February 23, 2023

 Paul Shephard

Staffing best practices flexible resourcing legal resourcing candidates

When you need to fill a role requiring a lawyer, how many rounds of interviews are best? On the one hand, you want to ensure you hire the right candidate; on the other, prolonging the processes unnecessarily wastes everyone’s time and, more importantly, extends the period during which the role remains unfilled. How, then, do you strike the right balance as to how many rounds of interviews are best?

Based on my decade-plus working in the legal resource sector advising law organisations and candidates – and my previous career practising law in the private sector – ‘over-interviewing’ often occurs. Myriad reasons explain the phenomenon. Sometimes, it happens because ‘we’ve always done __ rounds of interviews!’ Other times, it is a case of ‘defensive interviewing,’ whereby someone involved in the hiring process insists on interviewing every candidate to head off criticism should a particular hire not work out.

Whatever explains it, excessive interviewing frustrates everyone involved – from GCs, legal directors, partners, recruiters, HR department staff, and the candidates themselves. The question remains: How many interviews are enough?

You may be disappointed to learn that there isn’t a single perfect answer. Rather, the number varies depending on several factors highlighted by the following four questions:

1. Duration: Are you hiring this person for a permanent role, or are they a temporary recruit for a defined period?
2. Needs: How experienced must the individual be to fulfill the business requirement involved?
3. Position within the organisation: Who are the main stakeholders, i.e., the individual(s) to whom the new hire will report and, in turn, to whom those managers report?
4. Temperament: How important is the personality of the individual you seek to hire?

A permanent hire almost always requires at least two interviews of a candidate. However, this isn’t always the case. If the new hire is going to work closely with the GC with minimal involvement elsewhere, why would you need more than an interview with the GC? Counterintuitively, having junior staff conduct preliminary interviews with qualified candidates to generate a shortlist to present to superiors rarely works well. If a particular candidate has the right experience, have the right person (here, the GC) interview that candidate without delay.

This approach has numerous benefits, including two important ones:

• Nobody’s time gets wasted. Although conducting ‘filtering’ interviews may seem tempting, they unnecessarily prolong the process. In our example above, imagine five candidates, hour-long interviews, and a single round of screening interviews. The process will require at least six hours – five screening interviews plus one additional hour for the GC to interview a candidate deemed suitable by the screeners. (Given that presenting only one candidate to the GC may not be acceptable, the total time will likely be at least another hour). Of course, additional rounds of screening will add more time. Compare this to selecting the two or three best candidates and having the GC interview with them. If none pass muster, then you can proceed to the remaining candidates.
• Everyone feels valued from the get-go. It sends a strong signal to candidates and staff alike when you require (read: force) them to participate in interviews for positions that do not involve the interview participants working with each other. It comes across as bureaucratic and creates the impression that management is indifferent to the time, energy, and opportunity cost of interviewing. It also may lead a candidate to conclude – not unreasonably – that the person with whom they would work does not consider speaking with candidates a priority (which does not exactly bode well for a relationship where the new hire feels valued).

Ultimately, the answer to the correct number of interviews is always ‘as few as possible.’ Minimising the number will dramatically accelerate your hiring process, save everyone time, and make candidates and colleagues feel valued from day one.