- Breaching Confidentiality: I am always amazed at how casually some partners treat the confidentiality of the candidates whose resumes cross their desks. Transgressions range from calling common client contacts for feedback on the candidate, to innocently mentioning a meeting with the candidate to the candidate’s colleague, to accidentally disseminating a candidate’s resume outside of the law firm firewall. Apart from the breach of any legal obligations these firms owe to the candidates in question, who surely suffer when word gets back to their current employer – the firm that permits these breaches to occur commits incremental suicide to its reputation in the lateral marketplace.
- Improper use of Lawcruiters: Once the introduction is made – the Lawcruiter’s role is (1) to ensure that the interview process effectively establishes to both sides why (or why not) a candidate represents a good or bad hire, and (2) to ensure that that both sides receive each other’s feedback as promptly as possible. A client does its own recruitment efforts no favors by keeping the Lawcruiter in the dark on issues such as specific concerns or questions about the candidate’s background, or the duration and intensity of the hiring process. For example: leaving a candidate “hanging” for weeks on end without any feedback as to the “why” – is as good as saying “no interest” because, even if the client decides to move forward, the candidate will likely be too annoyed to want to proceed.
- Interview Failings by Partners: These include (and I am not making these up!): failing to have read the candidate’s resume, taking phone-calls or meetings during an interview, scolding a candidate for showing up with the wrong experience confusing a candidate with inconsistent job description, asking corporate candidates for copies of their litigation briefs, etc.
- Interview Failing by Associates Those candidates who are (properly) trained to treat every interview (including meetings with HR and support staff) as a potential deal breaker are often surprised at how poorly the interviewing firm will train its peer-level associate interviewers on the art of interviewing and recruiting an outstanding candidate. Insofar as the associate-level interview is usually a golden opportunity for a firm to put its best foot forward – it has amazed this Lawcruiter to hear accounts of associate interviewers bad-mouthing their employers, showing indifference or hostility to the candidate – or otherwise acting as though they had better things to do than recruit the candidate to their firm. With predictable results.
- Superficial Interviewing: For our clients - lateral hiring is an expensive and time consuming business. As such, it would make sense that our clients, in the interests of raising their rates of associate retention, would want to weed out those candidates for whom a lateral move represents little more than changing Mr. Hyde for Dr. Jekyll. Since clients are sometimes desperate, the lack of clear career planning by candidates is often overlooked by hiring managers – particularly when confronted by the magic bullet of potential hire from Cravath. Clearer eyes would ask, why should the Cravath associate who is moving simply because he or she wants “a better environment” prove to be any less likely to be the same person who moves on to the next “better environment “ one or two years later? Given the cost of integrating an associate into a firm, and the time lag before that associate becomes profitable – it strikes me as ludicrous that firms don’t dig deeper into a candidate’s motivations so as to ensure that they really do get a “keeper”. Why not give the job to the Fordham grad from Dewey who knows exactly why he wants that job, since that person is most likely to stay...
And here is wishing all of us a successful start to the lateral hiring season!
