Legal Recruitment Blog

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...