Interview Secrets, Part II-A: Control the flow.
If you want an offer, don't follow the unwitting Pied Piper
Top 1Ls,
This is the second in our series on interview secrets. This one will have two parts (creatively tagged, II-A and II-B) because it requires a longer explanation of how to approach some of the most difficult situations you will almost certainly encounter as an interviewee.
This week (Part II-A), we encourage you to adopt a paradigm shift in mentality that will require you to take a different approach. The paradigm shift is based on understanding the bigger context of the interviewer, something you won’t necessarily know by just being in the interview room with them. Next week (Part II-B), we take a step by step approach to executing on the secret we briefly describe below.
Please feel free to leave your questions or comments below (or just email us). You don’t have to use your real name - we know who you are, but it may not be a good idea to let others here know who you are, for purposes of having a free and vibrant conversation.
Very common interview experiences
During your Biglaw interviews this summer, you are likely going to experience several of the following situations:
You’re super enthusiastic about XYZ law firm, but when you meet the screening interviewers from that law firm, the partner starts the interview with… a yawn. And the dude cannot stop yawning.
The interview is punctuated by super-annoying, abstract, completely open-ended questions, such as “Tell me about yourself” or “Who are you” or “What’s your goal in life”.
The interviewer asks seemingly nonsensical, curveball questions like “If you were an animal, what would it be and why?” or “Who or what would you take with you if you knew you were going to be stuck on a remote island away from civilization?”
During an interview, with about 10 minutes left, the partner asks you if you have any questions for her. You ask your questions. She answers them. You still have 7 minutes left. You’re out of questions and the partner doesn’t have any questions for you. You’re horrified because this is your favorite firm.
In response to a question asked by the interviewer, you start talking about where you grew up as a child and give the best response you can provide. The partner nods and it’s clear he is intrigued by your unique background. He continues to ask follow up questions about your personal history from when you were 12 years old before you realize you’re almost out of time. Until that point, you further realize, everything you talked about is just tangentially relevant to a Biglaw interview.
You and the interviewer are both Boston Red Sox fans and hit it off. He talks about his favorite player in the team and you immediately start talking about why you also like that player. You two laugh and even joke around a bit; clearly you are on the same frequency as this partner. You are ecstatic, but before you can take it all in, the partner suddenly looks at his watch and says “So it seems like we’re out of time. Do you have any questions for me before I let you go?”
The common denominator in the situations above is that the interview is dominated by an element out of your control:
The whims of your screening interviewer
Your screening interviewer, who holds the key to your future, might be:
very unenthusiastic or completely unprepared
prone to asking abstract questions so open-ended that the conversation can go in random directions
a sociopath who unconsciously likes seeing people uncomfortable by asking non-sensical or curveball questions
disorganized and likely to continue a line of questioning that is inappropriate or inadequate for figuring out whether she should bring you back for a callback
someone who loves sports or some other domain so much he himself forgets he’s conducting an interview when the subject comes up
The situations we describe above are real-life situations that happened to one of us or someone we know in their screening interviews.
Most law students will fail in these situations, but you won’t
When interviewing law students find themselves in these situations, they are somewhat taken aback.
Most law students (especially those who aren’t reading this newsletter) are not going to get callbacks from the screening interviewers in situations like the above, because they will just follow the interviewer’s lead.
The vast majority of law students will treat whatever the interviewer says as sacrosanct and just try to give their best answer to the immediate question at hand. They will be ecstatic when the interviewer shows the same interests as theirs and utterly despondent when they see evidence that the interviewer seems bored or uninterested. The unwitting law students’ own enthusiasm and interview discipline are often uncontrollably dependent on the whims of the interviewer, leading them to follow the path set by the pied piper - the interviewer. Before they know it, they will be led off a cliff into the River of No-Offers.
As the days pass without getting a callback, these law students will simply think there is nothing they could have done and they will blame others for their own mishaps. They won’t realize - probably for a long time - how big of an opportunity has been squandered by them.
Why is it an opportunity?
How can an adverse situation beyond my control be an opportunity?
There is a high likelihood that the same screening interviewer who is unenthusiastic or disorganized in their conversation with you will take that approach in their conversations with others (below we explain why that might be the case). The situation will be adverse to everyone and not just you, in the vast majority of the cases.
