How to Overcome Difficulties Recruiting Permanent Staff in the Current Job Market, an article by Jonathan Fagan, MD of Ten Percent Legal Recruitment and Interim Lawyers.
There are two sides to every coin and when it comes to looking to recruit candidates to replace departing staff we regularly have conversations with owners of law firms telling us how hard it is to source qualified staff at the moment. Some firms appear to have given up on actually finding anyone to work for them and others simply continue with the forlorn hope that someone is going to come along at some point in the future.
However, when you speak to candidates, you soon realise that there is a major disparity between the expectations of law firms & employers and candidates.
Law Firms – Office Based, 9-5 Roles
When speaking to the law firms, they are very clear that they are office-based businesses with clients who expect their solicitors to be in the office, ready to take appointments or phone calls and that it’s simply not going to be possible for anyone to work elsewhere. Furthermore, the firm’s clients expect their solicitors to be in the office between the hours of 9am and 5:30pm and that any other hours simply would not work.
Law firms also have a very different level of expectation when it comes to salary levels. As a rule of thumb for senior fee earners earning more than £45k, firms very often think they can recruit at a level about on average £10,000 less than most candidates are looking for. This is in addition to the fact that they want someone to be office based and work fixed hours in age in a traditional format.
Candidates – Remote or Hybrid Flexible Working Roles
Moving across to the candidate side, the key reason given time and time again for looking for new roles is that they want remote working for some or all of the week and flexible hours. Nothing has changed since the pandemic; candidates have got used to some element of remote & flexible working and want to continue on this basis.
The Perfect Storm
When you put these things together – disparity with flexible working requirements, disparity with remote working requirements, a disparity in salary expectations plus a volatile and uncertain world at present (just added the last bit in by way of a bonus!) – you can see that recruitment is not easy. I am aware that law firms think that recruitment agencies are the solution to a lot of their problems, but I suspect the solution is a lot closer to home..
Solve Your Recruitment Problems
Firstly, take a long hard look at yourselves and think about the restrictions you have put on the vacancy.
Do your clients really expect their solicitors to be in the office from 9am to 5.30pm? Are your clients in their offices during this time or do they work remotely and flexibly? Are flexible hours actually a bonus? If you contact our company at 8pm on a Sunday night its possible you will get a response – we have worked flexibly for 25 years. Similarly, if we are all off doing other things at 11am on a Wednesday you may have to wait an hour or two for us to reply.
Can you set up a solution for working remotely – have you looked into the possibility of allowing your staff to log in from home to work? Can you set up a phone system that enables calls to be diverted to their home address? If you can do these two things, what is the issue with home working? I get the impression that some firms are almost too scared about looking at remote working to contemplate it, but that if they did go down this route recruitment would be a lot easier. Even 1 day or 2 days a week will make a difference to your recruitment prospects.
Salary expectations – will they be so high if the hours can be flexible and there is an element of remote working involved? I know that a lot of candidate expectations are unreasonable (we view law firm accounts on a daily basis and we see the profit margins) but can they be offset by negotiating on the conditions?
Summary
Candidates very specifically hunt out roles where there is flexible working available and hybrid working opportunities are possible. One easy fix when it comes to recruitment is to make sure that you get the word ‘hybrid’ at the very least into your job adverts and be prepared to talk about flexible working. Examine your working practices and be aware that candidates are not looking necessarily to commute to and from your offices to work between the hours of 9am and 5pm. Whilst you might like the concept of everyone being in the same office and working the same hours, you do need to realise that a lot of candidates no longer see this as a good thing.
