Exclusive Head of Legal Services recruitment campaign with Wakefield Council

Wakefield Council is a Metropolitan District Council based in Yorkshire serving around 325,000 people. Sellick Partnership has supplied temporary recruitment solutions to Wakefield Council for over five years and have developed a clear understanding of the council’s priorities, team structures and culture. 

At the beginning of 2025, Wakefield Council appointed Sellick Partnership exclusively to support their senior legal recruitment campaign. The Head of Legal Services is a key member of the strategic leadership and management team across the Council, with a focus on Legal and Emergency Planning services ensuring collaboration with district partners, line management of service managers, and acts as Deputy Monitoring Officer. 

Managing the campaign

The Recruitment Partner for this campaign was Chloë Cameron, Principal Consultant and Team Leader, who led the delivery of the recruitment support. With six years’ experience specialising in legal recruitment to the public sector, Chloë brings a consultative approach and a strong understanding of placing high-quality legal professionals across locum, fixed-term and permanent roles.

Chloë was supported by Sara Robinson, who has eight years’ experience specialising in public sector legal recruitment, focusing on locum and fixed-term roles across the East of England.

About the vacancy

To launch the campaign, the team met with the Chief Legal Officer to gather comprehensive vacancy details, provide market insights, define the person specification, and agree the appropriate recruitment steps and timescales. The successful candidate needed to have a background within Local Government, and previous Governance experience was essential, with a focus on someone already working in a similar role or looking for promotion from Team Leader or Principal. The role would also require a minimum of two days in the office, so suitable candidates needed to be within commuting distance. 

Sourcing strategy

As a leading provider of legal recruitment solutions across Yorkshire and the surrounding regions, the team were able to implement a wide-reaching attraction strategy which engaged both active and passive candidates through:

• Creation of a candidate attraction pack to promote the benefits of working with Wakefield Council, living within Wakefield and Yorkshire, and the full job details to underpin attraction strategies.
• Advertisements across a range of broad and niche boards including Public Law Today, Law Gazette, Totally Legal and LinkedIn Recruiter. 
• LinkedIn Recruiter searches, carefully crafted In-Mails, and clearly defined social strategy to raise awareness and drive applications. 
• Creation of a video blog with the Chief Legal Officer at Wakefield Council promoting the benefits of the role, promoted across LinkedIn as part of our wide-reaching social strategies to engage passive talent – this was particularly highlighted by candidates as a reason for their interest.
• Active market mapping of neighbouring authorities and their senior management teams, followed by active headhunting conducted by Chloë and Sara to engage passive talent with the vacancy. 

Outcomes         

The attraction and advertisement campaign ran for an agreed period of four weeks, and over the course of this period, Chloë and Sara spoke to around 35 candidates and prospective contacts about the vacancy who met the person specification criteria. 

Following telephone and video interviewing to align candidates with the skills, experience and behaviours required for the role, ten candidates were shortlisted and submitted to the hiring manager. India met with the Chief Legal Officer to discuss the shortlist in detail and highlight the strongest candidates for progression to interview at Wakefield. Four candidates progressed to final interview before a successful offer and acceptance. All four candidates interviewed were sourced from our existing client and contact networks and were proactively approached about the vacancy by our specialist team.

Testimonial 

“We engaged Sellick Partnership to support us with the appointment of a Head of Legal Services. Chloë and Sara worked with us on this assignment including helping us to create a candidate pack that gave the best impression of us as a service and the role profile. They were able to source, within a potentially challenging marketplace, a range of high quality and strongly motivated candidates, over a short timescale. This led to a successful appointment. They provided effective support to the candidates at all stages of the recruitment exercise. I’m therefore very happy to recommend the team and Sellick.”

Gillian Marshall, Chief Legal Officer, Wakefield Council