Most firms do not choose an agency. They inherit one.
HR used them for a paralegal hire two years ago. A partner replied to a LinkedIn message on a Tuesday. A recruiter phoned with a name that sounded interesting. The brief goes out on that basis, and a fortnight later a shortlist lands for a Conflicts Analyst role that is full of people who have spent five years doing transaction monitoring at a bank.
I see this often enough that it has stopped surprising me. The candidates are not bad. They are the wrong candidates. Financial services compliance and law firm risk and compliance share a word and very little else, and a generalist agency does not find that out until the hiring manager tells them.
That is the real cost. Not the fee. The three weeks you lose, the interview slots you burn, and the one candidate who was right for the role and has since accepted an offer somewhere else.
Five questions to ask before you instruct anyone. They work as well on us as on anyone else.
Why most compliance recruitment agencies get law firm briefs wrong
Compliance is a big word. It covers banks, asset managers, fintechs, insurers, listed companies and law firms, and the recruitment market has grown up around the biggest of those, which is financial services. That is where the volume is, so that is where most compliance recruitment agencies have built their databases.
A law firm brief then arrives and gets processed through the same machine. Same search terms, same candidate pool, same salary assumptions. The output looks like a compliance shortlist. It is not a law firm compliance shortlist.
The questions below are designed to find that out before the shortlist arrives rather than after.
1. What proportion of your placements are legal risk and compliance?
Not “do you cover it”. Every agency will say yes to that. Ask for the split.
A firm that places mostly into financial services has a database built for that market. The salary expectations are different. The vocabulary is different. A Compliance Manager in a bank spends their week on SMCR and regulatory reporting. A Compliance Manager in a law firm spends it on the SRA Standards and Regulations, client due diligence under the Money Laundering Regulations 2017, and whether the conflicts team has cleared a matter before the partner has started work on it.
Those are different jobs. The people who are good at one are not automatically good at the other, and the ones who want to move between them are a small minority.
If the agency cannot give you a number, that is the answer. Our number is simple. We only recruit for law firms. There is no other side of the desk.
2. Whose salary data are you quoting?
Ask where the figure came from.
A generalist quotes job adverts back at you. Adverts are what firms hoped to pay, not what they paid. They also skew upwards, because the roles that get advertised widely are the ones that were hard to fill at the first number.
A specialist owns data. Ours comes from our annual survey plus our own placement records, and we publish the bands openly, role by role, in the salary guide. You can check our figures before you pick up the phone, and I would encourage you to check anyone else’s the same way.
The gap this catches is not small. Our published bands put a Head of Compliance at £110,500 to £184,000 in regional UK, and £138,000 to £230,000 in London — the same job title, a materially different number. An agency working from a financial services dataset will quote you something else entirely, and you will either overpay for the hire or lose the candidate at offer stage.
3. Who have you placed at my tier of firm this year?
This year. Not ever.
Magic Circle, US, national and regional firms hire differently and pay differently. A US firm in London tends to expect more office presence. A regional firm may have one person covering compliance, conflicts and data protection between them, so breadth matters more than depth. A large City firm runs a business acceptance function with specialists in each lane, and wants someone who fits one lane well.
An agency that has placed at your tier recently knows the interview format, the sign-off chain and what the last few offers at your level looked like. An agency that has not is guessing, and you are paying for the guess.
Ask for specifics. Role, tier, month. They will not give you names and they should not. The pattern is what you are after. If you want a sense of what we are working on now, the live roles are on the jobs page.
4. Where does conflicts sit within business acceptance?
Ask them to talk you through it.
Several compliance recruitment firms treat conflicts and business acceptance as two separate jobs, or as the same job with two titles. Neither is right.
Conflicts sits inside business acceptance. It is the narrower part of it: running conflict searches, analysing the results, and escalating where the picture is unclear. Business acceptance covers a lot more ground. Client due diligence, source of funds, sanctions screening, engagement terms and the commercial question of whether the firm wants the matter at all.
Some firms run the whole thing as one team. Others carve conflicts out as its own seat. The candidate pools overlap, but somebody who has only ever run conflict searches has not done the wider role, and somebody who has run a full business acceptance function may have spent very little time on search analysis.
If an agency does not know where that line sits, they will shortlist as though it is not there. You will get a strong AML analyst for a conflicts seat and spend the first three months wondering why the search analysis is not up to standard.
5. What does your shortlist actually look like?
A shortlist should be short.
A handful of people who have been interviewed properly, with a note on why each one is on the list and where the risk sits with each. Not a dozen CVs forwarded from a job board with the agency’s logo on top.
A specialist can tell you why a candidate is worth your time, what they are weaker on, and what would make them turn the role down. A generalist sends volume and leaves you to work it out.
That is the part worth paying for. The screening either happens before the CVs reach you, or it happens in your interview slots.
What to do next
If you have a role live now, brief us. Tell us the tier, the team and the timeline and we will tell you what the market looks like for that role before you commit to anything. There is more on how we work on the recruitment page.
If you would rather see the data first, the salary guide is open. Read it, then hold it up against whatever another agency quotes you.
Either way, ask the five questions of everyone, including us. Most agencies have not been asked them before. You learn a lot from the length of the pause.
Frequently asked questions
How do I choose a legal risk and compliance recruitment agency?
Ask what proportion of their placements are in law firm risk and compliance rather than financial services, where their salary data comes from, who they have placed at your tier of firm this year, whether they can explain where conflicts sits within business acceptance, and what their shortlist actually looks like.
What is the difference between a compliance recruitment agency and a legal risk and compliance specialist?
Most compliance recruitment agencies are built around financial services, where the volume is. A legal risk and compliance specialist recruits only for law firms, where the roles, salaries and regulatory framework are different.
Whose salary data should a compliance recruitment agency be using?
Their own. A specialist agency owns survey and placement data and publishes it openly by role. A generalist quotes job adverts, which reflect what firms hoped to pay rather than what they paid.
What is the difference between conflicts and business acceptance?
Conflicts sits within business acceptance. It covers running conflict searches, analysing the results, and escalating where the picture is unclear. Business acceptance is wider, taking in client due diligence, source of funds, sanctions screening, engagement terms and whether the firm wants the matter at all. Some firms run them as one team, others carve conflicts out as its own seat.
What should a legal risk and compliance shortlist look like?
Short. A handful of people who have been properly interviewed, each with a note on why they are on the list and where the risk sits. If a shortlist arrives as a stack of forwarded CVs, the screening has not happened yet and it will happen in your interview slots instead.
