Legal Recruitment News – June 3rd 2014
Contents
▪ Legal Job Market Report
▪ New Candidate Registrations in last 3 days – click here
▪ Locums available now – click here
▪ Phantom Jobs and Rogue Recruitment Agencies
▪ Register Vacancies
▪ Legal Salary Reviews Online
▪ £60 Unlimited Recruitment
Newsletter
Welcome to the June edition of Legal Recruitment News, including a Legal Job Market Update, phantom jobs and rogue recruitment agents, locum availabiity and new candidates. Legal Recruitment News is written by Jonathan Fagan, MD and non-practising solicitor of the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment group (Interim Lawyers, Ten-Percent, Ten-Percent Legal Careers and TP Transcriptions).
Job Market Update – June 3rd
May 2014 – summed up in a few sentences:
Permanent vacancies same
Locum vacancies up on April
Conveyancing up, Commercial Property up
Crime down, Personal Injury down
Litigation & Family up
Further increase in vacancies attracting no, poor quality or few applications. Commercial property becoming a desert. Conveyancing not far off. Conveyancing Solicitors now as rare as hens teeth.
Market outlook – still very buoyant. Salaries expected to start rising shortly.
Statistics
Current live vacancies: 588
New permanent vacancies added in May 2014: 39
New candidates registering: 113
Average ‘Job Strength Factor’ for new vacancies in May: 3.5
Increase/Decrease in new vacancies from previous month: -5%
Increase/Decrease in new candidates from previous month: +10%
Key points from the KPMG Job Market survey for May 2014:
• Permanent placements growth accelerates, but temp billings rise at slower pace
• Decline in candidate availability intensifies
• Fastest permanent salary growth since July 2007
Bernard Brown, Partner and Head of Business Services at KPMG, said:
“With starting salaries rising at their fastest rate for almost seven years and temporary placements growth slowing down, people would be forgiven for thinking that the time is right to change jobs. Yet the truth is far different. The number of people putting themselves on the jobs market has dropped at its sharpest rate since 2004. It is this shortage of skilled labour that is forcing employers to tempt talent with improved pay, rather than new-found confidence.”
This review is undertaken by a market research company who contact 100s of recruitment agencies across the UK to undertake a monthly questionnaire. We are part of the panel and get exclusive access to the report.
Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment publishes the number of new vacancies, new candidates and indicate the increase or decrease from the previous month. We aim to assist the legal profession by showing the market from our perspective. Traditionally our clients have been high street law firms and smaller niche commercial practices.
The average job strength gives a good indication of the market because:
1. A Poor Job Strength on vacancies indicates a struggling market. When trade is bad, employers seek options for increasing turnover which usually also involves contacting recruitment agencies in the hope that they have candidates with their own following and not looking for a salary.
2. A Strong Job Strength on vacancies indicates a buoyant market, particularly if it is in connection with an increase in numbers of new vacancies.
Vacancies are each graded 1-5, with 5 being a very strong vacancy and 1 being a very weak vacancy.
Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and regularly writes the Legal Recruitment blog, an award-winning selection of articles and features on legal recruitment and the legal profession. You can contact Jonathan at cv@ten-percent.co.uk or visit one of our websites.
Candidate Registrations in the last 3 days
Member firms get access to full CVs for unlimited vacancies for just £60 per month – full details by email or on our website. Email us to request a CV or register vacancies
▪ 03061410 Conveyancing Executive looking specifically in Guildford and Woking. Permanent or locum.
▪ 03061127 Paralegal with Will drafting experience and some property work – 12 months in total – relocating to London.
▪ 02061646 Personal Injury Locum looking around Cardiff and Bristol for a suitable post.
▪ 02060925 Locum Conveyancing Lawyer available to cover assignments in the North West and the West Midlands. June to September.
▪ 01061306 Conveyancing Solicitor with over 20 years experience looking for long term cover in and around central London.
▪ 03061410 Family Locum looking for assignments in the West Midlands.
▪ 03061239 Conveyancing Fee Earner looking for work in the West Midlands. Over 10 years experience including extensive plot sales and new build exposure. Available immediately.
▪ 03061139 Conveyancing Paralegal looking in Birmingham City Centre for permanent posts.
▪ 03061051 Conveyancing and Commercial Property Locum Solicitor looking around central London for work.
▪ 02061426 Commercial Litigation, Construction and Reinsurance Locum looking around London.
▪ 02061359 NQ Solicitor with general practice background – litigation, employment, probate, costs experience, family, PI. London. Permanent.
▪ 02061248 Commercial Litigation Solicitor – c.1 year PQE looking around London. Permanent.
We have over 10,000 lawyers registered with us. To request CVs for a specific vacancy please register your vacancy – Locum or Permanent
Locums Available Immediately
We have over 700 candidates registered for locum work. Register Vacancies – Locum or Permanent
Phantom Jobs and Rogue Recruitment Agencies
Very recently the Law Society Gazette published an article online about phantom recruitment agents and jobs. The complaint appeared to be that candidates were attending interviews and then not hearing anything back afterwards. Another complaint appeared to be that recruitment agents were not responding to job applications with feedback.
