And, a firm certainly should have an idea of candidates’ ability to conduct themselves outside the interview process. For both firm and candidate, then, it is a good idea to have some type of social interaction, whether a lunch, dinner, happy hour, or any activity where both the
members of the firm and the candidate can obtain an idea of what it
would be like to work with each other and interact on a daily basis.
However, the social setting should not be forced. Do not put candidates in the situation where they feel forced to drink alcohol or engage in other activities that make them feel uncomfortable—not everyone
wants to play on the firm’s softball team.
• Require written evaluations from the interviewer. These evaluations should be completed immediately after the interview and should provide for some type of numbered scoring system by which candidates
can be compared with one another. It is not likely that every candidate will be interviewed by the same persons, and it is also certain that different interviews will contain different conversations and foci. By requiring written evaluations and scoring, the decision makers can have points of comparison from several different people to review when hiring decisions are made.
Checking References
As the candidate is being interviewed, or shortly thereafter, the recruiting coordinator should check the references provided by the candidate. This is ideally done by a single person for all of the candidates or by a specific team of persons. This procedure also ensures that bias and favoritism are taken out of the process as much as possible. Special care should be taken, however, with checking references for lateral hires. The firm and the candidate should be very clear on which references are going to be called and when the
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calls are going to take place. For obvious reasons, it is a bad practice for professionals in the interviewing firm to place calls on their own to friends or acquaintances about the candidate. Jobs are often lost, and firm reputations ruined, by the surreptitious investigation of a candidate. A side note: Potential conf licts of interest should also be thoroughly analyzed and cleared at this point, if not sooner.
Strict Decision-Making Process for Offers
This is the critical juncture in the recruiting process. The candidates have been interviewed, favorites have no doubt been selected, and the firm must decide who will receive an offer and who will not. A word of warning—speed is essential in this phase. Presumably, the candidate is interviewing with more than one firm, and many otherwise amenable professionals end up with other employers because their first choice simply did not move fast enough.
For the sake of speed and other considerations, this part of the process must be tightly controlled. Before the initial criteria for a candidate is established and well before any interviews take place, the decision makers in the firm should have a process in place that determines who will make the hiring decisions. It does not have to be, and probably should not be, a single person who makes the decision. A recruiting committee or hiring committee is a much better alternative. But it is important that once the committee is em-powered to make hiring decisions, such power be unfettered by politics or other considerations. This allows the committee to move quickly (an attractive feature for almost all candidates), and it prevents political meltdowns within the firm.
Using a recruiting committee has several benefits. First, no one person shares the blame if a candidate turns out to be a bad hire. Second, a committee allows for a consensus dialogue, which avoids favoritism and bias. All too often in the recruiting process in law firms, for example, a powerful partner with a large book of business can subvert the process by “demanding” that a certain candidate be hired (or shown the door, in some cases). A recruiting committee allows for each person on the committee to have a vote and thus forestall any dictatorial moves. Third, the committee itself has the advantage of uniformity. The committee can view all of the candidates, both on paper and in person, through their resumes, interview evaluations, and their own personal interaction with candidates. If a large number of hires are to be made, the committee can pick and choose candidates, even across different sections of the firm, who are likely to provide a good fit.
After all interviews have been conducted, the hiring committee should meet and determine whether there is sufficient information to make a hiring decision. It is quite possible, especially with a lateral hire, that more information will be needed. If that is the case, the partner with whom the employee will be working can conduct further interviews or have lunch with
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the candidate to f lesh out any concerns that he or she may have. Also, greater weight should obviously be given to the opinions of those with whom the employee will be working—everyone should have one vote, but there will always be votes that count more than others. Once the committee decides that it has enough information to make the decision, the appropriate compensation has to be decided before the offer is made.
Negotiation of Compensation
The issue of compensation is one of the most hotly contested and is one where much depends on the individual culture of the firm. Many firms, especially larger ones, subscribe to the theory of lockstep or banding compensation for nonequity employees. This ensures that every employee at a certain level gets paid the same amount or at least range of compensation, regardless of merit or other considerations. In most large law firms and accounting firms, the calculation is relatively simple: Each associate or manager gets paid a certain amount of salary in the first year out of school, a certain amount for the second year out of school, and so on. The only difference in compensation between employees of the same experience level comes in the form of periodic bonuses, which is outside the recruiting process and comes well after the employee has been hired and evaluated.
If the firm in question is hiring new workforce professionals, lockstep compensation is by far the preferred and most widely used method. The package will be the same for all new hires, and there is little, if any, negotiation. Candidates are simply told what the firm pays first-year associates and perhaps are apprised of the potential bonus range for first-year associates and what criteria determine the bonus. From the candidates’ perspective, this system is beneficial because evaluating the compensation packages at different firms is easy and transparent.7 From the firm’s perspective, it is able to make hiring decisions based solely on the merits of the individual, without having to worry about price and a blind-bidding scenario. The firm is also able to include in its yearly budget the appropriate allocations.
There can be a more difficult scenario for lateral hires, however. If a firm is approaching a lateral hire for a nonequity position, the lockstep method is still viable, provided that the lateral candidate is satisfied with the compensation.8 However, if a lateral hire is viewed as a potential superstar or has a practice in a sought-after specialty, the candidate may attempt to negotiate for a more lucrative pay package than others of his or her same experience. This situation must be handled cautiously. The candidate is attempting to gain the leverage in the negotiations, which is a situation most firms prefer to avoid.
Also, if the firm allows this to occur, it is almost certainly inviting its existing associates to renegotiate their pay packages. Therefore, a firm can start out with every intention of maintaining a lockstep compensation package, only to
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have it fall apart with the first exception. Most firms faced with this scenario compensate such an employee through the year-end bonus structure, rather than change the base rate of pay. This allows for some (but certainly not complete) secrecy from other employees and takes the compensation negotiation out of the recruiting process. It does require, however, a leap of faith from the incoming employee that the promises being made will be fulfilled, and this is likely to become an issue before acceptance of the offer. The candidate may ask for some comfort from a decision maker that the expected
“extra” compensation will in fact occur.
After the Offer: Selling the Firm
Once the candidate has been selected and the offer has been transmitted (preferably through a personal meeting or phone call, not by a letter), it will come as no surprise that more often than not, there is not an immediate acceptance. As stated earlier, the firm should probably not assume that it is the only suitor for the services of the candidate. Therefore, the members of the firm may be put into the situation where they will have to sell the candidate on the firm and themselves. For the most part, this varies by candidate: It is usually obvious whom the firm is competing with for the candidate and what the candidate believes are the sticking points for accepting the offer. The critical guidance here is that the members of the firm should not oversell and should be careful not to pressure the candidate into making a decision. Candidates appreciate the time and hassle-free period in which to make this important decision, and constant phone calls or lunches serve only to muddy the waters for many candidates, and to introduce undue pressure into the process. Suggested best practices in this time period are periodic personal letters from individual partners in the firm, offering to answer any questions that the candidate may have. A “hard sell” may also have the unintended consequence of making the candidate believe the firm is desperate or that it is trying to force an acceptance before the candidate finds out something the firm would prefer to keep hidden.