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I’ve been in interviews where there was heavy emphasis on someone’s skills and technical ability, and I have also experienced interviews where it focused more on work style, ethic, personality, how I would handle certain situations, teamwork ability, etc.
I think it varies by firm and practice area. If you’re in a firm that’s smaller or more tightly knit, fit is probably really important. Same with a tightly knit or smaller practice area where everyone pretty much works together and sees or interacts with EVERY person from their department every single day. With a bigger firm/department, I have not seen this as much. When I have been at bigger firms, there have been attorneys in my practice area or department that I never met, never saw, never worked with, never interacted with, etc.
My last interview focused on both technical/skill set as well as personality and fit. First round was with an HR manager. The interview was over Zoom and recorded. The firm owner watched it back to determine whether I should move onto the second round. During the first interview, I was asked a few skills-related questions + I also was asked a little bit about my experience, but a lot of it was assessing my personality and conversational.
The second round of the interview was solely a skills assessment. I was given a hypothetical case, and I had to write a complaint based off the facts given. I was instructed to format it to court style standards, present legal arguments, cite relevant cases, include any and all important documents for filing such as a cover letter, cert., order, etc., and I also had to justify any assumptions I may have made while completing the assignment (if I made any based off of any factual holes or uncertainties).
Finally, the third round was purely personality/fit based. Five minutes of the interview focused on my experience and skill set for the position. After that, most of the questions asked were about how I embody certain core values or personality traits, how I would handle a specific situation, how I have handled difficult situations in the past, weaknesses, strengths, etc.
To shed a little more light on how heavy fit is weighted in interviews, during this last interview I described, the firm owner told me how important a good fit was to her. This resulted from her being burned in the past by a toxic, lazy, and uncooperative employee (yes, there are two sides to every story, but a. I only have the firm owner’s to work off of and b. the firm owner seemed very genuine and truthful during my interaction with her so I am inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt). Anyway, being burned by a past employee is a totally understandable and valid reason to place a heavy emphasis on a candidate’s fit with the team imo. As employees, we definitely / most likely have been burned by an employer. Employers are not immune to it happening to them.
I also think fit is emphasized more than skills because you can ALWAYS train someone, teach them, or put resources and time into improving holes in technical skills. Having a sh*t personality is harder to fix, if even possible, and something that takes MUCH MUCH more time and resources. You can’t MAKE someone be a team player or a good person to with whom to work.
Assessing a firm’s fit for me was a challenge at first. Mostly because I am a first generation lawyer that had no familiarity with the industry or how it worked or what it really was. I thought law school completely and adequately prepared graduates for practice (💀). Assessing fit comes from having worked at a few places and seen various types of workplace culture, having dealt with different types of personalities (especially the more common workplace ones), having the ability to read people (this comes with time, practice, and close observation). The more you experience and see, the better questions you’ll know to ask. You will know what to look out for, what to ask about, what to focus on, etc. You’ll know your personal red flags and deal breakers, and you can ask about them. You’ll know that a red flag or deal breaker should not be ignored because NO, it will not improve over time and NO, you will not be special and have a different experience compared to previous employees or to your peers/colleagues. You’ll have to know what you’re looking for and what you definitely cannot tolerate. That’s the only way you’ll best assess a fit for yourself.
Thanks for both of your great responses and they are very helpful. I totally agree the fit means different things for different people but it normally means more for employees than employers. But given the market I don’t think employees have that many opportunities to assess “fit”, a lot of us just take what comes our way
In Biglaw transactional in NYC, all of the candidates were qualified on paper and, with rare exception, could be taught what they needed to know. So the threshold question became: who do I want to be stuck with in a conference room at 3am?
Yes, you need to like that person
On a basic level, people want to work with those they can get along with. So that's part of culture. And a firm may have a culture or ethos and it may seem that someone simply wouldn't fit in. At times, however, it can seem that passing on someone because of culture can be a catch-all for some unfair or biased judgment. It's one of those things where people may seem to know what it means instinctively, yet it can also be a nebulous criteria that could mean any number of things.
Yes, hard to tell
Fit will matter more to you when you have to spend 14h+ a day with someone who's rude, arrogant, not a team player, etc. When people get past a certain stage of the interview process it's basically already a given that they're qualified on paper; the real question then becomes, how much will I regret recommending this person for hire if they end up working on all my deals/frequently being added to my trial teams. You can absolutely ask questions to probe at whether someone has issues with working with others, is arrogant, is prone to throw others under a bus to save themselves, is bigoted in some way, etc.
On the other hand, fit is also frankly what too many people in law say when they want to say "I want to hire people who look/act like me/people who I'd want to be friends with outside of work" but know that's not a good or sometimes legal basis to decline an applicant.
The tricky thing as the applicant is that for obvious reasons you're never going to get a lot of clarity, regardless of which it is. No one wants to tell you you came off like an asshole even if it's true, and no one's going to admit that the reason why the 6 white male interviewers weren't jazzed about the black female applicant maybe had something to do with her race/sex/socioeconomic status growing up.
Wow that’s interesting to know
Wow! That's interesting. I'm sorry you went through that. The whole point for interviewing one another is to have a face-to-face conversation regarding job specific skills and or transferable skills that can be beneficial. Diving in to experiences where perhaps challenges were met with quantifiable results and or resolutions. I believe applicants are there because they want the job and the employer really wants to hire. This is really odd behavior. I can recall the experience with the particular employer as the weirdest and most unpleasant experience I've ever witnessed, especially at the interview stage. It honestly made me see what little experience the person had with regard to culture and people and gave me lots of insight as to what it would be like to be employed there. I respectfully declined to be considered further.
Yes. It’s overall unavoidable to be biased to assess “fit”.