How your firm can secure the best talent

Understand your employer brand

The image that your firm presents directly influences the quality and quantity of people that you attract. It’s exactly the same principle that you’d apply to marketing for potential clients, but directed at prospective employees.

Invest the time to understand exactly what your brand and branding communicate, assess the gap between what it is and what you’d like it to be, then develop a strategy to improve it. Developing an employer brand is a long-term project, but actively managing yours can have an enormous impact — 75% of job seekers are likely to apply to employers who do so^[6].

Improve the hiring experience

If the hires that you hoped for aren’t joining at the rate you’d expect, it’s normal to assess the start and the end of the process, i.e. ‘how are we advertising the role?’ and ‘are we offering competitive packages?’ Those remain crucial, but it’s also vital to ensure that you’re not losing people in the middle of the journey.

There are plenty of reasons why candidates will drop out — receiving other offers, changing their mind about leaving their employer, becoming fatigued with the process, or perhaps realising that the role or the firm isn’t exactly what they wanted or expected. There are many factors you can’t control, but for those you can, you obviously should.

It might be that your interview or assessment process is too long, that you’re not communicating enough about the next steps or the status of an application, or that the partners you choose aren’t best suited to conducting the interviews. Examine the journey and see if anything might be discouraging applicants from completing the process.

Run a referral scheme

Referral schemes are a very cost-effective and reliable way to locate excellent talent. By offering an incentive for current staff to encourage their contacts to apply, there’s an extra precision to the firm’s search — the applicants that result are selected by people whose judgement you trust, and who have a professional and reputational stake in the success of those applicants.

You also enjoy an extra reach that simply advertising a role doesn’t have. A potential applicant might not have been thinking about a new role, so won’t have searched for vacancies. However, if a friend or acquaintance were to reach out directly (and sell the virtues of your firm) that is very likely to at least intrigue them.

Widen the search

If you only fish in one pond, you’ll get the same fish. If you’re not getting enough applicants or hires, you might need to diversify your search — ask yourself if you’ve applied unnecessary limits or filters.

It’s an understandable instinct to dismiss applicants that don’t hold a degree from a certain level of university, or whose experience doesn’t include something specific that you assume to be vital. It might seem like a practical necessity for a time-poor practice manager or hiring partner, but if there’s still a shortage of talent, then it’s not working as intended.

Academic prestige and professional cachet don’t necessarily reveal true potential, nor does their absence indicate incompetence. By looking further than what’s on paper, you might tap new wells of talent.

Admittedly, applying fewer initial filters could mean that the number of unsuitable interviewees increases, but just as improved efficiency increases firm productivity, it also frees up the time to conduct a less conventional and more time-intensive hiring process.

[1] MHA, ‘Legal Benchmarking Annual Report 2022’

[2] Thomson Reuters ‘State of the UK Legal Market 2021’

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid.

[5] Saffery Champness, ‘Strategies for Success: A survey of UK law firms’

[6] Glassdoor