The talent pool for fitting the firms criteria is also readily available, because it comes from the schools themselves. Almost every professional school has some form of career counseling, and most of the top schools have professional placement administrators, whose entire job consists of selling the schools and its graduates to potential employers. These schools most often have interviewing programs, whereby firms send a certain number of representatives for a day or multiple days, during which the firms interview a series of preselected candidates in 20- or 30-minute interviews. Once these initial on-campus interviews are concluded, the firm then informs the schools or the candidates directly whether they are interested in pursuing further action.

To access this talent pool, the recruiting coordinator (whether a professional or part time, as discussed earlier) need only contact the schools in which the firm is interested and ask to be a part of the process. The schools themselves have a vested interest in making sure all of their students obtain employment, regardless of GPA or other qualifications, and thus there is rarely a selective criteria for the firm to be able to participate.

Apart from the on-campus interviewing process, many firms accept resumes over the Internet or through the mail from potential employees looking for work. This is often the favored method for students whose grades are not as high as they would like or for students who are searching for job opportunities in less-traditional environments (e.g., public service or political arenas).

Lateral Hires. The process of identifying lateral hires (professionals already in the workplace working for other firms or in other capacities) is trickier. First, there is no common pool such as universities where the candidates are readily ascertainable. Therefore, the initial identification of lateral recruits takes much more legwork. Second, the process of identifying lateral recruits by necessity means that you must find people who are unhappy at their current job or, at the very least, would consider moving to another firm. For example, you could obtain the names, professional schools, background, and even basic qualifications of every third-year associate in a given firm easily over the Internet, simply by mining through the web site of that firm. Finding which associates would contemplate a move, however, requires a level of information that is not publicly available. To compound the problem, cold calling each such associate is both time consuming and can reflect negatively on the firm doing the recruiting. Professional services firm within a given industry are a close-knit group, and if you begin calling every employee of a rival that fits your criteria, someone is likely to find out about it.

The most reliable method of identifying lateral hires is simply word-of-mouth. Professionals form lifelong bonds with other persons with whom they attended school. They socialize together (often to complain about their bosses with someone who will understand), they marry each other, and they live in the same neighborhoods. Therefore, an open-ended bounty for new

hires can be offered by firms to their current employees. The logistics are simple: If Anne works for your firm and convinces her friend Robert (who she knows is unhappy at his job) to interview with your firm and Robert subsequently accepts an offer of employment, Anne is paid a recruiting bonus for her identification of a quality candidate.4

The other alternative, and one far more common than it was 20 years ago, is to hire a search firm to identify potential candidates. This completely outsources the process of identifying laterals and thus has the advantage of freeing up firm resources to deliver services to the clients while someone else goes through the arduous task of cold calling potential recruits. This also has the advantage, at least theoretically, of keeping the contacting firms identity a secret. The outside recruiting firm can cold call and vet likely candidates, according to their qualifications and interest level, without revealing to a rival firm that you are raiding its employees. The potential lateral is not informed of the raiding employers identity until the interview process is underway. The downside to using an outside firm is the cost. Many firms charge a flat fee, plus expenses, to conduct the search and insist on a contingent completion fee that is equal to a significant percentage of the new employees salary (from 10 percent to as much as 50 percent, depending on the level of the search).

Advance Screening

Once the criteria are set in place and the potential candidates that meet the criteria are identified, the next step is the advance screening. This can be combined with one of the preceding steps. For example, if a school conducts on-campus interviews (OCI) for new hires, the OCI program itself is the advance screening. It consists of a 20- or 30-minute interview, and if either the firm or the recruit does not wish to pursue the opportunity, both sides can walk away with very little time or effort wasted. The same theory applies to lateral hires. If during the search process a potential recruit is identified and contacted but the person expresses no interest or does not, at second glance, fit the firms needs, the process is terminated as to that candidate.

Interviewing

The beginning of the interview process is the turning point for the recruiting process. This is where a significant portion of firm time and resources begins to be spent, and thus the opportunity cost in lost business or lost opportunities for other candidates increases. Thus, firms should be careful as to how many persons are considered for interviews and how much time is allotted for them. If a firm interviews 100 people for five job openings, someone has invited far too many candidates to interview, and the firm should reassess its advance screening phase to rule out more candidates.

Because this chapter is focused on the recruiting and retention process overall, an analysis of interviewing itself is far too extensive for this space. Hundreds of books and articles are available on the subject.5 Nonetheless, firms should always remember certain truths to the interviewing process that make the world of professional services unique:

Keep the interviews manageable. Your employees are taking time out of their busy schedules to interview a potential employee and have other tasks that need to be done that presumably will generate revenue for the firm. At the same time, there needs to be sufficient time for the interviewer to get a feel for the candidate and for the candidate to feel comfortable and to obtain the information he or she needs to possibly make a decision. An hour is too long; 15 minutes is too short.

Keep the interviews friendly. One source indicates that the friendliness of an interview was the single most frequently cited best interviewing practice for law firms and a major factor in the decision of recruits as to whether to continue the application process.6 This can be more a function of who interviews potential candidates and can be a political football for the person in charge of the recruiting logistics. The office curmudgeon who is more likely to turn the interview into a pop quiz of the recruit is an almost sure-fire turnoff. However, if that person is also the managing partner who wants a hand in every decision the firm makes, some type of compromise will be necessary. A social situation, be it happy hour or lunch, where that person can be managed by another partner, is often a viable alternative. Firms should be cognizant of the fact that while they are possibly offering a job to someone, they are also selling the firm to that person. Ultimate recipients of these offers will accept only if they feel that this firm is the place they want to work.

Keep the interviews professional. This is the other side of the coin from keeping the interviews friendly-they should by no means be too friendly. Inappropriate (and sometimes illegal) questions such as family or marital status or personal history other than past employment should be avoided. Candidates are often uncomfortable answering questions that they do not view as job-related.

Be sure the candidate has the opportunity to ask questions and that the questions are answered. Members of many well-respected firms often fall into the trap of believing that their firms are the best possible place to practice their profession. As such, in interviews, they rattle on for the majority of the time about themselves and/or the firm, and the only information being imparted is nothing that the candidate could not glean from reading the firms web site. Interviewers should be encouraged to allot a mandatory amount of time (and more than