Recruiting a Business Development Manager – a good idea?

March 1st, 2010

If you have looked at the Law Society Gazette in recent times you will have noticed that a) it has shrunk dramatically, although the jobs section has started to expand rapidly in the last few weeks, and b) the editor appears to be concentrating on marketing and business development rather than legal practice.

 
Why recruit a Business Development Manager (BDM)?
 
1. If you have asked solicitors the question in the article above during an interview, you are probably already considering one without realising it.
2. The BDM spends his/her whole time on generating work, new ideas for business streams, marketing and sales.
3. Your lawyers spend their time doing legal work.
4. BDM’s get paid on performance (you would be mad to employ one who was not). Lawyers do not tend to like this type of arrangement.
 
Business development manager is also known as a business planner. A BDM will devote his/her attention to business development and exploiting the business opportunities that are presented. 
The business development manager must have considerable sales experience, be an organized and strong negotiator, and be aware of and responsive to economic trends, government policies and currency fluctuations.

The business development manager works to expand a company’s product reach and profit revenues. They do this by identifying new markets and attracting new clients. The business development manager therefore researches new business opportunities, identifies likely sales points, develops strategic plans and sales strategies, and undertakes presentations to and negotiations with prospective customers.

Responsibility of a Business Development Manager

  • Investigate the economic conditions surrounding your business activity such as industry trends and competition.
  • Conduct extensive market research and continue gathering information throughout the life of the business.
  • Prepare a detailed business and marketing plan so you will not lose sight of your goals and objectives.
  • Secure sufficient financial resources for future development or expansion.
  • Network with other business people; establish a support group, attend BNI and similar meetings, and build up trade.
  • Attend workshops, trade shows, and seminars to keep up-to-date on changes in the industry.
  • Adopt a team approach; work with others in pursuing common goals.
  • Understand the skills and qualities you bring to your business.
  • Develop a situation analysis of your company including its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to assist in the development of a strategic plan for the future of the business.
One of the best ways to recruit a BDM is to find one who has been successful before in another industry, offer them a reasonable basic salary, with a percentage bonus based on work generated and give them 12 months.
 
A good BDM will easily pay back their salary and generate a good profit. You will spot a poor BDM very quickly, as they will spend too much time doing administrative work and not enough time creating sales, marketing and looking at new opportunities.
 
If you would like to recruit a business development manager, Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment can assist. Register your Vacancy Online. Please note that we do not assist with commission only posts for BDMs – we do not have any candidates prepared to work on this basis.

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Legal Job Market Summary 1st March 2010

February 28th, 2010

February 2010 has been a reasonable month, bearing in mind the effect the weather has had on the resurgence in recruitment, and we are quite optimistic at the moment that things are going to pick up over the next 3-4 months. At the start of the year we were very confident that the market was picking up – we have been getting a steady stream of vacancies in from firms all looking to either expand or replace, and this is very good news indeed for jobseekers.

If the weather had not been so bad earlier in the year I think the market would be a lot more busy than it is now, but still we are seeing a gradual improvement day after day.

We have had over 25 vacancies in during February, the majority of which have been from good quality firms with definite salaries, plans and stability.

All the research coming out of the recruitment industry is pointing to a slow but gradual recovery, and I think the legal market unfortunately is going to remain one of the those longest hit by the recession.

We were one of the first markets to get the full effect of the tsunami wave of redundancies and drop off in work, and also going to be one of the last to recover.

Recruitment is done in waves, and the recent wave is getting towards its peak after a short drop off over February half term. The next wave will continue until the end of March, picking up again in mid April. We expect a busy period towards the Easter break at the end of March.

We are seeing conveyancing and commercial property posts again, including both permanent and locum. However to put it into context, 2 years ago we were regularly registering over 100 vacancies a month, and placing conveyancing and commercial property solicitors at a rate of knots….

Recent vacancies in – Family/Education Law – Colchester, Civil Litigation – Tunbridge Wells, Wills & Probate – Maidstone, Employment Law – Guildford, Company Commercial/Commercial Property – Central London, Duty Solicitor – Wrexham, Family – Plymouth.

www.ten-percent.co.uk/weeklyreport.htm

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Jobs Market to pick up in 2010

February 1st, 2010

Figures released today show that the UK economy has come out of recession with a reported growth of 0.1 per cent in the last quarter of 2009.

