Monthly News

Professionalising Recruitment – does it matter?

You may be surprised to read this, but firstly recruitment agencies have a professional body who regulate their conduct, and secondly it is possible to qualify as a recruitment consultant, up to graduate level. The professional body is the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, http://www.rec.uk.com/ and members sign up to a professional code of ethics.

At the end of the day, does it matter if agencies are a) regulated and b) professional? After all, very often employers are looking for people to fill vacancies and will go with the source able to provide them.

As a Member of the Institute of Recruitment Professionals, I can say that in order to pass the Certificate of Recruitment Practice, I had to study for about 5-6 hours, do an exam, and undertake CPD every year which consists of attending training courses or reading articles, in the same way solicitors do. As someone who has completed the LPC, the LLB and an LLM, as well as other qualifications including the IFA FPC 1 and 2, the Recruitment Professional qualification is by far one of the easiest I have experienced.

It did however make me stop and think of the service we provide to clients. Very often, existing and older clients will call from the middle of a partners meeting and ask me to give salary ranges for a particular type of candidate, to give market research advice into the current state of the market, or to discuss strategies for longer term recruitment. If someone has a professional qualification linked to that advice, it can only be a good thing in terms of providing quality information, advice and service to clients.

Monthly News

67% of the Public think Will Writers are Solicitors

The Fellowship of Professional Willwriters and Probate Practitioners have released a survey showing that consumers are completely confused by will writers, with 67% of them thinking that to write a will you need to be a qualified solicitor.

The main feature of this is that as lawyers the profession has remained pretty hopeless at marketing, thanks to the various restrictions that remained in place until recent times, and this has resulted in firms not being able to market their unique feature in the wills market place, which is namely that you can almost guarantee the price for writing a will will be a perfectly reasonable one, rather than some of the ridiculous figures some will writing companies come up with.

A few years ago, an elderly relative called one of the will companies from a local newspaper advert and had two wills drawn up (for assets of about £75,000), with no requirements at all in relation to beneficiaries etc.. and for this the will writer spent an hour at the house selling a number of different insurance products, as well as add-on services. The total cost was about £400 for the wills and about £250 a year for storage charges. The elderly relative was convinced he had got the will prepared by a solicitor, as the salesman had given him so many membership details he had sounded professional. The will looked appalling – it was almost as if the salesman had been into WHSmiths and photocopied a “Write your own Will” pack.

It is this point that perhaps solicitors and other lawyers have a genuine advantage over non-qualified will writers – the marketing point has to be precisely this – price, which will be less due to regulatory restrictions, professionalism and quality.

I appreciate that there is a market out there if you intend to overcharge for services not required, but surely this must apply as well to people in genuine need of a will being written professionally and at a reasonable price.

Monthly News

Legal Job Market Report – 1st February 2010

The Legal Job Market looked as if it was going to take off quite dramatically as December drew to a close. All the signs were there – firms wanting to interview over Christmas, indications of the recruitment freezes being lifted by some of the larger firms, lack of redundancies and a stop to the large numbers of CVs flooding the market through redundancy, and requests by law firms with posts. January has been a little bit slow as a result of the adverse weather conditions we have experienced, although vacancies have still picked up. We had people about to attend interviews two hundred miles away only to discover that not only was the firm they were going to see closed, but the partners they were due to meet being snowed in at their homes. One company had a whole days worth of interview cancelled with people travelling from all over the country to a central location in Derby. This makes it very difficult on the recruitment side as the work that a consultant puts in to set up one days worth of interviewing can take another week to get back on track, once partners have been tracked down, candidates have made travel arrangements etc.. It is all very time consuming and quite frustrating when adverse weather affects interviews. We are still seeing some rogue firms and candidates coming through, which has been a fairly common theme throughout the recession. We have had firms offering ridiculously low amounts of money to well qualified candidates and being surprised when they get turned down, candidates who get offered extremely good deals only to turn them down for spurious reasons and candidates who simply fail to turn up to interviews at all. All of these things have been very rare in legal recruitment during the time we have been involved in it, and thankfully are decreasing as the markets pick up. The other phenomenon is the non-existent law firm or job offer which usually involves a firm claiming to be starting up and with the money to provide a salary plus bonus scheme, only to get to the interview and find that the firm were wanting to see if the person coming to see them had their own following that a) they could potentially “use” and b) they could base their department on in order to pay the candidate to do the work rather than generating any new work. We have seen an increase in the number of non-contentious positions with Wills and Probate and conveyancing slowly starting to get back onto the market. In fact we have noticed in some areas that there is already a shortage of conveyancers with a particular level of experience and I expect this to start to become increasingly prevalent as the recruitment season progresses. The usual litigation positions are there as always although family appears to have died off again, after a surge last year. Perhaps this is a sign of the increased optimism in the economy, as I write this I hear that the country is now officially out of a recession which of course has an effect on people’s financial and personal decisions. The outlook for February is good and we hope that the snow stays off and firms start to look to recruit again. The back of the Law Society Gazette is always a good indication of the market and in recent weeks we have started to see a number of law firms and companies looking to expand departments and increase their teams and we hope that this continues for the foreseeable future.

Monthly News

Typing – Outsourcing – Digital Recorder Guide

Outsourcing some or all of your typing work in recent times has got quite popular. It is now possible via software to set up an online typing management system, with recordings being directly uploaded from your offices to home-based typists, and returned extremely quickly as required.

