Ben Holtom is the founder of RecQuest, a specialist legal recruitment consultancy covering the south coast, and LawBoard, a legal careers platform providing salary benchmarking and firm data for every SRA-regulated law firm in England and Wales. He has 15 years of experience in recruitment, and lives with his family in Hampshire.
What was your career path to your current role?
I fell into recruitment the way most people do: slightly by accident. I started in education recruitment, moved into outsourced recruitment delivery for large private and public organisations, and spent the best part of a decade learning how hiring really works from the operational side. About 18 months ago I made the jump into running my own recruitment business and set up RecQuest to focus on regional and boutique law firms across the south coast.
What surprised me was how little structured market data existed for legal professionals. Candidates had almost no way to benchmark their salary or see which firms operated in their area without going through a recruiter. That frustration led to LawBoard, which I built to give candidates and firms access to the kind of information that should have been freely available years ago.
Did you have any other career ambitions?
When I was young, I never had a specific career goal, my only ambition was to be a provider for my family, so my dream is still the same.
What keeps you motivated in your work?
Conversations with candidates who have no idea what they’re worth. I speak to conveyancers regularly who have been at the same firm for five or six years and have never had a meaningful pay review. They assume they’re paid fairly because they have nothing to compare against. When you show someone that the market has moved and they’re sitting £8,000 below mid-range for their experience, that’s a genuinely useful conversation. The data changes how people think about their careers, and that keeps me interested.
If you could change one thing about the transaction process, what would it be?
From a people perspective rather than a process one: the unpredictability. The feast-or-famine cycle in residential conveyancing is brutal on staff. Teams go from managing reasonable caseloads to drowning in completions within a few weeks, and then it drops off again. That inconsistency drives good people out of the sector entirely. I have spoken to experienced conveyancers who have moved into commercial property or left law altogether because they were tired of the workload swings.
If there were better tools to smooth the pipeline and give firms more visibility over upcoming volume, you would see fewer people burning out and more staying in the profession long term. The transaction process is a staffing problem as much as it is a legal one.
What has been the best development in conveyancing in the last 20 years?
The normalisation of hybrid and remote working, without question. It has transformed the talent pool for conveyancing firms outside London. Five years ago, a boutique firm in Hampshire was competing for candidates against every other firm within a 20-minute commute. Now they can attract people from a much wider area because the role does not require five days in the office.
From the data we see on LawBoard, residential property is consistently the most-searched practice area by both qualified solicitors and paralegals across the South East and South West. That demand is partly driven by candidates who now have options they did not have before hybrid working became standard.
And the worst?
The sustained compression of conveyancing fees, which has directly driven down salaries for the people doing the work. When firms are competing on price, the margin to pay staff well shrinks. We see this clearly in the non-fee-earning roles: experienced residential property paralegals in some regions are earning only marginally more than someone with less than a year’s experience. The floor has come up, which sounds positive until you realise the ceiling has barely moved. That erodes the incentive for experienced people to stay.
If the sector wants to retain talent, it has to find a way to charge sustainably. You cannot keep squeezing fees and expect the best people to stick around.
Do you think conveyancing will ever be fully digitalised?
Partially, yes. Fully, no, and I do not think it should be. The administrative and procedural elements of a transaction, the searches, the forms, the Land Registry submissions, absolutely should be digital. Much of that is already happening and it makes the process faster, when it all works.
But the advisory side of conveyancing, explaining a restrictive covenant to a first-time buyer, navigating a chain that is about to collapse, handling the emotional reality of someone’s biggest financial decision, that requires a human being with judgement and experience. The technology should free up conveyancers to spend more time on the work that actually matters, not replace them.
The firms that get this balance right will attract the best people. The ones that treat digitalisation as a way to cut headcount will struggle to recruit.
What’s the best piece of advice anyone ever gave you regarding your career?
“The cream always rises to the top.” My father-in-law told me that when I was starting out and it has stuck with me ever since. There are always going to be people who talk a good game or take shortcuts, but over time the ones who genuinely know their stuff and do the work properly are the ones who build something lasting.
In recruitment, and in conveyancing for that matter, reputation is everything. Do good work consistently and the rest follows.
What advice would you like to give to someone just starting out?
Know your market value and keep checking it. Too many people set their salary expectations based on what they were offered in their first role and never recalibrate. The legal market moves, and if you are not periodically benchmarking yourself, you will fall behind without realising it.
Also, do not underestimate the smaller firms. There is a perception, especially among newly qualified solicitors, that career progression only happens at large nationals. Some of the most interesting conveyancing work and the strongest salary progression I see is at regional firms where you get genuine responsibility early.
Tell us something people may be surprised to know about you…
Before recruitment, I worked in hospitality. It is genuinely the best training ground for any career that involves dealing with people. You learn to read a room, handle pressure, think on your feet, and treat everyone with the same respect whether they are easy or difficult. I have a huge amount of time for anyone with hospitality on their CV. It tells me they can work hard, communicate under pressure, and they will not crumble when things get busy. Some of the best people I have placed in law firms came from non-traditional backgrounds, and I always look twice at someone who has spent time behind a bar or on a restaurant floor.
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