Telephone-screening interviews are often a key part of the hiring process at law firms and are becoming increasingly common across the board. While it may seem like a simple matter to introduce yourself and cover a few of your most valuable qualities as a potential future partner, a telephone interview can come at any time and may through you off guard.
The Importance of Preparation
Every stage of your interview requires preparation. Preparation demonstrates that you’re taking a vested interest in the firm itself, shows professionalism during the interview process, and allows you to get a better chance of leading the interviewer to see your best qualities. Perhaps most importantly, however, preparation shows that you did the work of preparing itself and that you plan to bring that level of commitment to every case you’ll be working on.
If you really want to nail your next phone interview and give yourself the best chance that you can on landing the job, then they key to success is to prepare as much as you possibly can. Here are three strategies for preparing for a legal telephone-screening interview:
- Get a Legal Recruiter to Help You Prepare
There may be a thousand different ways to go about prepping for the telephone-interview, but the most important will be to contact a legal recruiter. That’s because legal recruiter knows the legal job market and hiring process inside and out. They also partner with law firms looking to hire new top legal talent, so they can tell you the best ways to prepare for interviews at particular law firms – along with an inside advantage.
- Take It Seriously
The telephone-screening interview might not be as daunting as an interview that is conducted in-person, but it’s just as important. If you don’t take this particular stage of the process seriously, then you’ll project that attitude into your conversation and it will be all too easy to detect. Don’t make the mistake of only learning to take the telephone-screening stage seriously after it causes you to get rejected for the real deal!
- Make Yourself a Cue Card
The benefit of not being seen is that no one will be able to tell that you’ve prepared notes for your call. Even a simple cue card in point form can help you to remember the salient points that you want to impart and keep you from allowing your mind to wander when you’re trying to remember every single detail.
The key to making a cue card work during a phone call is to keep things simple. Don’t make the mistake of crowding a large page with text that you’ll have no chance of skimming while carrying a professional conversation.
When it comes to an interview that will determine the path of your entire future career, it is almost impossible to prepare too much. Make sure that you hire a legal recruiter before your next interview to ensure that you don’t do too much or too little but the perfect amount.
