Career Talk

August 2007 Issue

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Strategies for Smart Hiring

by Charles Volkert, Esq.

Charles A. Volkert is executive director of Robert Half Legal®, a legal staffing service specializing in the placement of attorneys, paralegals, legal administrators and other legal professionals with law firms and corporate legal departments. Based in Menlo Park, Calif., Robert Half Legal has offices in major cities throughout the United States and Canada.

Given the current shortage of skilled legal talent in many areas, legal administrators’ task of finding experienced paralegals, legal secretaries and other support professionals for their firms has become more difficult and time-consuming ? and often results in a disappointingly limited selection of candidates. The situation is unlikely to improve in the short-term, as the oldest members of the Baby Boom generation prepare to leave the workforce for retirement.

To increase the odds that your recruitment efforts yield a large pool of candidates to choose from, you’ll need to implement smart hiring strategies. Following are several techniques to help you find the talent you need without protracted searches that cost your firm money and negatively impact productivity.

• Offer competitive compensation

Money may seem like an obvious incentive, but to attract the broadest cross-section of candidates, you can’t afford to be on the low side of the market with salaries, raises and bonuses. Professionals with experience in high-growth specialties such as intellectual property and litigation typically command even higher compensation. To ensure that your firm is offering competitive starting salaries, consult sources such as the Robert Half Legal Salary Guide, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Outlook Handbook and trade publications.

• Take advantage of technology

It’s difficult to compete for candidates today without a sophisticated online presence and strategy. A law office’s Web site, for example, is an excellent recruiting tool and should contain detail-rich information about the company’s mission, culture, history, successes, ongoing community involvement and current activities, as well as a way for job seekers to submit resumes or request more information. Online advertising is also an excellent recruitment strategy ? a single ad can potentially reach many times the number of job seekers as a classified ad in traditional print media. Online career sites are also good recruitment tools. Most will allow firms to post both job ads and company profiles, and will provide databases of candidate resumes that you can search by keyword.

• Outsource recruitment

The economic downturn earlier in this decade caused some firms to suspend the hiring of new human resources professionals and divert those on staff from recruitment into other areas. The resulting shortage of employees with recruiting experience means that firms now have fewer HR staff members focused exclusively on recruitment and hiring. This has prompted some law offices to turn to specialized recruitment firms whose staffing professionals can quickly locate skilled applicants for law firms to evaluate. Recruitment firms also have better access to legal practitioners who may not be actively searching for employment, thus widening the pool of potential candidates.

• Ask your firm’s internal “recruiters”

One of your best recruitment aids is right in front of you — your staff can be an excellent source of qualified candidates. Encourage current employees to tap their own professional networks by awarding them cash bonuses for referrals that result in a hire.

• Bring in interim help

Other firms have ramped up quickly by hiring interim legal support staff. These professionals are accustomed to working in a variety of environments and can help your firm keep projects on schedule while you continue to search for full-time employees. Some firms use a "temp-to-hire" approach, bringing in professionals on a temporary basis, evaluate their job performance and eventually transition the most promising individuals to full-time status. This arrangement is a good way to assess the employee’s fit with the specific position and the firm’s culture before extending a job offer.

• Rehire former employees

Consider rehiring paralegals, legal secretaries and other support professionals who left your firm on good terms. When valuable staff members move on, do your best to keep in touch with them through periodic e-mail messages or phone calls. That way, you’ll know when they’re seeking a new position. One advantage of rehiring former employees is that they are already familiar with your firm’s culture and best practices and will not need extensive training to get up to speed in their new positions. Another benefit is that they are a “known quantity” — you are already familiar with their skills, strengths and abilities, and know they will be compatible with the rest of your staff.

• Make Positions Challenging and Interesting

Create a long-term career track for paralegals and legal secretaries with increasing levels of responsibility, more challenging duties and opportunities for advancement. Otherwise, prospective candidates may fear that they will be underutilized at your firm and seek more interesting work elsewhere. In response to a survey commissioned by Robert Half Legal, 42 percent of respondents said "challenging assignments" provide the greatest job satisfaction for legal professionals at their law firms.

By taking a multi-faceted approach to recruiting, your firm will be able to take the developing talent shortage in stride and find the best prospects — before your competitors do.

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