NALP 2016: Nobody Really Likes The New OCI, But Nobody Can Change It
The new OCI is good for the best students and no one else.
Nobody would choose to hire new talent the way Biglaw firms do it if they had any choice in the matter. Hiring lawyers in the summer before their 2L year, based on only one year’s worth of grades, two years before you actually need them to show up to work… is dumb. Everybody knows it’s dumb. During the recession — when law firms tried to on-board huge classes of new associates for which they had no work — most people imagined that the on-campus interviewing process (OCI) would get a major overhaul in the coming years.
It did. It got worse for firms.
The problem, as pretty much always, starts with law schools. During OCI in 2009, firms were still adjusting to the “new normal.” Remember, this was right after the disastrous Summer of 2009, when firms killed offer rates for their own summers, effectively ruining the kids who didn’t get a job at their 2L firm and were thrown into a 3L hiring market that simply did not exist. By the time OCI rolled around that fall, firms knew they had to drastically cut the size of their summer programs, but were unprepared for the much higher yield rate of desperate students taking the first offer extended. That meant that in 2009, law schools who interviewed near the end of the process lost out on spots for their students that were snapped up by students from schools earlier in Fall recruiting.
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It was a market correction, terrible but temporary. Firms would adjust and by 2010, greatly reduced summer classes were getting the normal 90% offer rate. But shortsighted law schools shouted “NEVER AGAIN” and moved up their interview weeks earlier in the calendar. That caused early schools to push up even earlier and now… what used to be “fall recruiting” (in ’02, I had OCI in late September and callbacks during the World Series), is now truncated into about four weeks in July and August.
Which, again, is dumb. It’s dumb for the schools which end up forcing their students into making quicker decisions about this life-altering choice. It’s dumb for firms whose relatively small recruiting teams are stretched to the max.
The first panel I attended at National Association for Law Placement’s (NALP) 2016 Annual Education Conference was called “Drinking From The Fire Hose: August Interview Trends.” Just think about that name. What is OCI like for firms now? It’s like getting drenched by a gigantic phallic apparatus when all you asked for was a glass of water.
On the panel were Paul Giangola and Caitlin Obringer, recruiting directors at Dechert and HoLove respectively. And Rob Cacace, the professional development guy at Georgetown Law.
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Giangola said that Dechert will travel to 42 different schools between July 25th and August 23rd. He said it with the same faraway look Bilbo Baggins has when he talks about butter being spread over too much bread.
The panel focused on strategies for managing the sheer numbers of applicants coming through the firm in a short period of time. Apparently, a lot of you are enjoying “group callback days,” where they bring a bunch of you into the firm and interview you “round robin” style. Giangola’s personal favorite is the “callback night,” where after your interview, you hit up a firm cocktail reception. Thank God they didn’t have these when my alcoholic ass was trying to hang on just long enough to get a job.
The main takeaway was that firms are encouraged to get their offers out to people as early as possible. It’s not that students will necessarily take those offers early. It’s just that with such a short time to schedule things, if your offer isn’t on the table the student might just be too booked with callbacks to fit your firm in.
Yeah, I said “too booked with callbacks.” The only people who are making out like bandits with the current system are the people who did well under the old system: the top students that everybody wants to hire anyway. These special snowflakes have always been fawned over, but Millennials are taking it to another level. Some examples:
• It’s now common for the top kids to ask for “second visits.” Like a whole other day where they come back to the firm, meet specific people, and generally get more of a feel for the place.
• Instead of telling people “thanks, but I’ve decided to go somewhere else,” the kids will just Ghost on a firm that they are no longer interested in.
• Recruiters are encouraged to be able to talk intelligently about “exit options” from their firms. Let me say that again… Millennials are straight up asking “what do people do when they get out of here,” and you, the hiring person, better have a good answer.
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I can’t imagine interviewing for a job and talking about what job I’d like to have after I quit that job, but I’m old and I guess I just don’t understand why those kids have to ride their skateboards all over the place.
The other big trend is that more and more firms are trying to “cut the line” of OCI and are extending offers to people before on-campus interviewing even begins. The panel suggested that while firms are doing this because they think it gives them an advantage, there’s little evidence to suggest that it does. Kids who get “Pre-OCI” offers still go through regular OCI, and they still make their decisions at the same time everybody else does. If anything, kids are using the Pre-OCI offers to leverage even quicker offer decisions from the firms they really want to go to. The panel was sly here, warning firms to “know where they stack up.” That’s, like, NALP code for “don’t try to pull this s**t unless you are Cravath or similar.” The top students know they are the top students and will not go to a lesser firm just because a firm yells “FIRST.”
In fact, the panelists suggested that the main use of Pre-OCI offers is for those students to brag and freak out their friends who didn’t get them. So… law students, if you hear someone talking about how they already have offers before OCI even starts, your instincts are correct, that person is a jerky jerkface and should be ostracized from polite society.
It seems that everybody has a strategy for dealing with the new OCI, but nobody has a plan to fix it. We have a system designed around hiring the 4.0 law review editor at a T14, when most students are not that student and most firms have no chance of attracting that student. We have a schedule that is condensed because of conditions which no longer exist. And we even have firms trying to trick the top talent they so desire into accepting an offer before they see all of their options.
Who wants it this way? When I see people lined up behind a fire truck waiting to get their faces blasted off by the hose, I don’t see victims. I see volunteers.
