Why Your Legal Recruitment Process Is Failing You

Summary: Old models for recruiting legal candidates no longer work. There’s more to the process than posting a legal job. And once you’ve decided on an attorney to hire, their training and support must be an ongoing process. If you’re not taking these steps, your competition will.

• Does your legal recruitment strategy leave room for improvement? If you’re not finding the talent you need, it’s time to change the strategy.
• Top legal talent makes for more competitive, more profitable organizations.
• To recruit top legal talent, an organization needs to attract talent which may be harder than it sounds.
• This article provides step-by-step advice throughout the entire legal hiring process funnel.

What You Should Be Doing vs. What You Are Doing

Your company or firm has a job opening. It needs to be filled quickly. How this is done is called a “recruiting process.” Methods differ by organization, but how yours chooses to undertake this process may be no less for your organization than a matter of life and death.

A matter of life or death?

Talent is an existential dilemma for all businesses and here’s why:

Attracting, recruiting, and retaining top legal talent is resource intensive. Legal talent is costly to find and very costly to replace, and they have profound effects on your organization’s mission and aspirations. That talent, from top to bottom, is how your brand and image are conveyed to your clients and customers. Studies also prove that organizations with the best talent attract more clients, are more profitable, and are better suited for long range success.

Start here: Human Resources or Talent Acquisition & Management

What’s your approach going to be?

Do you see your legal employees as talent or a resource? A resource model might see legal staff as more easily replaceable. To understand them as talent is to see staff as more individualized, harder to find, and worth the effort to retain—especially when considering all the resources your organization has expended to give them value.

Therefore, legal talent is not only something to be acquired or recruited; it’s also something to be managed on an ongoing basis. Also, the path doesn’t end once you’ve got attorneys and legal staff behind desks. Your legal team will need onboarding and development—this can be quick, or in the development case, it could be an ongoing process.

HR is necessary for the day-to-day; Talent Management is about tomorrow and beyond.

Once you find the best candidate to fill your legal opening, what is next?

The recruitment process: What you know about it & why it’s wrong

If you’ve ever hired someone or even had a job yourself, you’re familiar with how the recruitment process steps work. With current technologies and processes, there are many variables possible, but generally, it’ll look like this:

• An organization has a job opening
• A pool of candidates are alerted
• Résumés are submitted and screened
• A shortlist is drawn up
• An interview process is established, top candidates are scheduled and screened
• The preferred candidate(s) may have a second or additional interviews
• With the selection process ended, a job offer is made and a candidate accepts
• The new hire is onboarded—depending on the industry and culture, this could be days, months, or ongoing

Seems sound—what could go wrong? Everything; here’s an analysis:

What is the legal job opening, exactly?

Is the legal job opening clear in the description? And what do you think the optimized version of that job should look like?

To understand this, first you need to do a legal job analysis: This is a process used to identify the work performed in the position as well as the associated working conditions. It might help if other jobs within your law firm or organization, especially those jobs impacting the position needing to be filled, were also analyzed. When you’re done with the analysis, you should have a good understanding of the position’s duties, responsibilities, skills and knowledge required, desired outcomes, and working conditions the jobholder will be operating under.

Also, your understanding of the legal job description was likely based on the last employee who had the position, not the job description as it was when they started the job. A reason for this may be that the duties, workflows, and the environment around the position changed along the way. The jobholder may have been required to take on new or additional responsibilities. The position the person left could be very different than the one imagined when they started.

Then, a legal job specification is needed. This will identify the qualifications and capabilities of the person who fills the position, as it pertains to both soft and hard skills. This will be in response to the legal job analysis which is why that step is so important. Furthermore, does the position, as it’s now understood by the analysis, require different compensation, training, support, or performance management?

How is the legal job posted?

This is significant.

Many law firms and companies cut corners here—a bad idea. You could post your job on Craigslist or you could hire a legal recruiter or headhunter. Whether you post your legal job or use a legal recruiter could be the difference between “hunting” and “gathering.” Maybe an even better description is “predator” vs. “scavenger.” In this description you can see how a “predator” might have much better choices for “quarry.” The choices for the scavenger are limited in comparison. Scavengers get to pick over whatever is left behind by the predators.

If you feel posting your legal job to a job board is sufficient for your needs in resourcing candidates, there are several ways to go:

• Job sites: Some sites have a reach that includes millions of people all over the world. Pro: High visibility; Con: However you screen them, you’ll still end up with mountain of résumés.
• Internally: A no-cost solution! You may have qualified candidates within your organization or law firm. Otherwise, see below.
• Social networking & social media: Online networking may result in reaching passive candidates.
• Specialist support: Recruitment Specialists will use various tools to identify and reach out to potential candidates. They’ll work with the larger teams on outreach strategies and follow-up and vet potential candidates.

