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Building a Better Legal Profession

9/30/2009 8:13:10 PM EST

Get Specific: Making the Interview Work

By Bitta Jansma

Posted by BBLP

During on-campus interviews, students may find it surprisingly difficult to come up with good questions for the partner or associate sitting across the table from them. There are a host of sites out there with suggestions as to what type of questions demonstrate your work ethic, your drive, and your ability to scour a firm's website before the interview. When it comes to asking questions about work/life balance, however, bloggers and commentators are decidedly conflicted.

Take, for instance, the flurry of comments posted in response to an article on the WSJ.com Law Blog entitled, "When you land the job interview, should the ring come off?" Some readers took a pragmatic approach that embraced traditional assumptions about family structures made by hiring attorneys. They advised female interviewees to take the ring off, but counseled male candidates to leave it on. For women, the reasoning goes, getting hitched turns a committed associate into a baby-making machine. Meanwhile, married men with mouths to feed are likely to demonstrate a greater commitment to work. Other readers, shocked the discussion was even taking place, concluded with exasperation, "No wonder retention is such a problem."

The majority of readers felt that a woman should wear her engagement or wedding ring during interviews as a sort of litmus test for her future with a firm. That is, recruiters who recoil at the sight of a wedding band on a female law student may not be worth the candidate's time (or at least no more than 20 minutes of it). The same "litmus test" strategy could be employed when coming up with questions about work/life balance.

Whether married or single, female law students in their mid-to-late twenties interviewing for law firm jobs are in sort of a pickle when it comes to asking firms about balance. On the one hand, a candidate who poses a broad question about a firm's policies such as, "What sort of flex-time policy do you have?" might be pegged as having done too little research on the firm. Or, as is more commonly suggested, she could lose dedication points for inquiring about reduced hours before her first day of work. On the other hand, some firms might interpret such questions as an indication that the candidate is committed to the firm for the long haul, rather than as a three-to-five year training program. In either case, asking the question serves as a test. How the recruiter reacts can indicate the extent to which whether the firm is family-friendly.

This middle-of-the-road approach to ring-bearing and question-asking is certainly one way to avoid ending up in a firm that is hostile to married women. But the idea of wearing a wedding band or posing a question as a way to ward off employers hardly seems like an efficient way to ensure a modicum of work/life balance.

So what's a woman to do?

On-campus interview season is inevitably a time-consuming and draining process. To help convert a hectic OCI schedule into a manageable set of meaningful interviews, it's important to do your homework on employers beforehand. If you are thinking of having children sometime in the next ten to fifteen years, and you also aspire to making the jump from associate to partner within that timeframe, you may as well narrow down the selection of employers before bidding on firms.

For many women, there's an assumption that you might as well go to the most prestigious firm and treat the experience as an apprenticeship. A few years down the road, with a Big Firm gold star in hand, you're free to lateral to a smaller firm with better work/life balance. Unfortunately, the sense of burnout that settles in after enduring a few years in a firm that provides little means of advancement tends to push people out of the profession altogether. In order to commit to the profession, it seems wise to commit to an environment that values individuals who are willing to give and take with the career- long ebb and flow of their family life.

Factors to look for in deciding which firms are committed to retaining and promoting working mothers include: the number of female partners at the firm; the number of attorneys who made partner after taking advantage of a flex-time policy; whether the firm has a formal flex-time policy (good) or a policy fashioned on an "individual, case-by-case basis" (bad); number of weeks of paid maternity leave (many firms now have 18); the minimum number of hours/week that qualify as part-time with benefits, etc. Before interviewing with a firm, think about which criteria are most important to you, and check out how each firm fares against your critical criteria.

With a few hours' preparation, you'll avoid interviewing with a slew of firms that are widely divergent in their policies. By selecting firms that show some commitment to employees with families, you can save precious time and a ton of guesswork. But aside from the time you save by foregoing the ring-and-question-as-shield tactic, you can score major points with firms by taking this route. Firms that do good by women (and men) with children are generally proud of it. Many firms will talk endlessly about "the woman they know who made partner on flex-time," and the more data you can find corroborating such anecdotes the better. Put simply, retaining and promoting women is good for business, and firms will be pleased when you can point out concrete examples of how they are ahead of the curve in this respect.

Updated September 30, 2009 from previous post

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Comments

KH
Last Post: 9/29/2008 12:00:18 PM

Subject: Get Specific: Making the Interview Work

Date Posted: 9/29/2008 12:00:18 PM

Ms. JD has a string of comments/advice on this subject here: http://ms-jd.org/ring-or-not-ring

Check it out. Ms. JD is a great resource for women lawyers/law students looking for advice and information: www.ms-jd.org

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