I bet I can guess what many of you are thinking.

Good recruitment is nothing more than placing a vacancy on a job board, collecting a few CVs, sending these CVs to the client, hope that at least one candidate gets an interview, pray that one of these will receive a job offer, and then sit back and enjoy as the client pays your fee.

Am I right?

Actually, you could not be more wrong.

Good recruitment is, first and foremost, about relationships.

Regardless of whether you are a Candidate or a Client, you should ask yourself how willing is the recruitment consultant to build a meaningful relationship with me? The truth is, you need a recruiter who can build a relationship with both.

If you are a Client, then it is vital that the consultant understands your firm's challenges, its practice areas, the needs of the recruiting partner and his/her team, its culture and the types of personalities involved.

A good recruitment consultancy will create with you, as the client, a meaningful job vacancy to secure the very best Candidate.

Good recruitment is not about placing any Candidate, it is placing the best Candidate.

Any Candidate can underperform, negatively disrupt a team, destroy a culture or leave after only a few months, leaving behind a firm in a worst position than before it started the recruitment process.

The best Candidate will add value, enhance their new team, enforce client service and benefit their new firm. They help deliver on strategic plans, provide opportunities for future growth and positively represent their firm. The best Candidate's ambitions will drive their new firm's success.

That is the major difference between a consultancy, like RSP, and an agency; a consultancy seeks to add value and promote success for its Clients. An agency is only really concerned about placing a Candidate.

RSP often deals with the ramifications of bad recruitment, where the Client has used an agency to indiscriminately provide unsuitable Candidates. The impact of bad recruitment can often be seen in two levels.

The first is financial; the Client has pay twice for a service that should have been provided properly the first time. However, the financial implications are always more profound. It can include a loss of income in addition to the cost of employment of a bad Candidate until such a point as the Candidate is somehow convinced to leave.

The second impact is reputational; in the most extreme cases a bad Candidate can devalue the reputation which Clients spend so long in establishing.

I maybe being somewhat unfair to agencies; it is ultimately the Clients who make the final decision re recruitment. Unfortunately, if the pool of talent to recruitment from is poor, then this will be reflected in their final decision.

Our instructions are invariably to recruit the candidate whom the Client should have hired first.

As a Candidate, I am sure many of you are asking why this should be of interest to you.

But think, if a consultancy is prepared to put this much effort into establishing a relationship with its Clients, then the chances are that will put the same effort into you. The reality is that both Candidates and Clients can learn a lot about a recruitment consultancy in how it interacts with either party.

RSP is passionate about understanding its Candidates.

How do we do this?

Time, obviously, is important; but so too is the use of time. For each Candidate, a consultancy should undertake personality and psychometric profiling. These just aren't fancy terms to make us look like we're providing a service.

They are a valuable tool in ascertaining to which Client a Candidate is best suited. The Client tells us their preferred qualities in a Candidate, we implement that. But we are careful to only present Candidates to whom we know are suited to a specific Client.

However good tests are, there is only so much that they can tells us. A recruitment consultancy will spend time with each Candidate, in order to ascertain reasons for a change, future aspirations, career goals, career highlights and future career paths.

Your recruitment consultant should coach and mentor you through the hiring process; from helping you to make winning changes to your CV, to phoning you immediately after your interviews, to representing you to the Client.

In short, a consultant should care about your success. Afterall, your success is the consultant's success.

It is vital for Candidates to feel confident in the firm they are joining; what is the firm's long-term strategies? What is its business case to maintain lead generation? Does it have any plans to expand or is it happy to remain still? Are its plans commercially robust? Where does the Candidate fit into them?

Many of these questions are answered in the initial discussion between consultant and Client, but that is somewhat missing the point: a consultant asks these questions, it will not even occur to an agent to do so.

RSP goes beyond recruitment.

