How to Use Social Media to Recruit & Hire for Law Firms: That’s right—Law Firms

Summary: Social media for law firms is no longer an option. It may be the most effective way of finding legal hires. A plan, a strategy—and policy—will be required.

• The traditional methods of finding attorneys to hire are disappearing; to find the best candidates you need to go where they are.
• Social media allows law firms to find passive candidates and vet them before ever contacting them
• There’s more to social media recruiting than LinkedIn—a lot more.
• Different channels require different approaches—the article explains.

Social Media for Law Firms 101:

Law firms need to court social media. It’s an opportunity that’s simply too big to ignore.

But first, some myths:

1. Law firms are too dignified for social media
2. They’re too traditional, staid, and proper for social media
3. Social media is wholly inappropriate for a law firm’s recruitment process
4. For law firms, social media is only useful as a marketing apparatus
5. Law firms, especially Big Law firms, don’t need anything as draconian as a social media policy

Social media matters. Aside from its value for branding and thought leadership, law firms can also be used as a great way to cultivate and engage with future clients. To not use it, or to use it poorly, is to deny your firm an immense opportunity.

If you have a need to reach the 25-29 year-old demographic, of which 88% of which use social media, there may be no other way to connect with them. For that age group, once traditional sources of contact are no longer effective—in fact, they’re nearly non-existent.

Also, consider that 70% of the workforce by 2020 will be Millennials. Social networks are their jam. Your time to get off the fence has long passed.

Social media channels can be divided rigidly into age groups. Don’t look for law school students on Facebook or LinkedIn. Those with little work experience won’t have much use for LinkedIn and Facebook is what they might use to wish their grandparents “happy birthday.” Otherwise, you’ll find them on platforms like Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram. (Latino Gen Zs tend to favor WhatsApp, using at a rate more than double that of their black or white peers.)

Using Social Media to Recruit: A Primer

Many law firms are recruiting legal candidates through social media. Few, however, are doing it well. Law firms need to get over that, quickly. Social media should be a mandatory element in the recruitment process steps for all firms.

Here are some suggestions for getting it right:

• You need to be where you target audience is. As LinkedIn has become an indispensable part of how businesses, especially those within the legal industry, seek out candidates—younger candidates, like law students and new attorneys, don’t often have profiles or may not visit LinkedIn with any regularity. To connect with them, you need to go where they go. Every law firm should have its own brand voice and unique social media recruiting strategy that at least includes Twitter and Instagram.
• What if your top candidates aren’t reading job boards and seeking recruiters? Then reaching them where they are is essential; but make sure you’re giving them something worthy of their attention: engaging content.
• You may ultimately use job boards or legal recruiters to find a larger pool of candidates, but social media can still help you extend the reach of your search. You can impress your target candidates through innovative means of reaching them. You may not be reaching your intended audience, but you may be reaching their network; they may know someone who’s exactly what you’re looking for.
• Through social media, you can participate in conversations and speak directly to your targets. LinkedIn and other channels with hashtags, like Instagram and Twitter, can be effective ways of getting your legal openings to front of the right candidates.
• Use a soft sell approach and promote your law firm culture and work. Social media recruiting allows for more than posting open legal positions from company accounts, you also have the opportunity to share content that shows what a great place your law firm is to work. This way you can attract candidates organically. People love engaging with companies with unique cultures. This kind of content can potentially get a lot of shares.
• Because the tone is more conversational, your descriptions of legal job specifications can get more detailed and performance oriented than you would in a typical job board posting.
• Respect the niche networks also. Beyond Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter you can focus on more specific candidates by visiting niche networks and forums. There are audiences on Quora, Reddit, and TopLawSchools where people will respond to thought-provoking comments.
• Use your internal resources: You may already have employees who are social media power users. Encourage your staff to share legal openings and be brand ambassadors and evangelists for your law firm on social media. However, here, you need to proceed with caution. Everyone in your office has an opinion and their own experience with your firm. Having strict social media rules can allow your employees to talk about their work experiences responsibly and it’s another way to extend your social reach and alert potential legal candidates about your positions.
•  If you’re working with a legal recruiter, you can help them grow a social media presence. Corporate accounts can be limited in what they can do but individual recruiters can make person-to-person connections. They should know social media best practices and use their accounts on a regular basis.