While the pool of available talent you can access with Craigslist and other job boards like Indeed, Ziprecruiter, or LawCrossing, may be perfectly fine, you’ll also be getting a flood of hopefuls that are likely nothing like what you’re looking for. Legal recruiters do have the advantage of expertise and resources you don’t have. They can also manage the entire hiring process and allow you to keep your own resources focused on your day-to-day operations.

Poaching and passive candidates: Depending on the job you’re offering, finding a potential hire that already has a job is another option. Poaching a candidate in a similar position at another law firm with a proven record of performance could be ideal. If they are a competitor, you can build your talent pool by disabling a competitor—a win-win. However, chances are good that attorney or legal candidate is not going to leave their present situation, especially if they are happy, without a substantially better offer.

So-called passive candidates are an even larger resource. According to the jobsite EmploymentCrossing:

“[Passive candidates are those that]… may already have a job and may be relatively satisfied with their situation. They have none of the urgency of the typical active candidate. Even so, they might be willing to make a change if presented with the right circumstances. As job seekers, this passive population represents 75% of all global candidates.”

Turning a passive legal candidate into an active one will be dependent on your ability to make a better offer. A passive legal candidate will be intrigued by an elevated career move. Even if the upward gain isn’t immediate, they will want to know it’s somewhere in the not-too distant future. Upward gains could include increased salaries, fewer required billable hours, or a defined path to partnership. Passive legal candidates usually want at least a 30% increase in their overall career situation to make a move.

Again, the recruiter will need to build a strong case as passive candidates tend to overvalue the short-term and ignore the longer-term potential.

And then, there are your internal resources—this also from EmploymentCrossing:

“In-house referrals are the top source of quality hires at almost half of all hires—that’s more than third party websites and even more than online job boards with applicant tracking systems (ATS). Companies are now developing programs to tap into this resource given that referred employees are faster to hire, perform better, and stay longer in the company.”

For finding legal talent gold, your best recruitment process steps must also include methods of reachingout to the hard to reach.

This is why talent is important (this should already be obvious)

We know that law firms with superior talent—those firms that understand talent as value creation—perform better. And there’s plenty of data:

• According to a study from the Hackett Group, companies that manage talent well have shown earnings 15% higher than their peers that don’t. If this were an average Fortune 500 company, this improvement in performance would mean hundreds of millions of dollars.
• An IBM study found public companies that managed talent more effectively had higher percentages of financial outperformers than their less effective, similarly sized competition.
• A research study from McBassi & Co. found that high scorers in five categories of human capital management—leadership practices, employee engagement, knowledge accountability, workforce organization, and learning capacity—posted higher stock market returns and better safety records.

Finding the ones you want

Finding “someone” is easy; finding “the one” is not.

Even when using recruiters, internal sources, or poaching passive candidates, finding A-list players—the ones your competition would also love to hire—will always be a challenge. They are not abundant and everywhere. And if they are out there, what are the chances of you finding each other? So, in the process of searching, screening, and identifying your A-listers, these will be the three most crucial and difficult steps of the process.

• Searching: Know what you want and be able to describe it; when you’re able to locate the legal candidate you want, they’ll want to know that you’re offering something that they too want.
• Screening: You may like what they’ve done but do they have the right skill set, do they have experience with processes like yours, etc.? Is your applicant tracking system (ATS) delivering to you the kind of candidates you want? Will they know what they are getting from you?
• Identifying: You should be looking for long-term legal employees. Your candidate needs to be convinced you’re a law firm worthy of devoting 35% of their waking hours to. They need to be sold on your law firm or organization—they’ll want more than an interesting job offer. Next: Once you have their list of skills, get to know their performance objectives.

Making them want you

A study from 2017 said nearly half of professionals were going to look for new jobs. For attorneys, 10.3% of all associates at BigLaw firms tracked will lateral in the first 11 months of 2019—or one lateral move for every 9.7 associates. (Numbers vary depending on practice area: for Bankruptcy & Restructuring, 19.2%; for litigators, 7.3%.) According to The American Lawyer, 2,000 partners at major national firms switch firms every year.

There’s a lot of restless legal talent to be had—but is your firm the cure for their restlessness?

According to the same survey, lawyers and other professionals look for these five things to make them stay with a job:

1. A humiliation-free work zone: Mistakes will be made, inevitably. Attorneys and legal staff want to be able to save face when they do. They don’t want to feel embarrassed by supervisors and want to know they’ll be supported moving forward.
2. Supervisors that’ll own their mistakes: In particular, acknowledging their part of the blame before blaming subordinates.
3. Acknowledge improvements in performance: Almost three-quarters of those asked said this was one of the most important traits a supervisor can have.
4. More than acknowledgement, also praise and appreciation: Three-quarters believe praise and expressed appreciation is important.
5. Encourage improvement: They want positive reinforcement and inspiration.