That isn't meant to sound like some cutting edge, post Blairite sound bite (otherwise I would have said Strong on Recruitment, Strong on the Aspiration of Recruitment...). No, what we mean by this is that we look at what recruitment can deliver and apply the principles of business which all three of the founding directors have learnt from their decades of experience.

Succession planning is an absolutely vital aspect of a firm's development, and yet is it really top of any firm's agenda until the managing partner or head of department decides to retire.

Good recruitment helps firms of any size identify tomorrow's leaders, the rising star for whom a new team can be built around guaranteeing success in the years ahead.

This year has seen an increase in the number of firm mergers and acquisitions. A competent recruitment consultant complements this work; identifying weaker areas of a firm which need improving and providing the process for those employees who will not be part of the new firm to find new roles.

Corporate restructuring, alternative fee arrangements and alternative business models; these are just some of the additional services which any reputable consultancy can provide.

We all know how the Covid pandemic affected our working habits, providing the opportunity to glimpse at alternative working practices and how these impacted upon our work/life balance. Since then, the purpose behind the consultant solicitor model has focussed many of our minds.

None of you need worry; I appreciate that my last two blogs discussed consultant solicitors in detail and I shall not repeat what I said. I would, however, urge any of you who have not read them to do so. It may be even be beneficial for those of you who have, to read them again (I suppose I would say that, I did write them after all...).

Now comes my first real warning about consultant solicitors; be wary of any recruiter who will only bestow the virtues of the model. As I said to you all in the last fortnight, and as we say to our Candidates; the consultant solicitor is not for everyone.

The good consultant will be able to recognise those Candidates for whom it is suited, and advise them towards the firms more suited to their personality and talents. It is worth remembering that like all firms, even those which have adapted the consultant solicitor model have their own cultures.

Unfortunately, and when it comes to explaining the virtues of the model, agents can start to adapt the hard sell technique more akin to a second-hand car dealer, only pushing the Candidate to the role sometime regardless of the Candidate's attributes. My apologies to second-hand car dealers, I am sure that not all of you are like Swiss Tony...

This is not to say that we should all become insipid, especially as our Clients want us to sell their vacancy.

But remember, no unfair or undue pressure should ever be applied to any Candidate, especially when considering the consultant solicitor model.

It is in the interest of neither party to recruit a Candidate (and for the Candidate to be recruited) into a position unsuitable to which they are unsuited. Needless to say, this will lead to bad recruitment and many of the problems we have already discussed.

A key part of RSP's service is the work we undertake when working with firms who are considering adopting the consultant solicitor model. Apprehension, an understandable reluctance to change a perceived successful working practice, some misinformation; these are the usual hurdles we face when discussing it with Clients for the first time.

How do we achieve this?

By providing analysis and putting forward a robust business case explaining how even the recruitment of even a couple of consultant solicitors can beneficially impact a firm.

Ultimately, good recruitment is about aspirations, and this is something which only a good consultant will understand. Unfortunately, an agent just will not be interested in this.

All of those discussions we have been having in the last month are about our aspirations; what we want and how we are going to get there. Working out our aspirations is not easy and can be challenging.

But, as I am sure we have all been told at some point in our lives; those things which are worth it are usually challenging.

It is not so much a question of where you want to be or what you want to achieve (although these are important and something which we always ascertain), but it is more about how you are going to achieve this. The process you are going to follow to see it through.

For a Candidate, we look at those who embody ambition, tenacity, commitment and genuine enthusiasm to work through the process. For a Client, trust is important; trust in the process, trust in the belief that you are going to be receiving the best suited Candidate for your long-term success.

I appreciate that I have been somewhat unfair to agents in this blog, and I am sorry for that. I try to be positive on most things, and there are some very good agents out there who genuinely do care about their clients and candidates.

Perhaps the best way of looking at this is the focus between consultants and agents. An agent will look at immediate success; you have been placed/you have a placement. Congratulations.

A consultant will look at the long-term implications; how will this benefit all parties in the next two, five even ten years plus from now.

For long-term success, a consultant cannot be bettered.