In-house Legal Team Recruitment Project: Case Study
Background
Our client is a leading, vertically integrated premium drinks company manufacturing, marketing, and distributing branded beer, cider, wine, spirits and soft drinks across the UK and Ireland.
The company’s General Counsel had reached a point at which there was a need to add further layers of talent to the existing in-house legal team and retained Florit Legal exclusively to manage the whole process.
The wider in-house legal and governance function was to be expanded by the addition of four new people to be based in Glasgow – three generalist legal counsel (one of whom would take up a senior legal counsel position) and one regulatory compliance professional who could either be a qualified lawyer or an experienced data protection officer or regulatory compliance manager from a highly regulated industry.
Challenge
With multiple roles available and different skills and levels of seniority required, the challenge is to give the client enough relevant options to consider that meet the brief for each category of role within a reasonable time frame so that comparing like-for-like applications is made easier than would otherwise be the case with a longer process.
Our objective was to give client multiple options to consider within a global salary budget for the entire in-house legal team.
There would be an element of overlap in responsibilities between individuals on a day-to-day basis, and there was also the opportunity for individuals to come with some complementary skills and experience. By endeavouring to shortlist six people for the two junior roles and 4 each of the other more senior roles, we anticipated that enough choice ought to be offered without overwhelming the client with candidates.
We were very much hiring a team; not a group of individuals in distinct roles. So this was a case of completely understanding the client’s brief and delivering options as if they had undertaken the process themselves, whilst saving them considerable time in the process.
Solution
Whilst we had identified a number of specific candidates to target from other in-house legal teams in Glasgow and Edinburgh, the client was also willing to consider candidates looking to move in-house for the very first time from practice. So, with a project as extensive as this one, the publication of an advertisement and other content on social media was helpful to create wider awareness quickly in the local market, so as to consider multiple applications, from different sources, within a relatively short time frame. A positive message is delivered to the market more quickly with a multi-pronged approach such as this.
Following a two stage interview process which each of the candidates offers were made an accepted on all four, with appointments being made from two top-tier commercial law firms, and two other local in-house legal teams.
