How to Select a National Legal Recruiting Firm

How to Select a National Legal Recruiting Firm
By: Karen Anderson

How to select a national legal recruiting firm for your legal recruitment requirements can be a difficult process. However, with the right approach and a little thought and advice it can be a very rewarding process that can land you the perfect candidate.

There is a plethora of national legal recruiting firms to choose from, but they are not all created equal. So how do you go about selecting a national legal recruiting firm to conduct attorney recruiting on your behalf?

There are of course many well-established national legal recruiting firms up, and you may consider starting there. But there are also a number of less well-known legal recruiters who are growing fast and have an excellent reputation. You need to do a little homework and shop around. There are a number of important considerations worth mentioning that can start you on the right track:

National Legal Recruiting Firms – There are a growing number of national legal recruiting firms who operate across the country and can provide you with candidates from outside your immediate area through their extensive network and contacts. They can identify the type of talented candidates that may well be missed by using only a local legal recruitment firm or your own internal recruiting resources.

A number of national legal recruiting firms can also match a company’s specific requirements with a candidate experience, track record and previous employment recommendations. This is an important filtering process and can really help identify those candidates worth interviewing – but only if it’s done correctly.

A really good national legal recruiting firm will keep an extensive database of candidate profiles, tracking them from role-to-role ensuring a deep knowledge of their employment history is always at hand.

The Legal Recruiting Firm’s Network – Does your national legal recruiting firm have a significant national network that they can tap into to identify legal talent? If in doubt, ask them while you interview the legal recruiting firms you are considering hiring.

Determining how well connected the legal recruiting firm is and their areas of legal specialization can save a lot of time and ensure their candidate matching services are focused on your specific requirements. First, do they specialize in the type of recruiting that you are hiring them to do? How well do they know the market and the players? Also, be careful about hiring national legal recruiting firms that have done extensive work in your industry. Why? Because while they may look great on paper in terms of understanding your business, they may be limited insofar as where they can recruit legal talent from. In other words, legal recruiters have certain companies that he or she “places in” and some that he does not.

Written on: 09/28/16 PDF Version