Hiring entrepreneurial lawyers to join The Legal Director
The Challenge
The Legal Director is an SRA regulated law firm that provides a remote or virtual outsourced Legal Director service for businesses who do not have sufficient need for a full time resource but still have legal requirements that require the attention of experienced and specialist legal professionals.
After a period of growth for The Legal Director, Quarsh was tasked with taking over the sourcing, hiring and onboarding of Legal Directors, previously managed by the company directors and supported by ad-hoc agency activity. It became apparent that one of the key challenges was around the recruitment process that would need to ensure standardisation across selection and assessment, as well as significantly reducing the time spent recruiting by the Directors. The experience level required of a commercial Legal Director as well as requirement to have both in-house counsel alongside their own practice experience was also a key prerequisite for all hires. The candidate market is incredibly competitive, with a very strong reliance on recruitment agencies across the industry.
The Result
Where the relationship with The Legal Director stood apart from “regular” recruitment, was that all lawyers joining the business were entering into a partnership. They would be running their own business under the umbrella of The Legal Director. This meant every candidate needed to be comfortable with the level of risk and reward. They would need to be an excellent Legal Director and comfortable and competent taking responsibility for doing some of their own business development. This added an additional layer of complexity to our sourcing, advertising and screening strategies.
Quarsh set about understanding the unique candidate value proposition for the Legal Director, and analysed the existing recruitment performance. From here, Quarsh applied a bespoke outsourced recruitment department model to immediately take over the ongoing hiring need whilst developing the processes and capabilities of the business to both proactively reach and passively attract a high quality of candidate.
"We realised we needed to look at recruitment differently. Our growth was heavy on internal resources and “traditional” recruiters were at best mixed. Jason and Lucy’s comprehensive approach was very interesting. Quarsh’s detailed and enlightening audit process showed us how to re-engineer our recruitment process from top to bottom. With this information, we could have then improved things ourselves, but we decided to leave it to the experts, and we weren’t disappointed. Tony became our white-labelled, in house recruitment manager. With the Quarsh team, he set about establishing best practice processes and achievable targets, all against a recruitment strategy the management team bought into. At every stage, the team has delivered. Audit, process design, recruitment strategy and MI; we have everything we could have hoped for. We now have reliable access to the people we need to grow, and they are consistently candidates of the highest calibre. This pool of quality people enables us to look again at our future development strategy. We’re delighted with all that Quarsh has done for us and we’re looking forward to continuing our relationship."