This slight recovery could further boost employer confidence and accelerate the already increasing demand for both permanent and temporary staff, according to the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC).

The latest REC JobsOutlook showed that employer confidence was already starting to rise with one in five businesses planning to increase their permanent workforce over the coming year and a huge majority (over 90 per cent) not intending to carry out any more job cuts. 

This followed the latest REC/KPMG Report on Jobs which showed permanent staff placements growing at their fastest rate for 18 months and  temporary staff assignments rising  at their sharpest rate for 30 months.

Commenting on today’s economic news and the outlook for jobs, Roger Tweedy, the REC’s Director of Research said: “The UK jobs market has shown positive signs of recovery for several months and today’s news will further boost employer confidence. It is also likely that this will lead to  some fluidity returning to the labour market as more workers currently  in employment feel confident enough to look at new opportunities.”

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Should Legal Course Providers downsize their operations?

February 1st, 2010

There has been an announcement today that the government withdrawal of funding for higher education is going to result in a lot of university places being withdrawn in the coming 12 months. This may or may not affect legal departments.

 
Some commentators will view this as a good thing,including ourselves. We see so many students who are going to spend approximately £20-25,000 getting through the LLB and LPC to find that there is no suitable work, that it must be time to restrict the numbers coming through the academic stage in order to improve the chances of those who do get through.
 
Often the arguments in relation to law students not finding work tend to miss one rather important element – is the student actually suited to a career as a lawyer, and what steps have they taken to discover this? Very often, the answer is no and none, and it is this type of student I suspect any reduction in funding will affect, not those who are genuinely going to make good lawyers (and law students).
 
Perhaps the funding reduction will have a positive affect on the legal profession?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8487354.stm

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Professionalising Recruitment – does it matter?

February 1st, 2010

You may be surprised to read this, but firstly recruitment agencies have a professional body who regulate their conduct, and secondly it is possible to qualify as a recruitment consultant, up to graduate level. The professional body is the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, http://www.rec.uk.com/ and members sign up to a professional code of ethics.
 
At the end of the day, does it matter if agencies are a) regulated and b) professional? After all, very often employers are looking for people to fill vacancies and will go with the source able to provide them.
 
As a Member of the Institute of Recruitment Professionals, I can say that in order to pass the Certificate of Recruitment Practice, I had to study for about 5-6 hours, do an exam, and undertake CPD every year which consists of attending training courses or reading articles, in the same way solicitors do. As someone who has completed the LPC, the LLB and an LLM, as well as other qualifications including the IFA FPC 1 and 2, the Recruitment Professional qualification is by far one of the easiest I have experienced.
 
It did however make me stop and think of the service we provide to clients. Very often, existing and older clients will call from the middle of a partners meeting and ask me to give salary ranges for a particular type of candidate, to give market research advice into the current state of the market, or to discuss strategies for longer term recruitment. If someone has a professional qualification linked to that advice, it can only be a good thing in terms of providing quality information, advice and service to clients.

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67% of the Public think Will Writers are Solicitors

February 1st, 2010

The Fellowship of Professional Willwriters and Probate Practitioners have released a survey showing that consumers are completely confused by will writers, with 67% of them thinking that to write a will you need to be a qualified solicitor.
 
The main feature of this is that as lawyers the profession has remained pretty hopeless at marketing, thanks to the various restrictions that remained in place until recent times, and this has resulted in firms not being able to market their unique feature in the wills market place, which is namely that you can almost guarantee the price for writing a will will be a perfectly reasonable one, rather than some of the ridiculous figures some will writing companies come up with.

A few years ago, an elderly relative called one of the will companies from a local newspaper advert and had two wills drawn up (for assets of about £75,000), with no requirements at all in relation to beneficiaries etc.. and for this the will writer spent an hour at the house selling a number of different insurance products, as well as add-on services. The total cost was about £400 for the wills and about £250 a year for storage charges. The elderly relative was convinced he had got the will prepared by a solicitor, as the salesman had given him so many membership details he had sounded professional. The will looked appalling – it was almost as if the salesman had been into WHSmiths and photocopied a “Write your own Will” pack.
 
