Seven Things Best Legal Recruiters Can Do

 

Not Every Service Is the Same

As I already mentioned, if you are getting a service, you will never get the same thing from two people providing you the service. That is the main difference between getting a product and getting a service.


Years ago, I discovered that my neck lymph gland had swelled significantly. I visited several doctors about this issue for almost a year; however, none could tell me what it was. A young doctor who has just graduated from a school in Malibu asked me questions about using drugs and having unprotected sex, suggesting he suspected it was AIDS. Doctors in the emergency room did not know what it was, so they did many different tests without any luck in finding an answer. A blood doctor suspected it must be in my blood. A neurologist thought the origin of the swollen lymph must be neurological. An oncologist, of course, told me it must be cancer, although he has not yet found what type.

Desperate and thinking I would never find the cause or cure for my health problem, I stopped searching. When I was at a dermatologist with my wife a year later, I mentioned this problem to the young doctor. She was very motivated and wanted to help, so she started researching, ordered a few tests, talked to the doctors I had visited before, and invited an expert for a second opinion. It took her a few days of researching, and then she called me to tell me that she had found the solution - I was straining myself too much while doing hot yoga, and my immune system was reacting to that. She advised me to stop doing the yoga to make the swelling go away. And it did!

The main difference between the doctors was not that one went to a better school than the others or was more intelligent than them. She just cared about helping me and did not put her own biases before finding the solution. We want people to care about us, so finding people who do what they can to help us and provide solutions to our problems is essential.

Legal recruiters also provide services, so you always want to find those who care about you and your situation, not just someone who will do the bare minimum and call it a day. The right legal recruiter will believe in you and not judge you based on where you have been or where you are now.

Unfortunately, too many legal recruiters do not care about their clients. They went into recruiting because they figured out that a law firm is not for them, and this was the next logical step with a law degree after practicing law.

However, just having a law degree is not enough for becoming a good recruiter. Recruiters have also to be motivated by being able to help people. They have to be excited to be around others, finding out about them, their problems and finding solutions for them.

When you find a legal recruiter that wants to help people and cares about you, you get several things you would not have if you went into the job search on your own or used the services of a recruiter that does not care about you.
 

Things Only the Best Legal Recruiters Do

 

A Great Legal Recruiter Will Find Out As Much Information About You As Possible

Finding the perfect position for a person requires the recruiter to know a lot of information about them. However, if a person is in the legal recruiting industry just because they want to earn some money and do not know what to do after law school, they will likely not diligently do this. A great legal recruiter will always try to find as much information as possible. They will want to know about your background, the experiences you had in law school or your previous law firms, your hobbies, aspirations, what your dream law firm is, and also why you decided to go into the law industry, and what motivates you to want to stay there.

They need this information for two main things. Understanding you is vital for finding the right law firms and positions for you. Every law firm has different expectations from its attorneys and has a diverse company culture. That means that not every attorney will fit into the same firm even if they have similar backgrounds. Understanding your personality and motivation is therefore essential for finding the right position to succeed and grow in the position once you get it.

Great legal recruiters need to know so much about you because when they have a good idea of who you are as a person and as a lawyer, they can "sell" you to the law firms much more easily and convincingly. They can effectively communicate your strengths and tailor your story to fit the law firms, and they can imagine you as a part of it.

When a legal recruiter is good, they will want you to succeed, so they will want to find all of it to ensure they will give you the best chance to succeed in your ideal law firm.
 

An Excellent Legal Recruiter Will Provide Only High-Quality Service for You

Law firms always notice how people apply to their job ads and how they communicate with them. When they notice grammatical errors, typos, other mistakes, and inaccuracies in any documentation submitted by you, it does not represent you in the best light.

Lawyers are trained to notice even the smallest mistakes, and they do it in their everyday work. If your legal recruiter produces work of poor quality on your behalf, you can be sure they will notice it and will probably reject your application on that basis alone. A great legal recruiter will never send out an application in your name that is not perfect and flawless.

That is why it is often important that legal recruiters have started as attorneys. As attorneys, especially in top law firms, they had to learn to always triple-check everything they wrote because mistakes are never tolerated in these environments.

Just like the best attorneys take great care in producing only the highest quality briefs and statements, the best legal recruiters put the same effort into writing up only the highest quality applications, emails. They make sure your cover letter and resume are perfect, and they try to present you in the best light overall. Choosing a legal recruiter should be approached with the same care and thought as selecting an attorney. You would not want to be represented by an attorney of poor quality, so why choose a recruiter or legal recruiting firm that is not among the best.
 

A Great Legal Recruiter Focuses on Your Potential, Not Your Current Situation

While legal recruiters who are not that passionate about helping others might see obstacles between where you are now and where you want to be, a great recruiter will always see your potential and see you where you want to be regardless of where you are now. They do not care if you are unemployed, in a different type of law firm, in a different legal market or practice area. If they see that you are dedicated and motivated to work hard and do everything you can to get where you want to be, they will also give their all. They see the potential of where you could be with your skills and drive, not obstacles that stand in the way.

Of course, if you are not willing to put your all into getting where you want to be, even the greatest legal recruiter cannot do anything for you. However, the best recruiters know how to find out how motivated and willing you are to invest your time and energy into getting where you want to be. If a great recruiter decides to work with you, they already assessed that you really want to get somewhere and are willing to work for it, so they have no reason not to trust your abilities and potential. At that point, they have a vision for you and will help you improve and achieve your dreams.
 

