Law Schools

The Future Of Legal Recruiting Takes Less Than A Half-Hour?

Pymetrics could be a game changer when it comes to entry-level legal recruiting.

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As I have both written and podcasted about before, Vanderbilt has an extensive professional development series designed to help all of our students — with a particular emphasis on 1Ls — build their non-academic legal skills while also learning more about the profession as a whole.  While the programming is extremely valuable for students, for me, the fifth iteration of how to excel as a summer associate is not something I feel compelled to attend, having both heard all of the advice before and having previously lived that glorious summer associate life with subsequent post-graduation employment offers — though it is always great to see wonderful Vanderbilt alumni who come back to campus for these presentations.  Instead, that lunch hour can be spent catching up on the important issues of the day, such as #GetReeseToVanderbilt.

But while certain important topics are covered each and every year, sometimes a new presentation will crop up and catch my attention.  This happened last month with a professional development event entitled “A Brand New Way of Interviewing: What You Need to Know.”  Sponsored by O’Melveny, the presentation featured John-Paul Motley, Managing Partner of the firm’s Los Angeles office (Vanderbilt Law Class of 1999), and Darin Snyder, Regional Head of Litigation for Northern California, and perhaps more importantly for the day, the firm’s Diversity and Inclusion Partner.  While Motley served as the Vanderbilt hook, Snyder was the star of the show, walking the students through OMM’s new method of finding law school talent.

Snyder began by discussing the two biggest flaws in the current system of legal recruiting — there are far more than two, but this was a good place to start.  First, despite the massive financial resources of O’Melveny (gross revenue in 2018 surpassed $800 million), due to the finite nature of the recruiting calendar and the metaphysical fact that their attorneys cannot be on multiple campuses at once, the firm is only able to meet with a tiny percentage of the 111,000+ law students enrolled on campuses across the country.  Given these constraints, like most elite firms, OMM tends to only recruit (at least on campus) at the elite law schools.  Setting aside the issue of how this limited OCI reach can perpetuate and entrench privilege, even at the schools O’Melveny visits, they are only afforded an opportunity to meet with a limited number of students.  For example, Vanderbilt’s Class of 2021 is around 180 students.  A full OCI interview schedule consists of 18 interview slots.  That means, at best, OMM is getting a chance to meet with 10 percent of the class.  And Vanderbilt is a small school.  When looking at the size of the classes at law schools such as Harvard, NYU, or Georgetown, unless a firm is bringing a group of associates that would rival a World War II landing party in size, said firm is probably only reaching a minute portion of the class.  So how can employers fix this issue?  Snyder told the assembled Vanderbilt students that he thinks he has a way for the firm to thoroughly evaluate any law student, at any law school, who might be interested in working for O’Melveny.

Snyder introduced us to Pymetrics.  Designed by neuroscientists, Pymetrics bills itself as a bias-free way for employers to evaluate candidates through a series of short computer games.  As applicants play these games, a profile of key employment traits is generated.  An algorithm then compares the candidate’s profile to a model for that particular employer and determines whether that individual could excel at the firm.  It sounded simultaneously simple and revolutionary.  Pymetrics is currently being used in Corporate America by entities such as Unilever, LinkedIn, and Mercer, but Snyder believes O’Melveny is the first law firm to employ this recruiting approach.

Not surprisingly, the biggest question on attendees’ minds was also the one that Snyder could not/would not answer, what traits are OMM looking for, i.e., what’s the firm’s model.  However, he was happy to describe how the model came about.  Since initially the Pymetrics approach is only being used for entry-level hiring initially — if successful, Snyder has grand plans of employing it for hiring decisions across the spectrum, including lateral associates and partners — the firm identified a number of junior associates who are currently excelling at the firm and had them play the games.  The traits identified in those associates formed the foundation of the model.

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While one plays Pymetrics games on a computer, these are not standard video games wherein the object is to “win.”  There are no victories in these games, but rather they serve to capture personality traits.  Thus, the results generated by the games should be the same after one play as it would be after 50.  This eliminates any disadvantage for those students who attend law schools which operate on delayed schedule from the rest of their peer institutions.  It also makes it highly unlikely that a Pymetrics coaching/tutoring industry will develop and introduce socioeconomic bias that this process is designed to eliminate.

As I was curious to see what students, including those at Vanderbilt, would have to go through if they wanted a summer associate position with O’Melveny, Snyder was kind enough to provide me access to play the games.  When I first logged on, I was expecting to meet Joshua from Wargames.

Instead, a friendly video popped up and I was told there would be 15 games that could take upwards of 20 minutes to complete.  The most important factor is that I was to make sure I would not be distracted while playing the games.  As a father of two kids under the age of four and three pets, including a mewling cat who is mystified as to why 2:45 a.m. is not the ideal time to play, even if I am able to carve out 20 minutes without actual distractions, there is still the seemingly constant distraction of abject exhaustion.  Plus, living in a country run by Donald Trump is its own unceasing distraction.  But putting those concerns aside, I dove into games with such innocuous titles as “Balloon” and “Easy or Hard.”  Alas, there was no Global Thermonuclear War.

While the whole point of these games is that takers cannot “learn” how to play them, I will skip too much detail on the actual gameplay involved, except to say that it turns out I am very good at hitting the spacebar on my computer in rapid succession.  Once I finished, Pymetrics generated a long “trait report” containing my “unique cognitive and emotional profile.”  Turns out I am trusting, fair-minded, and great at screening out distractions, though not as altruistic as I thought.  As a high school policy debater, I was subjected to far more Ayn Rand than is probably healthy at that, or really any, age, so I will place the blame there.  If I were applying to O’Melveny, the Pymetrics algorithm would inform the firm if I was a good match with their model.

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I can imagine that the natural instinct of anyone in the legal employment realm might well be skepticism to a 20-minute computer test determining Biglaw employment.  But the standard OCI screener interview is the exact same length and it is there that the applicant pool is most whittled down.  An employer is probably going to get more valuable information from the Pymetrics trait report than what tree a student said they would be if they had to be a tree, or what their favorite 1L class had been.  Some logistics questions abound.  While the value of Pymetrics is clearly obvious for those schools/students OMM would not otherwise get to interview, it is still not perfectly clear how these tests will integrate with the existing interviewing structure.  Are students who are interviewing with the firm at OCI take these tests before their screener interview?  After?  Before a potential callback?

Snyder told the Vanderbilt assemblage that if Pymetrics proves successful — an evaluation that will take years, if not decades — he can see it surpassing academic performance in the firm’s evaluative process.  Though in subsequent conversation, he made it clear that Pymetrics will be part of the OMM evaluative process and will not represent the entirety of how candidates are evaluated.  If the utilization of Pymetrics results in strong first-year associate classes, the importance of Pymetrics in the evaluative process could well continue to grow, but they do not anticipate going to the extent of some corporations which exclusively use Pymetrics to find new talent.  That makes sense as I am a bit dubious that an Am Law 50 firm would pass on a Sears Prize winner from Harvard merely because a computerized test revealed some personality traits that were not shared by standout attorneys at the firm.  But I applaud the effort to break out of the old interview modes and embrace a technological approach that is ideally free of bias.  Not to mention, it is kind of fun to play.

(Flip to the next page to see Nicholas Alexiou’s Pymetrics trait profile.)

Nicholas Alexiou is the Director of LL.M. and Alumni Advising as well as the Associate Director of Career Services at Vanderbilt University Law School. He will, hopefully, respond to your emails at abovethelawcso@gmail.com.

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