Legal Recruiting:
The Perils of Doing It Yourself

by Jon Lewis, Managing Director, Michael Lord & Company

Particularly in soft job markets, many law firms and in-house legal departments will ask themselves whether they really need to use a legal recruiter to fill an open position. After all, there are a lot of good lawyers out there looking for a job — how hard can it be to find one? And, more importantly, why should they pay a fee to have someone else do it for them?

Fair enough questions, and going it alone can indeed be a reasonable way to search for legal talent in some cases. Before doing so, however, employers should be aware of the potential pitfalls of such an approach, including the following:

1. Overwhelming Quantity. In a tight market for lawyers, employers can quite reasonably expect to have few problems in getting resumes. Just post the job on your website and watch the applications come rolling in. What could be easier, right? One problem, however, is that this can actually be too true. A posting for a reasonably attractive position can sometimes quickly generate an avalanche of candidates, many of whom are horribly desperate and even more horribly unqualified. There is a paradox here: the same tough times that make it easy to get resumes from a job posting are exactly when such a posting is most likely to generate a flood of paper that would be useful to have a recruiter sift through. This issue may not be too troublesome for a large firm or corporation with staff dedicated to recruitment, but for a smaller organization, a huge stack of resumes can become too much of a good thing.
2. Insufficient Quality. Most job seekers prefer to work with a recruiter if they can. Recruiters provide a variety of services (including resume review, market intelligence, interview preparation, etc.), all at no cost to the candidate. Obviously, recruiters offer such services because they hope to earn a fee by placing the candidate, but will not do so for candidates whose credentials they do not feel are strong enough to lead to a placement. (Shocking, I know, but saintly altruists are actually quite rare in the recruiting industry.) As a result, when an employer declines to work with recruiters, they are effectively making it more difficult for the higher-quality candidates using those recruiters to learn of the opening/submit resumes. Of course, some strong candidates will both work with a recruiter and take the additional step of submitting resumes directly for positions not open to recruiters. However, many good candidates will rely almost exclusively on recruiters to present them with appropriate opportunities, either because they are too busy with work to look on their own or are not actively considering new employment unless/until something attractive is presented to them. For this reason, the decision by an employer to forego recruiters has the net effect of disproportionately reducing the number of high-quality resumes likely to be received.
3. Paper Tigers. Sometimes, resumes lie. And not just in the sense that candidates may deliberately falsify information (though that unfortunately does happen from time to time). Even candidates who legitimately offer outstanding paper credentials in terms of academic achievement, legal experience, and job stability may not be good candidates for a particular position. Factors not apparent from a resume (such as personality issues, long-term career objectives, salary requirements, etc.) can be major stumbling blocks. While a good recruiter can often sniff out such problems before submitting a resume, an employer who opts against using a recruiter can expect to more frequently experience the disappointment (and waste of time) resulting when an interview reveals that the candidate who looked like a handsome prince on paper is an ugly toad in the real world.
4. Misreading Candidate Interest Levels. When candidates are in the midst of the interview process, they have every incentive to convey enthusiasm to the firm/company that is looking to hire. Even if candidates have reservations about the desirability/suitability of a particular opportunity, they will often not disclose that to the potential employer, figuring that they might as well get an offer even if they are likely to turn it down. Recruiters can often be a valuable resource in helping their clients better understand which candidates are, and are not, likely to accept an offered position. For this reason, employers who go it alone in hiring run a greater risk of wasting time on candidates who probably aren’t going to join them at the end of the day.
5. Negotiation Hangover. Even candidates and employers who are very well suited to one another sometimes have a hard time ironing out all the terms of a deal. An experienced recruiter can often help with the negotiation process, if nothing else than by serving as an intermediary who takes the heat from both sides. If protracted negotiations are handled directly between the parties, there is a greater risk that one or both sides may wind up harboring resentments towards the other (rather than towards a recruiter) before employment even starts. Not an auspicious way to begin a relationship.

Jon Lewis is a Managing Director with Michael Lord & Company. Jon graduated from Yale Law School and Wesleyan University and is formerly a trademark counsel at Joseph E. Seagram & Company and an associate at the predecessor firm to the New York City office of Dorsey & Whitney. His direct dial is 646.431.3431, and his email address is jon@mlordco.com.

© 2011 by Michael Lord & Company, New York, NY and Wilton, CT. All rights reserved.