Discovery Call: Our process starts with a Discovery Call – an informal discussion aimed at exploring whether our businesses are the right fit for one another. There’s no obligation at this point. Our objective is simply to understand fully your particular legal recruitment challenges and whether we can work together. We fully appreciate that, before you spend money retaining any legal recruiter, you need to be confident they will deliver a return on your investment and feel comfortable they will de-risk the process for you.

This boils down to 3 key questions: How will they deliver the right behavioural fit in the legal candidates presented? How will they help the appointee to succeed, and integrate quickly in their first 100 days in a new role? And what happens if employment is terminated in the first 12 months?

Briefing Meeting: Once you’re comfortable with our answers to those questions, we sign terms, and meet to take a detailed brief from you, which forms the basis of our terms of reference, prior to engaging with potential legal candidates, on your behalf. We cover four things:

• Legal job specification: We gain a full understanding of the background and rationale underpinning the creation of the role. We also explore the full extent of the relevant responsibilities, accountabilities and day to day activities.
• Legal candidate pool: Together, we define and agree the legal candidate pool, based on technical legal skills, length of experience, and the extent to which this needs to have come from another in-house legal department, a commercial legal practice, or both.
• Business fit: We take steps to understand exactly how a client’s legal department operates, the company culture, structure, decision-making approach, and any particular features associated with the hiring manager’s work style, motivations and competencies.
• Behavioural fit: Most importantly, we work with the hiring manager to identify the desired behavioural profile required for success in each job. To do this, we use cutting edge McQuaig® job profiling technology as part of our process. This is one of the major factors that sets our processes apart from of other specialist in-house legal recruiters.

Terms of Reference: Having explored your legal recruitment needs in depth, we incorporate our findings in a ‘terms of reference’ document for you to sign off. That way, everything’s clear and everyone’s on the same page, before we engage with the legal candidate pool, on your behalf.

Research: Research and engagement is an ongoing process in the niche UK legal market. When we have your mandate, the approach is laser focused on exactly the right pool of candidates from both in-house legal departments and commercial law firms (where we have no conflicts of interest whatsoever). We undertake extensive, legal talent research to identify sources and contacts, and make use of emerging technologies to connect and engage with appropriately qualified solicitors and other legal candidates.

Advertising: Where appropriate, we extend the reach with appropriately placed recruitment advertising, managed by us, and incorporating a client’s branding. This ensures the role gains the attention of candidates right across the UK, or further afield, where there may be already be a desire to relocate. We also offer leverage through social media channels as part of the process.

Outreach: Engagement is extensive in order to increase the selection of candidates you are able to recruit from. Our aim is for you to hire someone from the top 20% of candidates available in the entire legal market, whether or not they consider themselves to be actively seeking a new legal job. We focus on passive legal candidates, on your behalf. If you don’t engage with passive candidates, you’re at a huge disadvantage because you end up being restricted to a very small number of candidates who are open to new opportunities. (Our research has shown that this is frequently less than 5% of candidates with the particular qualifications, legal job and industry sector experience required by a client).

This stage of the process marries up our extensive legal recruitment experience and objectivity with cutting-edge, behavioural assessment technology. This enables clients to recruit in-house lawyers with the correct cultural fit for the organisation and right behavioural fit for both the team they are joining and the legal role they will be performing.

The initial screening process is undertaken by an experienced legal recruiter. Our interviews are both biographical and competency based. We aim to uncover the key drivers influencing each candidate’s chosen career path and the goals they are looking to achieve in their next move, and beyond. We then evaluate whether this is likely to be achieved if they were to take up the in-house legal role in question. We explore total compensation, so that you are fully informed, and break this down into each composite part of the package to ensure candidates are on brief. We set appropriate expectations on each side, and explore the prospects and consequences of a counter-offer, from the outset.

Shortlisted candidates are presented to you with a CV, executive summary, and an assessment of how closely each one matches the behavioural profile you created when we took our brief. The behavioural profiling technology we use helps clients evaluate how each candidate will perform the role before you make a hiring decision, instead of relying on trial and error after you appoint them. The valuable foresight this provides is a key element in minimising the risk of a wrong hire – and is one of the elements of our L-TAR^® process that sets us apart from other legal recruitment companies.

Ultimately, any recruitment agency on a PSL can send you a selection of CVs, matched to a job description, assuming they have the experience to know what they are doing. But that’s only a partial service with, let’s face it, hardly any effort. The experience of in-house legal and HR teams we have worked with in the past shows you can hire the most technically gifted lawyer within your budget this way, but unless they are the right fit for the business, you risk wasting significant time and money with that recruitment model and having to repeat the process.

When we set up the business, our mission was (and still is) to add more value to the recruitment process than any other legal recruiter – via a premium service designed to create enduring relationships.

Employee retention drives us, every day. This is of paramount importance to companies when the costs of attrition, and failed attempts to recruit, are so high. Our primary aim is to enhance this element of the legal recruitment process for you.

By the time one of our legal candidates accepts your offer of employment, step one of our enhancement process is already complete: by using behavioural assessment technology, you’re already confident that the person you have hired has the right fit. And with the right fit, they are less likely to disappoint you, or leave you.

It’s not only the behavioural assessment that allows us to de-risk the legal hiring process for you. Once a role has been filled, our commitment continues beyond the appointee’s start date. Our Employee Retention Programme (ERP), provides further opportunities to de-risk the process for clients, through structured follow-ups and executive coaching, from our panel of independent coaching associates. This is included in the price of our service, which is backed by market leading guarantees* which are above and beyond those we used to provide before we adopted this model. Such is the confidence in our process.

In a 2017 report, the Recruitment & Employment Confederation identified that the cost of a bad hire could be over 3 times the individual’s annual salary. Our process is aimed at eliminating this wasted time and money. Read some of our Success Stories.

*Terms and Conditions apply