5 Things Hiring Managers Need To Quit Doing

A few notes on these items, from the bitter ‘hiring manager’ of a four lawyer firm:

1. Cheating on writing samples has become rampant among job applicants these days. By cheating I mean handing me something that was heavily edited by a professor, an older sibling or a smarter class mate. (Don’t try to deny it’s happening. We see their work after we hire them, and we hear associates talking, including the ones who’ve “helped” siblings get into professional schools by “proofreading” said siblings’ essays for the applications.) We don’t really have the time or personnel to devote to testing applicants, but then again, we’re getting tired of trying to train people who haven’t mastered subject-verb agreement and apostrophes. It may get to a point where we have to resort to giving short essay tests for the applicants who are right out of law school. “Harvesting labor”? Please. I’m having a hard time imagining anything useful you could do that wouldn’t breach client confidentiality.

2. If you don’t get a call for an interview, you can infer that you’re not getting the job. Prospective employers don’t owe anything to applicants who are carpet-bombing multiple states with resumes. Particularly if it requires the time of an actual employee to create an otherwise useless database of applicants the firm isn’t hiring in order to perform the mail merge mentioned in this listicle – not to mention postage and/or the time to create an email list. If you are interviewed, yes, you should be told when you can expect to hear back from the firm. It is understood that you will keep looking in the meantime and that the firm may miss out on hiring you (as has happened to us a couple of times). Also, and this may come as a surprise to you, sometimes there is lag time in changes to the publication of job-listings, even when we notify the relevant outlets. (Possibly because they don’t want us to ask for a refund for the extra week we’ve already paid for.)

3. Survey monkey, disclosing salary – this sounds like BigLaw b.s. Agree that this is absurd.

4. Also sounds like BigLaw b.s. Small and medium-size firms don’t have time to waste training interns who might immediately decamp for a job that actually pays.

5. Oh, but we do read cover letters. It is your first writing sample to us. If you can’t be bothered to get the addressee’s name right or your letter contains a grammatical or spelling error, then your resume goes to the bottom of the pile (probably the pile in the garbage). Otherwise, yes, we know you just want a job. Keep your letter short, new law school graduates; your amazing experience in that one class does not really convince me that your “skills will be an asset” to the firm, so no need to agonize over that extra paragraph. We already know you don’t really know much of anything about our practice, and that’s OK.

Final note:

If you want the job, do try to sound like you might stay in the same city for a couple of years before you leave with only two weeks’ notice. It’s a drag to train someone and get them up to speed, licensed in other states, etc. only to have them leave without even an opportunity to discuss it. And we hate having to interview new people – we have work to do. We keep hearing that new grads are looking for a firm that will provide “mentorship,” but it appears that loyalty and investment are a one-way street to a lot of you. The legal community is very small, and karma goes both ways.

-Bitter Hiring Manager