From the simply tiresome — mass emails, messages and robocalls — to more deceitful application offers that the hiring law firms are unaware of, stories of candidates being shocked at recruiter behavior have proliferated on LinkedIn and other social media platforms in recent months.
In a LinkedIn post at the end of July, Mintz member Suman Chakraborty said he'd received a message from a recruiter encouraging him to apply to a job below his level of seniority.
"I was very confused when I received this message on LinkedIn," Chakraborty said in the post. "The description of the role was very, very familiar. I quickly realized why: The job posting this recruiter was emailing me for is … a position working for me at my current firm!"
Chakraborty chalked the snafu up to AI-driven messaging. Longtime legal recruiter Gary Miles said he's seen a major increase in off-base messages from recruiters to candidates and believes artificial intelligence does play a role in that.
Miles, who largely works with partners and groups at large law firms, said he knows a candidate who was recently contacted about four different jobs within five minutes, none of which aligned with his practice area.
"You get these mass AI-generated emails and robocalls. Lawyers in the U.S. are besieged by these, quite frankly," he said. "They're always vague, sometimes making reference to a top 50 law firm client asking for you by name. They're basically fishing expeditions trying to get a call set up."
The idea behind the tactic is that a lawyer will bite and apply for a job through the recruiter, then get hired despite the absence of a genuine request on the part of the law firm for that candidate to apply, and the recruiter earns a fee, according to the experts.
The practice is being used by a fairly small portion of legal search professionals, and in many cases those professionals are based in the U.K., Miles said.
Beyond ethics, he explained, the problem is that it creates awkward moments in interviews when the law firm asks why the person applied and the applicant says, "Well, because you asked me to."
Anne Heaviside, a recruiter in Houston at Upperline Legal who has been active on LinkedIn posting about questionable recruiter practices, said she and her candidates have seen an uptick in such behavior. She said she too sees it most often with a handful of U.K.-based recruiting firms that target U.S.-based lawyers.
In one instance that Heaviside shared, an associate had already set up an interview with a law firm when a recruiter reached out and said they had an exclusive opportunity for her to apply to the very job she was already interviewing for.
In another instance, a recruiter contacted one of Heaviside's candidates and said a top global law firm had asked the recruiter to reach out about a capital markets job opportunity. Heaviside said she is deeply familiar with the law firm and didn't believe it would be hiring for such a position. They decided to ask the law firm, and neither the firm's top leadership nor the capital markets partners had reached out to fill a position.
"They were appalled," Heaviside said of the law firm's leaders and partners. "Nobody there had asked the recruiting firm to reach out."
Melissa Peters, president of the National Association of Legal Search Consultants, said she too has heard of some of the questionable practices that have popped up in the industry, and said she encourages candidates to work with recruiters who are NALSC members.
Members, she explained, are held to a code of ethics, which include honesty. Violations can be reported and recruiters found to be in violation are expelled from the organization.
Peters and the other recruiters also advise candidates to jump on a phone call and ask a lot of questions of any recruiter who reaches out, to get to know who they are and how much they truly know about the law firm, job and hiring managers they purport to represent.
"Dig in," Peters said. "Who within the practice area are they working with? What about my bio is of interest to them? If the recruiter doesn't have a real relationship with the firm, that's going to come out really quickly."
According to Heaviside, it's also important to inform a recruiter out loud or in writing that they do not have permission to circulate the candidate's name or résumé broadly, but instead only to law firms for which they have permission to do so. She also advises against candidates handing their résumés over to recruiters for informational purposes early in the recruiting process.
The reason is another questionable recruiting practice: sending out résumés without a candidate's express permission. This can lead to confusion and wasted time when a candidate is not interested in applying to a law firm and the résumé is submitted anyway, or unfairness if the candidate is interested but is working with a different recruiter, she said.
Heaviside said the threat of expulsion from NALSC is not enough to stop all recruiters from engaging in such behavior, in her opinion. Instead, she said she believes the only way the industry will change for the better is if law firms put their feet down and refuse to work with recruiters who have proved to be unethical.
That, she said, hasn't happened in any kind of organized fashion.
For instance, she said, she knows of "one or two" law firms that vet recruiters' claims that a candidate asked them to submit a résumé. But the practice is still relatively rare.
"We all really want something to change. This has gotten out of control," she said. "The law firms have got to lead the charge. We need the law firms to come up with a better way to do this and when you get a report that someone is unethical, to ban them."
--Editing by Robert Rudinger.
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