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.
The Recruitment Partner for this campaign was India Langman, Senior Recruitment Consultant. India has recruited legal professionals across the Yorkshire region for over three years and has an excellent understanding of the local candidate market and a well-established client network. India was supported by Chloë Cameron, Principal Consultant, with over six years’ experience recruiting legal professionals to the public sector, specialising in the North East and Yorkshire regions.
To launch the campaign, India 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.
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:
The attraction and advertisement campaign ran for an agreed period of four weeks, and over the course of this period, India and Chloë 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.
“We engaged Sellick Partnership to support us with the appointment of a Head of Legal Services. India Langman 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. She was 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. India provided effective support to the candidates at all stages of the recruitment exercise. I’m therefore very happy to recommend India and Sellick.”
Gillian Marshall, Chief Legal Officer, Wakefield Council
