To make the process more efficient, many firms assign more than one mentor to each junior professional. This allows the junior professional to spread the questions around to more than one person, thus preventing the mentoring program from taking up too much time from one individual. It also prevents problems with bad mentors, bad advice, or simply a breakdown in what is a very personal relationship.
Mentoring is not, primarily, about the teaching of skills. The mentor is meant to provide guidance and advice, not necessarily strict training. It is assumed in firms today that the training will be provided by a number of professionals, mentors, and others, from project to project. In fact, one of the greatest benefits to a larger firm is that often the associates are exposed to a number of professional staff from all levels on different projects. Since each supervisor will perform tasks and projects in different ways, the training itself is varied and associates will eventually develop their own style. But supervision is not mentoring. Mentoring involves guidance, “showing the way of the world” to the younger professional. The mentor should provide experience and encouragement and should work to develop the interpersonal skills of the protégé.10 The mentor is above all intended to be a background or a voice to which the professional can turn to on a variety of issues, not just a single question on a particular project.
Quality of Life Issues
It is no secret that professional services firms expect a great deal of sacrifice from their employees. In turn, those employees are compensated extremely well with pay packages, perks, and benefits. However, quality of life issues often are raised within firm surveys as a top five issue with which professionals have problems. The long hours and the travel time are difficult on young families and often lead to defections from professionals looking to have a life, not just earn a living. The strongest weapon that a firm has concerning quality of life issues is the group input panels discussed earlier.
When the non-equity professionals are listened to through these groups, it provides a cross-section of opinion on whether the quality of life at the firm is suffering. This validates that a problem is real and not the product of one or two malcontents. At the same time, it also ensures that the problem, once
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identified, is dealt with on an ongoing basis between the group input committee and the leadership of the firm.
Debriefing the Recruiting and
Retention Processes
At some point on an annual basis, it is important that the recruiting process as a whole be reviewed separately by the hiring committee and by the management committee of the firm. This is a step in the recruiting and retention process most often overlooked, to the detriment of many firms.
The hiring committee should undergo a detailed analysis, concentrating on certain, quantifiable metrics: how many candidates were considered, how many were interviewed, what was the acceptance rate, and how much money was spent per candidate on a pro-rata basis. These and other metrics help the committee determine where the money and time should be spent in the next year ’s recruiting, and eventually the goal is to have most of the inefficiencies of the process eliminated. Keeping a running total of five years of rolling budgets is particularly helpful, as these can be charted against firm growth and the professional services economy to spot trends that can be anticipated for the next year. The data collected by the hiring committee should then be passed on to the management committee, along with any recommendations that the hiring committee has for changes to the program.
The management committee’s review should be more in line with this second, five-year review of the hiring committee. The management committee should be able to take the 10,000-foot view of the recruiting process in general to determine:
• Are we getting the people that we need?
• Why are certain people accepting, and why are certain people rejecting?
• Once we recruit a new employee, what is the average length of tenure?
• What do exit interviews indicate are the top five reasons people give for leaving?
• Are there trends that we, as a firm, have not yet identified?
Summary
Professionals by their very nature can have difficulty in actually “running their business.” Professionals would often rather be providing client services than be involved in the day-to-day details of operations. However, there are numerous opportunities for the firm to obtain objective data that affects not
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only its present, but also its future. The key is to institutionalize the processes and put the effort in on the front end to make sure the processes are correct and that each step gathers data that can be used to analyze what the firm does correctly and what the firm does incorrectly.
If the recruiting and retention process concentrates on obtaining objective criteria at every level, the management committee should be able to aggregate and report on all of the information and determine whether there are underlying problems in the firm’s culture, compensation structure, or workload that indicate a wrong path.
Resources
“An Insider ’s Guide To Interviewing: Insights from the Employer ’s Perspective”
(National Association for Law Placement, 1666 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 325, Washington, DC 20009; 1996).
“Attorney Recruitment and Retention: A Showcase of Best Practices” (National Association for Law Placement, 1666 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 325, Washington, DC 20009; 1996).
Ida O. Abbot, Esq., The Lawyer’s Guide to Mentoring (National Association for Law Placement, 1666 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 325, Washington, DC 20009; 2000).
Arnold B. Kanter, The Essential Book of Interviewing: Everything You Need to Know from Both Sides of the Table (Times Books/Random House, 1995).
H. Anthony Medley, Sweaty Palms: The Neglected Art of Being Interviewed (Ten Speed Press, 1978, revised 1984, 1992).
Notes
1. The scope of this chapter is limited to the recruitment and retention of professional employees, that is, individuals with the education and attendant licenses to deliver the core services of the firm, whether the practice of law, account-ancy, investment banking, or others. Excluded from this chapter is the recruitment or retention of support staff and back-office functions. Those processes, equally, and in many cases more, important to the operations of a firm, are reserved for other chapters.
2. The names of these categories were chosen by the author, and certainly each category has numerous synonyms. None of the categories are intended as slights to any particular classification—in fact, each is wholly necessary to the successful functioning of a professional firm. And, contrary to the beliefs of many professionals, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for any one individual to perform adequately in more than two of these categories.
3. Terms used in this article that denote industry-specific terms, such as associate or partner, ref lect the author ’s background as a lawyer but are not meant exclusively to ref lect law firms, either big or small. The concepts can be equally
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applied to accounting firms, investment banks, and other professional services firms. The reader is encouraged to substitute his or her own industry terms (such as principal, manager, managing director, or others) where appropriate.
4. These bonuses can be substantial. A bounty of $5,000 or $10,000 (and sometimes more) for recruiting a lateral hire is not uncommon.
5. One excellent resource is An Insider’s Guide to Interviewing: Insights from the Employer’s Perspective (National Association for Law Placement, 1666 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 325, Washington, DC 20009; 1996).
6. Attorney Recruitment and Retention: A Showcase of Best Practices (National Association for Law Placement, 1666 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 325, Washington, DC 20009; 1996).
7. Nor is it a secret. In larger cities, the vast majority of new hires at professional services firms can tell you almost to the penny what each of their friends and associates is earning at a firm across town.
8. Not all lateral moves are related solely to an increase in compensation. In fact, numerous firms hire lateral employees from high-paying, but difficult, firms, for a lower salary. The lateral often makes the move for quality-of-life reasons or for the opportunity for advancement.
9. Ida O. Abbott, Esq., The Lawyer’s Guide to Mentoring (National Association for Law Placement, 1666 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 325, Washington, DC
20009; 2000).
10. See note 9.
SECTION IV
Services Delivery:
Taking Care of Business
12
Service Delivery
D. MICHAEL MCDOWELL
To live through an impossible situation, you don’t need the reflexes of a Grand Prix driver, the muscles of Hercules, the mind of Einstein.You simply need to know what to do (next).
—Anthony Greenback, The Book of Survival 1
Successfully developing and delivering professional services present a unique combination of challenges and opportunities. Meeting these challenges and seizing these opportunities depend on the personal abilities of the professionals involved and the relationships they maintain with their clients. Experience, expertise, and reputation all play a part in the professional services firm’s ability to build and sustain a successful practice.