Description
- Harrison's Top Advice: Apply to law firms without openings—it's the most effective and underutilized strategy.
- Unique Approach: Most job seekers avoid this strategy due to misconceptions, but it's a game-changer.
- Success Story: This method helped a top law graduate secure interviews and salvage their career.
- Overlooked Strategy: Applying to firms with openings leads to fierce competition; applying to those without openings sets you apart.
- Resume Tips: Focus your resume on relevant law firm experience, avoiding unnecessary details.
- Unconventional Wisdom: Buck the trend and stand out by pursuing opportunities others overlook.
- Career Rescue: This approach can save or jumpstart your law career effectively.
- Avoid Competition: Why vie with hundreds on job boards when you can target untapped opportunities?
- Strategy Insight: Applying to unadvertised positions offers an intelligent alternative for job seekers.
- Career Saving Advice: Follow this advice to secure law firm jobs and boost your chances uniquely.
Transcript:
What would your advice cable associate market yourself? Yeah, same thing. This is top advice. Harrison's top advice. So if I've learned anything in my entire career, so 25 plus year career of marketing attorneys and getting tens of thousands of them a job, simplest thing imaginable. The top advice, the most easy to follow is that no one does because they're afraid of it for whatever reason is you apply to firms without openings.
And find as many as you possibly can and find as many as you possibly can. That's it. You do that. There's other things, like you can review resumes and resume videos that I've done and that sort of thing that you apply to firms without openings. And then you find as many as you fricking can, as you possibly can.
That's it. That's how you market yourself. No one does that because there's something, I don't know. It's called an article on BCG called the worst job search advice ever. And I'm not going to criticize anyone here. But there are a lot of sources of so called job search information that tell you it's wrong to apply to firms without openings.
You should never do that. That's bad. It's gonna, and sometimes the people in that are doing that because They're trying to, I don't know, protect themselves, or I don't know, or for example, if you're a law school and you have 300 students or 500 students in Lansing, Michigan, and half of them want to work in Lansing, do you want 250 students applying to all the law firms in Lansing if you're a law school?
Probably not, right? I'm not saying Harvard or Michigan or someone or whatever is going to tell you this, but this is the advice that because if everyone, the law firm, the law schools, in order to get people jobs they need to basically. Have some control over where people go because they need the best applicants to go to certain firms, then they end up in relationships with different people.
I've watched law schools do this. I have lots of employees that have gone and been like career service or former recruiters at big law schools. And anyway, but the point is that you need to apply to lots of places about openings. I'll just tell you a quick story so you can understand how powerful this is.
So I had a candidate. That went to great law school. I don't know what it was. It was some great place, Chicago or whatever, Stanford, some, something really good and had done very well. They were like one of the top five students or something, or 10 students in his class, just fricking off the charts, Mark.
And he was doing the same thing that had the same thing happened that happened to so many people on this call. And he had lost his position at a major law firm. And been fired because he had made a stupid mistake and missed the deadline or something. And so he went to all the recruiters he could find in whatever market he was in.
I guess it doesn't matter, but it was a market with a lot of critters. And everyone told him, no, we don't have any jobs for someone with six months out, or we have this firm, maybe we'll try that. And no one told him to, no one, no recruiter tried to get him to apply to. Lots of places. They basically said, this is all we have got these two jobs or this one job, but we don't have anything below that we do, or we can't work with people that lost their job and all this stuff.
Long story short, I got him interviews like Boy Schiller, which is impossible to get interviews with. I got him interviews with Quinn. I got him interviews at a bunch of different firms and it saved his career. If I hadn't done that, he would have Lots and lots of problems. This particular story, by the way, is something that is repeated.
At BCG with people that aren't getting jobs and other ways on a daily basis when interviews come in and a monthly basis when lots of people get jobs. It's freaking crazy. Now, we have other ways of helping them because we track the firms that interview certain kinds of people consistently and we know who they are and there's.
Tens of, there's 30, 000 firms are in our database and 10, 000 of them are consistently work. So we have a lot of intelligence, but you can do the same freaking thing. So my advice is it doesn't matter who you are, what you, all you need to do is apply to a lot of places. You would be crazy if you didn't, and you were trying to get a job.
If you are, just have a JD job and not a law firm job, if you apply, this is how crazy this stuff is, if you apply to jobs on Indeed or LinkedIn, that employer is going to have lots of people applying and they're, most of them are going to have jobs in LinkedIn. From law firms. Most of them are probably going to have better qualifications than you.
Most of them are going to be interviewed from the first people that apply and not later. So why on earth would you possibly want to market yourself that way when you know you're not going to get the job because most of the people that are applying to me better than you. You would have to be insane.
And that's what everyone does. Oh, I'm not going to apply to places that open. Oh, that's bottom line. Oh, that's this and it's that. And wow, I've seen so many people stop their careers because of this one piece of advice. And you need to fricking fix it and apply to places that open these. And if you do, you will get jobs.
Now your resume, by the way, I don't want to, I know you asked for the top piece of advice, but your resume needs to. Not be all over the place and I, you should watch videos that I've done about this and all sorts of stuff, but it needs to be focused on something and allow people to read into it as all, but you don't need to talk about all this stuff that has nothing to do with working in a law firm.
You just need to. Tone it down and just, if possible, just take out your fricking description of your experience, if it's nothing, you just need to fix it. So that's my, but yeah, apply to places. I don't, no one does it. Everyone thinks again, most people don't do it. If I tell my candidates to do it, they're like, Oh, Harrison or BCG is trying to spam me.
No, I'm trying to get you a fricking job. My God. But. Again, this is how it works. You have to apply to places that open. You apply to places without openings. No one else is doing it. You're the only applicant. If the law firm can make money without having to go and interview and spend time and call people in, interview multiple people and just talk to you, it's much easier and you're not competing with others.
You'd have to be freaking out of your mind. To not do that. That's what everyone does. Why would you want to compete with hundreds of people submitting their resume on Indeed or LinkedIn for the same jobs? You can go to Law Crossing and apply for jobs that aren't being advertised, which is also smart, but I'm not trying to promote my services here.
You can, or my businesses, I just want you to understand what you need to do to frickin save your career or start your career.
