4 ms·

I've read a million "hiring is broken" articles about software companies, so I asked my sister (lawyer) yesterday how the legal industry does hiring. She told m

by noego 7y ago

I've read a million "hiring is broken" articles about software companies, so I asked my sister (lawyer) yesterday how the legal industry does hiring. She told me that even at the most prestigious and exclusive legal firms in the nation, the interview success rate is ~50%. That seemed staggeringly high, considering that Google's is less than 10%. So I asked her how these legal firms managed to pull off such a high interview success rate. Apparently, they only ever invite someone to interview, if they are already pretty sure they want to hire that person. And how does that work? They make no attempt whatsoever to judge your competency on the basis of interview performance. Rather, you are judged almost entirely by your resume - the "brand name" of the law school you attended, your GPA, and the "brand name" of the law firms you've previously worked at. If your school or previous law firms aren't prestigious enough, you won't even be invited to an interview. In fact, not only is the above a convention, it's often a firm policy. My sister once got a job offer, through very fortunate circumstances, at an elite law firm. But their HR department blocked her hire, literally because she did not attend a top-15 law school. Ironically enough, I've never heard anyone complain about legal hiring being broken. Perhaps that's precisely because legal firms don't even give most people a shot - they are filtered out entirely at the resume stage. I imagine people get far more agitated when they are rejected after an interview, as opposed to being ignored entirely from the outset. I'm personally glad to work in an industry where even the most exclusive companies are willing to give everyone a shot at the interview, regardless of which school they went to. Is hiring broken in tech? Sure. But it's completely dysfunctional elsewhere.

fatnoah 7y ago
>Rather, you are judged almost entirely by your resume - the "brand name" of the law school you attended, your GPA, and the "brand name" of the law firms you've previously worked at. If your school or previous law firms aren't prestigious enough, you won't even be invited to an interview. Somewhat ironically, I took a brief detour into patent law after my first few years as a SW developer. I had a MSEE plus four years of software experience. I mailed 5 resumes to the biggest law firms in town (Boston). I got five interviews and 2 job offers. Salary was about 5% less than my current salary at the time, but they'd pay for law school and guarantee a job when you finished. There is an "in" but it's fairly unconventional.
- sizzle 7y ago
  That's awesome! Why didn't you follow through with offers?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
DavidAdams 7y ago
Malcom Gladwell addresses this strange credentialism in the legal industry in a recent podcast. In his reckoning, entry into top law schools is determined almost entirely on LSAT scores, and the LSAT favors people who can process questions extremely quickly. But good lawyering is done by deliberative people who often don't perform well on standardized tests. In the podcast, a guest who took a look a legal hiring determined that LSAT or resume from top firms were not good markers of a good lawyer, so yes, legal hiring seems to be very broken. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/31-puzzle-rush http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/31-puzzle-rush
- dogma1138 7y ago
  For every court room charmer or a loophole engineer a large firm will 100’s of associates digging through documents and filing motions in the background. In fact if a top tier law firm does their job well they would likely never get to a court room. The main “need” of large law firms is an army of motion bees and discovery drones. If anything it shows that large firms have too much of an influence over school admissions rather than that legal hiring is broken.
bradleyjg 7y ago
Came to make this comment. I think all the popular programming hiring processes are flawed but as compared to other professions we are doing great. Most industries aren’t even trying to have any objectivity whatsoever. It’s purely did the interviewer have a nice chat with the interviewee. My last round of tech interviews I know why I didn’t get offers for most of the ones I didn’t. The BigLaw interviews I went on I have no clue.
TrackerFF 7y ago
That is certainly the case for law, consulting, and finance. And it has been like that for decades. For the most part, I think it's due to two things: - Signaling to clients ("We're hiring the best students from the best schools") - The workload that these people are expected to tackle. If you hire a 3.5 GPA student from good schools, with a impressive resume, there's a good chance that he/she is - Smart. Not necessarily a genius, but smart enough to tackle most problems they get. Some fields, like consulting, require relatively fast thinking and soaking up new information / knowledge. - Hard-working / good work ethics. They probably put in a lot of hours during their school years, which also happens to be something you'll meet in those industries - Structured. People that go to the top schools don't tend to just stumble into them, there's a good chance they've planned and stuck to it. And if you're a bit cynical, and it could also maybe signal: - That they're from the "correct" socio-economic class. The majority of HYPS students come from well-off families. When the majority of your clients have similar backgrounds (upper middle-class to upper class), the social interaction can be a bit smoother. But with that said, these companies have become more open and lenient on these kinds of things. They see that top students from "lesser" ranked schools are just as good as their peers from the Ivies. Other fields, like tech, is a serious competitor for top talent. 30-40 years ago Ivy league grads flocked to management consulting and investment banking; And they still do, but top tech companies are attracting them too.
christiansakai 7y ago
Interesting. For some reason rejection always finds its way to me in many aspects of life. When I was looking around for coding bootcamps 6 years ago I got rejected 8/9 times lol. I got into one, and upon finishing that bootcamp I went to get a CS degree. I have a CS degree now and I think I perform quite well, even in my DSA knowledge (I solved about 200 Leetcode questions by now, easy, medium and hard in total). I still find it hard to get even a phone interview at FAANG. My resume just got rejected, or ghosted by the recruiters.
- xtracto 7y ago
  Life is a funnel. Everything is a matter of numbers and setting the odds in your favor. From the % probability to get into a Uni for a student, to the probability of raising a good series C for a successful CEO. Passing through the probability of finding a good life partner. Successful people have realized this and either learn to improve their funnel % or they increase their numbers.... the later is the easiest. Just keep applying and by pure statistics, you will land a job you want to.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
RandallBrown 7y ago
My wife is a Physician Assistant and her interview process was so strange to me because it wasn't really based on her medical skills, just sorta standard "Why do you want to work here?" type questions. I would expect they ask her questions about hypothetical patients to see what her thought process is. See what kind of details she notices or discards. Nope, they just trust that your PA school degree and subsequent exam do all of that for you.

