Humans First

Humans First: What the Practices Winning on Talent Have Understood

Posted on 28 July 2026 by Lydia Sinclair FREC


Ask most people why they go to work and they will not say "because I love reconciliations".

They go so they can pay a mortgage, take their children somewhere in August, retire at a reasonable age, or simply have a life that feels like their own. The work is how they fund it and, on a good day, something they genuinely enjoy. It is very rarely the point of the exercise.

Firms have known this in the abstract for years. What has changed is that a group of practices now build around it deliberately, and they are quietly winning the talent war because of it.


The model that stopped working

For a long time the deal in practice was straightforward. You gave the firm your twenties, you worked the hours, and in return you got a qualification, a career and eventually, if you stuck it out, a shot at partnership.

It worked because the alternative options were narrower and because people accepted that work came first. Family life fitted around busy season. Nobody expected anything else.

Two things broke it. Industry got better at offering balance, and technology made it possible to do a great deal of practice work from anywhere. Once people could see an alternative, the old deal started to look like a poor trade.

The firms that struggled are mostly the ones that treated this as a generational complaint. The firms that are thriving treated it as information.


What people are actually optimising for

When somebody sits in front of me and talks about a move, the reasons they give first are usually professional. More responsibility. Better clients. A route to manager.

The reasons that actually decide it come out later, and they are almost always about life.

A commute that means they never do bedtime. A firm that says it's flexible but sighs when someone leaves at half four. A parent whose health is declining two hours away. A partner whose job has just changed shape. A house they want to buy in a specific catchment area.

None of that appears on a CV, and none of it appears in a job advert. But it is what the decision turns on, every time.


Pay is not really about the number

This is the part firms most often get wrong.

I interviewed two people recently, both long-serving, both paid well below market rate, and neither had ever raised it. When we talked about what more money would mean, neither said anything about status or fairness in the abstract. One wanted to move house. The other wanted to stop worrying about school trips.

Pay is a proxy for a set of things people want to be able to do. Which is why "we pay competitively" reassures nobody, and why a rise that arrives eighteen months after somebody needed it doesn't repair the relationship.

There are two practical conclusions.

If you run a firm, review pay before people ask, and tell them you are doing it. Your quietest, most loyal people are the least likely to raise it and the most expensive to replace. Silence is not contentment.

If you work in one, find out what your role actually pays elsewhere before you have the conversation. Not to threaten anybody with it. Just so you are discussing facts rather than feelings.


The things that aren't pay

A firm told me recently they had stopped funding study, on the grounds that they pay for qualifications and then people leave.

The logic holds together until you look at it from the other side. To the firm, study support is a cost with a leakage problem. To the person, it is the thing that changes what their entire working life looks like for the next twenty years.

Withdrawing it does not fix why people were leaving. It removes one of the reasons they joined.

The same applies across the board. Flexibility that is real rather than stated. Honesty about how bad January gets and what the firm does about it. A partner who notices when somebody has gone quiet for a fortnight. None of it is soft, and all of it shows up in retention figures.


Why returners tell you something

One of the clearest signals that practice has changed is that people are coming back to it.

For years the traffic ran one way, out of practice and into industry, chasing hours and control. Now I speak to people who left for exactly those reasons and are looking at practice again, because the specific thing that drove them out has been fixed in a lot of firms.

They come back with commercial instinct built on the other side of the audit, and with much clearer expectations about what they need. If your firm can attract them, it is a good sign you have got the fundamentals right.


What this changes about how you hire

Stop leading with the work.

Every practice within twenty miles of you offers broadly similar work to broadly similar clients. What differs is what the job does to somebody's life, and that is what you should be able to describe precisely.

Not "we offer flexible working". Instead: core hours are ten to four, most of the team is in twice a week, nobody comments on a school run, and here is honestly what happens in January.

Specificity is credibility. Vagueness reads as a hedge, and candidates who have been let down before are listening for exactly that.


A note on Samaritans Awareness Week

This week, 24 to 30 July, is Samaritans Awareness Week. Their message is a simple one: talking helps, and people will listen for longer than you would expect.

Treating people as humans first is not only about pay and flexibility. It is also about noticing when someone has gone quiet, and asking. If you are carrying something at the moment, whether or not it relates to work, please say it to somebody. Samaritans are there day and night, free, on 116 123.


Final thought

The practices doing best on recruitment and retention are not the ones with the largest salary budgets. They are the ones that stopped treating people's lives as an inconvenience to be managed around, and started treating them as the actual reason anybody turns up.

That is not a soft position. It is the most commercial one available.


If you'd like to know what your role or your team should be earning, the 2026/27 ProTalent Salary Guide has real figures for practice roles across the South East. Get in touch and I'll send you a copy.

Lydia Sinclair FREC, Founder, ProTalent Limited
lydia@protalent.co | 01273 491 852