Imagine you had to drive or attend a meeting somewhere you haven’t been before and Google Maps and Apple Maps weren’t working or all GPS systems had been disabled. Ignoring the widespread apocalyptic scenes that would no doubt be occurring if such an event happened, how would you successfully navigate to your meeting? For those people who remember using maps, it is a slower and more laborious process and getting lost was a common occurrence. It was difficult to pinpoint your final destination and your route there. Getting lost was a common theme of many a holiday trip only 30 years or so ago. Now with the advent of reliable GPS technology, navigation is a breeze and no one is looking to go back to traditional, clunky and less reliable methods. Which begs the question, why is your law firm or in-house legal team not embracing technology and trying to recruit legal talent without a GPS?
A map, compass and a long journey.
For the purpose of this analogy, this equates to posting job advertisements and using a traditional recruitment agency. It’s not that you don’t eventually find your final destination but it wastes a great deal of your time, most likely sends you down some dead-ends and is ultimately a very frustrating experience. By the time you’ve reached your destination, you arrive flustered and annoyed. If your recruiting experience is similar, that is not a good place for you to onboard your latest hire.
In many ways, traditional recruitment methods are outdated and increasingly aren’t producing the results law firms, legal providers and in-house legal teams require. Looking at job advertisements first, they are like a map that you bought five years ago. The main areas are marked, and you can see the wider location but it is missing lots of the details. Job adverts, when you think about them, only talk to a small portion of the market. People don’t go on Seek and the alternative websites if they are not actively looking for a new opportunity. This means your advert is only hitting a tiny portion of the market. You have realistically a ripped or incomplete map! Your chances of finding the best option for your new or vacant position are minimal with this limited and costly approach.
Then there are recruitment agencies. Their first port of call is the candidates registered with their agency. Once again a map that only has part of the landscape navigated. They may then reach out to lawyers at your competitors with a hope of tempting them across. This process is somewhat targeted but is a bit scattergun and as soon as the recruiters have a candidate that might fit part of the brief they will try and sell them into you. These candidates can be those dead-ends mentioned earlier. It looks like you are going the right way but somehow it turns out to be the wrong candidate and that time has been wasted.
If X marks the spot, what if you can’t locate X?
For law firms and in-house teams, the issue perhaps surprisingly isn’t that the right legal talent and ideal candidate doesn’t exist, it’s simply that hiring firms have no idea where it is. In any journey you’re navigating, if you don’t know what your final destination is, then your chances of getting there are slim to none.
However, many of the successful hires you have had over the years, have been those that already had connections to your employees and your firm and company. It is why companies and firms offer internal reward schemes for successful candidate referrals and also one of the reasons why they invest so heavily in alumni programmes. These hires work as they not only have the technical skills required but tend to be culturally aligned with your current employees.
Imagine if you could see who has the skills you require, who they know within your firm and could see the final destination of your talent search in minutes? It sounds revolutionary, being able to know where X is and how to navigate to it in the quickest way possible. It is like you have your own legal recruitment version of google or apple maps!
You need a GPS to find the leading legal talent
To do any job successfully you need the right tools. For those firms and in-house teams that are serious about winning the battle for legal talent, do you currently have the right tools? Do you have your own GPS equivalent? A legal technology tool that can help you see and search the entire talent pool in minutes, and create your own shortlist of candidates, in the same time it takes you to create a realistic and updated job description?
The crazy thing is, that this technology exists. It has for a few years now. Those firms and in-house teams around you that seem to always be growing, prospering and continually hiring the legal talent you wish you had are the ones most likely using it. In the race for legal talent, you’re not only lagging behind but the real kicker is that you’re also paying a huge amount of money more than they are to lose the race. It makes zero commercial sense to keep doing what you’re doing and hope you catch up.
It’s time to join the legal recruitment revolution and invest in your own legal recruitment technology that enables you to locate the legal talent you are looking for and most importantly the talent that has links to your people. Use the technology that exists to navigate the hiring journey smoothly, at a fraction of the cost and in far less time.
Conclusion – stop trying to recruit legal talent without a GPS.
Imagine you’d never opened or downloaded Google Maps or Apple Maps. How much time and extra frustration would travelling around have been for you in that time? You wouldn’t do it. The technology is far too powerful and helpful for you to ignore.
The same is true of our legal recruitment technology. Our existing customers not only tell us that they save time and money on every single hire, they also ask us not to tell their competitors about it. They don’t want you to take out an Insource subscription, they see our technology as a massive competitive advantage.
Stop getting left behind in the legal talent race, book in your free demo today.
