Outstanding legal support staff members are crucial to your organization. The costs of finding and keeping the best people, however, can be prohibitive – and you may not realize how steep some of the “hidden” costs are.
In Part 1 of our series on legal support recruiting costs we uncover the true costs of recruiting and retention and recommend strategies for keeping these costs under control.
The True Costs of Hiring
Time
“Time is money,” the old saying goes. When it comes to hiring, time can cost you a great deal of money.
For example, for every day your organization spends with an unstaffed legal support position:
- Profitable work the missing legal support staff member could perform goes undone.
- Other staff members have to “pitch in” to cover crucial tasks, neglecting items on their own to-do lists.
- Time spent reading resumes, contacting references, planning and conducting interviews and evaluating results is time spent away from more productive and profitable work.
- The “learning curve” for a new staff member represents productivity lost until the new staff member is up to speed.
A staffing partner can be invaluable in helping you recoup lost time by handling many hiring tasks and streamlining the process, so you can focus on other things.
Retention
Finding the right person is half the battle. Keeping the right people is the other half. A poor “fit” leads to a higher likelihood of:
- In-team conflicts that distract staff and reduce productivity
- Increased lateness and absenteeism
- Lower quality of work and lower volume of quality work produced
- Increased turnover – imposing all the costs of hiring on the organization once again
By contrast, when you hire to build a cohesive team, you amplify the skills of each member of the team by generating a workplace culture that supports every team member’s best efforts.
Improving retention is a multistep process. Your recruiter can walk you through ways to find and keep better legal support staff members.
At Kent Legal, our goal is to connect you to some of the top legal support candidates in Toronto – and to help you reduce the costs of recruiting and retaining better people. Contact us today to learn more about our legal recruitment services in Toronto and beyond.