Seven Things the Best Legal Recruiters Do that You Cannot Do Yourself By Harrison Barnes from Los Angeles Office Managing Director Summary: Legal recruiters offer unique advantages to attorney job seekers that aren't always available to them in their legal job search. One of the problems with using a service--as opposed to buying a product--is that you never know what you are getting. When you purchase a Mercedes, you know that it is going to be something of a certain quality, absolute reliability and that it has some inherent value in it. In contrast, when you use a service, you do not know all of this. This is especially so with the decision to use a given attorney, doctor, accountant, or a legal recruiter. There are people out there who are poor, average, good and exceptional at what they do. When you are using a given service, you want to use someone exceptional. The results you get from an excellent service are likely to exceed far what you get using a poor one. If you use a poor to an average one, you may be throwing your money away. When we use lawyers, doctors, and others we always talk about how they were ranked the best for doing something, about how they are the best at this, or about where they attended school. We do this because this is often the only way we have to judge whether or not they are good at what they purport to do. But there are plenty of doctors, lawyers, legal recruiters and others who attended great schools and are poor at what they do. I am sure you know many of them. Here are the three types of recruiting I've seen during my years as a recruiter and some other helpful insights: Three Types of Recruiting How to Know If You Are Marketable by a Legal Recruiter What Characteristics Should I Look for in a Legal Recruiter? What Makes a World Class Recruiter How to Get Your Recruiter to Work for You Should I Work with Multiple Recruiters? Before I get into what happens when you use a poor lawyer or legal recruiter, consider what happens when you go to see a poor doctor. I have seen poor doctors before, and it did not go well. I will explain briefly. Years ago a lymph node on my neck suddenly blew up and became very large. At the same time, all of the skin on one side of my face started peeling off. I went to see a local doctor from the Midwest who had just graduated from medical school at a clinic in Malibu, and they thought it was some infection and prescribed antibiotics. I came back quite upset when it had not gone down a few days later, and the doctor started asking me all sorts of questions about whether I had ever had used intravenous drugs or had unprotected sex with a man while my wife was waiting in the waiting room with two of my children. When the growth got to be the size of my fist, the doctor sent me to the emergency room. I went to the emergency room and sat around the waiting room for several hours and when I was seen they put me on a morphine drip and decided to order some tests. Over the course of several more hours, the growth went down. The doctors called back a few weeks later and confessed they did not know what it was but sent me to a few specialists. I went to a blood specialist (nephrologist), a neurologist, a cancer doctor, and even an arthritis doctor. None of them could figure it out either. Over the next several weeks, this growth came back again and again, and it was also accompanied by exhaustion so severe I was unable to work for several days. I even went to the emergency room and spent a day there when I was on vacation in San Diego. I was hospitalized
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