A brief word about Snapchat:

More than 158 million users get on Snapchat every day for 25-30 minutes—compare that to LinkedIn’s 106 million users a day at 17 minutes. The average under-25 user checks in about 20 times a day; because content only stays up for 24 hours, there is more urgency to view it. For the under-25 demographic, Snapchat is more popular than Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

• The app allows for geo-targeting so you know where your targets are located
• While the app is often associated with companies looking for hourly workers, JP Morgan, Cisco, AOL, General Electric, Shopify, Goldman Sachs, and others have used the app as part of their recruiting strategy
• The Snapcode feature allows users to be directed to a specific URL while allowing them to still remain within the app
• Snapchat isn’t for everyone or every kind of business as the vibe tends toward the whimsical; though, many companies have used it successfully in their recruiting efforts

Hooking Up with LinkedIn

For social media recruiting, LinkedIn is the channel most often used. While those entering the legal market may be more sporadic about creating profiles, nearly everyone with an established career will be compelled to have one. Most legal employers will view candidates’ LinkedIn profiles as part of their selection process. The site can be used effectively for recruiting both active and passive legal candidates.

If your law firm is interested in recruiting through social media, here are some actions you should take:

• Make sure your law firm brand page is complete and informative—allow your seekers to learn what they should know about your organization. Doing this will make more of your brand available in LinkedIn’s search results. It will also give you the opportunity to showcase your law firm culture.
• Since so many use LinkedIn for its legal job search functions, you may get a flood of inquiries. Use filters to help you target the best qualified legal candidates. You can search by location, current and past employment history, years of experience, job description, and other factors to narrow the field of potential legal candidates to only those that specifically meet your requirements.
• Make your outreach personalized and personal. Good attorneys will likely be hearing from lots of recruiters on LinkedIn. Don’t simply copy and paste the same message to everyone. Mention what it was about the candidate that caught your attention and why you think they’d be a good fit for your law firm.
• LinkedIn allows lawyers to network through groups. For example, The Personal Injury Attorney Network is a group with over 16,000 members that hosts discussions on the latest trends that engage experts in the field.
• 92% of all media professionals are on LinkedIn, more than any other social networking site; editors, journalists, and reporters of local, regional and national publications and other media types can also be found there; reach out and invite them to your group so they can see the type of information you can offer their readers, listeners, or viewers.

Why social media recruiting is good for you

Taking the initiative to reach out to premium legal candidates rather than waiting for them to come to you is no longer a novelty. LinkedIn has become a vital channel for sourcing legal candidates and promoting law firm culture.

Here’s how to make it work for you:

• Social media can be an effective way to reach elusive passive legal candidates; it’s also a great way to find and connect with those most suitable based on experience and qualifications. This is essentially why LinkedIn was created; there’s no other channel that does it nearly so well.
• People often use social media to extoll about why they love their work, job, and career. You can find passionate people. They may share creative ideas on their personal pages about the work they do.
• It also allows you access to résumé details without a résumé. With both LinkedIn and, to an extent, Facebook, you can view a person’s work and education history. This way you can get a good read on their background and experience before reaching out to them.
• Through a person’s social media accounts, you can discover what their interests and hobbies are and even get a sense of their personality. You can get an idea of what kind of fit they might be for your workplace and culture.
• Social media allows you to pre-screen. You can be your own applicant tracking system and preemptively filter out bad candidates. People often reveal themselves through their social media. This way, you can determine if a potential candidate has the right attitude and openness.
• Save money: as an alternative to posting legal job openings through paid campaigns, social media recruiting costs you nothing but time.
• By seeing legal candidates describe themselves in their own words—and not in those of a cover letter or as an applicant—you’ll gain an insight that might otherwise remain hidden, especially during the legal hiring process.
• The most effective way of both finding legal candidates and new clients is the same: providing good content.

Create your own social media recruiting strategy

Tailor a strategy to your particular needs and demands. What works for someone else may not work for you. Consider a broader legal recruiting process as a part of your general business development strategy. This way you can operate from a place of abundance and not one of famine.

