Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment FAQ’s
What is Ten-Percent.co.uk?
What are legal recruitment consultants?
Why do you call yourselves low cost legal recruitment consultants?
What is a legal job?
What is the difference between recruitment consultants and agencies? What are headhunters?
Why do recruitment consultants exist?
Why should I register with you?
How many agencies should I register with?
What do ‘PQE’ and ‘NQ’ mean?
What are your ethical policies?
I am a law graduate seeking a training contract – can you assist?
I am a law graduate seeking paralegal work – can you assist?
I have a legal career-related question for you
What do you charge firms for your services?
What is an accredited police station representative?
Which areas of law do you cover?
Do you deal with in-house legal departments?
Do you deal with large city law firms?
Do you assist with moves overseas?
Do you really donate 10% of your profits to charity?
I have a service I wish to advertise to lawyers – can you assist?
I want to know what salary I should be getting
Do you offer a CV writing or review service?
Who and What is Ten-Percent.co.uk?
Ten-Percent.co.uk is an online legal recruitment agency exclusively for lawyers and legal support staff looking for new positions, and law firms, in house legal departments and employers wishing to employ lawyers and law staff. Law firms and employers who become members recruit as many candidates as they wish completely free of charge. The site also offers careers services for law students and lawyers, including career coaching and CV preparation.
What are Legal Recruitment Consultants?
Legal recruitment consultants are in effect employment agencies attempting to locate and source new opportunities for lawyers. They work by advertising for lawyers to register with them, and then charging firms for the privilege of an introduction to the lawyers. The term “agency” tends to be reserved for lorry drivers and pickle factory operative type jobs, but the principle is exactly the same.
Why do you call yourselves low cost legal recruitment consultants?
Mainly because we are low cost legal recruitment consultants! We used to charge contingency fees to law firms, but in July 2011 we took the radical decision to abandon the model completely. We think the subscription based approach to recruitment works for both employers and agents. It avoids the hard sell, the flood of CVs, the constant harrassment of partners by recruitment agencies desperate to make a quick buck.
Instead we work with our client firms over a long period of time and provide them with a recruitment service involving no agency fees for a successful placement. We already have over 45 law firm members and hope to expand this to 100 by the summer of 2012. Our vision is for over 500 law firms to come over to us and make us their preferred suppliers of recruitment for a period of 5 years.
What is a Legal Job?
We help with legal jobs. These can include anything from a receptionist, a legal secretary, a fee earner (what is a fee earner? A fee earner is someone who earns fees for the law firm they work for. A secretary does not earn fees – he/she administrates), legal executives, solicitors, barristers, trainee solicitors, paralegals, legal cashiers, support staff, marketing managers. Any job that involves working in the legal profession.
What is the difference between recruitment consultants and agencies? What are headhunters?
Headhunters are consultants who either network source or cold call source (depending on your level of cynicism) lawyers and try to persuade them to change firms with offers of high salary or better terms. Most recruitment consultants offer a headhunting service and call it “search and selection”. There is very little difference between recruitment consultants and agencies, except that consultants tend to operate in the high end market and agencies at the lower end. For example, if you ran a warehouse and wanted to recruit a logistics manager you would probably use an agency calling itself a recruitment consultancy (usually because they charge a higher fee!) and if you wanted to recruit a forklift truck driver you would use a recruitment agency.
Why do legal recruitment consultants exist?
Good question! Partly because there has traditionally been a nationwide shortage of a certain standard of lawyer, and secondly, because finding a new opportunity is not often simply a case of looking in the Law Society Gazette at the ‘Situations Vacant’ page. At any one time, there may be 6 or 7 adverts for a particular area of the country, but we will know that there are a number of other firms in that area have vacancies but not advertised them. Firms do not advertise partly because they know that consultants can assist, and secondly because the cost of advertising is prohibitive for the return they will get. It can take up to 2 years to get a vacancy filled in some areas of the country.
Why should I register with you?
We are a specialist legal recruitment consultancy, concentrating specifically on solicitors and legal support staff in private practice, in-house and local authority in the UK and abroad. We have an ethical policy, an environmental policy, a privacy policy, we donate 10% of our annual profits to charity and we are good at securing and locating new opportunities for lawyers registered with us. Read our feedback page for comments from previous service-users. Ten-Percent is also managed by solicitors.
How many agencies should I register with?
How long is a piece of string? We cannot answer this question with any authority because we would like it if you only registered with us! It depends on your circumstances. A quick example may assist. If you are a duty solicitor in Manchester, looking for positions in Manchester City Centre, there are about 35 firms you could apply to for work. If you register with 3 agencies, each one will send either your full CV, anonymous details or a briefing letter to each firm, causing a headache for both you and the firm. We would advise you not to register with more than one agency to begin with if you are one of the following:
High Street
Conveyancing (NQ-Partner), Crime (solicitor with police station accreditation or duty solicitor status), Family (SFLA or Law Society panel member), PI or clinical negligence (2 yrs PQE), Mental Health (if panel member), Wills & Probate/Private Client (NQ-10yrs PQE).
Commercial
Commercial Property (NQ-4 yrs PQE), Corporate finance (1-8yrs PQE), Banking (2-5yrs PQE), Clinical Negligence (2-4yrs PQE), Tax (1-4yrs PQE), Shipping (2-4yrs PQE)
If you are not one of the above, you should register with one agency to begin with, allow them 2 weeks to make any necessary enquiries, and then think about registering with others if the first has been unsuccessful. If you live in a remote area, such as North Devon, North Lincolnshire or the Lake District, we would recommend allowing at least 3 weeks before registering with anyone else.
What do PQE and NQ mean?
