Another year of interview insanity has come to an end and my firm, Adler Bytensky Prutschi, has happily matched with an outstanding candidate who we have very high hopes for in the 2010-2011 articling year. While this fact on its own is likely of little interest to Slaw readers, the technophile lawyers who follow this blog on a regular basis may be intrigued to hear how twitter – for the first time in our firm's history – became unwittingly a very central part of our interview process.
Having started a legal twitter feed some months ago (www.twitter.com/prutschi), I earned a number of sideways glances from my partners as I began to blog intermittently on cases of interest within our firm along with commentary on anything that caught my eye in the broader criminal justice system. As it turns out, a significant number of law students across the country were following my tweets. While this fact may have provided a totally unnecessary ego boost to a type-A criminal lawyer like myself, I had low expectations for the impact, if any, this following would have on our annual recruitment ritual. As it turns out, I was wrong.
A very high percentage of the exceptional students we interviewed had been following my feed and as such were tuned in to the kind of work our firm does, along with the legal issues that interest us, in a way that has never before been possible. Our interviews often resulted in engaging discussions about recent cases and trends within the criminal law field. It gave us as interviewers, rare insight into the minds of our candidates which we simply have been unable to glean in the course of a one-hour meeting in previous years. In some cases, we even began following the tweets of our candidates and used that information as part of our overall assessment of their quality. On the flip side, many students came armed with a level of knowledge about the day-to-day operations of our practice that was simply unprecedented in previous years.
While the jury is still out on the effectiveness of twittering to attract clients in our field, we cannot deny that it has had a very significant positive impact on our student recruitment in a very short period of time.
@Prutschi welcomes @Joel_Welch to the firm as our 2010-2011 incoming student-at-law.
Edward, thank you so much for sharing this with the Slaw community. This is the first I've heard of this effect of Twitter, and it sounds like a good one.
Fascinating post, Joel'll be an excellent articling student. Just one html comment:
http://www.twitter.com/prutschi
should be
<a href="http://http://www.twitter.com/prutschi">www.twitter.com/prutschi
(the url won't work without the http:// in front).
I guess ignore the middle part of my post because the way the formatting comment worked out, basically to fix the url just add http:// in front of the www
Joel is well known to us here at Western, especially among the Mature Students Club. He's our incoming President, and I had tweeted my recommendation.
Mr. Prutschi was also helpful enough to let me know when I could walk away from the phone during this process via Twitter. I had the strange (yet strangely successful) challenge of trying to do interviews while in another country.
Still, I suspect many law students will be applying for masters programs in coming months. It's only anecdotal at this point, but I've heard many are still looking.
I am very honoured to be an articling student at Adler Bytensky Prutschi in 2010-11 and my experience through the articling recruitment process shows that web 2.0 is a force to be reckon with and is here to stay.
So, get on twitter and be part of the larger community. We want your input and perceptive.
I've enjoyed reading the comments on this post and watching the reaction across the internet. A specal thanks to Jacob who proved that just because I'm "hip" enough to be twittering, doesn't mean I'm remotely proficient with coding and wordpress — I've adjusted the link to my twitter page so hopefully it now works. Sigh…so many missed follower opportunities. :)