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.
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