Employment

01 Aug 2013

...and the OCI Madness begins

A deranged student sent the following email to a close friend and CSO officer this morning. Redacted: I woke up this morning and was disappointed to see that I did not have any job offers from any of the firms I applied to last night. Some of them have had my application materials for nearly 12 hours now, so I went ahead and sent them all very angry and profane letters of retraction. So here is his dilemma. How do you get all of the hiring partners to click on the user recalled email in their

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16 May 2013

Want to make a really good first impression to an admissions dean or hiring partner?

This is a simple way to differentiate yourself, yet my experience has been that only about 1% of applicants and 5% of law students do it. But 50% of professionals do. Before I reveal it, a very quick backstory is necessary. Without this understanding, I think it is hard to genuinely “get” what I am about to say. The backstory is simply that professionals are really busy, often stressed, and at times frantic. Moreover, they know all of this. Anything tedious that requires a shred of time increas

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31 Oct 2012

Interview advice from Fortune 50 Hiring Authority

Our first guest blog comes from a hiring authority at a Fortune 50 company. This is great advice, enjoy and dig in! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Interviewing is a strange skill requirement. You’ll use it very few times in your life, but, when you do, it’s extremely important as it definitely determines whether you’ll make it past the interviewing person with a ‘yes.’ Fortunately it has residual value. Probably, at some point in your career,

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18 Oct 2012

Why does Spivey Consulting turn away clients?

I’ve had to turn away a good number of clients and I have tried very hard to explain to each why that is. It strikes me as a good idea to outline this policy a bit here. There are two possible categories: (1) Admissions So far, the majority of the people I have turned away are prospective students. There are two scenarios that seem to be unfolding. Scenario 1: You want to go to *x *school and from my initial conversation I can tell it seems immensely probable you will get into x school, and li

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17 Sep 2012

What you can learn from the 2012 Presidential Election

I live in a swing state, which means that I am constantly getting emails from both the Obama and Romney campaigns. Political platforms aside, what these emails wildly have in common is this important nugget for job search emails: They are always exceptionally concise. More so than law firms, corporations, foundations, and any other entity I know of, political campaign managers use research to dictate their message. This speech from the movie The Adjustment Bureau is not hyperbolic: http://www

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14 Aug 2012

Your Legal Future in 5 minutes

A dean of a law school told me once that he could tell who would win a moot court competition within 5 minutes of the arrival of the competitors – before the competition even started. His postulation, developed over years of experience at this competition, was that the winning team was always the team that really wanted to be there. Not the most prepared, not the most talented or from the “best” school, but simply the team that was enjoying the process. Similarly, after years of counseling st

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