Jobs

Ace your interviews by considering the view from behind the desk

By David c. james

If experience, skills, and accomplishments were all it took to get jobs, interviewing wouldn’t be necessary. Employers could hire you sight unseen based on your résumé, writing sample, and perhaps a few letters of recommendation. The fact of the matter, however, is that in order to get a job as a lawyer, you’ll have to interview for it.

To make the most of your interview, there’s a cluster of related qualities you need to present. You need to be positive. You need to be energetic. You need to be enthusiastic. And you need to smile.

This lesson is fresh in my mind because of a recent interview in which I was one of three employment committee members interviewing an applicant for a prosecutor position. The job-seeker was a prosecutor in another jurisdiction, and, based strictly on experience, he was highly qualified. After the interview, our panel caucused, but nothing needed to be said: We had all been underwhelmed. He had been impassive, had never cracked a smile. Even with so much experience, he left all three of us completely unwilling to make a case for hiring him.

Employers want positive, friendly people. Looking for a job is like aiming for the red circle of a bull’s-eye and continuing to practice throwing those darts. Employers get to choose whom they’re going to target in the world of work. You need to demonstrate the qualities that are going to keep an employer’s eye focused on you.

In my experience, far too many applicants adopt a no-smiling rule. To show yourself off at your best in interviews, you have to be genuine, and smiles are a part of that. There’s no reason to act differently when talking in an interview than you do in most other areas of your life. Especially in call-back interviews, interviewers may joke around; they’re looking for applicants who respond in kind. A sense of humor is an appealing quality. Don’t suppress yours.

How you perform in interviews is one of four factors employers consider when deciding whether to hire you. The other three factors are your experience, your academic achievement, and your writing sample. By "experience," I mean primarily work experience, although course work counts. For easy reference, I’ll indelicately simplify "academic achievement" to "grades," even though academic achievement does encompass more than grades.

But you’re not going to come out of an interview with more experience, better grades, or a higher caliber writing sample than you had when you went in. These factors are set. How you perform in the interview is the only one of the four factors that is not already set at the time you go into the interview. At this point, how you do is still very much up to you.

I listed the four factors—experience, grades, writing sample, and interview performance—in order of ascending importance for law students. Once you graduate, experience becomes more and more important. At the first really important juncture for job hunting, the fall of your second year, there’s still relatively little information available about your academic achievement in law school; your undergraduate record may even come into play. I put more stock in writing samples than in grades, because I can compare writing ability head to head. There’s a positive correlation between the quality of writing samples and class standing, but that correlation is not infallible. After you’ve been in the work force a bit longer—soon after you pass the bar and begin practicing, for example—your experience becomes more important than grades.

Employers have minimum standards for experience, grades, and writing samples. If you fail to meet the minimum standard on any one of these factors, you won’t be offered a job. If you do, how well you do in the interview might determine whether you get a job offer. Generally, finalists with the best interviews get the jobs, even when their experience, grades, and writing sample are not the most highly rated.

Just as employers have minimum standards for experience, grades, and writing ability, they have minimum standards for interview performance. If you don’t perform up to standard in the interview, you won’t land the job, even if you meet—even if you greatly exceed—an employer’s standards for experience, grades, and writing. Employers look for intangibles such as attitude, drive, determination, and a whole host of interpersonal skills. The applicants who interview the best are the ones who best demonstrate these intangibles.

Doing well in interviews requires three things: doing the research necessary to prepare; psyching yourself up to be at your most enthusiastic, engaging best; and displaying the appropriate intangibles. To the extent you need a competitive edge, you need to outwork your competitors. Check out your career services office to see whether they offer interview workshops. Until you’re as comfortable in interviews as you are talking to friends, you can profit from working on your interviewing skills.

The interview is your last opportunity to persuade an employer that your experience, skills, and accomplishments qualify you to excel at what the employer’s lawyers do. Whether you are persuasive in a given interview is subjective. It is this very subjectivity that makes it so critical that your qualifications are squarely on target.

Picture a target—that bull’s-eye I talked about earlier, surrounded by concentric rings. The best experience—experience in the employer’s bull’s-eye—is having done what that employer’s lawyers do. The first ring outside the bull’s-eye contains those with the next-best qualifications—those with experience doing not exactly but almost what they do. Qualifications somewhat less well suited for a particular employer fall in the next ring, and so on to the target’s outermost ring.

The secret here is that whether your qualifications hit the bull’s-eye can depend on how artfully you frame them in your interviews. You can adapt your qualifications to strike a responsive chord with employers.

Determine the work experience in the employer’s bull’s-eye, then frame your experience so it’s as close to the bull’s-eye as possible. Let’s imagine a prosecuting agency looking for a prosecutor. If you have experience in the bull’s-eye, you would pitch that. If you have experience as a criminal defense attorney—just off the bull’s-eye—you would pitch "criminal law" experience. But suppose you have experience in a litigation department and have applied for a nonlitigation job—a judicial clerkship, for example. You would strike a more responsive chord by framing your qualifications as "research and writing" experience, which you do have, rather than "litigation."

I’m not advocating that you present your experience as something it’s not. I’m emphasizing the need to frame your qualifications differently for different employers. You must be honest and credible. At the same time, your experience can be somewhat flexible in definition.

Being on target has implications for the choices you make in law school. With any experience at all, there will be employers for which you are in the bull’s-eye, others for which you are not in the bull’s-eye but are on target, and still others for which you are off target. To have the best shot at the job you want, choose the right framework—and remember to smile.

David C. James is the hiring lawyer for the office of the San Diego city attorney.