April 21, 2006
Law Firms Should Look for Industry Knowledge when Recruiting
Yesterday’s post was a reminder that when hiring new talent, the firm needed to look for candidates who have the personality and fire in their belly to bring new business to the law firm. While those traits are needed by the law firm, it turns out that they are not that important in the minds of your existing clients. Perhaps a better way to say it is that the client is looking for more than just a personality.
Most mid-sized law firms are in the B2B business. B2B, of course, is the new age shorthand for an enterprise (a business) that provides services or sells products to other businesses. Law firms are viewed as businesses by their business customers.
The April 2006 Harvard Business Review reports that a Zurich, Switzerland team carried out extensive research to determine the difference between what customers wanted in a company's representative and what the providers looked for while recruiting new team members.
Customers placed considerable value on whether the provider’s representative understood the customer’s business and industry; whereas, industry knowledge was near the bottom of the qualifications that providers looked for when recruiting.
Philip Kreindler and Copal Rajguru with Infoteam Sales Process Consulting in Zurich said, "Our survey suggests that vendors would be wise to put industry and subject matter expertise ahead of social skills when it comes to recruitment." The point was made that instead of learning industry subject matter on the job, the ideal candidate brings that knowledge with them.
That characteristic is usually available to the law firm only through lateral hires. But in that regard, it is clear that knowledge of industries targeted by a law firm should be high on the list of qualifications when searching for a lateral prospect.
The question this raises is: "Does industry and customer knowledge trump relationship building skills?" I’m not sure these are separate skills. Relationship building requires one to have an honest and sincere interest in the other party. To acquire customer and industry knowledge requires that interest, and the more you know, the more interested you become in contributing to both.
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Filed under HR by Tom Collins