Description
How Relevant are Career Services
[00:00:00] What can you share about career services, offices, law schools, especially the top ones. How helpful are they? On the one hand, my career services connections are valuable to me.
Great.
On the other. They've given me terrible advice about long-winding cover letters, criticizing me for cutting down my resume and moving non-relevant public experience that hindered my job search. Not until I started listening to these seminars, ignoring their advice that I had success. I hope this isn't too vague, but what is the advice here? Should I treat career services as a supplement to my job search or ignore them entirely if their advice is harmful?.
Okay. So you see what you're getting? So it depends on the career services office. In the real estate business, for example, in real estate, what sells a property is the price, not the real estate agent. The real estate agent could screw it up, but not the real estate. So it was just the price in the market. In the legal profession it's pretty much, I dunno, I don't want to get too far into this now without criticizing career services, offices you're going to get. [00:01:00] I do nothing but this, and I've been doing this for 20 years.
I'm very committed to it. I help all sorts of people, and I understand this in a much different way than a lot of other people do. Because I have hundreds of employees to a couple of hundred employees now to support and make sure that all of this works.
I'm getting real-time market feedback. And I'm not doing this from the standpoint of, someone working in a law school that keeps their job regardless of what happens. I need to give you advice that works in the market. Now, a lot of laughs, there are some very good career services offices, and some of them, I'm just extremely impressed with. I'm extremely impressed with a lot of the material that's on the Yale law school website.
For example, they have some really good writing and in-depth material. It's just over the top. It's very good. Harvard has got very good stuff on their career services offices. Lots of these career services offices have very good material.
And some smaller schools do too. It's just some of them are exceptional. Georgetown is pretty good. And so I have a lot of [00:02:00] respect for a lot of these career services offices. But again, these are, bureaucratic organizations, so they're not necessarily getting all sorts of market feedback and they're doing what they know, and that they're assuming that your qualifications are what makes the grade.
So just like the real estate, just like the price and market, not the advice or career services. So the thing about career services offices that is very good is they do have connections. Those connections can be very valuable. They can give you that sort of advice.
They can often do a lot of things you can, that the only issue that I would say is, and this isn't a criticism of them. If every different recruiter in different companies and even in my company might give you different advice. And different people are going to have different sorts of advice.
And career services offices, people that work in them don't always know the right things to do. They may not be approaching things from a business standpoint or they may have different types of advice for [00:03:00] you.
And you're right. Removing non-relevant career service experience. There are no real standards for how they work and how they give advice. That's the only problem. But I don't know that any of that is necessarily a bad thing. You need to do your job search in a way that works for you.
The only thing that I have a lot of good things to say about career services offices and most schools. I'm not really in, and I do believe that they do try to help people. And so I don't think you can attack a career services office for really anything. But there are going to be different people in them.
And so you may go to see three or four people and they may all tell you different things. And you have to be able to process that information. The only thing that I don't like is that a lot of people in career services, what the career industry does is tell people not to apply to a lot of places.
And I don't understand that advice most career services offices will try to limit the number of places you're applying to. But a lot of times, that ends up hurting you. I don't like that. And a lot of their advice can be contradictory, but you're going to get the same thing in [00:04:00] recruiting too, with the recruiters.
So it's not necessarily their fault. Different people have different standards and not anything is going to help you. The stuff that I'm telling you is coming directly from the market. Yeah. If I don't get people jobs in every economy our company's screwed. We have a lot of people to support so we need to do very well at this.
Your people keep taking out student loans and giving schools money regardless of what happens, but I think career services offices are very good. I think you should be using them. I don't think you shouldn't be ignoring their advice. I think you should be measuring it against the advice that I'm giving.
I also think there are some very good people in the industry and some very good career services offices. And I think most of their recruiters do take it seriously, but you have to ask, what experiences they've had and, what their thought are about everything.
And that's what I would recommend. I don't know what their advice is, you should always try to use your career services office when you're searching, there are advantages to it because law firms call career services offices, [00:05:00] and they can prioritize resumes for people to look at. I think that you should use them or job leads.
You should ask them as many questions as you can and they can help you. And I think a lot of people having a bad attitude towards them can hurt you.
The other thing I would say about career services too, that's very useful. So sometimes there'll be people that are experts in the public interest and career service. There might be people with expertise in law firms and all sorts of different types of roles inside of career services office. So those people may know a lot more than I do, I'm sure they do.
They might know more about clerkships, so you shouldn't try to use the ones that are most relevant to you. So I don't have anything bad to say about career services offices other than they approach it in a little bit different way than I do because I have the picture of a market and I get real-time feedback, every day thousands of times. 1,100 times a day.
