Fall Recruiting and the Evening Student, Part 2: Selling Your Experience

Chances are, if you’re an evening student you’re slightly more, uh, seasoned than your day section counterparts. Not over the hill, exactly, but far enough removed from your undergraduate experience to remember doing research for your political science papers using books and a card catalog. No, I’m not quite THAT old, you little punk. My college had fully digitized the card catalog the year before I got to school, thank you very much, and those hot Gateway pentiums in the library really cranked out those search results while napster was working in the background.

The point is you’ve got experience that day students may not have, even if it’s just a few years in the workforce. I’ve been told this is an advantage. After all, you know how to interact professionally with colleagues, bosses, clients, customers and vendors. You know how to meet deadlines and manage expectations. You know how to be on time and how to ask for vacation and organize your files and follow-up on tasks. All the stuff you get from working in the real world. But you might also be set in your ways or a little bitter or rundown – all traits of youth that may get worn down a bit with some years under the ole work belt.

So how do you sell your experience to a law firm during fall recruiting or at any point in your fledgling legal career?

Oh, did you expect me to answer that? I’ll probably be able to in a few months. For now, I’m just thinking out loud and hopefully your comments will help us out (particularly if you’re involved with legal recruiting).

The second paragraph above hits on the stuff we’re talking about. When it comes down to you, with X years of non-student experiences, against a student, with a summer internship and a case study from class, you should be able to run circles around them in the area of professional and life experience.

Mrs. Sherpa interviewed someone at her company the other day who tried to equate doing case studies for class on major international governing bodies with experience working at those same agencies. The interviewee was trying to sell the delusion that book study equaled work experience. That’s a load of crap, and we all know it. Your task is to pinpoint those discrete professional skills you’ve picked up and hammer on them as the ideal recipe when blended with your law school training, even when your law school might not measure up to a hiring partner’s pretentious tastes.

The trouble, of course, is that the experience you have isn’t necessarily transferable to a summer position at a law firm or agency. Or at least the hiring attorney may not grasp how that experience is transferable. Except that your exposure to the real world has allowed you cut through the bullshit that we’re taught to use on an interview when you have no experience. This is actually an important distinguishing factor between you and a day student who lacks this experience.

Let’s take interacting with clients, for example. My dad told me a story recently of a man whose car wouldn’t start. He had it towed to a service station where the mechanic lifted the hood, felt around for a few second, took a small hammer and took a crack at something in there. Man turns a key, the car starts, and the mechanic says, “that’ll be $160.” To which the man replies, as we would, “What?!?! All you did was hit it with a hammer. The mechanic says, “Well, it was $10 to hit it with a hammer and $150 to know where it needed to be hit.”

If you’ve done this as part of your job, you get this story. You know that first and foremost you need to understand the line between your client’s expertise, knowledge, and desires and your special knowledge. Before anything else, this is why you get paid to do what you do and there’s a value to that. Being able to understand this line helps you discern how to address client concerns and give your client effective counsel even when they don’t yet grasp your vision or understand where to focus their attention. This comes from training and experience.

BigShow shared this experience a friend of ours had awhile back:

A friend of mine recently interviewed for a non-legal position at one of the top law firms in town here, and while I’m not surprised at what he found during the interview, it does make me question some of the facts of life in our profession.

Early on in the interview, the associate who was interviewing my friend made the comment, “You know, this firm would never recruit out of your school. What do you think about that? How do you distinguish yourself from your education?”

Now, one of the unspoken things at our law school is the fact that we’re not top-tier. Everyone knows it, but no one talks about it. So my buddy was taken aback by the fact that the associate came right out and said it, but he kept his composure. He replied that while he wasn’t happy hearing that, his experience outside of law school made him qualified for the current position etc. Anyone who knows my friend would be impressed with his credentials.

Later, the associate went on about how the firm parades 23 year-old top-tier law school students through the summer program and throws obscene amounts of money at them to produce drivel (if they do anything at all). He also said that someone in the job my friend was interviewing for would need to get used to being paid modestly for doing real work while seeing kids get paid a lot for doing nothing and bossing him around at times.

By many measures of sanity and fairness, the situation is silly. Not because the top tier schools aren’t great. I’m sure they are. But because you don’t even get a shot. Here’s where you can frame your experience in terms of transferable skills. For my part, I’ve pulled out complex project management, close and regular client interaction, diverse writing and speaking experience, strategic consulting and planning, working under tight deadlines with my reputation and job on the line. These things touch on discrete skills that you can’t pick up in school and speak to my ability to grasp complex problems facing my clients and apply a set of experiences and skills to address those problems from start (strategic planning) through implementation and completion (communication, project management and client contact).

They’re not legal skills obviously, but they are life skills that a 24- or 25-year-old T20 law school grad lacks even if he goes to a “better” school than I do and as an evening student it’s an important asset to leverage in your favor.

Your experience might help you clear a school rank/reputation/credibility hurdle that you would not otherwise have cleared by showing a partner that you know where to focus your attention; you know just where to strike the engine to get it moving in the right direction. And you never know. In this economy, your experience could be a deciding factor for law firms interested in finding people who can contribute immediately.