The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world. —Steve Jobs
All of us who run our own law firms have made hiring mistakes. Through the years, I have made too many hiring mistakes to list. These unforced errors held down the growth of my firm and caused me great frustration. There is no question that hiring the right team members—and avoiding the wrong ones—is a small hinge that opens big doors when it comes to growing a healthy and thriving firm. No great law firm was ever built on the backs of average team members. While none of us will ever bat 1,000 when we take our hiring swings, the key I’ve discovered is to increase our odds of hiring the right people. By avoiding the following four mistakes I repeatedly used to make and by being very intentional with your hiring process, your odds of bringing on the right people will indeed increase substantially. Here are the mistakes I used to make that you can and should avoid:
This was probably the biggest mistake I made. The reason for this mistake is that I didn’t even have core values laid out. Little did I know then that I was shooting myself in the foot more times than not by “going with my gut” when deciding who to hire. This often resulted in me hiring some people who ended up being poor culture fits—and some were even cancerous. Today, core values alignment is my north star when choosing who to let on the bus. First, create and then apply your core values to all phases of your hiring process.
On more than one occasion, I had team members resign abruptly, leaving me to fill their seat—fast. As a result, I ended up with panic hires. The worst thing you can do is to get desperate and hire someone just to fill a hole. No matter how much you need to hire someone, you must not let that need ever hasten the hiring process. When you rush to fill a seat, you are simply hoping and praying the person turns out to be the right person. You need to be sober and disciplined and never hire anyone out of desperation.
I’ve learned from painful past experiences that you must write job ads that are specifically tailored to and designed to attract very few applicants to your firm. You need to write your job ad with extreme specificity that outlines your firm’s core values, who exactly you are looking for, and the types of traits the position needs to have. You want to repel nearly everyone reading the job ad because you are on the hunt for those select few people who are exactly the type of person you are seeking to attract to your firm. ChatGPT can massively help you write these ads and will save you lots of time and energy.
For years, I would do very conventional, cookie-cutter interviews because that is “the way it has always been done.” Little did I know at the time that asking very surface-level questions was preventing me from getting to know the applicant. Now, my interview style is quite different. I ask curveball questions, frequently say, “Tell me more,” and then wait for them to talk more; this lets me learn as much as I possibly can about the applicant during the interview. I also go out of my way to tell the applicant the worst part of the job that the person is applying for. I do that because I want to make every effort to talk the applicant out of the job. If they come out of that and still want the position (and if I believe that person will be a strong fit with my firm’s core values), I feel good and confident about the applicant.
Even if we are very intentional about how we hire, we still might bring aboard people who ultimately do not work out. But our chances of that happening will decrease if we avoid the preceding four mistakes that I routinely made. If you have other ideas on hiring, I would love to hear from you, so please email me at [email protected].
