News & Views

Season’s Greetings, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Joyous Wishes to you for all of the wonderful holidays and great moments this holiday season.

Well, it seems that overall, the economy is on a slow steady path in recovery.  In San Francisco, corporate hiring seems to be strong and solid, especially in the technology sector.  We did not meet our goal this year of expanding our diversity of clients into the corporate, technology and biomedical fields.  There is always next year!

Thankfully, we did experience a modest improvement in our legal support staff placements, particularly in the temporary arena. Direct-hire placements remained fairly consistent with last year. Many of our law firm clients have been reticent to add additional staff, and/or to pay agency fees for direct-hire placements except in certain circumstances.  We feel fortunate that we have expanded our “active client” base and were able to be of service in times of urgent need and quick turnaround.

We are very optimistic about the prospects for hiring for next year.  On the client side, 95% of our clients report being “busier than ever”. Bonuses are being paid and raises provided. On the candidate side, we have established relationships with very exceptional candidates across the board.  The first Quarter of 2012 should be a busy time for us.

2011 has been a good year for Fusilier Business Services.  We eagerly look forward to 2012 as a better year for us, our clients and our candidates.

Happy New Year to you!

We are very pleased to report that we have been successful in placing a new office manger in a full-time position in the San Francisco office of an international law firm.  As is so often the case, it was a situation of being in the right place at the right time, for the candidate, the client, and Fusilier Business Services.  Even more amazing is the fact that we were also successful in filling a full-time position for a legal word processor two weeks ago–in this same office.  Lucky lightning does indeed strike twice on rare occasions.

We also just filled a “RUSH” order for a temporary mid-level (1-2 years of experience) litigation paralegal to support a team preparing for trial; and a short term assignment for a records clerk to perform quality assurance indexing of legal files.

Our current legal staffing positions include:

-Help Desk Specialist, full-time

-Temporary Legal Word Processor in a large office.

-Executive/Corporate Legal Secretary to Support the Managing Partner of a San Francisco office, and a corporate/litigation secretary in the same office.

-Temporary junior accounting/administrative assistant to support an accounting department in a mid-sized firm.

The job market continues to be sluggish, for all categories of staffing.  While our staffing activity has improved over the past couple of years, it is not as robust as it should be. We maintain a significant client base with several dozen active, profitable law firms. The majority of these firms are “holding the line” on adding temporary staff or considering full-time hires (with or without fees).  The reports from our candidates and staff contacts do consistently indicate that their departments are busier than they have been in years, reaching the limits of productivity almost to the point of diminishing returns (read: errors, burnout, and low morale).  It is still our intention to remain active in our business and client outreach, anticipating the eventual need for temporary staff and direct-hire agency placements.

Oh, happy day! The first temporary employee that I placed in a law firm in June 2010 as a records clerk has just been hired full-time by the firm as an office services clerk! My first temp is now in a full-time job, and he’s thrilled. The client is also very pleased that things have worked out this way as well.
In this case, patience and perseverance paid off, for everyone.

Hiring in the legal job market is improving, slowly but surely. The rate of temporary hiring and direct-hires is not strong, but if we compare the overall activity to one year ago, things are definitely better. Several of our legal candidates report having 2 and 3 interviews in a week, which is much better than it used to be. Many of the “junior-level” paralegals and case clerks have been interviewing more actively, both in legal AND in non-legal companies. We’ve heard of a couple of upcoming trials which are now requiring additional temporary staff. The general attitude among our law firm clients is that business has steadily improved.

But, we do notice that the overall good news has not yet translated into full-time positions, and not many temp-to-hire positions. Many of our candidates need to be reminded that their inability to find a good new position may have very little to do with their own experience or interviewing skills. This job market is still very, very sluggish. And hearing of a new hire here, or a new temp there, does not constitute what we would call a “recovery”.

We encourage our candidates to stay strong, be patient, and put your best foot forward. And in that line of thought, take another look at your first representation: your resume. Just yesterday, a client HR representative rejected a couple of resumes from our qualified candidates, due to inconsistent formatting and grammatical tense-usage errors. We strongly recommend conducting online research for resume creation. Find a style that is professional, articulate, and yet conservative. On occasion, we have recommended that a candidate consider hiring a professional resume writer. In another discussion coming soon, we will make some resume suggestions based upon our professional experience in legal staffing, as well as some interviewing tips.