City firms look to in-house recruiters to track skilled staff

City firms look to in-house recruiters to track skilled staff

City law firms are increasingly looking to in-house recruiters to find staff in a market that continues to boom, according to a survey of recruitment consultants to be published shortly.The London Professional Recruitment Guides second edition published next week will report a severe shortage of corporate City lawyers between two and five years qualified, and that newly qualified corporate and banking lawyers are able to pick and choose jobs.The guide says that it is perhaps surprising that unprofessional [recruitment] practices still survive when firms want staff matched to the job.

It explains: HR professionals bemoan the so-called scattergun approach to CV distribution adopted by some consultancies, where consultants simply bombard HR desks with unsolicited and irrelevant CVs.Some consultancies encourage this behaviour in their staff by insisting their consultants send out a number of CVs per day, and adopting the attitude that if you send out enough CVs eventually one will hit the spot, the guide continues.But law firms are fighting back, with Clifford Chance, Pinsent Curtis Biddle and DLA all hiring in-house recruiters.

Olswang and Wragge & Co have also recently advertised for recruiters, according to the guide.However, recruiters are being forced to react to other developments in the legal market too.

Globalisation and mergers have created a market for recruiters who can keep up with their international prey.The acquisition of QD Legal by TMP Worldwide for 45 million last July created tmp.qd Legal, the biggest player in the recruitment market.This has boosted the ranking in private practice recruitment of the merged firm in this years guide to number one; rising above the other first-division legal recruiters Garfield Robbins, Hays ZMB and Taylor Root, with whom QD Legal shared the accolade last year.For in-house recruitment the top four recruiters placed equally by the guide are Hays ZMB, Laurence Simons International, Taylor Root and tmp.qd Legal.Jeremy Fleming