New York Lawyer
July 31, 2003

Q:
I'm a 3L student preparing for the coming on-campus interviews. Despite my being in a top-five law school and having good credentials, I was unable to receive a summer offer during my previous interviews and mass mailing. I suspect that my interviewing skills are the reason to blame (probably due to cultural differences; I'm a foreign attorney).

Could you advise me on how should I approach this problem and what is really meant by the phrase, that I hate, that "You should sell yourself?"

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A:

Not knowing you and being unable to ask more questions about your background makes answering this question a little harder. So I�ll throw out a variety of possibilities, some of which may help depending on the obstacles you�ve encountered.

Let career services help you. �One of the most important things that foreign students have to do is to take advantage of the career services office,� says Elizabeth Beebe, director of career services at Rutgers University Law School in Newark. For instance, have them vet your resume to make sure you conform to American-style resume writing. Many offices offer mock interviewing sessions, both with their own counselors as well as attorneys from the community. According to Beebe, �Some students might have the idea that an interview is an incredibly formal process and may not think it�s ever appropriate to even smile or have any casual interaction with the interviewer. That�s something that needs to be discussed with a counselor.� So you may need to loosen up and show your personality. Ask forthrightly for candid feedback, leading the way by saying, �Is my English faulty? Is my accent hard to understand? Do I send out signals that make me out of step with American culture?� You have to show that you are open to feedback and you will then get it. �Interviewing is a learned skill, and the more you do it, the better you get at it,� states Ellen Wayne, dean of career services at Columbia Law School.

Learn to love tooting your own horn. The fact is that many or most Americans find it necessary to recite their sterling qualities when trying to land a job. In other countries the legal community is often very small, thus it�s not necessary to apprise an interviewer of one�s prizes and awards and deans lists and law reviews. In America (as if you hadn�t noticed) the land is crawling with lawyers, and the number grows every year. Interviewers need to know why they should hire you in particular. Think of it less as bragging and more as passing along useful information. Many Americans actually don�t like boastful behavior either, and compromise by seeing it less as �selling themselves,� as if they�re a brand of dishwasher soap, and more as letting another person know why they would be an asset in their office.

Polish your communication skills. If you have language difficulties, take a course to deal with them, both for conversational purposes and for accent reduction. The law is very much a communications business, so if you�re having trouble talking with people, that�s going to be a hard hurdle to get over. �Lawyers have to deal with communication skills,� advises Wayne. �It�s part of the profession. If you want to practice in the United States, you have to enhance those skills, both written and spoken.�

Seek out firms that value diversity. There�s little question that many firms have difficulty with the idea of having someone �different� in their ranks. Witness the problems firms have retaining white women, let alone American minorities. Thus it�s little surprise that it�s not easy for a foreigner to be hired, when conservative law firms are skittish that clients may not respond to the person, and when in fact the hiring attorneys think (consciously or not) that they don�t feel a comfort level with the applicant (all this of course being against the law but difficult to prove). Therefore, find firms that like having different people in their ranks. Look at the NALP figures on diversity in the career services offices, keep your ear to the ground to hear about firms that are open and tolerant, and scour the pages of legal periodicals to learn about independent firms.

Sincerely,
Holly English
Principal Consultant, Values at Work