A firm once asked me to fill a genuinely difficult role, and then made it close to impossible.

The brief itself was a good one. A small firm, a main partner heading towards retirement, and a need for a senior lawyer with a narrow construction specialism who could take the practice on and step up to partner. The business case was already written. This was a real role with a real future attached to it.

I told them to give it to one recruiter, retained.

That sounds self-serving, so here is the reasoning.

Most legal recruitment is contingent. The recruiter is paid only if they fill the role. No placement, no fee, however much work went in.

Contingent works perfectly well when there are plenty of suitable lawyers who are already looking. You advertise, you go through your database, you call the people you know, and you send over three or four names.

This role was not that. There were perhaps a dozen lawyers in the country with the right experience, and none of them had their CV out. Finding them meant mapping the market firm by firm, working out who did what, and approaching people who were not looking and had no particular reason to take the call. That is days of work before a single CV appears.

Now give that role to three agencies on a contingent basis.

Each recruiter knows they have, at best, a one in three chance of being paid. So the sensible commercial decision is to spend a couple of hours on it, advertise, hope something turns up, and put the real effort into roles they are more likely to fill.

Nobody funds three weeks of headhunting on a lottery ticket.

A retainer changes that calculation. The recruiter is paid in stages for the work, not just the outcome, so the market actually gets mapped. The firm gets one person accountable, and a search rather than a scattering of adverts.

The firm gave it to three recruiters.

Some months later, their HR contact told me that none of us had come up with anything, with a hint that this reflected poorly on the recruiters. I explained it again. My guess is that all three of us advertised the role, put in a few hours, quietly assumed somebody else would fill it, and stopped. I know that is what I did.

She had chosen the outcome she was complaining about.

There is a postscript. Not long after, the firm was bought by another firm. So a small part of me is pleased I never won that retainer, because the retiring partner was clearly preparing to sell the whole thing anyway.

If a role is easy, give it to whoever you like.

If it is hard, give it to one person and pay them to do the work. A hard role given to three recruiters is a hard role given to nobody.

If you’re hiring and want to make sure your process is built for speed as well as quality, get in touch with David von Dadelszen to discuss how Jameson Legal can help you secure the candidates you want, before they look elsewhere.