitment Consultant? You Decide

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 maternity leave didn’t start until April or May 2019 and it was unlikely that the firm were going to be so daft as to send the vacancy to other recruitment consultants when using us would be completely free of charge under Ten Percent Unlimited.

So having established further details about the vacancy I sent it out to our locum list of conveyancing solicitors and legal executives. I identified the town the firm were based in and described the vacancy.

The response was quite good for the area and I ended up putting in four CV’s to the firm, from a variety of locums with different levels of experience and conveyancing backgrounds.

I sat back and waited for the feedback from the firm, which I knew would not be particularly swift because they were in no hurry to recruit.

However, in the interim I received an email from one of the locum candidates which read as follows:

“Thank you for putting my details in to the firm. Unfortunately between the time of you telling me about the vacancy and the time you confirmed my CV had gone, I have been contacted by another agency about the same vacancy and they have put my CV forward in the meantime, and I have signed an exclusivity arrangement with them. Sorry.”

You can imagine my surprise! However this was not the first time that this pattern of behaviour has been witnessed by our company and we had a similar experience with another client firm a few weeks before this one. We immediately guessed that this was the Venn Group.

I contacted the law firm in question to ask them whether they knew anything about this and got an email back from the senior partner, explaining that a recruitment agency had sent a CV into them speculatively, which he had ignored, but then they had followed this up with an email, sent by a manager, Charlie Cripps:

"Hi [ ], I have just tried giving you a call but understand you were not wanting to take it. I appreciate you are busy. One of our candidates who we work closely with [name of candidate], has heard from an associate of his that your firm is potentially looking to secure a locum. [candidate] is keen to be put forward via Venn Group and would like to be represented by us exclusively."

Their terms included the proviso that the client would have to pay 30% fees if they wanted to recruit this particular locum.

Similarly, the company appears to have a very strong Acceptance clause, which reads as follows:

"ACCEPTANCE - Once you have received this CSA [client services agreement], any act by you of accepting or requesting services from us, or using in any way information from us relating to a Candidate, is deemed to be and shall constitute your acceptance of these Terms of Business which then, in consideration of the mutual benefits set out, apply."

The senior partner of the firm was as bemused as I was because clearly the firm had absolutely no intention of paying any recruitment agency a fee when there was no need to, because they were signed up on an exclusive basis with us and did not have to pay any recruitment fees to take on the locum. They had not contacted the Venn Group to request CVs, register the vacancy or in any way intimate that they were recruiting. The only external agency aware of the vacancy was Ten Percent (and our locum platform Interim Lawyers).

So have The Venn Group decided to indulge in a spot of ambulance chasing?

Either

a) they follow our assignments online via the various places we post our assignments,

b) persuade locums to tip them off about vacancies of other locum agencies, or

c) obtain intelligence from the locum to determine roughly where and assignment is and then contact all the firms in the area.

Which one was it?

We did receive another email from the locum candidate in question to say that he understood the agency had contacted a small number of firms in the town in question on his behalf. There are only a small number of firms in the town in question..

Is this type of behaviour dodgy or simply good/sharp business practice? Does it contravene any professional standards? The Institute of Recruitment Professionals (the IRP) and the REC (Recruitment and Employment  Confederation) has a code of conduct which includes:

Principle 2 Respect for Honesty and Transparency

 

"Members will act honestly in all dealings with work-seekers, clients, members, non-members and others."

Were the Venn Group acting honestly when they contacted the client? Seemingly yes. They did indicate that "an associate" of the locum had identified the vacancy and presumably had not held themselves out to the locum as having the vacancy registered to them.

"In the course of representing a work-seeker or client, a member shall not knowingly make a false or inaccurate statement, fail to disclose a material fact, or make a representation as to future matters without having reasonable grounds for making it."

Did the Venn Group misrepresent anything here? We don't think so - they were pretty clear in their dealings with the locum and the firm.