The Best Legal Recruiters Will Contact You Constantly

A legal job search will generally last some time, and it is rarely done just within a few days. That usually means that you have to contact your legal recruiter over a longer period of time. If a recruiter connects you to a few firms, secures you some interviews, and you never hear from them again until you have the results from the interviews, it is not good.

A good legal recruiter will always be in contact with you. They usually work throughout your collaboration to research new positions, check-in with the firms you have already interviewed in, and stay on top of news in the legal industry. Throughout all of this, they should remain in contact with you. They should call or email you the moment they find out about a new position or the moment they hear back from a firm.

At BCG Attorney Search, we try to stay in constant contact with our clients from the moment they seek out our services to the moment they successfully onboard in a new law firm or decide to no longer use our company. Unfortunately, many legal recruiting firms are not like that, and they will stop contacting you once they find out that you have not been offered a position in any of the first firms you interviewed. Make sure you are not represented by that type of recruiter.
 

A Great Legal Recruiter Will Keep Up With the Firm on Your Behalf

Many legal recruiters will contact a few law firms on your behalf, send them your resume, and consider the job done. However, firms, especially the prestigious ones, get hundreds of emails and applications a day, so just sending them your resume is not enough. It is straightforward for them to overlook your application, so following up is essential for success. Great legal recruiters and legal recruiting firms will always find ways to keep in touch with law firms on your behalf, and they will keep checking in to find out where your application is in the process.

At BCG Attorney Search, we have an established system for keeping up with the firm about our clients. We make sure to send the application by email and by post mail, and we call the firm to make sure they received the application. We contact all law firms we collaborate with and stay on top of all candidates we refer to them. We also send them monthly overviews of all our clients they have invited for an interview, interviewed, or otherwise were in contact with. Having such a close relationship and regular contact with firms is very important for our clients and us, and I truly believe it makes us so successful in finding great placements for our candidates.

However, not all legal recruiting firms approach it this way. Staying in contact with so many firms can get time-consuming, and you have to have a system for it. Not everyone is willing to put this much work into it. Legal recruiters who do not care about their clients or their relationships with law firms will not be willing to do all of this for their candidates. But those who care about other attorneys and their placement will do this (and more) to help them.
 

Amazing Legal Recruiters Will Use Your Mistakes To Help You Learn From Them

No one is perfect, and we all make mistakes. Every attorney will inevitably make a mistake or two throughout their employment and legal job search. Some of these mistakes can set them back in their career.

Firms will often look down on them when an attorney goes in-house and later wants to come back into the law firm environment. If an attorney quits their current law firm without having another job lined up, they will end up unemployed for some time, which is usually a red flag for firms. Some attorneys switch firms and end up in a place about to go under without realizing it. Attorneys also often apply to firms and do not hear back from them, not knowing that they made a serious mistake with the firm's choice or had a resume full of typos.

A good recruiter is usually someone who has started as a lawyer themselves, so they have made these mistakes and are well aware of their effect on someone's life and career. They often use their own experiences making mistakes to help them navigate how their clients can learn from their mistakes and never repeat them. Good recruiters will help their clients be successful and learn to avoid mistakes by holding a thorough debriefing after every interview. Together the recruiter and client can identify and eliminate future errors. This debriefing will help the recruiter and the attorney have a successful collaboration. The attorney will be able to use this knowledge in their legal career.
 

A Great Legal Recruiter Will Always Be Able To Offer a Variety of Different Law Firms to an Attorney

There are many law firms in our country alone and even more when you are looking for law firm jobs worldwide. When a recruiter works hard to research these options, they can offer their clients a much wider selection of opportunities and a bigger chance of finding the perfect placement. A recruiter who can provide more options to their clients will always be more successful than someone who only works with a few firms or only in a limited legal market.

The key to uncovering all of these options is for the legal recruiting firms to research the less-known firms and markets and not focus only on the big names that everyone knows. That is why BCG Attorney Search only focuses on law firms and employs many researchers, not only legal recruiters. They work tirelessly to discover all available positions around the country (and even outside of it). At the same time, our recruiters collaborate with our clients and stay in constant contact with the firms. Many recruiting firms focus on too many settings, which do not allow them to dive deep and find the opportunities others do not know about. Also, suppose a legal recruiter works independently or in a small legal recruiting firm. In that case, it is much harder for them to invest that much time, effort, and money into researching legal jobs in smaller law firms and smaller markets.
 

Conclusions

Many attorneys believe that they can handle the job search and find the perfect placement on their own. And while it is certainly possible to do that, using the services of a talented legal recruiter or a recruiting firm can give you an upper hand and added value. Legal recruiters, especially the best ones, can find more positions than you because they have more resources. They also have established relationships with firms, so recruiters know about positions before they are published (sometimes before they are created/available). Moreover, they can prepare you for interviews. They know the firms' cultures, so they can warn you about what not to do. They are also your supporters and can plead your case to the law firms you interview in.

For the recruiter to be successful in this, they have to care about you and be interested in helping you. If they care about whether you succeed, they will be able to succeed themselves. Therefore, it is essential to find a good recruiter at their job and cares deeply about the people they are working with.