First, our clients generally sign up on our website or call in. Once clients call in or sign up on our website, we call to schedule an appointment with them and they are assigned an Employment Advocate who will be their contact person throughout their search. With only one exception, all of our Employment Advocates are attorneys. Our Employment Advocates work with our clients through each step of the process.
Second, once an appointment is scheduled, clients speaks with one of our Employment Advocates about their job search and what they are seeking to do. During the phone call, a list of employers is generated which matches precisely what the client is seeking to do. Employment Advocates will generally counsel clients about what they believe are the most appropriate steps for the candidate to follow in their job search. Employment Advocates are sort of like recruiters because their ultimate objective is to get you a job. The difference between an Employment Advocate and a traditional legal recruiter, however, is that Employment Advocates work with you.
In the third step of the process, the list of employers that the client and Employment Advocate agree upon is sent to our data review center and the resume is sent to our resume and cover letter department.
Our resume and cover letter department is also populated almost exclusively by attorneys. Two of our resume and cover letter personnel have worked in major New York law firms. Another holds a master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. In our resume and cover letter department, with the input from what you are seeking to do gained from their discussions with you and your Employment Advocate, a resume fitting exactly what you are seeking to do is crafted.
Our data center is extremely sophisticated, operates 24 hours a day seven days a week and is staffed by over twenty researchers. Our data center is populating our database with contact information every day of the week. Many of our candidates often ask us where we get our data and the answer is we get it from numerous sources. The least challenging aspect of our work is getting the data from printed sources. The problem with printed sources, however, is that a large percentage of law firms, corporations and other legal hiring organizations do not even list themselves in printed sources. A listing in Martindale Hubble, for example, costs firms several hundreds of dollars. At a cost exceeding $50,000 a month, our data center pulls information from other data sources making use of U.S. Government issued Standard Industry Classifications (SIC Codes) which classify businesses based upon the type of industry they are in. This information is constantly being double checked, reclassified and loaded into our database.
Once the candidate file is sent to the data center, the data center reviews the list of contacts put together by the Employment Advocate. Since each search is personal to everyone who uses our service, our list of contacts inside each legal hiring organization is never perfect. For example, we try to use contacts that are less than four months old. If a contact is less than four months old we do not use it and reinvestigate who the contact is. In addition, we very rarely have a full list of contacts within each hiring organization because each search our candidates perform is unique. Accordingly, the data center identifies which contacts on the Employment Advocates’ list either (1) need to be found, or (2) need to be updated and sends them to a researcher within the data center. This process of updating the information often takes less than a day. In some cases it has taken our data center over two weeks. Once the data center is happy with its information, it is sent to a data analyst like Catherine for review.
