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Nothing ventured, nothing gained
1 May 2022
Overly risk-averse legal recruiters are selecting bland candidates over more atypical creative profiles. Their Clients are then realising too late that no risk means no reward.
What better way to celebrate International Workers’ Day then with the results of a small survey we conducted on recent legal hiring trends. We’ll spare you the statistical details (it’s a holiday after all), but here’s what we found in our practice areas:
- The COVID crisis added more legal job seekers to the market, without increasing the amount of roles available, thus further increasing competition.
- Legal recruiters are even more risk-averse than previously, and tended to prefer applicants who were (i) based, (ii) educated, and (iii) registered in the same country as the position to fill. In other words, international applicants were passed over, even if they were (significantly) more qualified than local talent.
- Employers continue to request physical office presence for online legal tasks, and have been slow to accept the new remote working paradigm.
- Companies continue to request bar admission for in-house roles, even though it’s quite rare for such counsel to represent the company in litigation.
- Recruitment firms and agents increasingly conform to the desires of their corporate clients and do not deliver the free services they advertise to job seekers.
Overall, there were no real surprises in these results, which just underline that legal recruiters – especially those who are not themselves actively practising legal counsel – often focus on ticking safe square boxes that lead to their commission and disregard their client's long-term interests. This is only possible because incumbent counsel prefer not to get involved in a task without billable hours and delegate legal recruitment to their HR department or an outside firm.
Both sides should keep in mind though that although bland candidates may be easier to “sell” to clients / stakeholders, legal excellence comes from creativity and thinking outside a company’s current contractual / regulatory boxes.
We suggest that a company’s own counsel invest personally in recruiting members of their legal team and take full ownership of this essential task. They are the ones that should ensure role requirements match their company’s needs ; they should direct recruiters to avoid ticking boxes and to find candidates that are creative in life, which is a good indicator of their creativity in law. Once counsel blaze the trail, the pure administration of the recruitment process can be safely outsourced to recruiters.