The Traditional Vetting Process
For decades most in-house legal departments have relied on a three-pronged vetting system: (1) evaluation of the candidate’s credentials and experience as revealed on the resume to assess advanced reasoning aptitude and substantive skill set compatibility; (2) the in-person interview to assess cultural fit; and (3) the pro-forma postinterview reference check to make sure there is nothing glaringly wrong with the candidate that the first two parts of the system failed to reveal.
Within these three prongs, most hiring managers placed significant emphasis on only a couple of key components. As for the resume, the single most important factor has always been academic credentials. Sometimes to an exclusionary degree, but always to a significant degree, employers relied on the prestige of the candidate’s law school and his performance within the law school to assess general levels of intelligence and advanced legal reasoning. The more prestigious the better, and the higher the class rank the better. Such credentials served as certification of the candidates’ ability to navigate complex legal issues and also to excel at legal writing and drafting. In short, the credentials established the candidates’ high quality lawyering skills.
The credentials could be augmented by a work experience (including the reputation and prestige of previous employers) that confirmed the above assessment, or the work experience could dilute the value of the credential in certain rare cases. More often the traditional system looked at work experience in a purely utilitarian light. Is the experience relevant to the type of work that the candidate would perform at the company? If it is and the credentials are strong, then the evaluation of the resume often would come to a quick end.
Once the candidate cleared the credential and work experience hurdles, the in-person interview was primarily used for two purposes.
First, to gently probe the quality of the candidate’s lawyering skills to confirm the positive assessment. Second, and more importantly, to determine if the candidate’s personality would fit with the company’s culture. Under the traditional method, this was a necessarily vague and subjective assessment which all too often boiled down to whether or not the general counsel or hiring manager felt “comfortable” with the candidate. Whenever such an assessment is made without reference to some defined criteria, many people do the natural thing: they find themselves more “comfortable” with a candidate who is most like themselves. Hiring in one's own image is among the most common results of the traditional vetting process.Finally, the traditional method would use the post-interview reference check in a fairly perfunctory way to basically (and briefly) allow the reference to confirm the Hiring Manager's positive view of the candidate. Many companies traditionally do not even initiate the reference checking process until they have made an offer, making the offer conditional on the positive reference. Given that it is the candidates themselves who provide the references, a negative reference is extremely unlikely. In fact, in the over 25 years of my experience in the legal search business and the thousands of placements made during that period, I can only recall one instance where an offer was rescinded as a result of a negative reference. In short, as traditionally used, the post-interview reference check is a pro-forma waste of time.
Given the limitations of the traditional method, it is hardly surprising that some companies are moving to a different system utilizing different tools to assess potential candidates. Also not surprisingly, many of these tools are beginning to incorporate the very metrics that now help to define a legal department's success. In short, companies are now beginning to measure the suitability of potential candidates.
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