Day in the Life: Ellen Yaffe, director of search boutique

She began her career in human resources, working in the pharmaceutical industry and then in financial services. She had responsibility in both roles for labour relations, dispute resolution, compensation, training and development, and campus recruitment. She moved to London from New York in 1994.

0615 Wake up and get ready for work.

0700 Get the baby up, give her the morning bottle. She is 15 months old and during the week this is the only time I have to spend with her. Her nanny arrives a little before 7.30 and we have a 'handover' before I head out the door.

0730 Leave to catch a South West Train into Waterloo and then the 'Drain' into the City.

0730-0830 Train. Read IFR, Financial News, Euromoney, all that.

0830 Unless I have an early morning interview, I try to keep this first hour free to check e-mails and review the morning's summary of the Financial Times prepared by one of the junior consultants.

(The FT Summary is something of a Rose Partnership tradition. During their first few months, young new hires spend part of each morning preparing this for circulation around the firm. This is a great way to bring them up to speed with issues across financial services and helps them learn how to juggle commitments.

Often they've just got back from a breakfast meeting somewhere with a head full of impressions about a candidate: requiring them to turn their minds to bigger issues before getting back into the specifics of a search is important commercial training. So as soon as I'm at my desk, I know about any 'stop-press' client headlines or the like.)

0845 Morning status checks: I review the status of 'live' candidates with my team and talk through the plan of attack for any marketing exercises we have on.

1000 This morning, I have an interview with a candidate for a post as European head of structuring at a major investment bank. This will be quite an involved interview so we've invited him in to our offices, where we have some quiet rooms, rather than arranging to meet in a public place. He's early - a bit of luck on this senior search where last-minute rescheduling comes with the territory.

1115 Phone calls to candidates and clients. On the client side, I am presently in discussions with a number of HR contacts to hammer out fee arrangements for new products we are developing - and discuss how we can integrate them into the service we already offer.

The Rose Partnership has long carried out ad hoc consulting exercises for clients on various aspects of employment practice in the City of London and now we're formalising this. And as a director, I'm at the front line in negotiations.

1230 Lunch with the senior consultant spearheading our hedge fund effort, to review the marketing plan. As a firm with a pedigree among the big institutions, we're finding this market's extreme fragmentation an interesting new experience.

But we have some great leads and agree on the next fortnight's plan of action. Some good news is that the word has got around the market about placements we've recently made into the hedge fund desk at an institutional fund manager, and this is starting to open doors in a world which hadn't really heard of us until lately.

1330 Review current status of candidate interview schedules with one of our search assistants. Today, clients and candidates alike have mostly behaved themselves and not cancelled at the last minute.

1400 Leave for a once-fortnightly update meeting with a client in Canary Wharf. This used to be much more of a chore than it is now, seeing as how the location has come along.

1430 After a few housekeeping matters, I review the candidate list with the client and agree to approach six people. As this is a client I've grown to know well, the meeting turns into a wide-ranging discussion of possible further growth areas for their business and general headcount plans for 2003.

1600 Back at the office (just off London Wall). Make sourcing calls to fill out my view of the market for the European Head of Structuring mandate.

The last time I covered this ground was about a year ago and I need to talk to senior people in debt derivative marketing, trading and product development about how some individuals I was watching then have progressed.

Review some candidate write-ups that have been done by consultants within the debt practice.

We need to come to an agreement about our commercial appraisal of candidates, but there are other issues too. The Rose Partnership is quite systems-driven, and as a senior consultant, I need to ensure that all the key information gathered through meetings and phone calls has been stored in the right place.

Our IT developers are fine-tuning some improvements to the candidate database right now and these have triggered a few discussions about how it is most efficient to store information for the long term. We draw a few conclusions and put them into the IT issue log for developers' attention.

Feed the database; write a meeting note; log some conversations I have had today.

1730 Interview candidate in the West End for the role of head of sterling swaps at a European investment bank.

1900 Travel home from West End. Catch up on a meeting note written by a colleague in another practice. Make a note of the lateral thought that occurs to me for a possible candidate from my world who could suit her client.

As it happens, this is just returning the favour: only last month she fielded me an experienced debt-focused corporate financier who fitted perfectly into a very specific geographical debt capital markets mandate I (and the market!) had thought was not capable of being filled.

2000 Get home to put baby to bed. Dinner. I am fortunate that often my client and candidate commitments allow me to get home to my family by this time. At the most, I will likely have three client events a month in the evenings.

2100 Log on from home to draft a few e-mails. Only stay on for about 45 minutes, and I'm done for the day.