Today we are going to talk about hiring. So I hope that you are in a position right now where you are looking to hire talent and you were looking to hire lawyers and you were looking to expand your law firm.
Management Can Be Like Parenting
But hiring is hard. Hiring is hard. Training is hard. Management is hard getting people to function in the way that you want them to function is a lot like parenting. And it’s just challenging. So, after many years of doing this poorly and having high turnover rates or hiring the wrong people, my team and I put together some hiring guidelines and I want to share them with you.
Developing Procedures Makes It Easier
Number one, the most important thing that you need to do is come up with procedures and follow them. It’s very difficult for me to be disciplined enough to do that.
Most of the time or many times I will need to hire an opportunity will present itself. And I’ll just say, yes, it’s kind of like my, my, my tendency to book, travel dates without exactly checking the calendar and booking it wrong. I do the same thing in travel that I do in hiring. So number one, the first, most important thing that you should do, if you’re anything like me, it’s come up with rules, come up with procedures that you’re going to follow every single time you hire because hiring the wrong person is even worse than picking the wrong travel dates.
Number two, all so here’s some of our procedures, all openings are going to be posted on ZipRecruiter for a minimum 30 days.
The reason I do that is so that if somebody walks in my door, I don’t hire them because I have a rule that says you have to put them on ZipRecruiter or post it for a minimum of 30 days. Next thing it says, all qualified individuals will be invited to submit a video cover letter, levered letter, answering specific behavioral questions.
Streamlining Your Process
So why do I do that? I, we are a technological office. I like to put people on social media. If they’re unwilling to make me a video, they’re probably not going to be a good fit. Number one, number two, I can save so much time interviewing by looking at someone in, in a video. I can tell immediately if it’s not going to work or it doesn’t feel right, or I can’t handle their voice or whatever it is. You can tell a lot about someone on video, more than on their resume.
And then I want to ask a behavioral question. So like for instance, a question that we would ask for, for paralegals is describe a time that a client or a court called with an urgent matter and your attorney was unavailable, or you could not reach your attorney.
How did you handle the issue? That’s one, another one might be describe how you’ve used your unique gifts, attributes, and talents to invest in previous organizations that you’ve worked with for, or at the reason I do that is because at Modern Law, every single person is part of this process of investing in the company and making the company better. So if that’s not something that you’re comfortable with, or that concept is not something you can get your head around, then you’re probably not going to be a good fit at my firm.
So you want not just the video to be there because it’s video, but you also want to elicit information, behavioral type information that can help you decide if they’re going to be a good candidate, then eligible candidates will be given a job description and invited to an initial interview via zoom or in person with their direct supervisor only.
Determining Baseline Skills
And the purpose of this interview is to determine baseline skills, experience and competency. So you have to have two things. You have to have baseline skills, experience competency, and then you have to have a good fit. So we give people a color analysis, personality test, and then we ask people competency questions.
So paralegals have to describe the procedures associated with family law events. We’re not hiring just for talent at Modern Law. Like if you watched my leverage video, I need people who know what they’re doing, who can work in the system, who can learn the way we do things and become part of our profitable machine. And that doesn’t happen as quickly.
If you start from scratch with somebody who doesn’t know things. So we’ve decided right now with the point that we’re at, we’re only hiring highly qualified, competent individuals, which means you need to be able to describe, family law, uh, procedures.
The Group Interview
After the minimum competency is determined, then they come back for a second group interview with more people. And then there’s one other thing that we’ve put in front of people. And that is a list of values. We ask them to rank the values. And so for us, those values, some of them are client satisfaction, timeliness case predictability accuracy slash perfection relationships with coworkers relationships, with clients, relationships, with industry professional reputation, winning awarding, mistakes, learning, improving client feelings, client outcomes. So when I asked them to rank those in order, most important to least important, the reason is none of those values are wrong, but we want to have the right aligned values.
Do We Share Values?
For instance, if somebody is really obsessed with winning or perfection, they may not do well at Modern Law because we’re always pretty obsessed with improving or, and you know, we’re also pretty darn obsessed with how clients feel more than necessarily the outcomes.
If those values don’t align, that’s going to be another good indication that people aren’t going to be a good fit. So this is the first step making better hires. Then we’ve got an entire policy on how to train people and make sure that we’re giving them management wise and support wise enough. But, if you don’t hire the right people, then the training and the management doesn’t really matter.
So just to recap, what are we looking for with hiring a procedure that stops me from making steaks a procedure that guarantees both competency and personality fit and the vetting process of not just one individual within a firm, but many people within the firm.
So that’s the structure that we have set up. We’ve used it several times and it’s worked out really great before, just better than ever. But I would love to know if I’ve missed something or if you’ve got some, some hiring tips for me, I could use them because I’m hiring. And if you know, people who want to work at Modern Law, I could use more family law attorneys and family law paralegals here in the miracle buck County, Phoenix, Arizona area have an amazing day. And don’t forget to subscribe.
