Are recruitment agencies vetting candidates?

Having been in the same job for 36 years and never having had to change it, I am always curious to read the CVs that come through the door when I’m recruiting.

How you can have worked for ten different firms before you are aged 30 defeats me. Some applicants appear to change job every six months. Quite what chaos they leave behind and whether this is good for anyone’s wellbeing is an open question. Sure, some people will dislike their firm and move on; others may not be retained once they have completed their training contract. But moving around
on a regular basis must be unsettling, bad for the clients and almost certainly bad for business.

Younger solicitors seem to be much more mobile and keener to move on than develop roots. Whether this is a fear of the responsibilities that come
with partnership or just a low boredom threshold is not entirely clear – there is also the role of the recruitment agencies.

When interviewing candidates for a position recently, it became clear to me that recruiters had been ringing around asking solicitors in perfectly good jobs whether they would like to leave and go somewhere else, tapping into the ‘grass-is-always-greener’ syndrome and promising a more prestigious position, a higher salary or simply a more glamourous title, like ‘head
of department’. But is it professional to do this?

Certainly I have had a couple
of staff leave over the last few years who may have been tapped up by an agency, perhaps with the promise of
a higher salary. This can in some cases be a gigantic waste of
time. Only recently I interviewed an extremely good candidate, invited him back for a second interview and then a week later was told that he had decided
to stay where he was. It was probably a good decision, but how had he come to be looking for the job in the first place? Perhaps he had been lured by an agency to attend the interviews.

Agencies can make a pretty penny out of all of this: fees of 18 to 22 per cent are not abnormal and even if negotiated they can be difficult to reduce below
10 per cent. But 10 per cent of
a £50,000 salary is £5,000 – and that is a fine fee just to make
a few phone calls.

Quite how much agencies vet candidates is a grey area. I have interviewed candidates who have admitted to 18-month suspensions by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, others whose firms have been intervened into, and quite a few whose firms have been closed down for a variety of different reasons. Should they ever have been sent for interview in the first place?

We live in an age where lawyers will move around more often. Jobs are no longer for
life and moving around firms enables you to pick up new
ideas and better practices
and methods of working.

But simply being poached
by an agency may not be in
your long-term best interests.

Cosmo the office labrador has been loyal to me for over eight years now, and despite many requests to join bigger, more prestigious firms he remains firmly under my desk. SJ

Russell Conway is senior partner at Oliver Fisher