Becoming a Legal Eagle
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Thank you.
Hello, and welcome to the Talent Trade. I am your host, Stephanie Moss, partner with Thinking Ahead Executive Search. Today, I am super jazzed to have one of the best of the best in the business with us today. Jen White joined our firm three years ago. She came out of the gates swinging. She broke our 20 plus year top first year record and has been a top producer every year since then in the legal recruiting space. Super happy to have you with us. And Jen, I'll let you tell us a little bit more about you and your niche, and then we'll dive into our topic. Thank you so much, Steph.
Yes, I joined three years ago in the legal space. I have been in sales and marketing for, I would say, my entire career in one aspect or the other. And I love recruiting for law firms and for attorneys. It's a great group of people to get to know and to chat with. Most attorneys are networkers at heart because they have their own kind of sense of book of business that they're trying to build. So in ways we kind of line up in that, in that sense. So I've really, really enjoyed it. We have a wonderful team and my coworkers on my team. I just love, so I feel very blessed to be here.
We're super. Super thankful to have you. So today, Jen, my understanding is you are going to lead us through a little bit of a discussion as it relates to partnership versus vendor, all that stuff in the legal recruiting business.
So a lot of times the way that things work when you are in the legal recruiting field is there's different types of ways that you can partner with law firms. The law firms are considered the client and the attorneys are considered the candidate. And if you can kind of liken it a little bit to real estate where the clients are the sellers and then the candidates are the buyers. So what you're trying to do is get to know your clients, your firms as much as possible and and be able to have the respect that they would be calling you. So what I thought would be a good idea is to kind of go through the steps of how to get to be at the desk in the C-suite with these firms. So there's different types of searches that you have.
You can start out with a contingent search, which basically means they have a need and they're sending it out to all the recruiters out there and candidates alike. Sometimes it will be posted on their on their firm websites. It's a little bit like acting like you're a sports agent. So you have the talent and you're kind of shopping them around to each of these firms. So that's the contingent basis. Everyone has the same shot at the person that you are working with, the candidate. So the good thing about that is that you have a lot of shots on goal. You can have this candidate go out to different types of firms. However, there's no guarantee that you're going to get paid. So sometimes what you do is you'll try to have that firm, a firm in particular, be a client that you want to have a retained search with. And what that means is that you're identifying a firm that you feel like has great opportunities because I think that's one thing is identifying which firms you want to work with is just as key as them identifying which recruiters.
Because if you have a search that no one wants and it's a dog search, then you're really kind of shitting yourself in the foot because even though you may get money up front, you are probably not going to get the rest of that money because it's a really difficult find. So when you identify the firm and you realize that it's a great firm that you want to work with, that's number one. But you have to make sure that the firm's good. You're going to have a successful search. It's actually something that people are going to want to join. That's kind of what I think it's important for people to realize. You don't just want to work with anyone. And then the approach of how you want to work with these firms can be either you identified them and you've never worked with them and never placed with them, but you've always known about them. And you're going to pitch that routine search right off the bat. Then there's the way that you have worked with them in the contingent side.
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