Lawyers are ‘moving more often’ – and not always for a higher pay cheque

In the session, “Tackling the challenges of recruitment and retention in law firms”, Elias said that post-pandemic, the world has changed, with lawyers and firms working increasingly flexibly.

The candidates that are the hardest to find in the post-pandemic world, according to Elias, are mid-level lawyers – practitioners with three to six years of experience, a “unicorn” for legal recruiters.

“How do we find good lawyers? So, the obvious way is through advertising. There are various job boards out there. There’s SEEK. There’s Indeed. There’s LinkedIn. There’s a whole range of them. But the results for ad responses for the last couple of years have been very poor, and we’re finding a lot of people are quite disenchanted by the fact that they pay for ads on job boards that might cost them upwards of $3-400 and either get poor response, get unqualified response or get even no response,” he said.

“So, we’ve found that in our sourcing of candidates, we’re relying less and less on advertising, and more and more on headhunting and tapping people on shoulders and getting referrals. So, a lot of our placements are from word of mouth. [We’ll] ring up people and go, ‘Hey, I’ve got this job. Are you interested?’ They say, no, I just started a new job. But here are two people to call, and we keep working those concentric circles. So, we might end up speaking to 30 or 40 people, of which three and four may be suitable.”

Candidates who are looking to move, Elias added, may also switch jobs for benefits other than salary, such as better work/life balance, better leadership and increased growth opportunities, as well as flexibility.

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“It’s really key that if you’re trying to attract good quality stuff that you have that flexibility. Have a serious discussion internally about whether these are things that you can offer. And a lot of these things aren’t that expensive, so they’re quite worthwhile throwing in – things like performance bonuses, work from home and flexibility. We’ve discussed additional annual leave.

“There are a lot of candidates that say to me, we get four weeks paid leave. But I’m primary caregiver for three kids, and when they’ve got school holidays, it’s mayhem, or I have to put them in daycare, and I’m actually losing money by going to work. Why can’t I buy some extra leave? So, for example, maybe I’ve got eight weeks annual leave, four weeks paid and four weeks unpaid,” Elias said.

“And the thing is, let’s be honest, in a lot of firms, we’re still billing by six-minute increments. So, you’ve got accountability. You can see what people are doing on their time sheets. There’s nowhere to hide, and I think that, initially, there was a bit of scepticism that people were on Netflix. But I think we’ve outgrown that. And quite frankly, if you don’t trust your staff enough to work from home, there are bigger issues at play.”

In terms of lawyers who actually come into the office, there’s also a “generational gap”, with Elias finding that early-career lawyers are more likely to go into the office than mid-level or senior lawyers, due to increased training opportunities and being able to socialise after work.

“What I’m also hearing anecdotally is that because people have not been in the office, amongst their peers for five days a week for the last few years, that what you would expect the level of a five-year lawyer now is behind what you might have expected five years ago, because that person would have been in the office every day learning.

“Whereas a lot of time, these people [now] are working remotely, and they’re not getting the benefit of that water cooler talk, and being able to stick your head and ask quick questions,” he said.

Despite firms implementing a number of retention strategies, such as flexibility and increased training, Elias noted that firms can’t “reinvent” what they are.

“There’ll always be natural attrition that people will want to try something different – try a bigger or smaller firm. So, all you can do is not reduce the risk, but minimise the risk. If you look after your people, they’re less likely to move. But there will always be natural churn.

“When I was a baby recruiter 25 years ago, we’d look at CVs. And if people had left jobs or they hadn’t stayed in a job for more than three to five years, we’d consider them a bit jumpy. Now, you don’t see too many people staying in a job for three to five years. People are moving more often,” he added.

“So, trends change, and you will expect people to move. And sometimes, it’s not bad. If some of those people do move, you just want to hold on to your rock stars. That’s where I prioritise. We spend a disproportionate amount of time on the lemons and the people we don’t need to keep, and not enough time on the rock stars that we do need to keep.”

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