Principle 3 Respect for Work Relationships

 

"Members will not undertake actions that may unfairly or unlawfully jeopardise a work seeker’s employment. Members will not undertake actions that may unfairly or unlawfully interfere in work relationships established by others."

Did the Venn Group undertake an action that unfairly interfered with work relationships established by others? Quite possibly, but again the code of conduct is not clear on the issue.  There is talk of agencies sending unsolicited CVs being in breach of the code of conduct. In this case the agency did have consent from the candidate to send the CV, but they didn't have consent from the firm to act on their behalf in a search for a locum and neither did the firm ask them to send CVs. Was this an unsolicited approach?

The locum involved in this incident is not answering my telephone calls or emails to discuss the incident. We understand that our client has immediately ruled him out of the running for this assignment, which is a shame because he looks a very strong candidate.

Here at Interim Lawyers and Ten Percent Legal we pride ourselves on the highest level of moral and ethical codes. We do not ask locums to sign exclusivity arrangements but as of 2019 (and following this incident and a few others) we now require all locums to sign NDAs (non-disclosure agreements).

Interestingly the Venn Group included the following with their accounts for 2017, filed at Companies House:

For details of our locum services please visit www.interimlawyers.co.uk.

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 (unless you are another recruitment consultant - in which case please don't!).

NB: If any of the parties named in the article would like to send us a reply to publish in the article itself we would be happy to oblige. 

Legal Recruitment News January 2019

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.

Predictions 2019 - how accurate was a leading psychic in 2018?

 

Predictions - How Accurate was a Top UK Psychic in 2018?

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.

Predictions for 2018
1. Assassination attempt at Balmoral. INCORRECT
2. Terrorist attack on British motorway. INCORRECT
3. A new political party will be formed (repeat prediction from 2016 - could Craig have foreseen the delay?). INCORRECT - prediction repeated for 2019..
4. There will be a hard Brexit but trade deal allowed at last minute. Juncker will retire. Britain does separate deal with Ireland. INCORRECT
5. Theresa May will stay in power. CORRECT
6. Jeremy Corbyn will urge lots of strikes and lose support. INCORRECT
7. An attempt will be made to impeach Donald Trump - and fail. INCORRECT
8. Donald Trump will initiate a massive trade deal with the UK. INCORRECT
9. Explosion causes US warship to sink. INCORRECT
10. Melania Trump and Trump grandchildren release a song. INCORRECT
11. US will rent nuclear weapons to Japan. INCORRECT
12. Riots in the EU as steep economic decline takes hold. ?? SORT OF CORRECT - half mark for the French riots - not sure about the steep economic decline bit..
13. Italian banking crisis will occur. INCORRECT
14. US strikes North Korea with missiles. INCORRECT THANK GOODNESS.

Total score out of 14 - 1.5 out of 14.

Here are a selection of Craig's 2019 predictions, which we will revisit in 2020:

1.	THERESA MAY GOES She survives until Brexit on the 29th March but resigns immediately afterward.

2.	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.

3.	POUND SOARS AFTER BREXIT The City of London sees unprecedented activity and a general improvement after a sharp initial fall.

4.	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.

5.	BORIS JOHNSON BECOMES TORY LEADER In a close fight with David Davis, Boris eventually becomes PM. (I have also predicted elsewhere that David Davis may be a temporary caretaker PM)

6.	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.

7.	PROPERTY MARKET IGNITES: FIRST TIME BUYERS REWARDED The government offers huge incentives to first time buyers. Incentives for tenants to buy from Landlords.

8.	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.

9.	UK FLOODING Large swathes of the country see record flooding. Hardest hit are the West Country and Lancashire.

10.	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.

11.	RUDI GIULIANI BETRAYS TRUMP Trump promotes Rudi Giuliani to a high office. Giuliani turns of trump when a new scandal hits the fan. Rudi Giuliani will one day run for president.

12.	RIOTS IN CHINA: DEBT BUBBLE BURSTS China plunges into recession and people take to the streets.

13.	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.

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.