Double Edition: "Law firm hiring" and "Where have all the lawyers gone?"
A deep dive into various matters related to law firm hiring and turnover statistics.
I recently concluded our firm’s first official hiring process. Was that ever a task!
I had been lucky to-date that our initial Durant Barristers staff largely fell into my lap thanks to past relationships and a super eager young lawyer applying on the very first day that I was open for business. When we had an opening this time, I decided to go beyond my personal network and do a general call for applications.
The posting was open for approximately 1 week and we took applications through LinkedIn only. The posting was accompanied by a video from myself explaining a bit more about the position and the firm in general.
We received about 150 applicants. Roughly half of those were easily eliminated based on LinkedIn screening questions. We then reviewed the rest of the applicants and selected 25 people to be interviewed. We requested additional information from our top applicants after the interview process and ultimately extended offers to two lawyers - although we initially intended to only hire one.
I learned a few things from our interviews with top candidates. Here are the top 3 themes:
Many people were willing to take a significant pay cut to work remotely and in a more flexible/supportive environment.
Candidates appreciated my personal involvement in the process and the clarity about the type of work that the successful candidate would do.
A lot of candidates shared horrendous stories about their current work environment and stated that they applied due to my social media content, writing and speaking about mental health in the workplace.
I also learned quite a bit about sorting through candidates as part of this process. Previously, I had only really been involved with hiring as part of a Big Law machine and primarily with student recruiting. In that context, firms are often looking for simply the best and brightest while also looking to hire some specific subject matter or language needs. What I was looking for in a smaller firm was much different. We need lawyers with practical experience, who have business development potential and who have the ability to service clients that are currently outside of our wheelhouse. Given our firm’s unwavering commitment to a healthy work environment, we also had to be careful to select candidates whose goals aligned with ours. We did not need or want to accidentally introduce a shark to our calm waters.
In the end, we made offers to two amazing lawyers who we will introduce to our network in due course. We have also kept a folder of future prospects in hopes that we do not have to run such a large process again in the near future.
Hiring in a small firm takes up a significant amount of time and resources. Time and resources that we could not spend on client service and making money. The hiring process solidified my view that keeping employees happy and healthy needs to remain a top priority as we continue to grow. Constant hiring would be a significant drain on our resources.
That brings me to my second topic: law firm turnover. I have been fascinated by turnover rates since I was an associate and I constantly saw lawyers coming and going from various firms. There was no real way to easily track the total number of people leaving - even at my own firm. Fortunately, I have since discovered that there are paid services that attempt to track these numbers for recruiters and law firm managers. I have paid to get access to these numbers. Below are some insights (for paid subscribers only since the cost to access this data is not small).
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