Researching Your New Career in a Non-Legal Field

One of the goals of your research program was the development of your own listing of potential employers. Names and addresses alone, however, will not be enough for an effective job search. What you will require is a system for organizing the information you will be acquiring.

What kind of information do you need to acquire? Any and all that may contribute to a productive contact and promote more effective interviewing. Although there is really no limit to the possible data which can be collected, there are a few basics which you will certainly wish to develop.


First is the name of the individual within the business organization who will receive your initial contact. Upon occasion it may be the head of a special activity in which you are specifically interested, but more often it will be the head of the personnel function. If you have been unable to locate this information in one of your directories, then call the company headquarters and ask the switchboard operator for the name of that individual. In the latter event, be sure to ask for the spelling of the name and the exact title. Mistakes at this point are deadly.

Certainly you will want to collect information on the nature of the company's business. There is a sound psychological reason for this. You are asking the business organization to be interested in your qualifications with a view to possible employment. Is it not reasonable that they should expect that you would have taken the time and trouble to find out about the products and services with which the organization is concerned?

Essentially this will be basic information, but you undoubtedly will wish to flesh it out with further background that will assist you at the interview. You may add clippings, the brochures mentioned in the previous section, and all sorts of information that may come your way in the course of your research which would serve to make you as familiar with the individual business organization as possible.

As you perhaps can detect by now, your individual files may become quite voluminous. How may you best organize all this material? The most practical answer for flexibility in use would appear to be one or more loose-leaf notebooks which, if you do not already possess them, can be inexpensively obtained. The reason for the notebooks is that they permit you to add and subtract material as it seems important. You can also easily arrange your files in a sequence which is easiest for you to use, whether it be geographical or alphabetical. The notebooks are also easily transported to a library where you are doing your background research.

By allowing one full sheet or more for each prospective employer, you leave yourself room to make notations regarding dates of contact, individuals spoken to, your own observations and comments. The size of the loose-leaf page also makes it easy to enter additional information as you develop it.

Then while your basic research and development of a roster of prospective employers is proceeding, you will also be working on the development of your resume and your basic cover letter. The first step is that all-important resume.

All too many people get the cart before the horse. They want to start writing the resume before they have analyzed their qualifications. It is particularly important in approaching the business community, as opposed to a law office, simply because completion of a legal education will be only one of a number of qualifications in which the organization will be interested, as opposed to the law office for which it is the central fact of interest.

The business organization will want to know other aspects of your education and training that will be pertinent to job performance, the types of work experience that you may have had and the duties and responsibilities involved. As you jot down the various items, use your imagination to determine as to how the experiences that you have had would contribute to the business career you are seeking. Even if your work experience has been only in low-level jobs, for example, see if their pattern does not indicate ambition, drive, eagerness for education and ability to get along with others. Make a note of your conclusions.

Once you have assembled all of this information, you will then be able to decide on how your material should be arranged within your resume. You can find dozens of samples of good resumes in any job-hunting guide. There is no single pat formula. What you seek to do is to provide information about you and your qualifications in the manner that will call attention to the most important points at the very outset. Naturally, a one-page resume is the ideal, but in no event should it be more than two pages.

Once you are satisfied with the arrangement of your information, then it is time to have the resume in final form ready for duplication, proofreading and printing. At this point it is a foolish economy to print too few. It will be cheaper to purchase 500 copies and discard almost all rather than go through the expense of several reprints as the job search proceeds. Most people tend to underestimate the number of resumes that they will wish to use.

One important factor to keep in mind is that in all probability the initial reading of your resume will be by someone in the personnel department of the organization who is responsible for recruiting administrative and management personnel. As the personnel office is often a major stumbling block for legally trained persons seeking business careers, let us digress for a moment to talk about these persons and how you may develop their assistance in your own search. As always, this is probably easiest by putting yourself in the other person's shoes.

Probably the central factor that turns off highly trained people by the personnel department is the seemingly impersonal attitude created by the organization and paperwork necessary to handle the recruitment, record keeping and related functions for an organization with numbers of employees. Consider your own job search program and the amount of paperwork involved and multiply this many times over, and you will have some idea of the difficulties which they face.

However, the individuals you will be talking to in this department measure their own effective job performance by their ability to recruit and to channel into appropriate slots the most qualified employees to fill company needs. Thus, it is in their best interests, as well as yours, to communicate as freely and fully as possible. For example, can you imagine the suggestions which you might receive if at some point in your conversation you were to say something along the lines of, "Initially, I would like to be considered for a non-legal position in the contract administration area. However, I would consider other alternatives within the organization. Perhaps you can suggest other areas where my background and experience could best be utilized by your organization." As you can see, this type of approach gives you and the company representative a common goal, to find an opportunity which will use your talents to the fullest and which thereby offers the best possibility for advancement.

Keep in mind that your resume will be read by someone experienced in doing just that and able, therefore, to glean the important information efficiently and rapidly. (This is no excuse for sloppiness in your preparation because a good resume also tells that person favorable things about you.)

You will also be interviewed by a person experienced in employment interviewing. In fact, the individual to whom you are speaking may well have trained the management level persons of the organization in the art of effective employment interviewing in order that they also may do the best job in attracting qualified individuals to the posts under their jurisdiction. Personnel people, because of their experience, can be strong allies in your search for a position that you will be happy with and where you can perform most effectively—but only if you let them.

If the organization is small and does not have a personnel department your initial contact and interview will undoubtedly be with a management person in the area of interest you have indicated.

Back to the third step in the development of your job search program. That is the preparation of the general pattern for your cover letter. The resume itself is of necessity a somewhat formal document. The cover letter is essentially your sales piece. It need be only three paragraphs long.

In the first paragraph, tell the business organization why you are specifically contacting their company. Look at your research notes for clues. Is the type of business activity the particular appeal? Did the stockholder's report indicate a dynamic and aggressive management team? Is it because of the growth potential of the company? The particular factor you use is not as important as the evidence it provides that you have been specifically interested in that particular organization enough to find out something about it. Your geographic preferences, for example, would probably not be pertinent. What you want is something about the company that made you want to contact them.

The next paragraph should call to their attention your resume and particular qualifications for the opportunity that you seek. It should make quite clear that you are applying for a non-legal position even though you may call attention to aspects of your legal education that might particularly pertain to effective job performance.

The third paragraph should specifically state the reason for your communication. "I am interested in arranging an interview with a view to possible employment," may seem too direct but it clearly states the purpose of your contact and is, therefore, more likely to produce action. The final sentence of this last paragraph should indicate an address or telephone number where you can be reached, or even both. Do not let it worry you that this information also appears on your resume. Its purpose on the resume is informational, in the cover letter it is action oriented.

Since the cover letter must be individually typewritten, addressed to a specific person, and varied at least in the first paragraph by your differing reasons for contact, production may seem an insurmountable task. However, keep in mind that it can proceed as your research work proceeds and new contacts are developed. Further, you can divide the project into manageable segments. For example, five letters a week might be a manageable number, 100 letters a week might be impossible.

Your research is done, your resumes are printed and your cover letter has been developed.