3 more ways in-house recruiting has changed over 20 years

Last week I talked about the 4 changes I’ve seen with in-house recruiting over the last 20 years (in summary: no more suits, the rise of Zoom interviews, writing/presentation exercises, and LinkedIn profiles). Here are 3 more:

1. Expect employers to back-channel you. Why? Because everyone is on LinkedIn now so it’s easy to see who you know in common. Pre-LinkedIn, interviewers could only guess if they knew someone who knew you, but now they can tell immediately. The takeaway: never burn a bridge.
2. Interviewers expect you to talk concretely about your accomplishments. The STAR interview method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) is now a standard way to conduct interviews these days. Lawyers are asked about their impact, so they should be able to give examples of how they persuaded clients, saved money, avoided disaster, closed $X-sized deals, or created processes/programs that sped up by Y%. Also, legal ops has grown exponentially, and legal metrics are now part of the discourse.
3. Lawyers are expected to be tech-savvy. At a minimum, they must know how to do video-conference calls (logging in, sharing screens/documents, turning on/off AI assistants, muting/unmuting(!)). Also with fewer admin staff, lawyers are expected to know how to navigate apps and portals.