Some tactical suggestions:

• Create a Careers Page or blog about it on your website: Post your legal job listings on your Careers, etc. page.
• Promote your legal job openings on your social networks: This could be just as simple as sharing a link on a status update.
• Create a Custom Tab on Your Facebook Page: A tab for featuring your legal job openings—you may have to outsource this to someone who knows how to add custom content to Facebook pages. It could be as simple as importing your current Careers page into a tab on your Facebook page using iframes.
• Market your legal job openings on YouTube: This may not be for everybody but it’s a great way for reaching out, especially to Millennials. By seeing a representative of your law firm in character and in their element will give legal candidates a far more telling picture than a couple of paragraphs of terse copy.

Today legal recruitment, tomorrow the world

Law firms and attorneys have been having great successes in their use of social media, and not just as a means for recruiting. (See Law360’s list of “20 Attorneys Killing It On Twitter”). When you place your content, expertise, and messaging in front of targeted prospects, you’re accessing the best way of attracting new clients and referral sources.

• A social media channel like Twitter can be a way for attorneys to appear more approachable. In the legal field, communication is key. Law firms ask their clients to open up and trust them with their most intimate and sensitive financial, emotional, and personal struggles. Presenting your law firm as approachable and empathetic can be a crucial way to connect with future clients.
• Law firms and attorneys who are best at using social media to connect with their target audiences are seeing exponential growth in their daily business and inquiries.
• In 2012, the Law Society issued social media guidance for lawyers. By June of that year, Legal Futures reported that Twitter was becoming the key referral source for lawyers in the UK with a 663% increase in inquiries for legal recommendations on the social network.
• Facebook has also proven to be an effective tool for reaching new clients through social engagement and advertisement. Social media interactions allow opportunities to develop into the kinds of relationships that can bring clients to your practice.
• Social media channels can be an excellent way to find out what’s being said about your law firm or lawyers in public, online. You can Google search your brand name and do the same on Facebook and Twitter. Any chatter you find is an opportunity to influence. If there’s no chatter about your law firm, it may be because your content isn’t interesting enough. This you can easily fix.
• Also, through the use of Facebook groups, direct messaging, video content, and Facebook Advertising, it’s possible to significantly increase online traffic that can result in new leads.
• Educate your audience through your posts and they’ll want to come to you with their needs.

Warning: You need a Social media policy

A policy needs to be in place, understood by your legal staff, and strictly enforced. Such a policy should reflect the top priority of any law firm or attorney: your clients.

Any postings related to clients, cases, or transactions should generally be forbidden—unless the law firm has a related policy in place for what’s allowed. No attorney or support staff should believe that they exist in a social media bubble, no matter how relatively few friends or followers they may have. In training sessions, firms must reinforce the rule that nothing online is truly private. Any information can easily breech your small circle and fall into the hands of opposing counsel, clients, other lawyers at your firm, or even—worst yet—the hands of judges. You can imagine how, if received into the wrong hands, this could irreparably damage the integrity of the entire firm.

What can be done with Twitter:

• Establish thought leadership in your industry; you can also be a portal of worthy information by posting current news, professional and industry developments and trends
• By presenting an image of approachability through engagement, you have an opportunity to create new clients
• Network with other attorneys to increase exposure and gain new potential referrals
• Share information about your practice or law firm so clients can learn more about you

What can be done with Facebook:

• This platform allows for direct engagement which can create business inquiries and potential clients
• Create a social environment that informs potential clients
• It’s also a great platform for sharing business information; this can in turn develop trust through quick response times, reviews, and visuals that can drive clients to contact you about services
• The use of video can have high conversion rates for new clients and website clicks

What can be done with LinkedIn:

• Share advice on topics that impact the success of your firm, like marketing
• Network with others in a particular practice fields
• Gain insights on trends in the industry to add to your status in “thought leadership”
• Build relationships with potential referral sources; network with partners or employees at general practice firms where they refer clients that need expertise in your practice field; business lawyers can network with accountants and business advisors; lawyers working in the real estate industry can connect with realtors; elder care attorneys can network with assisted living homes, care giving service providers, and their associations
• LinkedIn groups can become lead generation funnels: within a community of other like-minded professionals, you can facilitate great conversations; from there you can link prospects, referral sources, and the media to your blog or website for more information
• And this: According to Business Insider, LinkedIn is the most popular business social networking site for attorneys: 70% of corporate counsel use LinkedIn as a tool, and half rely on it. Executives from every Fortune 500 company are on LinkedIn.