Jumping In(House): Hiring Line

[Ed: Check out our fancy new artwork for the series!  We'll be working it in to past editions and the column archive, but going forward you should keep an eye out for it so you can identify this column.  The artist is Gideon Kendall, whom we found from all the work he does with Bankruptcy Bill.]

Even the largest law departments of the Fortune 500 hire fewer attorneys each year than most of the Vault 100.

More importantly, where law firms are, for the most part, looking for raw talent at the most-junior levels, law departments tend to hire people with particular skill sets.

Finally, law departments can’t take the “spray and pray” approach to hiring that firms seem to do.  The current law-firm business model depends on attrition; inhouse jobs are meant to last much longer.

How does that all affect the hiring process?

First, second, and third it makes the inhouse process much longer.  There are exceptions, but a corporate law department that goes from initial contact to offer in less than three months is lightning fast.

If the initial contact is a headhunter reaching out, that pushes toward a shorter process.  Not necessarily because the headhunter is so great, but because it shows the company is sufficiently committed to hiring.

Some companies know that it costs basically nothing to post a job opening.  They may not have funding to fill it yet, they may not even be sure there’s a need, or they may just want to know what’s available in the market.  The company may let resumes pour in for a while to crystallize their requirements before starting the search in earnest.  If you’re responding cold to a posting, it can be difficult to tell how serious they are.

Engaging a recruiter means that the company has done enough legwork to figure out exactly what they’re looking for and articulate it. It also means that the hiring manager* either has or is confident that he’ll get budget approval for the hire.

* Inhouse, “hiring manager” just means the person the new hire will report to.  It’s not a full-time job.

Companies also want to maintain good relationships with good recruiters, so they won’t engage a recruiter unless they’re serious about hiring.

Job postings are creatures of committee.  The hiring manager pulls together past precedents. If he’s really ambitious, he’ll not only use the previous listing, but he’ll also go through the job responsibilities of his other reports and work those in. The inhouse recruiter (they’re usually called “Talent [something]” these days, where [something] is similar to Acquisition, Delivery, Management or whatever) then conforms it to the company style, adds the boilerplate and sends a draft to a favorite recruiter or two.  They polish it a little and put in some more of the industry buzzwords.

All of that results in every job listing looking like it’s for a general counsel who will be responsible for everything under the sun, or a hyperfocused niche job that only 14 people qualify for.  They’re equally inaccurate.

The former happens because everyone knows that most jobs aren’t that exciting, but no one wants to put out a posting that’s so banal it scares off good talent.  That leads to dumping in all sorts of stuff that comes up once in a blue moon.

Plus, it makes you question how boring your own job is.

The latter happens when there has been a recent crisis due to some particular skillset not being at hand.  This usually results in a worse situation for the candidate.  You either end up being swamped with work in one hypernarrow field, which stifles career development, or you end up doing a whole bunch of stuff that wasn’t in the listing and you don’t want to do.

Next time, we’ll get into how to glean useful information from the posting, and then probably the actual hiring process.