As a legal employer, this is what you should be offering to entice potential hires—especially those that need to be convinced:

1. Stability: Has the law firm’s performance been steady? Is internal movement available to legal staff? Has your firm experienced layoffs?
2. Security: When someone asks around, will they find most attorneys are recent hires? Job security is important and not so common.
3. Reliability: Can your law firm deliver on promises? Are procedures and policies consistent? People who have worked at startups or fledgling firms will know how often incipient organizations grasp at straws for something that works.
4. Opportunity: This can mean moving up with job titles and pay but it can also mean getting to do meaningful work; work that may guide the business into the future.
5. Your commitment to creating a better workplace: Are you interested in creating a positive, non-toxic company culture? Is that kind of working environment worth an investment? Are all able to contribute to the success of the law firm?
6. Core values and beliefs: A law firm is a machine made of people. Such people like to be surrounded by others with similar core values and beliefs. Do you know what your firm stands for and what its future goals are? Does it have a history of integrity? Shared values with new prospects can lead to long-term employees. Core values are those that drive decisions. When attorneys and legal staff understand them, a trust is developed and there’s stability in the decision making process. This makes for a fruitful culture.
7. Work–life balance: Law firms have traditionally operated on the premise that once they offer the job, they get to take the life: the balance of the equation is all-work, not much else. This is stressful and creates a vicious cycle: stress at work goes home and stress at home comes to work. The stress from work that comes home will boomerang into even more stress at work. Allowing flexibility for your legal employees to handle their lives is a big plus for prospects as is the possibility of remote work.

Conducting better interviews for getting better hires

The way to systematically hire the best legal employees—arguably, the only way—is to clearly define what constitutes superior performance for your law firm before you begin any new job search. Using a performance profile instead of a job description can be an effective means of doing this.

How can you know what these performance objectives are? That’s easy:

• Watch what it is your best employees are doing that your average ones aren’t.
• If you imagine that a position demands a certain amount of experience, decide why that is. Is it because that experience confers certain abilities and behaviors? Asking for those behaviors and abilities upfront makes for a more direct conversation. The prospect will also better understand what’s being asked of them and if they can do it.

Asking questions using the SMARTe method can be a better way of getting more directly to the type of information you’re looking for:

• Specific task: Have the interviewee describe a task, challenge, project, or problem.
• Measurable: By their solution, what actually changed and can their performance be measured somehow?
• Action: In achieving the solution, what was actually done and what was their specific role?
• Result: What result was achieved and/or what was the deliverable?
• Timeframe: When did this take place and how long did it take?
• environment: Have them describe the environment and conditions that this task, etc. was completed under including pace, resources, level of sophistication, the people involved, and any input from the supervisor.

Then, devise a new problem for the candidate and ask them to offer a solution. This job-related, problem-solving question (PSQ) can be a great way to understand critical thinking skills relative to the actual needs of the job. Of course, visualizing a solution is only one part of the equation. The action is also critical. Still, it can provide great insight into the candidate’s thinking and help you determine if the candidate is a good fit for your culture.

And why simply hiring the right people isn’t enough

It’s often argued that law firms too often make long-term plans based on short-term information. The current progressive view on talent management is that staff needs to be viewed as an ongoing relationship under development. Dialogue and feedback as well as performance assessments using analytics can be used.

Legal employees should be mentored, coached, and supported on an ongoing basis—consider your onboarding process as one that has no end. Annual performance appraisals are no longer enough. The process should be focused on developing and aligning goals between the attorney and the organization and how their job specifications fit into that landscape. Working on skillsets, addressing performance gaps, discussing career aspirations and law firm goals, and giving and receiving feedback should be the aligned objective of both parties.

About Harrison Barnes

Harrison Barnes is the founder of BCG Attorney Search and a successful legal recruiter. Harrison is extremely committed to and passionate about the profession of legal placement. His firm BCG Attorney Search has placed thousands of attorneys. BCG Attorney Search works with attorneys to dramatically improve their careers by leaving no stone unturned in job searches and bringing out the very best in them. Harrison has placed the leaders of the nation’s top law firms, and countless associates who have gone on to lead the nation’s top law firms. There are very few firms Harrison has not made placements with. Harrison’s writings about attorney careers and placements attract millions of reads each year. He coaches and consults with law firms about how to dramatically improve their recruiting and retention efforts. His company, LawCrossing, has been ranked on the Inc. 500 twice. For more information, please visit Harrison Barnes’ bio.

About HiringPartner

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