It is this point that perhaps solicitors and other lawyers have a genuine advantage over non-qualified will writers – the marketing point has to be precisely this – price, which will be less due to regulatory restrictions, professionalism and quality.
 
I appreciate that there is a market out there if you intend to overcharge for services not required, but surely this must apply as well to people in genuine need of a will being written professionally and at a reasonable price.

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Legal Job Market Report – 1st February 2010

February 1st, 2010

The Legal Job Market looked as if it was going to take off quite dramatically as December drew to a close. All the signs were there – firms wanting to interview over Christmas, indications of the recruitment freezes being lifted by some of the larger firms, lack of redundancies and a stop to the large numbers of CVs flooding the market through redundancy, and requests by law firms with posts. January has been a little bit slow as a result of the adverse weather conditions we have experienced, although vacancies have still picked up. We had people about to attend interviews two hundred miles away only to discover that not only was the firm they were going to see closed, but the partners they were due to meet being snowed in at their homes. One company had a whole days worth of interview cancelled with people travelling from all over the country to a central location in Derby. This makes it very difficult on the recruitment side as the work that a consultant puts in to set up one days worth of interviewing can take another week to get back on track, once partners have been tracked down, candidates have made travel arrangements etc.. It is all very time consuming and quite frustrating when adverse weather affects interviews. We are still seeing some rogue firms and candidates coming through, which has been a fairly common theme throughout the recession. We have had firms offering ridiculously low amounts of money to well qualified candidates and being surprised when they get turned down, candidates who get offered extremely good deals only to turn them down for spurious reasons and candidates who simply fail to turn up to interviews at all. All of these things have been very rare in legal recruitment during the time we have been involved in it, and thankfully are decreasing as the markets pick up. The other phenomenon is the non-existent law firm or job offer which usually involves a firm claiming to be starting up and with the money to provide a salary plus bonus scheme, only to get to the interview and find that the firm were wanting to see if the person coming to see them had their own following that a) they could potentially “use” and b) they could base their department on in order to pay the candidate to do the work rather than generating any new work. We have seen an increase in the number of non-contentious positions with Wills and Probate and conveyancing slowly starting to get back onto the market. In fact we have noticed in some areas that there is already a shortage of conveyancers with a particular level of experience and I expect this to start to become increasingly prevalent as the recruitment season progresses. The usual litigation positions are there as always although family appears to have died off again, after a surge last year. Perhaps this is a sign of the increased optimism in the economy, as I write this I hear that the country is now officially out of a recession which of course has an effect on people’s financial and personal decisions. The outlook for February is good and we hope that the snow stays off and firms start to look to recruit again. The back of the Law Society Gazette is always a good indication of the market and in recent weeks we have started to see a number of law firms and companies looking to expand departments and increase their teams and we hope that this continues for the foreseeable future.

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Typing – Outsourcing – Digital Recorder Guide

January 11th, 2010

Outsourcing some or all of your typing work in recent times has got quite popular. It is now possible via software to set up an online typing management system, with recordings being directly uploaded from your offices to home-based typists, and returned extremely quickly as required.

 

There are a whole host of companies out there selling a range of products, but one of the cheapest solutions remains the Olympus digital recorders, which come with the market-leading DSS Player software, and are compatible with the Express Dictate packages from NCH, an Australian company.

 

The recorders we recommend are as follows:

 

1. Olympus DS 2400

This is a very powerful machine that comes with the Olympus DSS Player. It enables you to do as much recording as you want as it comes with a memory card for recording onto rather than directly onto a hard drive. The cost is about £169 on Amazon at present:

Olympus DS-2400 Professional Digital Voice Recorder

 

2. Olympus DS 40

The cheaper option at £82 on Amazon, this still comes with the Olympus DSS Player, which makes it an option if you do not dictate more than about an hour at any one dictation session. It is compatible with the Express Dictate suite of software, and is a very inexpensive option for firms wanting to outsource and not spend considerable sums in doing so.

Olympus DS-40 Digital Voice Recorder with MP3/WMA Playback 512MB

 

These two machines are often superceded by other models, but Olympus make such good systems for dictation and transcription they are thoroughly recommended.

