Articles From the Team

Does your recruiter’s brand affect your job search?

The cold hard truth of the modern world is that brand name and brand recognition make a huge difference to our perception of things. A product’s brand can create both positive and negative reactions in people, based on their own experiences and perceptions.

One of the benefits the candidates receive through working with legal recruiters is the positive influence that a recruiter’s brand name can have on your application. You may be completely unknown to a recruiting Partner/ in-house recruitment team. Your current employer may not operate in the same sphere of the firm you want to approach or may be known for expertise in other areas. The fact that an experienced or trusted recruitment company is promoting your application, putting their reputation on the line by suggesting that you are a suitable candidate to interview, can therefore be of great assistance.

Conversely you can be the greatest candidate on the planet but if the recruiter that you are working with is known to be one of the bad one’s this can only damage your chances of securing an interview. You are damned by association.

BCL Legal is the largest legal recruiter outside of London. Our team in the Midlands is more than twice the size of any other and we are the only firm to have preferred supplier relationships with every major law firm. Our programme of seminars (run with Partner law firms) is one of the major providers of CPD points to in-house solicitors. In addition to recruiting for the biggest law firms, we also recruit for massive names in business for example McDonalds, Rolls Royce, Boots, Mercedes Benz, Manchester United, Crown Estates and the Football League. Our on-line magazine “The Brief” has a readership of over 80,000 solicitors and routinely features comments, interviews and articles from some of the biggest names in the legal field. We have a separate website BCL Graduates which connects graduate level candidates with our clients free of charge.

When you partner with BCL Legal in your job search not only do you benefit from working with a niche’ consultant who specialises in recruiting solicitors into your chosen area of law, your application also benefits from BCL’s position in the market place and the reputation that we have as arguably the best regional legal recruitment business.

The difference between BCL and our major competitors was highlighted to me recently in a post on LinkedIn. The post was celebrating the appointment of a new team member (a former paralegal). Oddly it was suggesting that candidates should sign up with this agency to benefit from this new team member’s network of contacts. In Birmingham alone we have three solicitors, one legal executive, one paralegal and one legal secretary in our team of consultants. Upon joining BCL Legal not a single one of those individuals had a bigger network of contacts than BCL Legal itself. The reason to sign up with us isn’t to benefit from the limited network of one individual; it is to benefit from the exceptional brand name and massive network of the whole business.

I have numerous examples where candidates have sent their CVs to firms either directly or through other recruiters and not secured interviews. Yet when they re submit through BCL Legal, they do secure an interview. Remember just because an agency has a big brand name, they may even feel that that they are a household name; it doesn’t necessarily mean that name is universally respected within legal recruitment.

So before you choose a partner to help you along the rocky road of searching for a new job, consider who has the most specialist consultants, who works the hardest to ensure their brand name is regarded positively in the legal world, whose reputation can add something to your application?

For more information please contact BCL Legal or call us on 0845 241 0933.