While the same adversity is present, the approach you can take in the face of such adversity can be and should be drastically better from the rest of your competitors.
When you take our approach, it will usually be very appreciated in ways seen and unseen. When this approach is taken over the course of all of your interviews, your callback rate will inevitably be higher. (You should take the same approach to your callback interviews to score the highest number of offers.)
Let’s take a step back to understand several things that are not apparent to virtually all rising 2L doing on-campus interviews, which will be the foundation for our approach. They are centered around understanding the interviewer’s context.
Get into the mind of the interviewer
The first thing you have to realize about screening interviews is that it is very tedious for the interviewer.
Sure, the first few interviews might be interesting as the interviewer meets aspirational lawyers bursting with energy. Perhaps, for a moment, it will remind the attorney of their law school days when everything seemed simpler. But after the first couple of interviews, the fun wears off very quickly. You must understand how tedious and potentially torturous it can be for the attorney to be forced to meet tens of new strangers in 20-minute increments in a single day.
We’ve done some of these interviews ourselves and trust us, we hated ourselves for agreeing to do them. Every now and then we’d come across an interviewee so entitled and so out of their element (usually the gunner type who also happens to have terrible grades) that we feel suffocated by them. And at the end of the day, we’d come back home (or sometimes to the office!) with a sore throat, our backs aching from having to sit on uncomfortable chairs for hours and feeling disgusting after stress-eating copious amounts of unhealthy snacks lying around the interview premises.
Sometimes interviewers have serious issues of their own that unwittingly materialize into the interview by way of an unenthusiastic attitude or a lack of preparation.
It may be the case that firm politics came into play on the question of who has to do screening interviews - which, for all intents and purposes, usually do not count toward billable hour requirements. Many of the interviewers are actually junior partners or senior associates who are slammed with billable work (work that actually matters to them), who would rather spend their time working in the office. This is in addition to being subject to guilt for not able to carry out various family responsibilities in regards to their children or spouse (people who actually matter to them). They know they will never be able to fulfill such expectations any time soon. Behind many of the worst interview experiences is a screening interviewer who simply can’t control their own angst or displeasure about their own predicament.
Screening interviewers are not incentivized to pull out diamonds from a rough; they are incentivized to find fault with you and reject you.
In fact, the screening interviewer has very little to gain from this experience, while you - interviewee law students - have much to gain: a prestigious job, a recurring six-digit income stream, boasting rights, etc. From a different angle, there also isn’t really any real downside to them if they happen to miss out on a great candidate. In most cases, they won’t ever realize you were a great candidate because they will never hear from you again. Even if you eventually get a final offer from the firm and begin to work at the firm, the odds of you working together with your screening interviewer is very, very slim. Take it from us - many of us never worked with the people who hired us!
For these reasons, you must realize that:
It’s not up to the law firms to discover you.
You must realize that it’s not up law firms to discover how great of a candidate you are. In fact, the burden is completely on you. You have to help them discover you. You have to be the one to navigate the terrain for them. And you can’t do that consistently with the completely passive attitude that all of your competitors will inevitably take, because many of your interviewers will indeed put you in one of the uncomfortable and awkward situations described above, where following the path they set is actually to your detriment. Instead, when you are faced with such difficult interviewers, you need to take a significantly more proactive approach.
The proactive approach we are advising has little to do with “thinking on your feet”. If you’re not strategically prepared, on-the-fly tactics simply will not work or could backfire. It’s not something that can be accomplished in a day, but with incremental effort over time, it is a sure strategy.
Which brings us now to our second interview secret.
Interview Secret #2: You must control the flow.
Adverse interview situations like the ones described above can and should be managed well. By you.
You must learn how to steer the conversation ship in the direction that is relevant for the common purpose shared between you and your interviewer of evaluating your candidacy for employment at the firm. And in order to steer the ship, you have to know where you want to take it.
So where should you want to take the conversation? To a place that is beneficial for you, your strengths. This sounds simple, but the conversation is typically led by the interviewer which means there is an infinite number of possibilities as to how things can go wrong. How are you supposed to prepare for every kind of randomness? Also, how do you control the flow of the conversation in a way that is still respectful of your interviewer? You want to steer the ship, but not be treated like a pirate.
Stay tuned for a detailed breakdown of our methodology that will enable you to do this, in Part II-B, next week.