This Week In Legal Tech: Is This App The Tinder Of Legal Hiring?
Its founders believe it's already disrupting legal hiring by providing a quick, easy alternative to legal recruiters.
I am going to tell you about a legal hiring app that you cannot get in the United States. Not yet, anyway.
But in the UK, where it launched just six months ago, it has over 4,000 lawyers and 100 legal employers signed up, including leading firms such as Linklaters, Clifford Chance, Shearman & Sterling, Herbert Smith Freehills and DLA Piper.
The app is called Route1, and its founders believe it is already disrupting legal hiring by providing a quick and easy alternative to legal recruiters. Founder and CEO Henry Allan likens it to Tinder. Not to mention Airbnb and Twitter.
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“Like Airbnb, we let the buyer and seller deal directly with each other,” Allan explains. “Like Tinder, we felt the best way to pair people is through matching them, rather than through a job board. Like Twitter, our product is aimed at millennials, who have a nanosecond attention span.”
Here’s how it works. Employers post jobs for free. Job seekers register anonymously, indicating the location where they are seeking to work, the practice area, and their years of experience. Route1 sends job seekers the job listings that match their backgrounds.
Like swiping photos on Tinder, job seekers swipe tiles showing jobs that match their qualifications and interests.
Like swiping photos on Tinder, job seekers swipe the job listings they’re interested in. Route1 calls them “tiles.” This gives them concise specifics about the job and the firm. Another click gets the full job specification. If they decide to apply for a job, they do so directly through the app (at which point the applicant’s identity is revealed to the employer, of course). Through the app, they can keep track of all their applications.
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For employers, Route1 charges nothing to post jobs. If a successful match is made through the app, then the employer is charged 5 percent of the hire’s first-year salary.
“We tried to cut all the fat off the job spec, just give them the most interesting points,” Allan says. “All you really need to know is who’s the firm, what’s the work, the salary info, and some clients and deals.”
Job seekers are guaranteed total anonymity up until the point at which they apply. But, even though anonymized, the employer still gets data on how often its postings are viewed, Allan points out.
The fact that the app matches applicants to the jobs that fit their qualifications is an advantage to both applicants and employers. As an applicant, if you are a third-year lawyer with a specialty in mergers and acquisitions looking for a job in London, those are the matches you are sent. As an employer, if the position you want to fill requires that third-year lawyer with a specialty in M&A, those are the only applicants who will see your posting.
And for both applicants and employers, the app is far more efficient than working through recruiters, Allan believes. Firms often go to multiple recruitment agencies and end up having to sift through multiple candidates from multiple sources. In addition, there is a natural question of recruiters’ conflicts, of whose interests they are looking after, he says.
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“We feel the whole process can be much better done through an automated agnostic system.”
Route1 launched its app in London last May without much fanfare at first. “We didn’t make much of a fuss about it,” Allan says. “We wanted to make sure we had scalability.”
Two events this fall hastened its momentum. In September, the company expanded the platform to Australia. Then, in October, Route1 won the Legal Geek/Thomson Reuters LawTech Startup Award for best marketplace.
The company viewed the Australia launch as a test of the platform’s ability to scale rapidly. With that under its belt, the company is now looking to expand to other markets with strong hiring ties to the UK, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as to other verticals, such as accounting and banking.
But also big on Route1’s expansion radar is the U.S., Allan says. However, he is reluctant to launch the product in the U.S. without some sort of U.S. anchor, preferably in the form of a business partner with experience in this area.
“We could turn it on to be live in the U.S. today, but we need to have the infrastructure in place to get the relationships with law firms and the volume of job listings,” Allan says.
“The U.S. is the holy grail for us. We think this service could make a huge difference for the job market there.”
Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).
