For at least 10 years, legal marketers have been making a deliberate and concerted effort to raise the bar and be thought-provoking, strategic team-players that add value to their firm’s business development efforts.
Their technical abilities are now finely tuned; now, the biggest challenge is how to perform their role in just five days a week, as multiple initiatives and key client-specific activities can overwhelm even the most organized marketer. So with these circumstances, how do firms differentiate and really understand which marketers do what better, and how?
Getting the right person takes time — and time is something marketers have less and less of. From our perspective, we see firms differentiating themselves to attract the very best talent in two distinct ways.
First, savvy firms are incorporating personality and behavioral testing.
This is happening early on in the interview process when considering new candidates for a role. These tests can be surprisingly quick (taking just a few minutes to complete) and ask questions about traits, drivers, influencers and comfort levels, giving the interviewer a quick and accurate overview of the candidate’s past behavior (which is the best indicator of future behavior).
Conducting deep analysis on the test results assists interviewers in crafting questions and discussion points during the interview process to ensure that the candidate is absolutely the right fit for the team and can contribute to the long-term success of the firm.
Second, firms are partnering with recruiting firms to procure the very best talent in the marketplace.
Busy HR personnel and Marketing Directors now choose to delegate this function to trained professionals who specialize in talent acquisition; after all, they know the market, who the quality candidates are (both on and off the market) and how to sell the role to the right candidate.
Firms are realizing that, to attract the talent they want, they must proactively recruit. Most potential candidates are not sending their resumes into law firms or surfing job boards; rather they need to be made aware of a role and its potential through an intentional, targeted approach.
Get ready for a more “corporate” feel to trickle into the legal marketing recruiting process; as the industry is evolving, so is the quest and demand for the best talent.
Author Jennifer Johnson is CEO of Calibrate, Inc.