by noego 7y ago

fatnoah 7y ago

>Rather, you are judged almost entirely by your resume - the "brand name" of the law school you attended, your GPA, and the "brand name" of the law firms you've previously worked at. If your school or previous law firms aren't prestigious enough, you won't even be invited to an interview. Somewhat ironically, I took a brief detour into patent law after my first few years as a SW developer. I had a MSEE plus four years of software experience. I mailed 5 resumes to the biggest law firms in town (Boston). I got five interviews and 2 job offers. Salary was about 5% less than my current salary at the time, but they'd pay for law school and guarantee a job when you finished. There is an "in" but it's fairly unconventional.

sizzle 7y ago
That's awesome! Why didn't you follow through with offers?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

DavidAdams 7y ago

Malcom Gladwell addresses this strange credentialism in the legal industry in a recent podcast. In his reckoning, entry into top law schools is determined almost entirely on LSAT scores, and the LSAT favors people who can process questions extremely quickly. But good lawyering is done by deliberative people who often don't perform well on standardized tests. In the podcast, a guest who took a look a legal hiring determined that LSAT or resume from top firms were not good markers of a good lawyer, so yes, legal hiring seems to be very broken. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/31-puzzle-rush http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/31-puzzle-rush

dogma1138 7y ago
For every court room charmer or a loophole engineer a large firm will 100’s of associates digging through documents and filing motions in the background. In fact if a top tier law firm does their job well they would likely never get to a court room. The main “need” of large law firms is an army of motion bees and discovery drones. If anything it shows that large firms have too much of an influence over school admissions rather than that legal hiring is broken.

bradleyjg 7y ago

Came to make this comment. I think all the popular programming hiring processes are flawed but as compared to other professions we are doing great. Most industries aren’t even trying to have any objectivity whatsoever. It’s purely did the interviewer have a nice chat with the interviewee. My last round of tech interviews I know why I didn’t get offers for most of the ones I didn’t. The BigLaw interviews I went on I have no clue.

TrackerFF 7y ago

That is certainly the case for law, consulting, and finance. And it has been like that for decades. For the most part, I think it's due to two things: - Signaling to clients ("We're hiring the best students from the best schools") - The workload that these people are expected to tackle. If you hire a 3.5 GPA student from good schools, with a impressive resume, there's a good chance that he/she is - Smart. Not necessarily a genius, but smart enough to tackle most problems they get. Some fields, like consulting, require relatively fast thinking and soaking up new information / knowledge. - Hard-working / good work ethics. They probably put in a lot of hours during their school years, which also happens to be something you'll meet in those industries - Structured. People that go to the top schools don't tend to just stumble into them, there's a good chance they've planned and stuck to it. And if you're a bit cynical, and it could also maybe signal: - That they're from the "correct" socio-economic class. The majority of HYPS students come from well-off families. When the majority of your clients have similar backgrounds (upper middle-class to upper class), the social interaction can be a bit smoother. But with that said, these companies have become more open and lenient on these kinds of things. They see that top students from "lesser" ranked schools are just as good as their peers from the Ivies. Other fields, like tech, is a serious competitor for top talent. 30-40 years ago Ivy league grads flocked to management consulting and investment banking; And they still do, but top tech companies are attracting them too.

christiansakai 7y ago

Interesting. For some reason rejection always finds its way to me in many aspects of life. When I was looking around for coding bootcamps 6 years ago I got rejected 8/9 times lol. I got into one, and upon finishing that bootcamp I went to get a CS degree. I have a CS degree now and I think I perform quite well, even in my DSA knowledge (I solved about 200 Leetcode questions by now, easy, medium and hard in total). I still find it hard to get even a phone interview at FAANG. My resume just got rejected, or ghosted by the recruiters.

xtracto 7y ago
Life is a funnel. Everything is a matter of numbers and setting the odds in your favor. From the % probability to get into a Uni for a student, to the probability of raising a good series C for a successful CEO. Passing through the probability of finding a good life partner. Successful people have realized this and either learn to improve their funnel % or they increase their numbers.... the later is the easiest. Just keep applying and by pure statistics, you will land a job you want to.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

RandallBrown 7y ago

My wife is a Physician Assistant and her interview process was so strange to me because it wasn't really based on her medical skills, just sorta standard "Why do you want to work here?" type questions. I would expect they ask her questions about hypothetical patients to see what her thought process is. See what kind of details she notices or discards. Nope, they just trust that your PA school degree and subsequent exam do all of that for you.