Articles From the Team

BCL Legal is hiring and here’s why we’re different…

I’m an Associate Director at BCL Legal, based out of our Manchester head office, and I manage the private practice team that covers Yorkshire, North East, Scotland and Ireland. I’ve been with the company for just over 6 years now. I’ve known James Batt, our CEO, ever since his first job in recruitment (but that’s another story!)

I’ve been in recruitment a long time and seen a lot of the ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ of how to run a successful recruitment company, and how to keep your consultants engaged and enjoying their recruitment career as it develops. I’ve even run my own recruitment company but I missed the camaraderie of working as part of a team.

I think BCL is different and here’s why.

We like to give our consultants a huge amount of autonomy. Sure, we use metrics to measure outputs, like a lot of companies in our industry, but they’re not there as a stick to beat you with, they’re there to help you understand your desk and how it is behaving with the input that you’re making. And you’re completely in charge of your metrics – demonstrate that they’re not reflective of the activity that you need to deliver to reach your objectives and you can change them. You have the autonomy to find the best way forward, with as much or as little support that you need.

We also operate a very ‘bottom up’ rather than ‘top down’ management style. At BCL Legal, you’re essentially running your own business within a business. This can take a bit of getting used to for junior consultants who join us from roles where they have less say in how they run their day, but there is a huge amount of support and one-to-one mentoring that goes into training our consultants, far more than I’ve seen in any other recruitment business, so that you come out the end of it feeling really confident in your ability to drive your business forward.

Once you reach a specific, and very achievable, threshold fee income in any rolling 12 month period, you will be promoted to Senior Associate level. With one-to-one mentoring, some of our consultants achieve this in their first year and many others in their second.  Two of the consultants in my team have recently been promoted from a standing start after coming back from furlough last October, and with very little experience with the company before the start of the pandemic. And both of them achieved that in brand new patches for BCL Legal, locations that we hadn’t worked in before, Scotland and Ireland respectively. I’m incredibly proud of how far they’ve come in such a short time.

And here’s where your career can really take off.

The ‘desks’ we give to consultants when they join are carefully chosen for their potential for growth, so that we can ensure that there is a rewarding career path for the consultant to follow. Once you reach Senior Associate, you are again given all the support and training that you need to further develop your business within a business, build your patch further, and recruit, train and develop  junior consultants of your own, so that you can continue your career path towards Associate Director and beyond.

So if you are bright, entrepreneurial in spirit and a good communicator, and finding your current career less than fulfilling, have a think about whether a career in recruitment might give you the things that you are missing. And if that doesn’t sway you, we also have some great parties, where we celebrate our successes, as that’s really important to us too!

To find out more, please get in touch with our Talent Manager, Joanna Leaver at joannaleaver@bcllegal.com, or give her a call on 07469153279. She’d love to hear from you.