While the “Great Resignation” is no longer the buzzword in legal recruiting circles, this doesn’t mean employees aren’t still walking away from their jobs at unprecedented rates. Employee turnover remains 20% higher than pre-pandemic levels, and law firms continue to feel the squeeze. You may have made big changes to your hiring, training, and retaining practices this past year, but this doesn’t mean your work is done. If you want your investment in renewed personnel strategies to pay off, you need to work towards humanizing the legal recruiting process. This begins with how you hire.
Law Firm Hiring: Want Top Talent? Here’s How to Ask for It
If I were to ask you to list the three things employees want most in a job, what would you say? Pay, location, and amazing colleagues, maybe? Upward mobility? Unmatched benefits? Nope, nope, nope, nope, and NOPE. All of these things are important, sure, but none are top priorities for today’s employees.
According to a study cited in the Harvard Business Review of over 50,000 employees from a randomized sample of professions around the world, the top indicators of work engagement and satisfaction were:
- A feeling of excitement to go to work
- A chance to use one’s strengths every day
- The opportunity to do work a person loves and is good at
Surprising? Not really when you step back and notice that each of the above is a profoundly human need.
Everyone needs to feel excitement in their life and, if you’re a busy professional, a lot of your life is spent at work. Likewise, everyone wants to feel accomplished. Applying one’s strength is a cornerstone of community building, and community is the backbone of human well-being. Lastly, doing something a person loves creates meaning, without which engagement is impossible. Beyond everything else a “good job” provides, top talent wants to work in a humanizing environment. Interview questions for law firms thus need to emphasize the human element if they hope to succeed at bringing in the best.
Interview Questions for Law Firms: Unveiling (and Attracting) Human Talent
All too often, law firm hiring focuses disproportionately on skills when cultural concerns are just as—if not even more—important. If you want to build a productive, happy, engaged team you need to know not just want your employees can do, but also who they are. Only upon this basis can you connect people with their purpose and thereby achieve sustained productivity. The following ten questions help you get there:
- What are your goals?
- Why are those your goals, and what makes them important to you?
- How do your professional goals impact your personal goals?
- What do you look for or need from your employer to help you achieve these goals?
- What work-related accomplishment are you most proud of? Why? What made you proud?
- When was a time you were truly happy or satisfied at work? What was it about the work or the environment that caused that feeling?
- What is the most important or exciting thing you have learned in the past year?
- What do you like about your current role and current work environment? How does that impact you?
- What are you looking to improve in your current situation?
- What do you want to learn, and where do you wish to grow your skill set?
These questions are, of course, just a guide. What matters is interviewing with genuine curiosity and a focus on unveiling the person behind the resume.
To learn more about landing (and retaining) the talent you need to succeed, check out our Smart Hire Solution™ process—a proven system for legal recruiting, all for one predictable flat fee. If you have an open position at your firm, we can help you find, recruit, hire, onboard, and even train the perfect new hire. Schedule a free clarity call with me, Hiring & Empowering Solutions founder, Molly McGrath.
