Interview Best Practices

Posted by

Kate Harry Shipham

Posted on

Jan 31, 2025

Best practice recruiting involves two things: a sound strategy, and good execution of that strategy.

An effective best practice recruiting approach to attract the right marketing and BD professionals includes:

Conduct meetings, not interviews
Plan out the meetings
Set your candidate’s expectations
Include the key people from the start
Have one meeting out of the office
Ask questions that give you the right information

Effective Execution

Here are some ways you can ensure effective execution of this approach. Not only does this put your firm’s cohesive organization on display, it will be noticed and talked about among this tightknit group of legal marketing professionals. It will also ensure a sophisticated and thorough interview meeting process for all involved. Keep in mind that all of these require only minimal planning:

Assign different questions and discussion points. There will be marketing and BD team leaders, HR professionals, and partners all involved in these meetings. Whoever is coordinating the touch points with a candidate should assign different questions and discussion points between these people. This ensures candidates aren’t being asked the same question multiple times throughout, and highlights the collaborative alignment internally. And importantly, you can learn more about your candidate as each question will have a different focus, allowing you to gain a complete picture of the candidate.
Consider the logistics. Consider any interruptions to the meeting process. For example, who is going on vacation or into trial and can’t participate, who is traveling to other offices and will be hard to reach and follow up with, and who is simply too busy. Plan this going in, and then talk to your candidate about the logistics and timing.
Who is assigned with the follow up? Someone needs to take the lead on communicating with the candidate. Particularly when there’s marketing, BD, HR and partners all involved, often everyone assumes someone else has the lead. The candidate deserves to have a central point of contact and also to understand where they are at in the process. I see too frequently candidates getting disengaged from the process as the firm forgets to do these simple updates. And that’s when candidates will look to other firms who do have these best practices in place.
Interview training. With the exception of HR professionals, most people don’t conduct interviews as a part of their daily lives, and particularly partners in law and accounting firms. When people are not used to conducting interview meetings, they can be unnatural or overly formal. Others mask their own unfamiliarity with either aggressive tactics or by talking too much. The role of the firm here is to prepare people who will be speaking with the candidate on how to conduct an interview meeting. It should involve these things: information gathering, information sharing, testing on technical abilities, and cultural alignment discussion points. Attempting to ‘catch the candidate out’, or proving you know more than them aren’t conducive to an effective interview meeting.
Formal versus informal. Hopefully time permits for you to have one interview meeting out of the office. I’ve seen this occur in several settings, and one of my favorites is a peer interview meeting over a coffee, with a senior team leader accompanying. Mirror the circumstances of these meetings with your style. For example, an in-office formal interview meeting will naturally be more structured. An out of the office coffee meeting should be deliberately more casual, trying to build rapport and get a sense of who the candidate is as a person. Find out what they do outside of work, what community efforts they’re involved in, what sports they like to play. Also watch for how they engage with and treat others around them. All of this tells you more about the candidate and who they will be each day in the office.
Share as much as you ask. Candidates often have just as many questions as you do. They have thought at length about the potential of the opportunity (and how it fits with their personal career goals), your team structure, the firm leadership, and the future goals and trajectory of the firm. They will have also dug into the tenure and composition of your firm leadership, noted your DEI initiatives, and more often than not, spoken with people in their network who are former employees of your firm (I can’t stress enough the importance of how tightknit this group of professionals are.) Don’t make the mistake of thinking these meetings are just for you to gather information. Purposefully make a point of allowing a good amount of time to ask them what you can share with them.
There is never enough time. It is a very common and natural reaction at the end of an interview meeting to feel like there is never quite enough time. This will happen. Purposeful planning of each interview meeting will ensure the key areas are covered, and the layers within each area are satisfactorily peeled back and explored. It is also the case that candidates are receptive to follow up conversations if indeed time does get derailed.

Our Final Thoughts

Interview meetings, and the whole process of conducting these meetings, is not easily done. There’s planning, logistics and effective execution to all happen at the right time. But importantly, you, at your firms, have to judge a candidate and make a call about whether they are right for you while they are doing the same in return. If you follow this approach and execute effectively, this hard decision does become a little easier. Make it as easy as you can: arm yourself with the right information and plan accordingly, involve the right people, and ask the right questions. You will then feel fully informed to make the right decision.