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.

How much do recruitment consultants make?

The average wage for a recruitment consultant in the UK including England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland is about £27,500. This is assuming you take into account basic salary and bonus, because essentially for most companies recruitment consultants are sales people, whether they undertake permanent recruitment or temporary or contract recruitment.

There is an underlying principle that recruitment consultants have to earn what they make, in that you can only remain working as a recruitment consultant if you are paying your way.

Here at TenPercent Legal Recruitment, Ten Percent Financial and Interim Lawyers, we pay recruitment consultants a base salary at a range of between £17,500 and £35,000, and then on top of that we pay 33% commission on all income generated; whether that takes you over or under any levels makes no difference. 

We believe this is a fair way of working; it incentivises recruitment consultants to generate more income if they want to, but it also gives them a stable, if not fairly modest income every month if no sales are achieved. Very often though, in fact in most companies, recruitment consultants will get paid a base salary but only get commission if they generate a certain level of income.

We encourage long term relationships with our recruitment consultants and our most senior has been with us for over 10 years.

Most recruitment consultants do not get paid commission on a set amount, as recruitment agencies work on the theory that you have to earn the money that they pay you as a base income, whereas here at Ten Percent and Ten Percent Financial we think you should earn a percentage of everything you make and your wage is a necessary expense for us, as not only do recruitment consultants do sales but they also do administration work to support those sales, and it is this that we pay for.

How much can a recruitment consultant make? This is a good question and the answer is the sky is your limit. We regularly get emails from training companies offering to turn our consultants into £1 million billers and there are recruitment consultants across the UK who regularly generate over £300,000 worth of business every year. Assuming you can do this then you can expect an income of well over £100,000, but the hours you would have to put in to do this would be somewhat astonishing. 

Have a read of our series ‘how to be happy’ at www.wisebusinessadvice.com to see whether this is a good idea and something for you.

 

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.

Experiences of Discrimination in Recruitment

There has been a story in the Gazette recently about a barrister being turned down for a case because he was Afghan and not a while male barrister. Cue uproar in the legal profession and quite rightly too.

 My own experience of this dates back to practice over 20 years ago when a number of clients would reject the opportunity to be represented by colleagues who were Asian or female, and instead ask for a white male to represent them. It was not always clear whether this was because the white male in question was a well regarded 25 year qualified solicitor with a reputation for being able to get anybody off, but the way some of the clients asked was pretty indicative of someone with racist or sexist opinions, and impressively at the practice I worked at, the partners would have none of it. Similarly, I was aware of practices where they would bend over backwards to accommodate the wishes of such unpleasant clients simply to ensure they got the business.

 However, this type of behaviour doesn’t necessarily just follow in a client and lawyer relationship. We have worked with firms in the Middle East numerous times many years ago (we don’t anymore), who have specifically rejected any candidate who has not had a white male sounding name. Some of these firms went to extraordinary lengths to avoid having to consider a female or, even worse, an Asian female, for a role and some are pretty blunt about it.

Similarly, I’ve had conversations in the past with old white male senior partners who have asked about the intentions of young female solicitors; as to whether we thought they were planning to have children in the forthcoming years and therefore whether they would be better investing in another member of staff. We have also noticed occasionally we send out five or six CVs for a vacancy to a law firm and the law firm get back to request details of those they think have “white” sounding names and not Asian or black sounding names, if there is such a thing.

Bias appears in every walk of life, and the legal profession in very small minority of firms can be pretty bad at times with recruitment on a completely impartial basis.