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[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

Yeah, I disagree violently with the hiring officer. My rule has always been to interview broadly, because we shouldn't be thinking that a certain GPA, or any other paper credential, qualifies you to become a good lawyer. And we shouldn't want people who fit too well.

By the way, once upon a time I thought much more deeply about these issues than I have had to in a long time. I was head of the hiring committee at another firm about a dozen years ago, and took a very aggressive approach along the lines Sidd suggested - I wanted people not born on 3rd base and I doubled the number of interviews we did at each school (while not increasing the number of hires - but this meant the high GPA folks didn't dominate the interviews the same way).

The classes I hired were each almost 50% minority and were majority women. The first year, my partners thought it was great, they were surprised at how many "good" candidates I found who were minorities. The second year, one law school complained, saying that we were "hostile" to a candidate who I had basically asked "you were born on third base; tell me how you overcome that?" (we got no complaints about questions about how people overcame all sorts of much tougher shit), and no one commented at all on all the great minorities we were hiring. That was my last year; they got someone else to run the process after that.

Looking back years later, the minorities were the ones, for the most part, who made partner. Though a couple of them then left for really sweet in-house jobs.

Now I just have to hire one person, and we'll see what the resumes look like. I've also recently been put in charge of hiring paralegals. First one hired was a woman and a minority; we'll see when people figure out my general philosophy.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/10-va...d-john-gardner