Whether it’s a hiring partner, talent acquisition officer, or human resources director who oversees recruitment at your law firm — if they are not collaborating with your marketing team, your law firm is missing the opportunity to be competitive and effective in attracting top talent.
A legal recruiting marketing strategy helps law firms find and retain the right candidates that match the job requirements and fit the firm’s culture. A legal recruitment marketing strategy puts the law firm’s best foot forward. Through tactics like branding, storytelling, and a consistent social media presence, marketing assists recruiters by letting them maximize resources to hire qualified attorneys and staff.
Everything your legal marketing team is doing, from thought leadership sent via emails to keeping your website updated to posting photos on social media, supports hiring. However, when the recruitment and marketing teams work together, a focused and successful legal recruitment marketing strategy is created.
Here are the five ways your law firm’s marketing team can support recruitment:
Branding
In today’s competitive legal talent market, candidates have choices about where they want to hang their professional hats. Legal marketers are experts at creating, maintaining, and amplifying a consistent and positive law firm brand. While most branding strategies are aimed at building business, potential job candidates are also influenced by law firm branding in deciding if a firm is the right match. Marketing ensures the firm is portrayed professionally while highlighting its unique culture, values, and mission.
A law firm’s brand is conveyed through imagery and text in everything from the firm logo and website design to mission statements and social media posts. Anyone can become aware of your law firm’s brand at any time through the marketing already in place. Plus, job candidates looking to dig deeper into an open position are likely to review the firm’s publicly available marketing materials to learn more. When a candidate sees that the law firm has a good reputation among clients and employees alike, they are more likely to feel attracted to the firm as an employer.
Job descriptions
Marketers, at their cores, are professional communicators. They know what catches attention and how to use keywords effectively to be found on job boards or search engines. Recruiters should enlist the digital marketing team’s support in drafting or, at the very least, reviewing, job descriptions. This will ensure the description is not only written well and SEO optimized, but the marketing team can also help convey consistent branding and messaging.
The marketing team can also help craft job descriptions that include a value proposition — the benefits a potential candidate would gain by working there. Legal recruiting value propositions include things like opportunities for advancement, mentorships, team-building or social activities, benefits, and, especially, flexible working locations and schedules.
Job descriptions should also convey the firm culture to attract candidates who match it. A law firm that prides itself on being nurturing with daily group meditations versus one that provides aggressive litigation training and high billing requirements will attract very different candidates. A job description should be clear about who the firm wants to hire.
Content
As mentioned above, legal marketers are expert communicators and content is their medium. Website text, thought leadership, graphics, images, and video are all used to build a law firm’s brand and increase its visibility. This work is not just for business development. These same tactics should be used to attract top talent.
Storytelling is one form of content that is effective in recruiting. Capturing current employees’ positive feelings and experiences through written or video testimonials is a powerful way to show why the firm is a great place to work. This content should appear on the firm’s career page and can also be used on social media and in brochures. Speaking of brochures, your law firm’s marketing team can help you develop informative, polished, and branded handouts to take to job interviews, email to candidates, and distribute at job fairs.
Outreach
One of the most important pillars of legal marketing is targeting and reaching the right audience. While your hiring team is likely already doing the basics, such as posting open positions on the firm’s career page and on job boards, marketing can boost that outreach.
For example, the law firm is looking for entry-level or intern candidates to support a team of litigators. The marketing staff knows that younger, newer attorneys are more likely looking at TikTok or Instagram than LinkedIn. They also know that it takes some creativity and knowledge of how these platforms work to get noticed on these imagery-driven sites. Marketers can create professional, branded posts that increase firm visibility while also calling attention to open positions. They know what works because they use social media insights and website analytics to measure and test how content performs.
Referral programs
Just like with building a business, one of the best sources of new potential job candidates is existing employees and people already in the firm’s network. Internally, marketing can help create referral programs to ensure employees and attorneys know about open positions and are incentivized to refer potential candidates. Creative communications and driving projects forward are at the heart of what marketers do, so chances are they can bring effective ideas to the legal recruitment strategy table.
While finding the right candidates is a challenge for law firms and businesses of all sizes, smaller and mid-size firms and corporations are especially challenged with tighter budgets and fewer resources. According to LinkedIn, 75% of job seekers will consider a company’s brand before applying for a job and 52% of candidates seek out a potential employer’s websites and social media profiles. Knowing that it’s clear how competition dictates that law firms up their legal recruiting marketing strategies. Let your marketers help find the right candidates right away!
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