I was having a conversation with a good friend yesterday who recently landed her dream job: providing free legal services to some of the most vulnerable members of our community. In addition to being incredibly proud of and happy for her, we started talking about the interview process.
At one point, I shared a story with her about how I was positive I had landed a coveted job solely because I treated my interviewer like a person and not like an untouchable gatekeeper. Since my friend thought it would be helpful if I shared that story more widely, here you go.
As you may know from having read some earlier posts, I almost ended up in BigLaw, attracted by how easy the path was. Well, the interview this post is about was one of my on-campus interviews with a prominent BigLaw firm.
The way on-campus interviews work (or at least how they worked about a decade ago) is that you sign up via a lottery system where you rank the law firms you’d like to interview with. If you’re selected for an interview – HLS holds a random lottery, while some other schools allow firms to match with students by reviewing their resumes in advance – then you have just 20 minutes to impress the interviewers enough to offer you the coveted on-site half-day interview.
(Those ones take place at the firm itself and typically include some swanky hotel stays, room service, and fancy lunches. Personally, I could not bear to order room service once I saw the prices – even though the firm was picking up the tab – so I would get Potbelly’s and Starbucks every morning. That said, the fancy lunches were part of the interview and I had no qualms about partaking in those.)
I was in the middle of a day filled with these 20-minute interviews when I found myself across the table from the managing partner of the one BigLaw firm I was most interested in joining if I took a position in New York City. As many people would later tell me, he intimidated them far more than any of their other interviewers that day. (Typically, the on-campus interviews consist of sitting across from a younger partner and a junior or mid-level associate, not the managing partner of a huge firm.)
I sat down for my interview only to find that my interviewer seemed far less interested in me than he did in his iPad. After a couple of minutes where I could tell our conversation wasn’t going anywhere, I asked, “Is everything okay? It seems like perhaps you’re distracted.” I asked it politely, but it was a bit direct, even for me. My assumption was that he had no interest in my application and was just trying to pass the time by asking generic questions and then getting work done while I answered.
To my surprise, he immediately apologized. He explained that he had clients coming in from overseas for only one day, and that he needed to get back to NYC that evening. Yet, there was a severe storm coming through Boston, and he was incredibly worried he would end up missing the meeting.
He turned his iPad towards me and showed me an app that combined all of the different transportation options – planes, trains, and buses – onto one screen with real-time updates. He had been scrolling through it to see what his options were for returning to the City all while praying that the evening options would not be canceled. I told him that I hoped the storm would not be as bad as predicted and that he would be able to make it back safely and in time for the meeting.
From there, he put away his iPad and we finally began having a real conversation. It turned out he knew my Contracts Professor, and despite my disinterest in transactional work, I had loved my Contracts class. I can’t remember much else outside of that part of the interview, though I remember it going well overall.
At the end of the day, I sent my slew of thank-you emails to everyone I had interviewed with that day. In his email, I made sure to mention that I hoped he had made it to his meeting and that the one-day trip had gone well for his clients.
To my surprise, I received an incredibly warm email in return. The managing partner could not believe that I had remembered about his meeting, or that I would actually check in that it had gone well. But of course I had. That seems like the normal thing a person would do.
That’s when I realized that most people do not treat interviewers like people. Instead, they treat them like the gatekeeper of a coveted opportunity to which only they hold the key. Well, that may be true, but they’re also people.
I remember telling some of my classmates about the interview after it happened, and specifically how I had told the managing partner that he had seemed distracted. My friends were shocked. Many of them had interviewed with him as well, and their impression was that he was their most terrifying interviewer of the day.
But that’s just it: he wasn’t some scary person, he was just scared. And when a person has concerns on their mind, trust that they are going to appear aloof or distracted, and in turn disinterested.
As you can imagine, I received a call back from the managing partner offering for me to come for a half-day on-site interview in NYC. I took him up on the offer along with a handful of other interviews, mostly in D.C. Out of all of the on-site interviews I went on, this was the only one where my original interviewer insisted on speaking to me. Yep, before I had even started my rounds of interviews on the gjillionth floor of some mega-skyscraper in downtown Manhattan, I was escorted to the managing partner’s office to say hello.
We chatted for a few minutes about how things were going. And I commented to him that his tortoise-shell glasses were very hip in Brooklyn these days. (He was the type of many who had likely been wearing that style of glasses for decades, not out of a fashion choice.) He didn’t seem to know how to respond, but I thought I’d at least try to have a lighter conversation than what he was used to experiencing with interviewees.
After I finished the series of interviews, I sent him a thank-you note. He responded that my comment about his glasses had been the nicest compliment he had received all week.
A day or two later, I received a call form him personally offering me a summer position at the firm. I ultimately turned it down to be in D.C. that summer, though I would have accepted it had I gone to NYC.
So what’s the takeaway? Don’t forget that your interviewers are people too. Take the opportunity to connect with them like you would anyone else. Show concern for their concerns. And feel free to give a compliment (though perhaps less of an awkward one) if the mood strikes.