The year is 2008 and the war for “top talent” is on. So when one of your legal secretaries serves notice, a senior attorney announces his retirement, or one of your top earners goes on maternity leave, how do you find quality candidates to replace your best assets quickly and efficiently?

Gone are the days when a lineage advertisement in a popular weekly legal publication would attract a slew of enthusiastic legal candidates. While law firms have become more selective about the legal staff they employ, talented legal job seekers have become lazier. Ever-developing technology now means candidates can go to a search engine, type in their dream legal job title; And voila, generate fifty matching legal openings that they can apply to with the click of a button. Why would potential legal staff spend hours combing through countless posts, when legal jobs could come directly to them?

So we’ve already established that the life of a legal job seeker is getting easier every day, but is this to the detriment of the law firm? With competition getting tougher for law firms as Legal Recruitment efficiently moves to the user-focused web, it is imperative that law firms have a strong internet presence for their legal works to be seen. . This will involve creating a variety of marketing campaigns, including overpaying to advertise on a variety of legal job boards, which, let’s be honest, will likely end up being swamped by millions of other similar openings. Advertising legal vacancies on a law firm’s website can also be an exercise in futility, as when a candidate Googles “Commercial Property Lawyer Job” it is very unlikely that they will see it without the website being submitted. to a substantial amount of search engine optimization work focused primarily on keywords such as “legal jobs” which seems like a total and expensive waste of time given that the primary focus of a law firm website is to attract new customers. Now, for just a few legal vacancies, going through all this trouble can seem like a timely and expensive exercise. Relax, there is another option: why not use a legal recruitment agency?

Back in the 1990s, when legal recruitment started to take off, legal recruitment agencies were considered a waste of money: a middleman would place an ad or two (that, let’s face it, the law firm could have done just as quickly). and charging an unbelievable fee for the no more than adequate legal staff they attracted. Well, times have changed and the Legal Recruitment industry is working harder than ever to earn their fees, and more often than not, using a good Legal Recruitment Agency is a much more cost and time efficient method to look for candidates to do it alone. Good legal recruitment agencies will have more time and experience to design marketing strategies that work, they will also have the resources to invest in several different advertising mediums and a good team of consultants with knowledge and experience in the legal profession.

With so many emerging legal recruitment agencies, it can seem like a daunting task to find a good one. However, in fact, a good Legal Recruitment Agency should be extremely easy to find: they will have a good and easy to use Legal Recruitment website; a strong presence on the most popular legal job boards; and will have good brand recognition both online and in traditional media. All of these attributes are easy to measure by simply going to a search engine and searching for “Legal Recruitment Agency” in the area in which the law firm is located. The best ones will have a good search engine ranking and a simple and effective website. The second step would be to call them, discuss your requirements, and judge how knowledgeable they are about the legal profession, the culture of the area you are in, and how well they have understood your requirements. It’s also worth discussing their fees and seeing if there are any discounts for exclusively using that particular Legal Recruitment Agency, and if there are any discount periods. A good legal recruitment agency should not charge you unless a candidate has been successfully placed with you.

Quite often, a legal recruitment agency will already have a good matching candidate in their database that is readily available. Otherwise, or additionally, the Legal Recruitment Agency will place a series of advertisements in different strategic places. Depending on the nature of the job, the Legal Recruitment Agency may even be looking for passive candidates. Candidates sent by the Legal Recruitment Agency will be filtered and should match your initial requirements. If you wish to interview any of them, the Agency must work closely with you and the candidate to organize it quickly. The Legal Recruitment Agency must also serve as a liaison between the candidate and the client until the law firm has sent the employment contract and the candidate has returned it.

Ultimately, using a Recruitment Agency could save your Human Resources department hours of time and effort. So the next time you foresee a legal recruitment nightmare within your HR team, don’t rule out legal recruitment agencies – you never know, the right one could be the answer to all your prayers!