Supporting Lewisham Council with 20 permanent roles in their legal team

Overview

Sellick Partnership has provided recruitment services on a temporary and permanent basis to Lewisham Council for over 15 years. In 2024, we were delighted to be exclusively appointed to a permanent recruitment campaign for over 20 vacancies. For some time, Lewisham Council had been heavily reliant on legal locums to support their busy legal department. After some internal discussion and attempting to advertise the vacancies directly without success, Lewisham Council reached out to us to support them. As experts in legal recruitment across the public sector, we brought a wealth of knowledge and understanding to this high-volume recruitment campaign.

A dedicated recruitment partner

Dedicated recruitment partner Rayhaneh Tehrani, Associate Director, has worked with Lewisham Council for over ten years, providing temporary and permanent recruitment solutions across their legal department. Rayhaneh joined Sellick Partnership in 2010 and has developed an extensive network within the public and not-for-profit sectors specialising within legal recruitment across London and Greater London.

Recruitment approach

To effectively manage this volume campaign, Rayhaneh and the team worked closely with key stakeholders to review all job descriptions, person specifications, team dynamics and culture to enable us to better promote the roles to candidates. We presented our plan for managing the recruitment campaign, agreeing a fast-paced approach to CV shortlisting whereby candidates who met the agreed criteria and a busy pipeline would be submitted immediately if appropriate, rather than holding shortlists back, to meet the Councils’ desire to move quickly. It was agreed to take a staggered approach to recruiting to these roles due to the high volume of positions available.

A comprehensive attraction strategy was delivered, targeting active and passive candidates, delivered by a dedicated team of 5 specialist legal Consultants, including: well written, inclusive job adverts posted across broad and specialist legal job boards, a comprehensive social media campaign planned by our in-house Marketing team, comprehensive searches across our established talent pools and extensive market mapping, LinkedIn Recruiter searches and direct headhunting to engage passive talent.

Outcome

The roles have been staggered, and to date we have successfully filled 10 of 20 vacancies. The remaining posts are at searching and interview stage. If you are interested in working at Lewisham Council, please reach out. Alternatively if you know anyone else who is looking, please do refer them over to us!