We commented on the article, which can be found here – http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/analysis/comment-and-opinion/curse-of-phantom-recruitment-agents/5041219.article, but in relation to phantom jobs and recruitment agencies we have the following points:
1. The problems of phantom recruitment agents tend to be specifically linked to new start ups. After all, what could be easier than setting up a recruitment agency, registering for a free job board as an employer, making up 30 vacancies, sitting back to wait for the CVs to roll in and then use those CVs to promote your agency to firms in order to get vacancies posted and candidates interviews?
2. Candidates often complain that recruitment agents haven’t got back to them and as a result the recruitment agent is useless. That may be true – I am sure at times candidates find me to be pretty useless when I don’t get back to them, but unfortunately recruitment is a sales driven business. If we put a CV in for a candidate and then get no response because of the reasons below, we can only pester the firm for so long before we have to leave the vacancy and move on.
3. Very often the reason vacancies do not get filled is because the firms do not want them to be filled, not because the recruitment consultant has in any way failed in his or her job.
The recruitment agent has possibly bent over backwards to push the candidates through the process, arranged the interview, spent ages getting the firm to agree to go forward, and then the firm bolt down the hatches and refuse to speak to him/her.
Over the years I have been in recruitment we have experienced vacancies being withdrawn at all stages of the process (which is perfectly understandable) and also being altered as the recruitment process has progressed (again understandable – circumstances change).
However we have also experienced firms where partners have been unable to decide whether to recruit even after advertising, shortlisting, interviewing and second interviewing candidates and as a result the vacancy has fallen through months down the line. Firms have set up 6 first interviews and then offered the job to the first person who came along, practice managers have indicated that they have authority to recruit, gone through the motions and then pulled out because in reality there was no vacancy in the first place.
In these circumstances legal recruitment consultants are not the problem. Agencies are very good at pushing the process along – after all most companies only get paid by commission (unlike Ten-Percent Legal who offer unlimited recruitment deals on a monthly basis).
1. One of the complaints in the article was that some vacancies offer the earth and suggesting that the recruitment consultant has made up a salary range or in some way exaggerated the role. I am sure this happens to a certain extent but very often salary ranges are completely wrong because client solicitor firms do not indicate salary ranges to us when posting vacancies. Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment insist that our 99 member firms do provide salary ranges, which can make some of our job advert salary levels extremely accurate, but firms using us on a one-off basis tend to just say ‘negotiable’. When posting the vacancy onto a job board such as ChanceryLane.co.uk the agency is required to enter the salary range. This is why vacancies sometimes have such a broad salary range attached to them like £25k to £60k.
Very often I think recruitment consultants are viewed in the same way as estate agents. Recruitment is considered money for old rope – so is estate agency! However both still exist and at the moment I imagine most agencies in the country are extremely busy – be it recruitment or estate.
When we started out in April 2000 it took us 8 months to make our first placement – with the Abbey National bank as it was then. Unfortunately the candidate left after a few days and it was another 2 months after this before we made our first placement and money started to come in to our bank account.
Recruitment is not as easy as you may think…
About Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
We are a specialist legal recruiter, covering the whole of the UK. A large proportion of our vacancies are based in London and the South East, but we do assist firms elsewhere on a very regular basis. Over 10,500 lawyers are registered with us and we have access to a range of external and internal job boards and websites where we do not have candidates available ourselves. We also assist with recruitment advice and assistance, regularly advising partners and practice managers on suitable salary and package levels.
Our company is unique for a number of reasons, including the fact that we are not shy to publish our fee structure and also donate a chunk of our profits to charity each year. We offer unlimited permanent and locum recruitment for a fixed fee of just £60 per month (terms apply) or 15% one-off fees for permanent and 18% for locum. We donate 10% of our profits annually to charity, hence our name.
At present we have three recruitment consultants, Jonathan Fagan, Clare Fagan and Pete Gresty, together with our finance director Pearl McNamara. Together we have over 40 years of experience in the legal profession. Jonathan Fagan is a qualified solicitor and still (reluctantly!) undertakes litigation on behalf of the company when required. He also provides a career coaching service to qualified lawyers and law graduates, although this is on a very selective basis.
Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment also owns Interim Lawyers, a specialist locum service. We operate an outsourced UK based typing service as well – www.uk-transcription.co.uk and are preferred suppliers to a number of institutional clients and law firms across the UK and overseas.
The Ten-Percent Group of Legal Recruitment websites gives 10% of annual profits to charity (hence our name). We have carried on with this tradition since we formed the company 14 years ago. So far over £51,000 has been donated to charities in the UK and Africa including LawCare and the CAB.
We hope you have enjoyed reading our newsletter and look forward to hearing from you if we can assist further.
Warm regards
Jonathan Fagan
Consultant
Register Vacancies – Locum or Permanent
£60 Per Month Recruitment Scheme
Jonathan Fagan is a solicitor, qualified recruitment consultant and Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. His LinkedIn profile can be viewed here – www.linkedin.com/in/jbfagan
Legal Recruitment News is produced by Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment – you can view all versions of the e-newsletter at www.legal-recruitment.co.uk. Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment was established in 2000 and donates 10% of profits to charity, hence the name.
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