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It Works Both Ways: When Clients Think Candidates Are the Commodity (and Candidates Think Employers Are)
In recruitment, both sides can feel like they’re the one with the power, right up until they don’t. The recruiter’s value is making sure neither side overplays their hand.
It sounds simple. It rarely is.
I’ve been doing this long enough to watch the same dynamic play out repeatedly, across legal sector hiring, accountancy recruitment, and just about every salary bracket in between. Both parties come to the table with a version of events that centres themselves. And both are, in part, right. Which is exactly what makes it tricky.
The Two-Sided Scarcity Mindset
The client side
A lot of firms, from boutique law practices to mid-sized accountancy offices, carry a quiet assumption that candidates need them more than they need candidates. That the firm’s name, reputation, or career development offer is the headline. That good people will wait, accept less, or overlook a clunky hiring process because landing the role is worth it.
In a buoyant talent market, that might hold. Right now, in UK law firm recruitment and across accountancy practices, it largely does not.
Experienced solicitors with two or more years in litigation, family, or private client work are in genuine demand. Senior tax and audit professionals who can walk straight into a portfolio and get on with it are not sitting around waiting to be impressed. When a firm drags its heels on interviews, goes quiet for two weeks, or comes back with a salary offer fifteen percent under what was discussed at the start of the process – candidates don’t wait. They move.
I see it regularly. A firm insists on three rounds of interviews for a role they’ve had vacant for four months. The candidate they want gets two offers in the time it takes to arrange the second call. The firm is surprised. They shouldn’t be.
The candidate side
The flip side is just as real, and I’ll be just as direct about it.
Some candidates enter the legal recruitment process, particularly those with a solid firm name on their CV, carrying the assumption that employers are lucky to have them in the room. That offer timelines are flexible, that salary demands can move significantly upwards after an offer has been made, or that it’s fine to keep three or four processes running indefinitely with no real intention of committing.
The accountancy recruitment market is slightly different in tone, but the dynamic is there too. Candidates who have been placed once or twice feel the leverage and occasionally push it past what the situation can support.
Neither mindset is entirely wrong. The problem is that acting on it, without calibration, blows things up.
How Expectation Management Prevents Blow-Ups
This is where I earn my fee, not by flooding a client’s inbox with CVs, but by holding both sides to a realistic picture of the market before anyone gets to a position they can’t walk back from.
At H-FTS, I only submit a small number of highly relevant CVs, with written consent from each candidate before submission. That means by the time a firm is reviewing a candidate’s profile, I’ve already done the expectation work on both sides:
- The candidate knows what the role pays, what the culture looks like, what the hiring timeline is, and what the firm’s likely stance on flexibility is.
- The client knows what the candidate is earning, what they’re looking for, and roughly what it’ll take to get them over the line.
That sounds obvious. It’s surprising how rarely it happens in practice.
Salary transparency matters here more than most recruiters will admit. I won’t send a candidate to a firm if there’s a fifteen-thousand pound gap between what the client is offering and what the candidate needs — not without flagging it clearly first. Pretending that gap will sort itself out in the offer stage is how you end up with a disappointed client and a resentful candidate, and a placement that falls over at the worst possible moment.
The other piece is timeline management. I tell clients honestly: in the current legal and accountancy market, if you want someone good, you have roughly two weeks from the point they’re actively looking before someone else has them. Some firms hear that and move accordingly. Others don’t. I can only advise but I make sure the advice is clear.
Real Examples (Names Changed)
The firm that waited too long
A Legal 500 firm in London came to us looking for a senior civil litigator. Strong role, reasonable salary, good team. We put forward two candidates both qualified, both interested, both with the right background.
The firm wanted to take their time. A first-stage interview was arranged, then postponed. Two weeks passed before they rescheduled. By the time they got to second-stage interviews, one candidate had accepted an offer elsewhere. The second candidate was still available but had been left uncertain long enough that they’d mentally half-moved on.
The firm got their hire in the end, but it cost them goodwill and nearly cost them the placement. The lesson wasn’t that they were a bad employer. It was that good candidates in the legal sector aren’t a queue that waits to be served. They’re people with options, and those options don’t pause because your diary is full.
The candidate who pushed too hard
A paralegal with five years’ experience in a specialist property law team, strong background, well-presented, genuinely good. I had a client firm who was interested quickly. Offer was made at the top of the salary range we’d discussed.
Then came the counter. The candidate came back asking for a figure twenty percent higher than they’d told me they needed at the start of the process. No new information had emerged no competing offer, no change in circumstances. They’d simply decided, at the last moment, to see what would happen.
The client withdrew. Not because the number was impossible, but because the process had felt unstable. They didn’t trust that the candidate was genuinely committed, and in legal recruitment, where firms are hiring people they’ll rely on for sensitive, client-facing work, trust matters.
I had a difficult conversation with that candidate. Not a lecture. Just an honest debrief about how the move had looked from the client’s perspective, and how to handle it differently next time. They found another role three months later. They did it properly.
The Takeaway
The recruiter’s job isn’t to side with the client or the candidate. It’s to make sure both of them have a clear, honest picture of the situation before they make decisions that are hard to undo.
That means telling a firm that their timeline is going to cost them. It means telling a candidate that their salary ask is at the edge of what the market will support. It means being willing to have uncomfortable conversations so that neither party arrives at the offer stage with expectations the other side can’t meet.
Ethical recruitment isn’t just about having the right values statement on your website. It’s about doing the unglamorous work: the honest conversations, the managed timelines, the genuine calibration on both sides.
If you’re a decision-maker at a UK law firm or accountancy practice and you want a recruitment partner who’ll be straight with you – not just send CVs and hope for the best drop me a DM or get in touch via h-fts.com . I won’t waste your time, and I’ll make sure your time isn’t wasted.
David Hawthorne-Finch is the Managing Director of Hawthorne-Finch Talent Solutions Ltd, a CIPD-qualified ethical recruitment consultancy specialising in legal and accountancy talent across the UK.