Can you work out how we can help?

There is a perception amongst most people that recruitment agencies are merely a storing place for CVs and provide access to a catalogue for a premium. Many believe that at a senior level we get on the phone and start headhunting, but that is about all we do.

For this reason, you can be forgiven for not seeing the value a specialist agency can provide you with but hopefully this article can shed some light on where else we might be able to help.

In reality, we are in constant daily contact with the community we look after, the Law Firm Risk & Compliance space. To understand the true value that we can add to your team the first thing to do is to really think about where a specialist recruiter sits in the market place. We effectively deal at the intersection of employers as they grow their teams, and employees as they grow their careers.

We are, therefore, in a unique position to get a very deep insight into what different businesses are trying to achieve with their Risk & Compliance functions and what candidates want to achieve from their career paths. These two drivers are, of course, intrinsically linked but, more often than not, there is a large disconnect between them.

In our day-to-day we get to hear what goes right, we get to hear what goes wrong, and all of this over a period of many years. We watch junior professionals become Heads of Risk & Compliance, we watch under-resourced Business Acceptance functions spiral downwards into chronic attrition as they struggle to hire their way out of the problem, and we watch as firms create opportunities that capture the interest of the very best talent on the market who weren’t looking to leave but this particular role is just too interesting to ignore.

We talk to candidates who have no interest in applying for a role due to a badly drafted job spec, we hear the frustrations of candidates who are interviewed in a way that doesn’t allow them to showcase their experience, and we hear from candidates when they have decided to interview for new roles in the first place.

We hear from candidates put off by a badly run process and candidates incredibly impressed by some well thought out questions.

We discuss long term career aspirations with all of our candidates and we see where these ambitions go beyond what their current employer is going to be able to offer them and we can often forecast with surprising clarity when a candidate will become active on the market.

We also encounter an Encarta-like volume of opinions. Opinions on US law firms, opinions on Conflicts, opinions on centralised BAU, opinions on decentralised business intake, opinions on Intapp, opinions on regulatory risk, opinions on job titles, on career progression.

In fact, if you have an opinion on anything Risk & Compliance related we probably have a vicariously obtained opinion on it also, gained from potentially in excess of 1000 similar conversations.

I could have just said something like “we have our fingers on the pulse of the market” but I really don’t think that would convey the position in which we sit!

So, with all the above in mind, I hope this gives some insight into where we might be able to help.

The truth is the clients we most enjoy working with are the ones that seek the most value, the ones that take advantage of the 1000s of conversations we have had to inform their recruitment and their hiring decisions. And the ones that value it the most, get the most value.

Written by Adam Spencer, Director of AJ Fox Compliance


To find out more about how we can help you give us a call on 0207 117 2542, email us on info@ajfoxcompliance.com, or message us on LinkedIn.

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