PQE stands for Post Qualification Experience (or equivalent for legal executives or non-qualified staff). NQ stands for Newly Qualified (solicitors).
What are your ethical policies?
We abhor discrimination of any kind – traditionally a major problem in the UK legal profession in certain firms (age, sex, race etc.. etc..). We give candidates and firms honest and impartial advice. We have a privacy policy, the company is committed to donate 10% of our net profits to charity each year, we have an environmental policy (we avoid printing anything where possible!), and an assurance that we believe in equal opportunities for all, regardless of disability, race, religion, colour, age or creed.
I am a law graduate seeking a training contract – can you assist?
No, is the simple answer. We get on average between 5 and 15 application forms and CVs each day from students and non-qualified paralegals without 6 months experience asking for our assistance. We cannot assist because firms do not want to pay an external source to find trainees when the market is so overloaded with potential lawyers! We can assist with careers advice, either as paid consultants, or on a questions by email basis. Visit our careers shop for details.
I am a law graduate seeking paralegal work – can you assist?
Sometimes, yes. It depends on your experience. You must have 6 months paid experience (can be unpaid if of sufficient quality in a law practice) and be looking for permanent paralegal work.
I have a legal career-related question for you
Great! Visit www.ten-percent.co.uk/careersshop to get a full personal response or alternatively post your question on our legal careers forum at www.ten-percent.co.uk/legalcareers. We will try to respond to your query within 24 hours but this is not always possible if we are busy.
What do you charge firms for your services?
Nothing. Recruitment through Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment is absolutely free for all our members. Of course, there is a catch, which is that employers have to apply for membership which costs £60 a month. This is somewhat revolutionary as the usual agency fees are 20%-25% per candidate. We hope to change the entire legal recruitment landscape within the next 3-5 years (we wrote this in 2012 – watch this space!).
What is an accredited police station representative?
We get asked this question on a regular basis by paralegals and overseas lawyers. The police station accreditation scheme was introduced in the 1990′s in England and Wales, after solicitors were accused of sending their secretaries down to the police station to sit with murder suspects, and did not really understand their role at the station, which should be proactive. A particularly notorious case was in Cardiff when a solicitor sat through questioning whilst a detective asked a suspect whether he had committed the murder over 100 times and subjected him to constant interviewing without a break. The Law Society began to develop guidelines, and soon a recognised qualification emerged.
You do not need to be qualified, but you must have a firm with whom you can undertake the training. The cost is about £500 for the examinations, which consist of a written portfolio of cases you have experienced, written exam for some levels of candidates, and an oral exam. This is a tough test, and the rewards for passing it are that you can undertake police station work (which may or may not be considered a benefit when you are sat at a police station at 2am on a Sunday morning with a particularly unpleasant client!). It takes between 3 and 12 months to complete this qualification.
If a solicitor wants to join the duty solicitor rota, he or she has to obtain this qualification at some stage in the same way as non-qualified representatives. We cannot assist with the training or courses on offer, and recommend that you do an internet search for police station law to read more about the scheme, and perhaps visit providers websites for details of courses offered.
Which areas of law do you cover?
Everything, anywhere in the world, if we get instructions from firms and candidates. Our main areas where we do most business are with medium sized firms either on the high street, or in niche commercial practices in the City of London or regions. Although we have links and dealings with larger city firms, we are not so busy in these areas.
We have however dealt with companies as diverse as offshore private practice law firms, in-house departments, charities, local authorities, licensed conveyancers and international internet law practices.
Do you assist with in house legal departments?
Yes. We have regular dealings with in house legal departments across the UK. Most of them do not sign up as members and use us for the supply of locums or contractors on an ad hoc basis. We also get permanent roles in and we have worked with organisations as diverse as oil companies and government departments over the years.
Do you deal with large city firms?
Not really. We would love to, but they always seem to want to give out £000s to very large recruitment agencies in order to fulfill their vacancies! We used to have a go at their legal jobs, which on the whole get passed out to about 15 difference agencies, but soon realised it was more trouble than it is worth. Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment has traditionally stuck to the small-medium sized practices. Over the years we have been involved with a lot of Legal 500 firms.
Do you assist with moves overseas?
Yes, although we are not specialists in the area. We have worked with law firms in offshore locations before such as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. As we expand our services it is hoped at some stage to establish an Australian Ten-Percent as well as offices in China, France and Germany. We do not tend to work in the opposite direction – UK firms tend to go for UK solicitors or lawyers from overseas with UK experience.
Do you really donate 10% of your profits to charity?
Yes. In our first year we donated £500 to a local childrens hospice. This was more than 10%. In our second year we donated around £1,800 and by our fifth year of trading we had donated about £15,000 to charitable causes. We established a charitable trust called the Ten-Percent Foundation in 2002 and this has two external trustees and one internal. The trust has a number of aims which include supporting small charitable causes with either a link to our local areas, the legal profession or to alleviate poverty in the third world. Our employees are encouraged to spend time on community related projects which in the past have included dry-stone walling on a local nature reserve. Between 2008 and 2010 we postponed payments to the charitable trust, but the company is committed to ensuring that monies are paid over when it is economically viable to do so. Our donations will continue from the 2010-2011 tax year onwards.
I have a service I wish to advertise to lawyers – can you assist?
Yes – we have a shopping mall for lawyers and we would be delighted to discuss your service with you. Contact us using the online form.
I want to know what salary I should be getting.
Visit the careers shop for personalised salary reviews – www.ten-percent.co.uk/careersshop.
Do you prepare or advise on resumes or CV’s?
Yes – visit our CV pages at www.ten-percent.co.uk/careersshop