Fall Recruiting and the Evening Student, Part 1: Telling Your Boss

If you’re an evening student who also has a real job (particularly if it’s non-legal), I suspect you share my sense of angst with the fall recruiting process. Granted, this year all law students have a particularly angst-filled path to trod through fall recruiting with firms canceling, shortening or otherwise messing with the summer programs. But for the evening student who likes his job, like me, there is a level of anxiety that is difficult to describe. On the one hand, you’re hesitant to tell an employer and company who you really do love about the process. On the other, there’s well… law school and what that $100K in tuition means for your future. There’s no right answer to how you should broach this issue with your employer. But perhaps my experience can help as you go through the process.

So, you like your job. Or at least don’t mind it and don’t want to lose it permanently with the economy the way it is. Perhaps you’re like me – I like my job and I do interesting work with interesting clients for a great boss who consistently recognizes my contributions to our (small) company. But we also need to find out where law school is taking us and what is potentially next for our careers. Enter fall recruiting.

Fall recruiting requires time and energy. If you’re going to interview at 4 or 10 or however many firms, you need to get away from the office.

One way to do that is to lie. You might say you have a doctor’s appointment and try to batch interviews on a single day. Another way is to use some vacation to take a day or two and knock all your interviews out. Neither option seems to work very well. On campus interviews, while not long, occur on days not of your choosing. And if you’re interested in ten firms that are interviewing at your school, odds are that they are all interviewing on different days. So unless you’re willing to make the case to your boss that you have personal appointments on ten different days, consider another approach. I recommend leveling with your employer

Discuss what a summer position would mean for your current job and what it would mean for next summer, while voicing concern for your boss’ needs (your need to figure out what’s next and your boss’ for making sure that the work I do gets done). Employing this approach can help you tackle head on the realities of your job and fall recruiting. These points might really help start a good dialogue:

1. Tell the truth.

It may be easier to just say you have a dentist appointment. But do you really want to lie just so you can make it to a 20 minute interview. Seriously. Do you? Plus when you get a callback, it’s much easier to explain the situation to your boss, than saying you need time off for a three hour follow-up to the routine teeth cleaning you had two weeks ago.

2. Layout the timing.

You also need to be honest about what a summer position entails, particularly if you’re asking your employer for a leave of absence of some sort. It’s a 6-12 week commitment to work as a lawyer at a law firm, government agency, company, or non-profit in order to assess whether that organization, or area of practice or whatever, is a good fit for you following graduation. If you work at a large company, it may not be a big deal for you to take this time off since there are 15 people on your team and they can fill in for you. If you work at a small company you are potentially asking a great deal of your boss.

3. Say what you want.

Before you talk to your boss consider what you really want. Do you want that day in May or April to be your very last day with that company? Do you want to come back to your company after your summer job? Are you thinking an unpaid leave situation might be best? Express this clearly and also be sure to be clear that you are interested in helping the company do what’s best. A word of caution though: there is a big risk here. Even the most understanding employer will feel an urge to ask you to leave immediately. I don’t have a good piece of advice for this other than that you should consider this possibility and if you want to stay with the company come next fall, say that first and reinforce it throughout the conversation.

4. Consider your boss’ needs.

I know it’s hard to believe, but the world does not revolve around you. (What’s that, you say? Yes, I do actually know that you’re going to be a lawyer someday.) It doesn’t even revolve around you temporarily while you go through Fall Recruiting, no matter how consuming the process might be. But your boss needs you; otherwise you’d be without a job. You need to understand this and make sure your boss knows you do. This is more a matter of courtesy than anything else, but if you view yourself as your boss’ business partner it’s much easier to express this.

5. Keep the dialogue open.

Hopefully, this won’t be one conversation. If it is, it likely means you’re cleaning out your desk. The response to hope for is, “well, I don’t know if we can make it work, but I want to try. Let’s keep talking and as you get something more concrete we’ll figure out if we can do this.” One approach that might help is laying out some options for your return: coming back part-time, coming back freelance, working part-time over the summer, playing it by ear. Some of these wouldn’t be ideal, but helping your boss envision some options shows that you are flexible and willing to work something out that works for both of you.

I’m not aiming for an exhaustive list here and I recognize that each situation is differently. Add some thoughts from your own experience or expertise. And, certainly, as I go through the process this list will change and grow.