"hiring team" revelations →[More:]
So last week / this week we interviewed a bunch of summer internship candidates. Specifically it was Boss, me, and an HR minion doing the interviewing.

I've been on interview teams before, but not at this level. Sure, it's just an internship, but these are kids who've survived their first year of law school and are still actually interested in the business, and a good internship plays a key role in their academic development.

A couple of things really hit home for me, being on "the other side of the table" as it were, for the first time - well, the first time I had any kind of real say in the hiring decision.

1) It is astonishing, and slightly worrisome how many mistakes were made on candidates' resumes / cover letters / writing samples. Especially in the current economic climate. OK so again, it's "only" an internship, but these internships are required experience for these kids to succeed and go on in their legal careers. And the thing is, I KNEW attention to detail was important, and I've always been uber-careful about my own documentation, but holy cats. Ugh. This really brought it home to me just how important it is. We threw out at least a couple dozen candidates alone just on basis of crappy writing skills / poor attention to detail / basic spelling errors. One kid even got the name of her own law school wrong in her cover letter, repeatedly, because it's the sort of title a spell checker will "correct" incorrectly for you if you're not paying attention.

So I'm just here to reiterate that, um, yea, that stuff is really important. Seriously, get someone else to review your resume, your cover letter AND any writing samples or project examples you may have to submit. I'm sure we tossed aside several worthwhile candidates based on the fact that their writing samples were just flat out terrible. Hell even I can write a better case summary than some of these kids.

2) When you do a live interview (well at least for our team) FOR FUCK'S SAKE JUST ANSWER THE DAMN QUESTION(S)!! I mean, at least on our behalf, we're not trying to trick these kids; these are simple questions like "how do you prioritise?" and "tell us about a project you enjoyed; at work, in school, or otherwise.". I mean, seriously, I know interviews are stressful and people freeze up. Lord knows I've done it before, quite a few times. And the thing is, we won't eat anyone alive for having to compose their thoughts prior to answering - in fact, we prefer that. So just take a deep breath, and really think about the actual question for a minute if you need to, but don't just spew a bunch of opaque bullshit pointy-haired-boss-speak at us thinking that's gonna solve it.

3) I adore Boss, because he and I think exactly alike. We ultimately whittled the field down to 2 candidates, who we affectionately refer to as the Geek and the Politician (i.e. an introverted task oriented chap, and an extroverted, chatty, polished, smooth "people person").

Dear readers, we (meaning Boss and I) chose the Geek. And hurrah-fucking-yay for that, seriously.

I'm guessing probably 80% of any normal business folks would probably have gone with the Politician. He's pretty, witty, smooth and has a shitload of credentials, including a ton of campaign work. Our HR minion even tried to sway us in that direction.

But Boss and I talked it over, and we just got a lot better gut feeling about the Geek. True, he didn't say much, and he wasn't as polished in his delivery, but he's quite personable in his own way, his writing was more organised and concise, he seems to have better time management skills just in general, and once he got a bit more comfortable with the interview team, we felt he engaged a lot better with us, despite being shy -- meaning: he asked us some really good specific questions in return, took decent notes, and overall seemed to get what working here entails.

Also, to my Point# 2 above, what he DID say, and the answers he gave, as well as the questions he asked us, were exactly what fits the department's needs. He didn't dress it up in a lot of flowery BS, either. We feel like he's the sort of kid you can throw a tangled up mess of contracts at, and he'll gladly root through them for hours digging up all the problems. Heck, he'll probably even be happy to write me a legitimate, properly organised database for the stupid file system clusterfuck that I've been struggling to sort out since I got here.

So yay, us! We have an intern to torture for the next few months!!