 

The Express Dictate system for sending your recordings to transcribers externally can be obtained through NCH systems in Australia for £48.48 per user (no ongoing costs), with a free trial as well. We have been using the software for over 6 years and it is thoroughly recommended.

 

 

 

http://www.uk-transcription.co.uk/ is a transcription company with over 10 years experience working on small to large contracts and one-off pieces of work for solicitors firms, universities, government bodies and research establishments, to name but a few. Unlike others in the market, the typing is undertaken by UK-based native English speaking secretaries working from home offices.

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Legal Job Market Summary January 11th 2010

January 11th, 2010

 

Legal Job Market Summary – 11th January 2010 As one would expect, December slowed down considerably in the run up to Christmas. However, again we have seen vacancies coming into us, including conveyancing, wills & probate, family, commercial litigation, crime and housing. These are not the usual emails from large firms with a multitude of parties being sent the same jobs, but actual vacancies from small and medium sized practices.

 

The geographical mix of vacancies shows that the regions are at present starting to pick up before London and the Home Counties. The majority of the posts have been spread across the UK, but because of the overspill of London into neighbouring areas the Home Counties are taking longer to get back up to speed.

 

Over Christmas, as candidates make New Year resolutions to move, we are seeing increasing numbers of grade A candidates registering with us, including for example a senior commercial property solicitor with a following and looking for a salary of about £120k. Employees are getting more comfortable with the idea of making moves, which has changed from previous months when on the whole most people very sensibly were making the decision to remain exactly where they were.

 

Family panel members and crime solicitors are still going strong in most areas, with firms looking to increase their departments following the delay of the LSC BVT arrangements.

 

Commercial and Civil Litigation are both gaining ground as clients start to realise that there are a number of outstanding debts available to go after and now have the funds to pursue these.

 

Commercial law firms still seem to be very cautious, with a considerably fewer number of positions coming on stream so far this year, although reports of large numbers of vacancies coming up for April 2010.

 

About Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment

Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment has a range of senior solicitors and executives looking for work as well as at a more junior level. We can introduce you to housing supervisors, crime duty solicitors, family law panel members, children panel members, immigration level 2 supervisors, mental health review tribunal panel members, personal injury panel members registered for work across the UK.

 

We have a database of candidates that you can view online, and assist with permanent and temporary recruitment. A good proportion of lawyers registered with us are passive jobseekers (ie they like to hear of new opportunities arising as opposed to actively looking for work). The company has about 7,000 solicitors registered at all levels, together with a large number of legal executives and paralegals/fee earners. We are called Ten-Percent because each year since 2000 we have donated 10% of our annual profits to a charitable trust called the Ten-Percent Foundation.

 

If you would like to use our services, please get in touch. You can view our Candidate Database online and register your vacancies either by emailing cv@ten-percent.co.uk or visiting

 

www.ten-percent.co.uk/er.html 

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How to get work done in the office for very low cost

December 1st, 2009
There are a number of different options here, but this month I am going to recommend a website we have used ourselves (and have no financial link to I hasten to add) called http://www.ifreelance.com/
 
Ifreelance.com is a website aimed at small to medium sized businesses who may have a particular project they need completing, and who may also want to consider low cost options or good quality work levels.
 
Sign up to the site for free, and post details of any particular projects free of charge as well. You will get a range of bids for the work from around the world. We have used consultants based in India, the USA, Australia and the UK so far.
 
We have sent at least 6 projects through the site, some of which would have cost £1000s through a conventional company. These have included data capture, website design, database manipulation, marketing and research. You can also use the site to identify outsourcing partners.
An example would be our need for an Excel spreadsheet process – how to get data out of our bespoke recruitment software and into a manipulative state so that we can post our candidates and vacancies online at low cost.
 
I spoke to our recruitment software company, who wanted £4,500 plus an ongoing maintenance contract of about £1,500 per year. I spoke to our online database supply company, who wanted about £1,200 to set up a piece of software.
 
I posted the project onto ifreelance.com and within 2 days had the project completed for £250. They set me up a range of macros in Excel plus additional add ons, that automatically converted the data, and meant that we did not need any ongoing maintenance. The consultant who carried out the work was based in the USA, and worked as a freelance IT consultant.
 
http://www.ifreelance.com/

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