There are a whole host of companies out there selling a range of products, but one of the cheapest solutions remains the Olympus digital recorders, which come with the market-leading DSS Player software, and are compatible with the Express Dictate packages from NCH, an Australian company.

The recorders we recommend are as follows:

1. Olympus DS 2400

This is a very powerful machine that comes with the Olympus DSS Player. It enables you to do as much recording as you want as it comes with a memory card for recording onto rather than directly onto a hard drive. The cost is about £169 on Amazon at present:

Olympus DS-2400 Professional Digital Voice Recorder

2. Olympus DS 40

The cheaper option at £82 on Amazon, this still comes with the Olympus DSS Player, which makes it an option if you do not dictate more than about an hour at any one dictation session. It is compatible with the Express Dictate suite of software, and is a very inexpensive option for firms wanting to outsource and not spend considerable sums in doing so.

Olympus DS-40 Digital Voice Recorder with MP3/WMA Playback 512MB

These two machines are often superceded by other models, but Olympus make such good systems for dictation and transcription they are thoroughly recommended.

The Express Dictate system for sending your recordings to transcribers externally can be obtained through NCH systems in Australia for £48.48 per user (no ongoing costs), with a free trial as well. We have been using the software for over 6 years and it is thoroughly recommended.

 


 

http://www.uk-transcription.co.uk/ is a transcription company with over 10 years experience working on small to large contracts and one-off pieces of work for solicitors firms, universities, government bodies and research establishments, to name but a few. Unlike others in the market, the typing is undertaken by UK-based native English speaking secretaries working from home offices.

Monthly News

Legal Job Market Summary January 11th 2010

 

Legal Job Market Summary – 11th January 2010 As one would expect, December slowed down considerably in the run up to Christmas. However, again we have seen vacancies coming into us, including conveyancing, wills & probate, family, commercial litigation, crime and housing. These are not the usual emails from large firms with a multitude of parties being sent the same jobs, but actual vacancies from small and medium sized practices.

 

The geographical mix of vacancies shows that the regions are at present starting to pick up before London and the Home Counties. The majority of the posts have been spread across the UK, but because of the overspill of London into neighbouring areas the Home Counties are taking longer to get back up to speed.

 

Over Christmas, as candidates make New Year resolutions to move, we are seeing increasing numbers of grade A candidates registering with us, including for example a senior commercial property solicitor with a following and looking for a salary of about £120k. Employees are getting more comfortable with the idea of making moves, which has changed from previous months when on the whole most people very sensibly were making the decision to remain exactly where they were.

 

Family panel members and crime solicitors are still going strong in most areas, with firms looking to increase their departments following the delay of the LSC BVT arrangements.

 

Commercial and Civil Litigation are both gaining ground as clients start to realise that there are a number of outstanding debts available to go after and now have the funds to pursue these.

 

Commercial law firms still seem to be very cautious, with a considerably fewer number of positions coming on stream so far this year, although reports of large numbers of vacancies coming up for April 2010.

 

About Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment

Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment has a range of senior solicitors and executives looking for work as well as at a more junior level. We can introduce you to housing supervisors, crime duty solicitors, family law panel members, children panel members, immigration level 2 supervisors, mental health review tribunal panel members, personal injury panel members registered for work across the UK.

 

We have a database of candidates that you can view online, and assist with permanent and temporary recruitment. A good proportion of lawyers registered with us are passive jobseekers (ie they like to hear of new opportunities arising as opposed to actively looking for work). The company has about 7,000 solicitors registered at all levels, together with a large number of legal executives and paralegals/fee earners. We are called Ten-Percent because each year since 2000 we have donated 10% of our annual profits to a charitable trust called the Ten-Percent Foundation.

 

If you would like to use our services, please get in touch. You can view our Candidate Database online and register your vacancies either by emailing cv@ten-percent.co.uk or visiting

 

www.ten-percent.co.uk/er.html 

Monthly News

How to get work done in the office for very low cost

There are a number of different options here, but this month I am going to recommend a website we have used ourselves (and have no financial link to I hasten to add) called http://www.ifreelance.com/
 
Ifreelance.com is a website aimed at small to medium sized businesses who may have a particular project they need completing, and who may also want to consider low cost options or good quality work levels.
 
Sign up to the site for free, and post details of any particular projects free of charge as well. You will get a range of bids for the work from around the world. We have used consultants based in India, the USA, Australia and the UK so far.
 
We have sent at least 6 projects through the site, some of which would have cost £1000s through a conventional company. These have included data capture, website design, database manipulation, marketing and research. You can also use the site to identify outsourcing partners.
An example would be our need for an Excel spreadsheet process – how to get data out of our bespoke recruitment software and into a manipulative state so that we can post our candidates and vacancies online at low cost.
 
I spoke to our recruitment software company, who wanted £4,500 plus an ongoing maintenance contract of about £1,500 per year. I spoke to our online database supply company, who wanted about £1,200 to set up a piece of software.
 
I posted the project onto ifreelance.com and within 2 days had the project completed for £250. They set me up a range of macros in Excel plus additional add ons, that automatically converted the data, and meant that we did not need any ongoing maintenance. The consultant who carried out the work was based in the USA, and worked as a freelance IT consultant.