Advice for anyone asked to “just go to market” for experienced, team-based BD, client or marketing talent – and for the Partners asking for a quick solution.
It’s a common story, a firm reaches out to me asking “why is it so hard to hire a Senior BD Manager or Client Relationship Manager?” often four, eight or even twelve weeks into a quiet search. This is usually coupled with the query, “is it our employer brand?”. (It very rarely is.) Here’s what’s actually going on, and what to do about it.
Start with the maths
The brief usually arrives fully formed: “find me an experienced law firm BD Manager with corporate experience, ideally in my preferred location.” Sounds reasonable, and it’s sometimes possible, but the reason it can be tricky becomes clear when you look at the numbers.
Staying with this example, in Sydney, there are approximately 80 BD Managers working in legal at any one time. Perhaps 20 have any real depth of corporate practice experience. Compare that with a very conservative estimate of 500 Corporate Senior Associates (though likely over 1,000 if we look at the true breadth), and the difficulty is obvious.
Partners or Directors often have much deeper pools of technical talent to consider, so there’s often a sense the lawyer must be the harder hire.
It’s not just in legal – the same rationale transposes across all of professional services – you could draw parallels in accounting, engineering or consulting. Before the brief goes anywhere, count the people who actually fit. Often you may be surprised that you’re describing a pool of twenty people – some you’ll rule out, and some will rule you out.
You get one shot at a very small audience
These candidates are often passive, well looked after, and have no burning platform to move. At the mid-senior team member level, BD, client and growth professionals are rarely touched by redundancy and firms work hard to retain them. Yet it can be typical for a recruitment drive to start with a scattergun of LinkedIn messages, sometimes from strangers or from several sources at once, with overlapping, conflicting or simply repeated messaging. In a pool of twenty, a badly positioned first approach doesn’t just miss, it quietly closes doors.
So often firms approach the market expecting applications, ready to make a selection – when actually these roles require the opposite: enticing the right talent pool, and marketing the opportunity to them.
A sideways title is not always a sideways move, but candidates won’t see it unaided
Briefs rarely account for genuine market resistance to lateral moves. Many moves that look flat on title offer real career progression: new challenge, better platform, financial step forward. But candidates won’t see that without a considered, individualised approach showing how a role with the same title actually advances their goals.
The brief needs internal alignment before it needs a market
It’s advisable for all decision makers to be aligned on how the brief meets the market and to consider both the realism and the genuine benefit of broader talent pool parameters:
- a great person in a less preferable location,
- someone stepping up,
- someone who’s done the job for a different service line, client group or sector,
- transferable skills from another industry, or
- someone from a smaller, less sophisticated environment.
The default go-to-market is often to find someone doing the exact same job at another firm. It rarely works as it ignores the need for challenge in a next step. Ideally, c30% of the role should be stretch and growth for the person coming in, with mentorship in place to aid their success.
The six-month problem
These are some of the primary seasons these roles sit vacant for six months, creating a problem of its own: the renewed campaign returns to the same small pool, now opening with “I saw this six months ago. What’s wrong with the role, or the team?”
So what’s the answer?
The advice I give when that call comes – or much better, before the search starts:
- Interrogate the pool, and the offer. Why would someone join? For team-based roles, it’s not the name above the door, it’s often the leadership, BD team strategy, firm vision and people. Doing the pre-work with partners or directors to build a collective understanding of who could genuinely be enticed into the role and who would thrive long term makes all the difference. Consider not just the realities but the benefits of an expanded talent pool.
- Design for the future, not last year’s org chart. For firms comfortable jumping ahead: how will these roles be designed and operate differently, and what skills-mix will that take? For example, is there an opportunity to look at more sales and market-facing client experience, lead generation, tech fluency, varied sector backgrounds? Change can be fast or it can take time, but briefs that rework the role, mandate and talent profile of the future can be some of the most rewarding.
- If you find a good one, hire them. Don’t wait for comparables, you may only meet one candidate who is the right fit for your role and firm. Benchmark them against the people already delivering for you. If you end up having three to choose from, that’s a very full shortlist.
- Outsource the campaign, ideally from the start. One credible, coordinated voice into a small market beats a scattergun, though an outsourced reset can work well even after a stalled first attempt. Firms with in-house talent teams won’t need to outsource every role: weigh how business-critical it is; the real urgency (some team structures can sustain a watching brief); how well the pool is already known and understood in-house; in-house team capacity; and how difficult (or easy) each role will be to fill.
Rosser Search Advisory runs campaigns for BD, client, marketing and communications roles as well as some broader business services roles. Whether you’re weeks into a quiet search or shaping the role of the future, it’s a conversation I’m always happy to have.
