A couple of weeks ago, I had shared on LinkedIn my requirement for an intern. The post was short (and in hindsight slightly ambiguous), requiring a 300 word note and little else. Completely aware of where Amicus Partners stands in the hierarchy of Law School Desirableness (low, low, low – millennials, you know what I am talking about), I was not expecting too many applications.
Within ten days, there were close to one hundred and fifty applications. The LinkedIn post received nearly 50,000 “impressions”. For context, my posts tend to have less than 500 impressions on average.
Given that Amicus Partners works in the field of student enrolments, and the fact that social media appears to be built on turning life experiences into lessons, I thought it was interesting to try and draw parallels between internship applications and student enrolments.
And these are some of the learnings made:
Lesson number one, India has a LOT of law schools
A lot.
Despite being in the field of legal education for well over a dozen years now, I don’t think I have truly realized the sheer number of law schools (and law graduates) India has. Of course, mainstream focus has always been split between the NLUs, some of the traditional universities, and a few private players, but there is so, so (so!) much more beyond them.
From a student recruitment perspective though, this does pose a problem of focus – should one aim to cater to as many law students (and potential applicants) as possible or instead choose to focus on just a few institutions?
And whatever be the eventual choice, how does one begin reaching out to them? If only there was a social media platform that could meet this requirement….
Lesson number two, LinkedIn is the social network to focus on
For a few years now, I have seen declining levels of engagement in the traditional favourites of Facebook and Instagram, and this experience forced me to truly appreciate the powerhouse that LinkedIn has become.
Indian lawyers and law students are moving onto the platform like never before, online groups and communities are being formed, and use cases are being discovered and developed across the board.
Those 50,000 post impressions? That was because my post was shared by four different pages whose sole goal was to share legal internship opportunities. In fact, the post was even picked up by a website (LawBhoomi) which again, only caters to Indian law students.
What can student recruiters take from this? In short, if you are recruiting law graduates from India, you need to be on LinkedIn. Ideally, this would mean more than just being visible but instead having campaigns with high levels of engagement.
Did you ask me for an example? What are the odds!
Lesson number three, Indian legal curriculum must include professional development
The responses to the call for applications made it clear that there is a high demand for internship experiences. The quality of applications, on the other hand, also made it clear that there is abundant scope for soft skills training and professional development.
Either law schools are not devoting enough time and resources to make their graduates “job/internship-ready” or the students are not taking advantage of these resources.
I suspect that the answer lies somewhere in between, but whatever be the case, I certainly think this is an area that international law schools can focus on as part of their recruitment strategy. They have the human resources and expertise required, of this I have little doubt.
And finally,
Lesson number four, Chat GPT is everywhere!
Probably 90% of the applications received had been made with some form of AI assistance; this was usually most obvious in the short note component of the application.
Why is this relevant for recruiters?
Well, for one it means that (recruiting) schools will have to develop clear positions on the use of AI, be it for applications or the coursework itself. For another, it means that the application process might need to be rethought – it will take only so many iterations of a machine generated SoP to make it seem completely human made.
I have no doubt that recruiters are aware of this dilemma, and shall wait and watch to see their solutions.