Staff recruitment and retention

The workload has been intense, and there have been reports about large numbers of conveyancers leaving the profession because they found the pace never-ending.

According to a survey earlier this year by Today’s Conveyancer, 49 per cent of conveyancers had seen colleagues depart because their work was negatively impacting their mental health.

Although our business unfortunately lost some people, we have also managed to attract a considerable number of new staff. A key factor in this was training.

As with IFAs, attracting people into the profession is paramount and it is not enough just to attract people from an existing company.

We need to bring new people into the industry and train them up – and we all have a role to play in this to ensure we have the personnel we need to deliver the standards clients expect from us.

At the beginning of the year we launched an interactive, remote-training academy that allows people to learn from home and brings traditional office and classroom-based learning into the remote-working area.

This has been fundamental to supporting the need to bring new people into the industry.

In fact, with the mortgage market being as it was in 2021 and likely to remain busy for the foreseeable future, new blood is going to be essential.

Adam Forshaw is managing director of legal firm O’Neill Patient