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I was a Biglaw associate for 10 years, then burned out and tried my hand at recruiting with a legal recruiting at a large agency (recruited associates, partners, and in-house); after a few years of recruiting wanted to go back to lawyering so am now in my 3rd year in-house. So I have good insight from all angles of this!
In-house talent teams do not headhunt like external recruiters do—in-house talent teams 99% of the time post jobs and get flooded with hundreds of resumes and spend their time sifting through those resumes (with help from AI tools that elevate the ones supposedly fitting the job description the best). They probably want 3-5 candidates to put through the interview process.
For very specific and hard-to-recruit role (think in-person required in a non-major market for a regulatory role where the talent is clustered in major cities) the in-house team maaaaay headhunt by using LinkedIn Recruiter to search for/find candidates and then will reach out; for example, I am an FCPA lawyer that worked as outside counsel on the biggest case in the aerospace and defense industry and got outreach from a defense company based in Melbourne, FL because they need someone to lead their anticorruption program and it’s an in-person role (I’m already in-house doing that work now in my second in-house role, I previously did bribery investigations).
In-house talent team members are each probably recruiting for 30-50 jobs at the same time so they don’t have time to proactively headhunt like that for the majority of roles. Sometimes in-house talent teams hire external recruiters but again this is only going to be for hard-to-fill roles and often the hiring manager needs to let the talent teams first try to see what resumes float in before engaging an external recruiter.
It’s very expensive because it’s very time consuming—an external recruiter will demand exclusivity (that recruiter will get paid their fee even if a candidate applies on their own and the company can’t accept applicants from other recruiters), and will get paid either the full fee or half of it upfront. The fee is typically 30% of the annual salary of the attorney that will get hired, so easily $75k-$100k+++. That’s a lot for in-house legal budgets and typically is only justified for a fairly senior level hire. It’s very time consuming to identify the candidate pool that meets the specific job requirements, and often the company paying this kind of fee does not show a lot of flexibility to consider candidates that don’t meet all the requirements. These external recruiters are using LinkedIn Recruiter Pro (which is very expensive, I think it could be $5k-$10k per year per login) to search for candidates using certain limited filters in the LinkedIn search tool that are not well suited for legal recruiting but primarily relying on search by keywords. To maximize your chances of being found your LinkedIn profile needs to be robust and include all the keywords for the practice area you’d want to be hired for.
But honestly when a company is paying an external recruiter the company wants someone who is already in-house. The only in-house job I worked on as a recruiter where they were open to hiring directly from a law firm was an investment firm that focused on investing in solid patents (not really a patent troll but something like that) and they wanted an IP lawyer to help evaluate potential investments and the candidate needed an MA or PhD in some biological science (not civil or mechanical engineering). So that’s the level of specialization that drives a company to hire an external recruiter.
And that’s why external recruiters who focus on in-house recruiting do not spend time forming relationships with law firms associates—the chance that one from a pool of even 100 law firm associates will be a fit for a very specific position the recruiter will be filling in the future is very very slim. It’s a waste of time for the in-house recruiter to forge relationships with associates. It’s very different from recruiters who focus on lateral moves firm-to-firm, as they benefit from having a pool of associates they have a relationship with to tap when standardized law firm roles open up. So don’t expect an in-house recruiter to engage with you like the lateral recruiters do.
And that my friends is a large part of the reason why it is so dang hard to land your first in-house role….
I didn’t start getting in-house recruiters calling until after I landed my first in-house job. Not sure why, but I definitely noticed it
That’s a really good question — I hadn’t thought about that. There’s been a few emails where it’s clear they knew I’m in-house and were actively trying bring me back to a firm. That said, now that I think about it, I would venture that most of them probably are mailing lists.
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What’s your practice area? Is your LinkedIn up to date with a clear bio? I did healthcare regulatory and transactional work and got a lot of in house recruiter messages in private practice. Note that I had more luck direct applying when I went in house as a 4th year (got two offers, one from LinkedIn and one from GoInHouse.com) and then again when I moved to my second role (used primarily LinkedIn).
Start by finding the in house positions on linked in and applying, a big chunk of in house roles are recruited by their own HR department
There are some sights like legal recruiter that I regularly get contacted from. You could also try looking on firms websites directly to see if they have roles you can apply for directly with them.
A lot of external recruiting companies have in-house teams. If a recruiter reached out to you in the past that you trust or felt had valuable insight, ask them if they do in-house work or can recommend someone.
I only do firms but can recommend someone if you need.
I'd assume most companies dont want to pay recruiters much if at all, and whether or not someone reaches out to you will therefore be tied more to word of mouth than anything else. In which case being in-house counsel somewhere else puts you in a better position to be recommended for a similar role elsewhere
I did start getting emails/messages from receuiters for in-house roles when I was more senior (and at a firm). I also have a somewhat niche skillset, though, which is likely the reason why.