Transforming Legal Recruiting With UX Research & Design
Turning around declining recruitment numbers and a shrinking internship program in seven months was a formidable challenge. By implementing user experience research and a human centered design principles, I kickstarted the program, resulting in the most successful recruitment season in the history of the company.
Skills
Service Design, UX Research, Change Management, Agile Recruitment, Diversity Equity & Inclusion, Brand Identity, Marketing
Year
2019-2020
Client
Winston & Strawn LLP
Role
Experience Consultant (UX/CX)
The Context
In 2019, firm leadership initiated a reorganization of their recruiting department. Winston engaged me to research the issues they were facing with recruitment, develop a new recruiting strategy, restructure the program and update their on campus marketing materials.
The Problem
Winston & Strawn LLP was facing a consistent decline in interest in their legal internship program. Over the five-year period of 2013-2018, offer acceptance from feeder and target schools declined significantly in comparison to the beginning of the decade. The DE&I initiatives were equally inadequate.
The Goal
Utilize UX research to uncover the problem, solution, and execute a restructuring of the recruiting department, recruitment strategy and marketing materials to attract a diverse, well-rounded class of 22 law students from feeder and target schools for their 2020 2L Internship program.
The short of it?
Utilizing UX research & service design, I mapped out the law candidate journey, uncovered pain points, and deeply understood their needs. After validating insights with data, I implemented an Agile recruitment structure, overhauled the engagement strategy and developed targeted marketing materials. The outcome exceeded the firms expectations, filling out the 2020 internship class with 28 students (27% over the target) of which, 67% of the class self-identified as diverse.
The 2020 2L intern class was the largest, most diverse group ever recruited in the 166 year history of Winston & Strawn LLP.
The full story…
The Plan
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Review the current state of the recruitment process. I Gathered historical data, compiled initial observations, and had cursory conversations to get a comprehensive understanding of the situation.
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Compile, sort, and analyze the historical recruitment data to generate a comprehensive model of the existing recruitment process. Compare data with initial observations and validate the problem statement.
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Interview past, present and future interns, associates, and partners to gather insights, deeply understand the problems, and empathize with the law candidates. Utilize affinity mapping, thematic analysis, and card sorting to process the insights gathered during user research.
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Implement an Agile recruitment process to modernize candidate management.
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Using feedback and insights gathered, develop a new strategy to engage and recruit law students
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Revise existing brand assets based on UX research and plan on campus distribution.
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Execute on the recruitment strategy utilizing the new process. Monitor and collect data on the new process to gauge efficacy and viability.
01.
Current State
Before any changes and implementation, I took a comprehensive look at the current state of the recruiting department. I was surprised to find that the entirety of candidate management throughout the process was still being done on paper.
Candidate files were compiled in manila folders and organized by the phase of the process they were in. I immediately could see why the recruiting department was struggling in all areas of the process.
This manual candidate management process was not only antiquated, but accounted for many of the pain points both candidates and recruiters were experiencing. A few of the pain points were:
Time consuming process of compiling candidate information
Physical candidate management process allowed candidates to get lost in the shuffle of physical paperwork
Frustrating to update candidate profiles with new information
I compiled all the historical recruiting data for the past nine years to analyze and model the data in Tableau. The charts below demonstrate the relationship of key metrics for the 2L internship program from the years 2010 to 2018.
2L Recruitment Data: 2010-2018
Additionally, the data showed that the firm gradually increased the number of offers extended to candidates to compensate for the declining offer acceptance. The line chart on the right shows the relationship between the number of offers extended vs. the percentage of offers accepted. The firm offset the declining acceptance rate by increasing the number of offers made to candidates. This was only a bandaid to the problem, as it did not address the root cause of declining acceptance.
The data confirmed a declining offer acceptance that was impacting the firms 2L internship program. In the line chart on the left, you can see the declining offer acceptance resulted in a steady reduction in the size of the 2L internship classes over the nine year period.
02.
Quantitative Analysis
To understand the driving factors, I interviewed 30 law students and current interns to deeply understand their perspective, pain points, goals and motivations.
From these interviews, I performed thematic analysis to group the major pain points and opportunities. These fell under four main categories:
Personas
Firm Differentiation
Winston needed to differentiate itself from other law firms when recruiting on campus. Specifically, highlighting it’s strongest practice areas, work-life balance, and benefits.
Candidate Match
Poor interviewer-interviewee matchups left candidates with more questions than answers.
With a deep understanding of the law students and their experience, I worked with firm leadership to put together the future outlook for the firm to determine the practice areas that were growing. This would inform the recruitment strategy in order to accurately staff the relevant practice areas and align the interests of the law candidates. We created personas to conceptualize the ideal candidates for each practice area as well as bring candidates wants, needs and frustrations to the forefront. By doing so, we put empathy at the forefront, which allowed us to build strong connections with candidates as they moved through the selection process.
Candidate Experience
Lagging response times from the recruiting department created a poor candidate experience and resulted in candidates accepting offers elsewhere.
Firm Representation
Lack of represented firm diversity during on campus events created a perception of exclusion which left candidates uninterested.
03.
User Research & Analysis
It was time to restructure the candidate experience. Implementing an agile recruiting approach to build out a candidate pipeline (illustrated below), the recruiting team was able to stay up to date on all active candidates and lead action items on a consistent basis.
Utilizing agile methodology, daily stand ups, and sprints ensured we followed up with every candidate application. This was a significant improvement over the previous candidate system. Not only were candidates engaged, so were the recruiting staff.
04.
Agile Recruiting
With research, synthesis and analysis completed. It was time to formulate a new strategy to engage law students. From the insights collected and with a new agile recruiting structure implemented, the major pain points surrounding candidate management, communication and timeliness would be resolved.
We turned our focus on addressing the interpersonal aspect of the recruiting process. With the firms goal of recruiting 22 law students from top law schools, the department had to be judicious in how it choose to allocate the recruiting budget and recruiter/attorney time.
With this in mind, we narrowed down the list of target schools, organized on campus events with law students and set up communication avenues to strategically engage candidates prior to the OCI (on-campus interviewing) week.
To address DE&I and mismatched interviewer-interviewee pain points, I worked directly with the senior manager of recruiting to develop a comprehensive interviewer dashboard to effectively match candidates, and included scoping questions during the initial interviews to establish candidate’s areas of interest. To engage diverse law students at on-campus recruiting events, I established a rotating list of the firms’ attorneys to attend these events, increasing engagement and discussion about life at Winston.
05.
A New Strategy
06.
Revised Marketing Materials
Revising the on-campus marketing materials was an important step in getting the most relevant information to law students. I partnered with the marketing, legal and recruiting teams to rewrite the on-campus brand language. I worked collaboratively and cross-functionally with these teams to update the on-campus collateral and marketing campaigns; Paying unique attention to highlight Winston’s strongest practice areas, its work-life balance and employee benefits.
07.
Results
At the end of the recruiting season, the 2020 summer intern class consisted of 28 individuals from the top 10 U.S. Law Schools. The recruiting strategy and agile recruiting structure was so successful, offer acceptance rate jumped 9% and Winston added six additional interns to the 2020 class. Of this class, 67% self-identified as diverse.
