WSJ and NPR Miss the Mark on Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)
Screening Interviews: 8 Ways to Waste Them
#9 Get too comfortable with the interviewer. Even if you spend the time talking about baseball or the movies, you are still in an interview and you are being judged.
Your seemingly casual conversation may be answering the question "Can we trust you to be professional and a good representative of the client should we leave you alone in a room with a client?" Be careful about slipping into jargon, slang, or Teen Age Mall Rat, the language of "I'm like, you know."
Your seemingly casual conversation may be answering the question "Can we trust you to be professional and a good representative of the client should we leave you alone in a room with a client?" Be careful about slipping into jargon, slang, or Teen Age Mall Rat, the language of "I'm like, you know."
Going to Work: 6 Tips for a Spring Job Search
Spring is a good time to jump start a job search.
You have (I hope) kept good records of the applications that you have made, the results of those applications, including interviews and any feedback that has come your way. Now is a particularly good time to look back and look forward, tidying up your documents and revising your activities. Here are 6 tips for your spring search.
REVIEW and REVISE:
- Your resume, cover letter & writing sample. Are your accomplishments described in useful, specific ways? It is not helpful for an employer to read "Research and writing" under a law clerk position because that is what all law clerks do. List, instead, two or three topics, making sure that you are able to talk intelligently and interestingly what you did. Do you state clearly who you are (1L, 2L, etc.), what you know about the job, and why you want it? Re-read your writing sample. Make it better.
- Your networking contact list. Contact someone from that list, and ask meaningful
specific questions. Make at least one contact per week. At the end of the year, you will know 52 new lawyers or other professionals.
- Your vision of the job that you want to have. If it looks
fuzzy, talk to someone who is working in a field that interests you. Ask
meaningful specific questions about what the person is doing. If, after talking to three people who have the job that you think you want, and you think that you would rather be boiled in oil, change directions.
- Your list of meaningful, specific questions. If you are having trouble creating a list of
meaningful specific questions, think carefully about how a work day might work?
Who might you talk to during the day? How do you get work assignments? How is your work evaluated? What are
the relationships like between and among co-workers? Who will supervise me? Who will I have to supervise? What does success look
like? What does it take to fail at this job? (My personal favorite.) Have your career services professionals or other valued and respected contacts review your questions to make sure that they are smart and not self-serving ("What perks do you have?")
- Your reading list. Are all of the substantive law and practice
blogs in your RSS feed still interesting to you and still related to your career goals? Or have
you changed your mind and not updated your RSS feed. A clogged RSS feed is an invitation to wild
and indiscriminate deletion. What? You don't have a reading list? If you don't take the time to learn about the work that you say that you want to do, why would anyone want to hire you?
- Your wardrobe. Are your shoes shined? Is your interview suit ready to wear today? Do your shirts need ironing? You should be prepared to go to an interview at any time. Employers are not constrained by spring break, exam schedules or bar study, and they post jobs and want to interview candidates right away. Be ready.
Dangerous High Heeled Interview Shoes
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| Dangerous Interview Shoe |
The business of law is deeply conservative, and dangerously high heels may bring a swift ending to an otherwise productive interview.
I applaud Lauren Rosa's recent lawyerist.com post, where she makes a very good case for the five shoes that every woman should want to own. Among her recommendations is a classic, closed-toe 3.5" heel stiletto.
7 inch heels and an interview suit?
From recent conversations with law school career services professionals and some observations of my own, it is time to remind some law students that 7-inch heels have no place with an interview suit.
Two reasons to avoid the maximum high heel in interviews and at work:
7-inch heels distracting?
Super-high heels can be distracting and scary to interviewers. Instead of your candidacy, the interviewer might be focused on "How does she walk in those?" or "What if she falls on me? Is that a Workers Comp injury?"
Interviewers know their culture
Interviewers know what will work at their offices, and they make cuts based on what they see. Many (not all, of course) legal employers are conservative, focused on their clients' needs, and not fashion-forward. Conservative dress doesn't include life-threatening high heels; clients may not be too keen on lawyers whose work-life-balance appears to be about standing upright; and managers, partners, associates and staff may cringe at the notion of stratospheric heels in court. What would the judge or jury think? How distracted would they be from our client's message?
Bottom line: Love them? Buy them. Don't wear them to interviews.
Going to Work: A New Law Firm With 161 Years of Experience - NYTimes.com
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Going to work: "No answer" is not enough
Would you leave a
final exam answer blank unless time had run out? Probably not. Why, then, might
you tell your supervisor that there was
no answer to the problem that he posed in your
most recent assignment?
Despite your best efforts, sometimes there is no easy answer
or no answer on point. However, you can’t just say “Sorry, Mr. Partner, there
is no answer,” or “I don’t know” after
hours or days of research. Why not? Your boss can’t turn around to the client
and say “Sorry, no answer.”
You have to give your
boss something that he can use to tell the client the pros and cons and options inherent in the difficult position
that having no clear answer creates.
At the very least you need to say “These are the options,
and here are the benefits and problems of each. Given the facts as you have
provided them to me, I would recommend the [first, second, whatever] choice
because...” Clients can’t make decisions
based on “I don’t know,” and they fire the lawyers they perceive as unhelpful.
This applies in the public sector, as well. The Attorney
General can’t go to the Governor and say “We don’t know, so you’re on your own
on this problem.”
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Susan Gainen's programs for law students are: Alternative Careers, 2nd Career Law Students, Job Search Skills = Business Development Skills, Professionalism Has Attached, and The Forever Skill: Job Search Outside of OCI. She is a watercolorist, painting geometric abstractions called nanoscapes, and she is artist, wrangler, blogger, and curator for whimsical creatures called small friends. Her creativity workshop is Watching Paint Dry Can Be Fun.
Diss 'Like' - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
BECOME BI-LINGUAL
Please continue to speak TAMR if it is your clients' first language, however, if you plan to represent them in the legal and business world, Standard English will be required.
Please continue to speak TAMR if it is your clients' first language, however, if you plan to represent them in the legal and business world, Standard English will be required.
Why? Imagine this language in a trial transcript:
"I'm like, Your Honor..."
"Like you know, the Plaintiff was like walking across the crosswalk, and, like the Defendant was like making a right turn and drove his car like right into my client."
Aside from sounding silly, is that language that your client may cheerfully pay for?
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